Tamar

by Mal Peet

  He felt his way to the corner of the barn and halted, puzzled. A narrow track of light lay on the ground some way ahead of him, crossing the yard. He hadn’t noticed it on the way out; but then he had been staring blindly ahead, fearful of falling. It took him a few seconds to work out that it must be coming from the kitchen window. The blackout curtains had not been closed properly.

  He had almost reached the safety of the farmhouse door when a perverse little notion took hold of him. He never did work out why. Perhaps he wanted to delay the pleasure of holding her and so make it more intense. Perhaps he wanted to see into that golden room from the outside, delighting in the fact that soon he would be inside it, no longer exiled. He knew that his father had sometimes done this, returning from work in the dark; he had stood outside his own window, watching his family, marvelling at the fact that he would soon be part of it again. Or maybe Dart was simply obeying a spy’s instinct. For whatever reason, he made his way to the window and peered in.

  The glass was studded with tiny beads of ice, and it took his eyes a couple of seconds to focus. Tamar was sitting on the same chair as before, but now Marijke was sitting on it also. She was on his lap, facing him, her legs straddling his, her hands gripping the back of the chair. The green dress had slid to the top of her thighs. Tamar was gazing into her face, which was hidden from Dart by the black tumble of her hair. Tamar’s mouth moved silently. His hands were somewhere inside her clothes. Marijke took one hand from the chair and gently forced his head back, lowering her face to his. Tamar’s hand appeared and pulled her hair away from their faces as if to display more clearly the way their mouths fed on each other.

  Dart felt a bitter howl climbing in his throat and jammed the side of his thumb between his teeth to stifle it. He forced himself back from the window. He slipped and staggered but did not fall. When he was steady, he crossed his arms and held himself tight. He lifted his face. The stars had gone; light snow, as fine as grains of salt, swirled slowly into his vision. It looked like the sound of static in headphones. He closed his eyes.

  He stood like that for a long time; he could not think what to do next because he did not want to think at all. He grew as cold as the stone cold weather.

  After Grandad’s death, several days passed before we could face going to the flat. The police had wanted Mum to go that same day, the day he died, and she’d put her coat on and picked up her keys before she cracked up and told them she couldn’t do it.

  When we did go, it was just terrible. Mum drove into the car park and headed for her usual space on the balcony side of the flats, but then she gave a sort of gasping scream and swerved away. She parked at the side of the block instead. Neither of us said anything, but we both knew why she’d done it. In the lobby two people were already waiting for the lift. When they recognized us, they pretended to change their minds and headed for the stairs.

  It was dark inside the flat because the curtains across the glass balcony doors had been closed. (By Grandad? By the police?) We didn’t open them. I put the lights on. We were both crying in a quiet, sniffly sort of way, but we didn’t talk. Mum went over to the bureau to look for various bits of paper and documents that the solicitor had told her she’d need. I went into my bedroom to get . . . well, I don’t know what, really. I think at the time I just wanted to leave everything there and close the door on it. The first thing I saw was the box, this box. It was on my bed. An ordinary shoe box made of brown cardboard. It had string tied around it, fastened with a tight knot. The lid had been sealed with parcel tape and had a small white adhesive label with TAMAR written on it. I absolutely did not want to touch it.

  I was still standing there staring at it when Mum came into the room.

  She said, “He’d got everything ready. He must’ve . . .” She choked up. I looked at what she was holding. “See?”

  There were two cardboard files, some large brown envelopes, and a long thin white envelope with the word WILL printed on it. The whole lot was held together by a thick rubber band.

  Then Mum saw the box. “What’s that?” she said.

  “I dunno.”

  “Is it yours? I mean, do you think —”

  “I dunno,” I said again. “Can we go? I want to go.”

  When we were in the lift, I saw she’d got the box under her arm. In the car she handed it to me, but I wouldn’t take it. She looked at me for several seconds and then dropped it onto the back seat. When we got home, I went straight indoors. Mum brought the box in and put it on the shelf in the hall. At some point in the evening, I took it upstairs and put it right at the back of my wardrobe. I didn’t open it until nearly three months later.

  Why didn’t I? The reasons changed as time passed. At first, the box simply scared me. It had scared me as soon as I saw it. I had to assume that Grandad had put it on my bed just before he’d thrown himself off the balcony. Perhaps it had been the very last thing he did. Perhaps he was already naked when he put it there. If there was some connection between the box and what was going on inside his head at that moment, I really, deeply didn’t want to know about it. Also, it seemed to me that there was something, well, sinister about the way the box was tied shut with two thicknesses of string and sealed with strong tape. As if to keep something from escaping. I did get it out, just once, and when I shook it slightly, I heard things shift inside with a dry, meaningless sound. Later, as I said before, my grief and hurt changed to anger. Grandad might have been overwhelmed by loss and despair, but he still had something to live for, someone who would need him even when his wife no longer knew who he was. Namely me. And killing himself had been the cruellest possible way of telling me that I wasn’t enough. A slap in the face, a punch to the heart. How dare he? That was something I found myself thinking, often saying it out loud: how dare he? So then it was a sort of bitter stubbornness that stopped me opening the box. I refused to. If what was in there was some sort of parting gift, I didn’t want it. If it was some sort of message or explanation, I didn’t want to hear it. Once or twice I got close to putting it out with the rubbish.

  Looking back, I’m amazed that sheer simple curiosity didn’t overcome these feelings. Because I was curious, of course. I thought about the box all the time, long after Mum stopped going on about it. I dreamed about it a few times. Once I dreamed it contained a severed head. I knew it was Grandad’s even though it was completely wrapped in bandages. I could tell that the head was speaking because I could see the bandages over the mouth moving in and out, but I couldn’t hear what it was saying. These dreams weren’t really nightmares. In them I wasn’t terrified. I felt sorry for the head. I wanted to help it but didn’t know how.

  I eventually opened the box on a hot Thursday afternoon in June. It was a daft time to choose, because I was in the middle of my GCSEs. I’d sat for a French exam in the morning, and I was annoyed with myself because I knew I hadn’t done as well as I could’ve. I was alone in the house. I heated a frozen pizza in the microwave and sat down to eat it at the kitchen table, thinking about what I should have written, remembering the mistakes I’d made. For reasons I can’t really explain, I decided that the box had something to do with my poor performance. That it was like a stone in my head, messing up my thinking. Halfway through the pizza I went upstairs and got the bloody thing out of the wardrobe and marched downstairs again before I could change my mind. My heart was banging. I put the box on the table and found a sharp knife in the kitchen drawer. I cut through the string and the tape and lifted the lid off.

  No severed head, of course. In the order I took them out and put them on the table, the box contained: a crossword puzzle; four maps held together by a rubber band; a fat bundle of money, also bound with a rubber band; a small black-and-white photograph; something that looked like a handkerchief, folded up; and a thin booklet with a reddish-brown cover. That was it.

  How did I feel? Disappointed? Mystified? Angry that I’d spent three months putting off opening this collection of strange bits and pieces? All of those
, I think. But almost immediately I felt something else, something stronger than any of those other feelings: regret. I really wished I hadn’t opened the box. Because I knew straightaway that Grandad hadn’t been mad when he’d put these things in it. I knew that these things fitted together in some way, and I had to find out how. I know it will sound strange, but it was as though he was in the box too. His spirit, something like that. I felt it so strongly that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d lifted my eyes and seen him settle down at the end of the table to watch me. I regretted what I’d done because I knew that on the following day I had an English exam in the morning and a biology exam in the afternoon. And that next week I was going to sit at a desk in the school gym taking history and maths. And that my mind wasn’t going to be focused on any of it.

  I spent the best part of the next two hours studying the things that Grandad had left me. I began with the money, naturally.

  There were twelve fifty-pound notes, one hundred and twenty ten-pound notes, and twenty-nine fivers. I counted them twice, carefully, and added them up: one thousand, nine hundred and forty-five pounds. Mum had said that Grandad had left me some money in his will, something complicated to do with a trust, when I was eighteen. But this wasn’t it, obviously. This was something else.

  The crossword. It was one of those jumbo ones the papers put in at holiday times — Easter, bank holidays, that sort of thing. It was from the Guardian from the previous Christmas. I remembered it because it was one of the last crosswords Grandad and I had tried to do. Just about half the grid had been filled in; I recognized Grandad’s neat black ink capital letters. It brought back the memories in a flood.

  Mum and Grandad and I had been invited to Christmas lunch at River Reach. We’d dreaded it but went anyway. And to be fair, the staff had done really well. The Christmas tree in the entrance hall was huge, and really beautiful, just silver and red decorations and simple white lights. The food was pretty good too, although the way some of the residents ate didn’t bear much looking at. A lot of them had to be fed by their relatives or the nurses and were too distracted to work their mouths properly. There was a good deal of noise, but Gran was pretty quiet throughout the whole thing. Her eyes kept darting about, but she didn’t seem to see anything to upset her. I don’t think she understood what was happening, really. She almost cleared her plate, though; there were just a few sprouts, a roast potato or two, and a lump of stuffing left on it when we’d all finished. But what I remember most vividly is looking over at Grandad sitting there wearing the orange paper crown from his cracker. He looked so stiff and stricken and swivel-eyed that anyone coming into the room would have taken him for one of the patients.

  When we got back to our house, Mum helped Grandad off with his coat and noticed that there was a greasy stain on the side of his jacket. He looked down at it and went into the kitchen without saying anything. We watched him fish out the sausage and bits of turkey that Gran had slipped into his pocket. Later, Mum was on the phone to Andrew for about three hours, so I found the crossword, and Grandad and I sat and struggled with it. It cheered him up, that and the whisky. It was a fiendish — Grandad’s word — puzzle. Several of the clues locked into other clues, so you went round and round in circles. And it turned out that it had a secret theme, Treasure Island. Lots of the answers were the names of characters from the story and so on. I was the one who worked that out, because we’d read the book at school the year before. Grandad had been most impressed that I’d cracked the code. All the same, we couldn’t do more than half of it, and gave up in the end. So that’s why I recognized it when I found it in the box.

  The maps. They were all proper Ordnance Survey maps. The one on top was OS 108, and the title had my name in it: Lower Tamar Valley & Plymouth. The next was 112, the next 111, and the last was 126. They were all fairly new, but I could see that they had been used, or opened up at least. The creases in them weren’t exactly as they would have been if they’d just come out of the shop. When I spread them out on the kitchen floor, I realized that all the maps joined up, and I found myself kneeling on a big chunk of Devon and Cornwall. The river with my name ran through all of it. For some reason I found that a bit spooky. It took me a couple of minutes to notice that there were faint pencil markings, tiny xs inside circles, at various places along the Tamar valley.

  The photograph. It was small, about five centimetres by eight, and black-and-white. Old, obviously. I knew straightaway where it had been taken. On the Albert Embankment, on the south bank of the Thames, there’s a place where tourists are always taking pictures of each other, and sometimes politicians are interviewed for TV. That’s because you get a good shot of the Houses of Parliament in the background. They were a bit out of focus in this little photo. The two men in the foreground were wearing old-fashioned army uniforms, the ones with short tunics. They were both bareheaded. I could just make out their berets rolled and tucked into their shoulder straps. The soldier on the left had one hand on the low wall of the embankment and the other in his pocket. He was looking straight at the camera. The one on the right had his arm round the other man’s shoulders. He was looking away from the camera slightly, as though he’d turned to speak to someone just as the shutter had clicked.

  I studied it for a while, then trudged upstairs again and rummaged about until I found the magnifying glass I used in biology. When I focused it on the photo, the two soldiers jumped out at me through the thick glass. They looked alike. Both had thick dark hair cut short at the sides and rather long narrow faces. They had the kind of features that a romantic novelist might describe as “finely chiselled.” Good-looking, in an old Hollywood movie sort of way. They could have been brothers. It was hard to tell how old they were. Youngish, but people somehow look older in old photographs. What I mean is that fifty years ago young people looked more like adults than we do now. And I was absolutely sure that this photo had been taken that long ago, during the war. I supposed one of these two men was Grandad, but I couldn’t tell which. I turned the photo over. There was nothing written on the back.

  The handkerchief. Actually, it wasn’t a handkerchief at all; it was a sheet of white silk, yellowish down the outside edges and along the creases where it had been folded. It was printed all over with row after row of letters. None of them made up words, whether you read the letters horizontally, vertically, or even diagonally. They didn’t seem to be anagrams, either. I gave up on it.

  The booklet. It looked like it had been fished out of a dustbin of wet garbage and dried on top of a radiator. On the cover there was an eagle with its wings outstretched and its claws clutching a sort of wreath. Inside the wreath there was a Nazi swastika. Below that there was a word in what I thought was German and obviously meant identity-something. The bottom right-hand corner was wrinkled and discoloured by a dark stain.

  I opened it up. At the top left of the first page there was a head-and-shoulders photograph, a bit smaller than the one in my passport. Black-and-white again, with the blurred print of a rubber stamp across the bottom corner. The man in the photo stared out at me. Lean-faced, dark-haired, with an expression that was blank but somehow defiant at the same time, like someone who’d been arrested and photographed against a police station wall. To the right of the picture there were spaces in which the man’s details had been carefully written in ink, now faded. The first space had the word BOOGART in capital letters, and below that the word Christiaan in ordinary writing. Below that, next to the word VERKLARING, someone had written Landarbeider. Next down, there was a date, 19th April 1920, which I took to be his date of birth. There were other entries filled in by someone using the kind of handwriting you don’t see any more. I could only guess at what they meant. Below the photo there were two fingerprints, or perhaps thumbprints. At the bottom of the page, where the brown stain had left a tidemark, there was another rubber stamp with BIJKANTOOR APELDOORN in the centre and two longer words around the edge. Next to that was a date, 21st September 1942, and a scrawled signature.
The next page had a sheet of very thin paper gummed to it. The same eagle and swastika design, and underneath it, in heavy elaborate capitals, the word AUSWEIS. Then came a lot of the same stuff as before about Boogart and three more rubber stamp prints. The first was the Apeldoorn one again; the second had a sort of crest and the word ESSEN. The third one was too blurred to make out; it looked as though it had been banged onto the paper by someone in a hurry. Apart from the stain spreading up from the bottom corner, the last page was blank.

  I put the London snapshot next to the photo in the identity book and stared at them both. Either one of the soldiers on the Albert Embankment could have been Boogart.

  I went to the bookcase in the living room and took down the two photo albums that Mum had brought back from Gran and Grandad’s flat before it was sold. There wasn’t a single picture of them when they were young. The first photo was of them both sitting in the garden of our old house, with Gran holding a baby, me. Grandad didn’t look much different from the way I remembered him. So that was a dead end.

  I went upstairs yet again and poked about in the tragic mess I called my schoolwork. Eventually I found a scrap of clean tracing paper. I laid it over the photograph in the booklet and carefully pencilled on a pair of glasses and a moustache. Something like a narrow-faced ghost of Grandad looked up at me.

  I chewed my way through the remains of the pizza, thinking. Grandad had never said anything to me about the war. To be honest, I don’t suppose I’d ever been interested enough to ask about it. I knew that he and Gran had lived in Holland and that they’d had something to do with the Dutch resistance. But when I’d read that stuff in the newspaper about him parachuting into Holland and being betrayed to the Germans and so on, I’d been amazed that in all the time I’d spent with him he’d not told me a thing about it. When I’d asked Mum, she said that she’d told the reporter all she knew, and that she’d got it from Dad, not Grandad. She didn’t know anything else.