by Eliza Graham
‘I’ll suggest I do more tidying out here when I finish with the tractor. She’ll be pleased I’m so keen.’
She being Mary? He tightened his lips. Miss Waites was obviously still making it clear his presence on the farm was unwelcome. Good. If Schulte felt uneasy with Mary it might make him welcome these meetings with me. Apart from anything else, speaking his own language must be a relief.
‘I’ll leave the papers under the large log beside the track down there.’ He nodded towards the junction with the lane.
‘We’ll talk again soon when I’ve read your report,’ I told him. He gave me another curt nod, his attention returning to the scythe. As I turned away from him I couldn’t help thinking that Schulte could slash my neck open in a second, before I uttered a sound. I told myself to calm down.
The snap of a twig made me stop. Had Schulte come after me?
‘Sergeant?’ he called. ‘Is it your man who comes out here? If he’s spying on me, there’s no need. I’d be mad to try anything.’
I turned back to him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The man in the long, dark coat who skulks around here at weekends.’
‘A local going for a walk, surely?’
Schulte smirked. ‘I was in that stinking cage in London with the worst kind of men. I can recognise people who are up to no good.’
‘Describe him,’ I said, taking out my pad.
‘Medium height, dark hair, early thirties. Quite fit, jumps over streams, that kind of thing.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you know who he is?’
I closed my notepad. ‘That’s all for today.’ I felt Schulte’s eyes on me as I walked back towards the farm track.
‘How did it go?’ William asked when I joined him in the car.
‘I think we might be on to something.’ I was glad for my drama training, which hopefully meant I could appear relaxed and confident. I closed the glass partition between us and the driver, and quietly filled him in about POWs on the farms easing their way into the affections of the farmers to the detriment of their own sons on the front.
‘We say those prisoners are Jewish,’ I said.
‘Are they?’
I shrugged. ‘They might be.’
William frowned.
‘What?’
‘We’ll need to be careful. We don’t want German farmers to start ill-treating POWs or handing them in to the authorities for being Jewish just to reassure their sons.’
‘Good point.’ I liked the way he picked up my ideas, examined them and highlighted any flaws without any of the arrogance men sometimes displayed with women. ‘I’ll talk it over with Beattie and if he thinks it’s not too risky he’ll refer it up the chain for clearance.’
William sat beside me in companionable silence, arm resting against the side of the car door, hand to the side of his head, as though thinking. After a while he took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote something.
‘Were you all right with Schulte?’ he asked.
I gave him a sharp look.
He gave me that grin of his that made him look like an RAF poster boy. ‘Oh, ignore me, Anna. You can look after yourself.’
Could I, though? ‘Good to know you were sitting in the car,’ I told William gruffly.
‘Happy to be your fall-back, sergeant,’ he said, rubbing his spine. ‘I’m about the same size and build as him, but he looks like a fit blighter, despite his time in POW camps.’
‘Is your back hurting?’
‘A little.’ I noticed blueish shadows under his eyes. Sleep must be hard when you had a very painful back injury.
‘I don’t know much about what happened to you,’ I said cautiously. Sometimes people didn’t like talking about it.
‘I was lucky,’ he said. ‘The pilot . . .’ He paused, seeming to struggle with something, some memory of twisted, acrid, burning metal, perhaps. ‘He stayed at the controls, risking his life for the crew. He landed the Halifax in a field, but it started to burn. Then he helped disentangle me. I’m a bit lanky for getting in and out of tight spaces in a hurry, and the flames were spreading.’ He shot me an apologetic look.
‘I’m fine talking about fire,’ I said, not quite honestly. He looked at me without speaking for a moment.
‘I can see why you might not like being near it,’ he said. ‘When I was stuck in the Halifax I could hear the flames crackling, feel the heat on my body. In the hurry to escape I fell out onto the ground and my lower back took the full force. Lucky I didn’t land on my neck, the docs say, or I might have paralysed myself. If it hadn’t been for . . .’ He stopped. I didn’t push him to continue.
‘Can they treat your back?’
‘Not really. At the moment I’m on a mixture of drugs to keep the pain at bay. They work some of the time but as the dose builds up inside me the side effects increase.’
He put a hand to his head, rubbing it. We were silent for a moment. I was remembering the months, the first year, after I’d been in the fire, how pain had snapped at my heels, impossible to throw off. It still lurked now and possibly would for some years to come, the doctors had warned me.
‘You told me there was someone you were close to before the fire,’ he said. ‘But you ended it?’ Nobody else had asked me these questions, not even Micki.
‘He deserved better than this.’ I tapped my cheek. In fact, it occurred to me now, it possibly hadn’t been my face as much as my disturbed mind that Patrick hadn’t deserved.
William opened his mouth as though to ask another question but shook his head. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m prying,’ he said.
‘I haven’t talked about what happened with Beattie or Micki. You must be a good listener, William.’
In the hospital the doctor had told me no more could be done for my face. I’d have to wait to see whether any kind of surgery might be possible once the facial tissues had calmed down, as he put it. In the meantime I was to stay in hospital until the risk of infection had passed.
I accepted the nurse’s hand mirror and looked at myself, examining every inch of my face and burnt arm. This person with the raw, red scab splayed across her right cheek was not me. It was all a mistake. The nurse’s expression told me otherwise. I handed her back the mirror silently.
‘A young man, a pilot, has been in to see you,’ she told me. ‘Sister wouldn’t let him in because visiting time was over.’ From the shake of her head I gathered she thought the sister unduly harsh. ‘He’s come back several times.’
‘I don’t want to see anyone apart from my father, regardless of whether it’s visiting time or not.’ My words sounded like those of an older, harsher person than the girl I’d been.
‘He’s a lovely-looking young man.’
I shrugged and grimaced as I moved.
‘It would cheer you up to see him, wouldn’t it?’
‘You really think so?’ I pointed at my cheek.
She was going to argue the point but stopped. ‘I understand, Anna,’ she said, using my Christian name for the first time.
‘I don’t need people to be kind to me.’ I closed my eyes. The right one still didn’t have many eye lashes and the lid felt stiff. I wanted to pull it over my eye like a blind, shut off the world. ‘And I don’t need sympathy.’
‘He brought the most beautiful flowers for you. Please don’t tell me to throw them away.’
‘Have them on the nurses’ station, then.’ I heard her footsteps moving towards the door.
I shuffled in the car.
‘When you survive something awful, you try hard to get back to being the person you were. But sometimes it’s as though you’re just walking around in a stranger’s clothes, pretending to be someone you’re not,’ William said softly.
I’d felt like that, too, at my sister’s funeral, wearing the black dress and shoes I’d worn to my mother’s funeral, which now seemed to belong to someone else. I’d become a stranger to my own clothes, my own life, my own self.
I wasn�
��t a stranger any more, I told myself. The new me, with the new job and the new colleagues was the real Anna Hall. I had to concentrate on my work.
‘There was something else Schulte said,’ I told William. ‘Probably nothing; someone enjoying a Sunday stroll.’ I described the walker.
William nodded and wrote another note to himself.
When we entered Mulberry House, Father Becker was setting down a tray of cups and saucers on his desk. He’d managed this without spilling more than a few drips of coffee from the cups. ‘A fresh bag of coffee beans has been kindly donated by Mr Beattie.’
William and I sniffed in appreciation.
‘Just going to take a pill before I have mine,’ William said.
‘His back’s been so bad.’ Micki was frowning as he went out. ‘We’d only just got into the taxi on the way to Euston on Saturday when he had to get out again to find a chemist.’
‘He was very lucky to find one open that late.’
‘He said there was a hospital, the Middlesex, almost on the way to Euston. A doctor there has given him a prescription the pharmacy makes up for him as needed. He just made the train.’
‘A shame he was in such pain, it was a good night out,’ I said. ‘Even with the fight.’ Micki was still screwing up her eyes, clearly preoccupied with William. Father Becker stood up, carrying his cup and the script he’d been working on.
‘I’m going to get some fresh air,’ he said.
‘William seemed more comfortable on the train,’ Micki went on. ‘Though he kept muttering about not having noticed, blaming himself for not steering us away from trouble.’
‘He’s stuck in navigator mode,’ I said. ‘Thinks he’s back in the Halifax.’
She nodded. ‘He reminds me of a dog my grandfather once had. He hated anyone coming close to Maxi when he was out in the garden in his pram.’
I looked at her.
She smiled. ‘Ach, you thought my family all lived in some inner-city tenement?’
I blushed. ‘I didn’t see Beattie’s notes on you, I—’
She squeezed my arm. ‘I’m teasing. I spent my earlier years in a fashionable modernist apartment.’ I’d imagined Micki’s life as having been hard. But there’d obviously been an earlier more prosperous, less fearful period. ‘Sometimes, if I can’t sleep, I imagine I’m back in our old home,’ she went on. ‘I go up in the lift, through the front door and into all the rooms, one by one.’
‘Who do you see in them?’
She paused. I’d gone too far, asked her a question she wasn’t ready to answer. ‘I see my mother in the kitchen, preparing the lunch: making the little dumplings we all love. My father’s playing with the boys outside on the communal lawn. I can just about hear them shouting. Maxi’s out there in his pram, too. I go into my bedroom and see my toy circus with the lions and tigers and acrobats and the big top arranged on the rug.’ She sounded dreamy. ‘I always wondered what the bastards did with that circus. Probably went to some Nazi brat.’
‘You were what, eight or nine, when Max was born?’
‘I liked having someone younger than me. Before he came along I was always having to prove myself to my older brothers.’
I wanted to say something more and looked at her, trying to see whether it was the right time. ‘When we left you and Maxi in Lisbon I kept thinking about the two of you. Was the hospital we found good to him?’
‘Nuns ran it,’ she said. ‘Sometimes very Catholic people aren’t good to Jews, but they were kind. They made me up a little trestle bed so I could sleep next to him at night.’
I bowed my head.
‘They couldn’t bury him in their own cemetery but they found a small patch of garden beside the field where they kept their donkey. Maxi always liked animals.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Enough of this.’ She clasped her hands together and stretched out her arms in what I recognised as part of her warm-up. The arms curled upwards, separated and rotated out at the shoulders. She stretched them behind herself. Next came the shoulder roll. Upper body finished, she kicked off her shoes, lunged one trousered leg forward and straightened it and repeated the movement on the other side. Without the slightest sign of effort she lowered into the splits.
‘My hips are stiffening up,’ she said with disapproval as she rose. ‘Just one quick inversion then back to work.’ She flipped upside down into a handstand, feet pointing up towards the biblical quotation. I imagined all the sadness dripping out of her onto the parquet.
‘If you had a moment to look at my script,’ Father Becker asked, coming back into the office. ‘Oh.’ He spotted Micki. ‘Fräulein, forgive me, I’ll—’
‘I’m wearing my slacks so you won’t see my knickers,’ she told him.
Father Becker blinked. ‘Gut.’ He straightened his shoulders and turned to me. ‘I think I have created something good for our young radio priest.’
‘Excellent.’ I took the sheets of paper from him.
‘What do you look for when you read my work?’ Becker asked, sounding casual, but looking at me intently.
‘Anything that might pull a listener out of believing he’s listening to a former parish priest rather than a radio actor. Sometimes we can sound too perfect.’
‘Too perfect?’ He considered me, brow puckered.
‘In real life people make slips.’
‘Interesting.’ He nodded slowly to himself.
‘I don’t make slips.’ Micki came down from her handstand, face slightly pink. ‘Slips would have meant a broken leg. Possibly a neck.’
‘A good incentive not to fall. Do you feel refreshed now?’ Father Becker asked. ‘It is good that you have this means of relaxation.’
‘More than relaxation,’ she said. ‘My gymnastics and acrobatics earned me my keep.’
Along with a bit of pickpocketing, I thought, feeling immediately disloyal as I remembered Beattie’s stolen wallet.
‘I suppose the world will always need entertainers,’ Father Becker said.
‘You’d be surprised how useful my skills are, even when I’m not performing.’ She gave an enigmatic little smile. I pictured her in crowded bars, filching a wallet and skipping away.
13
I went to find Beattie, who was in his study overlooking the flowering cherry trees and banks of daffodils. ‘We should really have the whole garden dug up for vegetables,’ he said, not lifting his head from his typewriter. ‘There has to be some beauty, though, doesn’t there? Oh to be in England now that April’s there, what we’re fighting for and so on.’
‘I never really understand people saying they’re fighting for landscapes. The Germans didn’t intend flooding the Lake District or dynamiting the White Cliffs of Dover if they’d invaded in 1940. Nature doesn’t care who wins.’
He grinned. ‘So cynical for one so young.’
I wasn’t much younger than him, although I had to remind myself of this at times.
‘Insightful and so perfectly suited to our works of deception.’ Beattie released the catch on his typewriter and pulled out the top sheet and carbons. ‘How was Schulte?’
‘Very cooperative.’ I told him how Schulte had identified a useful cache for storing documents.
‘Very foresighted of him.’
‘Too much so?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think anyone could have got at him. The two Italians he’s with are peasant boys with no axes to grind.’ He picked up the fountain pen on his desk and laid it down neatly at the top of the blotting paper.
‘What did Schulte tell you, Anna?’ He sounded casual, almost indifferent.
I told him about the German farmers and their use of Allied prisoner-of-war labour.
Beattie folded his arms. ‘And?’
‘The prisoners are so helpful that the sons of farmers away fighting feel redundant.’
‘Good as far as it goes.’ He yawned. ‘I’m sure there’s a twist somewhere.’ I didn’t want to tell him about the Jewish prisoner element I’d discussed with Schulte. Sch
ulte had been so uneasy about it. I’d write up the story without it and see how it flowed.
‘And Schulte gave me some good gossip about Party bigwigs enjoying lavish hospitality in his parents’ hotel.’
‘Nice. We can put that one in after a mention of proposed new German rationing on certain foodstuffs.’
‘There’s more rationing planned in Germany?’
He let his arms drop outwards. ‘Who’s to say there mightn’t be?’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘Anything else, Hall?’
‘The prisoner expressed concern that a civilian was paying him too much attention.’
I described the man Schulte had seen. Beattie said nothing, flicking through a pile of papers on his desk.
‘I might telephone the farm, ask Mary if she can keep an eye out for this mysterious observer.’
‘Is Miss Waites being cooperative?’ He stood up and went to the grate with a handful of papers. The top sheet was covered with what looked like squiggles and hieroglyphics. An astrological casting. Beattie still wrote occasional pieces of print propaganda, and sometimes this included horoscopes, created by a woman in a south London suburb who called herself a psychic but obligingly tweaked the readings for various high-ranked Germans as required. ‘Do people actually believe that astrology stuff?’ I asked. I’d grown up in a household that viewed horoscopes as foolish superstition.
‘Some do. We only need a cohort of housewives to believe the stars pointed to an important week for some high-ranking general and he failed to take advantage of it to sow a few seeds of doubt.’
He pulled out his lighter and ignited the sheets, using what looked like a former toasting fork to push them into the fireplace. ‘Anyway, you’re not supposed to look at my papers, Hall.’
I watched the flames consume the white sheets, heart pumping at the sight. ‘Mary Waites is still a bit grudging,’ I said. This little fire was no threat to me. The wave of nausea sweeping me was ridiculous.
‘Get young Nathanson to sweet-talk her.’ Just a week ago it would have bothered me that William was being pushed forward like this, but now I found myself nodding. A young girl like Mary, lugging dung and used straw to the heap, bringing cows in to milk twice a day, rarely visiting a cinema, would be susceptible to William’s easy manner and appearance.
