by Emma Fraser
Irena raised her arms and stepped forward.
Chapter 49
Skye, 1989
‘I’m so glad they’ve found Magdalena,’ Katherine said. ‘She’s bound to know something about your mother. And she might also be able to tell us what happened to Irena – if she knew her.’
‘If Magdalena comes. She might decide not to.’
‘You could always go to Poland to see her,’ Katherine suggested.
Sarah nodded. ‘I plan to. Supposing she allows the solicitors to give me her address. Otherwise, I’ll just have to search for her there.’
Katherine had arrived that evening for dinner as arranged. It had rained all afternoon so Sarah had stayed indoors, trying, but failing, to work on one of the manuscripts she’d brought with her. It wasn’t thinking about Matthew, however, that had distracted her. It was Neil, those dammed photographs, and her reaction.
The dining room was cold and musty so she had set the table in the kitchen now nicely heated by the Rayburn. Sarah had prepared the salmon earlier, turning her nose up when the scales had stuck to her fingers. To go with it, she’d put potatoes on to boil and was planning to steam some broccoli later. It wasn’t much of a meal, but then she wasn’t much of a cook.
Katherine was wearing a soft blue sweater, clearly hand-knitted, and a tweed skirt. Her hair was tied back with a scarf and lipstick coloured her still attractive mouth. Once again, Sarah thought she looked far younger than her years. Perhaps it had something to do with her relatively unlined skin and porcelain complexion. She must have been lovely when she was a young woman.
‘Would it be okay if we eat in the kitchen?’ Sarah asked.
Katherine grinned. ‘If you’d seen some of the places I’ve eaten in you wouldn’t be asking that. How was the crab?’
‘Still in the fridge, I’m afraid. Neil helped me cook it but I don’t have a clue what to do with it now.’
‘Why don’t you give it to me and I’ll deal with it if you want to get on with whatever you need to do.’
Katherine found a small hammer and placing the crab on a breadboard began to crack open the claws, while Sarah put the salmon in the oven.
‘I’ve been thinking about our chat,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s brought back a lot of memories – especially of the war.’
‘Was it terrible? I’m sorry, of course it was.’
‘Well now, that’s the thing. It wasn’t terrible, at least not all of it.’ Katherine had finished with the claws and had started on the body of the crab. ‘Maybe time plays tricks and you look back and only remember the good times.’ She paused. ‘We did see some awful things, of course. Especially in Africa. Dreadful burns the men had – the flies and the heat and sand getting into everything – not having enough water to wash – I remember that too. Not that Johnny minded any of it. They were having too much fun blowing up German planes in their hangers. The SAS were a real thorn in the Nazis’ flesh.
‘Neil was brought up on stories of his grandfather’s time with them. He worshipped him so it’s hardly surprising he decided to do what he does.’
Sarah thought back to the photos and her reaction. She cringed.
‘Was Johnny from Skye?’ Sarah sipped her glass of wine, hoping Katherine would think that the flush creeping up her neck was from the heat of the fire.
‘Johnny? No, he was from England. That’s where we lived all our married life. I only came back here when I retired. He died about ten years ago.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘I still miss him. Donald never even came to the funeral. Those two never got on. I think that’s why Donald became an artist. It was as far away from a war hero as he could get.’
‘Neil told me about his father.’
Katherine’s head jerked up. ‘He told you about Donald? That’s odd. Neil isn’t usually one for talking. I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time for his dad.’
Sarah pricked the potatoes with a fork and when the flesh gave way, she put the broccoli on to steam. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a starter,’ she apologised.
‘But we do. We have crab. Do you have mayonnaise?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Oil?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, pass me one of the eggs I brought for you and I’ll whip some up.’
Katherine found a bowl, cracked an egg into it and started whipping.
‘I often wondered why my mother married my father,’ Sarah said. ‘She was so quiet and reserved and he was, well, not quiet.’
‘You take after your mother, then?’
‘My friend Gilly says I inherited my Chicken-Licken attitude from her.’
‘Chicken Licken?’
‘It’s from a story about a chicken who goes around scared the sky is going to fall on his head. My best friend – she’s in PR but read psychology at university – says it’s an analogy for free-floating anxiety.’
When Katherine looked baffled, Sarah continued. ‘Some people feel anxious all the time. For no particular reason. That’s me and I guess it is my mother too.’
‘Do you look like her?’
‘We share the same colouring. I’m a bit taller and she’s skinnier.’ She smiled wryly. ‘We’re both shy – and stubborn.’ Perhaps she was more like her mother than she’d realised. For the first time the thought gave her pleasure.
‘Neil’s mother was only eighteen when she fell pregnant. Back then it was the done thing, the honourable thing, to get married. I thought they were too young but my husband insisted. Needless to say, it didn’t last. I probably spoiled Donald, but he was never one for knuckling down.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Och, it’s all right. I love my son, but we’re not all made the same way, are we?’ Katherine tipped a little more oil into the bowl and carried on whisking. ‘Neil’s mother couldn’t really cope after Donald abandoned them, so I took Neil on. I had to stop nursing for a while but that was all right. I went back to it when he went to school. We were still in Kent then.’
‘Does Neil still see his mother?’
‘No. She married again and there was no place for Neil in her new family. I shouldn’t be surprised if her second husband doesn’t even know about her first marriage – or Neil.’
‘Poor Neil.’ It seemed she and Katherine’s grandson had something else in common.
Katherine looked at her sharply. ‘I doubt Neil thinks that way. He’s always looked on me as his mother.’ She dipped her finger into the mayonnaise and tasted. ‘Perfect.’
When they were seated at the table, Sarah brought the topic back to Irena.
‘Why do you think Irena went back to Poland?’
‘I don’t know. Patriotic spirit perhaps – a need to do something for her country? I didn’t know her that well and she was very guarded. I suspect she’d become used to keeping herself to herself.’
‘Yet going back meant leaving Richard. I thought you said she loved him?’ Sarah took a mouthful of crab. It was delicious.
‘He certainly loved her. His squadron was in Italy when I was there. After North Africa, I was posted to Bari near the end of the war, when the allies were making the final push into Germany. We bumped into each other at a dance. He drank too much and told me he and Irena had become lovers but that she’d gone back to Poland. I didn’t see him again until after the war was over. When we were demobbed I went back to my mother’s home in Edinburgh. Although Johnny and I had decided to settle in England, I was to be married from there. I heard Richard was in hospital so I went to visit him.’ She pushed away her plate. ‘He’d changed. The Richard I’d known had always been full of fun. The man in the hospital was almost unrecognisable.’
Sarah cleared their plates and put the salmon and vegetables on the table. Even to her eyes it didn’t look very appetising. But although Katherine helped herself to a small portion, her mind didn’t seem to be on the food.
‘In what way?’
‘Sad. Angry. He felt he’d let Irena down.’ Sarah’s heart started racing. She kne
w instinctively they were getting to the part of the story she most wanted to hear. ‘War changes people. Especially men. My Johnny wasn’t always easy to live with. Neither was my father when he returned from the first war. I think they both had their demons.’ She sighed. ‘Men, at least men like my father and my husband, didn’t believe in talking about things that bothered them.’
‘Why did Richard feel he’d let Irena down?’ Sarah tried to get Katherine back on track again.
‘Apparently Irena had arranged for a child – a little Polish girl – to be sent to him. But he’d been shot down over Italy and was in hospital there for months before they sent him home to convalesce.
‘A child? Irena sent a child? From Poland?’ Why hadn’t Katherine mentioned this before?
‘Yes. A little girl. About four or five. I’m not exactly sure. Didn’t I say? Anyway, by the time he was told about the child, it was too late.’
Sarah’s mind snagged on Katherine’s last words. ‘What do you mean too late?’
‘The wee girl had been adopted by a couple. Friends of someone who knew the family, I think.’
Irena had sent a little girl from Poland who’d been adopted. The age was right. ‘But that little girl must have been my mother!’
‘How can you be sure? That child would be what, fifty? I assumed your mother was older. Didn’t she have a stroke?’
‘Mum was young to have a stroke. She was born in nineteen thirty-nine. It all fits.’
Katherine covered her mouth with her hands. ‘Of course, then, she could be your mother! Oh my dear, I never thought…’
Katherine waited silently while Sarah absorbed what she’d told her. So Mum was Polish. If she’d been sent here as a child what had happened to her family? Had they been Jewish? If so, what had her mother gone through before she’d made it here?
‘Did Richard know where she’d come from? Who she belonged to? Was she Irena’s daughter? Irena’s and Richard’s, even – if they were lovers. Perhaps Irena didn’t know she was pregnant when she went back to Poland.’
‘I’m pretty certain they were lovers, but the wee girl wasn’t Irena’s and Richard’s child. That I do know.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Richard would have told me. Anyway, the dates didn’t match. The child was about six in nineteen forty-five, so she would have been born in nineteen thirty-nine or ’forty. That was before Irena and Richard met.’
Katherine was right. However, the little girl, Sarah’s mother, must have meant something to Irena. ‘Why didn’t Richard’s parents keep the child?’
‘I think Irena assumed that they would. After all, they’d taken her in. She respected Richard’s mother and trusted her. I’m sure that they did what they thought best for the wee girl at the time. She needed a stay-at-home mother, one who could devote all the time in the world to her. Richard was in hospital in Italy and Irena in Poland. I don’t think anyone thought much of Irena’s chances of surviving the war or, for a while at least, Richard’s, either. Perhaps Richard’s mother already had plans to leave. I don’t really know.’
Isabel – the bolter! Sarah remembered what Lady Dorothea had told her about Richard’s mother going to America at the end of the war. It was unlikely Irena would have known that. But who were Mum’s parents? And how had Irena come to meet them? However it had happened, it seemed her mother owed her life to her. In which case so did Sarah.
They sat in silence for a while, each woman preoccupied with her thoughts.
‘So Irena must have been alive in nineteen forty-four,’ Sarah said eventually. ‘Did Richard ever find out where the child had come from? Who she belonged to?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Katherine stood and picked up their plates and put them on the counter. ‘What will you do now?’ she asked.
What indeed? ‘I’m going back to Edinburgh tomorrow. Hopefully Magdalena will get in touch soon. I’m certain she’ll be able to fill in the gaps.’
‘You’ll be looking forward to seeing your boyfriend.’
‘Ex-boyfriend. You were right. Everyone’s been right. I was just too scared to see it before. If Irena could fight in a war – I’m sure I can cope on my own.’
Katherine’s lips twitched. ‘Aye well, better now than when the dress is bought.’
Chapter 50
As soon as she was back in Edinburgh, Sarah went to see her mother.
She was in her chair but more upright, even without the cushions. Her hair was neatly combed and she was wearing all her own clothes.
When she saw Sarah walk into the ward, her face lit up.
‘Sa… rah!’
‘Mum, a whole word! You’ll be rattling away soon.’ Sarah pulled over a chair and sat down next to her. On the drive back from Skye she’d thought very carefully about what to say to her mother and how to broach the subject of where her mother had been born. She knew she had to tread gently.
‘Mum, the solicitors have found Magdalena!’
‘Ma… lena! Alive!’
‘Yes, Mum. Hopefully she’ll be coming to Scotland and we’ll meet her.’ She took her mother’s hand. ‘Mum, I think I’ve discovered where you came from – before you were adopted. I’m pretty sure it was Poland. Do you remember?’
Tears sprang to her mother’s eyes.
‘Don’t cry, Mum. Please. We don’t have to talk about it. Not now. Not ever if you don’t want to.’
‘Want – to – see – Ma… leena.’
‘So do I, Mum. So do I. I promise you, if she doesn’t come soon I’ll fetch her myself.’
As the solicitors refused to give Sarah Magdalena’s address, there was little Sarah could do but wait - and hope – that Magdalena would get in touch with her.
She’d told her mother she’d broken up with Matthew and thought she’d caught a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes when she’d given her the news. She’d mentioned Neil, too. Come to think of it, having only met the man a couple of times, she managed to talk about him rather a lot. She’d written to him, care of Katherine, to tell him she’d seen his work and that she’d been wrong to accuse him of not caring.
She spent most of the week working and when she wasn’t at the office or with her mother, she was at the library reading everything she could get her hands on about Poland and the war – dismayed by how little she’d really known about it. If Mum’s parents were Polish then Sarah was part Polish too – perhaps even part Jewish. She read everything she could about the camps in Poland, down to the last sickening detail. They’d been taught about the holocaust in school but then it seemed too far in the past to seem real. Now it did. Heartbreakingly real. What about the rest of Mum’s family? Had any of them survived?
While at the library, on impulse she’d looked up newspaper cuttings from the journals Neil had mentioned he worked for, searching through them until she found ones with his name on the byline.
His pictures were stunning in their simplicity. One photo depicted an old man, sitting outside the ruins of what must once have been his home. He was looking slightly to the left of the camera, yet somehow Neil had managed to capture the pain and despair in the eyes. There was another of Mrs Thatcher taken during an official trip to Africa. She was in the middle of a group of ragged children who had wide smiles on their faces. In their excitement they were pressing close to her and Neil had perfectly captured her discomfort. He seemed to have a canny instinct for catching people in their most unguarded moments, as if he could see into their very souls. Which is how she had felt when he had looked at her – as if he knew her better than she knew herself. And liked what he saw. Mostly.
There were other, more graphic, photos too. Ones that had been taken in China during the recent student protests – of young men and women, kneeling on the ground, their eyes blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs.
The last ones she looked at had been taken somewhere in Africa – of children, their tiny bellies swollen, eyes covered in flies, a mother holding her baby to a breast that cle
arly no longer held any milk.
She sat back and closed her eyes. Neil was right. Someone had to bear witness, someone had to tell these people’s story. And if not people like Neil, then who?
Today, she was back in the house in Charlotte Square. She’d already spent some time there, browsing Richard’s extensive collection of books about the Second World War.
She brushed a stray wisp of hair from her face, sat back on her heels, adding one more book to the pile she’d made on the floor to take home with her to read. She’d lit the fire in the small sitting room and although the rest of the house was chilly, this room was warm and cosy.
