‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Kit. ‘That’s exactly it. He was so reserved that you always thought twice before trying to draw him out. By and large he preferred not to make difficult things explicit.’
‘But he could talk about the rescue of children like himself, you say?’
‘Yes. But that was something he could be entirely and utterly positive about. And grateful. Britain was a country – still, he would always emphasise – where there was a sizeable minority who would ensure that the moral side to every question was thoroughly debated. Imagine the Germans in the Thirties debating the moral side of killing the Jews! But the situation of the Jews had to be debated in Britain, in the most practical way possible, by extending the hand of hospitality.’
‘However reluctantly at times,’ put in Leo. ‘But I must not be mean-minded. You are quite right. Britain’s action was a contribution to a moral debate that almost everyone else sidestepped.’
‘What worries me,’ said Kit, ‘is connections.’
‘What connections are they?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know. I’m worried about the lack of connections. I am told by my adoptive mother that my real mother is a Mrs Novello, of Leeds. I accept that because I retain faint memories of Isla and her house, particularly my old bedroom. But what is the connection between a Leeds solicitor’s family and a literary/academic family in Glasgow headed by a Jewish refugee?’
‘Perhaps the kidnap was the work of one of the Glasgow gangs,’ suggested Leo. ‘Plenty of Italian – especially Sicilian – elements there. Though why you should be kidnapped to order is beyond me. But then, perhaps you weren’t. Coincidences happen. Tell me, what does it say on your birth certificate?’
‘Just “adopted”. I thought the certificate would be useful, but then, of course, it couldn’t say the mother’s name because many prefer to keep it from the child.’
‘And of course, the certificate could be a forgery. That is one of the things that Glasgow crooks do very well. Passports, marriage certificates, nationalisation papers – you want it, they can do it. For a price.’
‘Yes, of course. It’s quite possible that the only genuine birth certificate I’ll ever have will be as Peter Novello. Isla is sure to have one.’
‘Would that worry you?’
‘It would a bit. I loved Jürgen and Genevieve. They were my loving parents from the age of three. I felt at ease, comfortable, confident with them. I can imagine, with time, feeling the same about Isla. But the fact will remain that I grew up with the Philipsons, went through all the pleasures and pains of childhood and adolescence with them. My personal papers ought to record that in some way.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Leo. ‘For me you are – let’s say – not a part of Jürgen’s family, because you are not Jewish. But of course, Jürgen had married outside his religion, and apparently never practised the faith after he left Germany. He and Genevieve ought to be awarded the lion’s share of the credit for your upbringing.’
Kit decided to change the subject a shade.
‘Tell me, I’m told you were at a meeting which I suspect both my birth father and my adopted father attended.’
‘Really? It’s perfectly possible. I am an inveterate attender of meetings, because I have to be buoyed up with optimism, with a feeling of doing something. What was the meeting about?’
‘About bringing down barriers among peoples, races, groups. It was held at the St Andrews Theological College in Glasgow in about 2002. But what I’m interested in is what happened between the two men.’
‘They met? Talked?’
‘Yes. I gather my Leeds birth father was prominent in peace talks among the various Glasgow gangs – the ice cream wars and so on. Often there would be a wholly or partially Italian component to these groups, and their disagreements were most often about territories: which should be serviced by which ice cream vendor. Sounds absurd, but that was the truth of it. That’s how they began, though they burgeoned into something much bigger. A British legal man with Italian as one of his languages could be very useful when peace talks had been arranged.’
‘Yes – and you’re saying he could have got closer to some of the big names in the gangs than he ought to have done?’
‘Yes. Perhaps he was compromised in some way, and was forced into things he detested. Perhaps he simply used the gangs himself, having acquired a lot of influence through his apparently above-board work negotiating and peacemaking. It’s a mystery, but one we have a chance of solving as he’s still alive. The only point I’m making is that he is very likely a link.’
‘And did something happen at this meeting I was apparently at that illustrated his connection with the gangs?’
‘Not quite that. But it suggested some connection between my birth father and Jürgen. They talked in the coffee break of this meeting—’
‘At such meetings everybody talks.’
‘Yes, but something must have been said that angered my … angered Jürgen. I think my birth father approached Jürgen for a second time that day in the lunch break and for once my father couldn’t hide his emotions. When he saw who was about to accost him again, I’m told his face showed absolute detestation, and he turned away – frozen-faced again – to avoid my father and any further contact between them.’
‘I see,’ said Leo thoughtfully. ‘Could it be that it was at this time that Jürgen learnt who you actually were?’
‘I suppose it’s possible. There’s a slightly dog-eared note under the name Novello in Jürgen’s address book – “Kit’s mother” is all it says – enough, I suppose, but no date is given.’
‘Tell me,’ said Kappstein, ‘what you know about Jürgen’s birth father and mother.’
Kit raised his eyebrows in surprise.
‘Very little. His mother died, it’s thought, in Auschwitz or perhaps Dachau. His father, I believe – I don’t know – was still alive seven or eight years ago, though if so he must have been very old. Maybe bedridden or mentally disturbed and unable to travel. I am guessing here, of course. All I have to go on are those few words, which I don’t actually remember, of my father’s. Something like, “I ought to go and see him.” Or maybe, “I’d like to go and see him.”’
‘Yes … I feel most at home with the Jewish side of your parentage, though I understand a fair bit of Scottish mores and opinions by now, and even Italians sometimes have revealed their mysteries to me. But I can try to find in the archives anything I may have on your father’s birth family.’
‘Yes please. I suppose you don’t know his name …’
‘Oh, but I do. Your father was a Horovitz, and at the time of his birth his father was known as Samuel Horovitz and his mother as Lisabeth. Apart from the genuine name, your grandfather called himself all sorts of things, Greenspan among them – I found it quite bewildering, but I’ll find my way around his various personae eventually. I’ve made a start. I took the trouble to look up your father after I had your phone call last night which arranged this meeting. Until I lose my marbles you will find me quite boringly well organised and terribly well informed.’
‘Do you know what happened to my grandfather?’
‘He was not one of nature’s victims. There were a lot of rumours, but no rumour of his being in one of the German camps.’
‘What did the rumours concern?’
‘East European countries mostly. Hungary, Romania, for example. Both places where Jews were persecuted – had been for centuries – but the persecution intensified when the political leaders of the countries became Fascists. But the most frequent place of refuge and the subject of most rumours about your grandfather was Italy.’
‘That surprises me,’ said Kit, shifting uneasily in his chair. ‘Mussolini was Hitler’s henchman, surely. Fleeing to Italy would be going from the frying pan into the fire.’
Kappstein shook his head.
‘Not quite. Mussolini was Hitler’s ally, several steps down as a Fascist leader of importance. This r
iled him. He had a ten-year lead in the catalogue of Fascist countries; he’d given the world the word and many of the ideas – that’s what the poor man thought – he was Europe’s inspiration. It’s often said he was lukewarm in the persecution of the Jews. There’s some truth in that, but it was not a matter of conscience or tender-heartedness. He just saw it as one of Hitler’s pointless obsessions. He thought it was better to screw money out of them.’
‘What changed his mind?’
‘The course of the war. By the time of the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 he had no future except tied to Hitler’s chariot wheels, and he soon realised that wholesale spoliation of the Italian Jews’ fortunes was a wonderful source of revenue, and he began that with energy and efficiency.’
‘Right,’ said Kit slowly. ‘So if my grandfather didn’t land up in the German camps he could have died in their Italian equivalents.’
‘Possible. But far fewer of the Italian Jews died. And if we are right about his activities, they were always on the windy side of the law. If he was in Italy, if he was incarcerated there, what should such a man have done?’
Kit thought.
‘Teamed up with his Italian equivalents? The Mafia, the Camorra, all sorts of small and large gangsters.’
‘Yes, exactly. And rumour has him in a camp called Ferramonti in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – the old kingdom centred on Naples, and including Sicily and the bottom of mainland Italy, the part of Italy that was liberated fairly early by the Allies.’
‘This does begin to sound promising.’
‘But remember to be careful. This is almost conjecture, supported only by rumour. Courage and caution, that’s what you must show. I want to help you, and I will do, so long as I am mentally active. Remember, a lot of my information is inconvenient to the people who consult me. For example, your grandfather used a series of different names – practically a new name every time he went to a new city. Up to no good? Probably. The name he bequeathed to his children was Greenspan, but as I have discovered, that was not his real or legal name.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
‘Good. Being a pedant, even about births and deaths rather than grammar, is a very inconvenient thing. But it may prevent you going off into cul-de-sacs, that I can promise you.’
But, leaving the bungalow in the afternoon sunlight, Kit felt torn between contrary emotions. He had liked Leo Kappstein. On the other hand he had a niggling sense that the man was holding back on something, perhaps even playing with him. And he had been shocked by Leo’s admission that for him he, Kit, a non-Jew, was not part of Jürgen’s ‘family’. He was quite sure Jürgen had not felt the same. But then he was of another generation.
And what was it that had really made his father’s life ‘difficult’?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Undercurrents
‘Peter!’ said Isla, when she opened her front door to her son two days later.
‘Isla!’ said Kit. They embraced, but the two words left a legacy of embarrassment which it took some time to dispel. Isla looked at the two smallish suitcases her son was carrying and definitely had to smother feelings of disappointment.
‘Oh good, you’ve brought some of your things,’ she said.
‘Just a few,’ said Kit. ‘So that I have two sets of the important things when I’m here.’
‘Yes … I’ve had a second set of keys made for you,’ said Isla, but carefully, as if she knew she was on delicate terrain. Kit responded a shade too enthusiastically.
‘Great! Though I’m not sure I ought to treat this house as my own, barging in whenever I feel like it.’
‘You barge in, Kit. You can’t interrupt anything important, or anything I’d blush to have you see for that matter. Now, you go up and unpack your things and we’ll have a nice drink before dinner. Gin and tonic suit you?’
‘Fine.’
‘And I’ve got pork fillet for dinner.’ She noticed or imagined that a shadow passed over his face as she spoke. ‘Oh dear! Have I done something silly?’
‘No, not at all. I eat pork, ham and all that stuff – always have. My mother wasn’t Jewish, as you know, and Dad was a sort of halfway Jew. That meant we didn’t have it that often for dinner, so it’s a sort of treat. Pork fillet will be fine.’
And certainly when he came to eat it Isla could detect no sign of nausea or hesitation. Before that, over the gin and tonics with the obligatory lemon, Isla asked how things had gone in Glasgow.
‘Fine. I got things done in connection with my mother’s will – things that needed sorting out.’ On an impulse he ventured on a half-truth. ‘And I heard one or two things about my father that I want to look into.’
‘Which father?’
Looking quickly up and then down Kit saw that Isla’s face was flushed a blood-red.
‘Jürgen Philipson. It was just an incident, something that happened at one of those do-gooding conferences he was often a delegate at. I’ve learnt that he made it clear, without a word spoken, that he had the strongest objections to another of the delegates. The whole encounter was so unlike my father’s usual self that it made me think. Why would he have been so upset? I’m going to try to find out who that other person was, and if he could have had anything to do with my “adoption”.’
‘Isn’t that a terribly long shot? Why should your father have anything against someone who helped him to get you? I should have thought he’d be eternally grateful.’
She was now her usual colour. Kit looked straight into her eyes.
‘I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that a good man – as my father was – would be the last person on earth who would want to benefit from a child abduction.’
Isla swallowed.
‘Yes, of course. If he knew—’
‘There are all sorts of possibilities: for example, that he did not know how I’d been taken from my birth parents, but he found out from the man he immediately took an aversion to. By that time, by the way, I must have been about fifteen, so it would have been a bit of an academic question: they’d surely never have taken me away from my adoptive parents?’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
That pulled Kit up in his tracks.
‘Well, I suppose I mean the police – or the authorities generally. Oddly enough I really know very little about adoption. And the abduction would still have been a police matter, even though it happened a long time before and the British police had always left matters to the Italian police. By the time they’d got anywhere, if they ever did, I’d have been practically of legal age for sure.’
Later, when they were eating apple crumble, Isla said: ‘I wish I understood why you’re doing all this rummaging about in the past. What good is it going to do? Why can’t you just accept the facts: you were stolen from me, and landed up somehow as the adopted child of people you liked and respected. Not a too dreadful fate, was it?’
‘No, of course not … Remember, Isla, that the first step in this “rummaging” – I’d prefer to call it amateur detective work – was finding you. As soon as I knew that Genevieve was not my birth mother, finding you became my aim: to find my real mother and to know who I was, and how it happened. And to try to lessen the pain you must have felt at losing your young child.’
‘I realise that, and I’m glad and grateful.’
‘And I found out how it was done, the abduction, and I’m glad to know. But the question arises: how did I come to belong to Jürgen and Genevieve? How would they connect with Sicilian kidnappers? How did I get from Sicily to Glasgow?’
‘Of course, I don’t know,’ said Isla, now more subdued. ‘Till you turned up I had no idea where you were or who you were with.’
‘No, you didn’t – couldn’t have. Even after they knew about your identity, or began to have suspicions, Jürgen and Genevieve couldn’t have made contact with you, for fear of losing me. And, of course, I understand that it’s not as important to you to know the details as it is to me. I want to know to fill in g
aps in my knowledge of the past, but also to understand the psychology of what happened. How did two high-minded, law-abiding citizens come to acquire a child in so dubious a way? How did they come to profit by a crime they would have abhorred?’
‘It’s a mystery,’ said Isla, now almost complacent. ‘But I don’t see that you had anything to do with it. You were too young. Isn’t it time you got on with your life and stopped worrying about what happened in the past and why? I know that’s what I would do.’
‘Well, maybe that’s what I will be forced to do if I get nowhere. But it’s definitely second best. I know I won’t feel happy and complete unless I’ve tried to make sense of it all.’
Isla shook her head.
‘Well, I’ll hold my peace. You’re not going to take advice from a silly old woman, I realise that.’
Kit shook his head and grinned.
‘You don’t regard yourself as silly, Isla, and I’m pretty sure you don’t see yourself as old either.’ They both laughed. ‘And neither do I.’
As they were preparing for bed Isla tentatively asked Kit what he was going to do the next day.
‘I thought of driving into Leeds,’ he said. ‘They say it’s very hard to find your way around, so I thought I’d make a start.’
‘Oh, that’s a good idea. You can take my car.’
‘But I don’t need to. I have my car. I drove down.’
Isla left a pause, obviously not trusting herself to speak. It was clear that Kit’s paucity of luggage was doubly painful to her if he had had a car to load it into.
‘Of course. You’d have inherited the Philipsons’ car, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes. We sold Jürgen’s soon after he died. Genevieve’s is the car I learnt to drive in. I drove it a lot in the last few months of her life, when we were going to all her favourite places. Is there anything I can do for you tomorrow in Leeds?’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said Isla, still sounding a bit miffed.
A Stranger in the Family Page 9
