The Rose Gardener Page 9

  Kevin thought for a moment. “Maybe she wants to get money from you somehow.”

  “And just how is she supposed to do that? Never mind the fact that between Helene and me, there’s really not much to take.”

  Kevin shook his head in concern. “You’re far too trusting. And a bit naïve. I wouldn’t just start telling so much about myself to some stranger.”

  “She’s harmless. A young woman who’s obviously got a few serious problems. Somehow she strikes me as being very lonely.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then she’s not lonely!”

  “The fact that someone is married does not automatically mean that she isn’t lonely! You can be very alone within the bounds of a marriage.” She furrowed her brow. “How much longer are you going to keep washing those tomatoes? Soon there won’t be anything left of them.”

  Kevin finished up with the tomatoes. “You can’t be too careful with produce,” he said. “You don’t want me to poison you, do you?”

  “I believe what you’ve got there is your own, organically-grown produce.”

  “Of course. But it’s not just a question of pesticide. There’s also the matter of the bacteria in the air all around us.”

  “When you get to be as old as I am, you’ve survived so many bacteria that you get to feel somewhat indifferent towards them,” said Beatrice. She leaned back and gave Kevin a worried look. “You’ve been so anxious recently. A lot of the time it’s like you’re not all there. Something is weighing on you.”

  “I have a few financial worries. You knew that already.”

  “Still?”

  “Your check was an enormous help. I can’t thank you enough,” Kevin said, but the smile that accompanied his words seemed put on. “Everything’s alright.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Please, Beatrice, don’t give me that piercing look of yours! And let’s talk about something else. We’re going to have a nice evening. Not exchange unpleasantries.”

  She relented. “Okay then,” she said casually. “We’ll leave it. It’s nice here at your place, Kevin. I don’t know anyone with a kitchen as wonderful and spotless as yours. When I think about what Alan’s kitchen in London looks like — I mean, it’s clean there, but it’s rather cold and uncomfortable.”

  “All the same, I’ll bet you’re happy that Alan’s your son and not me. Very few mothers can accept it when their sons are gay.”

  Beatrice thought for a second. “I think what they can’t accept is when their sons are unhappy. And the manner and quality of the relationships we enter into are rather a deciding factor when it comes to whether we’re happy or not. Homosexuality brings with it a whole host of problems, you know that better than I do. It’s just — the way Alan lives, God knows it makes me worry so much. He’s got no home. I believe he has a lot of different brief affairs, but nothing that lasts any longer.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly the kind of life he wants to live,” Kevin suggested. He had just started cleaning a head of lettuce with the same fervor as he had before with the tomatoes. “And I mean, it’s still better for him to be constantly changing who he shares his bed with than to be stuck on that slut Maya!”

  Beatrice shook her head. “I’m afraid he is stuck on Maya. That’s his problem exactly. He’s obsessed with her. He can’t even imagine himself with another woman anymore. It keeps him from any chance he might have at being in a serious relationship. I’m just so terribly afraid for him sometimes.”

  “Is he still on the island?”

  “He flew back to London the day after my birthday. I’ll probably not see him again until Christmas.”

  Kevin froze all of a sudden. A tense expression had appeared on his face. “Did you hear that?”

  Beatrice looked at him. “No, what is it?”

  “I thought there was someone at the front door.”

  “Go take a look! Most likely anyone who’d come to see you would just walk in.”

  “No,” said Kevin. “I locked the door. Are you sure you didn’t hear anything?”

  Beatrice stood up. “I’ll go have a look now.” She walked into the narrow hall. Kevin had indeed locked the door, and had even fastened the chain. Beatrice opened the door and looked outside. There was no one in sight, just a cat stretched out on the garden wall in the warm September sun. Not far from the house the round tower of St. Phillip’s church rose against a clear blue evening sky. Already a glimmer of red lay on the wildflowers and bushes that grew scattered around the property. Beatrice took a deep breath. How wonderful it is here, she thought. She liked the little village of Torteval, here on the southwestern end of the island, even more than Le Variouf, her home. From Torteval you could get to Pleinmont Point on foot. The wild cliffs there, the foaming surf, the few low patches of grass that the wind blew flat on the hillside — she liked all of this better than the gentler landscape of the south of the island. Pleinmont was her favorite place. When she really wanted to think, to be alone, to be at one with herself, that’s where she withdrew.

  She went back into the kitchen. “No one there,” she said. “Just a cat.”

  “I was just imagining things then. Did you lock the door?”

  “Since when do you keep the door locked? No, I left it open.”

  “You shouldn’t be so careless these days. Theft is on the rise everywhere.”

  She laughed. “But not on Guernsey!” She watched him take the lettuce, which seemed finally to have been cleaned to his satisfaction, and place it in the serving bowl. It seemed to her more and more that he was getting to be a bit funny. His germ phobia, his fear of burglars … In all likelihood he’d been living alone too long. In her experience that often caused people to develop strange quirks. They were too preoccupied with themselves. All day long their thoughts revolved only around themselves. It made a person peculiar.

  Poor Kevin, she thought tenderly.

  Sensitive as he was, he noticed that she’d started thinking about him, and he was already making an effort to divert her elsewhere, away from himself.

  “Are you going to write to the woman in Germany again?”

  “Why not? A person gets to be chatty in old age, and if I’ve got someone who’s interested in what I’ve got to say — why shouldn’t I take advantage?”

  “Because it might stir up some things that had only just been set to rest.”

  Thoughtfully she looked at the smoke rising from her cigarette.

  “I don’t know that anything has been set to rest,” she said. “Not really, I don’t think. There are things that you never get over. You repress them, but that’s not the same as getting over them.”

  “People always say it’s bad to repress things, but the way I see it that’s nonsense,” Kevin said. “Pop-psychology dribble. Why shouldn’t you repress something that’s unpleasant, if it makes life better for you? And I think you’ll definitely live more at ease if you don’t drag all that horror from those days back up to the surface. And what for, anyway? You have your nice, relatively worry-free existence. Forget the things that once gave you such a heavy heart.”

  “I can’t forget them either way. There are some memories that are as stubborn as superglue. You’ll never be rid of them, no matter what. And sometimes it’s easier to talk about them than to be constantly fighting them back so they don’t force their way up to the surface.”

  “So long as you know what you’re doing,” was all Kevin said.

  The fiery red rays of the setting sun had made their way through the window and set the kitchen ablaze. There was a soft clattering as Kevin arranged the plates and silverware. A few minutes more, then the sun would set. The mild half-light of a late summer evening would set in.

  Beatrice’s thoughts were wandering. She had spent t
he afternoon writing a letter to Franca, but she hadn’t sent it off yet. She wasn’t quite sure if she would even do so. She’d taken note of how highly unusual Kevin had found her behavior, and maybe he was right. She hardly knew this woman, and yet she was so willing to reveal her life story to her.

  On the other hand, she thought, I’m not actually revealing my life story to her at all. She’s German, she’s been here a few times, she’s interested in what happened on the Channel Islands over fifty years ago. I’m relating a few facts. That’s all.

  That wasn’t quite the case, and she knew it. She had rather precisely described for her what that lost little girl had thought and felt when she’d hid in the living room of her parents’ home and listened, frozen in fear, to the droning of the airplanes that brought an occupying army onto the island. She had allowed this stranger a glimpse into her soul’s interior, had confessed more to her than to her own son. But Alan would have reacted to these “dusty stories from a hundred years ago,” as he always referred to them, with a yawn.

  Maybe I should end this correspondence, she thought. But Franca Palmer is a polite, considerate woman. If I make just the slightest indication that I’ve had enough, she’ll pull back at once. I can stop anytime.

  She shouldn’t think so much about it, that was the main thing. She tried to concentrate on Kevin, who was bemoaning the increase in criminality throughout the world. She asked herself where he’d come up with this obsession with burglars: to her knowledge he didn’t have anything at all worth taking. She was certain that he’d turn up again in Le Variouf very soon asking for another check. This time he would probably go back to Helene.

  Helene had a weakness for Kevin, who in many respects embodied her ideal of what a young man should be: he was polite, orderly, well-groomed, and unlike other single men his age, wasn’t constantly chasing after all kinds of women. It was typical for Helene that she successfully repressed her awareness of his homosexuality, and didn’t at all allow the notion to penetrate that Kevin was constantly chasing after all kinds of men. She took just as little into account that for all his pedantry and his love of order, the truth was that Kevin could not manage to get his life under control. He was always living beyond his means and, in quite the contrast to Alan, was always hitting people up for money. Helene, thought Beatrice, was a master at blocking out reality. She shuffled things around until they fit the picture she wanted to have of them.

  But not too long from now, she thought, she won’t be able to help Kevin anymore. No matter what she’s saved, she’s got to be slowly using it up.

  Now her thoughts were on Helene again, and as a result they were on Franca as well. That afternoon she had written her a long letter. She had sat in the garden on a comfortable wicker chair under the apple tree, her feet propped up on another chair and a book on her lap, which she’d used as a support for writing on. The day had been unusually warm, but its coloring was like autumn, the sky a cool blue.

  Helene had been out, over at Mae’s for tea, and Beatrice had hoped she would be gone until evening. She immediately felt better, more free; she felt like she could breathe more easily when Helene wasn’t at home.

  She had begun the letter to Franca with the words: “Helene Feldmann stole my life from me.”

  Immediately, she had crossed the sentence out. She had scribbled over it until no one would have been able to read it. It gave too much away, much more than she would want to confide in a stranger. Much more than she would want to confide in anyone at all. Not even to Mae had she spoken this sentence. Strictly speaking, she’d never even thought it. The words might have existed as a feeling somewhere within her, but she had never put them together. She wouldn’t have dared to. The realization was too terrible. A stolen life was not the same as a stolen car — the absolutely irrecoverable nature of what had been taken from her caused her to panic. It threatened to take her breath away. As she crossed out the words on the paper, with a violence that almost destroyed the dust jacket of the book underneath, she tried to banish them from her thoughts for good — well suspecting that this wouldn’t work. Once something was alive, it couldn’t just be wiped away. Already it was dawning on her: these fateful words would now haunt her mind. They would become ever more insistent.

  Instead, she had begun the letter by writing about trivial matters, with a few clichés about the weather and the already long-persistent drought on the island. Then she had begun to write about back then. About those first days with Erich Feldmann in her parents’ house.

  GUERNSEY, JUNE/JULY 1940

  He hadn’t gone any further. He had looked around and with clear conviction had said, “Here is good. Excellent. I’ll stay here.”

  A second German soldier, still a very young man, came into the room. He spoke with the officer, but since they were speaking German, Beatrice didn’t understand a word. The man who had found her and lured her out of her hiding place had told her that his name was Erich Feldmann, and now in her head she practiced saying this name, so hard for her tongue to form: Erich Feldmann.

  Erich gestured towards her and said something. The other man nodded. He walked over to Beatrice, took her hand and said, “Come on, let’s go and find you something to eat.”

  His English sounded almost perfect, and he had warm, kind eyes. Beatrice followed him into the kitchen. There was a bad smell in the room. The summer heat sat inert between the walls, and from somewhere came the stench of spoiled milk.

  “We need ice,” said the man after opening the refrigerator door and making a face in disgust. “It’s all melted in here.”

  He rifled through the cabinets. This was hard to bear, a violation. Beatrice felt it painfully. Deborah’s kitchen cabinets! But she told herself that he probably meant well. He was trying to find her something to eat.

  “What’s your name?” She asked softly.

  “Wilhelm. Everyone calls me Will. What’s your name?”

  “Beatrice.”

  “That’s a pretty name, Beatrice. What do people call you?”

  “They call me by my name.”

  “And your father? Your mother? Don’t they have a nickname for you?

  She felt something catch in her throat. “My mother …,” her voice sounded strange, “my mother often calls me Bee.”

  “If you like, I can call you Bee as well.” He looked at her searchingly. “Or is this name reserved for your Mom?”

  The catch in her throat got worse. Another second and she would burst into tears. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want him to take her in his arms and comfort her and stroke her hair — and that was just what he’d do, she could tell. The way he looked at her was full of compassion, of true warmth.

  She managed it. She swallowed and swallowed, and the tears stayed back.

  “I would like it better if you called me Beatrice,” she said finally.

  He sighed softly. “Alright then. Listen, Beatrice, there’s nothing in this kitchen that isn’t either moldy or rotten. I’m afraid you’ll have to keep being patient. But before tonight, you’ll have something to eat, that I promise you.”

  She wasn’t actually hungry at all, but she didn’t tell him this. Adults always insisted on stuffing kids full of huge amounts of food, that was certainly no different with Germans than it was with the English.

  “May I please go upstairs to my room?” She asked.

  Will nodded. He looked concerned. Beatrice sensed how sorry he was for her, how he felt compelled to comfort her in some way.

  But maybe I don’t want to be comforted by a German, she thought aggressively. Without another word she turned around and went up the stairs to her room.

  Everything there looked the same as always. Nothing had changed since her family’s hectic flight. The wallpaper with the rose pattern; the sky-blue chest of drawers with the mirror above it; the small picture frames with scenes from
around the Channel Islands; the bed on which a few dolls and stuffed animals sat lined up in a row; the writing desk; the white-washed dresser — everything was peaceful, untouched by all that had happened. There was only a large bee that flew into the window pane with a disconsolate buzzing, over and over again. Beatrice opened the window and it vanished into the pale blue sky, in its buzzing now a note of relief.

  The warmth of the summer day flooded into the room. The smell of the roses that grew under her window wafted upwards, sweet and sensuous. It seemed to Beatrice that from the roses, more than from any of the other familiar things around her, there came an outpouring of peace. Until now this peace had been the rock solid foundation of her life. She hadn’t realized until that moment how an unwavering stability had determined every hour of every day. A premonition told her that that time would never return, but she tried all the same to cling to the hope that the nightmare would fade, that everything would be as it had been before.

  That whole afternoon Beatrice sat on her bed. She sat up straight, with her knees pressed together, a good little school girl. The only things that refused to fit the image were her messy hair and her weary face, with its hungry eyes. She could hear that the house was filled with hectic activity. Cars drove up, voices and footfalls rang out from every room. She found the sound of German threatening, above all because she didn’t understand a single syllable. She wouldn’t even have known it if those outside had been speaking about her, about what it was that should be done with her.

  She resisted the urge to take one of the dolls or stuffed animals in her arms. It seemed to her that it was no longer appropriate. It was as if in just one turning the world had taken on an entirely new face. The new bore no resemblance to the old. Her childhood was over. It had ended abruptly; there had been no smooth transition into her new life. Never again would Beatrice find comfort in holding a doll or a teddy bear.

  Early in the evening Will appeared and said she should come downstairs to eat. Beatrice still wasn’t hungry, but she did as she was told. Downstairs in the entrance hall there were stacks of boxes and crates. Through the open front door Beatrice saw an open staff car with two German soldiers leaning against it, chatting. Their faces caught the evening sun, and they laughed. They didn’t look like they were at war, but rather gave the impression of two young men on holiday, enjoying their freedom.