to the front of the bungalow. Would it be best to take the grapes home with her? But then, looking at their firm, shiny plumpness, she felt a sudden distaste for them. Quietly she laid the box on the front doorstep and hurried out of the gate.
It wasn’t that one was shocked, she told herself, standing in her cool, gracious drawing room a little later. If one had thought about it, one would naturally have assumed that he must have some sort of ‘love life’, to use the rather ridiculous modern expression. It was simply that one didn’t expect that kind of thing to be going on in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight, and not even in his bedroom.
Absently she rearranged a spray of Michaelmas daisies in the vase that stood on the low table. With sprigs of purple hebe and a few creamy-white roses the effect was exquisite.
It was strange that she had not noticed the reddish tinge in Mr Redfern’s hair before today; she had never cared for ginger men – just one of those little irrational foibles. Of course, one had always realized that he was not quite a gentleman …
She gazed out of the window at her charming garden, a restful, soothing vista of greens and blues and silver and white. It might be agreeable to take a tray of tea out to the courtyard, she thought.
Sitting there, sipping Earl Grey tea from a fragile, bone china cup, she turned once more to the Adult Education Prospectus. Watercolour Flower Painting; how delightful that sounded! The tutor was a Bridget Coombe-Stevens, and students were encouraged to bring their own plant and flower material.
There was nothing more ageing than to get into a rut and one really had a duty to oneself to ensure that this did not happen. And of course this class had the added advantage of not clashing with Italian, and so one would be able to keep one’s promise to poor Marjorie …
Philip Sealey
Philip Sealey currently teaches English at the European School in Munich. He has travelled widely and written two novels and the libretto for an opera. At present he is working on a third book set, like this short story, in Berlin after the Wall.
Es war einmal – once upon a time.
The wood was dark and the thin ribbon of sky above their heads was already speckled with the first stars.
She was four and he was six and every few paces she had to break into a run in order to keep up with him. Her basket, filled with the berries they had been gathering, hung heavily in her small hand and she longed to abandon it somewhere. Her brother Hans had nothing to carry.
‘Why do you always go so fast?’ she called crossly after him.
‘It’s getting dark!’ he shouted back over his shoulder.
‘But we’ll be home soon, won’t we? You promised we’d only be gone an hour.’
In the middle of the path, he stopped and turned to face her. She looked at his wide, frightened eyes and, in her mind, saw the forest stretching away endlessly behind him.
‘I don’t know the way any more,’ he said.
When Greta Maier opened her eyes, the sunlight was already filtering through the gaps in the half-drawn blinds. She lay still, listening to the faint voices she could hear from downstairs. Children’s voices. How strange that, on this of all days, the old dream – or was it a memory? – should return to haunt her. But not only the dream. The three words also that, like an incantation, seemed to float in the air around her, as though she had spoken them aloud in her sleep.
Es war einmal.
But perhaps, she thought suddenly, the words contained a message for her. For when she looked back over her long life, it seemed that everything she could remember, the century’s swirling tides that she had been forced to sail upon, had now no more substance than a dream. And this city – in which so much of it had come to pass, in which more than eighty years had slipped like fine sand through her fingers – was not its history, especially its most recent past, as unreal as the events of a fairytale? And for each character, in every fairytale she had ever read, whether the ending was happy or sad, there was always a final page and one last, conclusive full stop.
There was a knock at the door. Too abrupt, too authoritative by far, for children.
‘Mother.’
But, of course, it was only Hannah.
‘Yes?’ How faint her own voice sounded.
Her daughter knocked again. ‘Mother, are you awake yet?’
Frau Maier raised her head from the pillow and cleared her throat. She must be still half-asleep.
‘I’m just about to get up.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’
The door opened and Hannah came into the room. She was wearing an apron over the new dress the old lady knew she had bought especially for today. She was smiling, though her face looked strained. She bent down beside the bed and kissed her mother on the forehead.
‘Happy birthday, Mother. I wish you all the health and happiness you could desire for another year.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
Frau Maier reached out and hugged her daughter. ‘Are the children being difficult downstairs?’
‘You should know what it’s like. There’s so much to do and the little ones always seem to be under your feet. Lukas and Maria have baked you some currant bread. It tastes delicious. They insisted on using the old bread oven though, which meant having to light a fire. Miroslav had to chop up that old chair in the cellar for wood. You don’t mind, do you?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘I doubt if it was much good for anything else.’ She hoped it wasn’t the one she thought it was, but then was there any longer a point in hoarding these things from her past? The house was full of everything it had been possible to save from two world wars and their aftermaths. Each small ornament, photograph, or piece of furniture meant something to her, but perhaps the time had come to stop clinging on to all this debris. Maybe the oven, that had remained so long unlit, was the best place for many other things that seemed, on this morning of her ninetieth birthday, to have suddenly lost their meaning.
Hannah went back downstairs, closing the door behind her, and Frau Maier began to get up. She poured some water into the china bowl on the stand beside her bed and washed. The modern bathroom, that had been fitted at Hannah’s insistence when she moved back to live with her mother after her husband’s death, held no attractions for her. She washed, and lived, as she had always done. She took out a simple, dark-coloured dress, that she seemed to remember wearing for her eightieth birthday, and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror. Did she look any different from the last time she had worn it? The material seemed to hang more loosely from the shoulders, perhaps, her hair looked a little thinner, but other than that the only
