Read Online Somewhere Over England by Margaret Graham - Free Book Online

she reached the street the daylight hurt her eyes. The flags were thrashing on their poles in a burst of wind and she turned and looked up at the windows of their flat. Would he come?
    He came with the cakes and the jelly and the hats she had cut from coloured paper, and Hans, Georg, Hermann and Ernst came too and they danced throughout the afternoon and evening and Heine bought wine for the street because Helen had worked on five studio portraits in two weeks and for once all the bills had been paid on time.
    Helen laughed with Marian, the girl who was married to the greengrocer and gave Helen yesterday’s vegetables without charge for the rabbit they both knew she did not have. She had a daughter of four and Helen had photographed her in return. Heine drank with her husband Rob and learned of this for the first time. He kissed his wife though she did not know why, and then sat Christoph on his shoulders and danced him up the street and back again along with the surging crowd. For the first time he met and spoke to their neighbours in the street.
    That night he helped Helen to bath Christoph and he said he had not realised he had grown so much and bent over the cot to watch him fall asleep. He had not looked at him for so long; hehad not looked at his wife for so long. He must remember that they existed. He must remember that he loved them; that he was responsible for them.
    Helen stood in the doorway, glad that at least this room was safe. Its ornaments of trains and dogs and bricks in place on the mantelpiece. This was family territory, to be kept secure for her son. There would be no sleeping bags here, no camp beds.
    That night Heine made love to her, slowly, gently, and she wept and told him how much she loved him and he said that she would always be loved by him.
    ‘Will I?’ she asked against his shoulder. ‘Will Christoph?’ She dreamed of the dark cupboard that night.
    Helen’s photographs of the Silver Jubilee celebrations were bought by an American magazine and she celebrated with champagne. She and Heine had one glass only for there were three others with them, but what did it matter? Isaac’s cousin Joseph laughed with them and Wilhelm and Günther too and it was good to see their eyes full of fun, their pain, which tore at Helen daily, gone for just a moment. But then Heine left to meet a contact. Helen watched him leave without surprise for what else had she come to expect? She pushed the bottle with one more glass in it towards the bruised, thin boys who were as young as she was and went to bed alone, for that also she had come to expect.
    In 1936 during a January that was dank and cold George V was laid to rest and Helen and her mother lined the route. Christoph was warm in his knitted suit and coat and he wore a black arm band like the rest of the crowd. The mood was sombre. Helen was thoughtful as her mother pointed out King Edward VIII walking behind the gun carriage pulled by sailors because she had read in the letters which came from America of the liaison between Edward and Mrs Simpson. She brushed the hair from her eyes. So even the succession seemed as uncertain as the rest of the world, which darkened as Hitler and Mussolini growled and raged. Peace was never more fragile, Heine had said, and Helen feared that he was right and what would happen then to a German who lived in England?
    Her mother held Christoph’s hand as Helen lifted him high on to her shoulders.
    ‘That’s right, then he can see and tell his own children, poorlittle mite,’ her mother said, glaring at the man behind who clicked his teeth and moved so that he could also see.
    ‘But he won’t remember surely? He’s only three,’ Helen commented.
    ‘You always said you remembered your father taking you to the stream at that age. He was on leave,’ her mother said with an edge to her voice, a voice which had been more mellow since Helen had begun to take Christoph to see her every two months. Alone of course. Her mother