All This by Chance Read online

  His mind leaped back to the woman in the room near Russell Square preparing them, warning them, ‘It would be wrong to conceal that there will indeed be problems.’ Yet her assuming what they shared as family would assist in difficult times, that surely? But neither Eva nor her husband at that moment realising how little that was to draw on, how in fact it could mean nothing to them, a past which was never theirs and was now imposed on them? It was something that had not occurred to them, not with the clarity so apparent now, how they were accepting the middle-aged woman with her awkward arm, her slab of close-cut grey hair, her languages they would never grasp, because they could not avoid doing so without an unspoken judgement against them. Against their humanity. They had accepted because there had been no choice. All that coming back. Miss McGovern had clawed at ancient regrets.

  For one of the few times since he had bought the shop, six months after he and Eva and her aunt and their infant daughter moved into the Westmere house and the pharmacy with his name displayed in the identically styled gold print as had been there on Mr Golson’s window, Stephen snibbed the lock early and turned the card informing the public it was Closed. He sat in the room off the dispensary, his elbow on the chequered cloth, his thumb and forefinger pinching at the bridge of his nose. How David would be so confirmed in what he thought! The boy was right. There was no atoning, even if one might reasonably insist there is nothing personally that needs atoning for. A loneliness that for the most part he adroitly kept at bay came down on him. He removed his glasses and rubbed his hands at the sudden feeling of exposure. The phone rang and it was Eva. She said the assistant in the grocer’s next door had phoned to say a customer had asked why the chemist’s shop was closed, she had prescriptions to be made up. Was something wrong?

  Stephen lied to his wife for the first time in his life. He said Mrs Stoddart had been obliged to go home early and there was a sudden panic, he supposed you could call it that, when the Kempthorne Prosser man from pharmaceutical supplies had come in days earlier than expected. There was such confusion coping with him for a while, out the back there with invoices and catalogues, the front door must have blown to and locked. The notice? That must have swung around. And he asked, ‘Is everything all right there? At home?’

  Eva said, ‘As it always is.’

  ‘That’s good then,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ll see you before long.’

  Next time Miss McGovern wrote first, which surprised him. She informed him she would come the following Tuesday afternoon, if Stephen kindly agreed? He had not seen her handwriting before. She did not sign cards with the little gifts she gave Babcia or send letters during the two times she was away, visiting a relative in Australia. And so the novelty of it now, the neat authoritative script of a woman who once had taught in schools, who on Sundays still stood in front of children, writing names from the Bible on a blackboard, instructing yet making a game of it as well, the way she looped and coloured them, the fruit she twined round the first letter of Eve, the bright ring of light setting the M of Moses. Even the A of Abraham could look like a curved knife.

  This time Stephen walked along from the shop to the bus stop to help her descend, although she chose to grasp the brass rail as she lowered herself to stand beside him, and again handed across the scuffed heavy bag. ‘Mrs Stoddart will keep an eye on it.’

  She grunted rather than spoke in agreeing with him. Yet Miss McGovern assumed the closeness that had been established between them, that they would take up where a week before they left off. Stephen nodded to where clouds gathered heavily above the slate-grey harbour at the end of the sloping street. He said it looked as though the weather might turn at any moment, so they would drive across to Ponsonby. If she didn’t mind. There was a tearoom they could go to and not have rain to worry them. A place he had heard Eva speak of.

  ‘I like cakes,’ Miss McGovern said, as if that were the purpose of his suggesting it. Stephen thought yet again how it was a challenge to warm to her, to comprehend her distance from anything he truly understood. Even that simple enough remark of hers just now, was it some kind of wryness? Or even teasing him, her knowing the distaste he felt for her, casting herself as glutton as well as stranger? They walked to the green Vauxhall parked in the lane behind the shop. He held the door open for her. She said, ‘This smells different from other cars. I suppose it’s the chemist stuff you have in it.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  He was right about the rain. By the time they turned to Jervois Road a wind swept up the streets rising from the harbour, wet dead leaves from the trees stuck like rags against picket fences. He surprised himself, although not it seemed the woman he spoke to, as he used her name for the first time. ‘So you’ve come again to tell me something, Ellen, that you don’t want my family to know what it is?’

  ‘Important,’ she said, ‘that you know and they don’t.’ For the moment leaving it there, her implying she would tell him more as she decided, it was not for him to ask. Instead, ‘This is nice,’ she said, meaning the comfort of the car, how she had settled in the mock-leather seat beside him. He wondered what she might have been without the rest, all that? Without her kind of God. Without the camp. The absurdity of even thinking that. For she was speaking again, out of the blue, of her sister, Irma’s asking that last night if Ruth would come to her and the danger of doing as she asked, and yet it was done. ‘As if Ruth wouldn’t have. She was young and tough and angry,’ Miss McGovern said, ‘you would not believe. Before other things were done as well.’ And Stephen thinking, yet again, it is two lives we are always talking about, with everyone. And the impossibility of bringing them together, the frightened yet fearless young woman Miss McGovern recollected, the vacantly smiling, slow-moving aunt with her few dozen words, sitting hours at a time, as she liked to do in these colder months, on the sofa with its slanted stripes from the tilted blinds, her silence, her painful needlework. Then this unfathomable woman beside him laughing at something she did not explain to Stephen, the deep unexpected laughter Eva had told him of, when the two old women sat together in the sitting room. His thinking, as he turned to park in the street behind the block of shops at the Three Lamps, that there is a craziness through all this too, we are infected with it one way or another, all of us. We can no more follow them back there than they can get away to us.

  Miss McGovern rubbed a fat pale knuckle against a leaking eye. Then as if linking her own thinking for a moment with his own, she told him, as she eased herself from the creaking leather seat to reach for the door handle, ‘We were gifted with a kind of hysteria that helped us through. People hate us saying that, Stephen. Even those who share the truth. I say, God looks after us in different ways. It was not a place not to be mad, one way or another. How Daniel too must have thought that, as the beasts circled him.’ They walked through to the main road, and waited until the traffic paused. He stepped a pace ahead of her to the tearooms near the disused cinema with its scrap of Californian façade.

  It was a strangely old-fashioned place they entered, whose ageing owner had not kept up with the dark painted walls, the ceiling draped with nets and large glass floats of the smarter coffee shop a few doors further along. Towards the back of the long narrow room they took a table with pink brocaded chairs, a standard lamp throwing a cone of light from a tasselled shade. Stephen disliked everything it aspired to, a kind of crimped gentility, but his guest admired it. She sat with her fingers laced on the edge of the linen cloth. She nodded as she took in the room. He felt her steeping in the novelty of it. ‘It’s nice,’ she told him. He was not an imaginative man. He disliked profanity, not for its offensiveness so much as not seeing the point of it, but as they waited he pressed his palms together, thinking, Christ, will she never get on with it! As he also thought, Whatever it is she has in mind, whatever it is she is convinced I must be told, I would prefer not to hear. And then an extraordinary discomfort he did not expect and so resented, as she untied the knot holding her scarf, and removed it from her head. I
t was the casual slight flick of her head, the loosening of her hair as he had never seen it revealed in the years he had known her, its glint in the sudden light across it. Almost an indecency that shocked him. It was the action of a young girl, a grotesqueness from this ageing mounded figure close enough beside him to again pick up that tang of mint that so accompanied her. He wanted her to remain as she had always been, a monument, a relic. And yet now that casual feminine flinging of her hair: this too is what I am.

  A young woman then stood beside the table, an almost comic interruption. She wore jeans and a black-knit short-sleeved top, her casualness too at odds with the decor of where she worked. Without speaking she held a card towards Stephen, who told her, ‘Whatever you have. What you have for afternoon tea.’ The waitress said several things that this strange distant man—because that is what he is, the girl decided, even if he does not mean to be rude—seemed not to attend to. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes. What you have is fine.’

  Miss McGovern had folded her scarf and placed it on a corner of the table, her fist lying across it. The light from the lamp softened her appearance, yet netted her too with a hatching of lines from the tasselled fringe. Get on with it. Then ‘Listen,’ she ordered him. And again, so it seemed to Stephen, her speaking at random, whatever it was she thought so important for him to know as yet elusive, distant. Her speaking first of the fights, the hatreds, that flared between the different groups of women, the betrayals and jealousies and indecent loves. Before coming back to Ruth, and to her own sister’s death, always back to that. The prick of his own obtuseness also troubling him, his indifference, even that, to what he had thought of as garrulous and distant women caught up in their memories, their sentimental swathes of silence, but never this—the youthful and resurrected women younger than his own daughter now was, vital and determined to survive, elected ‘to defy in their souls’, in one of her redeeming phrases. ‘So many of those too besides our own.’

  She broke off as the returning girl placed patterned china cups in front of them, a matching teapot, and a few minutes later brought plates of neatly cornered sandwiches, scones which they were assured were fresh that moment, they couldn’t have come at a better time. Miss McGovern waited, silent, as if accepting there was ceremony in how such things were done as she took the handle of the teapot and gently moved it from side to side. A pause again as she reached and took a scone from the stand and rearranged the dishes of cream and jam so they lay exactly between herself and the man who waited for her to speak. And then the first scone eaten and a second prepared, before her repeating, ‘Listen.’

  She talked of her transferral from her working in the camp laundry to the same unit, the same division. She said what the exact word was for it in English she couldn’t say, but where the clothes taken from the new arrivals were gathered and placed on racks, where Ruth called out and set in place the things she took from them, and another woman typed up so order and detail in all things was maintained. Her own new job, she explained, after her sister died, was working in a nearby building with those who were on what she called ‘the lists’. Towards the end, she said, when more women came each day, after the killing of the Reichsprotektor in Prague and the reparations for that, after the barracks were not sufficient and thousands were crammed in a great tent with only canvas between the dying and the weather. More and more women were taken away as well, not the ones railed east to other camps but the chosen who must be attended to at once. ‘We did not have our own facilities. We were not one of those places. So they had to be taken to other places. When the transports began.’ Those on the special lists, Miss McGovern said, her job to check as the women were brought out to board the trucks. These were women who did not get back the clothes they wore when they arrived, but were handed dresses, jackets, at random, no one bothering if the sizes were incorrect. The clothes they wore out in the morning would be returned sometimes later that evening, brought back from the range where the women were taken to be shot. Before they boarded the trucks and the metal gates clanged up, before the waving of some and the placid dullness of others, they were given the drugged coffee the female guards told them was to warm them for their journey. To settle them. At times someone managed to conceal a stub of pencil, a scrap of paper, and notes came back and were taken from the pocket of a returned jacket before it was given to another woman on another day. The notes were brief and mostly said goodbye to a particular friend. A few confirmed that yes, what they feared would almost immediately take place.

  Most days there was not the chance for her and Ruth to speak. But as the Russians crossed the great plains towards them the camp became more frantic. More of the Reich floated on drugs and drunkenness, yet even then as discipline slipped it became more savage. Typhoid raged in the tents. Some of the guards began to disappear. One was returned and punished as if she had been a prisoner on the Appellplatz. An officer killed himself in public, and more shameful than his death, the fact that it was done in front of Slavs. And so the details came, until Stephen said, ‘I know that this must always come back to you. That there can be no end to it for you and Babcia. But to talk about it now. To insist on telling me. Is there point to that?’

  Miss McGovern held his gaze until he lowered it. There must be an end, surely, to what she feels she has to say to him? And the thought too, as if any detail dredged and lingered over and handed on to him could matter a damn to the irretrievable wasting of the past, the iron fact of that coming in on him as they sat together now, as she instructed him in this absurd bloody room at the world’s smug and inevitably forgetting end? He felt the pulse in his temple thicken and beat. He had hit the wall, wasn’t that the phrase young Caddy in the butcher’s shop had used, telling Stephen about one of the long races he ran at weekends? It meant you had to stop because there is nowhere to go on to.

  ‘Can we go now?’ he broke in on her.

  ‘No,’ Miss McGovern said. ‘I would like more tea.’

  ‘The pharmacy,’ he began to say, but left his sentence incomplete. He signalled to the waitress and when she came to the table he tapped the pot in front of him. ‘Tea. Would you bring her more of that?’

  He glanced across to the large man who sat at a table closer to the entrance, the length of dull glass confirming the drabness of the day outside, the continuing fall of rain. The woman with him examined a small diary for some time before placing it back in her purse. There was a surliness that seemed to emanate from them, Stephen thought, yet the absurdity of that too, imagining we can hazard anything about another mind. For the moment everything seemed touched with the insistence of the old woman beside him. The girl came back with the fresh tea, the charm-bracelet on her wrist tinkling close to Stephen’s ear as she leaned forward to reposition things on the table. Again, his guest turning the teapot, pouring the tea, before commanding as she had before, Now listen. ‘The family,’ she said.

  ‘Yes? The family?’

  ‘She muddles it a little when she talks of it. Ruth. About Berlin. About before in Breslau. You must know that.’

  ‘You forget you’re the only one she talks with. Talks with properly. What we say with her is like children with a handful of words. Beyond that there is not even confusion. What can we talk of?’

  ‘Not Eva’s mother, you think?’

  ‘Not even Eva’s mother. Babcia at times may stroke my wife’s cheek and touch her arm and say her sister’s name. Or their mother’s. But what else is there to tell? A few threads. What they told us in London, which was little enough. Names of relatives. Where they died. The dates they sometimes knew but mostly didn’t. At least there is comfort and safety for her as we live together. A bond between her and Eva which shouldn’t surprise us. A closeness they don’t need words for, is what I mean.’ And the appalling emptiness of it all, that is what Stephen wanted to say. But instead, quietly, not wishing it to sound an accusation, ‘That is why we wish you told us more. Those things you talk of and laugh about and must have in mind when you sit, even as y
ou sit together in silence. That is what I wish you had said to us before. But there is always such a gap. With you and us. You know that too.’

  Then the extraordinary truth that had never occurred to him, as Miss McGovern startled him with her insistent, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘That is what she remembers. Next to. Fragments. Next to nothing.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘A year at least,’ she said. ‘Nothing of importance. Yet of course it might come back. From time to time. I’ve read of that. A shock, say, raising it. Something might come back to her.’

  Her words coming down on him as if a physical weight. He felt himself lean forward in the way men do when suddenly in pain. ‘Perhaps as well,’ he said, but not believing it. All that, and then its loss. Not the suffering, no, not that, but the courage that brought her through it, the simple yet implacable integrity of what she was. The cruelty of losing that.

  It is then, surprisingly, Miss McGovern who looks at her watch. ‘What you must know,’ she said. At last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This man from the other camp, close to our own. We were the women’s camp, the one everyone knows of. There are people writing books about it. But there was a smaller place where only men were held, political people and the rest, the mix as there was with us. The ones who did the things we couldn’t do, the builders, the electricians, ones who drove the trucks, took away the dead. Even bread. The bread, the scraps of it we lined up for, that was made there in the men’s camp and driven across. I would see the bread truck on the road between the barracks and I would think this is like some dreadful pretence of what life was like in other places. Everyone I think had one thing like that at least, to remind them of somewhere else. Even for a few seconds.’