The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

  Pierre placed the Jameson on the table. ‘Duty-free,’ he said. He turned to Geoffrey, raised his voice, made a drinking gesture with his hands. ‘Shall I pour you one now?’

  Geoffrey smiled, nodded. He didn’t have many pleasures in life, since his hearing was blown and now his eyesight was fading. Taste, touch and smell. Jameson did the lot. Pierre poured the glass and Geoffrey closed his arthritic fingers round it. He didn’t complain, but Joe knew they pained him. He could barely turn the page of a newspaper, let alone write, these days.

  They didn’t have a big herd, no more than seventy milking cows at any one time, but Joe had hand-picked them all, and bred them. Betsy was their first cow, bought at the market in December 1945. When she’d calved in the spring, they’d called her daughter Betsy, and in turn, her daughter. Joe’d lost count of the generations now. They gave up naming the other cows, except the Betsys.

  It was a trick he’d introduced to Geoffrey, putting them out to grass for a few years once their milking days were over, resting and fattening them on nothing but clover and grass. You couldn’t do the whole herd like that, for that would be a waste of the grazing, but one at a time. It took the three of them to slaughter her. There was a lot of meat on an old milker and a whole cow was too much for two, even with the chest freezer that Joe had bought second-hand. But Pierre knew a restaurant that would buy what they couldn’t use, charged a fortune for mature Galician beef. Paid Joe and Geoffrey in cash and kind, what with the drop of Jameson and a helping hand and a quiet word with the Food Safety boys.

  Joe checked on Betsy as he walked over to the milking shed. She was lying down, chewing her cud. He’d get her up in due course, put her in the head gate. The poleaxe was ready and he’d never missed yet. Swing it behind him, aim between the eyes, pierce the skull, kill the brain. She wouldn’t know a thing. The knife was nearby, and the bucket. Slit the throat, catch the blood. Cut the Achilles tendon, then hang her by the hind legs with the block and tackle slung over the beam. Split her down the middle from throat to groin so the guts spread thick as a delta, peel back the skin, sever the head and slice the animal down the backbone with his chopper. The skin pulled back easy when the animal was still warm. He’d never used anything other than a boning knife, like his daidí before him. Quartered and hung. The room where Joe kept the freezer was spick and span, and they’d carry the quarters there and hang them from the hooks.

  They worked well as a team, but Joe wasn’t sure how long Geoffrey could carry on. He’d been born at the turn of the century, as the century turned. A minute past midnight on the first of January, 1900.

  ‘Nowadays,’ Joe said, ‘you’d most likely be in the papers.’

  Joe did the slaughtering, and the other two did the hoisting and lifting. Geoffrey still had his marbles at eighty-five, but he wasn’t as strong as he used to be, and his hands meant he sometimes let slip the pulley. This might be the last Betsy they’d be able to slaughter. He’d have to send her daughter with the rest of the old milkers to be minced up for pet food.

  He cleaned and disinfected the machines, readied the churns for the morning pickup, poured a jug of fresh milk, went back into the kitchen. Geoffrey had put the bowls in the sink and spread out the copy of the Evening Post on the table. He was standing over it, staring at the photograph.

  ‘I didn’t know her that well,’ Pierre was saying. ‘She lodged with my sister. They all seemed a bit strict in that house.’

  Geoffrey was nodding, not hearing a word.

  ‘So who was the woman who had her photo?’ Pierre said.

  ‘Her name,’ Joe said, putting the milk on the table, ‘is Barbara Hummel.’

  Geoffrey looked up. He was straining to follow the conversation, looked at Pierre, then at Joe.

  ‘Margaret,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What was Margaret doing here?’

  ‘Margaret?’ Joe looked at Geoffrey, then Pierre.

  ‘Margaret. The young woman.’ Geoffrey went on. ‘Earlier.’

  He must be losing his marbles, Joe thought. Dementia. Joe’d need to keep an eye on him. Still, you had to be straight.

  ‘That wasn’t Margaret,’Joe said. ‘We buried her, if you remember.’ He didn’t say, When I was a priest. Didn’t say, I wasn’t up to the job, not at Margaret’s funeral. How could he have given comfort to Geoffrey at that time?

  ‘Her name was Barbara Hummel,’ Joe said, raising his voice and enunciating the syllables. He turned to Pierre, spoke softly. ‘I sent her away. You probably passed her on the road.’

  Pierre looked across at Geoffrey, who was still struggling to hear over the feedback from his hearing aid. ‘Why?’ Pierre said. ‘Why send her away?’ Added, softly, so Geoffrey couldn’t hear, ‘You know he loved that woman Dora?’

  ‘I won’t rush into having the Hummel woman in my kitchen without–’ Joe paused, reached for the word. ‘Without provenance. I want to know who she is and how she got the photo of Dora.’

  ‘You can ask her,’ Pierre said.

  ‘She looked nice,’ Geoffrey was saying. ‘Reminds me of someone. Will she come again?’

  ‘She’ll be back.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Pierre said.

  ‘She said as much. See,’ Joe said, lowering his voice again so Geoffrey couldn’t hear. ‘She could be up to mischief. One of those journalists who stir up dirt on the war.’

  ‘Did she say why she wanted to find out who Dora was?’ Pierre said.

  ‘No. But she did say she thought she might have traced Dora. I want to be sure. Why upset him unless we know for certain?’

  ‘We could have done Betsy some other time,’ Pierre said. ‘You could have pressed her.’

  Joe shook his head. ‘It’s Betsy’s time now. And the woman will be back. Are you ready?’

  Pierre stood up. Geoffrey folded the newspaper and put it back on the dresser.

  It had taken a dram or two to steel them up before, and a few more drams to soften them down after, for none of them, Joe thought, were natural slaughter men. It was past midnight by the time they’d cleaned up and Pierre had salted the hide ready to take to Docherty’s haulage, no questions asked, and they’d polished off the last of the whiskey. Joe took Geoffrey up to bed, helped him undress and put on his pyjamas, made sure he’d been to the lavatory and his pot was under the bed. The old man needed to get up in the night and Joe didn’t like him going down the stairs by himself, not with his dodgy leg and his poor eyesight.

  ‘We’ll be going to town tomorrow,’ Joe said. ‘You need new underpants, and a couple of shirts wouldn’t go amiss.’

  Geoffrey climbed into bed and pulled the blankets up to his chin. He was an easy man and never complained. Some men got difficult in their dotage, but not Geoffrey. Joe had looked after him for decades now and wasn’t sure what he would do were Geoffrey to die tomorrow. He was fond of him, loved him even, though that could be misconstrued, he knew, and there were gossips in Gorey who eyed the pair of them with disgust.

  ‘I’d like to see Dora again,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Before I die.’ He reached for his hearing aid. He seemed far from sleepy and the drink had made him talkative. Joe had no idea that he’d really loved the nurse, and that made the matter a whole lot worse.

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up, old man,’ Joe said. ‘It may not be her.’

  ‘And people change,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘They do change, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’ve thought about nothing else but her.’

  ‘Sure you have,’ Joe said. But Geoffrey had never shared this with Joe, until now. Joe had wondered, all those years ago in the war, whether the nurse had been his proper sweetheart but had put it out of his mind once the war was over. Joe reasoned that if they’d been sweethearts, Geoffrey would have said something. It could all be part of his own imagining, Joe told himself, and imagining had got him into no end of difficulty.

  ‘So why did you never look for her?’ Joe said.

  Geoffrey squinted. ‘What’s that?’


  He adjusted his hearing aid as Joe leaned forward and repeated himself loudly.

  Geoffrey shook his head. ‘I thought she was dead,’ he said. ‘I grieved for her. I died for her every day for forty years.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘I didn’t know where to begin then. The world was such a muddle in 1945 and I was broken.’

  And all along Joe had had her details, without realising it.

  ‘You see, Joe,’ Geoffrey said, looking up at him with rheumy eyes. ‘She was Jewish.’

  Joe took a moment to absorb the news. He’d never imagined that. No wonder the old man was so excited by the prospect of Dora, for wasn’t it a resurrection?

  What could Joe tell Geoffrey now? It would have broken his heart.

  Jersey: April – May 1943

  ‘By the way,’ Pierre said, not long after Joe had re-opened the boxing club. ‘Do you want company on your birdwatching?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘No. A friend of mine would like to meet you. Bit lonely. Could do with getting out a bit.’

  The one time Joe loved solitude was in the birdwatching, the stealth and silence of his footstep, the communion with the creatures, at one with them, in that moment. He’d focus his field glasses on the birds on the shoreline, his favourite. The red bills and legs of oyster catchers, listen, squee, squee. Or the laugh, soft at first, slow, working its way into a cackle, like two old biddies joking at some other’s expense, then he’d spot the speckled plumage of the dunlins, and after, dancing into view, his favourite, the sandpipers, skittering across the sand, too fast to count, for all the world like a class of colleens doing a jig. If the boxing took the edge off his loneliness, the birds took the edge off his doubts. That was his cross. Doubts. In the shadow of the birds, he would weep, and feel better.

  Company would shatter that. But he owed Pierre a favour, and he should be charitable. Besides, birds weren’t to everyone’s taste. Sitting, still as a stone, hours on end, for what? A rare glimpse, at the most. A chough, perhaps, Pyrrhocorax, red bill, red feet. Pierre’s friend would soon get bored. I’ll give it a miss this week. Thank you all the same…

  ‘All right,’ Joe said. ‘But I’m busy, what with the boxing and all.’

  ‘No rush,’ Pierre said.

  Pierre was already at the junction, with his friend.

  A woman. Why had he assumed the friend would be a man? They had propped their bicycles against the wall, and stood gazing at the harbour, cigarette smoke unfurling from their cupped hands. Pierre had to charge Joe for cigarettes now, supply and demand, he’d said, scarcity puts up the price. He’d imported tobacco seeds from France, promised that, come the end of the summer, he’d have a home-grown crop, free of charge, for him.

  ‘I can even get you a machine, if you want,’ Pierre had said. ‘So you can roll them, neat, like.’

  Joe was tempted to turn back, but Pierre had seen him, was walking towards him. Joe ran his finger inside his dog collar. There’s no reason, he thought, on the face of it, why he shouldn’t take a young lady birdwatching.

  ‘Father O’Cleary,’ Pierre held the handlebars steady while Joe scrambled off his bicycle. ‘I want you to meet my friend, Gertrude.’

  She stood beaming, brown hair in a short bob, plump, plain face and a round, buxom body. Joe recognised her. The nurse, from the boxing match. She held out her hand.

  ‘Call me Trude,’ she said. ‘Like your Trudy, only spelt with an “e”.’

  She was German. Pierre hadn’t told him that either.

  ‘Thank you for taking me with you,’ she went on. Her English was very good. ‘I love nature. Birds. Wildlife.’

  ‘Do you now,’ Joe said. It wasn’t a question. He’d never wanted company on his birdwatching trips, let alone from a woman, let alone a German.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I hope you can keep quiet.’

  They ended up in the Vallée de St Pierre.

  ‘Listen.’ Kweek-kweek-kweek, burru-burru-burru. He handed her the binoculars. ‘Ruddy breast, flash of white. Look, there he goes.’

  Chaffinch.

  ‘You see, Miss.’ Joe wasn’t about to be familiar and call her by her Christian name. Nor was he going to use Fräulein. ‘Listen. That’s why you can’t make a sound. You need to hear before you look. Listen, look, the ornithologist’s motto.’

  ‘Am I making a noise?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  He pushed his way through some hawthorn. An angry screech, a flash of white and blue. Trude breathed in sharply.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a jay. A crow in fancy dress.’ He added, ‘Do you not have these in Germany?’

  She smiled. She hasn’t a clue, Joe thought.

  Trude was harmless enough. She didn’t chatter, so when she asked to come again, Joe said yes. She needn’t come every week, he reasoned. He could be selective with the invitations. Besides, he enjoyed sharing his knowledge with her. It was the one thing he was sure about.

  Trude had the makings of a fine ornithologist, Joe finally had to admit, watching her as she squatted motionless, field glasses trailing a distant fluttering form. Hours together, with scarcely a word between them except to identify a bird call or a sighting, jotting down in their notebooks the ordinary birds, Phasianus colchicus, and the rare, Pernis apivorus. It was companionable, in its way. Perhaps, Joe thought, this was what friendship with a woman was about.

  ‘You must know the island well,’ she said.

  ‘I get around,’ Joe said.

  ‘And where’s the best place for birds?’

  ‘Well, now.’ Joe hesitated. ‘That depends on the time of year. And what kind of birds you’re interested in.’

  ‘Let’s say seabirds?’

  ‘Well, seabirds,’ Joe said. He stared into the distance. ‘The north is good in spring. The east in autumn. The south and west, all year.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Perhaps this autumn we should go east. What kind of birds would we see?’

  ‘Gulls,’ Joe said. ‘Auks. Divers.’ He could head for St Catherine’s.

  ‘Listen. Look,’ she said. ‘Is that what you do with people too?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘You must know a lot, then.’ She laughed, sweet as a song thrush. ‘And you,’ she said to him one day as they cycled back. ‘A boxing champion.’

  ‘Well,’ Joe said. ‘It was a long time ago now.’

  ‘Why did you stop?’

  ‘I had to choose,’ Joe said. ‘Boxing or the priesthood.’

  ‘Why a priest?’ Trude went on.

  Joe slowed down, back-pedalled, toes on the ground. ‘I had a calling,’ he said.

  Trude looked puzzled.

  ‘This was God’s plan for me and I felt it keenly.’

  ‘Don’t you want to marry?’ she said.

  ‘Why should I marry?’

  ‘You’re a man.’

  ‘The Church is my bride,’ Joe said. He’d never thought of himself in that way. ‘That’s more than enough for one man.’

  ‘You’ve never made love with a woman, have you, Father?’

  He could feel the heat rise, his neck and face sting with embarrassment. That she should even say such a thing. He looked at her, at her round face and round eyes. Not a trace of guile.

  ‘Unmarried,’ Joe swallowed. ‘Unmarried, I can love everyone. I don’t suppose you could understand.’

  She shrugged, pedalled away. He followed her. They parted at the parade ground.

  Joe hadn’t taken Trude to La Ferme de l’Anse. That was his special spot, his private hide. He came there once a week, on a Wednesday, and he hadn’t thought of sharing it. But that week he’d had to miss a Wednesday so decided to take Trude there on their Monday excursion. An exception.

  ‘A rare treat,’ he said as they let themselves in to Geoffrey’s field. It had been sown with winter oats, and now the shoots were growing thick and lush.

  ‘Walk be
tween the rows,’ he said. He led her through the field into the small dell that gave them the best view of the shoreline and the wooded hills that surrounded it. Sea, shore and spinney.

  ‘This place has it all,’ Joe said. ‘It’s very special.’

  ‘All year?’

  ‘All year.’

  ‘I like it,’ Trude said. When Trude smiled, her face melted into a sunbeam. She held her binoculars, trained them on the wood, edged her feet round, one by one, until she faced the sea. ‘I agree. It is very special.’

  Listen and look. Note well. Whoohohoho, the ghostly haunting call of an Arctic loon, Gavia arctica, the flat, dead chatter of the fulmar.

  ‘Fulmarus glacialis,’ Joe said. ‘They mate for life.’

  She wore woollen fingerless gloves but her hands looked cold. Joe had an urge to hold them, rub them tight to warm them through.

  ‘I like that,’ Trude said. ‘Being faithful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joe said. ‘Yes. To be faithful. It’s a great virtue.’

  She turned towards him, her eyes golden in the daylight, and he had a vision of her turning those eyes to other men. The sharp, sudden pain of that took him by surprise.

  ‘Do you have a sweetheart, Trude?’ He couldn’t stop himself. He had to know. It was the first time he’d called her Trude and he could feel the red-hot burn of a blush.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You’re an attractive woman,’ Joe pressed.

  She shook her head. ‘There are women who go with any man,’ she said. ‘But not me. If I have a sweetheart, it will be forever. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I know very little about you,’ Joe said. ‘Who you are. Where you come from.’

  ‘There is little to know.’ She trained her eyes on his and pouted her lips. Joe had an urge to kiss her but knew it wasn’t priestly. ‘I am a simple girl from the country. One day I would like to marry.’