Shadows of War

by Michael Ridpath

  Conrad had returned to England from Germany soon after her. He had been patient. He had been understanding. Or at least he had tried to understand, but he hadn’t quite managed it. He knew she was hurt, deeply damaged, but he didn’t know exactly how, and she seemed unable to tell him.

  The night before he had been due to leave for Sandhurst, he had asked her to marry him. She had said no. She hadn’t really explained why. He had been disappointed, but he hadn’t given up. He had seen her during weekend leave, either in North London or occasionally taking her out to a restaurant or club in the West End. He had even brought her down to Somerset twice to see his own family. They had had some good times; she had smiled, told him she was enjoying herself. They had even kissed. But there was always a barrier. He had been willing to wait, confident that the barrier would eventually melt away and reveal the old Anneliese.

  Even now, a year later, he still didn’t understand her. All he knew was that she wanted to leave him.

  ‘You have to accept it, Conrad,’ Anneliese said. She had switched to German, which soon attracted the attention of the two men at the next table. ‘We shouldn’t see each other anymore.’

  ‘No, I don’t accept it.’

  A tear leaked out of the corner of her eye.

  She pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. ‘Goodbye, Conrad,’ she said, bending to kiss his cheek, and then she was gone.

  Conrad stared after her. ‘Leb wohl,’ Conrad repeated.

  She hadn’t said ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, or ‘when we meet again’.

  He had lost her.

  14

  The Ritz, Paris

  Fruity Metcalfe sloped into the lobby of the Ritz and headed straight for the bar. He had had a perfectly bloody day and he needed a drink. Several drinks.

  He liked the bar at the Ritz. It was always lively. Although a lot of English soldiers thought that the French officers’ uniforms looked a bit effete, they certainly added colour. As did their women. Throw in a few Americans and one or two Englishmen, plus Fruity the Irishman, and you had quite an atmosphere.

  ‘Un Johnny Walker avec soda, Marcel,’ Fruity said to the barman while taking possession of a free stool. ‘Un grand, s’il vous plaît.’

  Fruity sipped his drink with pleasure. A bloody day.

  There had been trouble at the mission at Vincennes. Fruity had expected to help the duke draw up his report for the Wombat on their visit to the French lines, but the duke had rebuffed him. Which offended Fruity. Fruity had been a first-rate officer in his time, and it was important to convey accurately what they had seen, especially along the Meuse on the border with Luxembourg and Belgium. Frankly, there was a bloody great hole there that the Germans could stroll through any time they liked, once they had penetrated the forests of the Ardennes. The French troops were mostly reservists: fat, untrained and unfit. The anti-tank defences were pathetic: positioned in the wrong place, in plain view; and in many cases the anti-tank traps and the barbed wire were on top of each other, which meant they could be knocked out simultaneously by well-placed artillery fire. General Huntziger, Commander of the 2nd Army, oozed complacency. The French 9th Army, just to the west of the 2nd, commanded by the obese Corap, was only a little better.

  All this, Fruity and the duke had discussed. And frankly, Fruity wanted to have a part in writing it down. He wanted to be doing a soldier’s work in this phoney war.

  Instead of being a bloody tourist. A tourist who had to pay for himself. Because the other thing Fruity had learned that day was that no one was going to pay him for what he was doing. The War Office had refused his demand for payment, telling him he was not in France in an official capacity, and the duke had changed the subject when Fruity had raised it. He was so damned mean! Mean about bills, mean about paying his staff. Mean about everything apart from Wallis. One of her Fulco di Verdura brooches would keep Fruity going for the duration.

  Not for the first time, the Little Man was taking advantage of Fruity.

  He ordered another whisky.

  It was not as if Fruity had a private income. His wife did, but a chap needed to pay his own way. He loathed being beholden to Baba. She was loaded. She was the daughter of Lord Curzon, the grandest Indian viceroy, but her real wealth came from a settlement from her mother, an American department-store heiress.

  He hated leaving her alone in London. Not just because he missed her – which he did, very much – but also because he had no idea whom she was seeing. He just hoped it wasn’t Tom Mosley again. He was sure he didn’t know who all his wife’s lovers were, but he knew enough of them, and Tom Mosley was the most serious. She had started writing about weekends with Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and another former viceroy. He was about as high-minded as they came, so she ought to be safe with him, although you never knew with Baba.

  Fruity needed another whisky. And he needed to take his mind off his woes. He spotted a sociable American he had had a drink with the week before, and called out to him. ‘Let me get you one, old man. What will you have?’

  At least the duke was paying his bloody hotel bill.

  Kensington Square, London

  ‘A glass of sherry, Conrad?’

  After all he had been through in the last twenty-four hours, Venlo and then his conversation with Anneliese, Conrad felt like something stronger, but he accepted his father’s offer.

  Lord Oakford was pleased to see his son. Conrad was relieved that he wasn’t in one of his frequent black moods. He poured Conrad a glass from a decanter with his one remaining arm, and then a glass for himself.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so late for dinner,’ Conrad said. ‘Thanks for waiting for me. I wanted to see Anneliese.’

  ‘Oh, how is she?’ said Oakford.

  I don’t know how she is, thought Conrad. I don’t understand her! Why can’t she just agree to marry me? Why does she have to run away to New York? Why won’t she see me again? What’s wrong with her? Doesn’t she know I love her? Doesn’t she know I’ll do anything for her?

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he said.

  Oakford looked at him sharply. Conrad stared into his sherry glass.

  ‘I heard about Venlo,’ Oakford said.

  ‘I wondered,’ said Conrad. He had scanned The Times that afternoon in the club. As well as a description of the Munich beer hall bomb, it had reported a confused incident at ‘Venloo’ involving kidnapped Dutchmen. Clearly his father knew the real story.

  ‘I knew you were going.’

  ‘I thought you might.’ Conrad sipped his sherry.

  ‘Why didn’t you drop in and see me before you went?’

  ‘It was all fixed up rather quickly,’ Conrad said. ‘One moment I was at Tidworth, the next I was in Whitehall, and before I knew it I was in an aeroplane bound for Holland.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Conrad hesitated and then decided to tell his father everything. For three years in the early 1930s Lord Oakford had been a minister in the National Government. He was a close friend of Van and Lord Halifax, and he had helped Conrad arrange the visit of emissaries from the German conspirators to Britain the year before. He knew secrets.

  Oakford listened with interest. ‘A shambles,’ he said when Conrad had finished.

  ‘My thought exactly,’ said Conrad.

  ‘So the Germans have nabbed our agents. Presumably the Gestapo will interrogate them? Will they talk, I wonder?’

  ‘One has to assume they will,’ said Conrad. ‘Do you know a Major McCaigue? He debriefed me with Van.’

  ‘I’ve met him once or twice. A good man. Works for the SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service. They’re under a lot of pressure at the moment. They have a reputation for being all-seeing, but they didn’t spot the Nazi–Soviet pact coming, and this is a very public balls-up. On top of all that, their chief died last week, and they haven’t picked a successor yet. Did you contact Theo? Van said you were going to try.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Conrad. ‘He said he didn’t know whether Schämmel
was genuine and he was going to check. I never found out his answer.’

  ‘Did you discuss peace terms with him?’ Oakford asked. He was trying to make the question sound casual, but Conrad could feel the quickening of his attention.

  Conrad pretended not to notice. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Does he think there is still a chance of a coup?’

  ‘They are planning one,’ Conrad said. ‘To coincide with an offensive in the Low Countries.’

  ‘Interesting. Soon?’

  ‘In the next few days. The fifteenth to be precise. But Theo didn’t seem certain either would happen.’

  ‘I’ve always thought it was a mistake to rely on the generals,’ said Oakford.

  ‘I’m going back to Holland to see him tomorrow,’ Conrad said. ‘Van sent me. He wants me to confirm Schämmel was bait and find out if Payne Best and Stevens have talked.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Oakford, raising his eyebrows.

  Conrad sensed there was something a little odd about his father’s reaction, but before he could pursue it, the door opened and a tall girl with dark hair bounded in.

  ‘Millie!’ Conrad leaped to his feet. She hugged him. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here! I thought you were down in Somerset.’

  ‘I’ve come up to find some war work,’ Millie said.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you.’ And it was. Conrad and Millie had always been close. There were four surviving de Lancey children: Conrad, his younger brother Reggie, Charlotte, who was married with a baby, and Millie. Edward, the eldest and Lord Oakford’s favourite, had died in a mountaineering accident when he was twenty-two. No one in the family mentioned his name, but Conrad knew they all thought about him. Millie was twenty-three and still unmarried, although Conrad knew she had turned down many advances. The suitors didn’t surprise him; in his opinion she would be quite a catch. She was attractive in a gangly kind of way, she was intelligent and she was fun.

  ‘What about the evacuees?’ he asked. Millie was helping billet the bewildered families who had arrived from Coventry in September in the homes of an equally bewildered village.

  ‘Most of them are fed up with the country and are going home. I thought I would be more use in London.’

  ‘And Reggie? What’s he up to?’

  Reggie was twenty-seven, a year younger than Conrad. He was therefore too old to be called up yet, but certainly young enough to volunteer.

  ‘He says that he’s wanted on the estate,’ Millie said.

  ‘He’s quite right,’ said Lord Oakford. ‘The country is going to need all the food it can grow.’

  Reggie had devoted his life to managing Chilton Coombe, the small family estate in Somerset, and irritating the three perfectly capable tenant farmers there. But Lord Oakford was happy to keep at least one of his sons out of harm’s way. Conrad didn’t have much respect for Reggie.

  ‘Father tells me you have been on another top-secret mission,’ Millie said.

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ said Conrad. ‘Although it didn’t go very well.’

  Oakford poured his daughter a glass of sherry.

  ‘Cheers!’ said Millie, raising her glass to her brother. ‘Anything to do with Theo?’

  Conrad glanced at his father, who looked sheepish. He must have told his daughter more than he was letting on. Theo had made quite an impression on Millie when he had met her in Berlin the year before; Theo tended to make an impression on women when he met them.

  ‘Theo is in the enemy’s secret service, Millie,’ Conrad said.

  ‘You’re not answering the question, are you, Conrad?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Conrad with a grin.

  They went in to dinner, the three of them. Tomato soup and pheasant from Chilton Coombe. They talked about the evacuees, and about Conrad’s mother and how the village was dealing with a German woman in its midst, which was very well – with the exception of the old bat who ran the village shop, who was causing trouble.

  ‘How’s Anneliese?’ Millie asked. ‘How do people treat her in London?’

  ‘Some people think she’s a spy because she’s German,’ said Conrad. ‘Some people think she’s a profiteer because she’s Jewish. But she says it’s miles better than Berlin. Her family seem pleased to be here, although they are all crammed into one room in Hampstead.’

  ‘Can’t you help, her, Conrad?’

  ‘Anneliese is very proud,’ Conrad said. ‘And stubborn.’

  ‘Like your mother,’ said Lord Oakford.

  ‘What’s wrong, Conrad?’ Millie asked.

  Conrad hesitated. Typical of Millie to notice there was something wrong, and then to come right out and ask about it. Conrad knew his family liked Anneliese, much more than they had liked his former wife Veronica. With Millie there, he abandoned his earlier reticence.

  ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ he said. ‘She says she doesn’t want to see me anymore. No matter how hard I try to help her, she seems to push me away. I don’t know whether it’s got something to do with what she suffered in the concentration camp, or coming to England, or worrying about her parents. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense!’ Millie said.

  ‘Sometimes these things don’t,’ said Oakford gravely. ‘The mind can work in strange ways after the kind of thing she suffered. I know.’

  Conrad and Millie fell silent. Lord Oakford had come out of the Great War a severely damaged man. His life had changed the day at Passchendaele when he had taken and held a German machine-gun position, won his Victoria Cross, lost his arm, and lost his will to fight. Since then, he had done everything he could to stop war. But also since then he had suffered from occasional bouts of black, angry misery. These Conrad and Millie had grown up with. They had come to learn what triggered these moods, but still they didn’t really understand them.

  ‘What should I do, Father? About Anneliese?’

  It was a long time since Conrad had asked his father’s advice on anything. But he had a feeling that Lord Oakford might know the answer.

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Conrad. ‘In fact I asked her to marry me. She turned me down.’

  Oakford sipped his water. ‘Give her space to sort herself out, Conrad. When she wants you, she’ll find you. Just make sure you are available.’

  Conrad exchanged glances with Millie. That sounded like good advice, although he wasn’t sure he could just let Anneliese go. Once she went to New York he might never see her again and he wasn’t sure he could bear that. But what choice did he have?

  They ate in silence for a moment or two.

  ‘Conrad?’ Oakford said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know I’ve asked you before now, but I could use your help.’

  ‘With what, Father?’ But Conrad knew. He could see Millie tense up. She was right to do so. There was trouble brewing.

  ‘Can you have a word with Theo for me? About peace.’

  ‘You’ve asked me before. The answer is still no.’

  Lord Oakford had asked Conrad to meet Theo in Switzerland the previous spring, before the outbreak of war. Conrad had refused: he was suspicious of his father’s desire for peace at any cost, and was concerned that his meddling would just undermine the British government’s attempt finally to stand up to Hitler. It was true that in the end he, Conrad, had travelled to Holland to talk to Schämmel about peace, but that was at the British government’s behest, not his father’s. And that little jaunt hadn’t turned out very well.

  ‘We need to stop this war before it really gets going,’ Lord Oakford said.

  ‘We need to stop Hitler, you mean.’

  ‘They’ve all got plans, you know. Churchill wants to invade Norway. The French want to invade Russia. Hitler wants to invade Holland and Belgium. It’s only a matter of time before the Luftwaffe comes and starts dropping bombs on London. We’ve got to stop them, Conrad, all of them. And with your links with the Wehrmacht, you can help us.’
>
  ‘Father, we’re fighting a war,’ Conrad said. ‘And it’s a just war. It’s not like the first war where your country fought Mother’s country. This is a war between good and evil. Hitler is evil, Father. If he wins, Europe will fall into darkness. He has to lose. We have to beat him.’

  ‘But we have no plans to beat him, do we?’ said Oakford. ‘Our plan is to sit in France and wait for him to attack us. And when he does it will be like the western front all over again. Except this time there will be tens of thousands of air-raid casualties among civilians in Britain.’

  ‘He won’t go away until we beat him,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Damn it, Conrad!’ Oakford hit his palm on the table. ‘It takes two to fight a war. We can end this if we want to.’

  ‘Stop it, both of you!’ said Millie.

  Both men looked at her.

  ‘Stop it! Father, you know what Conrad’s views are. And, Conrad, you know how much Father believes in peace. Neither of you is going to change the other’s point of view. But Conrad’s going off to fight. And Father is right, a bomb might land on this house, or on the House of Lords. Maybe the Germans will invade Somerset. Maybe we won’t see each other again. I couldn’t bear it if the last time we ever saw each other ended in a fight. So please do shut up.’

  Lord Oakford glared at his impertinent daughter. ‘Millie!’

  The colour in Millie’s cheeks rose, but she held his gaze.

  ‘I’ll shut up,’ said Conrad. ‘Millie’s right.’

  Oakford turned to his pheasant, stabbing it with his fork. ‘I wish you would see sense, Conrad,’ he muttered.

  Conrad let his father have the last word. But, as far as he was concerned, he had seen sense. That was the whole point.