The Hidden
Page 15
‘Why do you think this man was your father?’ Dora pointed to the photograph.
‘I think List and my mother were lovers,’ Barbara said. ‘She looks happy here. But she was never a happy woman, as I knew her. She kept his picture, despite the war, but did not keep my father’s. And there is a date, here.’ She turned the photograph over. ‘Christmas, 1943. She must have been pregnant.’
‘Perhaps she was already a widow.’
Barbara shook her head. ‘There is no marriage certificate.’
‘Perhaps there was no wedding. You said yourself you didn’t need to be married to have a child.’
Barbara leaned forward, hunched her shoulders. ‘It’s crazy, I know. I just have this feeling. I never felt at home with my mother. We didn’t get on.’
‘What happened to this Maximilian List?’ Dora said, hoping Barbara did not hear the quiver in her voice.
‘He’s still alive,’ Barbara said.
Dora felt dizzy and clutched the side of the sink for balance.
‘He lives in Hamburg,’ Barbara went on. ‘That’s the irony. I could have met him at any time. Perhaps I did, and never knew it. As a matter of fact, I have to go back to Hamburg next week, on business.’ She smiled. ‘So much for my holiday, but I work freelance, and you can’t turn down work.’
‘Will you visit him?’ Dora said. Willed Barbara to say, No, I’ll leave it at that.
‘Perhaps.’
‘You’re good at turning up unannounced,’ Dora said, and smiled though her heart was beating as fast as a baby’s and she could feel the blood flooding to her hands and feet. ‘Springing surprises. Like your mother.’
‘Like my mother?’
‘Yes.’ Dora thought fast. ‘With her box of memories. What else did she have in there?’
‘Not much,’ Barbara said. ‘A newspaper clipping of a boxing match between a priest called Father Joseph O’Cleary and the Wehrmacht champion.’
‘This Joseph O’Cleary who told you about me? Who lives at the farm?’
‘I think so. I shall ask him if he knows my mother.’
‘Anything else there?’
‘A beer mat. A pressed flower. A bird’s feather. Bits and bobs. Nothing of interest. Why did you ask?’
‘Just in case,’ Dora said. ‘Just in case.’
Jersey: May – June 1943
The trees fizzed with green and dog roses coated the woodlands. Dora cycled down the hill to Geoffrey’s farm, feet off the pedals and her legs splayed out, with the breeze in her hair and the soft kiss of the day’s warmth. She looked over the cliff to the sea beyond, at the white tufts and crests of the waves that churned beige and grey on a cloudy day, to the sapphire and emerald and turquoise that shimmered when the skies were cobalt, the sun high and the breezes becalmed. She pretended not to see the rolls of razor wire on the beach.
Some days, when Dora thought she wouldn’t get pregnant, they made love in the afternoon, his eyes as soft and creamy as the surf below. Lying spooned in the late sun, his arms holding her tight, she felt his breath mingle with her own, his muscles tighten against hers, his skin and hers, smooth together. Those days, she forgot.
Other times, she’d crouch beside a gaunt and wasted figure and lance an abscess, or wash a wound, hand on a brow, there, there, as the planes droned overhead, or dynamite thundered in the tunnels and the ground vibrated.
It was Wednesday in late June. It was a long haul up the Grande Route de Rozel, feet pressing hard on the pedals and the makeshift rubber hose tyres sticking to the road. Dora was hot and thirsty when she arrived. The iron shoe-scraper was to the left of the front door, their signal that someone else was inside, and the front door was locked. Dora made sure no one had followed her, walked to the back of the house, fished the key from under the flowerpot, opened the scullery door, locked it behind her and went through, into the kitchen. She dreaded the days when there were people there, never knew what she would find, never knew whether she, too, like her father in Verdun, would feel the drag of death.
The kitchen was empty. She walked through the hall, the grandfather clock with its steady, homely tock-tock, so normal, up the stairs, along the landing, steep steps to the attic.
‘Who’s there?’ Geoffrey lurched from behind the screen.
‘Me,’ Dora said. She walked towards him. There were two escapees this time. One was a young man. Her age, perhaps, wizened with hunger, his face lined and wrinkled. The other was a boy, with emaciated legs and a face no more than a skull. They sat on the mattress, elbows on knees, dying hawks with jagged broken wings. ‘Are they injured?’ Dora said.
Geoffrey shook his head. ‘Only their spirits.’ Smiled.
But she smelled it. ‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said.
She saw him swallow, his Adam’s apple move as it pushed down the spit, like a guilty schoolboy. He put his hands to his temples.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I’ve had a glass of brandy.’
Brandy? Where did he get brandy from?
‘I thought these two poor sods could do with it.’
‘You gave it to them?’ Dora said, unable to conceal her shock. ‘Are you mad? That could kill them.’
He just looked at her. ‘Why shouldn’t they have a drop?’
Sometimes, Doralein, we gave them brandy in Verdun. There was nothing more to be done.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let’s go downstairs. I’ll make something hot for us all.’
She smiled at the men, signalled with her fingers that she was going away. ‘Ich werde zurückkommen,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back.’ She held her hands together and placed her head on them at an angle. ‘Rest. Ausruhen.’
They nodded, smiled, parchment skin cracking.
Geoffrey shut the attic door behind them, locked it. He put the key in his pocket.
They sat in the kitchen, elbows on the table, hands clasping their mugs.
‘You seem anxious,’ Dora said. ‘Why?’ Perhaps it was the brandy, made him jumpy.
He shook his head. ‘You never really know, do you?’ he said. ‘They could be Germans. Dressed up, to catch us out. They do that, you know? Pretend they’re OT workers, trick us.’
‘Those men are starving,’ she said. ‘They’re not Germans.’
‘Spies, then.’
She leaned over, placed her hand over his. ‘No, Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘They’re not spies.’
‘But if I was caught,’ he went on. Dark fears surfacing as the brandy took hold. ‘I don’t think I could survive. Locked away. The walls pressing in. I’d suffocate.’
‘You won’t be caught,’ she said. ‘And you’d be fine. How’s the farm? Your potatoes. Oats.’
He lifted his cup, drained it noisily. ‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘At least things look healthy here.’
Geoffrey shook his head. ‘Colorado potato beetle,’ he said. ‘They tell us it’s on the island. Nonsense. We’ve never had the beetle here.’ He reached over and poured himself some more tea. ‘They just want us to spray everything. God knows why. Poison us all, I suppose.’ He lifted his cup, put it down.
Dora shook her head. Surely not. But she was thinking about what he had said earlier, about imprisonment, locked in a cell where the walls marched forward and squeezed, tighter and tighter.
‘Have you ever been in prison?’ she said.
He looked at her for a long time before he nodded.
Dora shivered. ‘What for?’
‘Drunk and disorderly.’
‘Drunk and disorderly?’ She laughed, the relief. ‘Was that all? Was that how you broke your nose?’
‘I didn’t break my nose,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It was broken for me.’
‘In a brawl?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
She wanted to know, wanted him to be honest, not evasive, like he had been in the past. After all, a brawl was not so serious, and she’d seen him with a temper.
She leaned forward.
‘So what happened?’
‘I’m not proud of this,’ he said.
‘Is that why you’ve never told me?’
‘You’d have to know, sooner or later. Perhaps you’ve heard rumours already.’ He smiled. ‘You know what this place is like.’
‘Nothing specific,’ she said. ‘Though I was warned off you.’
‘Really? By whom?’
‘That would be telling.’ Two could play at secrets.
He shrugged, took a breath. ‘When I was nineteen,’ he said, ‘I was engaged. It seemed a good idea, the next step. It’s what you did. Leave school. Get a job. Get married. It’s a small island. Families know each other. Parents have ideas. You go along with it.’
Dora understood that pressure, she’d witnessed it time enough in Berlin. Her cousin Naomi, for instance, just had to look at a boy and her aunts were arranging the wedding. Vati disapproved. A waste, he’d say. What’s the hurry? Get the girl educated.
‘So who was she?’
‘Her name was Vanessa.’ He paused and looked at her, a smile teasing his mouth. ‘You had dealings with her father. Sir Leonard de la Moye.’
Do you understand now?
‘Ah,’ Dora said. ‘Go on.’
‘It was announced in the Evening Post. And The Times. There was a big engagement party. A rather grand affair.’
Apart from the hospital dance, Dora had never seen Geoffrey dressed up, couldn’t imagine him mingling with the good and the great of Jersey, although he must have been a catch at one stage with his farm and land, and he was handsome enough.
‘That doesn’t seem like you,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘It was a world away.’
‘So what happened?’
‘About two months before the wedding, I met Bea. She was on holiday with her parents. She was a very modern woman. A stenographer. Vanessa didn’t work. All she was expected to do was marry, settle down. I’d never met anyone like Bea. A working woman, with her short frocks and bobbed hair. I was bowled over by her. Attraction of opposites, I suppose. Perhaps it was infatuation, but at the time it seemed real.’
He was holding his cup, flicking his thumb on the handle so it sung.
‘One thing led to another. I didn’t think. Nor did she. We were young, impulsive. Frankly, I was an idiot. Infatuated. Never gave a single thought to Vanessa, or the consequences. After the holiday, Bea returned to Manchester.’ He paused. ‘I’d told her at the start I was already spoken for. That our affair had no future. She agreed. She said she had a job to return to anyway.’
He gazed past Dora, stared at the Aga.
‘I thought about her after she left. Of course I did. But I was caught up in the plans for the nuptials. Vanessa and me. Where we’d live. Practical things.’
He turned back to look at Dora.
‘Then a week before the wedding, Bea turned up, with her father. She was pregnant. He was a policeman. He threatened to break every bone in my body if I didn’t do the decent thing and marry Bea.’
His eyes focused once more on his cup, his finger scratching at a small chip on its rim.
‘I was prepared to marry Bea, even though I hardly knew her. So I had to break it to Vanessa.’ He twisted the cup so the tea made brown waves inside. ‘I was a complete cad, and I knew it. Goodness knows, Vanessa didn’t deserve it. Nor did Bea. I should have taken precautions. Who wants a shotgun marriage? Just didn’t think.’ He shrugged. ‘I drank a brandy, to give myself courage. And another. Maybe two. Maybe more. Went round to Vanessa’s house, hammered on the door and blurted it out.’
His hand was shaking. He put the cup down on the edge of its saucer. Dora reached over to steady it.
‘And?’
‘Her father threatened to break every bone in my body if I didn’t do the decent thing and marry his daughter.’
‘I hope you were ashamed,’ Dora said.
Geoffrey nodded, but he didn’t look up. Dora wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the rest, wasn’t sure that she could trust a man who’d behaved so badly. She’d told him her secret, had given him her love, put her faith in – in whom? A reprobate? A scoundrel who was quivering at the prospect of prison when he’d trapped one woman and humiliated another, and could yet betray her?
‘What happened?’
‘I was in a mess. I was nineteen. I was drunk.’
‘You’re making excuses,’ Dora said.
‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I said I was ashamed of myself. But it gets worse. I told Sir Leonard he was a two-faced bastard, balled my fist and went to smash it into his face, only he moved and I missed and fell flat on the floor.’
‘That was shocking,’ Dora said. That a young man should swear like that and resort to violence was bad enough, but to the father of your fiancée? Had he no respect? She pushed herself away from the table. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘Please. Listen.’ Geoffrey was watching her. Dora hesitated. ‘He had me arrested by the States Police,’ he went on. ‘I was still a minor. I should have been Parish-Halled, but he put me up before the Juge d’Instruction. Common assault. Drunk and disorderly. Breach of promise. He threw the book at me. Made sure I had a custodial sentence, criminal record.’ He looked up at her. ‘You don’t shake a record off lightly. And for good measure, he made sure I was roughed up in the cell with no medical attention.’
He pointed to his nose.
‘How long were you in prison?’
‘One year,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t marry Bea, though I planned to when I was released.’
‘And then she died,’ Dora said, her voice soft.
‘Yes,’ he said. He flicked the cup, so it rang again. ‘Bea’s parents had thrown her out. They were Roman Catholic, so was Bea. So she stayed with my mother, who looked after Margaret until I came out of prison and came to my senses. I’ve told you that bit already.’
Dora nodded.
‘Margaret was illegitimate,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘Sir Leonard made sure of that. She had to live with that stigma and I’ve been pretty much ostracised ever since.’ He chewed his lip, a worried expression on his face. ‘I think that’s why maybe she went with that German.’
Dora had all but forgotten that.
‘What I did was shocking. A real scandal at the time. But this is what really enrages me.’ He looked up and Dora saw once more the fury in his face, his jawbone set firm and hard. ‘What really gets under my skin is that the very same man fathered at least one child out of wedlock, possibly two. Common knowledge, but he never acknowledged them. Hypocritical bastard.’
‘And Vanessa?’
‘She married a couple of years later, moved to England. I never heard from her again.’
He pushed himself up from the table so the chair juddered on the floor. ‘What was that?’
‘Your chair,’ she said.
‘No. That.’
Dora listened. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘Listen.’
Dora strained her ears. In the distance, the unmistakable clug of a Kübelwagen. The noise was coming closer.
‘It’s at the top of the hill,’ Geoffrey said, pushing himself away from the table. ‘Coming this way. More than one.’ He stood up, pointing to the ceiling. ‘Tell them to keep still. Lie low. Hide. Under the blankets. Not a movement.’ He grabbed Dora’s arm, pulled her to her feet, handed her the key. ‘Hurry.’
Dora ran out of the room, up the stairs, two at a time, her heart beating fast. Into the attic, Soldaten, Soldaten. Finger to her lips, as she signalled to them to scrunch up under a blanket. She folded another blanket, and another, half and half again, laid it on the top, so it looked like a pile. Pathetic. Tiptoed back across the floor, locked the door, down to the landing. She could hear the hammering. Why wasn’t he answering it? Had he escaped? Left her? She dared not go down in case they saw her through the window. Perhaps he was hoping they’d think the house was empty, unoccupied. Would leave. But her bike was outside. They’d know someone was in.
Go. A crash as the wood splintered. Dora could hear the soldiers, butting the panels with their guns, opening up.
‘What do you want?’ Geoffrey’s voice, calm in the storm. ‘How dare you.’
She heard him cry out, a man’s scream. Her father would have heard that scream too on his battlefields. A war cry. She shut her eyes, crouched on the landing, one hand on the baluster. She should go down, feign surprise. Innocence. They mustn’t come upstairs.
She pulled herself up.
‘Geoffrey? What’s happening?’ One step, another, slowly down the staircase. Saw the soldiers in the hallway below, rifles aimed. Only they weren’t the Wehrmacht. They were from the Geheime Feldpolizei, the secret police. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. Voice steady, though she could hear the chip of fear, nearly said, because it came first, now. Was machen Sie hier? Was wollen Sie? No German. No German.
A Feldpolizist came towards her, three steps at a time, grabbed her arm, yanked her forward so she almost tripped, marched her into the kitchen. Geoffrey’s hands had been tied, arms pulled back, head down, eyes to the floor. Another Feldpolizist stood close, Mauser at the ready. Geoffrey stayed motionless as Dora came in, didn’t look up, no eye to catch, no sign, no hope, no we’ll be all right.
Three Feldpolizisten now climbed the stairs to the attic. She heard their heavy boots overhead, kicking each door on the floor above, their shouts, Nichts! Nichts! The door to the attic stairs. The clomp of toecaps on the wooden steps, the rattle of the handle as they tried the lock, the splintering crash as they kicked it open. Silence.
And a scream, the broken gargle of the young lad. The Feldpolizisten were shouting. Raus! Schnell! The roll of their boots and the shuffle as the prisoners tripped and fell down the steps, across the landing, down the stairs, heads banging on the walls as they tried to keep their balance. She shut her eyes. Felt her arms pulled behind her, the cold metal of the handcuffs, the pinch as they clamped tight.
‘I know you,’ one of the Feldpolizisten, a sergeant, said. She gulped, don’t look him in the eye. ‘I told you I never forget a face.’