‘I don’t know what to say,’ David says. ‘My father sounds like a monster.’ He puts a hand to his head. I picture the wires of his brain that have been firing the wrong kind of electricity. Are they still causing him problems?
‘He was . . . my husband.’ I cooked his meals and walked to meet him from work in the evenings, and I did those things because I wanted to. ‘He could be, oh, so kind, so perceptive. He could make me feel he was the only person who could understand me. I don’t think you can fake that kind of thing, not completely.’
David puts his hand down. ‘Once we were in the pool, in Greece with the Holderns. I was about six. He was keen for me to swim. I was scared, couldn’t let go of the side. James told Dad just to throw me in: quickest way to get over a funk.’
Again my hand clenches the cheese knife.
‘Dad ignored him. He pulled me out of the water and sat me on his lap. He described all the feelings I had, what I thought would happen when I let go of the side, how my head would go under and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. It was as if he could see inside me. He told me I didn’t have to swim, but also to think of going back to London and telling my friends I’d done a whole length by myself. He described how I’d have this warm glow inside me, how the other kids would look at me. How good that would feel. I got off his lap and jumped in, to the shallow end, mind you, and swam three strokes unaided.’ He peels an orange, seeming reflective. I feel the need to pull him back to me.
‘Do you have photos of the family?’ I ask. David pulls a wallet out of his jacket pocket. ‘I didn’t have much time to pack, my Balkan drivers were . . . insistent, but there should be a picture in here. A bit out of date. They were still at school when we took this. We were skiing in France.’ A woman with bobbed blonde hair. Two blond children who must have been in their mid-teens when the picture was taken. I devour them, find bits of my parents in their features. And something of Robert, too, particularly in Sophie, whose stance on her skis is panther-like. Her eyes are slightly narrowed in concentration as she smiles for the camera. I sense purposefulness. Michael is perhaps a little like my mother: nonchalant, amused. I express these observations to David. He laughs.
‘I wish Michael had been more purposeful in his A-levels, but he’s worked hard since he’s been at university. Sophie is quite driven. She’s in the sixth form.’
David tells me more about my grandchildren as we eat and drink. I tell him more about Mama and Dad. David outlines his own work in the Geology department. I wish my father could have heard him talk; they share a love of minerals and rocks. They should have spent time together, years back, before my father died. Anger floods me. I take a breath, trying to hide how I feel from my son. Robert was his father, after all.
‘It was so wrong,’ David says, perhaps seeing this struggle play on my features. ‘All of it, but perhaps the worst bit was telling me you were dead. But . . .’ He stops. On his face I can see a mixture of pain and something else: a question, perhaps even an accusation. And a fair one, too.
‘You’re wondering why I didn’t make contact myself years ago?’
‘I do understand that you thought you were sparing me some kind of stigma,’ he adds.
I explain the places where I have lived, how the life there, even when you’re not medicated, becomes so contained, so removed, that the thought of doing anything other than the quotidian is impossible.
‘There’s something else,’ David says. ‘I don’t know if it helps or not. Dad let me think you’d been mad. That you’d died. But he also told me you had been a very brave young woman, had carried out a secret mission he couldn’t describe. “Heroine” was the word he used. He said I could be proud of you.’
I bow my head to the table. For minutes I can’t speak. I have to acknowledge something I have struggled with all these years: despite all he did to me, a small part of me has retained love for Robert. And I still believe he loved me. He deprived me of my child and my freedom in order to protect himself, but Robert was a man who could split himself into parts. He taught me to be someone else during my operation and it was a lesson he himself had learnt well.
‘Dad also showed me some photos of you, on your wedding day. He told me you were beautiful. I see you still are.’
Our fingers touch briefly, just the tips, over the table.
‘I didn’t stab him, you know.’ We haven’t yet talked about the particular incident that had me locked up.
‘What?’ David stares at me. ‘Stab him? That was the reason they sent you to the mental hospital?’ He sounds shocked. Robert spared our son this detail. David pushes the plate aside and stares at the table.
‘That scar on your father’s abdomen?’ He won’t believe it wasn’t me. ‘It was on his right side, wasn’t it?’ I continue.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m right-handed.’ I show him the cheese knife in my hand. ‘And I was trained in combat. If I’d wanted to inflict a serious or fatal wound, I would have done it properly.’ David frowns but then nods.
‘James started to say something about the scar once but Cecilia shut him up.’
I lean forward. I have long wondered whether James knew the truth about what had happened in that scuffle in Robert’s study. At least Robert didn’t tell our son the lie about me stabbing him. Perhaps he had enough decency not to claim I’d done that to him.
We sit in silence for a moment.
David puts a hand to his head again. ‘I’m still finding this a lot to make sense of. That he would do something like that to himself.’
My son is a child of the peace. He cannot think of cut flesh without being shocked. I am pleased that this is so.
‘Would you mind if I rang Paula?’
‘Help yourself.’ I point to the receiver. ‘I’ll step outside for a cigarette.’ I stand in my garden, shaking, looking at the last of the asters, waiting. David doesn’t believe me about the stabbing. Why did I mention it?
Perhaps Paula will tell him to come home straight away, if there’s a train he can catch at this time on a Sunday night. Everything has unfolded so abruptly. He must need time to think, to reflect. And perhaps it’s been enough. What have I been hoping for? Why would he want to bring an elderly woman like me into his family?
I look for my snail. I want to see what words its slow trail is forming. But the snail does not show itself.
David opens the back door. ‘I didn’t mean to banish you. Sorry. The conversation lasted longer than I thought it would.’
Paula definitely told him to come straight home and leave the mad mother. David looks pale. ‘I think we need another slivovitz,’ I say.
He puts a hand to his throat. ‘I don’t suppose you have any wine or beer?’
He reminds me of myself when Branko offered me a flask of some fiery Balkan spirit on my first night with the Partisans.
‘May I look at the crystals?’ he asks when we’ve each drunk a glass of claret.
It’s a good plan. Gives us time to absorb what’s been said, to process it. I unlock the little mahogany cabinet, which came from the cottage in Trpca, stored on my parents’ deaths and restored to me when I moved here.
‘Who’s this little fellow?’ He points at the rabbit.
‘He’s yours.’
David’s eyebrows rise.
‘I bought him for you before you were born. Then I put him in my handbag and forgot all about him. Somehow he never went with you . . . when you went to the Holderns.’
David picks up the rabbit. ‘I like his expression.’
‘Take him,’ I say. I bite my lip. Why would a middle-aged man want a soft toy?
‘I’d love to.’ His fingers tighten on the rabbit. ‘But won’t you miss him?’
‘No.’ The word starts as a lie because, in fact, the toy has become something of a silent companion since I moved here. But as I say it, I realise that I am delighted that it might finally be united with my son, even so many years too late.
David puts the rabbit on the tab
le beside his empty wine glass and returns to the cabinet, picking up crystals and minerals, looking at them. Something in his eyes reminds me of my father again. It gives me confidence. I can make this easier: show David that he doesn’t have to have split loyalties.
‘Robert was under a huge strain just before you were born,’ I say. ‘He might have wanted to confide in me.’ I can still remember my husband’s expression at times when he looked at me. ‘I found out about what he’d done. He had to think quickly. He got me locked away, but he chose Woodlands for me, knowing that Dr Rosenstein was regarded as enlightened.’
Robert wanted me on the right side of the green baize door, treated gently. Perhaps the couple of years he estimated I would be locked away would give him time to cover his tracks. Perhaps he could persuade me to say nothing when I came out. I might forget key parts of what I’d seen or be nudged into interpreting them in a different light. But I recovered more rapidly than he had anticipated. He wasn’t ready. His dealings with the Chetniks might still get out.
‘You mentioned Greece?’ I say. A country where the British authorities couldn’t touch him.
‘He spent a lot of his time in Athens or on an island where he owned a small house.’
While I sat in grey day rooms Robert was out in the bright sunshine, free to come and go as he pleased. The mellower feelings I have been experiencing towards my former husband fall away. He didn’t deserve his freedom. He was the criminal, not I. If he was here in this room I might take the cheese knife and stab him, for real this time.
Ana comes suddenly into my mind. Fierce, passionate Ana, who wouldn’t think twice about killing an enemy; and yet she’s speaking to me now and her words are words of reason. She tells me that rage destroys the good with the bad. Anger now will drive my son away from me. Ana was furious with Miko for joining the Chetniks, but when it came to it, the desire to heal him was stronger than her rage.
This is no time for anger.
David is still holding a silvery grey rock in his hand. Galena: a lead sulphide. He twists it so that its little speckles glint in the light. I remember my mother dusting these same minerals in the display case when we lived in Kosovo. They’d catch the sunlight and reflect it around the sitting room of our cottage in beams of white, silver, gold and violet. Mama would have spent part of the afternoon in the kitchen, letting the Serbian cook put her feet up, stoning plums or cherries for one of the cakes she loved to bake for my father and me. She would have let me beat the eggs, or scrape out the mixture into the baking tray. My father would come in, sniffing at the fragrant aroma. I should tell David about these scenes.
It’s late now on an autumn night in London, but some of the Balkan sunlight seems to enter the small bungalow. ‘I should find the photographs of our house in Kosovo,’ I tell David. ‘Those were happy days. And our holidays on the Dalmatian coast were good ones, too.’ Somewhere there’s a photo of my father and me in a canoe, paddling on a sunny Adriatic.
My own child and I have only known one another for a few hours in our entire lifetimes. Much between us remains wary, uncertain. But now I sense something else between my son and me: a willingness to try to know one another, to push beyond the past.
It’s late, but David and I have time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As far as I know, the only female agent operating in Yugoslavia during the Second World War who could possibly be classed as British is Hannah Szenes (sometimes written as Senesh), a young Jewish woman in her early twenties, originally from Budapest, whose family had sent her to safety in Mandate Palestine. Hannah, a poet, volunteered to train as a British paratrooper and landed in Yugoslavia in 1944, on an operation very similar to that of my fictional character, Naomi. Hannah made it (just) into Hungary, but was almost immediately arrested and eventually executed. Amber and her operation are entirely fictional, but loosely based on the work carried out by a number of British and Allied operatives in Yugoslavia during the middle and latter stages of the war in Europe. Because the war in Yugoslavia is so complicated (even Robert’s cake is a simplification), keen military historians will probably notice some details have been simplified, although I sincerely hope that the main thrust of the story of the Partisans and Chetniks remains true to life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As has been the case with pretty well every book of the nine I have written, special thanks go to Kristina Riggle and Johnnie Graham for reading and providing me with sensitive and probing comments on various drafts of this book. A big thank you to Sammia Hamer, Victoria Pepe, Celine Kelly, Emilie Marneur, Bekah Graham, Hatty Stiles, Sana Chebaro, Emma Coode and Trevor Horwood. Thanks also to my children for bearing with me cluttering up the kitchen table with my laptop and research books. A pat to Isla for providing entertainment and exercise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eliza Graham spent biology lessons reading Jean Plaidy novels behind the textbooks, sitting at the back of the classroom. In English and history lessons, by contrast, she sat right at the front, hanging on to every word. At home she read books while getting dressed and cleaning her teeth. During school holidays she visited the public library multiple times a day.
At Oxford University she read English literature on a course that regarded anything post 1930 as too modern to be included. Despite this, she retains a love of Victorian novels. Eliza lives in an ancient village in the Oxfordshire countryside with her family. Her interests (still) mainly revolve around reading, but she also enjoys walking in the downland country around her home.
Find out more about Eliza on her website: www.elizagrahamauthor.com or on Facebook: @ElizaGrahamUK.
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