At one point in this eulogy, which had something of an obsessional edge, Tessa began to wonder if there was more to this scientific brotherhood than met the eye. She studied the man’s gestures, watched his expression. She wondered how one ever knew what men were to each other unless they came out openly and told you. And even then.
She also wondered why Stephen had never said anything to her about Jan Martin. The fact that he hadn’t incensed her. It also made her glad that she was now being as duplicitous as he was. A gleeful tingle of vengeance went through her.
Just then she heard Jan Martin say, ‘And of course, one cannot bury the recent past and all the grudges and bitter memories that come with it. But to mire oneself in vengeance is destructive for a nation. After all, so many are implicated. No, we have to strike a balance between the past and the present. It is delicate and difficult.’
Tessa coloured at her own paltry version of vengeance and nodded. ‘Very difficult. Perhaps more difficult than anything else.’
‘For our children’s sake.’
‘Yes,’ Tessa burbled.
‘The generations succeed each other so quickly. You see our waitress, over there, with the three rings in her ear. For her 1968, so important to our historians, is as boring and uninteresting as her parents. But you must be all too aware of that, coming from a university town.’
‘Too aware,’ she echoed.
Just before they got up, Tessa asked him, ‘And when did you meet Dr. Caldwell?’
‘Oh many years ago. When we were both still young men. But you shall perhaps meet him. He was called away but he will return to Prague soon. Unfortunately he will miss the opening of our Congress.’
Tessa hid her confusion. Stephen in Prague. Something else he had omitted to tell her. She must make sure she didn’t bump into him. Not now. Not when she had plans for Ted. Though the thought of Stephen’s surprise should Ted or Jan let her name drop in conversation rather thrilled her. Bumping into him, face to face, was another story. She had the sudden sensation that they were circling round each other like hawks, but that at any moment, one of them might become the other’s prey. It was better to keep circling.
‘No, no, that’s mine. I insist. Ted Knight insists,’ She took the bill the waitress had handed to Jan and busied herself with the paying of it.
‘If you are going in my direction, I shall be happy to show you some sights on my way to the Institute.’
Tessa accepted gladly. As they walked, she found herself thinking how different this man’s quick, light gait was from Ted’s energetic stride. Then she found herself wondering what he might be like in bed and she called herself a heartless whore and asked him, ‘Do you have a family?’
He made a sound which was not quite a laugh. ‘A lovely daughter and an estranged wife.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘No, no. Don’t be sorry.’ He took her arm to lead her round a noisy group of tourists and down a little cobbled sidestreet. He pointed to twin Gothic towers capped by what looked like nothing so much as sorcerer’s hats. ‘You can visit Tycho Brahe’s tombstone in there. Perhaps not now. Or I shall have to leave you.’
She matched her pace to his.
‘You know,’ he said in a voice so low she wasn’t sure she was meant to hear, ‘sometimes, only when things get a little better,’ he gestured expansively around them, ‘do you realise how bad they have really become. Or maybe, it’s just that when life becomes about more than blunt surviving, you learn about wanting. This is what happened to my wife and me. Or perhaps it is simpler still. We had grown tired of each other and loyalty became less important than truth.’ He laughed with soft irony. ‘Like the story of my country in recent years. Truth won out over party loyalty.’
They paused on the curb to let a large cement mixer inch its way into a narrow corner. ‘But my friend Stephen is disappointed in me.’
‘Oh? He’s fond of your wife?
‘That too.’ He glanced at her oddly, ‘You know. I feel I already know you quite well.’
‘The Cambridge connection.’ Tessa mumbled, extricated her arm. They had come out on a market square crowded with stalls. There were heaps of grotesque puppets, apples, potatoes, scarfs and amulets and hippy gear from India. ‘This isn’t actually so different either.’
‘Except to us it’s new. A shopping revolution. You don’t approve?’
‘I approve, though it’s hardly for me to do so.’
‘But you English are so good at morality.’
‘Are we?’
‘Yes.’ He met her eyes for a moment with the intensity of his. ‘You can help me with a problem I have. If a friend were to offer you something very precious which he shouldn’t be offering you, but which he wanted to give you and wanted you to accept and which you wanted, but couldn’t really accept, would you accept or refuse?’
‘First I’d have to have the proposition repeated,’ Tessa smiled. ‘Several times. I’m not sure my morality is subtle enough.’
‘But only then does it becomes interesting.’
‘Are you going to fill in the blanks?’
He looked perplexed.
‘I mean give me a for instance. Tell me about the friend, about the you, about the gift?’
‘Would that make a big difference?’
‘I think so.’
‘But there isn’t the time now. We’ll meet again, yes?’ He pulled a card from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. ‘And there on the second street to the left, you have a very interesting church. St Cyril’s. You will see. It is a surprise.’ He stretched out his hand to her, bowed slightly. ‘Give my best regards to Edward Knight.’
She watched him walk hurriedly up the street, his shoulders tensed, his head bent in concentration. An interesting man, she thought. Decidedly an interesting man.
It came to her as she walked in the direction Jan Martin had pointed her that the world from which Stephen had so secretively excluded her grew richer daily. The anger lay heavy in her stomach, but it was overlaid by something else - a wonder, perhaps a fascination. What else would she find in this shifting world in which he seemed to appear in a different guise behind every tree?
Tessa glanced at her watch. It was two-forty. She would just have time to inspect the church before going back, a little late, to Ted. Her pulse raced ahead of her footsteps. Tonight. Tonight she would ask him. He had already given her so much. A new confidence. A new sense of herself. And now there was only a tiny transparent sheath of a border to cross. He couldn’t refuse her.
She clenched her hands into fists and stared up at the unprepossessing wall of the church towards a plump dome. Half way up, fresh flowers graced the wall, above them photographs, a plaque, like a small shrine. She climbed up the stairs and read the inscription, then turned to her guidebook.
St Cyril’s was the church in which the British-trained Czech paratroopers who had assassinated Heydrich, the author of the Final Solution, had holed up, only to bring upon themselves the full wrath of the Gestapo. It was the site of a bloody battle. The two men had killed themselves with their last bullets, after having held out against 350 Germans for the length of a night. In retribution, the Nazis had killed some five thousand people, exterminated, in June 1942, the entire village of Lidice. The barbarity marked a turning point, stirred, as Anthony Eden had proclaimed, the conscience of the civilised world. After that, the British at last repudiated the Munich Agreement.
Tessa stared at the blurred photographs of two fresh-faced young men and shuddered at a history she had been lucky enough to escape. It made her own little drama negligible, a mere question of unfulfilled desires, of mundane frustrations and reproofs.
Chastened, she made her way into the church. The heavy doors opened on a space that was oddly intimate, informal, like someone’s sitting room. Yet her heels echoed on stone, invading silence. There was a man standing in the midst of the room, gazing towards where an altar should have been. He was very thin, haggard, an old tramp she tho
ught until he turned towards her and she realised he was very young, with jutting features, skin tautly stretched over bone. Furtively, he walked past her.
She penetrated deeper into the church. She was all alone now amidst the lingering smell of incense and she realised from the screen where the altar should have been that she was in an orthodox church, the sanctuary separated from the nave by what should have been an icon-covered wall punctuated by three doors. She remembered reading about that somewhere. An iconostasis, that’s what it was called. Yet here there were very few icons on the stasis.
Tessa perched on a rickety wooden chair and stared up into the dome. She wondered about those blurred youths in the photographs, how they had felt as the guns began their fire and their own deaths came closer. A dizziness took hold of her.
Suddenly a cry pierced the stillness. Tessa leapt up. Behind her, half-hidden by shadows, she saw a woman with streaming dark hair, a shapeless dress. Clutched to her bared breast was an infant. She looked like some savage madonna for whom beatitude was not even a dream. Tessa stared, then turned away guiltily, as if she had interrupted a secret rite.
She edged towards the front of the church, pretended to examine stone and sculpture on the way. At her back she heard the woman’s footsteps, then her voice, insistent, incomprehensible. She felt a tug on her arm. She turned, to be confronted by a barrage of sound. The woman seemed to be pleading. Her eyes were very black, her face thin where it might once have been voluptuous. She was holding the baby, a tiny bundle in a worn blanket, out to her. Beneath it her hands were outstretched.
Tessa reached into her bag, took out bills as meaningless as the verbal currency, handed them to the woman who looked and smiled and holding up five fingers, stretched the baby towards her.
Tessa took the child, cradled it, while the woman put the money into a shiny skier’s purse belt which sat oddly on her stained cotton frock. She kept talking all the while. Tessa gazed into the infant’s face. It was all big staring eyes and tiny slightly chapped lips in a grubby blanket. A minute hand flew at her, tugged at her beads, randomly touched her face. She folded her little finger into its grasp and made a gurgling sound at it.
‘Pretty baby,’ she said more coherently to the woman, but when she looked up there was no woman. She was gone. Tessa peered into the shadowy corners of the church.
‘Your mama will be back in a moment,’ she crooned, suddenly understanding the woman’s gestures. She sat down and held the baby close, rocking it. ‘Just a few more minutes.’
But when the few minutes had passed and then a few more and the church took on the hollow silence of unpeopled stone, an odd feeling came over her. Tessa sat very still. Her mind was playing tricks on her. The woman would be back soon. She sang the baby a song, then another. It was sleeping now, its little face all soft, dark lashes shadowing pale cheeks. It didn’t smell very good, not like the infants she knew, with their powders and milky lotions. More like musty old socks left for too long in Wellies in some back cupboard. Poor little mite. She held it closer. It was cold in the church and the rough checkered blanket had begun to feel distinctly damp. Perhaps the mother had gone off to buy provisions.
Tessa glanced at her watch. An hour. She couldn’t have been sitting here for an hour already. Panic pricked at her with icy fingers. She forced it away. The woman would be back soon. Should she leave the child here for her? No, she couldn’t do that. It would wake in terror. She rocked the baby with simulated calm and stared at where the altar should have been.
The door of the church creaked open and she saw an old man come in, cross himself. She walked swiftly toward him and tried to ask about the baby, its mother, but he looked at her with the same incomprehension she had felt when the child’s mother had spoken to her. And now the child woke up and started to whimper, then cry and the man shooed her towards the door with impatient gestures.
She went out and looked up and down the road. There was no woman with streaming dark hair and shapeless dress. She had known there wouldn’t be. There were only two men, their thin jagged faces half hidden beneath coat collars, lurking at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t like the dark eyes they turned on her with a glint of malevolence.
Tessa walked blindly down the stairs. The full force of her predicament suddenly hit her. The woman had gone, gone deliberately. Had she taken Tessa’s money in exchange for the child? She looked at the little mite, quiet now in the fresh air. What should she do? It was a nice baby and she felt a stir of temptation as it waved its little hand at her face. But one couldn’t just run away with someone else’s baby.
She tried to see whether any side doors might lead to priests or wardens, but the structure of the church was as solid and unyielding as a barricade.
Police. She would have to find a police station. She spotted a woman further down the street and chased after her.
‘Police station. I’m looking for a police station.’
The woman gave her a blank stare.
‘Polizei,’ she tried German. ‘Bitte,’ she managed to add and then for good measure added, ‘s’il vous plaît, la police’.
A tentative response came into the woman’s square face, but when she started to speak, Tessa understood nothing, tried instead to follow her gestures.
‘A gauche,’ the woman finally said, pointing to a street on the left, ‘A droit et à gauche.’ She traced a complicated map in the air, then held up five fingers.
‘Five minutes away,’ Tessa interpreted, thanked her, set off in what she hoped was the right direction, downhill and then along to the left, balancing the baby on her hip. She prayed it wouldn’t start to wail, draw attention to them. This street was a busier one and she kept her eyes open in case the mother turned up. Perhaps she would. Perhaps she would accuse her of kidnapping, demand more money.
Tessa felt she would gladly give her everything she had, but whether to keep her quiet, avoid embarrassment or to keep the baby, she wasn’t sure. It snuggled against her now, warm and damp and helpless, its little face against her breast. She tried to keep panic at bay. There was still no police station in sight. She stopped someone else on the street, a youth this time and repeated her query, but he shrugged, gave her an odd look, then pointed vaguely in the direction of another church.
Her guide book, Tessa thought. It might help. As she unearthed it clumsily from her bag, she heard footsteps coming up on her from behind and she veered round half in fear, half in expectation. But the man passed right by her, his face averted. She tried to read her guide book round the baby’s bulk, but whether there was simply no listing for police or whether she was too nervous to see properly, she found nothing.
She walked on past the designated church which sat astride a little mound banked by high walls. The street had grown quiet again, graceful with the tracery of trees and newly stuccoed houses. It didn’t feel like the route to a police station. She pushed back the tears which bit at her eyes, found herself babbling nonsense at the infant, which had grown heavier in her arms.
When she looked up, she saw in the middle distance a man in hat and coat standing by a wrought-iron grill and bending towards a gate. Stephen, she thought to herself in wonder, only to realise with a dejected shiver that she was conjuring him up out of distress and a decade-old habit.
She walked on, more quickly now, almost running. It had started to drizzle, sleet really. She tried to shield the child with her coat. She would have to get it some food soon, a bottle. How did one say bottle in Czech? Had she passed any chemists? She looked around for a green cross. And then she saw it, right there in front of her, on the corner of the street, a shabby nondescript building with the letters P O L I C I A half obscured above its door.
She slowed her steps, passed a hand through her hair. Hoping she didn’t look as unhinged as she felt, she took a deep breath and with a last cooing sound at the infant, pushed open the door.
The large shabby room was all but deserted. A solitary policeman with grey indoor skin and skimp
y hair sat behind a desk with an antique portable typewriter at its centre. He looked up at her with singular disinterest.
Tessa started to explain and as she spoke she realised that he understood hardly a word.
‘French, Français?’ She asked.
He shook his head, motioned for her to sit down. He disappeared into a back room and came back with an older man in plain clothes who proceeded to address her in German.
‘English or French,’ Tessa insisted.
The baby began to wail. The two men looked at them in sullen displeasure and for a moment she thought they were about to show her to the door. She hushed the child, grappled in her pocket for some tissues with which to wipe its face. A card came out with the tissues. Jan Martin. She stared at it and then pointed towards the telephone.
‘Dolmetscher,’ she said. ‘Interpreter’.
The uniformed policeman passed her the telephone.
What had her sister told her about hungry, crying babies, Tessa tried to remember as she dialled and prayed that Jan Martin would be in.
A man’s voice answered on the third ring.
‘Dr. Martin?’ she asked. Simultaneously, she put her little finger into the infant’s mouth, felt the suck, the relief of quiet. The double relief of the ‘Yes,’ at the other end of the line.
‘Dr. Martin, I’m so very sorry to trouble you, but I’m in a police station and no one understands me. I need someone to translate. Do you think you might?’
She explained as succinctly as she could and passed the telephone over to the officers who looked at her and the grizzling child with growing disquiet as they listened, then handed the phone back to her.
‘I shall be with you in a few minutes. I’m not far away. Would you wish me to ring Mr. Knight.’
‘Please, that would be kind. Just say I’ll be late.’
Tessa sat down on the single wooden bench and tried to calm the fretful child. The officers stared at her as if she were some troublesome leper who had come to ruin their afternoon. With sudden decision, she thrust the baby into the older one’s arms, and said loudly, ‘Pharmacy. Chemist.’ She made a sucking gesture with her lips and held an invisible bottle to her mouth.
The Things We Do For Love Page 16
