While Still We Live (28 page)

Steve tightened his lips. “What you need is a firm hand, my lady,” he said.

Olszak said quietly, “Yes, she already has done more than enough—if that phrase is valid in time of war. But remember, she won’t have the neutral’s prerogative to leave on a train, as you will have. She must go by underground. Until a safe route has been established, I do not want to risk sending her. She would be better waiting here. As I said, we have thought of that. We will give her a name and story that the Germans won’t think of questioning. And she can go on living in your flat, Stevens. Madame Aleksander will join her there. It will all fit into the story we have prepared for the Germans. She will be as safe as anyone can be under the Germans. Safer than many.”

Sheila avoided Steve’s angry eyes. “What’s my new name?” she asked quickly. The meeting had given her hope and courage. It only needed Mr. Olszak’s latest suggestion to end completely the sense of frustration and uselessness of the last few days. Perhaps there were other things she could do, as well as look after Madame Aleksander. She looked at Olszak and saw he
had half guessed her thoughts.

“Perhaps I could be of some use?” she suggested hesitatingly, without waiting for Olszak’s answer.

Mr. Olszak only smiled. But she knew him, by this time. If he needed her help, he would make use of her.

He said, “You’ll find Mr. Hofmeyer next door. From now on, you are under his advice and orders. He has your papers and life story all ready. He has enlarged considerably on the name of Anna Braun, which he first found for you in an embarrassing moment with the man Henryk. Stevens was right when he said you couldn’t be disguised as a Polish girl, so we have kept your old story of being a German girl who adopted the identity of Sheila Matthews. If the Germans question you, refer them to Mr. Hofmeyer whose secretary you have now become. That and the police records of August 31 will be enough to keep you safe. Now, I shall give Stevens his instructions if you will have a talk with Mr. Hofmeyer. I may not see you again for quite, some time. Meanwhile, good luck.”

Sheila smiled wholeheartedly. He would never have taken all this trouble about me if he hadn’t hoped to give me some job to do, she thought happily. She felt as if a very high compliment indeed had been paid her. As she closed the door carefully behind her, Olszak was saying, “Now about your Swedish friend... We find nothing against him. I think his best plan would be to...” How miserable, she thought, Mr. Olszak would be if there were no plans left to be invented. She was still smiling as she entered the large living-room.

Mr. Hofmeyer was reading peacefully at the desk. The candle stub gave a deep yellow light which rounded out the lines on his face, softened its furrows. He removed his horn-rimmed
glasses, stuffed them into the breast pocket of his neat, dark suit and came to meet her with his quick, light step. She seemed to be standing again in the music room at Korytów, listening to these footsteps in the hall. In the dining-room, the Aleksanders and their friends sat round a table rich with food and wine and silver. It was little Teresa’s first grown-up party. The children outside had played round the American’s car. The gaily dressed women from the village had brought their songs and laughter and friendly curiosity to the windows of the big house. The evening sky was slate blue. There was the lingering warmth of a summer’s day to carry the sweetness of flowers and trees into the softly lighted rooms.

It couldn’t be only a month ago. It couldn’t, Sheila thought, as she took Hofmeyer’s outstretched hand. It wasn’t possible so much could have happened in one month. But the boarded window, the dust gritting under her heels, the torn plaster, the guttering candle were there to prove the nightmare was a reality. There was no awakening, no escape from this dream.

Mr. Hofmeyer was speaking in English. Sheila knew by this time that it wasn’t a foreign language to him: his hesitancy was due to the fact that he had used English so little in many years. To serve his country, this man had been willing to renounce it. Living with foreigners, Hofmeyer had become one of them. Even the square-shaped head with its bristling white hair, or the way he bowed with his wheels together and made a little speech of welcome, was now quite un-English. She wondered if he were ever really happy, or was his happiness a sense of having accomplished a difficult task well?

“I am under your orders, Herr Hofmeyer,” she said, and sat on the nearest chair.

“Yes, Fräulein Braun.” He smiled as if to himself, and turned back to the papers he had been reading at the desk. “Here are the necessary documents. First of all, birth certificate. That gave us the greatest difficulty of all your papers: it had to be a blend of fact and fiction. We had to find a real man called Braun who lived in Munich and was killed in the last war. We found one called Ludwig Braun.” Mr. Hofmeyer repeated the name slowly as if to emphasise it in her memory. He was to do that with all the names and dates he mentioned, quietly, insistently. Sheila found herself repeating the name to herself quite naturally.

Mr. Hofmeyer’s clear voice went on, “Ludwig Braun had a wife Frieda, who married a year after his death and went to live in Cologne. She died two years ago. The Brauns did not have any children, so I have given you a birth certificate showing you were born six months after their marriage. Its date is the 15th May, 1916. For good middle-class reasons, your birth was kept secret from Frieda Braun’s ultra-respectable family. She boarded you out temporarily with a retired governess. Before Mrs. Braun had found courage to reveal your existence to her family, her husband had been killed and she herself was thinking of a second marriage. Naturally she had less courage, then, to own you. But Mrs. Braun found, even after she was successfully married for a second time, that confession grows more difficult with postponement. So when Mrs. Braun, now Mrs. Mühlmann, went to live in Cologne, you were still living with the governess. She was a Miss Thelma Leigh who had retired in the city where she had spent thirty years and had become a naturalised German. That is actual fact, by the way. She is a friend of mine and now lives in Switzerland. She already has
received instructions about the little girl whom she looked after in Munich. Her address there was Theresienstrasse, 25. You lived very quietly with her until you were sixteen. Miss Leigh tutored you, for she didn’t want to send you to a State school and yet the money which Mrs. Braun, now Mrs. Mühlmann, sent her each quarter was insufficient to pay for a private school. In this way, you did not have school friends and grew up almost unknown in Munich. Like many governesses, Miss Leigh was a snob and wouldn’t let you mix with the neighbourhood children. Miss Leigh was your constant companion. That was your simple life until you were sixteen, and you followed her through museums and art galleries obediently.”

Mr. Hofmeyer brought a small red book across to her. “Baedeker. He has a fine chapter on Munich. I understand that is the city you know best in Germany?”

Sheila nodded. She knew it well.

“Good. Then all you have to do is to refresh your memory. Don’t be worried about that part of the story. Any girl who has been away from her native town for almost ten years is not photographically clear about its details. All you need to do is to memorise the streets round your old home and the chief shopping centres. Remember what you can of the English Park and the old Pinakothek Museum.”

Sheila nodded again.

“Anna Braun left Munich when she was sixteen. That was in 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power. Miss Leigh wanted her to finish her education abroad, to learn languages, so that some day, when Miss Leigh was dead, Anna Braun could earn money in a ladylike manner. By this time your mother had stopped paying the small allowance to Miss Leigh,
and the governess had informally adopted you. So Miss Leigh arranged for you to go to England, where she had been born and still had some relatives. You travelled third class, and spent a quiet year with a dull English family. Their name was Carson and they stayed just outside of London. You can pick any district you know. You were teaching their daughter Margaret to speak German in exchange for room and board. At the end of that year, when you were about to return to Munich, Miss Leigh had lost her last savings in the depression; she had to become a governess once again with a family in Switzerland, this time. You were offered a temporary position, well paid, as a governess in a London household. Your employer was a Mrs. Bowman of Eaton Square. As things grew more difficult in Europe, you thought you must stay in a secure position. Mrs. Bowman helped you become a foreign correspondent in a business firm which exported to Germany. For the sake of being able to continue your position in this business firm and for the sake of future promotion, you wanted to become a naturalised British subject. Your mother’s selfishness had given you no pleasure in the name Braun, so you even chose an English name, Sheila Matthews. Your security was assured. You were highly thought of in your firm, whose name was Matheson, Walters and Crieff.”

Hofmeyer ignored Sheila’s upraised eyebrows. He pointed to a thin dark blue book and some papers on the desk. “There are the citizenship documents, the legal papers for your change of name, and your subsequent passport. They are excellent copies. You need have no fear about any suspicion rising from them.”

Hofmeyer didn’t wait for any questions. He went on, “You had, of course, been little interested in politics during
all this period. You were much too intent on trying to fight for yourself in a world where you had neither influence nor money nor a recognised name. Then the AO—the
Auslands-Organisation
—approached you. As the AO has some ten million Germans throughout the world organised in all grades of treachery towards their adopted countries, you are perfectly safe in maintaining that you agreed eventually to help your Fatherland. I can testify to that. For when you were visiting Miss Leigh in Switzerland, in 1938, I was in Switzerland too. I met you, and through my connections with the AO working in Poland, I decided the form of your service in that organisation. You returned to London, and we corresponded. You sent me several pieces of requested information which verified my opinion of your ability. Then in the winter of 1938–1939, you met Andrew Aleksander and had many enjoyable evenings together. You wrote me that he wanted you to visit his family. He thought you were English, of course, on account of your name, of your business connections in an old established British firm, and of your accent. Thanks to Miss Leigh’s early teaching, you had an excellent English voice. This summer when I was searching for a reliable secretary to replace Margareta Koch, I decided that you must be brought to Warsaw. I ordered you to resurrect the Aleksander invitation, and you arrived here welcomed as an English girl. Everything went according to plan, except that a careless member of our AO here betrayed me and drove me into hiding. You were arrested, released pending further investigation, rearrested along with Elzbieta Dittmar, and escaped during an air raid. Since then, you have been waiting until I can open my business house here again, and then you will begin working with me. And that is the story
of Anna Braun who became Sheila Matthews.”

There was a pause.

“Now, let’s begin at the beginning,” Hofmeyer said with a smile.

Sheila felt herself grow tense as she strained to repeat the names and dates which she had tried to memorise. She was too anxious: she made a mistake, fumbled, halted, and bit her lip in annoyance at her own stupidity.

“Easy, now,” Hofmeyer said. He prompted her carefully, insisting that she repeat the names after him, spelling them out slowly.

“Again,” the quiet voice said, when she had finished her account.

Again she told him. This time, the names were becoming familiar, the dates and events seemed more plausible.

“Good,” he said, and her confidence increased.

“If you could give me a piece of paper and a pencil, I could write down the German names. I’d remember them much better, then.”

Hofmeyer raised one of his eyebrows, but he followed her suggestion, watching the look of concentration on her face as she wrote. The resemblance was so strong, he thought. Charles Matthews was dead, and yet he still lived, still shared in life through this girl.

“There!” she said, and watched him anxiously as he examined the sheet of paper.

“Good,” he said once more. And then, as if to keep her from being too confident, he added, “There are two
n
’s in Mühlmann.” He held the piece of paper to the candle’s flame. “Well, that’s about everything, Miss Matthews.”

“But what work shall I do?” Sheila asked quickly. “I mean, the Germans will expect me to do more than typing, to justify all the trouble you took to get me into Warsaw.”

“I have already informed the proper authorities that you are invaluable to them for counter-espionage, which is my own field. You are to maintain the name and character and friendships of Sheila Matthews, by German permission. They believe that you will be able to give them necessary information from time to time because of the trust which your Polish friends have put in you.”

“But when I don’t report to the Germans, when I don’t give them information, won’t they guess something is wrong then?”

“I shall credit you with some information, Fräulein Braun. We have to throw a sop every now and again, you know, to justify the money the Germans pay us. Now, here are your papers. Your birth certificate, your naturalisation papers, your deed of name, your passport with its visit to Switzerland correctly dated, and your identification card in the
Auslands-Organisation
. Keep these safe.”

He watched her open her handbag, and transfer her powder box, cigarette case and comb into her pocket to make room for the papers.

“You may as well give me your real passport,” he said. “It has too many summer holidays stamped on its pages which would not at all agree with our story.”

Sheila removed the thin, dark blue book and held it in her hand thoughtfully. “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I don’t like giving it up. Silly, isn’t it?”