“I think we should talk about this between ourselves, Charles, come to a decision and then talk to Holly. Don’t you?” Linda tried to stop me but I thought it was time I stamped something of my authority on the business, Linda had not only been making assumptions about Holly’s role, she had been making assumptions about mine.
“No. I think we are all good enough friends to talk about it openly. I think Holly should come in with us. Commit herself.”
“Become a partner? With us? You’re joking!” Linda wasn’t just angry she was livid. “Holly, please go out. I need to talk to my partner alone.” Holly looked from Linda’s anger to my determination and decided to leave. “I’ve got some work to do.” She said rather weakly and left us to it.
“How dare you spring that on me! Surely it was something we should have talked about first! The last thing I want is another chief. You know the saying ‘too many chiefs and not enough indians’ well if we do as you suggest we’ll had three chiefs and four indians. It won’t work.”
“Why not? She’s shown her worth. I don’t think it’s right that she’s lumped with the girls when it’s clear she’s with us. They know her status is different, I’m simply thinking we should make it formal.”
“More than ‘simply thinking’, you’ve decided haven’t you? Whatever happened to our partnership? Aren’t we supposed to be equals? How can you make this decision without even talking to me? I don’t believe you could do this!”
“I thought you would realise how right it is.” I had been prepared for an argument but trusted that Linda’s sense of justice would prevail. “Let’s look at the pros and cons.”
So we talked it over.
“We depend on her, this way we won’t lose her”.
“But can we afford her?”
“You know how difficult it is to get good staff how on earth would we find someone as good as Holly if she left? This way she won’t”
Linda could think of no argument to counter the logic of the situation so she focused on details. It had always been a tactic of hers in arguments with her brothers that when they had won the sweeping general argument she would settle on the nitty-gritty and tie them in knots on the details, often ending up with them thinking they had lost the whole thing. She tried that tactic now.
“What would her package be? What percentage of the business would she get? What would we charge her for it? How would she raise the money anyway? How would it affect her divorce?” Linda listed some of the details that would need to be cleared up, but I wasn’t to be deflected.
“So you do agree in principal.”
“Well, yes, I suppose so. But you still should have talked it over with me first.”
“Right then let’s get her in and ask her what she thinks. We could have been having this argument for nothing if she doesn’t want to join us anyway.”
But she did want to join them and it was confirmed with self-conscious handshakes and hugs.
“We’ll get Ted to sort out the details. I bet he’s been wondering what took us so long. “
Linda was quick to forgive me, or maybe she was just trying to build bridges, and the following Sunday I was invited to lunch with her family. It was a full house, the twins and Carl, the girls and me along with Jeff and Pat.
It felt like a family lunch should and I was again reminded of all that I might have missed and that Carl had gained. But the difference between me now and me three years earlier was that now it didn’t depress me, I didn’t dwell on it feeling that I had missed out. We were friends now and I think we were both relieved at that. He seemed happy.
Perhaps he was learning to live without always looking over his shoulder for Susannah to catch up with him.
Jeff answered the phone as we were helping clear away and his voice was unusually low so we couldn’t overhear the conversation. All we heard was “No, I’ll tell her. Don’t you worry. Is there anything we can do? Oh dear.”
“Come on Holly, I need to have a word with you on your own.”
“What is it Jeff? What’s happened? “
Holly followed Jeff out of the room. All conversation stopped, no one quite looked into anybody else’s eyes, knowing that whatever it was Jeff had to say to Holly was not going to be good news.
When they came back into the room Holly spoke matter-of-factly “It was a car crash. He was drunk. No one else was involved. It was his own fault. He was well over the limit, skidded on some ice and hit a tree. He hasn’t driven on ice for years. I didn’t even know he had gone to Canada. It’s Dad. He’s dead.”
As Linda and Crispin immediately went round the table to hold her I remembered how Max had said he would ‘deal with’ Matt. At the time I had imagined there would be a problem with immigration stopping him from leaving for Canada.
Surely even Max couldn’t engineer a car accident in Toronto.
But it was very convenient.
As we all re-grouped in the sitting room I took hold of both her hands. “Tell me what I can do.”
“What we all can do.” Crispin looked at me as if I had no right to be doing any comforting whilst he handed Holly a large glass of brandy.
“Don’t worry. Any of you. I’m fine. I’m glad. I’m not sad at all. It was just a bit of a shock.”
“There’ll be the funeral to sort out.” Linda, ever the practical one, “Will it be in Canada? Will you want to go over?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t a clue. Where do I start?”
“Just leave it to us.” I made the point of not excluding others this time. “We’ll call Ted. He’ll know what’s best.”
“And then there’s the flat. I could take over the lease.”
I don’t think I was the only one who wondered how she felt she could possibly live there.
Chapter Twenty-One
Holly didn’t go to the funeral that was held the following week in Canada.
Ted had quickly made sure there were no problems in her taking over the lease but it was going to take a great deal of work to turn it into her own place, getting rid of everything that reminded her of him and facing up to all her dreadful memories.
She had insisted on being alone on the day she cleared out the flat her father had not wanted her to live in, where she had spent so many difficult Sundays. As she began to work through his belongings room by room the silence was broken only by the music playing on the radio.
She threw all his clothes into a plastic sack to take to the dump. She looked through the bookshelves to see if there was anything she would like to keep but it was filled with science fiction and murder mysteries, so she put them in boxes to take to the second-hand bookshop. Everything in the small kitchen she threw into plastic sacks for the tip.
She was going to start from scratch.
She had left the desk till last.
She was not surprised to find no pictures of her Mother. There was nothing that told of the years they had had together, nor were there any photographs.
It was as if he had had no family.
She opened the drawers one by one and placed all the papers on the floor. He had said he was writing a book, that had been his excuse for spending so much time in the library, but there was no sign of anything approaching a coherent narrative.
There were cuttings, paper notes and exercise books whose pages were filled with his almost illegible writing. One page stood out particularly clearly. It had been ruled carefully into columns. One had a number of dates and next to the dates were sums £500; £700; £250. So Graham had been right, he had been blackmailing someone. It had to be Max Fischer. He would have been the ‘rich man’ Graham had talked about in Benidorm.
No wonder he had no need of a job.
The newspaper cuttings and photocopies of newspaper articles were all about Max and the Donaldsons. The words that stood out from the pages of writing were ‘Charles’ ‘Alicia’ ‘Max’ ‘Monika’. As she turned the pages those names appeared everywhere. She read extracts trying to piece together what her
father had been doing, what he thought and what Graham had had to do with it.
Leafing through all the cuttings she couldn’t find the one of her and Linda. There was no sign of Star Pupils.
She glanced through the books, she would sit down to read them in detail another time, but she picked up enough to realise her father had been studying the household at Sandhey. There were notes about MF, MH and CD, against dates and times with details of their movements. CD/MH to Lighthouse. 10am. 2 hours. Every other Wed. MH Liverpool 5 hours Mon. Can we do anything with those kids? This last sentence was crossed out.
Then there were notes that showed he had been in the house. CD man’s room. Nothing to give the game away. What game she thought? MH Shit. Is RR. Map.
Holly picked up another book O’D brilliant. Have to get rid of GT prat. Thinks he can do me out of what’s mine. Thinks I don’t know. There were pages that seemed to be about Graham and her grandparents. She would have to read this all later, carefully.
She picked up a small bunch of old photographs held together with a rusting paperclip. They were of groups of people she had never known. There were more envelopes filled with scraps of paper with writing in English and in German.
One of the drawers was locked but she found a screwdriver in one of the sacks she had been taking to the dump and forced it open.
Inside the drawer was another file. All the papers it contained were in German which she had no way of understanding, but there were a number of small black and white photographs of young men in uniforms. On the back of one of them were names, roughly lining up with the figures on the other side.
Berndt August Mattieu
She picked up one photograph. There were six figures lined up against the backdrop of a stone wall; a tall man on the left, an elderly couple, two tall boys and, on the extreme right, a young girl. Slowly she turned the photograph over to see if names had been written on the back.
They had.
Maximilian Vater Mutter August Mattieu Rebecca
She sat looking at the photograph for a long time trying to make sense of it. She had realised that Mattieu was her father when she had seen that first photograph. August must be his brother. That was what Graham had meant. She hadn’t realised that August was a first name. Graham must have been making sure her Dad knew he knew.
She looked long and hard at the faces of Vater and Mutter, her grandparents.
He wasn’t Canadian. He was German, just like Graham had said.
Then she turned her attention to Maximilian and Rebecca.
Rebecca must be the sister of Mattieu and August.
As she looked at the photograph she felt a prickle in the skin of her arms which quickly spread to her neck and her knees; the whole of her body shivered with the sense of recognition.
She could see her own face in the face with the screwed up eyes, the head slightly angled as it faced into the low sun.
A phrase came to her mind ‘The child is father of the man’. She hadn’t understood how that could be, but she did now.
The young faces, looking out towards the camera on that sunny day nearly 50 years before, were unmistakably those of Max Fischer and Monika Heller.
And the face of Rebecca, of Monika Heller, was her own.
She checked back through the pages she had been reading ‘ MH=RR’. Monika Heller is Rebecca… Rebecca who? ‘MR=ME’ Mattieu R is Matthew Eccleston.
A jumble of questions was barely forming in her mind when she heard the knock on the door. She shuffled the papers into the file and shut them away in the drawer. The photographs she put in her pocket, apart from the one that she still held in her hand.
Someone, soon, was going to have to answer some questions.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Hi! Holly! We’re here!”
Linda and I walked in on a room filled with boxes and black plastic sacks with Holly kneeling on the floor by the desk, a small black and white photograph in her hand.
“What is it?” I reached her first as she handed me the photograph and turned it over so I could read the names on the back.
“Oh Shit.”
I didn’t think Linda heard anything as she had started picking up sacks.
“Come on, down to the car, we’ve got to get this lot to the dump.” Obediently Holly picked up far too many bags and boxes, she couldn’t possibly carry them all down the stairs so I pocketed the photograph and took some of the bags from her. “Let’s get this lot down to the car and to the dump before it closes.”
As we carried all the bags down from the flat and loaded up the car Holly’s mind was definitely somewhere else.
“It’s too late now to go back to the flat, fancy some supper?” I tried to sound casual and tried to include Linda in the invitation, but she chose to be left out.
“You two go, I’ve got some work to catch up on. Someone has to do it.” she added pointedly.
“Come off it Linda, Holly’s had a rotten day. We’ll be back into it tomorrow, don’t worry.”
We dropped Linda off and drove in silence to Sandhey.
It was only as we walked through the hall that Holly said what had been on her mind since we had walked in on her. “Give me the photograph.” She said and I obediently took it out of my pocket and handed it to her.
“What do you know about all this?”
“Not a lot. But some of it’s beginning to fall into place.”
“Graham said that my father was a Nazi. He seemed to know an awful lot about him. Was he? He must have been. There were other photographs, boys in uniform.”
I tried to keep her quiet. Monika must not overhear. “Let’s wait until we can talk to Max.”
“What about Monika?”
“No, she won’t be involved. We’ll talk to Max.”
“You’d better shut the door.” Max said as we walked into his study and she wordlessly held the photograph up so he could see.
“Well?” Holly asked on the verge of tears but trying hard to sound as if she was in control “I found it in my father’s things.”
Max took the photograph from her and held it under the light. “What’s it all about?” Holly wanted some reaction, any reaction. She expected more than this silent investigation. “What’s going on?”
Max looked at us as if he was weighing up what he should tell us, how much he could get away with. We both knew I had already discovered his relationship with Monika, we both knew Graham had read those same papers and we could assume that Graham had told Matt everything he had read. But what else had he read that I hadn’t? What was it that Max was not telling me?
Max opened the drawer of his desk and took out an envelope I recognised. He carefully shuffled through the papers and pulled out a small photograph album. Opening it at a page from where, both Holly and I could see, photographs were missing, he carefully placed Holly’s photograph on the black paper and fitted it between gold corner holders.
Max was sitting at his desk and gestured for us to pull up chairs and sit together in front of his desk. It felt just like being hauled up in front of the headmaster at school.
He held the small photograph album in his hand and started to talk conversationally.
“Why did Graham steal this photograph? Of all the photographs why did he find this one with us all in it? I wonder. The photograph was taken by Berndt, I never knew his family name, he was a friend of August’s. I had handed him my new camera and explained which button to press and for how long as the boy had never taken a picture before. It was her 7th birthday. I gave the picture to my sister on my next visit, but she never liked it. ‘Who is that old lady. It cannot be me.’ She had said. Were there others?” He asked Holly who took an envelope from her pocket and handed it to him. I sat watching him as he looked through his memories.
“You’ve seen all these then?” he eventually asked Holly, still intent on not giving anything away that he didn’t have to.
Holly nodded.
“I am going to have to tell you t
hings I had hoped never to tell any living person. I have written it all down to be read after my death but now I am going to tell you; and trust you will tell no one who does not need to know.”
He addressed himself to Holly. “You are correct, my dear, I am Maximilian and Mattieu is, was, your father. The older couple are your father’s father and mother. I will not call them old because when this photograph was taken neither was yet 50. She was my sister. It follows that your father was my nephew and you are, therefore, my great-niece.”
Holly didn’t ask how long he or I had known any of this and, if we had known, why we had said nothing.
If Max had hoped to divert Holly away from the young girl whose birthday it had been, standing with her screwed up eyes, staring into the sun he failed. “And the girl?”
“She was your father’s sister, Rebecca.” Holly realised he would say no more unless he had to so she pressed him.
“You say ‘was’ but she’s still alive isn’t she?”
He hesitated before replying with such a weight of sadness in his voice. “Yes. She is still alive.”
But he wasn’t going to voice the final link.
“What happened to August?” Holly diverted the subject hoping that, if on less difficult territory, Max would talk more freely. He obliged.
“Mattieu and August were young and impressionable. When this photograph was taken they would have been about 14 and 15 years old. August was the elder of the two, but he was not the leader. He went where his brother dictated even if it meant neglecting the farm that, one day, should have been his. Mattieu didn’t like the hard life on the farm but was not bright enough to use education, which was the only legitimate means of escape. They became involved, as all young boys did in those years, with organisations that gave them mud coloured uniforms and sticks of wood that they could pretend were guns. They marched up and down the square in the village full of their own importance and egging each other on into acts of greater and greater stupidity. What one day was harmless became the next dangerous. The young uniformed ones began to bully and argue with their elders. Any person who disagreed with the nonsense they spouted from their ugly mouths was at first laughed at, then shouted at and then hit. Yes, Holly, August became one of those boys, along with Mattieu. It wasn’t long before they only ever wore their uniforms and refused to work on the farm. They had decided they were too important for that.”
Walking Alone Page 24
