Perfectly Ordinary People(95)

Sorry, what shocked you?

Well, Christophe hadn’t said anything like that since Mulhouse in 1940. He hadn’t once mentioned finding someone attractive since he’d been tortured by the Germans. Obviously, I’d noticed that he’d liked Sam, but he’d never said anything to me about it. So I was really shocked and, surprisingly, a bit upset.

I’m sorry, but I’m not getting this. Can you explain why you were upset?

Oh, it’s perfectly normal you’re not getting it, dear. I’m not even sure that I understand, to tell the truth. Because you’re right, there’s no reason that should have shocked me at all because, before the war, he’d been incredibly cheeky. He was always commenting on men’s bums or muscles or whatever. He had quite a thing for moustaches at one point and could barely walk past a man with a moustache without saying, ‘I’d kiss him until he suffocated,’ or some such. He was very, very naughty.

But since Mulhouse, since 1940, he had never mentioned finding any man attractive. And then suddenly, we were in London, and the old Christophe was back. And the thing was, the thing that I didn’t want to admit to myself, was that it made me feel jealous!

Jealous? Oh! I see.

Yes, shocking, isn’t it? We’d been pretending to be this married couple with a child for so long that it was almost as if I’d convinced myself it was true!

But you still weren’t attracted to him? You weren’t in love with him?

Attracted? Absolutely not. As for ‘being in love’ with him, that’s more complicated. It’s just that I knew him so well by then. I knew his moods and his foibles and his weaknesses. I was so used to spending time with him – so used to depending on him, as well. We were linked in a way by Guillaume, too. It truly felt as if he was our son. And then suddenly here was Christophe talking about men, and I had to remind myself that my relationship with him was temporary and tenuous – in a nutshell, that he wasn’t ‘mine’ at all. And that made me think about Ethel and how much was riding on the fact of whether she was still waiting for me or whether she’d met someone new.

So while Christophe went down for his drink with the sexy barman, I lay next to Guillaume and tried to work out all my mixed-up feelings.

And how did it go for Christophe?

Oh, I don’t know. I fell asleep pretty quickly and he never mentioned it the next morning. But I don’t suppose anything happened. I expect he was just your typical flirty barman.

OK. And what was your plan? To find Ethel, I mean?

Well, the plan A was to visit her cousin Hannah. That was the only address we had in London, after all. But I was scared she’d refuse to help me find her.

Did you have any specific reason for thinking she might refuse?

Yes. Ethel had told me they’d fallen out, remember? In one of the last letters I’d got from her before we fled Mulhouse, she said she’d told Hannah the truth about us and that she was probably going to have to move on. In the subsequent letters I’d picked up from home she’d said she was having to move about constantly and that I should write care of Hannah, but I had written a few times, and she didn’t seem to have ever received my letters. So I suspected that Hannah wasn’t exactly on our side.

And how did it go? Did you find Hannah?

The whole thing was pretty awful. We went out there by bus, to Golders Green. We were too scared to use the Underground at first – for months, actually. We didn’t understand how it worked and without landmarks it was hard to work out where you were. But there was a bus that was almost direct and the bus journey was wonderful. I’d forgotten about that. It was a double-decker, which for us was quite the novelty, so we sat on the top floor, looking out over London. It was thick with cigarette smoke up there, but we loved it. Guillaume was thrilled too.

When we got to the address, it turned out to be a mansion – a huge place surrounded by a lovely garden. In London. Imagine! A maid answered the door, and I mean a proper maid in a uniform. She led us into the drawing room, and because Hannah no longer lived there – she’d got married in the meantime, I think – she got Hannah’s dad to talk to us instead.

Now, Hannah’s father was an orthodox Jew with the beard and the payots and everything—

Payots?

Yes, those braids they have dangling down. He was unfriendly from the start, and before he would even talk about giving us Hannah’s new address, he demanded to know how we knew her.

Christophe explained that we were friends and we’d shown Ethel around Mulhouse during her stay, and from that he deduced the entire story almost instantly. He pointed at me and said I was Ethel’s something-or-other, and then at Christophe and said that he was something else. I didn’t understand the words he used for either of us, but I suspected they were some kind of insult, in English or perhaps even Hebrew. From the curl of his lip you could definitely tell they weren’t compliments anyway. And then he began staring at Guillaume, who’d been sitting there good as gold, and demanding to know where he came from. He started looking back and forth between our faces as if mentally comparing us with Guillaume, and I became overcome with fear that he was in the process of working out that Guillaume was Jewish and wasn’t our child at all. I got panicky that he was going to try to take him from us because of some special Jewish law I didn’t know about.

Those things were impossible though, right?