“There’s not an imminent threat, as I understand it,” he drawled.
“A hyper-emotional guy flailing around—not threatening directly, but making everyone uncomfortable,” I agreed.
“Then I think I can do it on my own. I’ll set up a camp bed in that sunroom: it’s the one place with vulnerable windows. You’ve got the photos of the stalker, right?”
In the confusion of getting Morrell to O’Hare, I’d left my briefcase at his place. I had a set of photos in it, which I said I’d drop off in an hour or two on my way into the city. Calia pouted when I called the dogs to me, but Tim blew through his moustache and gave a walruslike bark. She turned her back on us and demanded that he bark again if he wanted another fish.
Lotty Herschel’s Story:
Quarantine
I reached the cottage on a day so hot that not even the bees could bear it. A man who’d ridden the bus with me from Seaton Junction carried my suitcase up the road for me. When he finally left me, after asking for the eighth or ninth time if I was sure I could manage, I sat exhausted on the door-stone, letting the sun burn through my jumper. I’d darned it so many times that it was more mending thread than cotton at this point.
It had been hot in London, too, but a horrible city heat, where the yellow skies pushed down on you so hard your head began to buzz as if it were filled with cotton wool. At night I sweated so much that sheet and nightgown both were wet when I got up in the morning. I knew I needed to eat, but between the heat and the lethargy my physical condition induced it was hard to force food down.
When Claire examined me, she told me brusquely that I was starving myself to death. “Any infection on the wards could kill you in a week, the condition you’re in right now. You need to eat. You need to rest.”
Eat and rest. When I lay in bed at night, feverish nightmares consumed me. I kept seeing my mother, too weak from hunger and pregnancy to walk down the stairs with us when Hugo and I left Vienna. The baby died of malnutrition at two months. Nadia, they’d called her, meaning hope. They would not be hopeless. I knew the baby died because my father wrote to tell me. A Red Cross letter, with the prescribed twenty-five words, that reached me in March, 1940. The last letter from him.
I had hated the baby when my mother was pregnant because it took her from me: no more games, no more songs, only her eyes getting bigger in her head. Now this poor little sister whom I’d never seen haunted me, reproaching me for my nine-year-old jealousy. In the night as I sweated in the thick London air, I could hear her feeble cries growing faint with malnutrition.
Or I’d see my Oma, her thick silvery-blond hair, about which she was so vain that she refused to bob it. In her apartment on the Renngasse I would sit with her at night while the maid brushed it, the ends so long my grandmother could sit on them. But now, in my misery, I would see her, shaved as my father’s mother had always been under her wig. Which image tormented me more? My Oma, shaved and helpless, or my father’s mother, my Bobe, whom I refused to kiss good-bye? As I grew thinner and weaker in the London heat, that last morning in Vienna grew so loud in my head that I could hardly hear the world around me.
The cousins with whom I shared a bed, not coming to England, staying in bed, refusing to get up to walk to the station with us. Oma and Opa would pay for Lingerl’s children, but not the daughters of my father’s sisters, those dark girls with nut-shaped faces whom I so closely resembled. Oh, the money, Opa had no money anymore, except that little hoard of coins. The coins that bought me my medical training could have bought my cousins’ lives. My Bobe stretching her arms out to me, her beloved Martin’s daughter, and I with my Oma’s jealous eyes on me giving her only a formal curtsy in farewell. I lay in bed weeping, begging my granny to forgive me.
I could hardly talk to Carl these days. Anyway, he wasn’t much in London for me to talk to. In the spring the orchestra went to Holland to perform; he’d spent most of June and July in Bournemouth and Brighton, where his fledgling chamber group was engaged to play a series of promenade concerts. The few nights we’d had together this summer ended with my walking away, walking across London from his little flat to my bed-sitter, walking away from an energy and optimism that seemed incomprehensible to me.