A Parachute in the Lime Tree

by Annemarie Neary

  He stayed very still, flat against the wall. She wondered if he understood a word she said. They both seemed to spend an eternity frozen like that. Next thing, she heard the boys’ voices from just beyond the house. He looked terrified now, and for a moment she thought he might dive under the table. The German in Uncle Malachy’s book flashed across her mind and she almost laughed again. The boys were nearly at the door now. He stepped towards her and instinctively she took a step backwards. He was panting, struggling to catch his breath, almost wheezing. Outside, getting closer, the boys with their sticks. He looked her straight in the eye and she realised then that she couldn’t stand the way nothing ever changed. She heard Bobby Coyle and that ridiculous Indian war cry of his. How could she bear for it all to just stay the same? The German was shivering now; waiting for her decision.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, and turned on her heel. When she turned round, he hadn’t moved. ‘Hurry up, this way.’ She opened the cellar door and almost pushed him through. Then she turned the key in the lock and put it in her pocket. She had barely enough time to take her seat at the table before the boys scrambled in through the door.

  ‘What the blazes are you doing sitting in the dark?’ Desmond rattled in his pocket for some matches and lit the paraffin lamp. Their faces materialised and she saw Desmond spot the flashlight on the table. ‘We were looking for that,’ he said, ‘Could have done with that, Bobby.’

  Bobby grunted. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea, Kitty?’

  She said nothing but she got up all the same and slid the kettle onto the hob. Desmond went into the pantry and came out with Mother’s baking box. ‘Bit of a mess in there, Kitty,’ he said, like she was Cinderella. She wondered what the German had knocked over. ‘Shouldn’t leave the bread out, either. The mice’ll be on to it in no time.’

  ‘Another go round outside before we turn in?’ Bobby asked, lifting the flashlight.

  Desmond nodded. ‘We’ll have a quick check round upstairs first, Kitty, just in case, and then we’ll be off.’

  She sat at the table with her head in her hands as she heard their heavy feet on the stairs. By the time they came down again the tea was harsh with tannin. There was nothing much left in the baking box. They drank their tea standing up and were soon gone outside again, rubbing their hands together as they went. She could hardly believe that her face hadn’t given her away, that she could possibly look the same as she had done that morning, or the day before that, or any other day she’d ever lived for that mattter.

  She tiptoed over to the cellar door, nibbling at her knuckles. What if she’d bitten off more than she could chew? She put her ear against the door, felt the key in her pocket. She didn’t like leaving him down there but what could she do? It gave her time to think what to do with him. She could hear the faint scrape of his boots on the flagstones as he walked around down there. If he kicked up a racket she’d have her mind made up for her. She almost hoped he would.

  She climbed the stairs to go up to bed, but she couldn’t settle, she was that worried he’d freeze to death down there. She hoped he wasn’t afraid of small spaces. The cellar was no more than a coal hole really, though it was a while since there’d been any coal in it. From the window on the landing she could see the boys’ flashlight bobbing down the avenue. Mother had a pile of old blankets she’d left out for the Red Cross when she heard of the business in Belfast. Kitty took her chance, bundled one under her arm and went back downstairs. When she reached the cellar door, she unlocked it as quietly as she could, then flung the blanket into the blackness, closing it again quickly and sliding the bolt across.

  A Spy without a Map

  Next morning, Kitty was exhausted. She’d been too jittery to sleep much. Instead, she was tossed in and out of a dream where she’d lost the cellar key and had to get Sean Galligan to kick the door in to save the man from starving to death down there. When she came downstairs, Bobby was already up out of bed. He was wearing a paisley-pattern dressing gown that she hoped wasn’t Father’s. He looked like he must have fallen into a ditch, for one side of his face was badly scratched. She noticed how he tried to turn that cheek away from her as he talked with great gusto about their antics the night before. The fact that they’d risked sharing a ditch with the Fox Gogarty he seemed to find particularly worthy of admiration.

  ‘Sure why would the Fox be bothered playing toy soldiers with you lot?’ she said.

  ‘Well there was definitely people round about the place last night,’ said Bobby, ‘whatever caper they were at.’

  ‘He’ll be needing his bayonet then,’ she said innocently.

  ‘Oh I doubt he’ll have one of those, Kitty,’ Bobby replied, all condescending now. ‘Sure how could he have a bayonet, coming down in a parachute?’

  ‘The man they caught over Lough Swilly way had a bayonet; took five men to get it off him. They can be terrible fierce when they’re cornered, these German types. The Lough Swilly man was jabbing away with it. One of the guards got it in the arm. Nasty old gash. You mind yourself, Bobby.’

  Desmond appeared at the door with his hand to his head. She hoped he had a hangover. ‘Nine’ll be the height of it, Bobby,’ he said.

  ‘Well, nine it’ll be then.’ Bobby was raring to go. He fidgeted constantly as Desmond sipped at his tea, and in the end he just couldn’t contain himself. He moved away from the table and began practising his swing.

  Kitty was beside herself. Would they never be gone? Finally, the boys slung the golf clubs into the boot of Bobby’s car and set off down the drive. She was about to attend to the parachute man when she saw Sean outside. Blast it. She’d forgotten about Sean. She was relieved to see him harnessing up the old gig they’d come across a couple of months ago in one of the barns; Sean had done it up because there was no point in having a motor if there was nothing to put in it. If the gig was out, it meant that Mother was planning a trip to Father’s grave.

  When Mother appeared at the top of the stairs, she was covered from head to toe in the old black velvet opera cloak she wore all the time now, for reasons Kitty hadn’t got to the bottom of yet. As she reached the bottom stair, the cloak gaped to reveal the figured organza underneath. She gave Kitty a dirty look and gathered the cloak back around her.

  ‘You’re off to the grave, then?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘I’ll put in a word on your behalf.’

  Kitty stood at the window, watching the gig head down the avenue. Her knuckles were red raw from her gnawing at them. What if he was mad as a bear from being cooped up all night? What if he ambushed her the moment she opened the door? What if he was a spy? She hugged herself with excitement. She’d talk to him through the door. That would be safe. She’d see how the land lay.

  When it came to it, she just flung the door open. He was sitting at the bottom of the cellar stairs, his hands clasped between his knees. He flinched as the daylight hit him, and looked away. He made no attempt to rush her. In fact, there was nothing desperate about him this morning. As he climbed the stairs, she noticed the limp for the first time, and thought of the wounded pigeon Desmond had kept for weeks. He seemed almost relaxed, for a man on the run. He was very well mannered, too. He stood back for her at the top of the stairs but she kept her distance all the same.

  He waited outside the kitchen door while she tripped over herself, bundling bits and pieces of leftovers onto a plate. When she went to give him his breakfast, he was standing outside, looking off into the distance at Knockree. She wished he’d take that yellow scarf off him. He was like a beacon with that round his neck. She kept an eye on him, pretending to wipe over the kitchen table and dust the jam jars in the pantry, as he sat on a whitewashed rock outside the back door and wolfed down cold mutton pie.

  ‘Where are the others?’ she asked when she went back out to him.

  He didn’t seem to understand what she meant.

  ‘Your friends, comrades, whatever you want to call them. The other fellas in the plane? Where are they?’

&n
bsp; ‘I am the only one.’

  ‘Did you crash or what?’

  ‘I jumped.’

  If he was on his own, that could only mean he was here on purpose. And if he was here on purpose, didn’t that make him a spy? Sergeant McCreesh would be furious.

  ‘There’s no need for you to have any concern,’ he said, as if he could read her mind. ‘Soon, I will leave for Wicklow.’

  Did he not have a map? Sure he was miles from Wicklow. Did they let them on the loose with no preparation at all?

  He gave her back the plate and drank a mug full of milk, wiping his lips on his sleeve.

  ‘Do you not even know where you are? There’s no way you’re walking to Wicklow with that leg on you. Besides, you’d be picked up in ten minutes flat in that get-up.’

  ‘If I could see a map please?’

  ‘Wait there.’

  She went to slide across the bolt on the door in case he followed her, then remembered it didn’t work anyway. He was like something out of the Keystone Cops, this fellow. No map?

  She rushed up to into the back bedroom, the one that was once Father’s study, and got down the atlas. It smelt peppery and she blew the dust off the top. She’d been brought up to have respect for books but she thought Father would understand the needs of a traveller. She laid the volume on the floor and flicked through the pages until she found Ireland. She made herself tear out the page, though it hurt to do it. Ireland: what was it but a little baby curled up with its back to England and France and Russia and all the other places where things happened?

  When she came back downstairs, he was still standing in the same place, waiting for her.

  ‘There you go,’ she said, handing him the page, ‘Ireland.’ Then, when she remembered he didn’t have a clue where he was, she showed him Dunkerin. ‘You’re here, by the way. That little speck over there.’

  She couldn’t stop herself telling him that Ireland wasn’t in the war and didn’t want to be, that she’d heard all about Belfast and the terrible things that had happened there and didn’t he feel ashamed and why shouldn’t she call in the Guards right now and have him locked up. The sergeant had told her there were IRA men, too, looking for the likes of him, thinking what’s good for Germany was good for them and she didn’t want any of that lot hanging around the place. Mother would have a fit. It was like she hadn’t talked to anyone for months.

  But he didn’t wait for her to finish. He raised his hand, quite politely, and interrupted. ‘I do not want to make trouble for you. I will leave as soon as I can.’

  He looked at the map. His finger traced the distance from Dunkerin to Wicklow. Then he shook his head and all of a sudden he looked so tired. He looked like he knew all kinds of things that she couldn’t even imagine. Hard things. She wished she could prise open his head and sit in there among all his brain cells, watching the pictures in his mind, getting the measure of him. He turned away and tucked the map inside his flying suit, zipping it up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, calm as you like.

  She watched him limp a little crookedly across the path and out of view. She stood there on the doorstep a minute with her arms folded, and then she followed him. It was easy to catch up with him; he was like a human gorse bush in that yellow scarf. He was moving slowly through the tangle of growth that had invaded the old vegetable patch. She knew immediately where he was going, and when she reached Father’s old shed she stood outside a moment before plucking up the courage to announce herself. She rapped on the dirty window and just asked him straight out if he was a spy or what.

  She could hear him chuckling away to himself in there, and she wondered then whether ‘spy’ was a rude word in German. Who the hell did he think he was to be laughing, and her after feeding him? The floor of the old shed creaked as he moved towards the door. She pulled at it from the outside to help him push it open.

  He stood there in the doorway as though he owned the place. ‘The reason I am here has nothing to do with wars. I have left the war.’

  He said this rather grandly, but she didn’t think wars were things you could just leave, and she wondered did he have a notion of himself. ‘So you’re a traitor to your cause, then,’ she said, not to be outdone, but he didn’t understand that so she just said, ‘why are you here?’ Plain enough for a baby to understand.

  ‘I jumped. I did not know where I would land. Perhaps I jumped too soon but better too soon than too late. I hoped for Éire but I did not know. I am here because I can no longer bear to be up there.’ He looked up at the sky then, and she did too. She felt a bit daft, for there was nothing to see but a jumble of leaves. He was so mysterious and sure of himself and so totally unlike anyone else she had ever come across. He must be brave, too, to jump out of the sky.

  ‘Were you one of the ones who bombed Belfast?’ she asked. Maybe that was a bit blunt but she had to know.

  ‘I was a lamplighter.’

  That sounded a nice thing to be but she knew it couldn’t be nice at all. She assumed she should know what that was, so she didn’t ask any more.

  ‘I will leave soon. As soon as my leg is strong enough, I will go.’

  ‘If you’re gone when I see you next,’ she said, ‘I’ll say nothing.’

  When she went back to the house, she couldn’t settle to anything. There was the baking to do and the pantry to be done over and the boys’ beds to be stripped. Instead, she went up to Mother’s dressing table and took out the manicure set with all the sharp little instruments with their pearly handles. She prised out specks of dirt from under her nails, soaked, clipped, filed and buffed them. All the time, she could see his tired face with the blue, blue eyes. She wished there was something she wanted enough to jump out of a plane for it.

  She still talked to Father sometimes and she knew he wouldn’t like what she’d done to his atlas. No one ever came to his shed uninvited either, but maybe he would like that a traveller was in there. He would be curious, of that she was sure. He was always far more interested in what was happening on the other side of the world than in what went on in Dunkerin. Mother always told him that to succeed in a country practice, you needed to join this and that, pay heed to give a little bit of business to this grocer, a bit to that draper. Father did none of that. He pretended not the slightest interest in either golf or bridge. There were those, of course, who said Dr Hennessy couldn’t give a hoot about anything; spent all his day doodling on maps in his consulting room while the queue of patients got longer and more restless. He never bothered about the order of arrivals, either. He would come out and scan the grey faces in the room and form a snap judgement as to who was most in need.

  ‘Every doctor needs a diversion,’ Father used to say. His own passion was St Brendan and his voyages. ‘First to reach America, not that the rest of the bloody world will give him the credit for it.’ All summer long, he’d be at his experiments. He spent months soaking scraps of leather in the old bath he filled with seawater, each one coated in a different substance from the pots he kept in his shed to see which one provided most protection from the brine. He tried tallow, beeswax, cod oil, lanolin, and God knows what else. Finally, he came down in favour of one, though she couldn’t remember now which one it was. He had Sean Galligan dig and line a trench that ran all the way down from the henhouse to the gooseberry bushes, which he filled with seawater from Dunkerin Bay. Then, he built himself a model curragh – gunwhale to keel about three feet long – covered it in stretched oxhide, treated it, and set it afloat.

  She went to put away the atlas she had defiled earlier. On the map of Europe were hundreds of pinpricks where Father had stuck little flags in different colours, trying to predict where the Germans would go next. She ran her fingers over the pitted surface of Poland and the Low Countries. He was dead before they reached France.

  When she went to bring the airman some food, she warned him about the lads.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not me who needs to be worrying.’

 
He smiled, and suddenly it seemed the right response.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked. He said it back to himself a few times, flicking her name on the tip of his tongue like he was calling the cat. ‘Well, Kitty, I might need to be here for a couple of days. After a couple of days they will forget about me and my knee will be stronger.’

  She wondered how she could have lost control of things so quickly. She had enjoyed being the ministering angel but he didn’t seem to need any of that now.

  ‘The boys go back to Dublin today,’ she said. ‘The two fellows who scared the living daylights out of you last night.’ It gave her some satisfaction to put him back in his place. Before she closed the door, he called after her. ‘My name is Oskar Müller.’

  She continued to pull the door to, as though she hadn’t heard him, but all the way back to the house she was thinking to herself what a lovely name it was, and how she’d never heard of anyone else called that, except for Oscar Wilde.

  Elsa

  Painting over Elsa

  Elsa played Scarlatti. Next door, the windows were flung open, even though it was already September. If Oskar had returned for the holiday, he would hear her play. She would make him hear. Now and then, she wandered over to the window to look for him in the Müller garden.

  Frau Müller sat there, as she always did on sunny mornings, her back to the Frankel house, her tea tray arranged as meticulously as the hair that shimmered at her neck. Once, they would take tea together in the garden, Mama and Frau Müller. Once, Oskar would paint with Papa, learning to be bold. They had mingled their blood, Elsa and Oskar, down in the shadiest part of the woods. Oskar couldn’t bring himself to cut her, so in the end she’d had to do it herself. They held up their index fingers and closed their eyes and promised each other an ever after. Now, a glassy membrane had settled between their houses. Whilst the Müllers lived in the air, amongst flowers, the Frankels dwelt behind shutters.