The Truth in Our Lies

by Eliza Graham

  I wanted to roll his head forward so his mouth would close but didn’t dare. ‘What happened to you, Alexander?’ I whispered. I had never used his Christian name before, not even last night. But nothing before had seemed as intimate as my being here with him now.

  I felt I was protecting him from those crows, still cawing. A murder of crows, that was the collective noun. Carrion crows. Beattie shouldn’t be lying out here on last year’s leaves and the scrubby undergrowth around the pond, soaked and cold, with those black, ungainly birds mocking him. I looked at the footprints going up to the water’s edge: mine and Micki’s, and two larger sets. Beattie’s and someone else’s?

  ‘Who was here with you?’ I asked the dead man. ‘You wouldn’t have risked falling in, would you?’ Death by water, said to be kinder than death by fire. But Beattie had feared water, he’d told me so on the flight over the Bay of Biscay to Lisbon. ‘Was it me? Something about last night?’ He looked up at me, silently. ‘I wasn’t kind to you at first. But then we found a way of being together, didn’t we?’

  Beattie continued to stare up at me. ‘It was all right between us, wasn’t it?’ I whispered. I remembered the old superstition about the last thing a dying person saw being imprinted on the eyes. I peered at his brown irises but saw only my own reflection. Had I wreaked internal calamity on him? Disastrous for Beattie himself, and for this country which needed Beattie and the labyrinthine folds of his mind. Once again I felt the sense of somebody watching me. The crows gave another burst of cawing. I turned my head to survey the woods but saw nobody there.

  I must have sat there with him for half an hour before Micki returned. With her was Atkins and the man who’d come into Beattie’s office and given me his card. ‘Move away from the body, sergeant,’ he called. ‘Leave this to us.’

  I stooped so they couldn’t hear and whispered to Beattie, ‘I won’t let you down.’

  When I stood up Atkins nodded at me. ‘Go home and change.’ She glanced at my soaked shoes and stockings. ‘Get your housekeeper to make you some hot, sweet tea.’

  ‘There’s no time,’ I said. ‘Tonight’s broadcast—’

  ‘Will be all the better for you not sitting around in wet clothes.’ She gave me a brief smile. ‘Find something stronger for your nerves, too. Beattie doubtless has a bottle somewhere in Mulberry House.’

  ‘He does,’ Micki said. ‘But he told me someone seems to have been drinking his whisky.’

  I’d spent so much of the last hour in my own emotional storm I’d failed to look at her. She appeared small, uncertain, as she stood among the bluebells, her stockings and skirt soaked too. Once the initial shock of Beattie’s death passed, she would worry that her own status would become insecure. It had been Beattie who’d brought her here to safety. If my job ended I had the refuge of my father’s vicarage and other employment options. Micki wasn’t a naturalised alien. Beattie had been the one who’d pushed through all the paperwork, shouted at officials on the telephone, even gone up to Liverpool to extract her from the holding camp.

  I stood up and approached her, placing my arms on her shoulders. ‘It’ll be all right,’ I said.

  She tensed up. ‘How can it be all right? He’s gone. There was nobody else like him. Nobody.’

  I looked at her more closely and saw something in her face that I hadn’t noticed before. ‘You . . . ?’

  Micki nodded. ‘Yes, I was in love with him. Probably just some silly fancy of mine. I knew there wasn’t a hope of him feeling the same way about me. He’s only ever had eyes for you. But you didn’t love him.’ She shook her head.

  I remembered how she’d made sure to sit next to him in the cinema. It hadn’t just been on account of the box of chocolates he’d brought with him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve really mucked everything up, haven’t I?’

  She swallowed and pushed her shoulders back. ‘It’s none of my business what Beattie and you got up to.’

  ‘Yesterday was a bad day,’ I whispered. ‘I felt, well, I don’t know what I felt.’ I shouldn’t have called him back last night when he went to leave me.

  ‘This has nothing to do with you.’ She was sounding more like the Micki I knew. ‘But the consequences for all of us are going to be severe.’

  ‘We will manage this,’ I told her. ‘Even if we lose our jobs here, I’ll make sure you get something else. You’ve been such an asset to our unit. Other people will want you.’

  I couldn’t let Beattie or his team down. She let her head droop momentarily onto my shoulder. When she raised it, her eyes were a little less accusing, though damp. I’d never seen her weep before. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll manage it, Anna. You always do. And we’ll find the bastard who did this to him.’

  We walked back towards the village. The splashes of pond water and my perspiration had washed away my pancake make-up. Two boys on their way to the village shop stared at me and one of them muttered something about my face. I didn’t care.

  Beattie was dead.

  19

  The coroner decided that Beattie had not intended to take his own life. The other set of footprints at the pond could not be proved to have anything to do with the incident and might have been there before the drowning – the woods were, after all, a popular local destination.

  He wasn’t a suicide so Beattie could be buried in consecrated ground. But where?

  Grey-suit Man’s secretary telephoned me. ‘He’s a civilian who didn’t leave a will and seems to have no family. You knew him . . . before, Sergeant Hall. Do you have any suggestions?’

  I felt a wave of sorrow for Beattie, who had done so much but left nobody behind close enough to know his final wishes.

  ‘The service needs to be discreet,’ the secretary said. ‘We don’t want to draw attention to Beattie and his work.’

  I pursed my lips.

  ‘On the other hand, we want to give him a good send-off.’ She sighed down the telephone line. ‘A conundrum.’

  ‘I know where we can go.’

  I rang my father. Dad spoke to the bishop. Permission was granted to allow the funeral and burial at the church, despite its planned deconsecration. A mid-morning service, Dad said in a telegram. I put him in touch with Grey-suit Man’s secretary. The same woman told me that the catering bill for refreshments following the service would be covered.

  A three-minute telephone call wouldn’t have been long enough to sum up Beattie’s life, so I wrote to Dad with a version that was as honest as I could make it. I had to borrow a pen from the landlady as Beattie had taken mine, I remembered. Had my pen been in his jacket pocket when we’d pulled him out of the pond? Thinking about this made me feel peculiar.

  ‘I can’t say much about his work,’ I explained in my letter. ‘But it was important and he was very good at it. He was kind to those who worked for him.’

  Writing it all down made me realise how much this was true. Beattie had been many other things to me, especially on that last night, but now I was clear that he had been my friend. He’d given me this job, pushed me to make a success of it, helped me forget the past.

  Dad wrote back saying that I’d remember the state of the church interior.

  But it’s clear Mr Beattie was very well regarded. Some anonymous official has provided funds to pay for cleaners and basic repairs to the pews and pulpit and to buy flowers, and refreshments for after the service. I hope you’re managing to carry on with your work. Your team must miss him terribly, he said.

  My team. At least for now, until Sefton Delmer could reorganise us into another research unit or units. I’d always been Beattie’s second in command, his lieutenant, though he had never called me any such thing. I’d probably been paid less than William because I was a woman, a sergeant rather than an officer. I looked at the three of them as they sat at their desks. They’d been so silent, working away on their scripts and POW interviews. Even Micki. Especially Micki. Sudden death, so common a companion in war, had shaken us.
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br />   I had made arrangements for refreshments to be served after the service at a pub near the vicarage. When I telephoned to confirm the details, they told me that a side of smoked salmon had already been anonymously delivered.

  I was given an extra day off to travel ahead to the vicarage to make sure everything was in hand. Sefton Delmer himself would supervise the evening’s broadcast. The other team members were to travel down first thing on the morning of the funeral. ‘What happens about Micki Rosenbaum?’ I asked Grey-suit Man’s secretary. ‘She’s only ever been allowed outside the village if Mr Beattie was present.’

  ‘We’ll send a special pass for her.’

  William made notes of all the arrangements, replacing the notebook in his breast pocket and patting it. He caught me watching him and gave me a gentle smile.

  I wondered whether Father Becker would be bothered by attending a service in a Protestant church. When I put this to him, he looked over my shoulder, as though seeking guidance from the heavens. ‘I’ve heard stories of soldiers fighting far from home with one padre, who attends to both Protestants and Catholics. I would be honoured to see your father’s church, Sergeant Hall.’

  ‘It’s not at its best now and will be deconsecrated at some point.’

  ‘Ach. And this was the site of your sister’s death, no?’ He sighed. ‘Such a heavy price we pay in war.’ Something else was conveyed in his glance now, something appraising. Perhaps this was what Catholic priests did: looked into your soul.

  ‘I will pay the price until my own death,’ I told him. ‘It was my fault. This,’ I pointed at my cheek, ‘feels almost like the mark Cain received for killing his brother.’

  He looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  ‘My father told us to stay in the cellar in our house after the bomb fell. But I didn’t listen, thought I could save some of the things in the church. And what’s worse . . .’

  What was worse was that I had dragged Grace with me.

  ‘Come on,’ I urged her. ‘Help me take things out.’ She stared at me for a moment with those large, innocent eyes of hers, uncertain, before taking a wicker shopping basket off the table and shoving it into my arms. She ran a drying-up cloth under the tap and tied it over her face and wrapped an apron round her waist, hoiking it up to form a bag.

  Smoke had colonised the church in the ten minutes we’d been gone. It swirled through the pews, stinging my eyes. Glass splintered above us, the boards put up at the start of the war preventing the windows from falling in. I ran down the aisle through the nave, turning left into the vestry. Unlocked. Thank God. Inside I opened the tall cupboard storing chalices and candlesticks. I grabbed an armful and ran back down the aisle, passing Grace, who was collecting prayer books from the pews. I tipped out my load onto the grass outside the church door, praying looters wouldn’t snatch them.

  Grace came out with an apron full of books and unloaded them onto the ground. The pages flicked open in the breeze. ‘Hurry,’ a fireman shouted as I ran back. The wind must be fanning the fire.

  Grace followed me, moving in her jolting, faster, gait. I tossed the basket away and grabbed armfuls of the kneelers, running back out to throw them onto the grass. With relief I saw the Lamb of God tumble safely towards the candlesticks.

  Grace came out, yelling something inaudible through the damp facemask.

  ‘Just one more load,’ I shouted to her through my own wet scarf. By now the flagstones were wet from the firemen’s hoses. I was thankful for my rubber-soled WAAF-issued shoes. I heard my sister behind me. ‘Here.’ I handed Grace a silver bible stand.

  ‘Hurry,’ she shouted, panic in her voice.

  The smoke was thick now, obscuring the door, choking and acrid. I abandoned the chalice and candlestick I carried and put out a hand to reach for a pew, disoriented, coughing, eyes stinging.

  ‘The porch’s in front of you, keep going.’ Grace sounded calmer now, the older sister reassuring the younger. I took one step and then another, continuing until I could make out the door. Something thumped. I turned. Grace must have slipped on water from a hose, that weaker foot in its brace perhaps unable to help her regain balance. She lay seemingly dazed on the stone floor.

  I dropped to my knees and tugged down my scarf so she could hear me above the roar and immediately choked on the smoke. ‘Can you get up?’ She moved her right arm and gasped.

  I unwound my scarf. ‘I’ll strap it up so you can move.’

  She murmured something I couldn’t hear; the smoke was making me dizzy. Overhead the Heinkels and Dorniers rumbled on, accompanied by gunfire from the ground.

  Something flashed above us; burning timbers falling from the roof. I jerked to the side reflexively. The timbers crashed onto the flagstones inches away from us, their heat blazing against me. Grace was still lying where she’d fallen. A corner of her jacket had ignited. I removed my own jacket and batted at the flames. ‘Get out, Anna,’ Grace muttered. ‘Leave me . . . firemen, they’ve . . . helmets.’

  Another slab of burning timber crashed down the wall beside us. It missed me but caught a thick velvet curtain attached to a wooden rail on the wall, hiding an alcove that, centuries ago, housed the confessional box. ‘Go!’ Grace screamed the word at me with a vehemence I’d never heard before.

  ‘I’m not leaving you.’ But now the curtain and I had become one being; flames from the velvet leaping onto my jacket, spreading to the sleeves, licking up the collar towards my face. The world shrank to the fire trying to devour me, and our dance together. Grace shouted out. I was lost to everything, throat full of smoke, eyes blinded. Death by fire, a martyr’s end. I heard a scream – mine? Grace’s?

  ‘So it was my fault she died,’ I told Becker.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. But even if it was, you seem to have punished yourself harshly.’ He sounded less like a priest and more like any other colleague now.

  ‘I’m not sure my father would agree.’ To my annoyance, my voice trembled. I’d seen the blankness in Dad’s eyes when he looked at me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that Grace wouldn’t have returned to the blazing church if I hadn’t persuaded her. Perhaps he’d guessed, but I’d never confessed.

  ‘We can never really see what’s in people’s hearts,’ Becker said with a quiet intensity.

  ‘Priests must have more of an insight than most people,’ I said. ‘Your parishioners talk to you in the confessional, don’t they?’ His expression changed to one I couldn’t decipher. I blinked, remembering that I didn’t have time to indulge myself like this.

  William had been observing us, one hand fiddling with the knot of his tie. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow, Anna,’ he said. He’d been quiet since Beattie’s death, his back seeming more troublesome than usual. The shadows beneath his eyes had returned. I hadn’t slept much, either. When Grace had died I’d retreated into sleep, but now I couldn’t seem to release myself from my own mind even at night. My dreams always turned to that dark track through the woods, the crows, the dank pool where Beattie floated.

  ‘We’ll all be together as a team to say farewell to Beattie,’ William said, his pupils large. He lit a cigarette, hand shaking. Was he feeling that yet again he’d inflicted bad luck on a team?

  ‘I hope we’ll do your Mr Beattie proud,’ Dad told me, when I reached the vicarage. ‘I don’t know what we’ll do if the weather’s bad, though.’

  ‘He wasn’t really my Mr Beattie,’ I said automatically. ‘Don’t worry about it raining, Dad. It won’t.’

  Beattie would already have ordered a clear day. I smiled for the first time in days.

  Dad had organised a pair of local women to polish the woodwork, and sweep and mop the flagstones. That afternoon a taxi delivered a dozen bunches of violets with no sender’s information on them. It was Lent – Dad didn’t want flowers on the altar, so we arranged them in small vases at the main entrance and along the windowsills beneath the shattered coloured glass, with a single bunch to be placed on the coffin. I recalled Beattie gazing at the
garden at Mulberry House and seeming to enjoy the spring flowers.

  I was glad Beattie would be laid to rest here, my father’s gentle but steady voice reading the centuries-old words from the King James Bible, commending him to the eternal.

  Dad did his best with a supper of fried-up corned beef and a few potatoes but my stomach still felt empty when I went to bed. I dreamt that someone served me up a big pie with a puff-pastry lid, oozing fragrant juices. I cut into it and saw it was full of black crows. They flapped out of the pastry to peck my eyes.

  On the morning of the service the church looked more welcoming than I could have hoped for. I sat near the front but couldn’t resist turning around to see who was filing in. I noted Grey-suit Man, now in a black version, with a woman who might have been the secretary I’d spoken to. Sefton Delmer sat at the back in a long, dark coat and nodded at me as our eyes met.

  A group of girls who worked as telephonists at the studio came in with a couple of technicians. I smiled at them, remembering how Beattie had brought them bars of Fry’s chocolate.

  Atkins walked in and went to sit with the telephonists. I beckoned her over to us. ‘You were Beattie’s favourite driver and courier,’ I told her.

  She smiled. ‘I gave him a racing tip or two. There aren’t many meetings these days, but he did well.’

  Dad read the words I’d produced for him and passed up to Sefton Delmer for approval. Less nervous than I expected when it was my turn, I read from the beginning of St John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . We couldn’t talk about Beattie’s work, but we could acknowledge that words had been his delight.

  The cords lowered the coffin into the ground. I had to prevent myself from yelling at the men to stop so I could check that he was really inside. Beside me Micki shifted from foot to foot. The earth was sprinkled on top of the casket. Beattie really wasn’t going to open the lid and enquire indignantly why we weren’t getting on with the evening’s broadcast.