The Oriental Wife Page 2

  For several years, gangs of Brownshirts had been roaming the streets of the city, shouting of the great cleansing that was to come. The men who came to sit with Franz in his study—members of the veterans’ committees and the board of the charity homes—told each other that soon those young men would settle down; the worst of the hard times was over; unemployment was down; there would be decent jobs for them all, and then they would come to their senses. They recognized, among the marchers, the man who delivered beer from house to house, the man who cleaned the chimneys, the boy who swept up in the Frauenplatz on market day. They were good fellows, they said, ordinary fellows, they only needed to be given a chance. Otto’s mother told Louisa how she made a point of speaking to them kindly when she saw them on their own—the delivery man, for example; she always gave him an extra tip, she said, and had bought a gift for his baby daughter.

  Only Jeannette insisted shrilly that this was just the beginning. The country was going mad, one day those men would be shooting them in broad daylight, and nobody would lift a finger. She could see it in people’s eyes, she told Franz as he peeled the figs Mrs. Müller had brought for his Nachtisch: the eyes of the laundress who came and hung out the sheets in the attic, and the dressmaker’s, and the maid’s, and Mrs. Müller’s too. “All the women are in love with the little corporal.” Nonsense, Franz told her, with unaccustomed firmness. She should be ashamed even to suggest such a thing. He leaned across and patted Louisa’s hand. “A nation that gave birth to the Enlightenment will never consent to be ruled by a gang of thugs.”

  Louisa never told them, but she had a Nazi admirer—a skinny, rawboned Brownshirt who had materialized on the street one night when she was walking home alone and asked if he could escort her. She remembered him from the marketplace, where his cart had tipped over; apples were rolling everywhere, and she helped him pick them up. The next week, when she was alone again, he appeared in the same place, stepping out of the shadows as she passed. His face, illuminated by the streetlamps, was pale and splotchy, with one tuft of hair protruding from the cleft in his chin; his walk was stiff and shambling, but something about him impressed her, a painful dignity lacking in her dancing partners. Mostly, on those nights they walked together, he was silent, but sometimes, with a kind of clumsy grandeur, he pointed out Orion or the Great Bear. “Imagine how far it is, in what pure air it lives. Up there you have the one true greatness.” “I would have liked to be an astronomer, but it was not possible for me,” he said once. “My parents are very simple people. Good folk, but ignorant. They have no sense of any higher destiny. So I have had to make my own way.”

  Another time, as they turned into her street, she asked, “Did you know that I am Jewish?” and felt him grow wary.

  Yes, he said, he knew it.

  “So aren’t you supposed to hate me?”

  He stopped walking. “All that is foolishness. I have no hatred for anyone, I only want to see my country restored to its honor. To take its rightful place among the great nations.”

  After that they did not speak again until they arrived at her door, when he took her hand and kissed it, like an old-style knight. He was the only National Socialist she had met, and she could not imagine him shooting her in broad daylight. She felt embarrassed, for his sake, about the things her mother said; she knew he would feel hurt, he would flush bright red if he could hear.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At the school in Lausanne, the Italian boarders wore silk underwear and high-heeled sandals, and painted each other’s toenails after tea, but they crossed themselves a lot and were strict about their purity. They were saving themselves for the men they would marry. The English, they said, rolling their eyes, had no morals whatsoever. “Is due to their climate. Everybody go to bed with everybody there to become warm.”

  But Louisa did not believe that. The English girls, with their light scornful voices and careless grace, were so clearly a higher order of being than anyone else. At dinner they commandeered the best table, as though by right, and afterward took possession of the red parlor next door, where there was a fire laid every night, and a vase of silk peonies was reflected in an ornate gilt mirror. If a Greek or German or Italian wandered in to retrieve a book or a handkerchief left behind during the day, the English girls would fall silent, watching her through narrowed eyes, until she retreated again. Everyone grumbled about them behind their backs—it was a bond among all the other nations—but was nonetheless anxious to curry favor. The Swiss girls seemed grateful to be asked about local dressmakers or the best cafés; the French girls, approached to explain the rules of the subjunctive in their language, were almost pitifully eager to oblige.

  The most glittering of the English boarders was Celia, who could often be heard on the telephone under the stairs, expressing disdain: “Tell me you didn’t. You really are too ridiculous … surely not, poppet … not even the Caitfords are that stupid.” She had once stopped Louisa on the landing and asked her if she happened to have seen a pink kid glove anywhere. Louisa wished passionately that she could produce it, but she couldn’t, and Celia carried on up the stairs.

  Apart from that, there had been no contact between them until the morning she came bursting into the common room, where Louisa, in preparation for her English class, was going over “The Highwayman” with a girl from Stuttgart. Something too horrible had happened, Celia said, brandishing one of the yellow slips the secretary left in their cubbyholes when they got a phone call. Her fiend of a brother was stopping off that afternoon on his way from Zermatt, having given her no warning, just when she had a date with the most divine creature, who happened, only happened, to be the ninth richest man in Switzerland. Or at least his father was. Not that it even mattered. He was so dishy that money was beside the point. But her English chums had absconded to Geneva for the day, to visit some doddering governess person, which meant there was no one to entertain Julian for her until she got back.

  “It’s too shattering.” She looked assessingly at the two Germans and then seized on Louisa. “I don’t suppose you’d be a brick and keep him occupied for me for a couple of hours.”

  “I cannot,” Louisa said in alarm. “My English is never yet good enough. It could not be understood to him.”

  “What nonsense! You speak marvelous English … Anyway, you can always take him for a walk if you can’t understand each other. Maybe tell him I had to visit an old friend with TB. He can’t be cross if I’m off comforting the sick.” And then, when Louisa expressed doubt, “Honestly, what’s an hour or two in a person’s life? Nothing to make a fuss about really.” So Louisa capitulated, and Celia called her a perfect angel. “I should warn you, petal,” she said briskly, as she was leaving, “he can be a bit difficult … Actually, he’s a perfect brute. But I’m sure you’ll manage him beautifully.”

  By four o’clock, Louisa had washed her hair and changed into her new, square-necked green dress with the scalloped hem; she waited on the sofa in the red parlor, rehearsing to herself the explanation about the ill friend she had composed with the help of a German–English dictionary. But the brother, when the maid showed him in, interrupted her just as she was beginning. “Oh, Christ,” he said savagely. “She’s ditched me for some bloke.”

  “No, no,” Louisa protested, as he stomped the snow from his shoes and blew into his hands. “Your sister is so much looking forward to again seeing you. She will as soon as possible come back.”

  “Well, it’s damned inconsiderate of her, is all I can say. To you too. How did she bribe you into it?” He blew noisily into his very large hands. His hair was the same honey blond as Celia’s, and like her he had an air of commanding deference, but his air of dissatisfaction—and in this too he was not unlike his sister—seemed pervasive, more than the mood of an hour. There was a sense that the world had failed to arrange itself for his convenience.

  “Since you’re stuck with me,” he said, stripping off the checked scarf that was wound several times around his neck, “could I ask
you to requisition a cup of tea?”

  So she headed for the pantry, to place a request with Birgitta, the Swedish maid. On her return he was seated on the couch she had just vacated, his legs stretched out toward the empty grate. She wasn’t sure if he was really extraordinarily tall or if he just occupied space more emphatically than other people. When Birgitta had set down the tray, and Louisa was handing him a cup of tea, she noticed that his hands trembled slightly, which was curiously thrilling.

  “So, Ulian,” she said, feeling bolder. “How long is it you are traveling today?”

  “Not Ulian. Julian. Like Jew.”

  “I am myself a Jew,” she said stiffly, before he could say something worse.

  “Oh, Christ, are you? Sorry. I was only correcting your English.”

  There was a pause. Perhaps he would like to see the lake, she said with dignity, when he had finished his tea.

  “Actually I’ve seen enough bloody lakes since I came to this country. It’s not exactly short of bodies of water. But thanks anyway. Are you a big chum of Celia’s?”

  Not really, she said.

  “Wise girl. No one should get too matey with my sister, she’s dangerous.” He leaned back, shutting his eyes. She was about to tiptoe out when he sat up and asked if she could scare up some wood; he would build a fire for them, he said.

  By the time Celia returned, two hours later, Louisa’s knowledge of colloquial English had improved exponentially: she managed to grasp that Julian had left Oxford in disgrace, having missed his tutorial once too often, and that his tutor had been a sexually suspect man who lacked all sense of humor. Since leaving university, two years before, he had had a bit of a disaster with a City firm and now had a job in advertising, writing ghastly slogans about hair oil and beef tea. “It’s vile work, I can tell you. But I don’t mean to stick it out much longer.”

  “Oh, no, you must leave there,” she said fervently.

  “I can’t chuck it all in for poetry or anything like that, because I don’t write the stuff.”

  “But you will find something else. Something better for you yourself.”

  He looked gratified. “What about you? Do you have any plans?”

  “I am hoping very much to pursue further studies,” she said, so he wouldn’t think she only wanted to get married. She was most interested in art history, she told him.

  “Why not study in London? You could practice your English.”

  It was at this point that Celia arrived, full of breathless apologies, and swooped down to kiss him on the cheek. Louisa stood to leave.

  “You’re not deserting me, are you?” Celia asked, in mock alarm. “I was counting on you to make him behave himself.”

  “You can’t keep the girl against her will,” Julian said. “Maybe she’s dying to escape.”

  “Not at all. It is only that you may wish to be alone together.”

  “Would you wish to be alone with your brother?”

  She bowed her head. “Alas, I have no brother. I am a lone child.”

  “Well, if you did you’d know that brothers and sisters don’t generally want to be alone together. In fact, just the opposite.”

  He was as horrid as ever, Celia said. She would just run upstairs to change for dinner, she’d leave him in Louisa’s capable hands.

  “I meant it, you know,” he said, when she had gone. Louisa could still smell her perfume in the air.

  “What is it you were meaning?”

  “About your coming to London. I think it’s rather a good idea.”

  In the end, he extended his visit to four days. His air of dissatisfaction never entirely left him, but that only made him more compelling. He reminded her of the Englishmen in the novels the girls read under the covers at night, moody, restless young men who always seemed to come to a bad end somewhere far from home, though surely that wasn’t true in life. At times his impatience was turned on her—he would go and stare out the window while she was talking to him, or interrupt with some irritable comment on the stuffiness of the room or the beastliness of the Swiss. Once, when she reached over tentatively to push his hair out of his eyes, he shooed her hand away as though it were a fly. But his very crossness seemed proprietary; if she did not spend every minute with him that she wasn’t in class he became crosser still.

  He decided he wanted to see the lake after all, and grabbed and kissed her on the far side, also in the red parlor, which the English girls had ceded to them from his first evening, and twice, more lingeringly, behind an orange tree in the conservatory. “It’ll be smashing when you come to London, you’ll see,” he said on his last evening, and then launched into a description of the white Triumph his friend Rupert was going to sell him if he could raise the money. She could not lure him into mentioning love, however many stratagems she tried; with him, unlike the boys she had danced with back home, the power had been taken from her. The air thickened when he was there, robbing her of will.

  As soon as he left she wrote to him, quoting English poetry and describing the snow on the mountains; the letter she got in return was taken up with complaints about the London weather and his vile toad of a boss, who was browbeating him more than ever. “I don’t know how much longer I can stick this. I’m thinking of chucking it in and emigrating to Australia.” But in his next letter he told her about a room to let in Marylebone, quite near the house of his aunt, where he was living. “It’s in a boardinghouse for young ladies. Very respectable.”

  She wrote to her father, asking if she could take courses at a new institute of art history that had opened in London. Two other girls from the school were enrolling for the term beginning in January, she said; they would find a place together. It was the first big lie she had ever told him, and she was almost ready to confess when he wrote back approving her plan. The situation in Germany remained unsettled, he said; much though he missed her, it would be wise for her to become fluent in English.

  Celia had long since ceased to be charming to her (“Never mind,” Julian said, “some day I’ll tell you the real story of why she was packed off to Switzerland”), but the rest of the school was thrilled with her romance. Ayako, the one Japanese pupil, much admired for her pretty ways and her boredom with lessons, came and sat on Louisa’s bed one night while she was brushing her hair, sighing wistfully and telling her how lucky she was. “I wish I could marry Westerner,” she said, brushing aside Louisa’s protest that she was not engaged to Julian. “If my parents would not disown me I would go right now and find European to marry. Anyone. Big Swiss shepherd, I don’t care.” She came up beside Louisa and examined her face in the mirror, smoothing down her eyebrows. “Do you think some Westerner would marry me?”

  “Of course,” Louisa said.

  “I think so too. But is hopeless. My papa has already found husband for me. Another diplomat, like him. He is in Portugal now.”

  “But then you can live in Europe, if that’s what you want.”

  “Yes, yes, I can live there for time being, but even so, my husband will expect me to be Oriental wife. Always meek, docile, my eyes cast down. Never making my own destiny.”

  “Perhaps your husband will be more enlightened than you think,” Louisa said, at a loss.

  Ayako turned her head, eyeing her profile in the mirror. “No, he will only pretend to be enlightened. I know what such boys are like.” She knotted her hair at the back of her neck, frowning. “I would love to be actress. Or singer. Something not mundane. Don’t you think that’s best?”

  But Louisa could not remember ever having such yearnings; all her daydreams had only been of romance, and now it was upon her. Soon she would escape to London, Julian, happiness.

  “Oh, look,” Ayako said, brightening. She snatched up Louisa’s malachite ring from the dresser and put it on her finger, where it slid around until it was facing her palm. She laughed merrily. “What hands you all have! So large hands and feet. Mine are very elegant, don’t you think?” And Louisa agreed, sincerely, that they were.
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  In mid-January she arrived in London on the boat train, with three matching pigskin suitcases. It was early afternoon, and as she pressed her face to the window of the taxi on the way to the address Julian had given her, the rows of brick houses, the sodden-looking trees, the marble pillars, all seemed dense with some heightened meaning she felt herself just on the point of grasping. Even the air, so freighted with damp it was a presence in itself, felt pregnant with richness and mystery. People had warned her about the grayness, but nobody had mentioned the constant, otherworldly changes of light.

  But Julian was in one of his fed-up moods when he came to fetch her that evening; now his boss was blaming him for losing a client whom, according to Julian, the man himself had alienated with his swinish behavior; worst of all, Julian’s father was on the boss’s side, he being an old classmate from Radley. “That tears it. It’s Australia for me. I’m going to the consulate tomorrow.” Not until they arrived at their destination, an oak-paneled pub with a coal fire opposite the bar, where they joined a group of his rugger mates at a square table, was she able to share her revelation about English damp, which the friends immediately drank to. Wait until she got chilblains, they said. She could hear herself imitating Celia’s laugh, she was reproducing Celia’s inflections as she described the deportment mistress in Switzerland (“You must float, float into the room, girls; never be defeated by anything so banal as gravity”). All this arduous performance was for Julian’s benefit, to tie him to her with silken threads; if all his friends found her enchanting enough, he would forget about Australia. Afterward, walking her back to her lodging house, he told her that when she was in the loo Clive had said he never thought a German could be so amusing. “Well done you,” he said, but absently, still preoccupied with other things.