The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

  ‘Is it now?’ Mrs Dauvin said. She took a step forward so her face was level with Joe’s. He felt the puff of her breath, smelled the fusty must of her hair. Her eyes were ringed with worry, sunk with hunger and her mouth cast in rigid lines. She poked a finger at Joe. ‘My husband isn’t risking his all for the British so you can hobnob with the Germans,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Joe said. ‘No, no. Not at all. Can I explain?’

  ‘No you bleeding can’t. Now clear off.’ The hallway was dark behind her, but Joe fancied he saw Tommy peering round the door at the end.

  ‘Tommy, now,’ Joe said, mustering his courage. ‘He loved the boxing, that he did. There’s not so much for the lads to do of an evening, and it keeps them out of trouble. Teaches them discipline. Teaches them–’

  ‘I said, clear off.’ Mrs Dauvin stepped back inside the hall, went to close the door, then paused, looking past Joe. ‘You can clear off, and all. Bloody scavenger.’

  Joe turned to follow her gaze as the door slammed shut behind him.

  There was a young boy ten yards or so behind Joe. Even in the gloom, Joe could see he was filthy and barefoot, his clothes in tatters and a look on his face that Joe knew well, the way fear haunts, the loneliness of suffering. He was one of the labourers the Germans had brought in.

  ‘Organisation Todt,’ Pierre’d said when they had first arrived a year or so earlier. ‘After some Nazi or other. They build roads and things. Riff-raff, for the most part. Criminals.’

  No, Joe thought, stretching the word. What could that lad have done? He was no delinquent, Joe would put money on that. The boy was short, young, and Joe saw himself in Cloghane standing on the flats as his daidí wound back his fist. I will not hear another word. The lad’s face was pinched, his eyes white against the grime and he was gesturing to his mouth, food, food. Joe delved in his pockets. He had a tobacco pouch and his pipe, a handkerchief and a box of matches. He knew there was no food, but he turned his pockets inside out and shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, pulling his bike free of the wall and pushing down hard on the pedals so the wheels squeaked and scraped the ground with their threadbare tyres, scratch-scratch on the broken tarmac.

  He took to looking out for the lad, searching him out in every gang he passed, breathing in the sickly cloy of the men, the sour of festering bodies. No flesh or muscle, sallow skin on bone, covered in dust and sand, as ramparts thirty feet high grew along the strand at St Ouen, cut off the sea with thick concrete walls, shrinking the island, shrivelling it to wrinkles in the landscape, to sulphurous craters, the vistas brown and small. It was like being buried alive in a vast, open mausoleum, watching as the masons sealed the vault, the air and the light diminishing day by day.

  Joe didn’t have the heart to try to open the boxing club again, couldn’t face another angry mother. He thought of going to the pub, but he didn’t have the money for a beer and though no one back home would have let Father Murphy pay for his Guinness, he knew they did things differently here. He wasn’t sure he’d be welcome, either. Now they had no wirelesses it was difficult to know what to do in the evenings.

  Pierre had taken to coming round to the convent in the spring, once the boxing club had closed.

  ‘There’s only so much of my sister I can take,’ he said one Friday. He pulled out his cigarettes and a small flask of brandy. ‘She doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke. And her lodgers, those nurses.’ He paused. ‘They’ve got as much sense of fun as a cuttlefish with a budgerigar.’

  Joe wasn’t sure what that meant, nor was he sure why Pierre had taken such a liking to him. Perhaps Pierre was lonely too. Perhaps he was being honest when he thought some of Joe’s grace could rub off on him. No matter. Pierre broke the monotony of the evenings. His cigarettes and brandy were welcome and Joe didn’t ask how he got them. He knew he had one of the trading concessions, but even so. They played rummy in the little parlour of the convent, or swapped stories. Pierre had a fine repertoire and was a good raconteur even though he embroidered the truth and played with the words as if he’d kissed the Blarney Stone itself.

  One evening, Pierre put a missal on the table, opened it up. An oblong had been cut in the centre and inside was a small tin of Fisherman’s Friend cough sweets. Joe wondered for a moment whether he had a sore throat, though why he should keep it in a missal was both a mystery and a blasphemy.

  Pierre lifted out the tin and prised open the lid. ‘Ever seen one of these before?’

  Joe was expecting to see the familiar beige lozenges, but instead he was staring at coils of wire and tiny cylinders. He shook his head.

  ‘Magic. Here.’ Pierre pulled out a small wire and threaded it out of the window, adjusted a miniscule dial and a faint voice could be made out through the static. This is the BBC Home Service. The nine o’clock news…

  ‘A crystal set,’ Pierre said, finger to his lips. ‘Present from that Jesuit, Father Rey.’ He spoke with emphasis. ‘So you know what’s going on. Now the Bosch have taken our wirelesses.’ He took the tin from Joe, recoiled the antenna and closed the lid. ‘Father Rey said people need hope, and what better way to deliver it than through a priest.’

  Joe pulled a face. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Pierre opened his brandy flask, offered it to Joe. ‘He said you’d know what he meant.’ He shrugged. ‘Pass on news, through the confessional. Or on your travels. Tunisia fallen. Ruhr bombed. Short and sweet. That sort of thing.’

  Planes took off and landed all the time. The rattle of a Focke-Wulf, the howl of a Messerschmitt. Joe was sure the war wasn’t going well for the Germans. He looked at the tiny wireless.

  ‘He said stack it on the shelf between the Bible and your breviary. No one would guess. He said they wouldn’t search a convent.’

  Pierre placed the tin back inside the missal. Pulled out a packet of Gauloises. ‘Father Rey thought you might be able to open your boxing club in a month or so,’ he said, taking a long drag on his cigarette and blowing the smoke out in rings. ‘The Lord moves in wondrous ways, don’t you think?’ He put the cigarette in his mouth and pulled his coat on. ‘I told you things would calm down.’ He turned his collar up. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

  Joe waited until he’d left, picked up the missal, sat down hard on the straight-backed chair, fished out the tin of Fisherman’s Friend and pulled out the antenna.

  The boys came back. Even Tommy Dauvin.

  ‘And is it true, Father, that you beat the Wehrmacht champion, Wilhelm Weber?’

  The boys were thin, undersized, and they were cherished sons, looked after. How had that young OT lad ended up here? If Pierre was right, what had he done to merit this punishment? It was a hard price to pay.

  ‘Watch the footwork, Tommy.’

  These lads, Joe thought, could be rounded up for no reason, set to labouring work. It wouldn’t take long before they, too, were scrawny as the devil and would thieve for a living.

  Joe thought about it. The nuns grew vegetables for their own use. He couldn’t take anything that would be noticed, but no one would miss half a dozen carrots or leftover taters from tea, an apple or two. It only went to the pig. Now the evenings were getting light, there were nearly three hours after the Angelus and before the curfew and the bedtime prayer. He knew the prisoners roamed at night, scavenging, as dynamite thundered in the tunnels of St Lawrence and the ground vibrated, that great bed of war tossed and ruptured.

  He put the vegetables in an enamel bowl, placed it in his basket and cycled off. He wished he had some cheese. That made a good meal, cheese and potatoes. But who had cheese in these times? The penalties for feeding the labourers were severe, but, Joe reasoned, if no one saw him, who could denounce him? Send an anonymous letter to the Feldkommandantur at Victoria College House? If he hid the food in a ditch, or a hedgerow, close to one of the camps, there was a chance a man would find it, before a feral dog or fox. And with a bit of luck, it would still be warm.

  He was caught up in this war, like
it or not.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DORA

  London: May 1985

  Dora had held Charles’s hand at Sal’s funeral, feet heavy as lead, black ribbons in the breeze while he sobbed through the Kaddish and threw the first clods of earth on her grave. He proposed to Dora a year after Sal had died.

  ‘I’m no good on my own, Dora,’ he said.

  ‘I’m an old maid,’ she said.

  ‘Wine and women,’ Charles said. ‘Best matured.’

  She said she’d think about his proposal.

  She hadn’t, of course. What would she do marrying Charles? He was more like a brother than a friend. Never a lover. He and Uncle Otto had met on the train out of Berlin in 1933. Half Otto’s age, and two years older than Dora, Charles was a short man, smiley and tubby, with a round face and crinkly hair. He’d wasted no time in anglicising his name – no longer Karl Rosenberg but Charles Ross – and himself, and didn’t so much speak English, she’d say to him, as articulate it with a careful, exaggerated accent.

  Marriage was out of the question, to Charles, or anyone.

  Would she have told a sister, if she’d had one, about the war? Sworn her to secrecy? She used to think so, but not now. She was used to her burden, carried it around wherever she went. Her memories were all she had in the world. Sometimes she thought of them crammed into a Gladstone, or a carpet bag, something soft and shapeless that expanded, with secret pockets and compartments.

  But she liked Charles. He was fun, and funny. They spent hours these days talking about the old times. She’d open her bag then, rummage through the top layers, leave the false bottom untouched. She’d forgotten sometimes what she’d hidden there.

  Charles had had a good war. Had volunteered to fight with the British when he was released from internment. A friendly enemy alien, they called him. Pioneer Corps. Then RAF. He became a pilot. Uncle Otto had told her this.

  ‘The only German-Jewish pilot, apart from Heinie Adam. Imagine, Doralein. That we should know him.’

  ‘Just as well I never had to jump,’ Charles said once. ‘I’d have pulled the wrong bloody cord on the parachute.’

  Never mind what would have happened if he’d had to bail out. Shot on the spot. They knew that now. He’d been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. Sergeant Charles Ross. DFM. He’d shrugged.

  ‘Nothing to it. Those Tiffys flew themselves. Clever machines.’

  But he was being modest, Dora knew. He’d flown more times than fate permitted. He never talked about the war, but he never missed the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. How had he felt as he climbed into the cockpit and pulled his goggles over his eyes? She could taste the fear, the adrenalin, the metal tang of bravery. He’d fought, and survived and killed at a distance and, yes, he’d had a good war.

  ‘Your war?’ he asked.

  ‘My war? A woman’s war.’ Make do and mend.

  ‘You’re lucky your hair was fair,’ Charles said. ‘And you could pass for a goy.’

  Charles and Sal had upped and moved to an oast house in Kent when he retired a few years ago, and left her high and dry.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he’d said. ‘You’ll come and visit.’

  But she hadn’t, not yet, though he came up to London once a week and they always had dinner, one way or another.

  He’d rung a couple of years ago. ‘It’s Sal,’ he said. His voice had the dull thud of sadness. ‘Cancer. It’s gone to her liver.’ She heard him swallow back tears. ‘She has three months.’

  In the event, it was six weeks.

  She had other friends that she’d met through work, university administrators like herself. Janet, Beryl, Roger. Jackie, Val, Derek. They met up every couple of months for dinner at the Koh-i-Noor in Warren Street. It was cheap, and crowded, a favourite with students. It served curries in dim light and dark decor.

  ‘So you can’t see what you’re eating,’ Roger said. They washed down the food with a pint of Kingfisher. These friends had other lives, busy social lives. She envied their hinterland of friendship. Their chums from school, their mates from university. English, she thought, was good that way, it had more words than other languages, even German, could distinguish between a chum and a mate and a pal, a companion, a comrade, a crony. Apart from Charles, Dora didn’t have old friends from her youth like that. No one to reminisce with.

  She had acquaintances. That was another word, another level of sociability, not intimates, not kindred spirits, not people you hobnobbed with on a regular basis. People she knew that she could chat to, but not share a secret with. Her bridge partners. People she met at exhibitions, or on courses at the City Lit. Or through music, in her choir once a week, or through a festival.

  ‘There’s a new Italian,’ Derek said. ‘Round the corner in Store Street. We’re going to try it.’

  Their table was at the back of the restaurant, tucked away so the waiters didn’t see them. Service was slow, and they were drinking too much. Dora saw her face in the mirror opposite, flushed with wine. I look old, she thought.

  Derek had just come back from America.

  ‘The papers were full of it,’ he said. ‘The trial. Scheduled for later, sometime in the summer.’

  ‘Trial?’

  ‘Don Nichols. Don’t you remember? He kidnapped that athlete, Kari Swenson, to use as a wife. Weird case.’

  Dora remembered. It had happened last year.

  ‘Not for himself,’ Janet said. ‘For his son.’

  She’d been rescued, Dora recalled, in the nick of time, though her rescuer was killed and she’d been chained to a tree. What would have happened to her if she hadn’t been found? Would she have grown to love this man’s son? Dora opened her bag, fished around for her cigarettes. Damn. She’d left them at home. She stood up, pushed back her chair and squeezed past her friends. She’d spotted a machine as they’d come in. Gold Leaf or Rothmans. No Benson and Hedges. She’d have to make do. She fed in the coins, pressed the button, delved for the cigarettes and walked back to the table, unwrapping the cellophane as she went. The conversation had moved on to Patty Hearst.

  Dora hadn’t taken much notice of the Hearst case at first, but as the trial had gone on, she’d grown more interested. Had the young woman been brainwashed? Or had she committed the robbery of her own volition? Had she been raped by her kidnapper, or were they lovers?

  ‘A real conundrum,’ Derek was saying. ‘A lawyer’s paradise.’

  ‘POW survivor syndrome,’ Roger said. He worked in the student welfare department. ‘She showed all the symptoms, lowered IQ, raised pulse rate, cold sweats. Couldn’t talk. Depressed.’

  ‘Says who?’ Val asked. She leaned forward, reached for a bread stick and snapped it in two, offering one half to Dora.

  ‘Says one of the psychiatrists who spoke to her,’ Roger said. ‘But they wouldn’t admit that evidence.’

  ‘Could she have been brainwashed?’ Janet said. ‘I mean, people are.’

  ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ Derek said. ‘Now that was a good film.’

  ‘They were communists too, weren’t they?’ Jackie said. ‘The Symbionese Liberation Army, or whatever they’re called. Brainwashing. The Reds do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Dora butted in. Uncle Otto was a communist, and many of his friends. They’d fought against fascism. All this Cold War stuff made people paranoid, dupes to propaganda, only Dora didn’t say that. She stubbed out her cigarette, nibbled on the bread stick, wished the food would hurry up.

  ‘But the brainwashing, now,’Janet said, ignoring Dora. ‘Stockholm syndrome and all that.’

  ‘Stockholm syndrome’s when the victim sympathises with the captor,’ Derek said.

  ‘And sometimes vice versa,’ Beryl said.

  ‘Rarer.’

  ‘But why would you want to sympathise with someone who terrorises you?’ Beryl said. She’d spilled some red wine on her jumper and was dipping the corner of her napkin in her water glass. She began to rub at the stain.
/>
  ‘Salt,’ Dora said. ‘Put salt on it.’

  Beryl mouthed Thanks. Dora was older than them, and she knew they treated her like a mother, not a peer, not someone with whom to share a confidence. She’d bumped into Beryl once, in Heal’s, shopping with her husband.

  ‘Ted,’ Beryl had said, turning to the man beside her. ‘This is Dora, my colleague.’

  Would she have done the same? Dora had wondered at the time. Introduced Beryl as her colleague? Or as her friend? Her friend from work?

  ‘Survival,’ Val was saying. They all turned to her.

  ‘Survival?’ Beryl said.

  ‘I read in New Scientist ages ago that the victim identifies with the captor, takes on their values. All to do with Freud. Defence mechanisms, and all that.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ Beryl said.

  ‘Aha,’ Val wagged her finger. ‘If you think that what your captor’s doing is right, then it stops being frightening. You accept it.’ She sipped at her wine. ‘Makes sense to me.’

  ‘No,’ Beryl said. ‘It’s just potty.’

  ‘They bond,’ Derek said. ‘Look at the case in Stockholm, that bank robbery. The women there even defended their kidnappers.’

  ‘Women are especially prone,’ Val went on. ‘They have less control. Think of all those women in history. The Sabines. Battered wives.’

  ‘They’re not the same,’ Jackie said.

  ‘Who knows?’

  Dora wasn’t sure about any of this. She reached into her handbag and pulled out her cigarettes again.

  ‘Swap places, Roger,’ she said. ‘So we smokers can sit at the same end.’ She waved the Rothmans at Val.

  ‘Hearst kept some trinket her captor gave her,’ Derek went on. ‘I rest my case.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ Jackie said. ‘If she’d been raped, why would she do that?’

  Dora took a deep drag at her cigarette, watching the smoke curl towards the ceiling.