The Madagaskar Plan (40 page)

After she first arrived in London, wearing a hand-me-down uniform and scrubbing floors, she thought she would spend the rest of her life as a spinster maid, growing bonier by the year. Now she had a beautiful daughter, two beautiful houses, and a marriage that protected her from persecution (if not occasional snide remarks); Jared was sober, prosperous, and endlessly faithful. Life had never been so comfortable—and yet she was ashamed to admit how miserable she was.

Madeleine was no longer the woman Jared had offered a ring to. She had flourished in the rich soil he planted her in, growing in ways neither of them intended. When she let herself be clipped into shape, he only seemed more dissatisfied with the result. As much as she tried, as much as she loved him, she fell short of being grateful in the way he expected. The miracle of their first few years became oppressive: a storm swelling in the distance, forever darkening, never breaking. Like after Dunkirk, when the country held its breath for invasion. Sometimes she yearned for an argument, to shout and be shouted at, simply for the respite that would follow. Jared hadn’t changed, though he wasn’t quite the husband she had imagined. She sensed that he preferred the vulnerable, unwashed immigrant who first entered his office. It might have been more bearable if she had a confidante; however, few women wanted to be her friend, and those who did were kind but incapable of understanding the life she had led. In the meantime, she became more entrenched in luxury.

As Madeleine was striding along the shingle, her boot became loose. She bent down to retie the laces and found them caught in a knot. The more she tried to unravel it, the tighter it drew. When it wouldn’t give, she slipped the boot off, raising it to her face to see better. The pebbles beneath her feet were spiky and sensuous. She wanted to feel them against her skin, so she tugged off her sock, burying her toes, arching her spine with pleasure. The knot was less pleasing: she plucked at it with her thumbnail, yet it refused to yield.

“
Verfluchter mist!”
she swore in German.

Madeleine continued to pry at the knot till her nail broke. She swore again, then again, speaking the forbidden language, her voice rising. The words came out in a flood. The beach was empty—what did she care? It felt good to roar. She cursed the lace and the boot and the muttering servants back home, working down through her register of insults till she reached the Nazis and Hitler, that kernel of pleasing, instinctive hate. Jared, ever the diplomat, tut-tutted whenever she spoke ill of the Führer in public.

The tension eased from her till she was giggling. When the knot still didn’t budge, she hurled the boot through the air in frustration.

It bounced off the shingle and landed in front of a stranger.

Madeleine shrank with embarrassment, wondering how he had managed to get so close without making any noise. His face looked familiar, and she feared he might be one of Jared’s friends. The thought of this incident getting back to her husband was too much to bear. The stranger was wearing a waxed jacket, his skin darkly tanned.

“Problem with your boot?” he asked in German.

His voice was soft, lethargic, exotic. She remembered him at once. “You’re the nephew,” she said, “the one in Africa.”

“You know my aunt?”

“We met at one of her parties last year. I was playing Schubert, remember? Your name’s Burton.”

He gave a half-smile, flattered to be recognized. He looked as if he was recovering from a long illness. The stubble around his chin showed the first signs of gray. Madeleine had a good memory for names, a talent inherited from her father; he claimed that his success as a doctor relied as much on his familiarity with his patients as it did on his clinical skills. She remembered that night at his aunt’s vividly, and the mistake she had made. After leaving him at the piano, she realized he was the first person she’d ever spoken to who might be able to answer her questions. She searched the house and gardens for him—but Burton had vanished.

He bent stiffly to retrieve her boot. “That’s a bad knot.”

Madeleine held out her hand for it, mortified that the innards might smell. That morning she had worn unlaundered socks—a silly, girlish act of rebellion. “Don’t worry. I can undo it.”

“By throwing it across the beach?”

She was unsure whether he was mocking her; his eyes gave away nothing. “Please, it’s no trouble.”

He returned it to her. She liked how he had not insisted, not proclaimed his superior skills. She fiddled with the laces for another thirty seconds before giving up. “I don’t want to cut them,” she said. The servants would tell.

He was looking at the ground. “Isn’t your foot cold?”

She passed the boot back and rolled on her sock. He took the laces between his fingers, did something she couldn’t see, and in an instant the knot was loose.

“How did you do that?” she asked, exasperated that it had been so simple.

“An old trick from the Legion.”

“You were a soldier?”

He gave an evasive nod and offered her the boot. “Which way are you headed?”

“Toward Dunwich.”

“Same as me. You want some company?”

Madeleine hesitated, unsure how to reply: not wanting to encourage him, not wanting to be rude. Knowing they might not meet again, and keen to question him.

They walked in silence except for the crunch of pebbles; Burton struggled to match her pace. She maintained at least a meter between them in case they chanced upon someone she knew.
A yard,
she heard her husband say
. You mustn’t use these continental terms.

“Are you back from Africa?” she asked. He gave another of his noncommittal nods. “I’ve always wanted to see Africa.”

“There’s nothing there. Just misery.”

Madeleine eased her stride, building up to her real question. “What about Madagaskar—have you been?”

“Once.”

“What’s it like?”

He glanced at her, probably guessing that she had Jewish blood. She rarely admitted it, detesting the pity and poison that sneaked into people’s faces. Burton’s expression remained neutral.

“It was a long time ago,” he replied. “Before they sent them south.”

“I’ve never met anyone who’s been.”

He searched for something to say. “My last night, we were hiding in the hills above Majunga, waiting for a boat. The shelling had stopped, and it was quiet. Really quiet, just a chorus of insects.” He offered a distant smile. “You could almost believe it was peaceful.”

She continued to quiz him, surprised by how considerate his answers were; for some reason, she’d had him down as a brute. She knew there were no words of consolation; she no longer needed any. She simply wanted to make the beyond her family had passed into real, know the color of the earth and the smell of the sky from someone who had been there.

After ten minutes, he stopped abruptly.

“I can’t go any farther.” He gripped his thigh. “It hurts.” He turned in the direction from which they had come. “Do you often walk here?”

“I like to.”

“The doctor says I need exercise every day. To strengthen the muscle. Perhaps we’ll meet another time.”

“I’m not sure that’s appropriate. I’m married.”

He limped away, boots scrunching on the shingle, before he stopped again. “I remember the Schubert now,” he said, “The Hungarian Melody. You were very good. But, I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.”

“Mrs. Cranley.”

“Your first name.”

She wavered. “Madeleine.”

“Like in the Bible.” Burton smiled and switched to German: “‘Healer of wounds and evil spirits.’”

The next morning dawned warm and blue, ideal for walking. “The weather’s been better since the Jews left” was a staple joke of the age. Madeleine stayed indoors, as she did the day after; then Jared visited till Sunday. As usual, he came with gifts and bonhomie, and that tightening of the atmosphere in the house. On Monday, it was pouring. Madeleine tied her hair in a bun and put on a mac, assuming she’d have the beach to herself, and found Burton patrolling the same stretch of shingle where they’d met before. They exchanged pleasantries as the rain lashed them, and he asked about her weekend. For reasons she never understood—the conspiracy of the weather, a need to unburden herself, instinct—she told him the truth. She said nothing bad about Jared but explained how suffocating she found the expectations of home, how with the servants always around there could be no lapse in her poise.

“You must think me awfully ungrateful,” she said when she finished.
Awfully ungrateful:
she sounded like a bad parody of Celia Johnson.

“My aunt’s a good woman; so is her maid,” replied Burton. “They care for me like nurses. But sometimes I have to get out of that house or I’ll scream.”

Madeleine was soaked by the time she returned home. She ran a bath, and as she stood in her underclothes, steam billowing from the tap, she wondered whether Burton liked hot baths.
I could never marry a man who didn’t like baths,
she used to vow to her friends when she was a teenager. Jared’s new obsession was showers.
They’re the future,
he told her.
Look at America.

She went out the next day in quiet anticipation of meeting Burton. But when she saw him in the distance—a dark, limping figure against the gray shingle—she froze. What was she doing? They could never be friends. She should return to London with Alice straightaway. When he raised his hand in greeting, she hurried off in the opposite direction.

“Ami!”
he cried after her. The sound bounced across the shingle into the boom of the waves.
“Ami!”

Madeleine jerked awake now, convinced that she could hear Burton’s voice echoing around her, as real as the pink walls and the pervasive damp.

Ami …

It was the call of a legionnaire as he approached a fort. She lurched to the door, her brain half-slopped, and looked up and down Boriziny Strasse. It was empty, the mist curling and shifting along its length. Nothing but the smell of baking. The woman opposite broke off from her breathing exercises to scowl.

Madeleine returned inside. She removed her other boot and concentrated on the knot, twisting the lace to either side as tight as she could while simultaneously pushing toward the center, the way Burton taught her. It took seconds. She tucked her boots away and massaged her feet. The soles were wrinkled and flaking, and she had a wart on her heel. She picked at the black dots in the crater, remembering how supple and beautiful her feet used to be and the way Burton squeezed them slightly too hard, the sensation delicious. She peeled off her shirt and her sopping trousers.

Behind the partition were a drain, a tub of ash, and several buckets of water, which had stood untouched for months. Madeleine took a handful of ash and, using it in place of soap, scoured herself till she was rosy, then emptied one of the pails over her head. Back in the room, she was aware of a stagnant odor rising from her skin. She retrieved her suitcase from under the bed and fished out the last remaining bottle of perfume Jared had packed. The rest she had sold in the market, amazed by the prices they had commanded and the vanity of some women among so many stinking bodies. She aimed the spray at her throat—but didn’t depress the pump.

Madeleine had neither wanted nor planned an affair; only in retrospect did she understand how emotionally dormant her life had become. Jared could be attentive and affectionate, he doted on Alice, but he was capable only of giving love. He had no desire to receive it.

She continued to encounter Burton, and they walked farther as he grew stronger. He offered more recollections about Madagaskar, but soon she wanted to know about the rest of his life: Africa, the Legion, his childhood. It was like hearing a fellow voice in the gloom. She was touched by his moments of awkwardness, his doubts—so different from her husband’s enameled certainty. For the first time, she spoke freely of her own past. Jared was from a blithe, successful family. His father was in good health, his mother had died peacefully at home. The bitterness of affliction was something he couldn’t share.

As the mornings grew darker and the wind from the North Sea more biting, Madeleine let herself look forward to seeing Burton. He always kept an arm’s length from her and never said anything suggestive—unlike some of Jared’s friends, with their secret gazes, as if they wanted to test the Nazi propaganda about the Jew’s lasciviousness. Once he met her with a crumb of breakfast stuck to his beard, and she brushed it off; it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. She hoped his leg would take a long time to heal.

Eventually Jared questioned why she was spending so much time at their second home. “Alice will think she’s a country girl,” he said playfully but without smiling.

“Come and spend more time with us,” she entreated, confident that he wouldn’t. “You work too hard.”

That weekend, they returned to London with him.

When Madeleine pictured Burton waiting for her, then walking the beach alone, she felt a draining in her chest. She wrote to apologize for her departure and signed it “Maddie” before adding a P.S., aware that a threshold had been crossed: she was committing them both to a secret. She asked him not to reply to her home address or mention their friendship to his aunt.

Madeleine found excuses to visit Suffolk, and Burton traveled often to London; for some reason, they always met on Thursdays. She wished it were summer so she could wear dresses, rather than being wrapped in wool and fur. They kissed for the first time at Christmas, after lunch at a Kardomah café, a tense, almost embarrassed pressing together of the lips that trilled with anticipation. She remembered carol singers and the cold of his face, the scent of roast chestnuts and petrol fumes. It was in Trafalgar Square, opposite the huge tree Hitler sent annually to Britain. A few years earlier she had wandered these streets like a beggar, blinking at the decorations and the restaurants crammed with diners, aware that she could never be a part of this world. Jared had allowed her access. The beard around Burton’s mouth was soft. They kissed beneath garlands of light, her hands grasping his cheeks—and she didn’t care if anyone saw her. She returned home to Hampstead elated and ill; for the next week, flu gripped her. After Christmas she told Burton that they must stop seeing each other. That same afternoon they made love for the first time. She had already imagined the moment; to her surprise, he had been less gentle than Jared.