Some Old Lover's Ghost (31 page)

I looked up. ‘Soldier?’ Tilda hadn’t mentioned a soldier.

‘A German soldier. A stray paratrooper, I suspect, who had become separated from the rest of his battalion. He was wounded – my mother noticed that he was limping. Anyway, he flagged down the car.’

I had stopped writing. Nirvana pounded from a nearby room, but I hardly heard it. ‘Was he armed?’

Leila nodded. ‘My mother said that she began to be afraid when he spoke to them in German. He told them to get out of the car. He was pointing a gun at them.’ She paused. ‘So they got out of the car. My mother’s legs were shaking so much that she was afraid she would not be able to walk. The soldier told
them to stand at the side of the road. Then Erich began to scream about his things, and he ran back to the car.’

I asked, ‘What things?’

Leila looked sad. ‘Apparently, he’d a few items belonging to his family in his suitcase. Nothing of value, but they were all that he had.’

I repeated, ‘Erich ran back to the car …’

‘The German soldier raised his pistol. And Tilda shot him and pushed his body into the dike.’

I stared at Leila, unable to speak.

She started up the car again. There were scarlet flecks all over her clothes. Hanna was crying. Erich clutched his suitcase to his chest. A sour smell filled the car. Tilda saw that Erich had wet himself.

She couldn’t steer properly at first; they veered from one side of the road to the other, as though she was drunk. But she managed to get hold of herself, and to straighten up, and to tell Hanna to pick up the map from the floor. She thought that she ought to speak to the children about what had happened, but she couldn’t. She didn’t think that she’d ever be able to speak about it to anyone. She did what Max did, and put it in a little compartment in her mind and shut the door.

Hanna had unfolded the map again. The tears had dried on her cheeks, and she had begun to follow the line of the road with her finger. The air that issued through the open window smelt salty. They were near the sea, thought Tilda, and her heart lifted slightly. In the aftermath of what had happened, she felt terribly tired and all her muscles ached. Hanna read out directions and she followed them like an automaton. When, after another hour’s driving, they reached Den Helder, she braked and sat for a moment, unable to move.

The girl, Hanna, stepped out of the car and opened the driver’s door. ‘Here,’ she said timidly, and handed Tilda a handkerchief. When Tilda glanced in the wing mirror, she saw that her
face was spotted with red. She spat on the handkerchief and scrubbed her face hard, and then, leaning out to the verge, she was very sick.

Afterwards, she felt better. She stripped off her coat and flung it into the back seat of the car, and helped Erich change into dry clothes. His skin was pale and waxy and his eyes glassy, and he still hummed the tuneless little song. Then she gathered suitcases and bags and children together. Though it was still dark, she found Felix’s house easily. When she hammered on the door the sound, breaking the ancient silence of the port, was as shocking as a gunshot.

After a few minutes, Felix opened the door.
‘Tilda!’
His hair was tousled, but he was fully dressed. ‘I’ve been listening to the wireless,’ he said, as he ushered them into the house.

She explained quickly about Emily’s illness, and Hanna and Erich and the SS
Bodegraven
. Felix, seventeen years old, looked excited rather than concerned. She did not tell him about the German soldier. When she had finished, she added, ‘Felix, I have to get back to England. Hanna and Erich will not be safe in Holland. I wondered—’

‘The boat,’ he said. His eyes, the same grey-blue as Jan’s, were big and round and delighted. ‘You want me to sail you back to England.’

‘Yes.’ Voiced, the idea seemed ridiculous. Mad and dangerous and irresponsible. ‘Jan—’ she began uncertainly.

‘Jan wouldn’t let me join up. But this’ll be much better fun. I was planning a fishing trip next weekend, so she’s all fitted out. And there’s tins and things in the larder.’

He turned to go, but she grabbed at his sleeve. ‘Felix, it’ll be dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt.’ Though he was six foot tall and rangy, Felix seemed suddenly so young. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t—’

‘It’ll be splendid,’ he said. Smiling broadly, he snaked his hand and made shooting noises. ‘Don’t worry, Tilda, she can get up quite a good speed with the wind behind her. Almost four knots.’

Two days after leaving Holland, they dropped anchor near Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. There was barbed wire on the beach and a great fuss of oldish men in assorted uniforms, one of whom brandished an ancient rifle until Tilda wearily explained who they were, and why they were there. Now, wrapped in borrowed blankets, they sat in the firelit parlour of a pub. The man with the rifle still watched them, though his suspicion was gradually being replaced by disappointment.

The English coastline had been swathed in fog. Once, orange sparks and an intermittent crackling noise had told them that someone was firing at them. Felix had sworn under his breath and cursed the difficult sandbanks and tides of the eastern coast. The wind, which had filled the sails and blown them across the North Sea, had died. Felix had started up the little outboard motor; its chugga-chug-chug had broken the silence and taken them towards a pebbled beach. The floor still moved beneath Tilda’s feet.

‘They’ve got that number for you, lovey.’ The innkeeper’s wife gestured to the telephone. The children were curled up together in front of the fire; even Felix had fallen silent.

The effort of crossing the room to the telephone was almost too much for Tilda. Her legs shook, and she leaned against the bar as she took the receiver.

‘Harold? Harold, it’s Tilda – Tilda Franklin.’

Harold Sykes’s voice boomed at the other end of the line. ‘Tilda! Lottie told me you’d stayed behind in Holland.’

‘I’m in England now, Harold.’ The line was bad, and she had to shout. ‘I’m in a pub in Aldeburgh. On the Suffolk coast. Max is still in Europe and I’ve no English money, and I didn’t like to disturb Lottie so late, and I thought perhaps you …’ Her voice wobbled; she was horribly near to tears. She felt none of the delight she had anticipated on reaching England, only an almost unbearable desire to be in her own bed, in her own house, with her family around her.

‘Suffolk?’ Harold seized on the salient point. ‘How on earth did you get to Suffolk, Tilda?’

‘By boat,’ she said. ‘Emily’s brother-in-law – you remember Emily, don’t you, Harold – has a boat.’

There was a pause. Tilda wondered if she had been cut off. But then Harold said, ‘Tell me the name of the pub, darling Tilda, and just wait there. I’ll drive up to fetch you.’

I took the overnight ferry back to Harwich. A wind had got up, and in the restaurant my plate slid drunkenly from one side of the table to the other. The restaurant was almost empty, the weather putting people off their food. In the bar, a woman sang and played keyboards. I listened to her for a while and then wandered up to the deck. Grey-faced passengers, like a Ford Madox Ford painting of emigrants, huddled on benches. I folded my arms on the barrier rail and looked out. The waves were iron-grey, crested with foam, the clouds that massed in the sky a similar shade. I imagined crossing this sea in a little Dutch fishing boat, as Tilda had done. The wooden hull lurching with every wave, spray crashing over the bows and soaking the deck. And it had been wartime: every dark shadow in the sky could have been an enemy plane; every distant vessel must have given Tilda and Felix reason to fear.

The newspaper articles about Tilda’s voyage had been written by Harold Sykes. Harold, that seasoned journalist, had given Tilda – against her will, I suspected – her first taste of fame. Her triumphant story (‘
ANGEL OF AMSTERDAMS HEROIC VOYAGE
’) would have been a useful antidote to the dark days after the fall of France. The rescue of the two refugee children from Holland had brought Tilda to public notice for the first time. From that small beginning her celebrity had grown. A practical woman, she had used her fame to further the causes dearest to her heart, to open doors hitherto closed to her, to help the unhappy children she loved.

But I thought that I understood now the cause of Tilda’s reticence. For her, the escape from Holland would always be
tarnished by an incident that she had hidden. If what Leila Gilbert had told me was true, then there was an aspect of Tilda that she preferred to keep from the rest of the world. However justified the killing of the Nazi paratrooper had been, to have taken another human life must have haunted her. What bothered me – what hurt me, I suppose – was that she had not confided in me. I had thought I knew her well; now I began to wonder whether I knew her at all.

I left the deck, aware of an urgent need to be back in England. I needed to look again at Tilda’s story, to see it in a slightly different light. I wondered what Patrick was doing, where he was. I slept little that night. The ferry rose and plunged with the waves, and its engines, which sounded as though they were in the next door cabin, roared alarmingly. When we docked at Harwich the following morning, I was relieved to drive out of the ship’s hold into the sheeny drizzle of an English June.

I spent the weekend with Patrick in his flat in Richmond, a tasteful little mews with ivy-leaved geraniums and an entryphone. Inside, the rooms had polished beech floors, cream-coloured blinds, and furniture that was matching, elegant and expensive. When I complimented him, he said, ‘Jen chose it,’ and silenced any further conversation by kissing me.

We did not leave the flat; we scarcely talked. The language of the body: skin against skin, the echo of another’s heartbeat behind layers of muscle and bone, and air expelled fast from the lungs. We parted on the Monday morning, Patrick for his chambers, me for my flat. I sang as I flung back curtains to let in the sunlight, and when I opened the windows even London air seemed sweet to breathe. I made myself coffee and idly leafed through yesterday’s Sunday papers as I drank it. Government scandals, Northern Ireland, the drought.

I could so easily have missed it, but I did not, it seemed to sear my eyes, that small, unimportant paragraph tucked in at the foot of a back page.

Human remains have been discovered in a Cambridgeshire dike. The grim discovery was made by workmen during routine repair work to the
bank of a dike near the village of Southam. The waterway was rebuilt following the floods of 1947, and Cambridgeshire police, investigating, believe that the body may have been concealed at that time
.

Daragh, I thought. I can’t explain why I was so certain. Daragh.

P
ART
T
WO

C
HAPTER
N
INE

She dreamt of 1940, sailing across the North Sea with Felix and Hanna and Erich. The tiny craft exposed on the great expanse of water. The fog that surrounded the English coast had magnified the sound of the sea lapping against the bows, and the shouting of the men on the beach.

Tilda awoke. Lying in the darkness, she remembered how Harold Sykes’s newspaper article about the crossing had changed her life. ‘Tilda Franklin? Didn’t you …?’ people had said when she had introduced herself, adding some ludicrously inaccurate version of her flight from Holland. At first she had tried to explain that she had just needed to get home to her children, but that too had been misinterpreted,
ANGEL OF AMSTERDAM SAYS, I DID IT FOR MY BABIES
! She had resented the intrusion into an episode that she would have preferred to forget, just as now, sometimes, she had to swallow her resentment of Rebecca’s questioning. There had been fear behind her anger at the assumption that her life had become public property, fear of the pointing fingers, the invasive questions, the crass curiosity about her origins. That fear lingered. She had never shaken off the shame she felt at her procreation, her birth, her earliest years. And the uncritical admiration of strangers
had driven further the wedge between herself and Max. Max had seen her flight from Holland rather differently: an unnecessary risk, the breaking of a promise. Promises had been important to Max.

Though it was June, she felt cold. Younger, she would have walked for miles to chase away her demons, or surrounded herself with her family. Old age reduced you to essentials, and to memory. A frail body and a tormenting memory. She hoped that when she had told Rebecca everything she needed to know, she herself would be free.

Now, though, she was still enchained. The war years lingered, in all their danger and drama and tedium. When she closed her eyes, trying to shut out the darkness, she saw the faces of those whom the war had taken. Clara Franklin. Felix van de Criendt. In 1941, Clara Franklin had been dancing in a nightclub when a bomb had struck a direct hit. Tilda remembered scouring a battered London for a bunch of the scarlet lilies that Clara had loved. Max, working abroad as a war correspondent, had been unable to attend his mother’s funeral. Another brick built into the wall with which he had surrounded himself. Max had been able to grieve properly neither for the mother who had died, nor for the mother he might have wished to have had. The snatched, unsatisfactory days that she and Max had been able to spend with each other during the war years had been marked by physical and emotional exhaustion. He had been reluctant to talk, she too busy to coax him. She had feared that they would never regain their old intimacy, or worse, that it had been hollow, built on sand.

Irony had haunted her throughout the war: the irony of saving Hanna and Erich from almost certain death, while losing their saviour. Felix van de Criendt had joined the RAF as soon as he had turned eighteen. He had been killed in 1942, when a German plane had shadowed his bomber as he had flown back to England. Felix had been gunned down within sight of his airfield, almost home, a pitiless death, a mockery of bravery and youth. Tilda had wept for Felix and had felt a complicity in his death, because she had brought him to England.