Some Old Lover's Ghost (30 page)

Tilda packed her bag and stayed up through the night washing and cooking, so that when she left Emily would be able to manage on her own. Emily had dragged herself out of bed, shuffling around the flat, the persistent pain of the stitches making her stooped and old. The wireless was on constantly, Emily retuning the dial as the signal was lost in crackles and screeches. The news from the BBC was optimistic. They could only understand parts of the Dutch broadcasts. When, every now and then, she found a German station, Emily cursed and flipped over the dial, her small round face creased with fury.

On the evening of 15 May, there was a hammering at the door of the shop. Tilda ran down the stairs to open it. An elderly woman stood on the doorstep, two children beside her. She spoke in Dutch, too fast for Tilda to follow her, but her gestures and expression were distressed.

‘She says that there’s a boat sailing from Ijmuiden to England tonight.’

Tilda turned to see Emily, crouched on the stairs in her dressing gown.

‘This lady’s husband sometimes works for Jan,’ Emily explained. She asked the woman something in halting Dutch. Another torrent, incomprehensible to Tilda, followed.

‘I think she’s saying that the children – Hanna and Erich – are German refugees, of Jewish extraction, but Christians, and that she must get them to Ijmuiden so that they can board the ship to England. But she can’t drive and hasn’t a car. She wonders if I can help.’

The woman fell silent, exhausted. The children, a teenage girl and a boy of about nine or ten, looked white and frightened. Emily said, ‘You must take them, Tilda. You must take Jan’s car and drive to Ijmuiden.’ She smiled. ‘William and I can manage. I’m better now. You must go home, Tilda.’

Within half an hour, she was driving out of Amsterdam. The roads were clogged with people: cars and bicycles and coaches and small, hurrying groups of pedestrians. The children, Hanna and Erich, sat beside Tilda on the wide front seat. The car, which Jan used for transporting furniture, was big and heavy. Her arms ached as she swung the lumbering vehicle round corners, overtaking vans and bicycles, driving as fast as she dared through the crowded streets.

On the road to Ijmuiden, their pace slowed. Cars jostled with army trucks and jeeps. A soldier flagged them down, and peered through the window. The little boy, Erich, seemed to shrink into himself, to become stiller than Tilda had thought it was possible for a child to be. Tilda tried to explain where they were going, and the soldier waved them on. A long queue of cars trailed slowly along the other side of the road, heading back to Amsterdam. Fear squeezed her stomach again. A second soldier stepped in front of the car, forcing Tilda to brake suddenly. Again, Erich froze. Hanna put her arm round him.
The soldier barked questions at them, and they were waved on once more.

She had to be in time. She had to be.

The flat fields, with their grazing cattle and their narrow dikes, so familiar to Tilda from her childhood in the Fens, crawled slowly by. There was not room enough to overtake the traffic, and the steady stream of motor cars and bicycles back to the city was ominous. Tilda’s jaw ached with tension. At last, they were in sight of the port. She could see the silhouettes of the ships in the dock. She parked the car at the side of the road, gave Hanna and Erich their suitcases, slung her own bag over her shoulder, and ran, a child’s hand clutched in each of hers. Voices – British voices – echoed around her. British soldiers had landed at Ijmuiden. Her heart lifted. Clouds of smoke clogged the horizon, and the sparks and flashes that intermittently brightened the darkening sky were like fireworks. Aeroplanes swooped overhead. Cars and coaches clustered around the dockside. Tilda could see the ship, a battered steam freighter. She could read the name written along its bows: the SS
Bodegraven
. She was within a hundred yards of it when it upped anchor and began, very slowly, to sail out of the port.

She stood there for a moment, gasping for breath, staring at the ship. The horror of her situation almost overwhelmed her. She was stranded in a Europe about to be engulfed by war, the immense distance of the North Sea between herself and her family. She might be separated from Max and the children for weeks, months, years. Dutch and British voices shouted to everyone to clear the port. Aeroplanes screamed as they dive-bombed the SS
Bodegraven
. She was not afraid for herself, she was afraid only of the acres of time and space that separated her from those whom she loved most in the world. Then she saw that beside her the boy Erich had sunk to the ground and curled up in a small, stiff ball. Tilda knelt down and stroked his curved spine. He rocked to and fro, humming softly to himself. Hanna was staring at her, her eyes wide and anxious. Tilda picked Erich up in her arms and carried him back to the car.

When the British blew up the pier and the Royal Dutch oil
tanks, the flames reached into an ultramarine sky, tarnishing it, casting a black shadow across the sea. The roads had cleared as Tilda drove back to Amsterdam. When she reached the city and saw the lights that burned in every window, she knew that Holland had surrendered.

Emily fed the children, and Tilda sat on the sofa, eyes wide, staring at the wall. She couldn’t think what to do, her mind no longer seemed to be working properly. Emily pressed a cup of tea into her hands, but Tilda could not yet drink it. The striped wallpaper, with its framed pictures of Emily in her wedding dress, and Jan and Felix sailing the
Marika
, blurred whenever she thought of Melissa and Josh.

She blinked and her sight cleared as she stared at the photograph of the boat. She remembered happier days: herself and Max on board the
Marika
. The tea slopped in her saucer, and she whispered,
‘Felix
.’ Then she stood up, and began clumsily to put her coat back on.

‘Tilda?’ Emily moved away from the children, who were seated at the table. ‘Tilda, where are you going?’

She told her. Emily stood quite still for a moment, eyes wide. Then she disappeared into the bedroom, and Tilda heard her open a drawer. When she came back, she was carrying something wrapped in a length of cloth. She sat on the sofa beside Tilda.

‘It was Jan’s father’s,’ Emily whispered. ‘Jan made me keep it when he went away. Just in case.’ Emily unfolded the cloth to reveal the old army revolver. ‘It’s loaded,’ she said softly. ‘You must take it, Tilda.’

Tilda wrapped up the gun in the cloth again and slid it into the deep pocket of her coat. Just in case.

The roads were empty now. There was an eerie, uneasy silence, as though the city itself could hardly believe its defeat. For the second time that day, Tilda steered the heavy motor car out of Amsterdam.

She had to switch on the headlights because it was dark and she did not know the road well, yet their conspicuousness in the quiet countryside alarmed her. Hanna and Erich sat beside her, as before, Erich’s small hand clasped in Hanna’s. The map was spread out on Hanna’s lap. Emily had given Tilda detailed instructions of how to find Felix van de Criendt’s house in Den Helder. She and Max had visited Felix several times, but she did not trust herself to find the way in the dark.

As they drove north, the road became less even and the car rattled and lurched in the potholes. The sky was clear, inky black, pocked with stars. The aeroplanes had gone. Tilda went through it all again in her head, just to make sure. The route took her through north Holland, via Alkmaar, past the dikes and dunes that held back the North Sea.

She smiled at the children, beside her. ‘Not far to go now.’ Hanna smiled. The boy worried Tilda. He did not speak at all. Hanna had told her that Erich was ten years old, but the expression in his eyes seemed much older. The road was unfamiliar and narrow; afraid of overturning into a ditch, Tilda slowed down. Thoughts of Max, of the children, of the precarious future darted into her head, and were pushed ruthlessly away. She focused her mind on the task in hand: reading the map, looking for roadsigns, reaching the coast before daybreak. The countryside was flat, crisscrossed by dikes, the only trees tall, spindly willows. It occurred to Tilda that such a countryside offered nowhere to hide. A sudden movement to the side of the road made her jump, but it was only a fat red cow, strayed out of her field. She broke off bits of chocolate and fed them to the children; Erich stored his furtively in the pocket of his shorts. It was late; she estimated that they had only thirty miles or so to travel. She had been awake since half past five that morning; her eyelids were growing heavy. Let Felix be at home, Tilda prayed, let him be at home.
Grant that no hobgoblins fright me, no hungry devils rise up and bite me
. Something moved at the side of the road. ‘It’s only another—’ Tilda began, and then she gasped, a sudden
sharp intake of breath, and stamped her foot on the brake. The car shuddered to a halt in the middle of the road.

I reached Scheveningen, on the Dutch coast, in the early evening. The town glittered in the sunshine. I booked into a small hotel, and quickly showered and unpacked. I had arranged to visit Leila Gilbert at half past seven. Mrs Gilbert’s apartment was only a ten-minute walk from my hotel. She greeted me warmly, and showed me into her living room. Through the front window I saw that the North Sea was now Prussian blue, flecked with silver, instead of the sullen grey that had accompanied my voyage from Harwich. A few children lingered on the beach, piling sand into plastic buckets.

I heard Leila Gilbert say, ‘It is beautiful, no?’ and I turned round as she placed a tray of coffee and biscuits on the table.

‘Beautiful,’ I echoed.

‘My sons think that Scheveningen is the dullest place on earth. But I like to be by the sea.’

Leila Gilbert, who was Hanna Schmidt’s only child, had two teenage boys. The apartment was littered with evidence of them: Doc Martens in the hallway, a rack of T-shirts dripping in the bathroom and loud music from one of the bedrooms.

I indicated a photograph on the sideboard. ‘Your mother?’

Leila nodded. ‘She died three years ago, as I told you. I still miss her dreadfully.’ She handed me the photograph and I looked down at it. There was a marked similarity between mother and daughter: both had high, broad, bony foreheads, long, thin noses, and bushy, light brown curls. Hanna had become a surgeon, Leila taught at a girls’ school in The Hague.

Leila poured coffee, and called to her son to turn down the music, and I flicked back through my notebook. ‘Your mother lived with Tilda after she left Holland, didn’t she?’

Leila handed me a cup and saucer. ‘At the end of the war, she went back to Europe, to see whether any of her family had survived. They hadn’t, I’m afraid. So she returned to England and took up
a scholarship at Cambridge, to study medicine. Rosi Liebermann went up at the same time to read English. They both stayed with Tilda in the vacations. Later, Hanna studied in Paris for a while, and later still she worked in Israel. We travelled a great deal. I was born in Paris, but I went to school in Belgium, and I married an Englishman. And now I live in the Netherlands.’

‘I’m interested in how your mother came to leave Holland in 1940. I’ve spoken to Tilda already, but I wondered whether Hanna ever described the journey to you.’

‘She told me about it a few weeks before she died. She was so ill that I think she had begun to live more in the past than the present. I knew some of it already, of course.’

I sat, pen in hand, scribbling notes as she spoke. Much of what Leila Gilbert told me I had already learned from Tilda. Hanna Schmidt had left Austria in 1938 and had been adopted by an elderly Dutch couple living in Amsterdam. Although Hanna was a Christian, she was of Jewish origin, and thus persecuted by the Nazis. In 1939 the Dutch couple had adopted a second child, a boy, Erich Wirmer. Hanna had felt safe in Amsterdam, and had believed that her parents and elder brothers would eventually join her there. That illusion crumbled in May 1940, when Germany invaded. Because Hanna and Erich were not of the Jewish faith, they were in touch with few other refugees in Amsterdam, and failed to receive the vital message telling them of the coaches that would take them to Ijmuiden. When they heard that a ship had been chartered to ferry the Jews to England, Hanna’s adoptive parents, who had no car, asked Mrs van de Criendt if she could drive the children to Ijmuiden. Mrs van de Criendt was unwell, but an English lady staying with her offered to help.

‘Tilda,’ said Leila. ‘The English lady was Tilda. My mother always remembered seeing her for the first time in Mrs van de Criendt’s shop. She said that she was like an illustration of a princess in a Hans Andersen book.’ Leila smiled.

Tilda had driven the two children to Ijmuiden. Leila mentioned, as Tilda had done, the many interruptions to their journey. The Dutch army had not been forewarned about the SS
Bodegraven
.

‘The ship was half empty – many more refugees could have been taken to safety had they been able to reach the port in time. Tilda and Hanna and Erich were too late – the boat had already sailed. After the first shock was over, my mother wasn’t frightened. She was always a level-headed person, and besides, as soon as she met Tilda she was convinced that she would be safe. But poor Erich …’ Leila shook her head. ‘He had seen such terrible things. He was only ten years old.’

They had driven back to Amsterdam, to Emily van de Criendt’s house. Leila told me that Hanna had remembered that Emily had given them special little chocolate biscuits to eat. Then, before she had time to finish her tea, she had to put on her coat again, and they had driven out of Amsterdam once more.

Leila left the room to tell her son to turn down the volume of his CD-player. I looked out of the window again. The little groups of children had left the beach. I knew the next part of Leila’s story. Tilda had driven from Amsterdam through north Holland, to the town where Felix van de Criendt lived. She had woken him up, and—

Leila took up her story again. ‘It was late, and Hanna was very tired. She kept drifting off to sleep. She read the map for Tilda and held Erich’s hand because she knew that he was frightened. Hanna wasn’t frightened at all until the soldier stopped them.’