Tamar

by Mal Peet

  We drove for no more than ten minutes before the Land Rover turned off the road through a pair of immense iron gates. A tarmac driveway curved through parkland ahead of us, and I caught a watery glimpse of a large and complicated roof. We didn’t go towards it. Instead, we turned left again and parked beside a gatehouse, a quaint cottage of grey stone and fancy white-painted gables.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, that at times of crisis we do the most ordinary things. Dad just walked to the back door of the gatehouse and said, “Come in.” Then we were in a small tidy kitchen with Dad filling a kettle as if we were familiar visitors who’d popped in for a cup of tea.

  If there are words for what I felt, I don’t know what they are. I was so full of questions that I thought they would choke me before I could tug them out of my throat. The first one I managed was truly stupid.

  “Do you live here?”

  “Yes. The big house — did you see it? — it’s a language school for business people. Residential. Lots of Germans, a few Japanese. I take care of the grounds and do maintenance jobs around the house. It’s a beautiful old place. I’ll show you round later, if you like.”

  He said all this very quickly, in one breath, knowing, I suppose, that if he paused I’d ask other, harder questions. I realized that I wouldn’t have recognized his voice if I hadn’t been looking at his face. I’d forgotten it.

  The kettle built to a roar. Dad was opening cupboard doors blindly as though he didn’t know where his things were kept.

  “Dad? Dad?”

  His shoulders fell. My fists were clenched; my fingernails dug into my palms. I felt Yoyo’s hands on my arms.

  “Dad,” I said, or wailed. “Dad, for God’s sake!”

  He turned to face us. His eyes were wet, and he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what to do with his hands. In the end he stuck them under his armpits and clamped his arms tightly to his chest. The kettle clicked off, leaving a huge silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you . . . I know you must have so many questions. I don’t know where to start.”

  Nor did I. I was shivering, and I couldn’t control it.

  Dad said, “I think you might be in shock. Wait.”

  He took three small glasses and a bottle from a shelf and poured shots of brandy. As soon as I smelled it, my mouth filled with salty saliva.

  I managed to say, “Bathroom.”

  Dad pointed to the hallway. “Through there. Top of the stairs.”

  I got there somehow. A clean, almost sterile room. A bath with a plastic shower curtain. I lifted the toilet lid and threw up, twice.

  When I went back down to the kitchen, Yoyo and Dad had gone. I looked around the room. Nothing in the sink, no washing up on the drainer. Tea towels neatly folded and hung on the rail of the electric cooker. A cork notice board with a few bills and business cards pinned to it, but nothing handwritten, no postcards, no photographs. A small square table, and just one chair.

  I heard voices and looked out of the open window into the garden. Dad and Yoyo were sitting opposite each other at a heavy-looking picnic table, the kind that pubs have. Yoyo was talking. Dad was leaning on his elbows, his head lowered.

  When I went out, they both stood up as if I were the Queen or somebody. Yoyo came to meet me and put the palm of his hand gently to the side of my face. “Tamar? Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  He said quietly, “This is some hell of a thing.”

  “I don’t know if I can deal with it,” I said.

  “To tell the truth, I think we have no choice. This is what it was all about, the whole time. Come on.”

  I sat down next to Yoyo so that I could hold his hand if I needed to. Dad looked sick, despite his suntan, but perhaps that was because his face was thinner than I’d remembered.

  He said, “Johannes has been telling me how you came to be here. About Mum, your gran. About your . . . William’s death. I’m trying to take it all in.”

  “You didn’t even know Grandad was dead?”

  “No. When I saw you, I thought he must have sent you here. That he’d told you where I was. Which I suppose he did, in his own twisted way.”

  I stared at him. I had the sensation of buckling and bending. It was a feeling that would get stronger — and worse — as the day went on.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you mean he knew? He knew where you were all along?”

  “No, no. He found me.”

  “What? He came to this house? You saw him?”

  “Oh, yes,” Dad said, and there was no missing the sourness in his voice.

  “When was this?”

  “Last November. November the fifth, to be precise. I’d been up at the school all afternoon. Setting up a firework display. I got back here just after six and found a car outside. A hire car, from Plymouth. I couldn’t see who was in it because the windows were all misted up. I was shocked to the core when it turned out to be him.”

  I struggled with this. Last November. Then I remembered. “He told us he’d gone to Brighton,” I said.

  Dad nodded, unsurprised, but said nothing.

  “And he didn’t tell me. He knew, he knew where you were for months, and he never told me!”

  “No. I didn’t think he would. Not after what happened between us.”

  I put my head in my hands. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.”

  Dad reached across the table and took my wrists in his hands. I couldn’t look at him.

  “Tamar,” he said, “listen, please. I suppose I knew that this would happen one day. I wanted it and dreaded it at the same time. I’ve missed you so much, my love. I can’t tell you what it’s been like.”

  I looked up then. There were tears in his eyes, and that was nothing like good enough.

  “Don’t say that. How can you say that? You left us. You left me. I thought you were bloody dead.”

  I pulled my arms from his grip. He clasped his hands on the table in front of him and stared down at them. Yoyo laid his palm on my back, a gentle, useless gesture. I really was all cried out by then, but my eyes felt hot and swollen.

  Dad said, “I want to say sorry, but it would be . . .”

  “What?”

  He looked up. “Pathetically inadequate.”

  “No, Dad,” I said, “it would be an insult.”

  “Yes.”

  Then there was a silence, and I couldn’t bear it. “So tell me, then. Tell me why you left us.” My voice didn’t sound like my own.

  He looked away, drawing in a long audible breath that made his shoulders rise then fall. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, very well.”

  He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him smoke.

  “He, William, once said to me that some of us have things, secrets, that it’s best we take to our graves. That was the expression he used. And I came to believe it. Or accept it, anyway. And it’s cost me more than I can say. Tell me, did he by any chance tell you how you came to be called Tamar?”

  The sun had become a hazy yellow ball. Blurred shadows had gathered at the foot of the neatly clipped hedge.

  “Anyway,” Dad said, “we had that conversation about your name two months — no, less — before you were born. I didn’t think too much about it for a long time after that. Now and again I’d try to talk to him about Holland and the war and the rest of it, but I never got anywhere. Mum, your gran, would sometimes let a few things slip, but then she’d sort of skitter away from the subject. Especially if he was there. She’d say her memories were all muddled up. Maybe they were. I don’t know.”

  He stared down at the table, picking at the grain with a fingernail.

  “Dad,” I said, “what does all this have do with you . . . going away?”

  “Everything. It has everything to do with it.” There was a sudden fierceness in his voice that startled me. “I’m sorry. This . . . all this stuff goes round and round in my head all the time.
All the time. I have to tell you about it in the order things happened; I can’t do it any other way.”

  There was a look on his face that I recognized. I’d seen it on the faces of poor crazy homeless people on the streets, the ones who are desperate to tell you their tragic life stories. Dad had that same twist to his mouth, that same determination to get things said. I felt almost afraid of him. I slid my hand under the table and found Yoyo’s, and he threaded his fingers tightly through mine.

  I said, “Okay, Dad. I’m listening.”

  “It was something to do with you starting school, strange to say. It was a big thing for me. Maybe for all parents. You have this baby, and then suddenly — boom — you’re dropping her off at the school gates. Time seemed to have accelerated. I was nearly forty by then; William and Marijke were well into their sixties. It started to seem like a terrible thing to me, that they would die and I would have no idea about who and what they’d been. It felt like I didn’t know who I was. So I started investigating, researching, the war in Holland. For a year or two it was, well, like a sort of hobby. But it was much more difficult than I’d thought. Information was hard to come by. There was the military stuff, of course. Plenty about the battle for Arnhem, for instance. But trying to find out anything about the SOE, what it actually did, was hopeless. And every time I came up against a brick wall, I got more determined to continue. As time went by I suppose I got a bit obsessive.”

  He took his cigarettes out again, hesitated, then decided against lighting one. “Once or twice my job took me to Holland, and I spent my free time trawling libraries, chatting up government contacts, and so on. People were a bit more helpful than they were here, but I’d always find myself at a dead end sooner or later. There are still things that went on over there during the war that people don’t want dug up.”

  Yoyo made a little grunting sound of agreement.

  “I learned a lot about the period, but it was bloody laborious. I don’t speak much Dutch or German, and I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, let alone where to look. Basically all I had, you see, was the year 1944 and the name Tamar. I was forever hoping that the word would leap out at me from some dusty old file. And it didn’t happen. It was like chasing shadows in fog.”

  He changed his mind and lit the cigarette. “Anyway, in 1988 my job changed. And as a result I found myself spending a bit of time with people from the secret services.”

  That made me blink. “What?” I said. “Are you telling me you were a spy or something?”

  “No, no. Not really. But the department started sending me to places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, the old Iron Curtain countries. We were looking for business opportunities, future markets, that sort of thing. So I’d go over there, and when I got back I’d have to go to some anonymous office in Euston or somewhere to be interviewed by blokes in grey suits. Debriefing, they called it. They were interested in anything I’d found out about industry and technology, stuff like that.”

  I remembered Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  “I got quite matey with one of them. Roger. I don’t suppose it was his real name. He was all right, though. Arsenal supporter, like me. So eventually I asked him if he could get his hands on SOE files. It was like I’d suggested he donate me his kidneys. But I kept on at him, and in the end he said he’d see what he could do. It was months before he got back to me. We met in a pub. He said he’d had one hell of a job finding the files, never mind getting a peep at them. But he’d done it. And what he’d found out was that everything, absolutely everything, to do with that group of agents, the Rivers group that William had been part of, had disappeared. It was as if those guys had never existed. He said he’d checked through all the Dutch section files, and although they were a bit patchy, there was at least something on all the other groups. He said it was as if someone had systematically removed the bits I was interested in. He gave me a funny look, I can tell you. He was a very suspicious man. I suppose it was a qualification for the job. He obviously thought that I might know how come those files had vanished. I didn’t, then. I think I do now, though. He did tell me that the man in charge of the SOE section that would have controlled the Rivers group was a Colonel Arthur Nicholson. Later I found out that Nicholson had been killed in a car accident in Australia in 1956. There was someone else called Hendriks, who might have been English or Dutch. And it probably wasn’t his real name; I never found out. So that was another dead end.”

  I can tell you what it was like, listening to my dad talking in that neat little garden of his. It was like listening to someone who’d been kept in a dark cellar for years. Someone who’d shaped and rehearsed the story of himself in order to stay real. I know Yoyo felt that too. So we kept quiet.

  “The next time I was in Holland I put an advert in a few newspapers. The personal columns. I can’t remember exactly what I said; something like Tamar: resistance organizer 1944–45. Information sought. Then a PO box number in Amsterdam and my London office number. Nothing. A few months later I did it again, and I got a phone call: a woman speaking perfect English with an unusual accent. Her name was Rosa Galloway. She said she might have information for me, but she was definitely suspicious. She wanted to know what my interest was. I told her that Tamar had been my father’s resistance code name during the war, and I was trying to trace his old comrades, which was sort of true. Then she surprised me by asking what my mother’s name was. I told her, then there was a silence. I got the impression she’d covered the mouthpiece and was speaking to someone at her end. Then she said that yes, perhaps she could help me, and asked if I could come to Holland, to The Hague. Of course I said yes. We fixed a date, and a place, the bar of a hotel.

  “I wangled myself a long weekend and got to The Hague early on a Friday evening. Rosa Galloway turned out to be a woman about the same age as me, very good-looking, very smartly dressed. Big brown eyes. When I commented on her excellent English, she told me that she was married to a Canadian who worked at the embassy. She’d lived in Ontario for several years. Then she told me that it was her mother who’d spotted my advert. Her name was Trixie Greydanus, and she lived in a hofje — that’s like an almshouse, an old people’s home — in Delft, just south of The Hague. When she’d seen the advert she’d phoned Rosa, very agitated, because she knew who Tamar was. She’d been his courier in the resistance.

  “That was an incredible moment for me. I begged Rosa to take me to Delft that evening, but she wouldn’t. She said her mother was in poor health and would be too tired. In the end we agreed she would drive me there the following morning.

  “The hofje in Delft was a beautiful old building. I was surprised to find that most of the staff were nurses. It turned out that it was, in fact, a hospice. Trixie Greydanus had cancer, although you wouldn’t have known it, not at first glance. Her room had a tall narrow window, and she was sitting in a chair with her back to the light; so it took me a second or two to see what she looked like. She had the same bright chestnut-coloured eyes as Rosa. She was wearing a lot of careful makeup, and her hair was strange. Cut in a very old-fashioned style and dyed a dark blond colour. I was a bit slow to realize that it was a wig, and that her eyebrows were painted on, not real. She was holding on tight to her chair, but I could see that her arms were trembling. I was shaky too.

  “Rosa introduced us and asked me to forgive her mother for not standing to greet me because her legs were very weak. Trixie said nothing at all during this, just stared at me with those big eyes. I felt awkward. Rosa started saying something in Dutch to her mother, but Trixie interrupted her.

  “Rosa said, ‘My mother asks when you were born, and where.’

  “‘October the fifth, 1945,’ I said. ‘In London.’ Trixie nodded and said something else.

  “‘She asks if you’ve brought a photograph of your mother.’

  “Which I had, of course. I’d brought three. The one that showed Marijke best was a picture I’d taken of her and William standing on the balcony of the flat the day they
moved in. I gave it to her, and that’s when things started getting emotional. Trixie looked at it a long time and then nodded again, and then it was like she couldn’t stop nodding, and she was crying at the same time. She kept touching Marijke’s face in the photo and saying the same thing over and over. I didn’t need it translated.

  “‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s not dead. She’s not dead.’

  “Rosa had her arms around her mother, trying to calm her. ‘I was afraid this would happen,’ she said. ‘It’s not good for her to get upset. The drugs she has to take sometimes make her very emotional anyway, and confused. Maybe it would be best if you left us alone for a short while.’

  “So I went for a walk. It was a freezing cold day. The streets were full of people shopping and doing ordinary things. When I went back, Trixie had calmed down. She’d put fresh makeup on to cover the mess her tears had made of her face. She was trying to smile, and she started talking straightaway. Rosa had to make her pause so she could fit the translations in.

  “ ‘She says she recognized your mother at once. She has hardly changed. Always such a beautiful girl. My mother had many terrible days during the war, but the day Marijke disappeared was the worst. She has never stopped thinking and, er, wondering about her. Marijke was her best friend, more like a sister. That is why she cried just now. She says she is sorry. She says you do not look like her. More like your father, perhaps, except for your hair. You have the same shape of face.’

  “Sitting there, I couldn’t decide whether my best bet was to wait and let Trixie Greydanus ramble on or to try to get her to answer the questions that I was desperate to ask. But before I could say anything, Trixie studied the photo again and spoke to Rosa.

  “Rosa said, ‘My mother asks who the man in the photograph is. Is it Marijke’s husband?’

  “I was taken by surprise. I laughed, I think, and said, ‘That’s Dad. My father. I expect he’s changed a great deal since you knew him.’

  “Trixie obviously understood ‘father’; vader in Dutch is pretty much the same. She looked at me and at the photo again and said something to Rosa. Rosa glanced at me and the two of them had this fast muttered conversation, then both looked at me. Rosa opened her mouth and shut it again, and I sat there smiling at them like the idiot I was.”