Selected Stories

‘I can’t help thinking of her,’ Liese whispered none the less. ‘I cannot help it.’

Tony turned away, and slowly crossed to the window. He wanted to be outside, to walk about the streets, to have a chance to think. He had been asked to reason with Liese when she wanted her wedding to be in London. A longish letter had come from Schelesnau, pleading with him to intervene, to make her see sense. It was inconvenient for everyone; it was an added and unnecessary expense; it was exzentrisch of her.

Tonight Liese had learnt that Tony had been daring as a boy, that he had walked along a ledge from one dormitory window to another, eighteen feet above the ground. She had delighted in that – that he had not told her himself, that he was courageous and did not boast of it. Yet everything seemed different now.

‘It is a feeling,’ Liese said.

At the window, Tony stared down into the empty street. The artificial light had not yet been extinguished and would not be for hours. Yet dawn had already crept in, among the parked cars, the plastic sacks brought up from basements the night before, bicycles chained to railings. What did she mean, a feeling?

‘Honestly, there is no reason to be upset.’

As he spoke, Tony turned from the window. Liese’s face was tight and nervous now, for a moment not beautiful. The air that came into the room was refreshingly cold, and again he wanted to be walking in it, alone somewhere. She did not love him was what she meant, she had been taken from him. He said so, staring down into the street again, his back to her.

‘Oh no, I love you, Tony.’

All over London, sleeping now, were tomorrow’s wedding guests – her mother and her father, her friends come all the way from Schelesnau. Her sisters’ bridesmaids’ dresses were laid out. Flowers had been ordered, and a be-ribboned car. The grass of the hotel lawns was trimmed for the reception. In her house by the sea Tony’s aunt had ironed the clothes she’d chosen, and Liese imagined them waiting on their hangers. The morning flights would bring more guests from Germany. She had been stubborn about the city of their romance. There would have been no old woman’s sleep disturbed in Schelesnau, no ugly unintended incident. Why did she know that the dead were carried from a house in a plain long box, not a coffin?

‘We are different kinds of people, Tony.’

‘Because you are German and I am English? Is that it? That history means something after all?’

She shook her head. Why did he think that? Why did he go off so much in the wrong direction, seizing so readily a useful cliché?

‘We are not enemies, we are friends.’ She said a little more, trying to explain what did not seem to her to be complicated. Yet she felt she made it so, for the response was bewilderment.

‘Remember that office party?’ Tony said. ‘The quarrelling woman in red? The waitress smiling when we went off together? 00178. Remember that?’

She tried to, but the images would not come as clearly as they usually did. ‘Yes, I remember,’ she said.

The doubt in their exchanges brought hesitation, was an inflexion that could not be disguised. Silences came, chasms that each time were wider.

‘This has to do with us, not with the past we did not know.’ Liese shook her head, firm in her emphasis.

Tony nodded and, saying nothing, felt the weight of patience. He wondered about it in a silence that went on for minutes, before there was the far-off rattle of the human voice, faint and small. He looked from the window to where Liese had laid the receiver on the table. He watched her move to pick it up.

They stood together while a clergyman repeated familiar lines. A ring was passed from palm to palm. When the last words were spoken they turned to walk away together from the clergyman and the altar.

The wedding guests strolled on tidy hotel lawns. A photographer fussed beneath a bright blue sky. ‘You are more beautiful than I ever knew,’ Tony whispered while more champagne was drunk and there was talk in German and in English. ‘And I love you more.’

Liese smiled in the moment they had purloined, before another speech was called for, before her father expressed his particular joy that the union of two families brought with it today the union of two nations. ‘We are two foolish people,’ Tony had said when at last the telephone receiver was replaced, after the journey to the loft had been retailed in detail, an apology offered because carrying out the instructions had taken so long. They had embraced, the warmth of their relief sensual as they clung to one another. And the shadow of truth that had come was lost in the euphoria.

‘I’m sorry,’ Liese said in the next day’s sunshine. ‘I’m sorry I was a nuisance.’