The Oriental Wife Read online

  Three nights later his aunt went out to a concert at the Albert Hall. First they sat and kissed on the chintz love seat in the sitting room, until Louisa pressed her breasts urgently against him, straining through her blouse. Ever since her arrival in London she’d been waiting for their happiness to start, for the connection between them to be carried onto a different plane. She was no longer sure she could trust him to make it happen.

  Breathing hard, he pulled her to her feet and guided her up two flights of dark stairs. His room on the third floor was cluttered with old birdcages and fringed lamps and chairs with broken seats, things his aunt must have wanted banished from public view. But the bed was neatly made, with a white chenille spread—Louisa found herself wondering distractedly if he had made it himself or if his aunt had a maid.

  Then he was yanking at her clothes, fumbling with buttons. Jesus, he muttered, when he got to her belt, so that she felt she ought to help him, and did. He kissed her fiercely on the mouth and tumbled her back on the bed, moaning, and wriggled out of his trousers. She lay there in a state of confusion, but felt she must show enthusiasm, and made encouraging noises, until she gasped with the pain, and he stopped. “I’m sorry—am I hurting you?” he asked, and she said he wasn’t, and bit her lip. Shortly after that, just as she was beginning to feel some stirrings of pleasure, it seemed to be over. He lay panting on top of her, before kissing her on the mouth again; then he rested his head on her breasts. She felt a great relief that they had managed it. When he rolled off her, sighing, she propped herself on one elbow and stroked his hair, feeling tender and womanly, while he told her about the red leather seats in the Triumph and his ongoing quarrel with his father, who continued to side with his boss. She was just getting nicely sleepy when he said they’d better get dressed and he’d take her back to Mrs. Webster’s, his aunt would be returning soon.

  And so the pattern of her London life was established: her evenings spent with Julian at the pub or the cinema; her mornings taken up with lectures at the Courtauld, couched in a special, German English clotted with compound words; in the afternoons, solitary excursions to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London and the National Gallery, or solitary wanderings through the streets.

  She had imagined that Mrs. Webster’s house would be like school, with the girls running in and out of each other’s rooms, but her fellow lodgers only seemed to communicate through the notes they left for each other in the big drafty bathroom on the second floor. “Personally, I find it extremely offensive to be surrounded by dripping undergarments while I bathe.” “To the girl who’s been using my Floris bath oil: do you think I can’t smell who you are?” It was disturbing to think that all the pink-and-white young Englishwomen who said good morning so politely in the hall should be harboring those secret reservoirs of ill will. She made a running joke of it for Julian and his friends at the pub, saying how very warlike Englishwomen were, how they terrified her. But it was a little bit true.

  There were moments of pure elation, when everything she saw—an old red tugboat on the river, a frilled plaid umbrella—seemed redolent with promise, but the euphoria could not be trusted to last, and for whole days she longed to be elsewhere. While she was dressing to go to the pub, leaning toward the mirror to apply her lipstick, her hopes were always high, but the talk about rugger and MGs and the Prince of Wales could not occupy her mind fully, and the unoccupied parts kept wondering what exactly she was doing there.

  On the evenings when Aunt Jilly absented herself, things in the upstairs room always seemed to go too quickly, leaving her agitated in a way she could not bring herself to mention. Sometimes she buried her head in the pillow afterward and responded in monosyllables to the saga of his boss’s and his father’s latest piece of perfidy. But the moment he grew offended, the moment he said Bloody hell and flung off the covers, she lost her nerve and started asking lots of questions, until he settled back down and began kissing her, and they started over.

  Then, when she had been in London for just six weeks, she got a letter from her father, warning her not to come back. It was an unseasonably warm day in March; the sun had broken through for the first time since she’d come to England, and her period had arrived that morning, after three days of terror and garbled prayers. She was on her way to lunch with a girl from her Neo-Baroque class, a Parisian with short, dyed red hair who had sat beside her in the lecture hall one day and whispered that the professor was all wrong about Poussin. Since then they had spoken together in French several times. She started reading the letter as she waited at the bus stop; all the women in the queue were commenting on the fineness of the weather for that time of year. Then she read it again, more slowly.

  “I wish I could be sanguine,” her father had written, “but the German people show no sign of rebelling against these measures. The German people seem very happy indeed. And the more I see of their Führer, the more I am convinced that on the matter of the Jews we must take him at his word … Practice your English, Liebling. You are always in my thoughts. Your mother, too, sends her love.” At the bottom he had added a postscript: “Do you remember Rolf Furchgott, Otto’s friend? He left for America this week, a cousin of his mother’s found him a job with a pencil manufacturer in New York.”

  She remembered, for the first time in years, the boy who had told her, in Otto’s garden, that he was going to be a cowboy. Then the bus arrived, and she climbed the steps with the others, clutching the blue air letter. In the unfamiliar sunlight the city seemed to have lost its romance. Buildings she had thought of as stately in their grayness were shown up as covered with grime; the people on the street looked down at heel; the conductor’s voice, when he asked for her fare, was harsh and toneless.

  Huddling in her seat, she shoved the letter into her handbag and smiled timidly at two straight-backed elderly women across the aisle, but they looked away without smiling back. She felt they knew, or suspected, that she needed more from them than was decent. She pressed her face against the window. The bus was traveling down a street of neat identical houses, with scrubbed steps and solid brick facades, each with its own brass knocker and high, fan-shaped window. The doors were red or blue or gray or black, their glossy paint shone in the sunlight; she could not imagine any of them opening to let her in. The only English home she had ever entered was Aunt Jilly’s, and that was when its owner was out. She took the letter from her bag and read it again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By May it was already harder to send money out of Germany, especially for Jews. Her father managed to smuggle her grandmother’s jewelry to her, in a round tin of Lebkuchen with a picture of the Frauenkirche on the lid. There were two square-cut diamond brooches, a small emerald pendant shaped like a lily, and a pair of sapphire earrings that dangled pearls. She took them to a pawnbroker in Whitechapel, an Ostjude, as her mother would have called him; coming out from behind the counter at her entrance, he fingered the stuff of her dress, complimenting her on the quality of the fabric. But when she brought the jewelry from her handbag, he assumed his professional manner, turning each item over and clucking his tongue. Then he told her, shaking his head and sighing, that they were all too old-fashioned to fetch much; it was a pity, but that sort of piece just wasn’t attractive to people any more. He offered what she knew must be a very low price, but still it was enough for her to get by for three months if she was careful.

  She was still going to the pub on most evenings, though it had become harder to strike the right note. For the first time in her life she was reading newspapers. Then there were the stories whispered by the refugees who’d started trickling across the Channel—accounts of a Jewish baby being snatched from her mother and hurled into a dustbin, an old woman set upon and knifed in the street.

  Two sisters she’d gone to school with, sent to London to learn to type, brought a letter from her father folded around her grandmother’s wedding ring. She invited them to meet her at the King’s Head one evening, where she introduced them around, bu
t they were not a great success. Julian was telling a story about climbing into his own window at Christchurch after curfew: how the beadle had called out to him, and then he’d bumped his head as he tried to extricate himself, which made him stagger, so the man had thought he was much drunker than he was. The girls from Nuremberg hadn’t laughed; they only smiled politely, in unmistakable puzzlement, their hands folded primly in the laps of their unfashionably wide skirts.

  “They’re a bit heavy going, aren’t they?” Julian said sotto voce. “Thank God you’re not like that.” Later she tried to defend them by telling him they’d been having a very hard time in Germany. He wasn’t surprised, he said with a shrug. Everyone knew the Hun was a beast.

  Since she’d been in England she’d come to understand that he was not after all a figure of romance but a recognizable type—that there were many young Englishmen as restless, derisive, even sulky, as he was. If she shut her eyes, in those evenings at the pub, she could not always be sure who was speaking. But such knowledge did not free her; it only made her afraid. She needed to go on loving him no matter what; she needed to believe she was there because of love, or she would only be another refugee, like the two sisters, someone whose country didn’t want her any more.

  At the Aliens Registration Office in Lambs Conduit Street, a stocky man in a bright blue suit looked her over suspiciously and told her the only work permit available to foreigners was for domestic service.

  “And what does that mean?” she asked timidly.

  “It means a maid.”

  She thought of Ilse, her mother’s housemaid from the mountains, whom she’d courted with bread and jam and almond pretzels when she was a child. Ilse could carry a bucket filled with coal up three flights of stairs without pausing for breath, or push the heavy sideboard away from the wall single-handedly when she wanted to clean behind it. Louisa got dizzy just scrubbing the bathtub after her bath; often she could not get the front door of the lodging house open, even when she hurled her shoulder at it while turning the key. She had to ring the doorbell instead. The other lodgers, who presumably had not lived through a famine, rolled their eyes; the landlady grumbled. Nevertheless, she asked the man humbly for an application and sat at a long high counter, filling it out in her best handwriting. She was the only person there in a hat with a feather on it, or a coat that was not sagging at the seams.

  She had stopped attending the lectures at the Courtauld. The bus fares were too high, and such interest as she’d had in Baroque art was waning. On the other hand, she could not spend all day in her room, either; the landlady didn’t like it, and the gas fire ate up sixpences at a terrifying rate. She wandered around the department stores on Oxford Street, avoiding the salesladies’ eyes; she sought comfort in the dingy splendor of the Paddington Library, where she sat reading books about medieval queens, but finally, stammering with embarrassment, she had to explain to Mrs. Webster that she had only one week’s rent to give her; she would need to look for a cheaper place.

  “I known something like that was happening, dear,” the woman said. “I can always tell with my young ladies.”

  Louisa hung her head, ashamed to have been so transparent—one in a long line of impecunious lodgers.

  “You’re best off going back to your own country, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “But I can’t,” she said wildly, and then stopped. “I can’t,” she said again.

  Mrs. Webster gave her a shrewd look. “It’s that way, is it, dearie?”

  “I’d get a job,” Louisa said in a rush, “but they’ll only let me go into service. And I’m not strong enough.”

  The woman looked her up and down, pursing her lips. “I tell you what,” she said. “I got a sister, see, who does sewing for some very fine ladies, and just today she was telling me about one of them, Mrs. Grenville I think her name is, what’s just had to fire her lady’s maid on account she was stealing from her. Robbing her blind, she was. Anyone can be a lady’s maid, I’m sure. There’s nothing to it, is there? Just hanging up her clothes and keeping the dressing table tidy, as far as I can make out. Cleaning up the spilled powder. You can do that much, can’t you?”

  Louisa nodded uncertainly. It did not seem possible that anyone got paid for doing so little, but at that point she was ready to try anything.

  “I’ll get my sister to put in a word, shall I? This Mrs. Grenville might take quite a fancy to you, you being so ladylike and all. And then you can stay here. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  And so, on a rainy morning in May, Louisa found herself entering a russet-painted gate in Blomfield Road, just opposite the canal, where a row of shabby-looking houseboats squatted in the water. When she rang the bell, a roly-poly little maid appeared and showed her into a blue-and-gold morning room. Louisa looked at the beautiful pale masses of Mrs. Grenville’s hair, piled and twisted and coiled around her face, and wondered if she could possibly create such a coiffure. But when she explained haltingly that she was most anxious to obtain a position and, inexperienced though she was, would do her conscientious best, the other woman looked at her in distress. Louisa realized that Mrs. Grenville was only a few years older than she was, twenty-four maybe, or twenty-five, and not completely mistress of her facial expressions.

  “Oh, but I couldn’t,” she cried in an agitated voice, and then more firmly, “I’m sorry, but it’s out of the question.” She leaned toward Louisa as though she were about to clasp her hands in sympathy. “It would be too awkward, don’t you see? You’re so obviously not a maid.”

  “But what am I going to do?” Louisa blurted. “I have to get a job, and they won’t give me a permit for anything but domestic work. I can’t be a proper maid—I’m not strong enough—and I don’t know how to cook. What would you do?” Then she blushed, because of course it was presumptuous to suggest that Mrs. Grenville would ever find herself in that situation.

  Mrs. Grenville frowned, shifting her hands in her lap. The rain lashed harder against the window. Louisa was sure she would say, What business is it of mine? But no. “Let me think,” she said, and Louisa waited tensely while she thought. Then her face cleared. “Hang on a moment. Isn’t a governess domestic help?”

  Louisa had no idea, but it seemed a moot point: she could not possibly be a governess, what with everything she didn’t know.

  When she said that, though, Mrs. Grenville laughed in delight, dislodging one of the coils of hair. She tucked it behind her ear. “My dear, you can’t imagine the ignorance of the average English governess. Mine had barely mastered the times table. The only thing I learnt from her were the Latin names of flowers. Can you play the piano?”

  “A little. Not very well.”

  “As long as you can thump out a tune or two. How’s your French?”

  “Not too bad. I went to school in Lausanne.”

  She clapped her hands like a child. “Splendid. And fluent German, of course. You’d be perfect. I know it’s a rotten sort of job, but better than a lady’s maid, don’t you think? And if you have a decent employer … Let me see.”

  Louisa sat there expectantly, as though Mrs. Grenville might come up with a job on the spot. Instead, she picked up the gold-and-white telephone and rang her mother to find out the name of the governesses’ agency she had used. Then she wrote, on beautiful cream-colored letterhead, a character reference stating that Louisa was known to her personally; she could vouch for her good character, as well as her exquisite German and French. She blotted it and put it into an embossed envelope. For a moment it almost seemed as though she might invite Louisa to stay for coffee, as though they would even become friends, but of course that didn’t happen. Louisa never saw her again, though Mrs. Grenville stood as she was leaving and kissed her impulsively on the cheek, wishing her luck.

  Two weeks later, just when the money from the jewelry had run out—she had one pair of stockings left, and had to choose between bus fare and breakfast—the woman at the agency sent her to a tall whitewashed hous
e in South Kensington, where she was hired on the spot to teach a precocious, lame little boy not strong enough to go to boarding school. She never became as fond of him as she had hoped—he mocked her accent and was skeptical about her grasp of geometry—but she had no trouble feeling romantic about his parents. His mother looked like a nun, always dressed in gray, with her dark hair pulled back into a chignon and her pale forehead always slightly puckered with the weight of conscience. She was the daughter of a rich industrialist in the Midlands who had converted to Catholicism after his wife’s death and given away a large part of his fortune. Now she was writing his biography, with the help of a Jesuit priest. Her husband too seemed burdened with some undisclosed worry; he was a Balkans expert at the Foreign Office, and seemed to understand better than most why Louisa could not return to Germany. Occasionally he even sought her out to discuss the situation there. She reported what the refugees had told her, and what her father had written about the massive rearmament going on. It was plain, Franz said, that sooner or later Germany would be going to war. When Louisa repeated this to her employer, he nodded grimly. She hoped, though she did not place much faith in it, that maybe he was taking the news back to the Foreign Office.

  But most of her fears were about Julian. She no longer asked herself what she felt for him, or didn’t feel; it only mattered that he should feel something for her, that she should not lose him entirely. More and more, she was nervous and clumsy around him, which made him irritable with her, and then she grew clumsier still. There always seemed to be a bit of food dangling from her mouth, or a sneeze coming on, at the very moment he glanced over at her.