by Ann Swinfen
‘I was there,’ Millicent whispered at last. ‘It all started as a bit of a silly game, I suppose. I don’t know whether we really believed Ed when he said they were Nazis. But everyone was very nervous about invasion all up this coast. There were concrete posts put up as barriers against landing craft along the beach, and some of the pillboxes on the headlands are still there. We half believed him, I think. Someone had thrown a stone before and had hit the girl on the forehead – she was a little older than I was, and she wasn’t really hurt. I swear I never threw anything. I just tagged along. I wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with that lot – my parents would have been horrified – but I was bored, and Ed was quite a handsome young man, very persuasive in his way. That grandson is very like him.’
The words were tumbling over each other, as though – having decided to talk about it – Millicent could not get the words out fast enough.
‘Ed threw the stone that night. The girl opened the door when he had just picked up a heavy piece of stone to throw at the door. The light flowed out, and he threw it anyway, into the light. He can’t have aimed at anything. We didn’t know till later that the old lady was hit.’
‘She wasn’t an old lady.’ A great depression settled over Kate as her suspicions were confirmed. ‘She was only forty-two.’
Millicent was sobbing now, an ugly, dry, rasping sound that shook Kate more profoundly than a lifetime of harsh criticisms. ‘I never meant any harm,’ she said pleadingly. ‘I never had anything to do with Ed and those others again, but I’ve never forgotten it. Then after the war your father and I got married, and I thought it was all behind me. But I still dream about it – the shouting, the path of lamplight as the door opened, the awful thud of the stone hitting something inside the cottage.’
She laid her hand tentatively on Kate’s arm. ‘I’ll understand if you don’t want us to come tomorrow.’
Kate put her arms awkwardly round her mother, something she had never done before. ‘Of course I want you to come. It’s Christmas.’
Millicent clung to her briefly, then pulled away, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. ‘I’m sorry. But perhaps it’s best to have it out in the open after all these years.’
Kate took a deep breath to steady herself.
‘There’s something else. Fourteen years later, in 1958, there was another attack on the cottage. There was a fire. I think Eddie Stannard, Ed’s son, was probably the instigator on that occasion. I have almost no memories of the first ten years of my life, but I think I remember something about that fire. I keep having nightmares about it. You must know. Was I somehow implicated?’
Her parents looked at each other, then Millicent said in a strangled voice, ‘No, I don’t think I can talk any more,’ and she got up and went out of the room. They could hear her climbing the stairs. Kate and Howard sat in silence. Toby had heard Millicent leave the sitting room, and he came ingratiatingly in, nosing the door open and followed by Sarah. They lay down at Kate’s feet.
‘Dad,’ said Kate, ‘I need to know. Whatever it was, it’s better to know the facts than to go on like this.’
Howard cleared his throat. ‘Yes, I do understand. We tried to shield you, of course, when you were a child. And then your mind seemed to have wiped out any memory of it, so we left well alone. As for facts – well, I don’t know the facts. It’s mostly guesswork.’
‘Tell me the guesswork, then.’
‘It was a November evening, so of course it was dark quite early. The week after Guy Fawkes, and I think that was partly the trouble. Some of those big boys – Eddie and his friends – had made a huge bonfire, and they were all still a bit fire-crazy, I think.’
‘But they were all much older than I was. Why was I there?’
‘They’d been bullying you for years. We didn’t realise, of course, or we’d have done something about it. In fact it was that very day, when I was out looking for you to call you in for your tea, that Dan Wilson mentioned Linda had let something drop. He was afraid they had been making your life a misery. Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’
‘Afterwards, of course, we sent you away to boarding-school as soon as possible.’ He paused, looking out at the bare trees in the long formal rectangle of the Terrace’s private garden.
‘I was coming back along Castle Terrace from the middle of Dunmouth, where I’d run into Dan, when I saw flames suddenly shoot up into the sky from the direction of the cottage on the headland. I didn’t know what to think. It might just have been the boys with another bonfire, or it might have been the cottage. I called out to Bill Herward, who kept the Castle Bar – where the Castle Café is now – to phone for the fire brigade, and I started running. By the time I got to the cottage I could see that the shed was well alight, and there was a gaunt woman I’d never seen before dowsing it with buckets of water. I helped, and so did Bill when he arrived, and between us we managed to put it out, though the building was destroyed. By the time the fire brigade arrived, all they had to do was make sure the fire was really out and the house wasn’t in danger.’
‘Was anyone else about, on the headland? Eddie and the others?’
‘Nobody. But I recalled seeing a crowd of them running along the beach back to Dunmouth as I turned into Castle Terrace. It wasn’t until we’d put the fire out that I remembered I was supposed to be looking for you. I found you eventually, not far away. You were chest deep in the sea, and your clothes were burned to tatters. You kept babbling something about lighting the fire. I carried you home, and as soon as I had you in the light I could see that your arms and legs were covered with burns – great patches as red as poppies.’
Kate pushed up her sleeve and tilted her arm wonderingly, looking at those silvery shadows on her skin.
‘You were very ill for a time, in hospital. You had to have some skin grafts in a couple of places – one on your back and one behind your right knee. And as a result of wandering in the November sea – we don’t know how long – you developed pneumonia.’
‘I don’t remember anything about it.’ But Kate wondered whether her lingering discomfort around hospitals had started then.
‘You never spoke of it, except when I first found you. None of the older children seemed to have a mark on them, so we were afraid – your mother and I,’ he cleared his throat again. ‘We were afraid you were the one who started the fire.’
* * *
The gate in the wall round Sofia’s garden was unlocked when Kate arrived at dusk. She had been walking for hours with the dogs in the secret valley behind the embankment, ever since she had left her parents’ house at the end of the morning. With part of her mind Kate knew that the valley was beautiful – the lace of fallen leaves trimmed with frost, the berries on the rowans scarlet as blood. But most of the time she simply sat on a log near the stream with her arms wrapped around herself, so still that once a squirrel ventured within a yard of her.
Sofia’s garden was still beautiful, but sad, like a lovely woman grown old and fragile, clinging on to her dignity. The bees were hibernating, the hens were shut up, even the goat was in her stall. One last red rose bloomed on a bush by the seat where they had sat in the summer, drinking tea amid all the busy life.
Sofia took one look at Kate, with her mud-stained skirt and lips blue with cold, and at the tired dogs with burrs in their coats, and shooed her into the sitting room where a driftwood fire burned on the hearth. Kate flopped into one of the old, shawl-covered chairs without a word, and she heard Sofia feeding the dogs in the kitchen. Ákos, who had returned to his spot by the fire, raised his head at the sound of his dishes being used, but he had already eaten, and lay down again with his head on Kate’s shoe. The house was filled with the smell of cinnamon and when she closed her eyes she felt as though she was back in Magdolna’s kitchen.
Preceded by the dogs, Sofia came in carrying a tray with a bottle and glasses, and a plate of little cakes.
‘I thought this would be better
than coffee,’ she said, drawing the cork. ‘It is the bottle of his Tokay that József gave me when we came home. I thought we would open it in honour of Christmas.’
‘You may not want to drink with me, Sofia,’ said Kate, ‘when you hear what I have to tell you.’
Sofia looked surprised, but she filled the glasses and waited. Kate told her of the nightmares, and of István’s theory about her mind blanking out some terrible event of her childhood. She held up her arms and showed the pale skin, which he had said was the mark of old burns. Then she began to explain what Howard had told her that morning.
As she was speaking, Sofia carried over a glass of wine and placed it beside her, with some of the little cakes on a plate. Then she took her own wine to the other chair and listened in silence until Kate had finished.
‘So you see,’ said Kate, ‘I will quite understand if you do not want me for a friend. A vicious little arsonist, who tried to burn your house down.’
Sofia raised her glass to Kate, then took a sip.
‘My dear Kate,’ she said, ‘I have always known who you were, from the time we met by the rock pool, back in May.’
‘You knew!’
‘Of course. I thought at first that you did also, but then I came to see that you had truly forgotten, and I did not want to waken painful memories.’
‘But, Sofia...’
‘Listen. Your father is right about the things he saw – the fire and how he helped me put it out, the crowd of older boys and girls running away. But he is wrong about the things he did not see.’
She paused, sipped her wine again, and Kate, without noticing, drank some of hers and bit into a cake. She realised suddenly that she had eaten nothing since early morning.
‘I was upstairs changing my clothes. I’d soaked my skirt fishing for crabs, so I didn’t see the crowd of you arrive. Then I heard a noise and I looked out of the window. The biggest boy had you in an arm lock, and he was waving a crude torch of twigs in your face, trying to force you to set fire to the shed with it. You were fighting him like a wild-cat, I may say. I saw you bite him. I flung up the window and shouted at them, and that must have made him give up the attempt to force you. He dropped you on the ground and pushed the torch under a broken plank in the side of the shed.’
Sofia closed her eyes, remembering.
‘It was a dry frosty night, like tonight, and the wood caught immediately. The rest of them ran off at once, and I rushed down the stairs and out into the garden, because my dog was shut in the shed. I had a bitch then, with young puppies, and I hadn’t wanted them to follow me down on to the beach when it was getting dark. Honey was howling in terror at the fire, and with fear for the pups, and there you were. You hadn’t run away with the rest of them – you were tearing at the burning planks, trying to get to the dog. I pulled you away, but your clothes were already on fire, so I rolled you up in some old sacks to try to put the flames out.’
‘The dog,’ said Kate, anguished, ‘I can still hear the dog.’
‘She was fine. I unlocked the door of the shed – which was on the side away from the fire – and got her and the puppies out safely. I don’t know why you hadn’t opened the door yourself – the key was in the lock – but you were only a child and I think you were half crazy with fear and pain by then.’
Kate stared at Sofia. Tears of relief were pouring unnoticed down her face.
‘Once the dogs were out, I went back to where I’d left you, but you’d disappeared. From what you’ve just told me I realise that you must have run into the sea to ease the burning. Then your father arrived, and another man, and we put out the fire between us. I didn’t know then that he was your father, or that he was looking for you. Since my mother’s death I hadn’t mixed much with the people of Dunmouth. And I assumed you had just run off home when you saw the dogs were safe. I had no idea you had been so ill.’
For a long time they sat in silence. Kate thought about the events of that night, which had remained in her memory as a blur of pain and guilt and fear, while Sofia had always known the true story. At last Sofia leaned forward and took both of Kate’s hands in hers.
‘I am so sorry, my dear. I would have told you long ago if I had realised you didn’t understand what happened.’
‘I’ve felt so guilty,’ said Kate. ‘I knew there was something here I should be ashamed of, but it was all confused in my mind.’
‘You had nothing to be guilty of. Quite the reverse, in fact. You risked your life to save my dogs. And that boy, Eddie Stannard, he more than compensated for it later, when the lifeboat was lost.’
‘Yes.’
Sofia turned and reached down beside her chair, where Zsigmond Niklai’s leather-bound diaries were piled.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever shown you this, Kate. It was the passage in my father’s diary which most set me wondering what had become of him. I felt guilt too, guilt at being the one who had survived, when my mother was dead and my father left behind. But you will see, he felt guilt too. Guilt simply to have been born who he was – privileged, wealthy, when people in his country were poor and starving.’
She began to turn over the pages, looking for the passage.
‘István felt guilt,’ said Kate slowly. ‘The guilt of the survivor, he said. He believed that if Zsigmond had gone without saying goodbye to him and Magdolna, he might have escaped.’
Sofia said nothing, but touched her hand gently.
‘Here it is,’ she said, holding the open book out to her and translating aloud.
Suppose, after all, we were to be called to account for our deeds in this world before some ultimate tribunal. The past made present, confronting us as it truly was – not as our flinching memories recall it – could prove appalling. But might there have been, even in our darkest acts, the seeds of redemption?
What if we could turn aside, walk through the unnoticed door into a hidden garden, and find there the past, ready to be lived again? Willing to be reshaped, fashioned from chaos into harmony and order? If the hurtling train of life could pause at the station, the hands of the clock stop.
If we could have another chance.
* * *
István had come home for Christmas. Anna was back from Budapest, András was on holiday from school, and the house was full of the spicy smells of festive cooking. And, remarkably, László would soon be here. Over the months since his visit to his son with Kate in the summer, István had travelled south three times to see László, acting on Kate’s suggestion that the rift between them might be bridgeable. He had tried to show his son that he had accepted his vocation to the priesthood, that it need not stand between them. Gradually, László was thawing towards his father. Last week he had telephoned István before he left Sopron for Szentmargit and said that he would join the rest of the family at Magdolna’s house two days after Christmas. He could not come for the festival itself as he was needed in his parish, but he had arranged with Father Pál to take a week’s holiday afterwards, his first since he had taken up his ministry.
István reflected, as he walked along the river path in the dusk, that his son’s intense commitment to his vocation for the last six years had probably contributed to the division between them. László had been determined to excel in his studies, and had thrown himself into his ministry with impassioned zeal, as the new freedom in Hungary resulted in more and more people turning to the Church – not just the old, who had retained their faith from pre-communist days, but the young, born under communism, and new to Christianity.
He needs a holiday, thought István. Some quiet time here in Szentmargit will do him good, and help us to get to know each other again.
László had not been in the village since his mid-teens, had lost touch with his cousins. In the past Anna had been an adoring shadow, András just a toddler. Their bright young company would help László ease off that stern armour he had adopted.
István’s feet crunched over the snow. No one had walked here since it had fallen a few days a
go, and this evening’s hard frost had crusted it over so that it had the texture of cake icing on the surface, but where his boots broke through into the softer snow beneath they squeaked against it, compressing it into deeper hollows where his footsteps fell.
He reached the bridge and leaned in his favourite place on the handrail, which was sheathed in ice. The trout stream below his feet was frozen, but deeper down beneath the locked ice he could make out the secret, constant movement of the stream. The Danube itself was frozen, here among the small islands. He could have walked across the water to the island where he had taken Kate for a picnic. The cold ashes of their fire would be lying under a foot of snow. The moon was rising now, over to his right, where the marsh was a forest of frozen reeds, standing clustered in silhouette like the spears of the silent wooden warriors he had seen with Kate at Mohács.
The herons had gone, the grey herons from their nest on the roof of the csárda, the rare blue herons from the marsh – flown away to the warmth of the Nile and its papyrus beds. Even the hunting owls were silent. Everything, on this bitter Christmas Eve, was frozen and still.
Kate had not written. She had promised to write by Christmas with her decision, but he remembered – as he counted the last days – that she had not said whether she meant she would send the letter by Christmas, or he would receive it by then. He might allow himself a few more days to hope.
The bell from the Church of Szent Margit began to ring out for the Christmas Eve family service. The air was so still that it sounded as clearly to him here on the bridge as it would have under the bare branches of the walnut tree, where the leaves and nuts of the coming year were already forming in some hidden part of the old tree’s being. István gripped the icy rail of the bridge, feeling the cold flow into his hands and the warmth of his own blood melt the ice and reveal the rough wood beneath.
‘I haven’t given up hope, Kate,’ he said.
* * *
When Kate left Sofia’s cottage it was getting dark. Soon she must go back to the house on Harbour Walk and cook dinner, and make the final preparations for Christmas. But first she walked out along the rocky headland which projected beyond the cottage into the sea. The dogs, puzzled but game, followed her – ranging about, sniffing at interesting deposits left by the sea, peering into rock pools where reflected stars swam amongst the sea anemones. Out towards the end of the point the going became more difficult, and Kate had to crouch and use her hands to scramble over the broken rocks, which were coated with treacherous, half-frozen seaweed and a slick covering of ice.
