Once, to my mother and father, in a small room in our family home in Fulham, on a fresh summer’s night when the moon was full and the stars were bright and the river was a shimmery-skinned snake beneath the window.
And once again, to Mrs Mack, when I was seven years old, in her house tucked above the shop selling birds and cages, in the area of Covent Garden referred to as the Seven Dials.
CHAPTER SIX
Summer, 2017
Mrs Berry was out amongst the hollyhocks and larkspur when Elodie arrived home from work. The garden door at the back of the hall was wide open and Elodie could see her old landlady inspecting the blooms. It never failed to amaze her how someone who relied on Coke-bottle glasses to tell the difference between diamonds and hearts could remain such a sharpshooter when it came to the grubs on her flowers.
Rather than duck straight upstairs, Elodie went down the hall, past Mrs Berry’s grandfather clock – still softly, patiently, sweeping time aside – to stop at the doorway. ‘Are you winning?’
‘Scoundrels,’ Mrs Berry called back, plucking a fat green caterpillar from a leaf and holding it up for Elodie’s distant inspection. ‘Sneaky little devils, and greedy, too – frightfully greedy.’ She dropped the offender into an old jam jar with a smattering of others. ‘Fancy a drink?’
‘Love one.’ Elodie dropped her bag on the concrete step and headed out into the summery garden. A quick Friday catch-up and then she’d start on the recordings as she’d promised Penelope.
Mrs Berry set the jar of wrigglers on the elegant iron table beneath the apple tree and disappeared into her kitchen. At eighty-four she was exceptionally spry, a fact she credited to her refusal to earn a driving licence. ‘Terrible polluting machines. And the way people charge about in them! Dreadful. Much better to walk.’
She reappeared carrying a tray loaded with a jug fizzing orange. Mrs Berry had been on a trip to Tuscany with her watercolour group the previous year and had developed a penchant for Aperol Spritz. She filled a generous glass for each of them and passed one across the table. ‘Salute!’
‘Cheers.’
‘I sent that RSVP of yours off today.’
‘Brilliant news. That’s one, at least, for my side of the church.’
‘And I’ve been giving more thought to my reading. There’s a lovely Rossetti – reads like a piece of Morris fabric, all peacocks and fruit and halcyon seas …’
‘Sounds divine.’
‘But trivial. Too trivial for you. I prefer the Tennyson. “If I were loved, as I desire to be, What is there in the great sphere of the earth, And range of evil between death and birth, That I should fear, – if I were loved by thee?”’ She was smiling beatifically, a small hand planted on her heart. ‘Oh, Elodie, what truth! What liberty! What joy, to be released from life’s fear by the simple knowledge of love.’
Elodie found herself nodding with equal enthusiasm. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘There’s the small matter of what Alastair’s mother will think of a wedding reading that describes life as a range of evil between death and birth …’
‘Pah! What business is it of hers?’
‘Well, none, I suppose.’
‘It’s not the point of the poem anyway. The point is that no matter what evil might come one’s way, to be loved is to be protected.’
‘Do you think that’s true?’
Mrs Berry smiled. ‘Did I ever tell you how I met my husband?’
Elodie shook her head. Mr Berry had died before she moved into the attic flat. She’d seen photos of him, though, lots of photos of a beaming man with glasses and a rim of white hair around an otherwise smooth pate; they were all over the walls and atop the sideboards in Mrs Berry’s flat.
‘We were children. His name was Bernstein back then. He came to England on one of the trains from Germany at the start of the Second War. The Kindertransport, you know? My mother and father had put their names down as foster parents and in June 1939 we were sent Tomas. I still remember the night he arrived: we opened the door and there he was, all alone, skinny legs and a battered suitcase in hand. Funny little thing, with his very dark hair and eyes, and not a word of English. Ever so polite. He sat at the dinner table and endured my mother’s attempt at sauerkraut and was then taken upstairs to the room they’d made up specially. I was fascinated, of course – I’d asked many times for a brother – and there was a fissure in the wall back then between my room and his, a mouse hole that my father had never got around to fixing. I used to spy through it, and that’s how I knew he lay down each night in the bed my mother had prepared, but when the house got dark and quiet he carried his blanket and pillow to the cupboard and climbed inside to sleep. I think it was this that made me love him.
‘He had a single photograph with him when he arrived, wrapped up with a letter from his parents. He told me later that his mother had sewn the little parcel inside the lining of his jacket so it couldn’t get lost along the way. He kept it all his life, that photograph. His two smartly dressed parents, and he a happy little lad between them with no idea of what was coming. They died at Auschwitz, both of them. We found that out later. We got married as soon as I turned sixteen and the two of us went off to Germany together. There was so much confusion after the war, still so much horror to be sorted through, even then. He was very brave. I kept waiting for it to hit him, all that he’d lost.
‘When we learned that we couldn’t have children, when his best friend and business partner swindled him and it looked like we might be bankrupted, when I discovered a lump in my breast … he was always so brave. So resilient, I suppose – that seems to be the word du jour. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things – many’s the time I saw him weep – but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognise adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.’ She topped up their glasses. ‘I’m telling you all this, not because I feel like a stroll down memory lane or because I like to tell my young friends sad stories on sunny Friday evenings; I just – I wanted you to understand. I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.’
There was little Elodie could think to say. To utter agreement in the face of such hard-won wisdom sounded glib, and really, what of life’s experience did she have to add to the thoughts of her eighty-four-year-old friend anyway? Mrs Berry didn’t appear to expect a response. She was sipping from her drink, her attention focused on something beyond Elodie’s shoulder, and so Elodie fell to her own musing. She realised that she hadn’t heard from Alastair all day. Penelope had mentioned on the phone that he’d had the meeting with the New York board and that it had all gone very well. Perhaps he was out with his colleagues celebrating the merger?