He shook his head, lifting a handful of his dark blond hair, which was so different from Jeff’s curls. I got the last bandages from the kitchen drawer and held them out to him. They would hide his hair, but he put two fingers to his head as if it was a gun and looked at me questioningly.
‘They won’t shoot you unless you try to run,’ I said, but I wondered if that was true. People did strange things when they were afraid. I tried not to imagine him falling dead on the concourse at Waverley with people running about screaming. It wasn’t possible, was it? ‘Just surrender,’ I said, putting my hands up. ‘Like this. Dinnae be feart.’
He stood at the window in the half-light, looking out at the trees. He was clean-shaven and thin. There were still dark hollows under his cheekbones. He was trapped here. ‘Es ist auch für Dich gefährlich wenn ich länger bleibe. Ich soll doch weggehen, abfliegen.’ He interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. ‘Okay, I go. Me here – is dangerous for you,’ he said, and rolled his shoulders like a swimmer preparing to dive.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked, remembering his tears after the cinema.
He nodded and opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. He didn’t have the words to express what he wanted to say, or perhaps the pain of his emotion had crawled into this throat and gagged him. I took his hand. I was standing so close that I could feel his breath on my face as he sighed. He drew his gaze away from the window. Out there far from this island someone close to him was suffering, had suffered. Perhaps it was too late for them, he had no way of knowing. His eyes were naked when they met mine and I saw the man without his bravado, his deference to me, his social grace. He looked at me and I looked back. We were both wounded and saw the other’s pain, and then stepping forward he pulled me close. I leant against him, and it felt like a home-coming. His heart beat under my ear, fast at first and then slower, a steady beat, the pulse of his life.
He let me go as soon as I loosened my grip on his waist, lifting my hands from his back. They felt light and empty as if it had been right to hold him, as if I should go on holding him.
‘I will miss you,’ he said.
I nodded, distracted by the bow shape of his lips, which closed now waiting for me to reply. I looked down and my eye fell on his picture of Liesl tucked into the book he had been reading. He followed my gaze. ‘Goethe,’ he said. ‘Auf dem See. “Hier auch Lieb und Leben ist.” There is… life here too.’
I stepped back and shook my head. ‘There is no life here for you in this war. You need to get away.’ A door banged on the stair and footsteps tapped on the steps, winding closer. There was a rattle of keys and the sound of Mrs MacDougall muttering ‘Hell’s teeth!’ as she dropped them with a clatter. A door banged shut and then, silence.
I wasn’t sure if he had understood what I’d said, then he sat down and nodded, putting his elbow on the table and tugging at his lower lip. I had his agreement, but I came down with something, and it was to be three weeks before I found the strength or courage to take him. I took to my bed, perhaps it was flu.
Fortunately, Mrs MacDougall, true to form, had knocked on the door to ask why I hadn’t cleaned the stair, and when she saw my peely-wally face, she took a spare key and agreed to fetch my rations. She gathered up the main book, yellow supplement book and points book, and went to sort out the new single book. I didn’t ask where she had registered me. ‘Don’t let a bad conscience affect your life, Agnes,’ she said as she brought through some porridge. ‘You are young, yet. There is a long way to go and you have a duty to our Lord to live the best life you can. “What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth?” Psalms 30:9. You should pay more attention to them, Agnes. They might benefit you. Keep you sound of body and mind.’
I grew stronger as best I could. I wasn’t sure I could take many more of Mrs MacDougall’s homilies. She telephoned the prison for me to say I was poorly. They were sympathetic and said to bring in the ID card as soon as I was well.
The night before I began to get better, I was woken by a great wailing, as if the city was screaming, and the sound rose and fell across the hills, echoing on the cold water of the Forth. It forced its way inside my head, but before I could try to get up, Mrs MacDougall had rushed through and pulled me from my new bed in the spare room. My legs buckled under me, and she couldn’t lift me, so she pushed me under the bed and crawled in after me. ‘What about Hannes?’ I said.
‘He’ll have to take care of himself as best he can. They are his bloody friends, after all.’
It was only the second time I had ever heard Mrs MacDougall swear. We lay there side by side, shivering until she pulled the quilt from the bed and we lay under it. There was no sound of planes passing over head, although I held my breath to listen. ‘Don’t worry about general engine noise,’ she said, ‘if it comes. You only need to worry if you hear a high-pitched, whining sound right over head. Let’s hope the guns on the Forth shoot them down, although I can tell you for a fact that more than one of the laddies down there has lied about his age.’
I could see the mattress bulging through the criss-crossed wire of the bed base. I tried not to think of the people who had been crushed falling on the stairs in the Tube in London, all the bodies piled up to make a wall of dead and not a single bomb dropped. There were so many ways to die. After an hour, the all-clear sounded and Mrs MacDougall helped me crawl back into bed, and then felt her way through the hall in the darkness. She returned with my taped-up torch and two hot toddies. ‘I was sorry to have to put Jeff’s good single malt in them, but I couldn’t find a blend,’ she said, as she passed me a cup. ‘Needs must, eh? Look on the bright side. At least if we drink it, it can’t fuel the flames if we’re hit. Not like those poor sods sitting on piles of the stuff in the distillery towns. They could go up in a fireball any day if the Jerries bomb them.’
The next morning, I huddled down in the bed, pulling the quilt and sheet up round the back of my neck. My feet were cold even in bed socks and although I was wrapped in Mrs MacDougall’s old crocheted bed jacket, the draft from the chimney crept in around me. I pressed my chin onto my chest, but had to sit up as another coughing fit took me and all the heat flew out from under the covers. As I lay back down, I heard the key turn in the lock, then footsteps and a knock at the door.
‘Come in, Mrs MacDougall,’ I croaked. Hannes stepped into the room. He was balancing a tray on his hip and smiled before coming in, as if asking permission. ‘Sorry,’ he said, waving a hand at the walls of the bedroom as if it were somehow sacred space.
I pulled the sheet up over my chest.
‘Mrs MacDougall…’ He lifted up the tray before laying it across my lap. ‘…Away.’
‘Where?’ I asked, wondering if she knew someone affected by the raid.
He shrugged. ‘She say back tomorrow.’ A frown crossed his brow. I suppose he wondered if she might return with the police, although I knew she was more afraid of them than he was. We had hidden him for so long that she must have believed she would join Jeff in prison, if Hannes was discovered. A good name was not the currency it used to be, as she was so fond of saying. I was sure Hannes would never let on when we had taken him in, but the authorities knew the day the plane had come down, and that would count against us. I imagined them picking over the wreckage on the hill, and wondering why there was no body; looking over to the city just thirty minutes’ walk away, as if they might see him like an ant creeping past the flats. Perhaps they were still searching.
I looked up from the pale, yellow loops of the bed jacket, a soft chain mail of fan shapes. Hannes was watching my face. ‘Noch etwas?’ he said. ‘Something else?’ It sounded like ‘zomzing’ and I wanted to laugh.
‘Votter?’ he added, and I watched the language come apart on his lips in this house of words, where every syllable had been guarded, and it wasn’t funny any more.
I nodded, blowing my nose to hide my tears, and he took the empty jug from the b
edside table and filled it in the kitchen. I saw him glance at the bread on my tray as he set the jug back down on its doily. He looked hungry. I held the bread out to him, but he shook his head. ‘Please,’ I said, worried that Mrs MacDougall hadn’t been feeding him while I was laid up.
He broke half of it off and put the rest back on the plate. ‘Take vegetables from the garden at night,’ I said. ‘No one will see you.’
He chewed without speaking, not understanding. I pointed at him and then towards the back wall with the garden beyond, mimed pulling up a carrot and nibbling on it.
He laughed and nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, and rubbed the crumbs from his hands on his thighs.
‘Also…’ he said, and paused. It was very quiet. ‘Goodbye.’ He glanced round the room, both of us aware that it was the empty guest room and not my own. His eyes met mine. There was something more than pity in them; concern, or a last flicker of anger against Jeff, or the war, or Mrs MacDougall, who kept him hungry. But above all, there was a kind of understanding that didn’t need words, a glimpse of the warmth I had seen upstairs. He took a step towards me and then stopped, looking at the bed as if he might sit on the edge. I pointed to the chair in the corner which he pulled over. It creaked as he sat down.
‘This room is cold,’ he said, looking round.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, but this time the tears came too fast to stop, and spilled down my cheeks. He passed me the napkin he had folded on the tray, and I blew my nose, then tried to smile. It was Jeff’s mother’s best linen. I laughed, but it came out as a burp.
‘Just cry,’ he said, and held my hand. The tears flowed faster and we sat in silence. The warmth of his grasp comforted me and I lay back against the pillows. He took the tray from my lap, and put it on the floor.
‘Sleep now,’ he said and leant forward. I flinched, I couldn’t help it. The light breaking in between the curtains and shining on the quilt had brought back memories of Jeff. I pushed it off the bed, and it slithered onto the floor, a green snake-skin. Hannes picked it up and put it over the back of the chair. The room smelt of mothballs and beeswax. It seemed to stick inside my nose. I held my breath.
‘Agnes,’ he said. I looked at him, and he smiled, holding his arms out as he might have done to calm a frightened animal on his farm. He reached forward slowly and moved one of the pillows from behind me, tucking me up like a child as I slid down between the sheets. He lifted my head and held a glass of water to my lips.
‘Schlaf gut,’ he said, putting the glass down. ‘Sleep well,’ and he turned away, closing my door without a sound. I heard him pause at the front door to listen, and a minute later the pad of his feet passing down the hall upstairs. He whistled a few bars of a tune I didn’t recognise and then stopped mid-phrase, as if remembering that the price of his safety was silence; that everything inside him must be silent, too, without voice. He had become his own jailer, imprisoning the man he had been, locking away his identity to preserve his future, a day that might never come.
It was on the first of the bright September mornings, after walking out early to send my mother a telegram, that I shaved and bandaged Hannes’ head as if he was still injured. I whitened his face with the last of my talcum powder. His hair lay on the kitchen lino like the fur of a moulting animal. For some reason I couldn’t sweep it up. He took the dustpan and brush from my hand, and knelt down. I put the last of the bread and the dictionary in a small hold-all containing my clothes. I thought it would be best to travel in the early afternoon and catch the train to Ayr from Glasgow, so that when we arrived at the farm it would be later, and fewer people would be about. My pin money and the housekeeping would be just enough to get us there if we didn’t buy anything on the way. Mrs MacDougall watched from the window as we left. I waved, but she gave no sign that she knew us.
We walked down the back streets to Haymarket. Hannes walked slowly and stopped at the top of Viewforth to look at the estuary. I was afraid he was memorising the scene. It was hazy. I knew Rosyth dockyard was tucked away in the distance and tried to pull him on. He looked down at me, and his eyes held no sign of anything but warmth as he turned towards me. ‘Schön,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’
I looked over my shoulder when he said the German word, but there was no one nearby, just a woman pulling her dog, which was sniffing at a wall. Large, white clouds scudded over the Forth, and we walked on down the hill past the tenements, the gates to the brewery and the canal. The swans were sailing on the water with their cygnets, nesting under the bridge as they did every year, but no one brought them bread any more.
The traffic increased as we neared the station; carts and trams rumbling across Haymarket junction. I took Hannes’ arm and he leant on me, playing along and keeping his eyes lowered. There were so many men here in suits and uniforms that I was worried in case someone Jeff knew might recognise me before I spotted them, but no one did. There were four platforms, and the ticket inspector pointed to the most distant one over the bridge. ‘Safe journey, folks,’ he said. ‘Plenty of time before the train, so don’t rush.’
We stood at the far end of the platform and Hannes kept his head down, staring at the tracks. If anyone guessed his true identity, there was no escape from this station for him. We were below the level of the street and he would never be able to climb the high walls on either side, or escape into the yards, which were bustling with railway men. After ten minutes, the train roared out of the tunnel from Waverley in a cloud of black smoke, and pulled up at the platform. We sat in an empty compartment, but were joined by a real old windbag who seemed determined to have our story even if it meant she had to stop knitting. ‘Going far?’ she asked, as she swapped needles. Her tweed coat was folded on the seat beside her. She had eyes like river-wet pebbles. One was cloudy.
‘Ayr,’ I said, and then realised I should just have said Glasgow. It was more anonymous. She might have kennt people in Ayr.
‘Don’t know it at all,’ she said. ‘I’m a Balloch woman, myself. It is better up the coast and away from all this trouble. Of course, it is not the same with all the men away. Difficult to keep things on track. What happened to you, dear?’ She leant forward to speak to Hannes as if he were a child. He rolled his eyes towards me.
‘He can’t speak,’ I said.
‘Bless him, the poor soul,’ she replied, leaning back. ‘His sacrifice won’t have been in vain. We’ll beat those Jerries. I said, we’ll beat the Boche, dear,’ she shouted at Hannes. He closed his eyes.
‘Tired?’ she asked me, nodding at him.
‘He’s only just getting better now.’
‘The sea air will do him good. It’s a great tonic. I swear by it.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said.
‘My arthritis is always worse in the city. Damp, you see. I don’t like to complain now there are so many people worse off than myself.’
But she spoke about her aches and pains all the way to Linlithgow without dropping a stitch. ‘Excuse me while I turn this heel,’ she said, unravelling more wool from her ball.
I looked out at the ruined palace as we pulled into the station. The four towers crumbled behind the gate. Jeff had taken me there, once. High above us, traces of fireplaces hung on the wall like picture frames, with no floor beneath them. We had walked up and down the towers, edging along what was left of the corridors, while Jeff sang bright airs he claimed were from Queen Mary’s court. They had echoed down into the dark hall beneath, which had grass for a carpet.
Hannes touched my sleeve and nodded towards the corridor. ‘I expect he needs to stretch his legs, dear,’ said the woman. ‘Far too long in a hospital bed, no doubt. My mother had a sore so septic it had to be packed every day by the district nurse. You know what suffering is when you have seen that.’
I nodded and followed Hannes out. We opened the window to feel the air rushing past. The conductor came along the corridor, moving in and out of the compartments, having a bit of banter with the people inside, and getting closer and closer
to us. I got the tickets out of my bag, and passed them to him before he could speak to Hannes. His hands were balled into fists in his pockets and pressed against his thighs to stop them trembling. The inspector glanced at our identity cards without opening them, clipped the tickets and said, ‘Thanks, hen. Thirty minutes to Glasgow. Your connection will leave at quarter past the hour from Central.’
‘Thank you, Sir,’ I said, as he squeezed past. Inside, I felt I was betraying the trust of my countrymen. I tried to imagine Hannes in uniform, like the men on the news in the cinema, but I couldn’t. I wondered where his uniform was. Perhaps it was hidden out on the Pentlands, pushed into a rabbit hole. He looked ordinary. Strained. I had never deceived anyone in my life and the burden of it slowed me down. I became conscious of every movement of my face as if I was acting in a movie, but I had forgotten the next line, and was making it up. Everything I said sounded false. I was playing a role and I had a sudden memory of Jeff pulling clothes from his mother’s wardrobe for me to wear, as if all I had been doing all those days was pretending. Hannes noticed the sadness in my face, and touched my cheek. ‘Es tut mir leid, Agnes,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’
I pushed his hand away, and looked out the other window. In my mind’s eye, Jeff was sniffing under the arms of his mother’s white ball gown after the university reception and complaining that he wouldn’t be able to get it dry-cleaned because of the war. He said he should never have let me wear it, as if it had been a crime to sweat, as if his mother had never been damp like a real woman, but a saint carried in the parade of his memory for everyone to worship. I stopped feeling the swaying of the train carrying me along the tracks to Glasgow. I was sliding on a moving platform into a strange world, indebted to a man who might already have killed my countrymen. I leant my head on the cool glass, and then went back into the compartment without him. The old dear was asleep, the needles still clamped under her arms, and I shut my eyes.
Capital Union, A Page 11
