by Mal Peet
For dinner I had a baked potato with chilli con carne topping. The beans were baked beans from a can, but I didn’t mind that. Yoyo ate a huge slab of battered fish that stuck out over both sides of his plate. When he drenched his chips with salad cream, the woman at the next table nudged her husband and they both watched.
“Rivers aren’t always beautiful,” I said. “It’s not that simple.”
“Of course. They are complicated. They go this way and that way. They are wide, then thin — no, narrow — then wide again. They are sometimes shady and secret, sometimes in the sunshine. You can swim in them and also drown in them. Sometimes they are deep and sometimes . . . what is the opposite word?”
“Shallow,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“So is that what I’m supposed to think? Is that what this is all about?”
Yoyo paused with a chip halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“That we’re doing all this so I can find out that I’m . . . I’m twisty and . . . and never the same from one minute to the next? And shallow?”
He put his fork down and carefully wiped his mouth with the paper napkin.
“Listen to you,” he said. “You pick up all the negative words. Let me tell you something. There are rivers you would not like to be named after. Some in Holland, well, it would be like an insult maybe. In England too, I bet. But you are Tamar, and today we saw how beautiful she — it — is. Okay, okay, I said this already, I know. And yes, those things your grandfather left you, they are complicated when you try to look at them all together. But maybe this part of it is simple. He is telling you that you are lovely. What’s wrong with that?”
“He’s dead, Yoyo. He killed himself.”
“So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?”
I didn’t sleep well. There were some well-thumbed trashy novels in the room, and I read one of them until long after the noisy drinkers in the bar had spilled onto the street. The two rooms that Yoyo and I had been given had once been one big room, now divided by a thin wall. I could hear his bed creak. I felt very alone, knowing he was so close to me.
Above Gunnislake the Tamar squirms and wriggles and loops back on itself as though it knows it has to get to the sea but wants to put it off as long as possible. And, just like downriver, the roads couldn’t get near it. We twisted and turned through the narrow lanes for ages but caught a glimpse of the river only once.
This new day was even hotter than the one before. Yoyo had appeared at breakfast wearing old black Levis with the legs cut off, which made him look taller and more stringy than ever. We drove with all the windows down and the sunroof open, but our faces still shone with sweat.
There were only two more of Grandad’s marks before the Tamar ran off the edge of the map, and we were headed for the first. We’d decided we weren’t in any hurry. Despite my restless night, some of the happy mood of yesterday afternoon had returned, and Yoyo was his usual laid-back self. Several times we had to reverse and cram into the hedge or a gateway to let oncoming cars pass, and he did it smilingly, waving cheerfully at the other drivers as they squeezed by. Judging from the expressions on the faces of one or two of them, they thought he was a nutter.
Grandad’s mark was where a narrow lane changed its mind about meeting the river and turned away westwards. At the turn there was a dirt track leading off, with a sign saying PUBLIC BRIDLEWAY. Yoyo eased the Saab along it, avoiding the knuckly rocks that poked up through the dusty surface.
A couple of hundred metres later, Yoyo parked, jamming the car tight against the hedge. I had to climb over his seat to get out. The trees met over our heads, and the path was splashes of light and shade that confused my eyes. The air was so hot it seemed to vibrate. For some reason I felt nervous, light-headed. We walked for several minutes and then came to a dead end. On either side of the path, gateways opened onto long fields of high grass. In front of us, a broken screen of tall weeds like white parasols, a line of single trees, and the sound and glitter of the Tamar. We pushed through, treading down nettles.
It was nothing like the wide waterway we’d followed the day before. It was maybe twenty metres across. The opposite bank was a tall cliff of motionless leaves. In both directions the river twisted away and disappeared. The deep silence was disturbed only by the plopping and chuckling of flowing water. It was a secretive place.
Yoyo said, “I need a pee.” He turned back the way we’d come and disappeared.
Just off to my right, a bed-sized slab of stone jutted into the water. I walked out onto it, grateful that it was half in the shade. On this side the river was shallow, sliding over sandy gravel that gave it the colour of pale beer. The deep-water channel was against the far bank, a dark mirror filled with warped and sliding reflections. Something made a faint splash and spread circular ripples on the surface. In the middle of the stream, long trails of weed floated, like thick green hair flecked with white confetti flowers.
It was then that I felt that same chilly unease I’d felt the previous day, standing on Halton Quay, but this time, suddenly, I knew what it was.
Yoyo and I had spent lots of time wondering why Grandad had marked these particular places on the maps. Of course we had. If they were clues to something, how did they work? Were the place-names some sort of code? Were there hidden meanings in Landulph or the Crooked Spaniards? If so, we hadn’t found them. Yoyo showed me how map grid references worked, and we wrote down the references for one or two places and tried translating these six-figure numbers into letters, to see if they gave us words. We thought perhaps that the names or the grid references somehow related to the mysterious letters on the silk sheet. None of this got us anywhere except deeper into headache territory. We’d wondered if there were certain things in each of these places that we were supposed to find. Perhaps a special gravestone in the churchyard, a painting at Cotehele. But if that had been it, Grandad would have given us a bit more help, surely.
What I’d never considered was the possibility that he had actually visited these places. If that seems strange, I can only say that he was the kind of man who worked things out in his head or on paper, not on his feet. I just couldn’t imagine him trudging up and down the Cornish countryside, not at his age. Besides, he didn’t have a car, and I’d never known him to drive. I didn’t even know if he had a licence. And anyway, I couldn’t imagine when he could have come down here. He never left London, never left Gran, except once, when his doctor told him he needed a holiday. That was when the stress of Marijke’s illness and her being in the nursing home had pumped his blood pressure way up. So he’d reluctantly taken himself off to Brighton for ten days. It hadn’t done him much good, judging from the mood he’d been in when he got back. Apart from that, he’d not gone away anywhere for years and years. Definitely not since Dad vanished. So I’d decided that whatever the marks on the maps meant, they weren’t places he’d actually been.
But as I stood chilled on warm stone with the water at my feet, I knew with absolute certainty that I’d been wrong. He had been there. I couldn’t understand how or when, but he’d stood where I was standing, just as he’d stood on the worn flagstones of Halton Quay. That was what the spooky feeling was. It was him, his presence. It doesn’t make sense in any normal way, I know, but I was suddenly so sure of it that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d materialized and stood ghostly among the trees beside me. I even looked.
When I turned back to the river, a corpse had drifted into the shadowed water towards the far bank. It could have been a pale slender tree trunk, but then I saw that the branches were arms, faintly greenish in the water, and that the splintered stump was drowned hair. I stared at it for the space of a couple of missing heartbeats, and then the corpse lifted its drenched unruly head and whooped.
I yelled at him. “Yoyo! You sod! I nearly wet myself!”
“Hah! Excellent!” He arched and dived and disappeared and bobbed up again; then he turned and swam against the current, pacing himself
so that he stayed in the same place.
“Come on,” he called, “get in. It’s great, really.”
“No way! You must be mad.”
“Why, can’t you swim?”
I could, but only just. Two lengths of a heated swimming pool was about my limit.
“Of course I can. But I’m not getting in there. Isn’t it freezing?”
“No, it’s perfect.”
“Well, be careful,” I said. “I don’t care if you drown, but I can’t drive the car.”
He laughed and swam towards me and got unsteadily to his feet in the shallows. The water came up to the frayed legs of his shorts. The confetti flowers wafted around his thighs. He shook his head like a dog, scattering brilliant droplets.
“Tamar, really, you should get in. Do you realize you have not put even a hand or foot into this river you are named after? You haven’t touched it. It’s a shame, I think.”
It was a fair point. So I slid my sandals off and stepped cautiously into ankle-deep water and squealed like a kid. “You bloody liar! It is freezing!”
“Of course not,” he said. “It is only the, what-you-call-it, contrast. In one minute you’ll get used to it.”
Which was true; then it was lovely.
“Come a bit nearer,” I said, “and I’ll come as far as you. But no farther. And no messing about, okay? I mean it. If you pull me in or anything, I’ll kill you.”
I was almost out to him when my foot slipped and I had to grab at his arm. It was hard and cold. He held my hand and we steadied ourselves, facing into the current. He was shivering slightly despite the heat; I could feel the vibration running down into my hand. The swirls of water against my legs were delicious. I seemed to be moving forward effortlessly. Through gaps in the trees, thick beams of brilliant light tilted onto the river. Where they burned on the water, the glitter was so intense that I closed my eyes. I shouldn’t have done.
I suppose it was the sensation of being blind in such light that made me feel as though I was losing my balance. That, and the heat, and the hypnotic liquid murmuring of the river, and the movement of water against me. I was filled with a thrilling sickness, like vertigo, like the fear of falling from some high place and wanting to fall at the same time. I think I must have stumbled, because Yoyo said my name and turned and held me by the shoulders, supporting me. I leaned against him and he had to brace his legs to steady himself. He put his arms around me. I could feel the water from his hair dripping onto mine and the water on his body soaking into my T-shirt.
After a while I said, “I’m okay now. You can let go of me.”
But I didn’t mean it, and he took no notice.
Things happened so fast and so close together that they seemed like one thing. The shock of it made Bibi Grotius draw in her breath so sharply that she almost choked on her own saliva; she had been remembering the taste of apple cake with apricot syrup. She saw two boys dash across the square from left to right. The one carrying the football called out to Trixie Greydanus. Trixie moved fast to the corner and looked down Market Street. She turned back immediately, leaned against the wall, and took off her left shoe. When she looked up at Bibi’s window, her mouth was open. The few people already in the square moved quickly and aimlessly like a startled shoal of fish. Three hundred metres down Prince William Street, a German heavy machine-gun carrier appeared from nowhere, howling and clouded in black exhaust, and accelerated towards the square. Someone screamed. It was just before noon on Sunday 11th March.
Bibi’s cry was so hoarse that at first Dart didn’t recognize it as his warning. But when he turned and saw her ashen face on the stairs, he knew. His head felt suddenly full of cold blood. His body did things by itself: his legs lifted him from the yellow chair; his left hand stammered on the Morse key, sending QUG, the code for emergency shutdown; his right hand scrabbled to gather the silks, the pencil, the pad. Then his eyes fastened on the revolver and he froze, immobilized by indecision.
The four SS troopers who barged through the shop door floundered in the near darkness, colliding with delicate obstacles and each other. What light there was in the shop came from the workshop door, which Pieter had left uncurtained. So the Germans headed for that, using their rifles like scythes to smash a path through the tables, the clockwork toys, the frozen ballerinas. The surviving puppets rattled their little wooden feet against the soldiers’ grey steel helmets.
Dart had reached the foot of the attic stairs when he heard the door crash open and the frantic jangling of the bell. He shrank back against the landing wall, holding the medical bag in his left hand and the revolver in his right, pressed against his leg. When the first explosion of breaking glass came, it seemed to go off inside his head. He looked down the staircase towards the workshop door. The legs and jackboots of one SS man, and then another. An order, harsh and urgent. The voice of Pieter Grotius, saying something he could not make out above the sounds of destruction. He heard someone sobbing faintly, then realized the sound was coming from his own throat.
A hand seized his arm.
Bibi dragged him into the parlour and closed the door. Stupidly he went to the window. Before Bibi pulled him away he saw, just below him, the head and shoulders of a German machine gunner protruding from an armoured car, his weapon trained on the opposite side of the square. A number of people — was that Trixie? — were crowded together, some with their hands in the air, others huddling into shop doorways. SS troops seemed to be raiding several buildings. A young man kneeled on the cobbles with a German holding his hair. Somewhere a woman was wailing. Inside the room, Bibi was hissing at him.
“Ernst! Ernst, for God’s sake! Open the bag. My leg, do my leg. Hurry!”
It was so hopeless he thought he might cry. Or laugh. He dropped the bag onto the floor and realized he still held the revolver in his other hand. Bibi saw it and swore. She grabbed it, stuffed it under the cushion on her chair and sat down. She propped her bandaged leg on the footstool and tore the safety pin from the bandage.
A loud voice from below, boots on the stairs. Dart kneeled beside Bibi, wrenched the bag open, pulled stuff, any stuff, out. Bibi leaned forward, took Dart’s face in her hands, and kissed him on the forehead. She fell back in the chair with tears in her eyes. Dart took hold of her ankle with his left hand and the loose end of the bandage in his right.
The door flew open.
One grey monster entered, then a second, and a third. Two with rifles; the other, the corporal, with a machine pistol. They filled the room.
“Stand up. Stand up!”
Dart looked at them over his shoulder and raised his right arm from the elbow. A shaky salute, perhaps, or a sign meaning wait. He didn’t know which, just that he had done it before somewhere and it had worked. But not this time.
“Stand up! Raise your hands!”
He stayed on his knees but half turned towards them, using his hands to explain that he was in the middle of a medical procedure. The corporal stepped forward and clubbed Dart on the right-hand side of his face with a gloved fist. The crunch that Dart felt was mixed up with the sound of the other two Germans working the bolts of their rifles and Bibi’s scream.
Dart collapsed sideways and somehow stopped himself from plunging headfirst into the glass cabinet of hollow eggshells painted with clowns’ faces. The cabinet shook and the egg heads wobbled on their little wooden stands. His own head was full of fizzy noise like a receding wave sucking shingle from a beach. When the darkness drew back, he got himself up onto his elbows. The first thing he noticed was that his lower lip was connected to the floor by a sticky thread of blood and dribble. The second thing was a pair of highly polished boots and, above them, way, way above them, a colourless face beneath the peak of a cap with a death’s head insignia.
“Ah. Dr. Ludders, is it not? We have met before.”
Dart wiped the mess from his mouth with his sleeve and mumbled, “Lubbers, Major. Not Ludders. Lubbers.”
“Of course. Ernst Lubbers, if I reme
mber correctly.”
His face was, impossibly, more bleached out than before. Its only colour was in the rim of red below each eye and the pink scar that ran down the ragged lobe of his ear. He said, still looking down at Dart, “Who struck this man?”
After some shuffling of jackboots the SS corporal said, “Sir, he failed to obey —”
The major turned abruptly. “Corporal, we are looking for terrorists. This man is a bloody doctor. Don’t you know the difference?”
“Sir.” The corporal’s face was a blank.
“Have you checked the rear of this building?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Do it now.”
When the troopers had gone, the pale major made a leisurely inspection of the cluttered room, surveying the posters, stooping to examine a framed photograph of Pieter and Bibi Grotius posing with the infamous Jew Charlie Chaplin. He made no comment. He lifted a Russian doll from a shelf; it rattled slightly. He twisted the body and separated the two halves and took out a smaller doll, and then found another inside that one. The fifth doll, no bigger than a clothes peg, was the last and did not open. The major seemed disappointed. He went to the window and gazed out, arms folded.
“An excellent view from here,” he said. “An ideal command post.”
Dart’s consciousness was coming and going. He wondered if it might be okay to go to sleep. Instead, he got to his feet, supporting himself on the back of Bibi’s chair. She stared up at him, her eyes wet, her face almost as white as the German’s.
