The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  Juno scanned the embroidered bergère armchairs for anyone fitting the description of the man she had come to meet. The only image she had was an online photograph from an English website suggesting a figure in his midseventies, in a dinner jacket and wire-rimmed glasses. This distinguished appearance had caused her to agonize over what to wear for their meeting and eventually to select her smartest dress and jacket, with her hair twisted up in a ballerina bun, in the hope of presenting a professional impression.

  She need not have worried. Slumped in an armchair, John Capel sported a skewed tie, uncombed gray hair, and a suit that looked like he had slept in it. A tray with a teapot and two cups was already on the table in front of him.

  At Juno’s approach he unlaced his long legs and sprang up.

  “Hello! I ordered already. Hope you don’t mind. Shall I pour? Milk? The Germans have absolutely no idea about tea, I’m afraid. They’ll present you with a cup of tepid water and a tea bag if they can get away with it. There’s sugar, if you want to dice with death.”

  His voice had a refined English edge, and his eyes gleamed with understated wit.

  “Matter of fact, it’s pure luck I’m here. I play with a small chamber orchestra and they happened to be traveling to Berlin, so when I got the inquiry from the Neue Synagoge about the Liebermann that they wanted for their exhibition, it was a simple matter to supervise the delivery at the same time.”

  “I wanted to be certain…” Nervousness had made Juno breathless, so she forced herself to pause a moment. “Sorry. What I mean is, the agency said that you had been left the Max Liebermann painting by your aunt, Irene.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Irene had only one sister. Which makes you…”

  “Cordelia’s son.” He tilted his head, inquiringly. “And you, Miss Lambert, would like to know more about her.”

  “Yes. But before I ask, though it’s been a while, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. My mother was a good old age when she died. My only regret is that I wasn’t there. I had a number of concerts scheduled and, as always, she put on a brave front and said she would be fine. She insisted she wasn’t going to die until her son was at her side, and she had such strength of will that I believed her. So, although her death shouldn’t have taken us by surprise, it did. I was only able to go over to New York for a short while and I had to leave directly after the funeral. I left all the arrangements to a house clearance company…” He paused expectantly.

  Juno reached into the bag at her side. “You’ll want to know why I asked to meet you.” She took out the manuscript with its yellowing pages and slid it across the table. “It’s this. The people who cleared your mother’s house sold her typewriter, and the shop that bought it found this in the case. They kept it because they thought it might be important. It’s about Cordelia’s earlier life.”

  “I see.”

  John Capel took a pair of reading glasses out of his top pocket, cleaned them on his tie, fitted them round his ears, and squinted briefly at the manuscript. Then he looked up.

  “It’s a novel,” Juno added.

  “Indeed.”

  He took the glasses off again and fumbled them back into place.

  “Or at least, part of a novel. I’ve read it and I feel certain it’s unfinished. It stops right in the middle of the story. But I thought you’d want to read it.”

  “Thank you. That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  He placed the manuscript carefully on the table, then folded his hands on his knees as if contemplating what to say. Despite his unkempt appearance, he had an intent, penetrating gaze and an air of precise intelligence.

  “Juno—may I call you Juno?—since you’ve raised this subject, I hope you don’t mind a little diversion. Perhaps I could tell you what happened when I was growing up.”

  His fingers were playing with the foxed edges of Cordelia’s manuscript as he spoke, and Juno couldn’t help studying them. Long, delicate fingers—a musician’s fingers—stroking the pages in a gentle, rhythmic caress.

  “I had always been told that my father died when I was a baby. But around the age of fourteen, for what reason I’m not sure, perhaps something about the way I looked, or the strange way my mother looked at me, I began to wonder if I might not actually be Cordelia’s son. I could hardly express this. To ask would have been…awkward. Outlandish, frankly. Who asks their mom if she’s really their mom? Besides, doubting your own parentage is a recognized Freudian syndrome. I didn’t want to spend my valuable teenage years imprisoned with some Upper West Side shrink when I could be out partying, so I said nothing.”

  “You say Cordelia seemed strange with you?”

  “Occasionally, I would catch her watching me with a kind of sadness. She always looked quickly away, but like any kid, I interpreted that sadness as disappointment.” Though his demeanor was relaxed and professional, his lips were tightly pressed. Almost as if, Juno realized, he was determined to prevent every undisciplined eruption of emotion. “Consequently I tried as hard as I could to please her. I buried myself in music. I attended Juilliard and made a career for myself. I met my wife and moved to London, but my playing took me all over the world. It was not until a couple of years ago that I discovered my early intuition about Cordelia was correct.”

  Juno was transfixed. The conversation with Oskar Blum rang suddenly in her head. What happened? I don’t know.

  Softly, with a sense of dawning comprehension, she said, “Irene was your mother.”

  “That’s right,” he replied, levelly. “Which makes my father either a Russian soldier or a German officer.”

  Juno scrutinized the wide cheekbones, pale skin, and high, monastic brow. If he wasn’t male, she might have called him beautiful. Who did he assume was his true father? An SS man on the run? Or did those cheekbones testify to Russian blood? Was he the son of a Nazi or of a rapist?

  “If you’re Irene’s son, how did you come to be raised by her sister?”

  “They had a plan. At the time that I was born, Irene was going through the de-Nazification process. Her passport had been confiscated, so she couldn’t leave Germany. But Irene believed very strongly that her son would have a safer and healthier childhood in England. So both sisters decided that Cordelia should take me to their parents’ home at Birnham Park. Irene would follow as soon as her passport was restored.”

  “But that’s not…”

  “That’s not what happened? No. Unfortunately, with babies, things very rarely go to plan. Nature intervenes. Once I was given into her care, Cordelia was offered a contract with Life magazine that required her to move to New York. It was a tremendous opportunity and it was the career she desperately wanted, but she found she couldn’t bear to give me up. Postwar England was still getting back on its feet. London had been bombed, everything was shabby and gray, rationing was in full force. America must have seemed like Shangri-la in comparison. So Cordelia told herself it was what her sister would want.”

  “But she would need paperwork, surely, if she was to take you?”

  “She had an old friend, a man called Gregory Fox, who worked in the Foreign Office, and he agreed to fix the papers for the two of us. So she signed the magazine contract, and made a new life for herself. It was a good life. A celebrated life. She became a fearless reporter.”

  He gestured around him. “I was thinking, when I saw all this. The Adlon Hotel was bombed to bits in 1945, yet now you’d never know it. The Germans have steeled themselves to keep the past in its place. I think Cordelia was like that.”

  “Wait.” Impulsively Juno reached out a hand to his arm, as though she could physically arrest the train of events. As though she could stop Cordelia back in that time, sit her down and interrogate her over her actions.

  “I don’t understand! How do you know all this? If you grew up assuming that Cordeli
a was your mother, how could you possibly know any different?”

  John Capel studied her a moment. Then he pushed the manuscript fractionally toward her. “I read this.”

  “But it stops midpoint! There’s nothing in it about the baby. Nothing about you!”

  A wry grin. “How quickly we forget. You see, Juno, this was in the past, before computers and so on, in the time of typewriters. Cordelia was a journalist. And what was the first thing journalists did when they sat down at their typewriters to write a story?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never used one.”

  “They put in a carbon. It was as automatic as breathing. The carbon paper makes a second sheet. A copy. Like a ghost of the original.”

  A ghost. The feeling that had haunted her from the very beginning. That behind one story lay the ghost of another.

  “This manuscript you have here is only a partial copy of Cordelia’s novel. I have the entire manuscript. It explains how Cordelia came to Berlin as an interpreter after the war and found Irene pregnant. How after Irene gave birth they formed their plan. And how the plan went awry. Cordelia wrote the novel just before she died. By the time I read it she was gone. Actually, she dedicated it to me.”

  “No. That’s wrong. It’s dedicated to someone named Hans.”

  He smiled thoughtfully at her. “Hans is a Germanic version of John. Irene named me after their father. And when Cordelia took me back to England, she made me English again. Hans became John.”

  He paused to pour them both another cup of tea, and Juno marveled at his composure. Yet it was a performance, she felt sure, as much as any he gave on the concert stage.

  “If that’s true, why didn’t Irene come and find you?”

  “As you can imagine, I’ve asked myself that time and again.” Setting his cup down, he leaned back, eyes on the ceiling and mind on the past. “I know she did not mutely accept the situation. Even after her passport was restored, the widow of a senior Nazi would find it difficult to gain entry to the U.S. in those early years. But she wrote repeatedly asking about me, and to begin with, Cordelia would respond, sending glowing reports of my progress. How happy I was. How thriving. An all-American boy.”

  There was a tightness in his voice that made Juno question if he had ever been that thriving, happy child Cordelia claimed.

  “Then those responses tailed off, and eventually, I suspect, Irene believed it was too late to break the bond between Cordelia and me. She must have accepted I would have a better life in the States. That I needed to grow up believing Cordelia was my mother.”

  “And did you? Have a better life, I mean?”

  “Cordelia and my adoptive father certainly did everything they could for me.”

  “Cordelia never married, did she? At least if she did, I never read about it.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m not surprised. For a journalist, my mother was perversely obsessive about her own privacy. She was notorious for refusing every approach from biographers. She used to say if she ever wanted to tell her story—which she most certainly did not—it would be on her own terms. She was not having some fatuous biographer sitting there asking inane questions.

  “But while she may not have married the man I call my father, she had a very good life with him. His name was Torin Fairchild.”

  Juno nearly dropped her tea cup in astonishment.

  “Torin died!” she protested.

  “So Cordelia believed. It wasn’t until after the war that she discovered what really happened. Shortly after he was sent into France in 1941, his SOE circuit was compromised. All the other members were captured and executed at Fresnes prison, but Torin escaped. A family of French farmers sheltered him for the rest of the war. He had perfect French, and they passed him off as a farmhand.”

  “Yet Cordelia had been told he was executed—”

  “By Kim Philby. What do you know about Philby?”

  “I know he was one of the Cambridge Spies.”

  Juno had seen film of him. She had a vague image of an upper-class Englishman with a lethal combination of menace and charm.

  “Philby had been working for the Soviet Union since 1934. The man who helped recruit him, Willi Münzenberg, was a German, who ran a Comintern operation out of Paris. When Torin was stationed in Paris, he encountered a journalist called Arthur Koestler, a suspected Soviet agent. He traced Koestler to this outfit and then reported back to a contact he had in British Intelligence. Kim Philby, who also worked in British Intelligence, got immediate wind of Torin’s move, and from that moment on, as far as Philby was concerned, Torin was a marked man. So Philby betrayed the circuit.”

  “Because he wanted Torin dead? You’re not saying that Kim Philby was prepared to sacrifice his own SOE agents to save himself?”

  “I am. Numerous British agents lost their lives through Philby. When you confuse your own survival with the survival of an ideology, those decisions become easier, I guess. All that matters is winning.”

  “So how did Torin find Cordelia?”

  “At the end of the war the continent was in turmoil. Can you imagine a multitude of displaced people, all en route to somewhere else? Mayhem. Torin made it back to England, but by then Cordelia was in Germany, and shortly afterward she moved with me to America. When he eventually tracked us down, Torin wasn’t expecting to find her with a child, and I don’t know what she told him about me, but whatever she said, it didn’t affect his devotion. Sometimes I got the feeling those two were so close I was in the way, but now I think otherwise. I think what I was sensing was that every time Cordelia looked at me she saw Irene and was reminded of what she had done.”

  His gaze strayed momentarily into the distance, before coming back to Juno.

  “Their happy life didn’t last forever, I’m afraid. Torin died in a light aircraft crash in 1962. I was sixteen, and that was when everything changed. Cordelia received a letter. I can still see the scene clearly in my mind’s eye—the sun was streaming into the kitchen and Cordelia was standing by the window poring over several sheets of pale blue airmail paper, with a German postmark and beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting. She stood there transfixed, reading the pages over and over with a mixture of astonishment and apprehension on her face. When she finally looked up, she announced that it was time to visit my German aunt in Berlin.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Just me. I protested, of course. Vigorously. I whined and complained and asked why I needed to go and stay with some old woman I’d never met, but Cordelia said, We’re sisters, after all. Never forget that. I got the impression it was a line she had only just read.”

  “She was taking quite a risk. Sending you alone to Irene.”

  “Indeed. It was brave of her. She must have dreaded that Irene would reveal the truth and turn me against her forever.”

  Softly, Juno asked, “And did she? Tell you about everything that had happened?”

  “Not a thing. I never suspected the secret they shared. Irene asked endless questions about my life, of course, and demanded every last little detail about me—who were my friends, what subjects did I enjoy in school, did I love music, what did I like to read—but as to our true relationship, she revealed nothing. She was a tremendous hostess. She showed me round West Berlin, planned treats and outings, took me to restaurants. We even went to a soccer match! She possessed the most exquisite Bechstein, and she loved to sit in the drawing room, listening to me play. After my first visit I went regularly, right up until the time she died.”

  “And you never suspected? That she was more than your aunt?”

  “Never. Why should I? It was not until I read Cordelia’s novel that I knew the truth.”

  John Capel leaned closer and placed a hand on Juno’s arm. His gaze was unflinching.

  “Please don’t think that knowing what I do has affected my admiration an
d love for Cordelia. She was a brave and remarkable woman—trenchant and fearless—and she campaigned tirelessly for children in war zones. She was an ambassador for UNICEF.”

  “Yet she was prepared to deprive her own child of his real mother.”

  “Imagine the courage it must have taken to explain, after all that time and those lies, how she came to raise me. It’s not surprising Cordelia believed that postwar Germany was not the best place to bring up a baby. Most people would agree with her. Her first article for Life magazine was about the horror of Year Zero and the German children growing up in starvation and misery. I think, too, that something changed in Cordelia when she thought she had lost Torin. That passionate intensity of hers had to go somewhere, and it happened that she lavished it on me. To have a little child, and have that child call you Mom? That’s an impossible knot to untie. Cordelia simply couldn’t give me up. Yet the fact that she had denied me my true relationship with Irene—well, she must have assumed that she would earn the full force of my resentment, right at the end of her life.”

  “And did she?”

  “It’s not that simple.” Capel’s fingers played with a spoon on the table, turning it back and forth as if scrutinizing the twin images of his face, concave and convex. As though he himself was still searching for the right perspective.

  “I have children myself now, and what I do know is that the bond between an adult and a young child is one of Nature’s wonders. It might be no more than the product of hormones on the brain, but it’s the most powerful force in the universe—more powerful than love between men and women, or friends or sisters even. It’s the deep, blind instinct that keeps our species going. It’s central to survival. Prolonged exposure to a small, dependent baby would certainly have had that effect on Cordelia.”

  Juno leaned toward him, hands clasped round her knees.