What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel

by Catherine Hokin

  Mummy’s headaches. Their rhythms had ruled the house for as long as Karen could remember. Some days the house was so silent, Karen imagined she could hear the sound of the dust motes floating through the air. She used to wonder if anyone passing by would ever have guessed there were flesh and blood people sitting quietly inside.

  Maybe that’s why Mummy went to the beach so early, because she was looking for quiet.

  No matter how many times Karen tried out that explanation, she could never quite believe it. If her mother wanted some peace, why would she need to go to the beach? They had been staying in Hove; it didn’t matter whether it was early or late, or whether you stood in the street or the park, nowhere on earth was as quiet as Hove. Even in summer, the place was as short on life as those ghost towns in the wild-west films her father loved, the ones that had all emptied out in fear of attack. On the first day of their week on the South Coast, Karen had half-expected cowboys to pop up from behind the wedding-cake houses. If only. Hove was dull. Capital D, underlined twice, dull, and not by any stretch of the imagination Karen’s idea of a holiday place.

  It was certainly no place for an eleven-year-old. Karen had decided that the moment they parked the car. The public gardens facing the hotel, which Father insisted were delightful, were ringed with dozing pensioners propped up on the benches like wrinkly babies. The hotel itself, which he kept calling charming, was cluttered and dusty, all drooping dried flowers and finger-marked paint. The prospect of a week there was worse than a maths test.

  Karen had crossed the fingers on both of her hands when they arrived in the gloomy reception hall, willing her mother to wrinkle her nose at the fusty smell. To take Father to one side and suggest they switch to somewhere less rotten. To even have one of the silent crying attacks that Karen hated so much but Father couldn’t ignore and would do anything to mend. Mummy hadn’t done a thing. She had followed Father up the stairs without so much as a glance at the muddy brown drapes shrouding the windows or the orange-swirled carpet stuck to the floor.

  Remembering that now, sitting in her perfectly matched pale pink and cream room, Karen realised how odd that lack of any reaction had been.

  Mummy had always hated anything ugly. She’d loved pretty fabrics, especially the soft ones, like velvet, or the expensive ones that were threaded through with silver or gold. Nothing in their neat little house had been allowed to be plain. The curtains were daisy-covered, the cushions striped and spotted. Her mother had been such an expert seamstress, she’d made dresses and skirts for most of the women in the village. Mrs Hubbard had said she was clever enough to have her own shop. She’d made all Karen’s clothes too, although Karen had started wishing she wouldn’t. Karen had desperately wanted a pair of blue jeans and a skinny-fit T-shirt with stripes, like Cathy Creggan showed off in. She had asked for those. No, she hadn’t, she had demanded them.

  Another tear dropped. She wished now she had asked nicely and not crumpled up the bib-fronted pinafore Mummy had offered instead. She would gladly have worn a dozen of those hand-sewn dresses if her mother was still here to make them.

  Karen blinked hard, wondering if the memories would ever come without the pain. Wondering if she would ever be able to filter the good ones out from the ones she didn’t want resurfacing. Wishing there was someone she could ask about that too.

  She remembered that Mummy had loved pretty fabric – that was a memory to hold on to – and also pretty smells, how particular she was about those. The long walks she dragged Karen on always turned into treasure hunts. The two of them would return clutching armfuls of plants and berries that they would pin up to dry. Sprigs of wild mint and lemon balm, jasmine and lavender. But never lilac: Mummy had said that went sad if you cut it and left only a ghost of its scent behind. Karen gathered that memory up too and hugged it to her like a blanket. How they would sit together at the kitchen table, mixing the gleanings with toasted orange peel and gnarled sticks of cinnamon; how her mother would fill every room with the scented bowls. On winter nights, when the fire was lit, the house smelled like a storybook Christmas.

  There wasn’t one of her bowls left now. There wasn’t a dress left in her wardrobe or a coat on the hall stand. And there wasn’t a photograph. Not that there had ever been many of those.

  Mrs Hubbard’s house was stacked with them; every surface groaned under their stiffly posed weight. Karen had spent more of her mother’s headache days than she could count in Mrs Hubbard’s front room, happily rearranging the photographs.

  There were only two pictures in the Cartwright house, both black and white and plainly framed. One of them was of Father’s parents, who had died long before Karen was born. She didn’t like it: the old man in a drab uniform, awkwardly linking arms with a tightly curled woman, had a rather menacing air. The other one was of her as a baby, lying on a rug and looking cross-eyed. There were no other grandparents on display and there wasn’t a single one of her parents, not even a wedding snap. Mrs Hubbard had generations of those, in increasingly elaborate frames. When Karen had asked Father why, he hadn’t answered; his usual strategy.

  During the Hove holiday, on their less-than-successful day trip to the far more thrilling town of Brighton, Karen had begged for a photo of the three of them together. The cameraman on the promenade had a monkey wearing a tiny red hat and she was desperate to hold it. She’d got quite upset when Mummy refused, had ‘made a scene’, which was Father’s cardinal sin. She had made quite a few scenes that day. Wanting to eat candyfloss and chips and visit the arcades on the pier and ride in the little yellow train that weaved along the pavements. Wanting some of the fun everyone else was noisily having. Maybe ‘all your ridiculous fuss’ was why her mother had needed to go alone to the beach. Father’s brusque ‘it’s a bit late to worry about that now’ when she ventured the question had seemed to suggest it.

  ‘Five minutes, Karen! Breakfast is waiting.’ Father’s voice rang up the stairs like a trumpet.

  Such a stupid thing to say. Where would it go if she didn’t turn up? This bright version of Father was no better than the gruff one; if anything, it was more exhausting. Not that it would last. If Karen was two minutes late to the table, he would be back to rules and regulations, wearing his soldier’s uniform even when he wasn’t.

  He doesn’t mean it. He’s just doing his best to keep us all running.

  The voice flew back so clear, Karen looked round for her mother.

  That was the last thing she’d said when she came to say goodnight. The last thing she’d ever said.

  Picking at the words now, Karen wondered what her mother had meant. She had made it sound as if they were a car needing petrol, not a family. Another confusion to add to a list that was growing, that Karen couldn’t stop picking at. That started with her not being woken up bright and early as usual on the beach-visiting day but left to sleep late. And the silence when she did wake up, so deep she thought she’d been magicked home in the night. That there was none of the hotel’s usual morning chorus was another oddity. There had been no clattering feet on the landing, no echoing gong announcing breakfast. She hadn’t heard water burping through the pipes or smelled bacon crisping its way up the stairs. Everything had pointed to something gone wrong, but Karen, for all the Famous Five mysteries she’d ploughed through, was blind to every clue.

  Patting her damp face dry with the corner of her skirt, Karen rummaged back through her memories, her daily task since the whole horrible mess had happened, as she tried to push the disjointed images into shape.

  She remembered the shock of waking up late and waking up alone. Wondering why her mother wasn’t sitting by her bed, stroking her hair and whispering that the world was awake and waiting for her. Wondering if that meant today was a bad day, a headache day. And she remembered scrambling into the day-before’s clothes; knocking on her parents’ door and getting no answer. Thundering down the staircase, wondering if Mummy was sick, or if she was still in trouble from the day before. She remembered crashing i
nto the breakfast room and the white faces turning. Her father slumped on a sofa as if someone had removed his bones. And the policewoman who took her into a separate room and came back empty-handed when Karen screamed for her father. Who tried in vain to talk over the bellowing ‘No, I can’t come; don’t ask me’ that was all Karen could hear.

  Things blurred after that, although the black dress which itched like sacking jumped out. And the hard lines of a funeral in the army church on the Aldershot base, with soldiers snapping to a salute she had instinctively known her mother would have hated.

  There were so many gaps. Long hours she must have spent alone, punctured by a hazy week Mrs Hubbard filled with ceaseless chatter and uneaten baking. And the day Father took her back to the base – Karen couldn’t forget that, although she had tried her best. Father talking about moving away, how life among the other army families might prove easier to manage than staying on in the village. Showing her the shoebox of a house he thought would best replace the cottage where, if she tried hard enough, she still might be able to conjure up her mother. Karen had run away from him and she had screamed. So loudly a white-coated medic came running. That was awful. But Father wasn’t. He hadn’t shouted the way she had expected. He had held her and tried to calm her and mopped up her tears. That was the bit she needed to hold on to. Not the noise and the fuss and everyone’s embarrassment, but Father’s gentleness as he carried her to bed and stayed till she slept and answered, without blinking, to Daddy.

  Karen cradled that memory and then she shoved it aside. What was the point of holding on to it when she wasn’t even sure anymore that it had happened? The next day, Father was back and moving wasn’t mentioned again. Nothing was ever mentioned again.

  Father went back to drilling his recruits, or whatever it was he did that seemed to involve long hours away and paperwork that kept him busy into the night. Karen spent her days with Mrs Hubbard and the parade of grandchildren who trooped in and out and were nice to her ‘because your mum’s dead’. When Father was home and not at his desk in the back room, they manoeuvred around each other, him hiding behind a book, Karen taking refuge in front of the television. Whatever barrier they could find to kill the slightest threat of conversation.

  The bottom stair creaked, breaking the flow of memories.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  Karen grabbed her creaky new satchel and headed down before Father could come up or call out again, before his voice could tighten. She paused for a moment on the landing, checking her reflection in the hallway mirror. Pale face but no redness. Neat hair, box-fresh blazer. Ordinary.

  Miss Larkin, her old junior school teacher, who wore tie-dye tops and mirror-studded skirts, said that ordinary was the same as dull, which was the worst thing to be. Karen didn’t agree with that at all. Staring at herself in the mirror, she realised that ordinary sounded perfect, sounded exactly what she wanted. An ordinary girl going to a new school filled with other ordinary girls, who didn’t know her. New faces who would believe in the mother Karen wanted to remember. The kind one, the gentle one; the one who was always present. New faces who hadn’t watched her mother shy away from the other mums gathered at the school gates. Who hadn’t giggled later on when her mother was there like clockwork every morning and every afternoon, reaching out for Karen’s hand long after the other children had declared their independence. Who didn’t know that Karen’s mother had ‘funny turns’. That Karen was the odd one, the unpopular one, the one who never had, so never went to, birthday parties.

  Or, better still, new faces who wouldn’t ask her anything personal at all. Who would let her forget, for eight glorious hours every day, the impossible, unthinkable fact that her beautiful mother wasn’t silent, or absent; she was dead.

  Three

  Liese

  Berlin, October 1936

  ‘Why is that boy never where he’s meant to be?’ Otto paced the pavement as the chauffeur hovered.

  ‘The traffic is building, sir. If you want to be on time…’

  ‘Uncle Otto? It’s freezing in here. Can I at least close the door?’

  ‘Fine, fine. I’m coming. I’ll deal with him later.’

  Otto scrambled into the back of the Mercedes, cursing as he caught his foot on the running board. The seats were wide, but he still managed to crowd Liese into the corner. Middle age and a comfortable life had curled rolls of fat over his collar and wrapped bracelets round his wrists. He was a ferocious fighter in the war, completely fearless. Far braver than me – one cognac too many and Paul became a storyteller.

  Watching Otto now, splayed out and puffing against the sand-coloured leather, all Liese could see was Lewis Carroll’s Walrus, drooling at the oysters.

  ‘Did you remind him what time we were leaving?’

  Yes, and he reminded me he had a KPD meeting which was far more important than ‘the nonsense of fashion’ so that was another conversation that made us both cross. The same as every attempt at conversation in the four weeks since he called me stupid has made us both cross.

  ‘I couldn’t find him. And maybe it’s for the best he doesn’t come, given the way he’s been behaving lately.’

  Liese kept her tone light, but she was deadly serious. Taking Michael to any of their stockists was a risk: he didn’t know when to leave his politics behind. He had already insulted the Wertheim department store’s buying team by calling their shoppers ‘blind and bourgeois’. Liese knew Haus Elfmann’s reputation wouldn’t survive the same behaviour at Hermann Tietz.

  Otto sighed, but he couldn’t argue.

  ‘You two shadowing me was meant to be a simple exercise and all he does is cause chaos. I’m starting to think he’s not cut out for this business. Not like you, missy.’

  Otto tapped on the partition for the driver to start moving and resettled his bulk.

  ‘Perhaps I should be concerned for my job, not Michael’s? If you carry on learning the ropes at the pace you’re going, Paul will soon have you running the place.’

  ‘As if Haus Elfmann could manage without its Fixer.’

  Liese crinkled her nose the way her father did when he used the nickname that had followed the two men out of the mud-soaked trenches where they had met and into the business they now ran side by side. Whatever we needed – food or wine or a cart when our feet were too broken to walk – Otto the Fixer would produce it faster than a magician. Now Otto worked his magic on late-running suppliers and overstretched workrooms, and when Paul declared, with more than a touch of theatricality, ‘all my ideas would come to nothing without him’, no one disagreed.

  ‘Besides, you know I don’t want to direct the salon. I want to be its chief designer.’

  Otto’s newly recovered smile disappeared again.

  ‘Which, with your talent, I don’t doubt you’ll be. And Michael was meant to stand in my position at your side, but the way that boy is going… To think I once harboured hopes that you and he wouldn’t only be business partners but—’

  ‘Uncle Otto, please!’

  Her horror stopped the sentence finishing.

  Bubbles of sweat popped out across Otto’s pink forehead; Liese refused to meet his eye as he fumbled for his handkerchief. How could he possibly think such a thing, when she and Michael had been brought up so closely they were practically related? Besides, Michael had a girlfriend, a cigarette-smoking redhead he slobbered over like she was carved out of candy. And as for her own fledgling love life… A sudden memory of André Bardou’s smiling mouth and stolen kisses at the salon reception, and the secret, so-romantic snatched meetings that had followed, burned her scarlet.

  Otto collapsed into a pile of apologies.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve embarrassed you. I won’t mention it again. I want to see him settled, and happy, that’s all. He’s so angry and lost, and every door that closes on him makes his temper worse. I love that boy, I really do, but whatever I say is wrong. And that rabble he’s mixed up with: they’ve turned his head, with their talk of rights and re
volutions. His mother always knew best how to reach him. If she was still alive…’

  Otto lapsed into a silence Liese had no idea how to fill.

  When the car finally glided to a halt in Alexanderplatz, outside a shop whose five sparkling storeys dominated the square, Liese jumped out of the car faster than the chauffeur could reach her door. Then she looked up and stopped so suddenly, Otto almost bundled into her. Until a few weeks ago, a sweep of letters across the top storey had spelled out the store’s name as Hermann Tietz. Now, the arch was shrunken, truncated into Hertie.

  ‘I can’t get used to the new name, no matter how often I see it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to; none of us should.’ Otto sniffed. ‘Reducing Germany’s oldest department store to this is an abomination. Hertie sounds like the lowest kind of cabaret.’

  Liese stifled a giggle and hurried inside. To her relief, nothing in there had changed. The interior wrapped round her like a favourite dress.

  Three steps across the floor and she was at the building’s heart, surrounded by slender pillars and staring up through floating chandeliers to where a glass dome hung like a green-tinged moon. Fur-swaddled women swanned up the curving staircase. Figures drifted in and out of the balconied galleries, shadow-like and flickering in the flatteringly dimmed light. Despite the bustle, there was a satisfying hush: footsteps were lost to thick carpets, voices whittled to whispers. Every counter was crowded and yet everywhere was space.

  Liese breathed in the leather and the face powder and the faint lilac sweetness. It smelled like perfection

  ‘Fraulein Elfmann, Herr Wasserman.’

  Herr Bruckner, the store’s new Head of Womenswear, stood poised like a conductor at the staircase’s turn. His voice carried a snap, which straightened the shop assistants. He clicked his heels and inclined his head; he didn’t come down to greet them.

  ‘If we could proceed to my office?’