VIII.
Those few days at Fersen Hall were for the most part ghoulish. The weather remained stale and indecisive and we few residents, permanent and temporary, gathered together almost by instinct. I studied with Leander in the library each morning, but we did not warm to one another. I found him to be standoffish, and needlessly competitive about our work. In turn, I suspect he thought me frivolous and undisciplined, which I was. At one point I doodled in the margin of the notebook he had leant me, and when he noticed he was furious; to see his reaction you would think I had desecrated some priceless saintly relic.
I had noticed a trend in the extended Barclay family: that the women tended towards feyness and the men, as though to compensate, were fiercely pragmatic and determined. Taken as a whole they were well-balanced, but individually insufferable with the wrong audience. During our sessions Leander would often speak to me – nay, lecture me – about his plans for life beyond school. Every milestone was set out: which university (Cambridge), which college (Pembroke), which degree (medicine), and even which specialism. I told him I did not know what pulmonology was, and he threw me a disgusted look. After university he would join a practice in Harley Street, he said, after which point it seemed an element of chance crept into this otherwise impeccably charted journey.
“If I’m made a partner of the practice by the time I’m twenty-eight, I shall stay in London,” he explained without prompting. “Otherwise I shall start my own practice abroad, probably in Hong Kong or Singapore. A man can climb the ladder much quicker in the colonies.”
I nodded glumly. If I had to pinpoint the moment when I turned decisively against pursuing a university education, it was then. I could not imagine anything less exciting than three years alongside Leander’s ilk. Would he mellow at Pembroke or grow yet more tedious, exposed – as of course he would be – to hordes of kindred spirits, each one a budding pulmonologist, whatever that was, with his sights on sturdy Harley Street, or the chancier, more exotic climes of Singapore.
“What about you?” he said at last, in a quite unfriendly tone. We were sitting in the bay window of the library, which looked out over the unkempt gardens, the grazing meadow, the ha-ha and the rolling forest beyond. This was part of a scheduled revision break, to clear our heads before we changed subjects.
“After school? Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t given it much thought.”
“You’ve spent too much time with my cousin, “ he replied. “You can’t just muddle through life, directionless, you know?”
“She seems to manage,” I said, rather petulantly.
“Florence is different. All women are. A man, on the other hand, has to know what he’s about.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“You ought to try for Cambridge,” he said. “It’s alright if you don’t know straight away what it is you want to read – you can always change. If science isn’t your forte you could do theology or English. Your next task is to choose the right college. I’ve got a friend you should speak to. He’s a third-year at Jesus, doing Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic literature.”
“I should like that very much,” I said, staring out at a flock of sheep in the near distance, beating a laborious path to the shelter of the woodland. “This friend of yours sounds extremely interesting.”
I began instead to think about art school. The seed of the idea had long lain dormant, but now it warranted serious consideration. True, I had no discernible artistic talents, but that had not prevented so many of my friends from signing up. I have written here, or at any rate should have written, that great artistry comprises vision, craftsmanship and bravery. Good artistry, however, can be achieved with as few as two, or even just one, of these elements. Craftsmanship I did not have, but vision and bravery I was sure I could fake. Through Megan I had learned to talk the talk, and when eventually I was exposed as a phony, by then it would be time to get a proper job anyhow. All that remained was to avoid flunking my exams; I was not stupid enough to believe I could bluff my way through life on a wing and a prayer. A man needs something to fall back on…
Respite, or something like it, came at meal times when I escaped the confines of the library, and Leander’s superior attitude. We all took turns preparing the food and I paired myself with Florence, who was an excellent cook. Every ingredient came from the garden, even the meat. She never shot or trapped rabbits herself, but she was adept at skinning them. (One of the most incongruous sights I have ever seen was Florence kneeling on the lawn in a beautiful summer dress, knife in hand and bloodied to the elbows, like a surgeon at Trafalgar. In front of her lay the corpses of two hares, turned inside-out. She dried and salted the pelts, and later on knitted them into fetching pillow covers.)
“A productive morning?” asked Mr Barclay during the final such luncheon, addressing Leander and me. I glanced at my study partner, who kept his eyes on his plate.
“Very productive,” I said. “Your nephew and I make a good team.”
Leander snorted derisively, though I don’t know if anybody but me noticed.
“My dear wife,” said Mr Barclay, quite mournfully, “had very high hopes for young Leander. He intends to be a doctor, did you know?”
I nodded. “Yes, he mentioned it in passing.”
“And what will you be studying this afternoon – more history?”
Florence interrupted. “No daddy, he’s resting from study. He will help me with my piano practice.”
“Ah, yes. Yes, he must not strain himself,” said Mr Barclay, and Leander snorted again. He was being really quite rude. “I hope your time here has not been stressful? It cannot be much fun revising all day when you could be playing outdoors.”
“I would otherwise be revising in London, sir,” I said. “The change of scene is healthy.”
“Indeed. And I appreciate the company, now of all times. Florence, too, I think. We would have been very lonely without you.”
I was ashamedly gratified that Leander, by implication, had been excluded from the compliment. I do not know what he made of his uncle but evidently he found Florence quite exasperating, understandably. As a blood relative he was perhaps immune to those other charms of hers, which in my mind absolved her entirely.
That afternoon, the last before my evening train to London, I spent in the drawing room with Florence, beside her on the duettists’ piano stool whilst she played, turning the brown brittle pages of some obscure concerto. The ink of the notes was faded into the score, the flags and stems almost indistinguishable from the tanned sheets upon which they were printed. Florence’s long slender fingers spanned an octave with either hand, or seemed to, and moved over the keys with a startling grace and vigour. In spite of the fire the long room was bitterly cold, such that our breath was vapour, and the room was a mess of piled up chairs, opened drawers and sheet music lying all about – as though in the aftermath of a frenetic burglary. But it transformed when she played. It became somehow grand, somehow palatial, and seemed to groan with heat. Really, I should not dwell too long on a scene which by its nature eludes description – after all, how can I convey the sound, and the way it moved me? I could tell you the piece she played, and perhaps even the manner in which she played it, but without Florence physically beside me it was nothing, and I know this because I have heard the music since, snatches of it on the radio and the notes, though reminiscent, rang hollow. Nothing would compare to that first, last and only performance.
When she had finished the piece some quarter of an hour later I took my turn and played some ditties which I knew from memory. Florence sang to the tunes she recognised, and I to the tunes she didn’t. In the corner of the room the fire crackled and wheezed, and I pictured Leander in the library along the corridor, trying his hardest to concentrate in spite of the racket. Comforted by the vision, I played as loudly as I could manage, hammering away at the ivory. When I had exhausted my repertoire, which did not take long, Florence and I sat in a comfortable silence, and music seemed to reverberate even though the keys were still, as if notes were leaking from the saturated air. Apropos of nothing Florence took my hand in her own, and rested her head on my shoulder. I felt her warmth, and breathed in the pleasant, earthy scent of her hair. My heart thumped so loudly I worried she might perceive it.
“I’m glad you came back,” she murmured. “It’s just like before.”
I could see our distorted reflections in the curved, polished walnut of the instrument, seemingly conjoined. But how did Florence view the scene? Arresting, oblivious Florence. She saw it not, I suspect, as a natural progression from our childhood but merely a continuation of it.
As for me, I burned.
The train to London that evening was a good trip for resolutions. It was largely black outside, and panes of pale light grew and dimmed on the carriage floor as we rocketed past trackside lamps. I drifted into a state of trance; of enhanced but limited focus. I resolved to end things with Megan. To put it bluntly I had taken what I could from the relationship, and it was time to call it off before either of us could be hurt. The question was how to go about it. For a teenage boy to break up with a young woman was a humiliation, and one which she deserved to be spared. My hope was that Megan did not regard me with any great fondness – I was a compromise, after all. She had idolised Elmo van Solling in the time he was with Esther, and afterwards too, and I thought if I appealed to that latent, fruitless adoration, I might engineer a situation in which Megan broke up with me. Granted it was unsound, ethically and logically speaking, but it was also harmless and face-saving. The second resolution, reached between Kemble and Reading, concerned my academic future.
I was in Camberwell by ten o’clock, and sat down with my mother for a late supper at the kitchen table. From upstairs came the intermittent creaks of a family bedding down for the night. The shadow of a moth flitted over the cutlery.
“Your old dad will be sore,” said my mother, spooning another fishcake onto my plate. I had just told her that I was having doubts about university. “It’s what he most wants – for his son to have a degree.”
“But it isn’t like I’m an only child. There’s Ruth and Katie.”
“Oh, but that isn’t the same.”
I knew it, of course. And what is more, my younger sisters Ruth and Katie were not academic, and neither had expressed a desire to take their studies further than school. Their interests lay in homemaking and cookery, and they would become what Megan termed “breeders”: females upon whom suffrage was wasted, and whose aims in life did not extend beyond the maternal and matrimonial. I had not dared to tell her that all my female relatives fell into this category, and seemed perfectly content. Her family, I understood, were more progressive in this respect: artists, writers and socialist agitators. She and her siblings had been educated in mixed gender schools, and were destined to become rabble-rousing adversaries of the Establishment.
“Well what do you think, mum?” I asked her. She had become distracted by a stain on the tablecloth, and was now humming to herself. It was a marvel how she could flit so peacefully from one set of thoughts to another.
“What, me? Oh darling, I don’t mind either way. I don’t know about universities and all that – it’s your father who’s interested. I just want you to be happy.”
“Well, I don’t think I would be happy at university. I think it would bore me.”
“So that’s your answer. What’ll you do instead – go into electricals like your dad?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t decided yet. Listen, what would you say if I were to become an artist? Or at least, go to art school?”
“Be a painter you mean? I didn’t know you could paint.”
“I can’t really.”
“Oh, well son…it sounds a bit daft then.”
“You don’t have to be able to paint, mother.”
“You’d make things then, like statues?”
“Sculptures. Maybe. Something like that. What do you think dad would say?”
“Your father would have a fit. You know what he thinks of Mr Picasso and all the rest.”
“I don’t, but I can well imagine. Will you speak to him?”
“Now why should I do that?” she protested, but not too loudly to wake those upstairs. The walls and floors of the house were paper-thin.
“Please mum.”
And so I left to her to soften the blow, which in hindsight was a terrible mistake. It was clear she had relayed a highly bastardised version of my proposal to my father, apparently even naming “Mr Picasso” as someone I might one day emulate. She was at least correct in foreseeing his disapproval.
It was made clear to me during a particularly raucous breakfast some days later that my future lay in a university degree, or in my father’s business, delivering furniture and refrigerator units around Southeast London.
“The third way is the highway,” he said, indicating with his thumb the direction of the street. My sisters tittered – they adored domestic strife, but were too well-behaved to cause any themselves.
So that was that. Either I went to Oxford or Cambridge, or more likely a redbrick given my grades, and studied economics for three years, and kept up with Elmo and Mathilde in the holidays, and Florence by post, or I traded imagination and ambition for a life on the road, installing white goods in restaurant and hotel kitchens. Of course, refrigeration was not the only racket in town, and there was nothing to stop me finding other work – but what to do? The one advantage of working with my father was a friendly, or relatively friendly, overseer. I was not built for manual labour, and I hadn’t the connections or the skill to make a living from my creativity, such as Elmo did with his sculpting. I relied on my parents for an allowance, without which I could ill afford what my well-to-do friends called “a lifestyle”. It is a crime, frankly, when pleasure is stifled by poverty. The “Kemble-to-Reading” resolution, you will agree, did not go to plan. Without parental support, and without the possibility of a scholarship, I could not hope to enrol in art school.
Meanwhile the other, slightly Machiavellian scheme of mine was taken up and championed by fate. I saw Megan a few days later, in a basement flat in Vauxhall. She was busy with some friends of hers constructing a float for the annual Chelsea Arts Club ball, only a week away.
It was difficult, through the scraps and sawdust, to see the form of the thing beneath, but from Megan’s account, and judging by the sketched designs lying about the room, it seemed they envisaged a kind of gigantic talking cloud on wheels. By C.A.C. ball standards this was fairly conservative: Megan had shown me photographs of the previous year’s event at the Royal Albert Hall, which featured dazzlingly attired harlequins dancing about a maypole, and jugglers and fire-eaters, and even a dog. Except for the Labrador these were students from London’s various arts and performing arts academies, roped in by the C.A.C. “ents” committee.
The pay was not good and the refreshment sporadic, but the event was something of a spectacle. Where else but the C.A.C. ball could impoverished students fraternise with “the quality”, and where else could the quality let loose the strictures of dress-code and protocol? For most striking of all was that they did not look out of place, these performers; many in fact were outshone by the guests themselves, who donned all kinds of ludicrous, outlandish getups.
In many cases you could hardly tell them apart. It was difficult to believe such scenes of eccentricity and rowdiness could come out of a city only a few years before torn to rubble by V2 missiles and incendiary bombs. But there they were, dated as proof that London’s wild ones were irrepressible. These were Hubert’s degenerates in their absolute element.
“Hand me the craft knife,” barked a woman, who looked about my mother’s age. She had shoulder-length straight hair, of a sort of honey colour, and sunken, tired-looking eyes. Her chin was strong and upright, her brow rather heavy, and I fancy she would have made a handsome man. Confiding none of this to her, I handed over the knife from the table beside me, and she snatched it away without even a murmur of thanks.
I knew from her haircut and surly manner that this was Megan’s former studio cohabitant, who had had a nervous breakdown but was now apparently well recovered. She barked at me a number of times that afternoon, and always for the most tenuous infraction. Mathilde, who seemed to know all the artists, had previously described her to me as a “charmless, talentless harridan”, but I for one quite enjoyed her discourtesies. There is much to be said for politeness, but with Sandra – for that was her name – you would know precisely what you had done to offend her, and very quickly too. Bluntness is a kind of charm.
Later on Megan interrogated me on the boat-trip. She had been with her family in Wales so was unavailable in any case, but suspected, and probably rightly, that it was the kind of impromptu jaunt to which she would not have been invited. In the court of van Solling she had only ever been in favour on the basis of her friendship with Esther, Elmo’s very brief love interest. He moved on, and she and all her faction were gently cast aside.
I knew also that Megan was not overly fond of Mathilde and I thought, this time wrongly, that she suspected I was secretly smitten with her. To appease Megan I played up the role of Felice, although I well knew by that point he had returned to Italy under a storm cloud.
Megan asked me what he did. We were in the flat’s bathroom, lit by a single small window of frosted glass. She was bent over a rusty sink, washing glue from her fingers. She did not look at me when she spoke. I was perched on the bathtub, also rust-stained, with a watered down bottle of beer in hand.
“Oh, well…Felice has fingers in lots of different pies.” It sounded cryptic – the unexciting truth was that I didn’t know. Was he in business? I could not recall any mention of it.
“And he likes Mathilde?”
“Tremendously, I think.”
“I wonder why. And what did you think of Mitchell?”
“Brusque.”
“So what does Elmo see in him?”
“I couldn’t say. Stability?” I had meant it as a joke, but Megan nodded seriously. She was watching me in the mirror.
“Listen,” she said, affecting an absentminded tone. “Next week, at the ball – we could do with an extra pair of hands to push the float. If you’re free…?”
It was an invitation – delivered so offhandedly – that I had almost lost hope of receiving. Of course I should I want to go! My friends had talked of nothing but the ball for what had seemed like months.
“Next week? Yes, I think I’m available.”
“It won’t be much fun – it’s a heavy float and you’d be hidden away in the cloud. You might get some complimentary champagne at the end.”
“Megan, I’d heave a cloud all night for a snifter of champagne.”
It did not raise a smile, and I got away from the flat as soon as I could, citing a commitment to visit Elmo in his workshop – in fact, this had been at my insistence; Elmo’s indifference I had taken for assent. I gave Sandra a hearty “adieu!” for the sheer hell of it. She scowled at me.
Elmo’s workshop was actually just a yard behind a tea shop, with a large plastic sheet tented on bamboo sticks to shield his work from the elements. A slope in this roof channelled any rain over the wall and into the adjacent street. Tools lay about an anvil in the centre of the yard. Twisted limbs of metal pointed this way and that, and cones of sawdust littered the paving stone floor. Despite the flames in the crude, coal-powered forge – not much more, really, than a trough on stilts, ventilated by drilled holes in its underside – the temperature in the yard was freezing. It was very distant from the high-ceilinged, Parisian-style atelier which I had imagined was his place of work, and I struggled to contain my disappointment. But of course, my approval was not the sort of trophy Elmo vied for.
Right then he was seated by the anvil on a three-legged stool, hunched over to inspect the copper head of a sledgehammer. He wore shorts and a white linen shirt with an apron over it. How he could stand the cold, I did not understand. The head of the hammer was apt to come loose from the shaft, he explained, and he was interested to see if he could bind it to the shaft with cords of leather, like a Palaeolithic axe-head.
A partly finished sculpture – and the only evidence of the studio’s output – stood against the fabric-covered wall of the makeshift marquee. It was the height of an adolescent: two cords of polished bonze alloy, bi-tonal, twisted around one another, spurting like a plume of water from a rough, blackened base. Nodes and tributaries frayed off the two cords and coiled into themselves, and eventually – for it did almost seem that the sculpture were in motion – those intertwining cords split apart, turned and felt back down into the base, now pockmarked and glazed in soot. It had been made with the help of a metalworker, at a dedicated forge near Hitchin, and transported by truck to Elmo’s studio for his final adjustments.
I was no connoisseur of sculpture, and knew nothing of its contemporary forms, but if I had had the opportunity, I would have stayed there and studied that piece for days, every niche and bulge. For all its liquid frivolity, the monument was at least a quarter-tonne of solid metal. Nothing about it was accidental, as watercolour paint might spill beyond the pencilled boundaries laid down by the artist.
After thirty minutes or so, in which time Elmo and I exchanged very little in the way of conversation, a pale, almost ghostly face appeared at the rear window of the shop, next to a door that opened onto the yard. It was a young woman, aged around nineteen or twenty. Her dyed brown hair was coiled tidily on her crown and she wore an old-fashioned dress with a silk nautical-style collar. She rapped on the pane, and Elmo looked up. He smiled with his eyes and beckoned the young lady, who then opened the door and stepped into the yard.
“Gosh Elmo, it’s rather dank out here,” she said. She bent down, for Elmo had not moved from the stool, and kissed his forehead.
“Hello sister,” he murmured. “You’re early. “
“Hello grumpy,” she teased, and to me: “Geraldine, how do you?” I shook her hand.
“I’m a friend of your brother,” I said, by way of explanation, although what else I could have been – Elmo’s patron? – I don’t quite know.
She looked me up and down, her delicate nose wrinkled, perhaps unconsciously. “I didn’t know Elmo’s friends were welcome at his studio. I’m certainly not.” She turned to her brother. “You’ve never let me through that door, have you Elmo? Until now.” She was being playful, but her brother was evidently not in the same mood.
Elmo grunted and stood up. He went across the yard to inspect a metallic globule which was skewered and hung over the forge’s red coals.
“Anyway,” she said, “here’s what I came to show you.”
From her brown leather satchel she produced a small framed picture. It depicted a young Elmo, perhaps nine or ten, on a cold-looking beach. A tall, bushy-haired lady was stood behind him, dressed in a quite daring swimming suit, with her hands on his shoulders, crouching slightly so their faces were level.
Elmo looked at the picture for a few moments, very intently, and then, nodding his approval, returned to his work.
“It’s for his birthday next week,” she explained to me, showing the picture. “I found the photograph in an old album and got a pal of mine to frame it. Rather nice, don’t you think?”
“It’s sweet. That’s your mother?” I asked, pointing to the lady in the photograph. “She’s very handsome.”
“Oh, but that isn’t mummy. Mummy passed away the year that was taken.”
“I’m so sorry.” In fact I did recall somebody had told me that one or another, or both, of Elmo’s parents had passed away, but Geraldine was unperturbed and she waved her hand dismissively.
“Don’t be sorry. If you didn’t know already, you’ll find that our upbringing was a quite mystifying mess – particularly my brother’s. That,” she said, pointing at the lady in the picture, “is Margritte, a very darling woman who looked after us growing up, especially after mummy died. I had another copy of the picture made and sent it to her just this morning. She’ll adore it.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Now brother,” she turned Elmo, who had his back to her, “it’s time for that drink you promised.”
Still with his back to her Elmo shook his head. He was stirring up the coals with a handheld rake.
“I’ve got work to do – don’t want the light to die.”
“Oh, but you promised!”
“Gerry, the light. Why don’t you two get a drink? I’ll be thirty minutes longer, an hour at most.”
“But can’t you come back later and use these torches,” said Geraldine, pointing to one of several halogen lamps which were jimmied to the tent poles with tape and wire.
“I prefer the natural light. Those are for emergencies.”
“Emergencies? Such as what – another blackout? Really, you are too dramatic. “
And so Geraldine and I went ahead. She did not turn her nose up exactly, when we reached the pub at the crossroads nearest to the studio, but she pursed her lips in a gesture of muted disapproval. The windows were covered inside and out with a layer of dust and grime, into which fingers had here and there traced obscene cartoons and phrases. Even without the graffiti, nothing about the place was seemly. I had suggested it because I knew it was cheap and nearby.
I held the door open, and Geraldine – who had hesitated and might otherwise have suggested we go elsewhere – acquiesced. We took a table near to the back, close to the open door which led into the garden. The pub was virtually empty.
“I’ll get us drinks,” I said, imagining that a strong sherry would act to cloak the pungent atmosphere. The bartender not only failed to ask my age, but was kind enough to push across the bar a bottle with at least five measures still inside. The cork was sealed with brownish ring of dregs and the label was mouldering and illegible.
“No one’s drunk this stuff in years. Can’t stand it myself. Why don’t you take the lot.” I had only paid for two glasses, and thanked him profusely, grasping the bottle like a trophy and returning to our table. Geraldine frowned and studied the label.
“It looks quite old,” she said. “Nineteen thirty-eight it says here.”
“A good vintage,” I replied, nonchalantly. I was joking of course. I knew nothing whatsoever about fortified wine, and whether or not they even had vintages, but Geraldine nodded thoughtfully. Silently she had revised her opinion of the place – perhaps it was a shabby trove of connoisseurs. With some effort I released the cork and filled our glasses to the brim.
We toasted the king, and the remaining sunlight.
“May neither die.”
Sherry is not a drink I have ever particularly enjoyed, but on this occasion it was most amusing to watch Geraldine progress at lightning-pace through the early phases of intoxication: she became incrementally louder, and more outspoken, less genteel. She began to slur her syllables – just the odd one or two at first, but with growing frequency. After our second sherry I noticed that she only drank when I drank, as if our right hands were cuffed together. When I lifted the glass to my lips, so too did Geraldine, a split-second later. If I hesitated, so too did Geraldine. It cannot have been a conscious mimicry, but all the same I did watch her carefully for a hint of a mischief. There was nothing to be found: her eyes were bright green, and her thin smile vacant. A strand of hair had escaped the fetters of her styling and dangled sweetly on her forehead.
Another sherry and her candour gave sudden way to glassy-eyed reflectiveness.
“Did he not like the picture? He seemed indifferent to me.” She was referring to the photograph she had had framed for Elmo.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him. He had his mind on work. I’m sure he loved it – a keepsake for him and Margaret.”
“Margritte,” she corrected.
“Of course. Sorry.” There were a few seconds of silence. “So – how often do you see her, Margritte?”
“We haven’t seen her in years. She lives in Algeria now, with her second husband. He’s a very nice man called Alain who is, at least judging by the photographs – ”, she lowered her voice to a whisper, “half-native.”
Knowing as much about the Algerian situation as I did about sherry, the allusion passed me by.
“And Elmo misses her?” I asked. Geraldine nodded. I did not recall him mentioning Margritte at all, but then he rarely spoke about his upbringing, and the salient characters of his past. I knew versions of it, from friends and onlookers, but successive layers of paint may very well shroud the picture beneath, rather than enhance it, and after a little prompting Geraldine, loose-tongued and with unmistakeable eagerness, moved to apply her own coat. I had a sense that she, like many of us, yearned for his attentions, and as his sister it seemed somehow doubly tragic.
The siblings had had a governess until Elmo was thirteen years-old, and Margritte was she – a young war widow from Rosenheim, in Bavaria. She travelled to England in the mid-nineteen twenties looking for work whilst pretending to be French, much as her eventual employer had assumed a fictional Dutch heritage in the decade before. At first, Geraldine explained, Margritte was only occasionally present in the van Solling household, cooking meals now and then, and giving lessons in French and German to the children, of whom Geraldine was at that time the youngest. Persephone was born in April, nineteen thirty-six.
Her birthday was not celebrated in the van Solling household, for the date also commemorated her mother’s death, from labour-induced hypertension. Mr van Solling blamed the midwife – tried even to have her charged with manslaughter by gross negligence – but in truth no one could have predicted it. Persephone was her fourth child, and with the lowest birth weight. There was no reason to suspect the birth would go so wrong. From that day forward, Mr van Solling “withdrew”, in Geraldine’s words. He became very distant and cold, in particular towards Elmo. Why so? Perhaps with his wife’s passing he became increasingly possessive of that family which remained. Elmo was not “flesh and blood”, being his mother’s child from an earlier relationship, and nor did he resemble his mother in the way that his sisters did. He was the cuckoo in a warbler’s nest.
Margritte became a live-in from that summer, mothered the children – and Elmo especially, for he needed it most – and took complete charge of their education, though from what I gathered she taught her wards very little in the way of traditional academics, focusing instead on epical poetry – in the original medieval German – and art, and also botany. I recalled that Elmo, in his bedroom at the squat, kept a potted edelweiss which loyally bloomed each July: a lion’s paw in a white double-starlet. The soil he used was stony, and mixed with pulverised chalk in order – he explained – to mimic the mild alkalinity of alpine soil. Personally, I have never seen the beauty of these mountainous flowers; they are nothing beside even the commonest tulip in terms of scent and clarity, but clearly they symbolised for Margritte – and the van Solling children by extension – a certain place and time and way of life, long since shattered by war and the steady march of progress.
For their bedtime stories Margritte conjured up scenes from her own childhood on sun-baked Bavarian hillsides, bristling with edelweiss, meadow-grass and conifers, and the higher peaks draped thinly with snow.
When Elmo reached the age of thirteen, his father sent him to boarding school in Switzerland, ostensibly to normalise his education but in fact to remove him from sight. Although Elmo never spoke of it, it was here, so Geraldine claimed, that he was regularly beaten and perhaps even raped by certain of the older boys in his boarding house. The desperate letters he wrote home to his sisters and governess were censored by the school, leaving the recipient to garner what she could from the tone. Correspondence in the other direction was similarly edited, compounding Elmo’s sense of isolation.
Outside of term-time his father arranged for him to attend a holiday camp outside Lausanne, where a distant cousin could be relied upon to keep watch over him. It was at this camp, during otherwise wretched, lonely, miserable weeks, that Elmo first learnt to sculpt, something which he then took up at school, as a formal discipline. Quite soon he was too big to be a target for bullies – over six feet tall by the age of fifteen, and with a prodigious build – but by no means was he happier, and by his accounts he passed every free moment of the day alone in the school’s art studios, moulding clay, stripping cables and beating copper.
Kolomon Moser, the Austrian graphic artist, was his idol, as well as the architect Henry van de Velde, and in nineteen-forty-one, aged just fifteen, with the aid of a bursary he travelled to New York City to study his Belgian Building before it was dismantled and rebuilt in Virginia. He stayed there as a guest of Annabelle Siedleska, the mother of a fellow student.
“ – You know Mathilde?” asked Geraldine, and I nodded. “Well Annabelle is Mathilde’s auntie. It’s how those two became friends – through Annabelle. I sometimes wonder if she and Elmo were…” Geraldine paused, blushed a little, and abruptly changed tack. “So, you see, when Elmo wasn’t at school he was travelling,” said his sister. “We never saw him, not even at Christmas.”
“How awful to have him absent for so long.” In fact, I was thinking how fortunate Elmo was to have seen New York at such an age. It went some way explaining his glum indifference to London.
“Quite awful,” she said, and a wistfulness had entered her voice. “And his letters were pointless with so much redacted. I never heard what he wanted to tell me. He is very poetic you know, in his letters. We’re only half-siblings, it’s true, but I love him very much. I wonder if he realises that.”
I nodded. My family was no model of accord and unity, but we were broadly functional. As such I had nothing meaningful to offer Geraldine in terms of personal advice. Above all I was curious as to how to members of a family could have come to be so un-bonded, if that is indeed the term. It is one thing not to love a child, openly or in secret, but quite another to torture that child with emphatic indifference.
“Was it something he did,” I began, “ – Elmo, I mean – that offended your father? I’m sure the man is perfectly decent, but…”. I trailed off, not knowing how to complete the sentence. From Geraldine’s account her father sounded anything but decent. That he was a petulant tyrant must have been obvious, even to her.
“Oh, well he is, to an extent. The thing is, he never really warmed to Elmo. He was a stepson, and nothing more. Elmo’s actual father died a while ago, and when mummy died too my father no longer felt any obligation to Elmo. I’m not sure he does even now.”
“A lot of deaths,” I murmured.
“That’s right,” she said, with a fleeting spark of cheer. “Didn’t I tell you it was awfully confusing? Elmo’s father’s name was Mr Woodbine. Mummy and Mr Woodbine divorced when Elmo was a toddler. A year later mummy married daddy, and then a few years after that Mr Woodbine died, abroad, from malaria or something exotic. And a little later mummy died in labour with Persephone. A lot of deaths. People have said we’re cursed, although Elmo seems to have done the worst of all.”
“Poor fellow.”
“Poor fellow indeed. He’s an orphan, you see, biologically. And he was away so much that he didn’t have us to comfort him. I felt like I missed out on his childhood and he missed out on mine.”
“It doesn’t sound as if he had much of one.” It had dawned on me that this horrifying neglect was ultimately the price for his glamour. His sullenness was no artistic affectation; it was the inverted smile of a perseverant and deeply-rooted sadness. He was crippled by death and neglect.
“No, it wasn’t much of a childhood. Just a few happy glimmers, here and there,” said Geraldine. She was gazing intently at the picture, of the smiling child. “It’s as if he died – his soul, I mean. I suppose that sounds a little strange. His soul died and the rest of him just carried on, or tried to.”