The Life of Objects Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Susanna Moore

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moore, Susanna.

  The life of objects / Susanna Moore.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96103-7

  1. Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Aristocracy (Social class)—Germany—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.O667L54 2012

  813′.54—dc23 2012019890

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photograph by Hugo Erfurth © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1938

  1939

  1940

  1941

  1942

  1943

  1944

  1945

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Other Books by This Author

  To Richard Moore and Cheryl Hardwick,

  and to Michael Moore

  1938

  My name is Beatrice Adelaide Palmer. I was born in 1921 in Ballycarra, County Mayo, the only child of Elizabeth Givens and Morris Palmer of Palmerstown. My family had come down in the world, and we were no longer gentry, but we weren’t tenant farmers, either (not educated at university, but not peasants). I attended a small school kept by Mr. Hugh Knox, a Church of Ireland clergyman with a passion for birds who gave lessons in Latin grammar and mathematics. As there was no lending library in Ballycarra, Mr. Knox encouraged his pupils (there were only three of us) to read from his own collection of books—Robinson Crusoe, Cranford, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray, Jane Eyre, the sermons of Jonathan Swift, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, The Journal of the Beagle, The Complete Father Brown, The Crusade and Death of Richard I, Siegfried Sassoon, The Cloister and the Hearth, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, and Biggles and the Black Peril (a book that instilled in me a terror of Russians).

  Mr. Knox also had an extensive collection of bird journals and scientific papers, and although much to Mr. Knox’s disappointment, I didn’t read the ornithology books, I read the novels, some more than once, and the fairy tales many times (particularly the story of Little Red Riding Hood, who Dickens claimed was his first love: “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss”). When Mr. Knox went to Dublin each fall, he always returned with a book that he knew would give me pleasure, such as the new Daphne du Maurier or Agatha Christie, and to my delight he allowed me to keep those books. Mr. Knox liked to say that novels help to show us that the world is a place of strangeness, ruled by chance, which makes it difficult to maintain our certainties. I had no certainties other than my desire to leave Ballycarra.

  Mr. Knox encouraged his students to accompany him on his excursions to study the birds of the Moy Estuary, but I was the only one who walked with him, just as I was the only one who read his books. That is when he taught me to fish, giving me the name of Maeve of Connacht, the pirate queen.

  He was the sole companion of my girlhood. Were it not for Mr. Knox, my loneliness would have been more than I could bear. When he was not distracted by fieldwork, I asked him questions. Mr. Knox, unlike anyone in our village, had been in the world. He had, by his own admission, seen things. He’d been to university in England and had served in the Great War. He had even traveled in Canada before taking orders. I had been once to Glasgow as a small child with my mother and father. My mother was ashamed of her relatives and never spoke of the trip, other than to remind my father that he’d been sick crossing the Irish Sea.

  I was a quiet girl, by all accounts, conversation considered an unnecessary luxury by my parents. I heard no family tales or instructive anecdotes, my head filled instead with the stories of willful heroines, vivacious of temperament unlike myself, with whom I shared a longing for the world and its imagined pleasures—irresistible girls like Eustachia Vye, Maggie Tulliver, Becky Sharpe, and even the wicked Gwendolen Harleth.

  It is no wonder that my curiosity threatened my peace of mind. I couldn’t explain my thoughts, or begin to understand them. There was nothing in my family that would have anticipated such a seeking temperament as I possessed, a mystery which often distressed me. Without knowing how to remedy it, I understood that I was already estranged from my parents, if only in my desires, and that my efforts to earn my mother’s regard were fruitless. She behaved more like a stepmother to me than a mother, and now and then I questioned if I was indeed her child.

  She rarely spoke about herself and I knew very little about her. She’d worked as a waitress in the teashop in Sligo where my father, a student at a nearby technical school, took his supper every Saturday night. When my grandfather Palmer died shortly after their marriage, my father abandoned his studies to take over the family shop. My mother said that she’d never have married him had she known she’d be lost for the rest of her miserable life in the filthy bogs of west Ireland. She claimed to envy her sisters—one had run off with a commercial traveler, and the other had drowned in childhood. She was born a fool, she said, and she would die a fool. I did not think her foolish—she had too little charm for that—but her disappointments had rendered her bitter and unkind. My father and I were in constant dread of her. I lived in a chaos of desire and disappointment.

  When I turned fifteen, my mother, who had long felt that Mr. Knox was filling my head with ideas that would do me little good in the world of haberdashery, took me from school to work in the shop. I was heartbroken, but no amount of pleading or persuasion could make her change her mind. Mr. Knox sent word through one of my fellow pupils, a smirking boy named Peter whose father was bailiff at the castle, that he hoped I would continue to read his books and to accompany him on his walks. My mother told Peter to inform our teacher that I was far too busy to idle in the woods.

  A few days later, I announced that Mr. Knox wished to engage me to clean the schoolroom. My mother, who welcomed the chance for me to earn a little money, allowed me to go to the rectory every Saturday when the shop was closed. When I told Mr. Knox my lie, knowing that my mother would demand to see the money, he said that I’d more than earned it, having read aloud to him for years. He was happy to give me a shilling every week.

  Mr. Knox particularly liked me to read from The Peterborough Bestiary, which I’d come to know by heart: Cranes divide the night into sentry-duty and they make up the sequence of the watches by order of rank, holding little stones in their claws to ward off sleep. When there is danger they make a loud cry. The bestiary also advised that parrots be beaten with an iron rod should they refuse to talk, a passage that always made him laugh. He had a pet gull named Wedgwood that he’d raised (from the shell, he liked to say), and the bird often accompanied us on our field trips. Mr. Knox also taught me to keep his lists in order, and through observing the comfort he took in them, I began to keep lis
ts of my own. In my first list, made when I was twelve, I wrote: A fine pair of shoes, a diary with a key, a parrot, a curling iron.

  Although we had few customers, my mother did not let me read in the shop, lest it appear that I gave myself airs. To ease the tedium, I studied my father’s ledgers as if they held the answers to all that I longed to know. They were narrow books with maroon board covers, and in them were kept the names of customers and their transactions. I conceived elaborate tales to match each entry. The notation Mrs. Dennis Gurney, doz. handkerchiefs, no monogram, one bolt pink tulle, three packets needles made me wonder what Mrs. Gurney possibly meant to do with so much tulle (as it was pink, it could not be for a bridal veil) and, less interesting, why she had chosen plain handkerchiefs, as the monogramming was done to order by my mother and free of charge. That the Catholic priest, Father Timothy, fancied costly cashmere hose that had to be ordered from Dublin was, thanks to my youth, less compelling, although mildly titillating.

  There were only two boys in Ballycarra who were not Catholic (my former schoolmates), and my mother took care to remind me that if I did not soon make a match with one of them, I would end my days a spinster. I found the boys to be ignorant and dull, and I avoided them whenever I saw them in the village. I was intrigued by the handsome Catholic boys, despite (or thanks to) my father’s horror of Roman Catholics. He’d been told by a great-aunt that the audience at a Punch and Judy show in Killala had cheered at the news that the French had landed nearby, and the shock of it had done it for him, even though the landing had been one hundred years before his birth. I was curious about the Catholic girls, too, but they kept themselves apart, a snub that infuriated my mother, who, despite her complaints, had done well for herself.

  It didn’t take long to exhaust the mysteries of the shop’s ledgers, and I began to teach myself to crochet, copying the patterns I found in the ladies’ magazines my father kept on behalf of his customers, studying them until the pages grew soft with use.

  I stole lengths of thread from the shop, rolling them into a ball until I’d accumulated enough to make my first cuff (I unraveled it eight times before it was to my liking, and even then I didn’t think it good enough). Copying Mr. Knox’s notes had given me patience and an appreciation of tidy handiwork, and the hours I spent sewing seemed to pass in a dream. Silence had become natural to me, and a tendency to secrecy, if not dissimulation.

  I sewed at night, using the ends of candles I found in the kitchen, which burned for an hour or two. My mother, naturally suspicious, took to creeping up the attic stairs to make sure that I was not committing any sins of impurity. At the sound of her footstep, despite her attempt at stealth, I hid my work under a blanket, my furtiveness undoubtedly encouraging her fantasies of vice. My mother was right to worry, as the patterns from Madeira and Brussels and Murano served to further excite my restlessness. I began to dream of the day when I would escape from Ballycarra.

  I determined to teach myself to make lace after I saw a Youghal tablecloth drying on a hedge, said to have been made by the girls who sewed in the byre across the bridge, where the moist warmth of the cows kept their thread supple and their hands from stiffening in the cold. I wished to see more of their work, but my mother would not allow me to call on them. It confused me that girls considered so uncivilized could have made something as beautiful as the lace tablecloth with its design of ferns and heather. On warm evenings, I used to watch from the dark shop as the girls made their way to the river, and sometimes I wished that I were Roman Catholic, if only for the summer.

  One morning, I brought down one of my finished pieces—a lace collar I’d studied in a magazine—and left it on the counter for my father to find when he opened the shop. Neither my mother nor my father mentioned it, but my father began to leave spools of thread at the foot of the stairs for me. By the end of the year, I had a dozen Valenciennes cuffs and collars, which I again left for my father to find. To my surprise, he offered to display my work in the window of the shop. Although the lace did not sell, even marked very low, it was admired, and I began to gain a certain small renown in the neighborhood. My father, who rarely praised me, reminded me that his father, my grandfather Palmer, had been notorious for the beauty of his salmon flies and suggested that I had, perhaps, inherited something after all.

  A few days after my seventeenth birthday, a woman in a rabbit coat stepped into the shop during a sudden rainstorm and noticed me sewing in a corner. My father, who recognized Lady Vaughan, pulled out the tray that held my finished pieces (my mother was not there) and, while he shook out her umbrella, encouraged her to look at them. A week later, a package was delivered to the shop marked with my name, causing my mother to fear that an embarrassing mistake had been made. Inside the parcel were two books of lace patterns, a gift from Lady Vaughan to me. Not long after, Lady Vaughan’s maid came into the shop to order half a dozen pieces of bed lace for her ladyship, so infuriating my mother that she did not speak to me for the rest of the week, and only then to tell me that Mr. Knox had sent me a box of books, which she had returned.

  My bed lace so pleased Lady Vaughan that she asked if I would make her a black lace shawl in time for a hunt ball in September. With my father’s permission, I no longer waited on customers but sewed in the back room where the light was best, and by summer’s end, my fingers were so red and swollen that I had to soak them each night in hot water and salt. I was afraid that my work would not be fine enough and that Lady Vaughan would be disappointed, but despite my fear, I also felt a strange elation, so new to me that I often laughed out loud, causing my mother to leave the room. When Lady Vaughan’s maid came to collect the finished shawl, I made her an awkward curtsy and rushed into the yard, where I sat for an hour to compose myself. That evening, Lady Vaughan sent a note thanking me for my “lovely” work, enclosing two one-pound notes with an order for two collars and six cuffs.

  The morning after the ball, it was known throughout the village that a guest at the castle, a foreign lady in Ireland for the hunting, had noticed my shawl and had asked Lady Vaughan where she had come by such exquisite lace. The lady, who was said to be a cousin of the Tsar, wore a long white taffeta skirt and black sweater to the ball, with a necklace of turquoise and diamonds, a costume so outlandish that by breakfast it had been described to my mother with screams of laughter by our neighbor, Mrs. Greeley, a maid at the castle (kind Lady Vaughan had worn claret velvet and her garnets). My mother announced that the lady was no more a Russian princess than she was, but I listened with fascination. There had never been a moment when I did not long for the world beyond Ballycarra, and to be offered a glimpse of it by a princess who wore a wooly to a ball was more than I’d imagined possible.

  The foreigner—there was no mistaking it was she—came to the shop the following day. I was embarrassed when my mother, who was knitting in a chair, did not rise to greet her, and I rushed to bring a chair from the kitchen. When I returned, my mother ordered me from the shop.

  To my confusion, the lady followed me into the street, catching up with me to ask if I’d care to walk by the river—the salmon were running, and she liked to watch the men casting, drops of water flying from their lines, she said, like jewels. Her name was Countess Hartenfels (although she spoke English with a foreign accent and she certainly looked like she could be a relation of the Tsar, she was not, to my relief, Russian). She said that she’d come to the shop in search of “that magician Miss Palmer,” and she confessed her surprise at discovering I was a girl, having expected an elderly gentlewoman in mittens.

  Linking her arm in mine (something that no grown woman had ever done, including my mother), she said that she’d like to see more of my lace. She admitted that she herself did not wear lace, except as lingerie. I’d never heard the word spoken, although I’d read it in magazines, pronouncing it with a hard g, and I didn’t understand her at first. She admired lace on others, however, particularly on her dear friend Dorothea Metzenburg, who lived in Berlin and owned a rare and
extremely valuable collection of lace. The countess was on her way to Germany to visit the Metzenburgs. “You’d find them sympathetic,” she said confidingly. “Felix has the best manners in Europe.” The intimacy of her tone, as well as her physical nearness, made me tremble with happiness. She spoke as if I understood everything that she said and, even more flattering, all that she did not say. When we returned to the village, having walked as far as the Ridge Pool, I stole into the house to gather my lace to show her, proudly spreading my work along the damp stone rampart of the bridge.

  Countess Hartenfels met me again the next afternoon. People stared at us as we passed, and in my excitement, I told her the names of the birds that I spotted along the river (a goosander and the rare killdeer), aware that the creature in black riding habit and veiled top hat, strolling with her arm linked in mine, was, at least in Ballycarra, rarer than any killdeer. The countess, who seemed a bit distracted, a quality that I took for sophistication, said that she, too, was quite fond of birds, even if she knew nothing about them. Her way of speaking, in which she exaggerated unexpected words, was confusing to me. I wasn’t accustomed to emphasis, and I gave significance to certain of her words and phrases that she perhaps didn’t intend. When she claimed never to have seen lace such as mine, I believed her.

  Shortly before the countess was to leave Ballycarra, she suggested that I accompany her to Berlin. I would live in the household of her friends, the Metzenburgs, where I would make lace. If I found myself unhappy, a condition she considered unlikely, I could, of course, return to Ireland. Convinced that she was mocking me, I paid her no mind, but she persisted, describing the amiability of her friends, the Metzenburgs, to whom she was devoted, and the excitement of the great city, until I could think of nothing else, causing my mother to ask if I were ill. I said nothing to her of the countess’s invitation but called on Mr. Knox to ask his advice.