The Irishman did not reply because this was one lesson Georgi had taught him. You must know nothing and be nobody to survive. Brendan savoured a strange emotion. It was not anger or pity for Georgi, or revenge. What he felt in the depth of his soul was triumph. He was still living while that bastard was dead. He had outwitted the fox. He could still piss and shit and eat while his puppet master would be stacked tomorrow with the other corpses to be subtracted from the cargo list. Yasili nudged him, producing something from inside the rags that constituted his clothes.
‘These belonged to the Pole,’ he whispered. ‘In all the excitement I slipped them off. He would have wanted you to have them. The gold fields aren’t so bad really. Winter only lasts twelve months – the rest of the year is a blaze of summer.’
Brendan took the shoes. They were worn thin but it didn’t matter. Even hunger did not trouble him just now, as he considered how more horrific Lubyanka must have been for Georgi who would have known in advance the details of every torture to be inflicted on him. In Barcelona, Georgi had wanted them to go whoring together – a test to see who would last the longest, but Brendan had always known that he would win. Tomorrow in Magadan, when Georgi’s body was being doused with petrol and burnt, he would still be standing, shuffling towards the Kolyma gold fields in the shoes of a dead man.
TWENTY-EIGHT
An Encounter
London, October 1940
Eva caught the two-thirty train from Oxford, hoping to meet Freddie at Paddington Station at four o’clock for drinks before going to dine with two fellow officers and their wives. She knew how difficult it was to organise such a meal in London at present. In all likelihood it would end with diners and waiters uneasily sharing the nearest air raid shelter, because London had been bombed without a break for the past fifty-six nights.
Two nights ago, after she arrived from Ireland, Freddie had introduced her to the two other wives and Eva instantly hated their piercing laughter and how they had called another wife ‘common’ for referring to writing paper as notepaper. She dreaded having to endure their company again, but knew how important it was for Freddie to show her off. Tomorrow she could escape back to Ireland but this evening she would play the dutiful wife and make him at least seem proud of her.
However, as the train neared London an inspector announced the presence of an unexploded bomb on the track near Ladbroke Grove. Passengers would have to disembark at White City, if and when the train reached there. No passengers complained, even when the driver reduced his speed to five miles an hour. Refusing to smile at setbacks was considered as unpatriotic as loose talk. People must make do and mend, as Mother had said last night in Oxford, using her time in the air raid shelter to patch up an old jacket of Father’s and join women from the Royal Air Force Comforts Committee in knitting socks for young pilots at the nearby airfields. Last night there had been none of the impromptu air raid shelter singsongs that Eva had heard about. People were too preoccupied by the latest rumours of a planned German invasion, which was only being delayed by the last-ditch courage of the Spitfire pilots who were buying Churchill time. Nobody mentioned the rumour aloud, just like nobody would discuss it now on this train, because loose talk in public cost lives. But Eva knew that behind their exhausted smiles people were anticipating the worst. This nightly blitzkrieg was to soften them up before the attack. For weeks, people had been snatching whatever sleep they could, never knowing the moment when they would have to dig or be dug out by their neighbours. When visiting old haunts from her art student days, Eva had been shocked to find the church of Austin Friars and the High Altar of St Paul’s destroyed. But London was also alive in a way she never experienced before. If she was not a mother she would happily stay here to share this suffering, spending her nights not with officers’ wives but with the ordinary population in underground stations and digging with them in the rubble of each dawn.
But two children in Ireland were dependent on her and she had to get back. Maureen was minding them in Glanmire House, having taken a week’s holidays from Mr Devlin’s shop. Eva felt guilty at taking the risk of leaving them, just like she felt guilty in Ireland when imagining Freddie alone here. Her sense of duty as a wife was partly responsible for this present visit. But there was also her duty as a daughter. Last night in Oxford she had once again tried to persuade her parents to return to Donegal. Father would not hear of it. He might be old but by volunteering as an air raid warden he wanted to play some role in the fight against fascism. His quiet resoluteness had reminded her of Brendan. Mother also refused to leave, feeling that she had more chance of getting information about Brendan by writing to the Foreign Office from an English address. Last night she showed Eva the curt non-committal replies. The Foreign Office neither knew nor appeared to wish to know about Brendan. Mother had also written to Walter Krivitsky, the Russian intelligence officer who defected to Britain. But there was no hope of a reply now, following his suspicious death in a hotel bedroom. Occurring so soon after Trotsky’s murder, it left Eva feeling that nobody was safe from Stalin.
It was four o’clock by the time the train reached Ealing Broadway. It halted for a time with blinds ordered to be drawn, as there were reports of German planes in the skies. Eventually it was given permission to limp as far as White City. By now Eva was fifty minutes late. Train and bus schedules were chaotic, with many streets barely passable, yet Eva knew that Freddie would still inwardly blame her for not reaching Paddington on time. He would make excuses to the other couples, claiming that Eva spent her whole life in the ether. The woman he should have married would navigate her way through any Blitz to arrive on time with perfect hair, orthodox beliefs and a carnivorous appetite for red meat. Eva found her efforts to be this perfect wife more exhausting than the constant German bombardment. Tonight she would again do everything that a wife should do to please him and afterwards feel guilty at her pretence of pleasure.
The passengers left White City station and crowded onto gas-powered buses. A huge Dig for Victory sign had been erected across a ruined terrace of houses. The front walls were gone, but she could still see fireplaces suspended in mid-air in the back rooms.
It was impossible to follow the route with so many detours to avoid damaged streets but eventually the bus halted near Marble Arch with the conductor apologising that they could get no further due to rubble and craters on the road. She was not too far from Paddington. If she ran, there was a chance that Freddie might still be there and their evening could be salvaged. Instead she began to walk in a different direction, past teams of men trying to clear the debris. Children watched while one old woman stood in bewilderment beside the rubble that was once her home. People tried to coax her away, but she ignored every kind voice. The Pavilion Theatre was destroyed. Many buildings along Baker Street and Marylebone Road were in ruins though others still miraculously stood. The bombers had tried to destroy Baker Street station, aware of the recent carnage when Balham tube station received a direct hit, with scores of people drowned in a flood from the shattered sewage pipes. The nearby cinema was flattened but workers had got a truck down the street to remove the rubble. The work stopped and she suspected that a body had been unearthed. Not wanting to be a voyeur, she walked on past Queen Charlotte’s Hospital with only its walls still standing. Every step made her later for Freddie’s dinner but suddenly she couldn’t face those officers’ wives with their snobbery and condescension.
It was dusk as she entered Regent’s Park, where the gates had been taken away to be smelted down. Much of the park was transformed into allotments, but other parts were as she remembered them. Rounding a bend she stopped, shocked at the sight of a grass bank crowded with girls and soldiers who barely bothered to use their greatcoats to conceal their desperate couplings. She could sense a shameless frantic passion, with these couples sensing that they might never see each other again. Any German spy could guess troop movements by the tangible sexual libido in the air. Eva wanted to move on but something about the way tha
t one girl – blatantly having intercourse beneath a bundle of coats – threw back her hair and stretched out a hand to clasp the damp grass, stirred Eva. She was witnessing a passion that she had never personally experienced.
She walked quickly on then, annoyed that she had strayed this far. Freddie’s party would have gone on to the restaurant by now. She would have to go there and apologise for her lateness and slowness and her personality. She would have to bite her tongue and not talk about admiring the Quaker ambulancemen who refused to hold a gun or discuss Bernard Shaw or mysticism or any of her troublesome family. She would make herself be a good wife until she could flee back to her children in Ireland.
‘Eva?’
The shout startled her. It came from one of four officers standing at a jeep parked near the boating lake. The man called her name again, leaving the others to their cigarettes as he walked towards her. His accent was not English or Irish, but familiar. She knew his features too. His face had aged but differently from how she imagined. The way he had filled out only made him more handsome.
‘My word, it is Eva, isn’t it?’
Eva didn’t know what she felt or wanted to say or do. How often had she longed to see him just once again? She had imagined him settled on a ranch in New Zealand but perhaps he had never gone home? If she had searched London for him as an art student perhaps her life might have been different. She made herself stop thinking like this. If she had not married Freddie she would never have given birth to Francis and Hazel. Her children were worth any unhappiness. She tried to focus on them and not blush like a silly girl. She tried to stay calm and shook his hand.
‘Jack, how marvellous to see you. I thought you went home years ago.’
‘I did.’ He smiled. ‘There must be a serious shortage of officers though because they called me up again and made me a brigadier. I’m just passing through London. I’m away in a few days, obviously can’t say where.’
‘I know.’ Eva saw that he had taken in her wedding ring, just as she had spotted the one on his finger. ‘My husband is in the services too.’
‘Excellent. Maybe I’ll run into him.’
She felt his eyes examining her and wondered who had he married and if she looked like her. Perhaps Eva had only been a brief infatuation whom he had not thought about for the past twenty years.
‘Well, I can’t say where he is posted.’
‘Very wise.’
She felt guilty concealing the fact that Freddie was in the Territorial Army. It was not his fault to be born with a club foot. He would gladly have been among the soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk. His duties were unglamorous but essential and if the German invasion came he was ready to take to the streets and die. But she didn’t want to talk about Freddie or her life during the past two decades. She wanted to remember what it had felt like to be young and to feel loved. Jack’s smile hinted that he was sharing those memories.
‘How are all the mad Goold Verschoyles?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’
‘Are your brothers in the war?’
‘In their own way.’
Jack laughed. ‘Sounds like them. The Goold Verschoyles never quite did things like anyone else. Will you remember me to Art?’
‘Of course.’
‘And to your father. Is he in Donegal still?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is the Manor House as madcap as ever? A new generation arguing and singing into the night?’
‘Yes.’
Something in her voice told him that she was lying. He glanced back at his watching companions.
‘Look here, would you like a cup of tea and a bun? I have an hour to spare. It’s rather dark or I could hire a boat for old time’s sake. You don’t by any chance have Brendan hiding around the corner as a chaperone, do you?’
He stopped, disturbed by the way she looked away and fearful that he might have offended her. ‘That was clumsy. Nerves. I didn’t expect to run into you again.’
‘I was very young, Jack.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you for an answer.’
‘Too young to really know my feelings.’
He produced a packet of cigarettes and she saw how his hand shook slightly. He offered her one. ‘Funny how life pans out, isn’t it? We only know how to live every moment when that moment is over. It makes us look darn foolish.’
‘We live our lives forward but only understand them backward, that’s what Father says.’
‘Is he really in Donegal?’
‘The house has been boarded up for years. Art is interned in Ireland and Brendan has disappeared. Thomas lives in South Africa and Maud is stranded over there with him.’
‘Golly, you’ve all been busy.’
Eva looked over at Jack’s companions and wondered what they were making of this encounter. Their gaze made her feel like an adulterous woman.
‘Do something for me, Jack.’
‘Anything.’
‘Remember us the way we were, as the family on Paradise Pier. We didn’t know it but we did live in a kind of paradise.’
Jack lowered his voice. ‘You haven’t changed, Eva, you’re still beautiful…’
‘Please stop.’
‘It’s the truth. You were always so free.’
‘Back then I didn’t know what freedom was. It’s a commodity, like on the black market. Something you trade.’
‘For what?’
‘To make other people happy. People who depend on you.’
He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You have children?’
‘Two.’
‘They are what’s important. I’ve a son in New Zealand. His mother died. My sister looks after him.’
‘Is he like you?’
‘I wouldn’t know. What am I like?’
‘You haven’t changed either.’
Have I really not changed? she longed to ask. Could he see anything of that young girl in her now? If he sat at her shoulder would she be able to paint again?
‘This war is about freedom,’ Jack said, ‘though I suppose they say that about every war. Freedom is the right to be ourselves.’
Eva wanted him. Her desire was so sudden and fierce that it shocked her very core. She wanted him to wrap his greatcoat around her and take her to the grass bank with the other couples. She wanted to be occupied by him and not by some foreign force. But another part of her would be horrified if he reached out one finger to touch her shoulder. Her desire was perfect because it could never be realised. What she really craved was the knowledge that he still desired her, not just in his memory but in the present, beneath all her layers of responsibilities.
‘Do you still paint?’
‘I didn’t possess enough talent.’
‘You did. I remember.’
The other officers climbed into the jeep and the engine started. Jack looked back at them again.
‘I hope your husband knows he’s a lucky man. I was lucky too. Eleven good years until cancer got her.’
‘You keep safe, Jack.’ Eva held out her hand.
‘Can we give you a lift?’
‘I’d sooner walk. I haven’t far to go.’
He shook her hand. ‘Good luck, Eva.’
She turned and walked quickly into the gloom. She didn’t want to see the tiny pinpricks of light from the covered headlights as the jeep drove across the grass to pick up Jack. She didn’t want to remember the sight of a small boat rounding the moonlit bend on the Bunlacky shore, his shoulders stooped, rowing away from her.
Eva did not look up at the couples on the grass bank as she hurried past. She was late for dinner. At any moment the air raid sirens could go off and she would be forced to shelter. It was hard to see on the blacked-out streets, with perilous craters and broken pavements, but she began to run, not caring about the danger of falling. When she reached the restaurant they would laugh at her tossed hair and how her skirt was covered in ash and dust off the streets. But she didn’t care because it was her du
ty to be at her husband’s side. She had to focus on that stark fact as if nothing else mattered.
TWENTY-NINE
The Great Betrayal
Ireland, July 1941
Two German army officers pushed their way onto the train and glanced down as if sensing his hostility. Walking through the carriage they stopped beside him with a militaristic click of their heels. The tallest leaned towards Art.
‘Are these seats taken?’
Art stared up into the face of the enemy. He imagined their jackbooted advance towards Moscow and Leningrad, their tanks heading south to encircle the oilfields, his own wife and child possibly starving in some city under siege, the worthless Nazi signatures on the Non-Aggression Pact. No party manual had equipped him for this eventuality. The German officer surveyed him with mild bemusement, as if wondering if Art was a local imbecile.
‘I asked are these seats taken?’
‘What difference would it make? You would just take them anyway.’
The officer looked at his companion who shrugged. They pushed past Art to occupy the seats as country people crowded onto the afternoon train to Dublin. Art stood up to let an old woman sit down and, soon after, as if mocking him the two Germans did likewise. They stood behind Art in the packed corridor as the train eventually pulled out of the station and, fuelled by damp turf, began to slowly chug towards Dublin.
He wanted to ask if they had crash-landed in Ireland before dropping their bombs on an English city or was it afterwards, damaged by flak and trying to limp back to Germany. But he refused to address these two fascist internees out on day parole. They would drink coffee in Dublin, stroll freely through the streets and honour their agreement to return to the Curragh internment camp on the evening train because indiscipline was unheard of in the German section. The Germans were segregated from the IRA internees who enjoyed no parole rights, but Art knew that regular communication existed between the two camps. Many Germans captured after parachuting into Ireland were spies attempting to reorganise the IRA and help it launch bombing missions in England like the one that Mrs Behan’s young son Brendan had embarked on in 1939. This alliance with the Nazis caused division among the IRA volunteers whom Art had been interned with until today. Some were so consumed by hatred of England that they gleefully hailed Hitler’s progress on crude maps in their huts, as if his sole intention in invading Poland was to force England to hand over control of Northern Ireland to them. Others – veterans of Spain or the Republican Congress – recognised the true dangers of Nazism. However not even these men had been willing to support Art’s recent assertion that the IRA – in the light of Germany’s invasion of Russia – should now cut all links with the Nazis and actively support Stalin’s call for an internationalist popular front against fascism.
The Family on Paradise Pier Page 38
