seems warm, but the wind from the sea is not. Martha holds her coat close as they turn towards the trees where the wood pigeons nest at the far end of the large, overgrown garden.
They both gasp at the sight of the great circular cloud of blue, white and gold lying under the spindly saplings and old sycamore trees. Lucy goes behind Martha to shield her from the cold wind and twines her arms around her neck.
‘Did you plant all those, Gran?’
‘No … Fred planted more and more each year until there was a great carpet of them, which grew and grew. So lovely. Oh, so lovely.’
‘Everything is just coming out. Look at that yellow, and the pink there in the corner near that white prickly bush thing.’
Martha laughs. ‘Quince,’ she says. ‘I think.’ Then suddenly, ‘I don’t want this all dug up for vegetables.’
‘Gran, why ever should it be? Of course not.’
‘It happens.’ Martha shivers, and takes one foot out of her shoe and dips it in the long wet winter grass. Lucy opens her mouth to say she will get cold, then seeing Martha’s face, says nothing.
Martha, leaning against Lucy, closes her eyes, pushes her old toes into the damp grass and for a moment the sharp cold sensation shoots her down the years to another place, another time. She smiles, savouring the birdsong, the flash of new-born, translucent yellow leaves, red flowering camellias, closed bud of cherry. She raises her face to the smell of spring, the first exciting promise of summer, to being young and full of hope, with the whole of life shimmering before her.
‘Gran?’ Lucy whispers after a while. ‘Don’t get cold.’
Martha opens her eyes, expecting to see Hanna, sent by Mama to bring her inside. But it is … it is …? ‘Darling,’ she says, ‘it is a little cold.’
Lucy bends and fits Martha’s small bent toes back into her shoe, and arm in arm they walk back to the house.
Fred is in the bathroom with the radio on and Lucy sits Martha on the bed and, fetching a towel, dries and gently rubs Martha’s feet warm again.
Martha places her hand on Lucy’s silky dark hair with the streaks of gold. ‘Darling, what would I do without you?’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this for me.’
Lucy looks up and says fiercely, ‘Gran, why not? All my life you have been here for me and now I am here for you.’
Lucy’s eyes fill with tears suddenly and so do Martha’s; for what has been between them and is now gone. Lucy longs to say, ‘Oh, Gran, I found something I wasn’t meant to in the loft. What really happened to you in the war?’ But she can’t. It’s too late. A few years ago, maybe. But not now. The Gran of her childhood is gone for ever, but the person she was is still here, burning with the same unquenchable spirit. Lucy takes Martha’s small hands and holds them to her cheeks for a moment, closing her eyes against her loss.
When she opens them, she says briskly, ‘Right, Gran, I’m afraid it’s woolly tights, passion-killer tweed skirt and shapeless warm sweater for you. You’ve done enough trolloping for one cold spring morning.’
Martha giggles. ‘Oh, darling, it’s so much more fun being a trollop.’
Fred, coming into the bedroom shaved and immaculate in tie and clean shirt, looks at the two women and the array of clothing on the bed and snorts at them.
‘If ever there were a couple of trollops, it’s you two.’
Outside in the garden, the very first bud on the cherry tree opens a fraction and NATO drops a bomb by mistake on a bridge full of Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo.
The rain has stopped and the Berlin night is quite still except for the muted sound of traffic out on the autobahn. He wakes in the dark and for a moment believes he is back in his childhood. He can smell the roses from his mother’s garden, but stronger still is the smell of horses and things he does not wish to remember. He can hear his heartbeat loud in the dark and the overpowering silence closes in on him. Why, after all these years, do the memories come flooding back? He has buried the past. He has buried it deep.
That was that life. This is another.
He can remember the first time he saw the little girl clearly. She had long, shiny black hair he wanted to touch. She was tiny, like a little doll, and she was afraid of horses. But she was not afraid of him.
Mutti was furious with his father. She did not want him to go into practice with a Jew, and she stood in the garden that day, unsmiling and icy. She called him to her and whispered loudly, ‘Ugh! How I hate the darkness of them.’
He pulled away from her. Kicked out at a garden chair because of the sickness in his stomach, and the gardener’s puppy lying underneath shot out with a squeal … I shiver at the memory of her eyes. Close my mind against the echo of her laugh.
All his childhood Mutti told him stories, terrible fairy stories of a race who ate their own babies, who were inferior, but a threat to all good Germans. After he met the little girl his heart told him something quite else.
How lonely they were, he and that fearless little girl. There were no other children nearby and only a hedge and a lawn between them. He defied Mutti, refused to think of her as Jewish. He and the girl were friends. They were friends.
Although he was older, she was the one with the imagination. They made small dens in the rambling garden on the edge of the forest, like nests, with old horse rugs and straw as linings against the cold and damp.
They always made more than one den to outwit Mutti. The girl seemed to know exactly where his mother would send the nurse or gardener to look for them, and where, in a tangle of dried fir branches, close under the branches of overhanging trees, grown-ups never ventured, if you stayed very quiet.
He was the practical one, carefully lining the small floor of their tree caves with layers of warmth. Pinching food from the kitchen and old coats from the hook in the stables so they would not freeze. Tying torn pieces of cloth to the trees so that they would know which way they had come.
In the depth of winter, when it was too cold to play in the garden, they often hid in the little tack room in the stable block. It had a small fire, and they played board games or drew pictures or read. The groom and the stable boy used to warn them when Mutti was on the warpath.
His mother knew perfectly well he played with the girl and she hated it. He could not take her into the house when Mutti was home, and even when his mother was out or away, the girl was so nervous she jumped at every sound, hated being inside his house.
His mother could not ban the little girl from the house and garden. She could not stop them playing together or from being friends, because of his father. He adored the child. She amused him. He also admired her mother, who was gentle and extremely well read.
Mutti was much too clever to dislike the family openly or show her jealousy and prejudice in front of his father. She enjoyed the money and lifestyle that the new clinic engendered. Instead, she made life difficult for the children, and any social interaction beyond the polite interchanges between the two families impossible.
This was neither unusual nor a surprise. Initially, the two families knew exactly where they stood and the conventions were strictly adhered to, in front of her. Jewish families kept to their own, lived amongst each other, not with Poles or Germans. As far as Mutti was concerned it should stay that way. Behind her back, the boy visited the girl in her home and so did his father.
As the years went by Mutti’s jealousy of the girl and her mother, combined with her prejudice, became all-consuming, obsessive. Fuelled by politics, the papers, her friends, Polish and German, it seemed to his mother that she had waited all her life for the time that was coming.