The Corridor

He woke at six, because he always woke at six, holidays or not, and lay in the dark and knew what he was going to do before he had decided to do it.

The house was quiet. Charlotte had gone back to Berlin the evening before, after the goose that his mother insisted on for the first day of Christmas, as a concession to London; she was on the ward on the second day and had left at eight with a box of leftovers that she said she would give to the night staff and would in fact, Alexander knew, eat herself, standing up, at two in the morning. The staff who lived out had gone home for the holiday. The ones who lived in were asleep. Herr Schade’s Tuesday replacement would be in the lodge by the gate with the radio. There was nobody on the first floor but his mother, at the far end, and himself, at this end, and between them, the corridor.

He got up and dressed in the dark. He put on Charlotte’s socks, both pairs.

---

He had not walked the corridor since February.

Nobody had told him not to. Nobody had told him anything. He had simply come back to the house in the Neuer Garten, three weeks after, for the first weekend, with the Council’s folders in a box in the car and Lukas beside him, and gone up the main stairs, and turned left at the top towards his room, as he had every day of his life, and stopped.

The corridor ran the length of the first floor on the garden side, from the head of the main stairs at one end to his parents’ rooms at the other. It was long and narrow and had a red runner down the middle and windows on the left, onto the garden, and doors on the right. Counted from the stairs, his father’s study was the first door, then a bathroom, then a room nobody used, then his own. Between the study and the head of the stairs there were perhaps fifteen metres of red carpet and three windows, and his father had walked them every morning of Alexander’s life on his way down to breakfast, at the same time, at the same pace, and on a Saturday in February, at twenty past six, he had walked about four of them.

So Alexander had stood at the top of the stairs on that first weekend, and looked down the corridor, and turned round, and gone down again, and through the hall, and along the passage past the boot room, and up the back stairs that came out by the linen cupboard next to his room, on the far side of it from the study and the stairs. It took four minutes longer. He had done it every time since. He did it without thinking now. Lukas, who had noticed the first weekend, had never once mentioned it, and had started using the back stairs too.

Nobody else had mentioned it either. He knew they knew. Herr Schade knew, because Herr Schade had once been coming down the back stairs as Alexander was going up, and had stood aside on the landing without a word. His mother knew. The woman in the kitchen knew, because the back stairs went past the kitchen, and since March there had been a plate of something on the side by the door every Saturday morning at a quarter past seven, which nobody had ever said was for him.

He opened his door and went out.

---

It was dark in the corridor. The windows onto the garden were grey, not yet light, and the runner was a darker strip down the middle of the floor, and at the far end, under his mother’s door, there was a line of light.

He stood outside his own door and looked at the study.

The study door. It was shut. It had a brass plate on it with nothing written on it, and a brass handle that had been polished every week since February by somebody who had been told to go on doing it, or had not been told to stop. He could see the handle from here, faintly, in the grey.

Beyond it, the stairs. Fifteen metres. Three windows.

It was nineteen minutes past six by the clock on the landing. He could hear it. It was the clock his father had wound every Sunday, standing on the bottom step of the library steps, and which somebody had wound every Sunday since, because it had not stopped.

He began to walk.

He walked at the pace you would walk to somebody’s door. He walked past the room nobody used, and the bathroom, and stopped outside the study.

The study door was shut. He did not open it. He stood outside it in his sister’s socks, and looked at the brass handle, and then he turned and looked down the corridor towards the stairs, the way his father would have been looking, at twenty past six, on his way to breakfast, with the windows on his left going grey, and the clock ticking on the landing ahead of him, and the smell of coffee coming up the stairs from the kitchen.

He walked it.

He did not count. He walked down the red runner towards the stairs at his father’s pace, which he knew, because he had walked beside it his whole life and had been told off for walking too fast beside it, and past the first window, and the second, and somewhere between the first window and the second, he did not know where, nobody had told him where and he had never asked, he passed the place.

Nothing happened. The runner was the runner. The window was a window. The clock ticked.

He reached the head of the stairs and stopped, with his hand on the newel post, which was cold, and stood there, and found that he was breathing as though he had run the length of the Neuer Garten, and that his eyes were dry, and that he did not know what to do next, because he had never got this far before, even in his head.

The clock on the landing said twenty-one minutes past six.

He turned round.

---

His mother was at the other end of the corridor.

She was standing in her doorway in her dressing gown, the dark blue one, with her hand on the frame, and the light from her room behind her, and she was looking down the whole length of the corridor at him, past all the doors, past the study, to where he was standing at the head of the stairs with his hand on the newel post.

Neither of them said anything.

Then she came down the corridor towards him. She came slowly, in her slippers, on the runner, past her own door and his, and the room nobody used, and the bathroom, and the study, and he watched her come, and saw her not look at the study as she passed it, and not slow down, and saw what it cost her, and when she reached him she stopped and stood beside him at the head of the stairs, and put her hand on the newel post next to his.

“You’re up early,” she said.

“I’m always up at six.”

“I know. I hear you.” She looked at the stairs going down into the dark hall. “I hear you go down the back way. Every Saturday. Four minutes. I’ve timed it.”

He did not say anything.

“I don’t go down the front stairs either,” said his mother. “I use the other back stairs. By my dressing room. You didn’t know there were other back stairs.”

“No.”

“There are two. The house was built by a man who didn’t want to meet his wife on the landing.” She was quiet. “We’ve been going round it by different staircases for ten months, you and I. In the same house. Like the man and his wife.”

Alexander looked down at the hall.

“I walked it,” he said.

“I saw.”

“I don’t know where it was.”

His mother did not answer for a moment.

“Between the first window and the second,” she said. “Nearer the first.” And then, before he could say anything: “I’m not going to tell you any more than that. There isn’t any more. There’s the floor. That’s all there is. I’ve stood on it.” She took her hand off the newel post. “Come and have some tea. I’ve got a pot. I’ve been up since four.”

---

Her sitting room was at the end of the corridor beside her bedroom, and it was warm, and there was a pot of tea on the low table by the window under a knitted cosy that Charlotte had made at eleven and that his mother had used every day since, and two cups, as though she had been expecting somebody.

“I always put out two,” said his mother. “I don’t know why. Habit. Sit down.”

He sat on the edge of the sofa. She poured. On the table beside the teapot there was a box, a long flat box of dark green card, of the kind that good shirts came in, with the lid off, and in it there were letters. A great many letters, in envelopes, upright, packed close, like cards in an index, with a strip of card between every twenty or so with a year written on it in his mother’s hand.

He looked at it and did not ask.

“Your father’s,” said his mother. “To me. I’ve been reading them. I read them in the mornings. I started in March.” She put the cup in front of him. “I’m up to 2011.”

“That’s a lot of letters.”

“He wrote to me every day he was away. Every single day. From the Reichstag, from Königsberg, from Kamerun, from a destroyer in the Baltic once, which I’m still not sure was allowed. Even when he’d telephoned. He said a telephone call was a thing that happened, and a letter was a thing that stayed.” She sat down in her chair. “I didn’t write back half as often. I was terrible. He never minded.”

Alexander drank some tea. It was very strong.

He thought about a box in a drawer of his own desk, in Berlin, with three letters in it, tied with a ribbon, in a hand that was not his father’s, from a boy in New Westminster who wrote every one of them as though he meant it to stay. He did not say anything about them. He drank his tea.

His mother reached into the box, without looking, and took out an envelope from the very front, and opened it, and took out the letter, and held it out to him.

“Look at that,” she said.

---

He took it.

It was one sheet, folded once, dated at the top Berlin, 4. Mai 2001. The hand was terrible. It was not his father’s hand at all. It was a scrawl, fast and sloping and impatient, with the letters running into each other, the line going uphill across the page, a word crossed out and rewritten above itself, the downstrokes so hard they had nearly gone through the paper. He could read perhaps one word in three.

“That’s Papa?”

“That’s your father. In 2001. Before we were married. He was thirty-two.” His mother smiled very slightly. “It took me a week to read it. It’s a proposal. It’s quite a good one, once you can read it. I didn’t know it was a proposal until the Wednesday.”

Alexander looked at the scrawl.

He thought about his father’s hand as he had known it all his life: on the cards he wrote at Christmas, on the labels in the dome, Okular 25 mm, Filter rot, on the notes left on the hall table, on the first page of the log. Square, upright, careful, every letter separate and standing on the line as though it had been put there by hand and told to stay. The hand he had been taught at six, sitting at the desk in the study with his father’s hand over his, and had practised for a year, and had never quite managed to make his own.

“That’s not how he wrote,” he said.

“No,” said his mother. “That’s how he wrote. Then you were born.”

She reached into the box again, further back, without looking, and took out another envelope, and gave it to him.

It was dated Berlin, 3. September 2020. It was the square hand. Every letter separate, upright, on the line.

“He changed it,” said his mother. “When you were five. He sat in that study every evening for about six months with a copybook from a stationer’s in the Friedrichstrasse, the kind they used to give children, and practised. Every evening. Like a schoolboy. With the door shut, so that nobody would see.” She looked at the window, where it was getting light. “He said that he was going to have to teach you to write, because he wanted to be the one who did it, and that he couldn’t teach you that.” She nodded at the letter of 2001 in his other hand. “He said it would be like teaching you to speak by mumbling at you. So he learned to write properly first. At fifty. So that you’d have something to copy.”

Alexander sat very still on the edge of the sofa, holding the two letters, one in each hand.

“He never said.”

“No. He wouldn’t have. He’d have thought it was showing off.” His mother picked up her cup. “He told me not to tell you. He said if you ever found out you’d feel you had to be grateful, and he didn’t want you grateful, he wanted you to be able to read your own notes.” She drank. “So I’m breaking a promise. It’s the first one I’ve broken. I’ve thought about it since March.”

He looked at the square hand. Berlin, 3. September 2020. It said, in the first line, that the weather in Berlin was dull and the Bundesrat duller, and that Alexander had written his name that afternoon on the back of an envelope, all of it, Alexander Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich, without help, and that it had taken twenty minutes and he had not let anybody touch the pencil.

He did not remember it. He had been six.

“I write like him,” said Alexander.

“No,” said his mother. “He wrote like you. That’s the point. That’s the whole of the point.” She put her cup down. “He worked at it. Every evening, for six months, so that it would look as though it had always been his. And then he taught it to you, and you didn’t have to work at it, because you had something to copy, and now you write it as though it’s yours. It’s yours. It was never his. He made it for you.”

Alexander looked down at the letter.

He found that he could not read it any more, and that it was not because of the hand.

---

They sat in the sitting room until it was light.

They did not say anything else about his father. They did not need to; there was nothing else that either of them could have said that morning and survived saying, and they both knew it, and the handwriting had been enough. It had been more than enough. It had been, Alexander thought, the only conversation about his father that he and his mother would ever be able to have, and they had had it, and it had been about the shapes of letters on a page, and that was right, because that was the thing his father had left that was most entirely his.

His mother read the 2020 letter again, to herself, and put it back in the box in its place, upright, between the others. She put the proposal back at the front.

“I’ll be up to 2020 by Easter,” she said. “If I go on like this.”

“Will you stop then?”

“I don’t know. There are eight more years after it. Then there aren’t any more.” She put the lid on the box. “I might start again at the beginning. I might not. I haven’t decided.”

He stood up. His legs had gone stiff on the edge of the sofa.

“Mama.”

“Mm.”

He wanted to say thank you, and could not, because his father had not wanted him grateful. He wanted to say that he would go on using the square hand, and could not, because it was obvious, and his mother would have looked at him as though he had told her the sun was coming up. He wanted to say something about the box in his own desk in Berlin, the three letters tied with a ribbon, and could not, because they were not his to say.

“I’m going to go down the front stairs,” he said.

His mother looked at him for a long moment.

“Yes,” she said. “Go on.”

---

He went out of her sitting room and along the corridor.

It was light now. The windows on the left were white with the morning, and the garden beyond them was grey with frost, and the red runner went down the middle of the floor towards the stairs, past the room nobody used and the bathroom and the study, and he walked down it, at his father’s pace, past all of them, past the study door with its brass handle that somebody went on polishing, and did not stop, and past the first window, and between the first window and the second, nearer the first, he did not look down.

At the head of the stairs the clock on the landing said nine minutes to eight. It was ticking. Somebody had wound it on Sunday, as they had every Sunday since February, and it had not stopped.

He went down the front stairs to breakfast.

In the kitchen, on the side by the back door, where it had been every Saturday since March, there was a plate with a roll on it and a slice of cheese and an apple, under a cloth. It was Tuesday. He looked at it for a moment, and then he picked it up and took it through to the breakfast room, the front way, and ate it at the table, and the woman who made the cocoa came to the door with the coffee pot and saw him there, and saw the plate, and stood in the doorway for a moment without saying anything, and then went away again and came back with a second roll.