The Road Between Us (36 page)

He recalls a line in the marriage service of the
Book of Common Prayer
which speaks of ‘the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed’. Realizing there is no one he can give this last instruction to, he curses. Society demands that he take his secret to the grave.

He hears in his head now the voice of the group captain at his court martial. ‘Consider yourself lucky to get away with a dishonourable discharge. A hundred years ago a man found guilty of gross indecency would have been hanged.’

The thought sends electric wakening shudders through his body and he now feels indignation mounting. Finally a cold anger tightens the muscles in his neck and jaw. As a German machine gun shrieks and spits out a vindictive white light like a blowtorch he thinks: why are these bastards preventing me from reaching Anselm? I have come too far; survived too many injuries to allow
them to get in my way now. He winces as dirt snaps at his skin. He then becomes aware of a dull ache in his thumb. Has he been hit? No, he realizes the ache has been building insidiously for days.

Charles now sees a human torch emerge from the flames below and stagger across the bridge. A German. The Resistance fighters to Charles’s left laugh when they see him. Charles puts the stock of his rifle to his shoulder, takes aim and, squeezing his trigger, feels the rifle buck. He then sees his bullet ricochet off the iron bridge about five feet behind the burning man. Charles adjusts his sight by two clicks and fires again. This time the man falls to the ground.

As daylight breaks, there is an order to fix bayonets. The Free French are about to attack. Charles can hear the scrape of metal as the bayonets are attached in foxholes along the line. He looks around him and sees that, in the night, the trees they have been sheltering under have been stripped of their leaves and their trunks are blackened. Most of them have had their branches sheared away.

The act of fixing bayonets will, he knows, send a signal to the Germans that the French are willing to kill at close quarters to get their country back, and with any luck it will sap their morale.

He watches how Lehague attaches his. The MAS-36 carries a seventeen-inch spike bayonet reversed in a tube below the barrel. A spring plunger is pressed to release it. It is then free to be pulled out, turned round, and fitted back into its receptacle. Charles attaches his.

A whistle blows and three or four hundred men rise from their foxholes and charge down the cratered hill. Charles is up and on his feet without thinking. He shouts as he runs, stopping every few yards to work the bolt action of his rifle. His movements are reflexive, his knuckles white. As the smell of gunpowder, oil and hot metal eddies through his senses, he is no longer conscious of where he ends and the weapon begins. Its heat is his heat.

PART SIX

I

Alsace. Present day. Summer. A year and a quarter after Edward’s release

FOR A FEW SECONDS, AS SHE RISES LIKE A BUBBLE TO HER OWN
surface, Hannah does not know where she is. She has been dreaming about her mother; that they were walking together on a beach talking about … something. She cannot now recall what, but this ritual is familiar. For these confused moments, her mother is alive, then sentience returns and reality enters her bloodstream like a trickle of ice water. Without any fuss, her mother dies again. Alive one second, then, with a hiss of steel being tempered, dead the next.

Through the bowed curve of the window, milky light is now slanting in. She had forgotten to close the curtain and it is this, the rising sun, that has woken her. Wrapping a sheet around herself, she crosses the room and opens the window wider. Though the courtyard is immediately below, she nevertheless has a good view of the garden from here. Or at least she will as soon as she puts her contacts in. She finds them in her wash bag and tips back her head to fit them.

Below her she now sees small sections of lawn covered in a mosaic of cobwebs beaded with dew. A marzipan smell of meadowsweet is rising in the air. She pulls on some shorts and a
blue T-shirt with a large peace sign on it, and creeps down the stairs so as not to disturb her father. His door is ajar and she can hear the shallow breaths of sleep coming from within.

In the kitchen, she flicks on the lights, only to fuse that part of the house. On top of the fridge, she notices, is a torch and, after testing it, she steps tentatively down the stairs to the wine cellar. The fuse box is mounted on the wall here and, after tripping the only switch that is down, the lights come back on. She tries the brass bulb of the door handle at the far end of the room, thinking it might be an alternative way of getting to the garden, but it is locked.

Back in the kitchen, she dustily snaps a breadstick, pours herself an orange juice and takes it out into the garden to drink. As she walks barefoot towards the river, her hair loose down her back, her eye is caught by the shapeless, wavering flight of some swallows. As they spiral and stall, their tails fine-tuning their balance, they look like windblown paper.

There is a fork in the river where the water becomes shallower and the mud on the edges is turning pale grey as it dries and cracks in the early morning sun. The swallows are skimming the surface here like flat stones thrown by children. As she sits down to watch them, she feels at peace.

Later, when she sees her father limping towards her, his suede shoes wet with dew, she realizes she has lost track of time. He is unshaven. The cuffs of his shirt are undone. This is good, she thinks. He is relaxing, too.

She pats the ground next to her. ‘Look at these swallows.’

‘Are they after the dragonflies?’

‘Midges, I think. Watch.’ They move their heads as the swallows jink back and forth over the river, grazing both air and water. When they touch the surface they cause explosions of shifting colour. Hannah’s attention is transferred to the heavily veined pouches of an orchid a few feet away. She crawls over to it and examines its downy smooth petals. They seem to pout in the direction of its own tautly curved stem. When she looks up, her father is staring at her.
There is something in his eyes, an energy and vitality she hasn’t seen before.

She points at some nearby vegetation. ‘Know what that is?’ Edward shrugs.

‘Honeysuckle and bindweed. See how the bindweed grows anti-clockwise and the honeysuckle clockwise, so the two entwine, weed and flower.’

‘Poetic.’

Hannah nods. ‘Yeah, poetic.’

After a couple of minutes, she gets to her feet and crooks her arm so that her father can link it with his. They walk slowly, out of step, and come to some wild thyme over-canopied with sweet musk roses. She takes a deep breath. ‘Can you believe this place?’ she says.

‘It’s quite something.’

‘Some people live such privileged lives, don’t they?’ Hannah says. ‘Private jets. Houses in different countries. He lives like a pharaoh, this guy.’

‘I found a framed cover of the
Economist
in my bedroom, put away at the back of a cupboard, face down. It’s got this picture of a man with long white hair and fine features. Serious-looking. The coverline reads: “Meet Germany’s answer to George Soros.” I guess it must be him.’ Edward stops walking and pulls Hannah to a stop, too. ‘Look!’

A few yards in front of them is a buddleia that appears to be floating. A cloud of butterflies is moving slowly and silently around it, like confetti on a breeze.

After contemplating them for a moment, Hannah says, ‘I was thinking of doing some painting. Will you sit for me?’

‘Sure.’

Edward follows his daughter back to the house, walking a few paces behind her, and when he sees her struggling with a large bag he takes it from her, shouldering its strap so that he can carry a kitchen chair with both hands. He sets the chair down under the bough of a chestnut tree and hands over the bag. Hannah unzips it
and pulls out some brushes, a palette and what looks like a fold-up music stand. She opens it and takes some paper from a tube. Once she has pinned this to a board, she half fills a jar with water from the river. ‘Did you ever talk to Grandpa about art?’

‘Not really,’ Edward says. ‘Wish I had.’

Hannah pulls back her hair, twists it into a casual knot and begins sketching. A minute later she cocks her head and, with the side of her thumb, smudges a pencil line she has drawn. ‘I never get bored with observing faces,’ she says. ‘Each one is a unique and complex pattern of planes, shapes and colours. It’s, like, such an intimate thing. Studying the subject’s face tells you so much about their experiences and character.’

‘What do you see with me, Frejya?’

‘You called me Frejya.’

Edward massages the sides of his head. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘I see someone who is haunted.’

Edward sighs and runs his hand through his hair.

Hannah sketches for a few minutes then looks up. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Talk about what? Your mother?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not really. Do you?’

‘Not really. Tell me about the cave instead. What did you miss most?’

A look of puzzlement clouds Edward’s face. ‘Why do you suppose I was released after so long? Niall gave me his theory but …’

‘No idea. Perhaps we’ll never know.’ Hannah becomes distracted by the whooshing sound of a coach passing on the road beyond the garden wall, its blue roof blurring for an instant between the trees. ‘That’s the third this morning.’

‘You hold your pencil in your fist, like Grandpa used to. When you draw.’

‘Do I?’ She looks at her hand. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

Beyond the wall another coach drives past. ‘That’s the fourth,’ Hannah says. She turns the board round. ‘There.’

‘That was quick.’ Edward walks over. His eyebrows lift and he nods judiciously as he takes the sketch in. ‘It’s good. Very good. I recognize myself, which is more than I do when I look in the mirror. Can I keep it?’

‘Only if you make lunch. I think I might use it as a preliminary study for an oil painting. And hey …’

‘What?’

‘Good talking.’

Edward ruffles Hannah’s hair, a fatherly gesture that seems to take them both by surprise.

Having drunk one bottle of wine with lunch they feel frivolous and open a second which they drink as they explore the house, opening doors and cupboards. ‘Look at this,’ Edward says, pulling out a drawer. Headlines about the Taliban attack on his convoy are yellowing on the newspaper lining. ‘I guess our host really was following my story.’

Hannah studies them with unfocused eyes, as though looking at a space a few feet beyond the paper.

Edward is now flicking through some old album covers. ‘
Cabaret
. He’s a Liza Minnelli fan. Oh and look, he’s got
Revolver
.’

‘Germans like the Beatles?’

‘Hamburg was where they properly came together as a band. And have you seen this?’ Edward is peering at a red-leather hand-stitched football in a glass case. ‘Looks like the 1966 World Cup football. A replica, I presume.’

At one end of the bookcase there is a lamp with a shade made from bruised, almost transparent leather and at the other is a chessboard. Edward examines one of the pieces, a bishop, holding it up to the light.

‘Look what I’ve found,’ Hannah calls from an adjoining room.

Edward follows the sound of her voice and finds her standing in the cinema with its dozen deep and comfortable-looking seats. On the back wall are metal containers of film. ‘Interesting film
library, don’t you think?’ She trails her finger along the titles. ‘
Schindler’s List. The Pianist. Downfall. Escape from Sobibor. The Night Porter. Triumph of the Will
. Don’t you think it odd?’

‘What?’

‘The films. And the books that have been left lying around for us to find.’

‘You think it’s deliberate?’ Edward picks up a book. ‘
Das Rosa Hakenkreuz
. The Pink Swastika … See if I have any German left.’ As he reads the blurb on the back, his lips move. ‘According to this, one of the administrators at Treblinka was gay. He had a harem of Jewish boys dressed like little princes.’ He arches an eyebrow. ‘There were quite a few gay men in the SS, it says here. It was to do with the Spartan way they trained. All that bonding and male nudity got to them. But any who were caught were automatically condemned to death.’

‘Those Nazis,’ Hannah says with a shake of her head as she drains her glass of wine. ‘They were such … Nazis.’

Edward taps the spines of the books on the shelf. Half of them are in German. There is a collection, in English, of Byron’s poetry, along with anthologies of Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. Edward opens the Keats. ‘I always liked the Romantic poets.’

‘Weren’t they all obsessed with suicide?’

‘Obsessed with
memento mori
,’ he corrects. He reads from the page. ‘“She dwells with beauty – Beauty that must die; / And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh.” I seduced your mother with Keats … Think I’m going to take this out into the garden to read … I might try writing something as well. By the way, I couldn’t find the notebook I was using in London. You didn’t see it lying around the house anywhere, did you?’

‘Where did you see it last?’

‘I think it was in the bathroom.’

Hannah’s brow creases.

‘What?’

‘Oh nothing,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it will turn up.’

‘Why did you frown?’

‘It was just that that journalist was up there. Was there anything compromising in it?’

Edward chews his lip. ‘It was a draft of … It’s not important. I have a spare notebook.’

While Hannah goes up for a siesta, Edward heads outside wearing a straw fedora with a red and yellow MCC band. A hosepipe, demented by the pressure of water, is snaking across the lawn. It must be part of the sprinkler system, he figures, come unattached. He follows it to a tap on the wall, switches it off, then heads for an oak tree by the riverbank and sits under its boughs, finding a comfortable position with his back to its trunk and his legs dangling over one of several coiling roots. He opens his new notebook, unscrews his fountain pen and, savouring the warmth infusing his bones, writes down a line of poetry that has been on the edge of his mind all day.