by Sarah Rayne
There was a child with them, of course: Petra’s son, Theo. He was small and rather silent and appeared perfectly accepting of the two visitors who came to see his mother. He was a self-contained child, apparently happy to amuse himself with books and pictures for hours on end. If they called in the afternoon Matthew always sought Theo out. He liked the boy’s quick intelligence and the way he listened when Matthew tried to describe his own home. He was not sure how much Theo understood – often Matthew had to search for an English word to convey a meaning and often he did not know the right word – but he thought they coped pretty well. If he and his father walked along the lane after supper at St Luke’s Theo would be in bed, and Petra would brew coffee and give them smoky Irish whisky, which neither of them had ever tasted.
‘We learn the customs of your country,’ said Andrei.
It was during those comfortable evenings that Andrei began to talk about Romania and Jilava. His English was more reliable now, and some of his former trick of making a subject interesting to a listener, was coming back. Petra listened with the absorption that was one of her attractions, curled in a deep old armchair with the curtains drawn against the night and the fire crackling in the hearth. Quite soon Matthew was going to ask if he could draw her like this, with the firelight painting fingers of colour in her hair, her eyes serious and sympathetic.
‘How did you survive?’ she asked once.
‘People do survive,’ said Andrei. ‘There are some remarkable accounts – some of the prisoners kept diaries in Jilava and Pitesti. A friend of Matthew’s did that.’ Matthew noticed he did not specify Mara’s name or say she, too, was at St Luke’s.
Petra said, ‘I’m glad you did, Andrei,’ and somehow she had put out a hand to him at the exact same moment he had put out a hand to her. Matthew saw the expression on his father’s face: love, warmth, gratitude. He looked at Petra, and knew he would not draw her in that earlier, serious mood; he would draw her like this, looking at his father with light in her eyes and longing in the curve of her lips.
There had to be a good twenty years between them – Matthew guessed Petra to be about twenty-eight; his father was nearing fifty. But seeing them together, he knew it would not have mattered if there had been thirty or fifty years. The spark, once ignited, flared up like a skyrocket, and realizing this, he stopped accompanying his father on most of the walks to Fenn House. He was working on a series of sketches, he said. Or he had promised to help Mara with some cataloguing – she was becoming interested in St Luke’s small library – or he was going somewhere with Michael. He and his father were becoming used to calling Mikhail by the anglicized version of his name by this time, although he noticed that if Mara was ever with them, she stuck stubbornly to Mikhail, almost as if it made a private bond with her brother.
Occasionally, though, Matthew went with his father to Fenn House, and saw how healing it was for Andrei to be with Petra Kendal. Several times Michael joined them, and Petra cooked supper for them – huge English meals. It was still a delight to be able to see all the good food available in the shops, and to enjoy eating it after the years of deprivation. Petra introduced them to English dishes – wonderful casseroles and roast meats, and once Andrei cooked fish ciorba for them all, which had been one of Wilma’s favourite dishes.
Michael talked a bit about Mara – once or twice he read out the letters she had written from Debreczen, translating as he went, Petra eagerly suggesting English words when he was stuck. Occasionally they went into Norwich to see the city, travelling in Petra’s car, the small Theo wedged on the back seat, fascinatedly watching Matthew make quick light sketches of the countryside they passed through.
‘Am I being very wicked?’ said Andrei to Matthew one day, shortly after Christmas. ‘Is this such a terrible sin I’m committing?’ They were in the small bedroom they shared at the convent, ready for the evening meal.
‘No, of course it isn’t wicked,’ said Matthew, surprised. ‘She’s bringing you back to life.’
‘Your mother…’ began Andrei, then turned away, staring through the window at the dark gardens.
‘Is dead,’ said Matthew, wishing this did not sound quite so hard. ‘She’d want you to find happiness, wouldn’t she? After so many years… she’d be pleased for you.’
Andrei remained where he was, not looking at Matthew. After a moment, he said, ‘I don’t think Elisabeth is dead. She was a member of the October Group, and was arrested for plotting against the social order – what was called a category three prisoner. That usually carried a sentence of anything up to fifteen years, under a severe regime. Matthew, I did absolutely everything I could to find her, and everything I could think of to draw attention to the plight of people like her, but I never succeeded. She’s still somewhere in one of those prisons – one of the houses of the lost.’
Matthew felt as if he had been picked up and flung over the edge of a cliff. There was a rushing in his ears, like a cataract of water, and he felt as if the room was spinning round him. After a moment, he heard himself say, ‘But you told me—’
‘I told you what I thought was the easiest thing for you to accept,’ said Andrei. He turned to face Matthew and Matthew saw that all the old ghosts – the ghosts he had been daring to hope Petra had vanquished – were back in his father’s eyes.
‘And you never found her?’
‘No. I spent ten years trying to find her – all those years when you were growing up I tried to get inside the prisons, to find a lead. In the end – Well, in the end, I attracted too much attention, and you know what happened.’ He stopped, and then said, ‘She might really be dead now.’
‘But she might not.’
‘No. That’s why one day soon I’ll have to go back to find out.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The present
‘He did go back,’ said Petra. ‘He and Matthew both went back.’
Theo, whose mind was spinning, thought, So Matthew was here after all. He and his father spent all those winter nights in this house. Andrei had a love affair with my mother, and both of them talked to her about the agonies of those years. They poured out all the angst to her, perhaps they even had some of Mara’s diaries as well as her letters, and they read them to her and she listened. And I listened as well, without realizing it. That’s how I know it all.
It was remarkable he had no conscious memory of this time. But he did have a subconscious memory – he must have heard far more of what was said than anyone realized. And all these years later, because he had been in Fenn House in another monochrome winter, the memories had come to the surface. I knew Matthew, he thought. I talked to him and rode in a car with him and I watched him sketch things. Maybe I even saw him sketch those pictures in St Luke’s. The knowledge of this was so immense he felt as if his mind might implode.
After a moment, Petra said, ‘And, as I think Theo’s already realized from the likeness in that sketch, Charmery was a cuckoo in the nest. My own nest.’
She looked at Theo, and he pushed away the incredible knowledge concerning Matthew, and said, ‘Charmery was your daughter. Yours and Andrei’s.’ Saying it made it real, but it did not make it any more extraordinary.
‘Yes,’ said Petra, ‘Charmery was my daughter and his.’
His mother’s words spun crazily inside Theo’s head and for a dreadful few seconds he was aware of anger against her, because if she had told him the truth, then he and Charmery… No, I’m wrong, he thought. Helen told me a distorted version of the truth all those years ago – it wasn’t a father we shared, it was a mother, but Charmery and I really were half-brother and sister. We could never have been together.
‘You don’t need the details about the affair and I’m not giving them anyway,’ Petra was saying. ‘My dears, let’s face it, there’s nothing remotely attractive about a woman of my age confiding the details of a youthful love affair. But during that couple of months – Well, it was a shattering experience.’
‘Andrei went back
to Romania?’ said Theo, relieved to hear his voice sounded reasonably normal.
‘Yes. I tried to talk him out of it. I think Michael tried as well, but we both knew he would go. And after he left, I discovered I was pregnant.’ She made a brief angry gesture. ‘At first I had no idea what to do. Your father had been dead for three months, Theo, and although I wasn’t especially conventional and I didn’t much mind having a child by myself, the family…’ She looked at Theo and Lesley. ‘The Kendals are loyal and honest, but let’s face it, dears, in the main they’re narrow and old-fashioned. Not you, Guff, dear, and not you, Lesley, either.’
‘Nancy,’ said Theo and Lesley together.
‘And one or two others,’ agreed Petra. ‘I was distraught at losing Andrei,’ she said, ‘but I’d had a brief letter saying he and Matthew had reached Resita and from there had gone on to Sister Teresa’s convent.’ She smiled. ‘The nuns were always prepared to help cheat Ceauşescu and the Securitate,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think one of them was imprisoned for a time. But even for them, the situation with Andrei was very high-risk: he was an enemy of the State and an escaped prisoner. As far as I was concerned – well, he would have been in appalling danger wherever he was, and his health was still precarious from the years in Jilava – I couldn’t hand him the responsibility, and certainly not the financial burden, of a child. I knew I’d have to make my own decisions about it.’
‘You could have told me,’ said Guff. ‘Whatever you decided, I’d have helped you.’
‘I know that, and I wished afterwards that I had told you,’ she said. ‘What I did was to go to the Kendal who wasn’t a Kendal – the one who, like me, had married into the family.’
‘Aunt Helen,’ said Lesley.
‘Yes. And we came up with a plan,’ said Petra. ‘If you think back, Guff, you remember that was the time Desmond went abroad.’
‘The unpronounceable country,’ said Guff, nodding. ‘He left a few weeks after John died.’
‘Yes. Desmond left the following January. In February I found out about the pregnancy. So Helen told everyone she was coming abroad with me for a few weeks – to help me recover from John’s death. We knew we’d have to be away for longer than a few weeks,’ said Petra, ‘but she was going to write to the family saying she was joining Desmond. I was going to let them think I was travelling around. We left England at the end of May – the longest I dared leave it before the pregnancy began to show – and went to Switzerland. I was able to keep in tenuous contact with Andrei from there.’
‘That was when I stayed with Lesley’s parents, and then with Guff?’ said Theo.
‘Yes.’
‘Did Desmond know the truth?’
‘Yes, almost from the beginning. Helen had to tell him. But I trusted him,’ said Petra. ‘My idea was to stay away from the family for the rest of the pregnancy, and then fudge the dates of the child’s birth – tell everyone it was born earlier than it actually was, so it would appear to be John’s. It was only a couple of months,’ she said. ‘I was going to say the child was born in July – actually the birth was September.’ She paused again, and Theo saw the sadness in her eyes. ‘But shortly before the birth I became quite ill. Helen found a Swiss clinic and I was taken into it and was there right up to the birth. She paid for everything, but I was beyond knowing or caring. After the birth I was very ill indeed. I never grasped the medical technicalities, but I don’t think I was expected to live.’ She looked at Theo. ‘I remember clinging on to the thought of you, telling myself I couldn’t die because I couldn’t possibly leave you on your own,’ she said. ‘I think that was what kept me alive. And when finally I did begin to recover—’
Lesley said, ‘You decided to give the child to Helen?’
‘No! Never that,’ said Petra. ‘I thought the child had died,’ she said, with angry pain in her voice. ‘That’s what Helen told me. Stillborn, she said. She came and went between the pension and the clinic, and said she had dealt with all the formalities and I didn’t need to do anything. I was still weak and pretty emotional about losing the child – as I believed – and I didn’t question anything.’
Stillborn. The word twisted a deep pain into Theo’s mind and, as he looked at his mother, he thought how curious that both she and Charmery should have borne the pain of a dead child. He wondered if he would ever tell Petra what had happened between himself and Charmery and about the small, lost David, and knew in the same heartbeat that he could not cause her so much pain.
‘But the doctors in the clinic would have known the child had lived?’ Lesley was saying.
‘By then I had been moved to a sort of convalescent place,’ said Petra. ‘It was way up in the mountains, one of the German-speaking areas. I don’t think any of them knew the truth. None of them had much English and my knowledge of German was almost nonexistent. Helen acted as interpreter – she wasn’t fluent, but she had some quite good school German. It’s possible she told the convalescent place that the child really had died. I never knew, though. When I had recovered a bit more, she came home, letting everyone believe she had been with Desmond all along. I followed later. But if you remember,’ she said, looking across at Guff, ‘I was only in England for a couple of weeks. I didn’t see Helen, and the only one of the family I saw was you. I collected Theo from your house and went back to Romania with him to be with Andrei. Travelling there was difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. And Mikhail still had contacts in the October Group who could oil the wheels a bit. I never asked questions about that,’ she said with a sudden grin.
Theo was staring at her. ‘I went with you to Romania?’ he said at last.
‘Yes. You weren’t quite five. I told you it was a holiday before you started school. I tried to make it sound like an adventure – something from a book.’
‘Where did we stay?’
‘In Andrei’s old house,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember any of it? Not even Wilma? She was a kind of housekeeper – a dear motherly soul. She had known Matthew’s mother from childhood.’ Petra smiled. ‘Wilma had no English at all, and I only had a few phrases of Romanian picked up from Andrei and Matthew, but we managed to communicate somehow. She made a great fuss of you,’ she said to Theo. ‘She gave you a room all to yourself at the very top of the house. She said it was Matthew’s room when he was small.’
‘And it had a view towards smudgy mountains, and, on the horizon, an old, crouching house with a sinister legend,’ said Theo softly. Dear God, he thought, not only have I met Matthew, I’ve slept in his bedroom – that room I wrote about. I saw the view he saw – the Black House and the Carpathian Mountains in the far distance. ‘I don’t remember any of it,’ he said aloud. ‘How long were we there?’
‘Only about a week. That’s probably why you don’t remember. And maybe it was fixed in your mind as being an adventure in a book. I might have overdone that. I’d meant to stay there much longer, but conditions were far worse than I realized. There was hardly any food and electricity was switched off for hours at a time. The people were so downtrodden, it broke my heart. I saw I’d made a massive mistake in taking you, and I wanted to get you back to England and safety. But before we left I went out to the convent to Andrei. You stayed with Wilma for a couple of days. The nuns were so kind to me, I remember.’
And, thought Theo, while you were there someone took a photo of you with the nuns as a little record of the English lady’s visit. Then years later someone at that convent – perhaps Sister Teresa, even – sent the photo to St Luke’s for their centenary book.
‘So you came home properly then,’ said Lesley.
‘Yes. And it was to find that while I’d been gone Helen had apparently given birth to a child,’ she said rather dryly.
‘And that child was Charmery,’ said Theo.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you guess she was your own baby?’ said Guff.
‘Not absolutely at once. At first I was suspicious because it was a whopping great coincidence, but I di
smissed it. But then I put things together and challenged Helen and she admitted it. What she had done was to simply come home with the child, letting everyone think Charmery was born while she was with Desmond. She told them all she had kept the months of pregnancy a secret because the doctors feared a miscarriage, and she hadn’t wanted to tempt Providence by telling anyone except Desmond. Really, of course,’ said Petra, ‘she had to wait to be sure she could actually get Charmery from me. The dates were a bit askew, but I think she said it had been a premature birth.’
‘And Desmond went along with all that?’ said Theo.
‘He believed Helen took Charmery with my knowledge and my permission. Theo, what’s wrong?’
Out of the tangle of complex emotions and memories, Theo said, ‘But Desmond was infertile.’
Petra stared at him. ‘He was, as a matter of fact. But how on earth did you know?’
‘Charmery found out,’ said Theo. ‘She challenged her mother.’
‘And Helen told her she had an affair with your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘And therefore the two of you were half-brother and sister?’
‘Yes,’ said Theo, staring at her.
‘Oh, Theo,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry you found out about it in that twisted way.’ She studied him for a moment. ‘Was it a problem for you?’
Theo returned the stare. ‘No,’ he said at last.
‘Helen and John never had an affair, of course,’ said Petra. ‘That was Helen’s back-up story. Desmond’s infertility was the one weakness in her plan. She didn’t think anyone knew about it, but it was just possible it might come out some day. If it did, she was going to say she had a brief fling with John just before he died.’
‘Did you mind about that?’ said Lesley.
‘Yes, I did. I was furious,’ said Petra. ‘But when I thought about it properly, I saw it didn’t really matter so much. It seemed to belong to another life.’
