The Madagaskar Plan (12 page)

“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” he asked.

“Yes.”

She rested her hand on his thigh, the movement unconscious; from early on she’d had an easy manner about touching him. At first he relished it; then he grew jealous, until he saw her around other men and realized how proper she was. Her fingers were cold through his trousers. He took her hand to warm it—she resisted briefly—and, when he failed, put it to his mouth and offered his breath. This time she didn’t struggle.

“I don’t want the train to arrive,” she said. They were due in London by nightfall. Outside, marshland trundled by, the smoky sunlight glittering on the water like tinsel.

Madeleine took her hand back, hesitated, then twisted to cup his face. Her dress crinkled loudly as she moved. She put her lips to his, tentative at first, before an angry passion took hold. Their tongues met but not like previous times; he understood the abandonment in her, reckless and resigned. When he ran out of breath, Burton stood and stepped to the door. The corridor was empty; some of the overhead lamps had failed. He drew down the blinds and forced Madeleine’s umbrella beneath the handle.

She had shrugged off her coat, loosened the buttons around her throat; her skin was flushed from her cheeks to her scalp. Madeleine carefully took off her pearl earrings. They kissed again, slipping down on the seats, with their dusty reek and layer of grime. He pressed his body against hers, eased up her dress, his palm catching on the clasp of her stockings. Her thighs encircled him.

Suddenly, she pushed him away. “What about Alice?”

It was only in the months that followed that Burton realized the significance of that question; he’d never fallen in love before. But on the train, aware of the heat surging through him, he was unsure how to reply.

“I won’t leave her,” breathed Madeleine. “Whatever happens, never ask me that.” She spoke those last words in German. He didn’t meet Alice for a long time after.

In the spring of 1952, Burton followed Madeleine on a trip she took with her husband to Germania. At a café on the Kurfürstendamm, they had discussed everything: her leaving Cranley, the end of Burton’s adventures abroad, finding a home, the life they wanted together, everything except her daughter, perhaps because both were afraid that their hopes might vanish before a five-year-old girl.

“It’s time you met Alice,” said Madeleine several months later, as they cleared out the attic in the farmhouse.

Burton had sensed something unspoken in her all day, a stiffness to her good humor. Marriage had taught her to be cautious of sharing thoughts too openly, a habit she wasn’t free of yet.

“We could have a day out,” he replied, picturing families on the beach, ice creams, normality—that bright overworld that was so foreign to him. “Go to the seaside.”

“I want her to come here.”

Burton set down the box he was moving. “That’s not a good idea. Not yet.”

“One day this will be her home.”

“What if she says something?”

“She won’t—she’s too young to understand.”

“But if she does?”

Madeleine considered his words. “What’s the worst that could happen? There’s a scandal, people gossip. The Jewish maid is used to that.”

“It’s not right that he finds out that way.”

But Burton relented and on the morning of Alice’s first visit had gone to the local village to buy sticky buns and the linzer tortes that were colonizing bakeries throughout the country. It seemed the duty of every Briton to carp about them even as they consumed the cakes in vast quantities. Later the three of them sat at the kitchen table, divided by teacups. Maybe it was because he sensed so much of Madeleine in her, but Burton was surprised to find a burl of affection for the girl; he wanted to befriend her. She sat tight to her mother, swinging her legs, in a velvet dress that looked more expensive than every stitch Burton owned. She kept her hands fastened together, her eyes darting at the peeling window frames and ramshackle furniture, nose twitching at the damp. With Madeleine’s encouragement, he managed to coax a few words from her.

When Burton was alone again, he threw away the leftover tea things. Alice hadn’t inherited her mother’s sweet tooth and had ignored the cakes, apart from a squeak of horror when a bluebottle settled on the icing. How much simpler it would be, he thought, if Madeleine didn’t have a child.

A coldness swilled in him. He wondered whether his mother had ever felt the same way.

*   *   *

The policeman with the tommy gun emerged from the blaze in the hallway, Mrs. Anderson at his side.

She pointed at Burton. “That’s him.”

Burton toppled the grandfather clock across the stairs to bar the way—a din of crashing cogs and chimes—then raced up the main staircase, into the smoke. A breath later and the air was fiery, mountain-thin, like when Hochburg burned down Burton’s childhood home; he remembered how rapidly the flames consumed the building. Alice’s cries had stopped, but he recalled that her room was on the third floor. By the time he reached it, the door was warping in its frame. He forced it open and found an empty bed, neatly stacked toys.

“Alice?”

He checked under the bed, then behind the curtains; the window was bolted. Burton glanced through it at a thirty-foot drop onto a brick patio. Protruding from the floor below was a downpipe. He resumed his search and opened the wardrobe, finding a mound of coats and blankets at the bottom. He lifted the top one. Alice was in her nightdress, the same dark hair as her mother’s straggling over her face, eyes gummy with tears and squeezed tight.

“Alice,” he said softly.

Her eyes remained shut.

“Alice, it’s Burton.” He reached for her. “You have to come with me.”

The air was thickening with smoke. She shrank deeper into the blankets, but Burton grabbed a skinny wrist and lifted her out.

Over the years, plenty of parents had weighted his palm to carry their children, but this was the first time he’d held Alice. She was a squirming bundle, heavier than he’d expected. He smelled sleep on her and smoky laundry and, hidden inside these scents, the faintest trace of Madeleine. He buried his nose in her hair, hugged her tight.

She fought him off. “You’re a spook!”

“No, I’m real.”

“Daddy said you were dead. But not in heaven. You’d gone to the place for bad people.”

“What about Mummy? Did he tell you where she was?”

She started to cough.

Burton let go of her and dropped to his knees so they were at eye level. “Alice, it’s very dangerous,” he said. He had no natural manner with children, feared that his words sounded like orders. “You have to come with me, do as I tell you.”

“I want Daddy.”

He wrapped a coat round her, clumsily fastening the buttons with his stump. When she saw the end of his wrist, she backed away and finished them herself. The coat had a fur collar; he told her to cover her mouth and breathe through it. Then he grasped her hand and tugged her from the room, into clouds of swirling black tar. Burton used the banister to guide them to the floor below; beyond that, the stairs descended into flame.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he asked.

Before he could stop her, Alice broke from his grip and darted to the end of the corridor; Burton followed. Once they were inside, he began running a bath. The air was less noxious. He threw some towels into the water, rolled them into sopping coils, and blocked the gaps round the door frame. Next he checked the window: like all the others in the house, it was bolted shut. Burton wrenched the towel rail from the wall and pounded it against the lock.

The metal rattled—but didn’t give.

Below them there was an explosion, shaking the whole room. Tiles pinged off the walls. The floor buckled, dropping several inches. Alice screamed over the sound of crashing timbers. A gash opened beneath the door; within seconds the air was blackening.

Burton smashed the lock again, battering it ferociously, till the window burst outward. He sucked in gulps of air. The garden flickered below: a shifting semicircle of lawn that vanished into the fog. The previous time he’d visited the house, even though it had been empty, he hadn’t relaxed until he knew how to get out.
An escape route!
joked Madeleine as he checked a path from the scullery to the rear of the property. It was bordered by a wall with a door that led directly to the heath.

Burton leaned out the window and found that he was able to reach the downpipe he’d seen from Alice’s room, its iron damp and slippery. He turned to take her hand.

She was sitting in the bath, knees drawn to her chest.

“What are you doing?”

“I saw it at the circus,” she replied. “You can’t catch fire if you’re wet.”

He scooped her out of the water and put her on his back. “Arms round my neck and hold tight. Like that time on the farm when you got stuck in the tree.” He levered them both onto the windowsill.

Alice’s arms tightened around him. “Burton, I’m scared.” Her face burrowed into his neck.

“Me, too.”

He lowered himself till his boots found the drainpipe, then carefully transferred his weight to it.

In the Legion, when he’d done
la corde—
rope training—he had been taught to climb and descend with one hand, rifle in the other.
Your legs and feet do the work,
the
sous-officiers
would shout.
Your hand is only there to guide you.
Burton spent most of the day sprawled in the dirt.

He shinned down the first few feet, aware of how hollow and flimsy the iron felt in his grip. There was a
boom
from above, like a mortar round. A roof tile rocketed into the air, then shattered as it hit the ground. Alice clung tighter, squeezing his windpipe, shifting her weight, threatening to topple them. Burton froze and pressed his face against the brickwork. He tried soothing her, then hissed at her to keep still.

The iron juddered in his hand, the fixings beginning to strain.

Burton worked his feet faster, the ground almost within leaping distance as the pipe broke away from the wall.

He twisted as they fell to cushion Alice, missing the patio but landing with a hard smack that emptied his lungs. For a beat he lay there, resting his face in the grass to soothe his skin. In the distance a siren was approaching. Burton untangled himself from Alice and checked her over. Her face was sooty and there was a cut on her forehead, but nothing was broken.

“Fun?” he asked. “Want to do it again?”

She shook her head emphatically.

Over the roar of the flames, he thought he heard men shouting. Burton picked the girl up and darted through the garden, pausing only to kick down the door in the wall. Then on to the heath. The fog was dense and black, muffling the noise of the fire, until soon they were moving in silence. Once Alice asked where they were going; he lifted her onto his shoulders and kept running.

CHAPTER TEN

A COPPICE EMERGED from the darkness. Burton slipped between the trees, found a sheltered spot, and lowered Alice to the ground. The place had an indoor quiet.

“Pull your collar up,” he said, catching his breath. “Keep warm.”

Despite the numbing fog, he was soaked with sweat. He needed water: to clean his face, soothe his blackened throat. Burton used his forearm to wipe his brow.

“Where’s your hand?” asked Alice, staring at his stump.

“I lost it.”

“Will it grow back?” He shook his head. “Mummy won’t like it.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

“It’s very important, Alice. Did your daddy”—he could barely form the word—“say anything?”

“No.”

“Anything at all?”

She dipped her head, scratching the ground with her feet; then her face puckered. Tears began rolling down her cheeks. “He said she was finished being my mummy. That they were broken up and she’s gone back to her other family.”

“That’s not possible.”

“He said it was your fault.”

Burton knelt, dried her face with the cuff of his sleeve. Her eyes had the same sapphire glow that Madeleine’s did when she’d been crying. “I love your mummy, and she loves you. I want to bring her home. So she can look after you. But I can only do that if I know where she is. I need some clue.”

Alice hesitated. “I heard Mrs. Anderson talking to the maids. She caught me. Said if I told, I’d be sent there.”

“Where?” Burton felt the urge to shake her, anything to get the answer. Instead he spoke kindly: “Mummy told me all her secrets. So can you.”

“I wanted to know why they were laughing. Mrs. Anderson was angry. She said Daddy would lock me in the coal cellar for ‘eve-dropping.’”

“No one’s angry with you, Elli.” He’d never called her that before. “But you have to tell me what you heard.”

For a moment he thought she wouldn’t reply; then she blurted out: “Mummy was sent south.” Her words were full of a shame she couldn’t comprehend.

Sent south.
One of the expressions of the age: spoken with a wink and a grin in factories and pubs throughout the country, used by parents after a clip round their kids’ ears.
Behave! Or you’ll be sent south.

Sent south like the Jews. Five and a half million shipped from Europe to the island of Madagaskar.

Burton dabbed at Alice’s tears again. Could it be true? He absorbed what she’d said, his mind full of boundless, confused thoughts, and experienced a shiver of hope. He had been to Madagaskar before, as a mercenary, rescuing wealthy French colonists during the Nazi takeover.

From Hitler’s earliest days, his avowed intent had been to make Germany
Judenfrei
—Jew-free. With the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and their institutionalized anti-Semitism, life became progressively more insufferable for Jews, until the outburst of Kristallnacht. That night, thousands were imprisoned, attacked, and killed, businesses destroyed, synagogues burned. The Nazis hoped a voluntary migration would follow; when it didn’t, and other countries refused to take Jewish refugees, compulsory deportations began en masse. But as war stretched the boundaries of the Reich, Germany found itself not only reabsorbing the Jews it had expelled but acquiring millions extra in the occupied territories. A more radical and permanent solution to the Jewish problem was needed.