Aurore

by Graham Hurley

  ‘Had?’

  ‘Has.’ He tipped his glass. ‘Touché.’

  Hélène said nothing. She wondered what he might have said had he been with the first wave of occupying troops. The empty roads. The boarded-up cafés. The shuttered houses. The mainline stations choked with families still desperate to escape. Was it some kind of comfort, years later, to tell yourself that Paris had been grateful for your company?

  She wondered whether it was worth pursuing this conversation, if only to feel better about herself, but then she became aware of a hand on her arm. It was Huber. He’d be grateful for a word in private.

  He led her out of the salon and up the staircase to a sitting room on the next floor. He seemed to be familiar with the house. He closed the door and invited her to sit down. Hélène felt a prickle of apprehension. First the Mikro. Now this.

  ‘We need to talk about paintings, madame. About fine art.’ His long pale fingers did a circuit of the room. Hélène had already recognised a Monet and a Degas hanging between the bookcases. Downstairs, she’d been within touching distance of a Pissarro she adored. Le Louvre sous la neige had been a favourite of Nathan’s, too.

  ‘You know my husband was a dealer?’

  ‘Of course. That’s why we needed to meet. Are you still in touch with him?’

  The bluntness of the question startled her. How much did this man know?

  ‘My husband’s in London, Herr Huber. Under the circumstances, conversation is far from easy.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question. I’m asking you whether you ever make contact.’

  ‘And how would I do that?’

  ‘I imagine there might be ways and means.’

  ‘Then the answer is no. I live in the depths of the countryside. I lead a very quiet life. I keep myself to myself. If you need to know more, then you might do worse than have a conversation with Oberst Klimt. He’s downstairs. If you require an introduction I’d be happy to oblige.’

  ‘I know Oberst Klimt, madame. This conversation has his blessing.’

  ‘It has?’

  ‘Of course. We’re not quite as stupid as you might think.’

  ‘And does Oberst Klimt believe I’m in touch with my husband?’

  ‘Oberst Klimt believes you are a woman of rare intelligence. He also believes you sometimes take matters into your own hands. If I may say so, that makes Oberst Klimt a very lucky man.’

  A smile played at the corners of Huber’s mouth. Hélène realised he was enjoying this conversation.

  ‘I’m flattered,’ she said. ‘Tell me how I might be able to help you.’

  Huber crossed one leg over the other and then fingered the crease on his trousers. Part of his responsibility was, he said, to draw up a comprehensive list of holdings with regard to the leading European art galleries currently under German protection. In France, the task was complicated by the fact that the French authorities had evacuated many of the best pictures during the drôle de guerre. The Germans had arrived to find most of the walls in the Louvre bare. Which remained, said Huber, a disappointment.

  Hélène permitted herself a smile. La drôle de guerre was the Phoney War. Huber was right. The best stuff had gone south.

  ‘You know about these paintings, madame?’

  ‘I know they were evacuated. Everyone knows that. All you had to do was go to an art gallery. There was nothing there. That’s why they all closed.’

  ‘So where did they go?’

  ‘I have no idea. France is a big country. I imagine it’s a question of patrimoine. A war breaks out, you do your best to protect your precious heritage. I’m sure Germany would do the same, no?’

  Huber left the question unanswered. Nathan, he said, would surely have known.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was his business, madame. Literally. Talk to anyone in this city about fine art, about paintings, and Nathan Khorrami is a name that comes up. He knew everything about everything. I find it inconceivable to believe that he wouldn’t know where the best work went.’

  Hélène shook her head. Herr Huber might be right. She accepted that. But if he also believed that her husband had shared any of this knowledge with his wife, then sadly Herr Huber was wrong.

  Huber’s face was a mask. He plainly didn’t believe a word.

  ‘We think many of the paintings ended up in chateaux,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t take much to hide even a big canvas. It would save us a great deal of time and effort if we knew where to look.’

  ‘And you still think I know?’

  ‘I think your husband knows. In fact I’m certain he does. And I also think it might be wise for you to have a conversation with him. We can facilitate that, madame. There are ways and means.’

  ‘By pigeon?’

  ‘By telephone. You will doubtless have his number. Am I right?’

  Hélène nodded. Klimt had acquired a number from sources he’d never revealed. She’d tried to get through on a number of occasions but calls out of France were always blocked at the exchange.

  ‘So what am I supposed to say to him?’

  Huber had produced a single sheet of paper. He flattened it on his knee, then glanced up.

  ‘You will appraise him of this conversation, madame, and present my compliments. You will tell him that we believe he may know the whereabouts of this list of paintings.’ He nodded down at his knee. ‘Maybe not the entire list but certainly some of them. You will ask him where they are and to whom we should direct our further inquiries. Does that sound reasonable?’

  Hélène didn’t know what to say. No wonder Huber had been spending so much time in Holland and Belgium. He must be systematically emptying northern Europe of centuries of priceless paintings.

  ‘What if my husband just says no? What if he refuses to co-operate?’

  ‘Then life might start to become…’ he shrugged, ‘… difficult.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘For you, madame.’

  Hélène nodded. Obvious, she thought. Abetz didn’t want Klimt at his soirée. He didn’t even want Hélène. He wanted Nathan.

  The silence stretched almost audibly. Downstairs, Hélène could hear laughter. Huber was waiting for an answer. Finally Hélène asked to see the list.

  Huber passed it across. Hélène got no further than the first painting. Then she looked up. She wanted to laugh.

  ‘The Mona Lisa, Herr Huber? Are you serious?’

  11

  Nell left next morning to catch the early train back to Exeter. Billy watched her through half-shut eyes as she packed her suitcase. When she went to the bathroom he slipped out of bed and folded a five-pound note beneath the top layer of clothes. They both knew the night had been a disaster and Billy, like Nell, had no appetite for a repeat performance. When she returned with her toothbrush, he pretended to be asleep. She left the room with her bag and moments later he caught the soft click as she opened the front door. Her footsteps receded down the street, leaving Billy with the squawk of the seagulls. If he felt anything, he felt relief. Better to be alone, he told himself, regardless of what happens next.

  He drifted back to sleep. A vivid dream took him downstairs in the little terrace house he’d shared with his mum in Bristol. The postman had just paid a visit. A letter was lying on the square of spare carpet that served as a doormat. The envelope was brown. It looked official. He opened it, knowing already in the dream that this would be his call to arms. Report to the Initial Training Wing. Bring proof of identity and a toothbrush. He shook the single sheet of paper from the envelope and studied it. A shopping list. Sprouts. Beetroot. And calamine lotion for his mum in case it got hot.

  He jerked awake, thinking of his mum. She’d always had reddish hair and the kind of milky complexion that burns easily. She loved the sun and every spring, when you could start to feel the heat, she’d come back from work at lunchtime and take a blanket into their thin ribbon of back garden and lie down for an hour or so before heading back. Next morning, without fail, her fa
ce would be scarlet with sunburn but she swore by the calamine lotion and within a week or so she’d have the makings of a proper tan.

  Back then, when he was still a kid, Billy’s mum had been the prettiest woman he knew. Most of the time she was soft with him, lots of treats, lots of attention, lots of love, and she saved the occasional smack for the rare moments when he really upset her. He’d cry, mostly from surprise, but they’d always make up afterwards and she’d tell him that it was hard being a woman and having to play father. What Billy really needed, she’d say, was his dad back again but thanks to the war that was never going to happen. Billy understood the logic, however dimly, but in truth he was more than happy to have his mum to himself. She’d always been his best friend, his trusted pal, a state of affairs he’d taken utterly for granted. Only in the last few days, since he had returned from duty, had he come to realise she had needs of her own.

  He got up late, wondering whether Nell might have left a note downstairs. She hadn’t. He found some tea in an old biscuit tin and made himself a brew. The last six months had taught him to do without milk when needs must and he took the scalding mug through to the sitting room at the front. The ashes in the grate were still warm and the smell of charred wood still hung in the dusty air. The house faced south and the room was full of sunshine. This was seaside weather. Bucket and spade weather. Babbacombe, he thought. And the view across the bay.

  He took the train to Exeter, and then another to Torquay. Sitting in the half-empty compartment with the sun on his face, he felt himself floating, apart, cut off from the conversation between the two women opposite, from glimpses of the nearby river, from the sudden chequerboard of shadows as the train clattered past a line of trees. At first he blamed last night. They’d drunk a lot, a bottle of wine each. But then he recognised something else. That this feeling of numbness came from somewhere else. That he was truly alone. No Nell. No mum. No aircrew. No friendly WAAF faces waiting at the foot of the ladder when they returned from yet another op. Not a single living person to share the week and a half to come.

  He walked the couple of miles from Torquay station to Babbacombe. The RAF had taken over most of the hotels and in the early afternoon they were as busy as ever: officers with briefcases ducking into cars at the kerbside, recruits still in civvies trying to match hotel names to their joining instructions, uniforms in line abreast marching untidily towards the seafront.

  Billy followed them. The Sefton Hotel overlooked a patch of greensward before the clifftop dropped away to the beach below. The view stretched across the blueness of the bay. In the far distance, beyond the line of ochre cliffs, he could just make out the smudge that was Exmouth.

  Billy paused, looking back at the hotel. He’d spent eight weeks here barely a year ago, sharing a room on the second floor with three other lads. Everything had been packed up and stored away for when peace finally returned – furniture, curtains, even carpet – and he remembered the bareness of the place, its sense of grim purpose, and the feel of the floorboards beneath his bare feet.

  In the services, they stripped you naked and remade you in their own image, exactly the way they wanted you. Like speeches he’d had to memorise in the theatre, he could still recite the standard issue kit that would shape the days to come. Knife, fork, spoon, shaving stick, hair brush, button cleaner, polishing stick. This was what turned you into an airman, an expert in the delivery of high explosive, but what had won his undivided attention were the dog tags. There were two. One was green and one was red. The green one was water-resistant. The red one would survive a fire. They were suspended on a 38-inch loop of cotton cord and you wore them round your neck. Stamped with your name, initials, service number and religion, they were all that would be left of you if it came to the worst. The red one, said the instructor, would be sent to your squadron for purposes of information. While the green one remained with whatever was left of you.

  Whatever was left of you.

  It was a phrase that Billy would never forget. So casual. So graphic. So laden with images too horrible and too unlikely to contemplate. Then, like everyone else, he’d shoved the thought to the very back of his mind because it served no useful purpose. Over the weeks to come, thanks to daily PT and hours in a classroom, he’d lost nearly a stone and learned a great deal about basic airmanship, every busy day taking him a step closer to acceptance as a trainee pilot. The flying hadn’t worked out, not at all, but gazing at the hotel he knew that the instructor had been a great deal wiser than he’d ever realised. Only at 20,000 feet over a burning city, he thought, do you finally understand where all this may lead.

  Whatever was left of you.

  He walked back down the hill to the harbour. More memories. This was a drill you only did once. Flying suit. Boots. Helmet. Goggles. And your Mae West life jacket. Standing on the edge of the harbour he gazed down at the murkiness of the water below. Felt the instructor’s hand in the small of his back. Then came the whispered invitation. Just do it, Angell. Don’t stand there. Don’t think about it. Just jump. And so he’d launched himself off the edge of the harbour, anticipating the explosion of bubbles, the icy kiss of the water as it sluiced into his suit, how heavy everything felt, and that unlikely moment of salvation as he finally surfaced. Through his misted-up goggles, he’d just made out the upturned dinghy. It was barely a fingertip away. And it was his job, with a couple of pals, to right it.

  One of them was a Scouser called Mick who’d later died over Wuppertal. The other was a thin-faced former choirboy from Reading who’d bailed out of a Halifax over the North Sea and was never seen again. Billy stared down at the water, at the blur of boats. Something to eat, he thought. Anything.

  The café lay several streets away from the waterfront. It was small and empty. Billy was glad of the semi-darkness at the back. A little privacy, the way he was feeling, was more than welcome.

  He asked for cake and a cup of tea at the counter. When the cake appeared on the plate it was a thin slice, wartime portions, and so he ordered two. The waitress, who was on the plump side, gave him a wink and then a grin but Billy wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He retired to his table with his tea. The cake was tasteless and he couldn’t even guess at the ingredients. He ate half the first slice and left the rest, staring glumly at a nearby poster.

  An airman in full flying kit was appealing for waste rubber. The line drawing was good and the implications were beyond sensible. Waste rubber makes for more wheels, more take-offs, and – on a good morning – more landings. Who wouldn’t dig out their worn bicycle tyres for the war effort? Swap their rubber doormat for another shower of bombs on some half-destroyed German city?

  He thought about the deal, waste rubber for mass incineration, and stirred his tea. It was nearly a week since he’d returned from the Hamburg raid. He’d avoided the chop, just, but what stuck in his memory, what grew and grew like some hideous cancer, was the moment he’d opened the hatch above the bomb bay and glimpsed the bubbling furnace below. He was part of that. He was complicit. Despite Irene, despite their visits to the Friends Meeting House, despite his passionate arguments with more or less everyone else in his life, he’d finally bent to the wind, and appeared before the selection board, and taken the train down here, and doubled up and down to the beach, and mistaken jelly-legs for patriotism. In the name of democracy, and to revenge the death of the woman he’d worshipped, he’d mastered the dark arts of slaughter. It was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet he’d done it.

  He stared down at the slices of cake. His appetite had vanished. His vision was blurring again. He felt a choking in his throat. People were right about war. It ate you up.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The question gave him a physical jolt. In combat, you never see the one that gets you. And here it was. The killer question.

  Local accent. Male. Soft. Concerned. Gentle.

  Are you all right?

  ‘No,’ Billy wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘No, I’m not.’


  He was looking up now. Against the glare from the street it was hard to be sure about details. Middle-aged? Bald? Wide face? Full lips? Kind eyes?

  ‘Here. Take it.’

  Billy did as he was told. The handkerchief was white, unsoiled. He dabbed at his eyes and then blew his nose.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He was looking at the handkerchief.

  ‘Don’t be. Keep it. You’re on leave? Bit of a holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But something’s happened? Am I right?’

  A second killer question. Two in a minute. This wasn’t a chat, Billy thought. This was an interrogation.

  Something’s happened?

  Billy took his time. He was a believer in the comfort of strangers, always had been, just one of the instincts that had drawn him to Irene. You looked someone in the eyes. You listened hard to the tone of their voice. You absorbed all the signals. You tuned to their wavelength. And if you were brave, or desperate, you made that leap of faith.

  ‘Have you got a moment?’ He nodded at the other chair. ‘I’d be grateful.’

  *

  They stayed in the café for the rest of the afternoon. The stranger’s name was Don. He helped out in the kitchen odd afternoons during high summer. The café happened to be on the route from the station and he’d watched hundreds, maybe thousands of young RAF recruits make their way up the hill towards the requisitioned hotels at Babbacombe.

  Money was always short, he said, and mornings and evenings he worked in a hotel along the way. The place was popular with the men in blue and he’d seen more than enough of these young heroes to be able to mimic their conversation. He was a good mimic. He caught the nervous edge of their excitement, of their shared glee to have avoided Army service, of their brash awkwardness when local girls turned up, and he drew a small round of applause from Billy when he described their anticipation of what awaited when they started flying in earnest.