And two girls in a garden, having a picnic.
A tablecloth spread on a lawn; a low, spreading tree. A rather formal picnic it looked, with knives and forks set out on the spread cloth, food on plates. Hilly stared at the older of the two girls, her senses quickening. Rachel. She knew this was Rachel. The girl smiling out of the photograph was not wearing her glasses this time, and looked more relaxed than in the studio portrait; she was leaning on one hand, her legs folded to one side, her feet in bar shoes. She wore a dark-coloured cardigan and a blouse with a small bow at the neck. Her hair, as before, was parted in the middle and plaited into neat coils over her ears.
Hilly turned over the photograph. ‘Rachel und Sarah im Garten’ was written on the back in pencil, in – she thought – the same handwriting as the Rachel portrait. Rachel and Sarah in the garden. That gave it a time and a place. Germany (Cologne?), before or during the war. The other girl, the younger one, looked excited, as if she was only just managing to sit still for the camera. Her face was rounder than Rachel’s, her hair a shade lighter, wavier. She sat cross-legged, showing white knickers.
Rachel and Sarah. Sisters? Hilly peered closer. It was possible; the younger girl’s round cheeks and general chubbiness might have matured into something more like the slimmer Rachel. Jewish sisters? What had happened to them?
Had Heidigran been at the picnic?
Hilly put the photograph carefully aside. There might be more.
‘Coffee, Hilly?’ her mother yelled up the stairs.
‘No, thanks,’ Hilly shouted back.
She knew she was not going to show her mother what she had found. A careful search through the remaining photographs revealed nothing more; not another glimpse of Rachel, nothing that seemed to be from Germany.
What had Heidigran been looking for, when she’d stuffed the photographs back in the cupboard? For Rachel, or for something else? Had she found it, or given up in frustration?
I’ll see, Hilly thought, when I show her this. When? It’s got to be when there’s no one else around. Not tonight, then. But tomorrow is Rashid – she remembered with a rush of warmth and nervousness – so not then either.
She put the photograph into her patchwork bag and went downstairs.
‘Mum,’ she began, ‘I forgot to say – it’s all right if I’m out all day tomorrow, isn’t it? With Tess?’
Annagran’s car was parked outside the house. They were having tea in the garden, Dad and the two grandmothers.
‘We had such a lovely time!’ said Heidigran. ‘Where did we go?’
‘Coton Manor,’ Annagran supplied.
‘Yes, that was it. Wonderful gardens, Rose, I’m surprised you haven’t been to see them! And I bought that Geranium renardii I’ve always wanted. It was a shame Ken couldn’t come, though. He’d have loved it.’
The usually tireless Annagran looked somewhat frazzled. ‘How was she?’ asked Rose, a little later, when Heidigran had wandered off to water the hanging baskets.
Annagran flopped back in her garden chair. ‘Rose, you must be a saint. I’m worn out after a few hours – and Gavin says this was one of her good days! Ken, Ken, it’s been Ken non-stop. Where is he? When’s he coming? Will he know the way? She even wanted to go back and wait at the entrance, so’s he wouldn’t miss us. I explained to her, Gavin explained – No, Heidi, don’t you remember, Ken died? Don’t you remember the funeral? She nodded and seemed to understand, and then straight away it was: Where’s Ken? When’s Ken coming?’
Hilly remembered something, and went up to the attic. Zoë was there, lying face-up on the bed. No radio or CD playing, no Walkman.
‘What’s up with you?’ Hilly said. ‘Aren’t you well?’
‘Nothing,’ said Zoë.
‘Why don’t you come down? We’re all in the garden.’
‘Don’t want to.’
Sulking, Hilly thought: since WPC Jo’s visit, Zoë had been grounded. The problem was that a grounded Zoë was never out of the house, and always where Hilly didn’t want her to be. Giving up, she went to the section of cupboard space that was designated hers. She hid the Sarah and Rachel photograph under her sweaters, then went to the shoe box in which she kept cassettes and CDs.
‘I’ve got bad news for you,’ Zoë said tonelessly.
‘Oh, what?’
‘Those three blokes that were arrested – it wasn’t Grant’s friends. Nothing to do with them. They were at the Chinese takeaway at the exact time what’s-his-face was being mugged, so there’s no way it could have been them.’
‘Oh—!’
‘But you had to stick your oar in, naturally, and get me into all this trouble. And all that police hassle for my friends. You’re not their favourite person, let me tell you.’
‘Have you told Mum and Dad? It might make things better.’
‘Not yet.’
Hilly faltered, ‘Well, I’m—’ No! She wasn’t going to say she was sorry. How could she be sorry? She had only told WPC Jo what she’d seen at Settlers, and she was definite about that. Even if Zoë’s friends weren’t muggers, they were still unpleasant racists. She stared at Zoë, puzzled by her mood – instead of being triumphant, angry or self-righteous, as Hilly would have expected, she was lying back with her eyes closed.
‘So what’s wrong? Aren’t you well?’ Hilly repeated.
Zoë rolled over, turning her face away. ‘I’m fine,’ she mumbled. ‘Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake. You’re not my favourite person, either.’
Hilly shrugged, and turned back to the cupboard, unable to remember for a moment what she’d been looking for. She pushed the new information to the back of her mind; she would think about the implications later. First, the cassette. She hadn’t recorded over it, had she? – no, here it was, a C90 cassette with Heidigran’s War written on the spine in her own handwriting.
The recording, Hilly and her grandmother, had been made two years ago for a GCSE History project. Two years ago was before Heidigran had Alzheimer’s. The interview had not been a success. Heidigran hadn’t wanted to do it: ‘All that was years and years ago! Why drag it all up again? And my memory’s so bad, you know …’ She had said little that Hilly didn’t already know from her history lessons or from TV documentaries, and none of it had gone into the project. But this time Hilly wanted to listen for a different reason. Heidigran was her project now.
She took her small radio/cassette player down to Heidigran’s room, inserted the tape and pressed PLAY. Immediately her own voice spoke. (God, do I really sound like that? she thought, telling herself that it was two years ago, that she didn’t now sound quite so high-pitched and girly.)
Chapter Twenty
Heidi Thornton
Letter from Eric Thornton to his parents, April 1945
Whatever happens now, Sarah thought, I needn’t be afraid any more, because the worst has happened. The very worst I could ever have imagined. Nothing can ever be as bad as this.
Rachel, Mutti, Vati, gone. Swept up like leaves for a bonfire. The ashes blown across the plains of Germany.
‘We don’t know,’ Auntie Enid kept saying, pleading with Sarah to believe her. ‘We can’t know for certain. We mustn’t give up hope.’
But Sarah felt that hope had gone long ago. It would have been better not to hope. It was better not to be like Helga, who was crying, raging, weeping, praying, repeating the same useless phrases over and over again. Helga kept coming round to the house to be with Sarah. Sarah listened to her, but did not join in. She could not find tears, only a numbness in her mind that got in the way of thinking, and a dryness in her throat that stopped her from speaking.
For three whole days she did not speak at all. She stayed in her bedroom – Eric’s room – and read Heidi. So simple it seemed now, Heidi’s story! Heidi was good and cheerful and she lived in the mountains where the sun shone and the goats bleated and there was good bread and cheese to eat, and people were kind. Sometimes there was sadness in Heidi’s story but there was no horror to co
mpare with now. There was no Bergen-Belsen, no skeleton-dead and skeleton-living. Soon the war would be over and Eric would be coming home, bringing his horrible memories with him. Talking about them. Sarah did not want to hear.
Concentration camps, they were called. Buchenwald was the first; Bergen-Belsen a few days later. Then Auschwitz. Ravensbrück. Theresienstadt. Mauthausen. Treblinka. They were scattered over Germany and Poland. The armies – Russian, British, American – were ‘liberating’ them. Liberating the dead, and the living dead. To what? To drift back over the plains and cities like dead leaves, ghosts of themselves?
I would have been there too, Sarah thought. I was a Jew. That’s where they would have taken me. With Mutti and Vati, with Rachel.
‘We don’t know,’ said Auntie Enid. ‘We don’t know anything for certain. We can write letters – the Red Cross – they’ll be trying to trace people.’
Sarah didn’t answer. After three days of silence Auntie Enid thought she must be ill, and took her to the doctor, who stared down her throat and poked his stethoscope into her chest and swiped his hand in front of her eyes. There was nothing physically wrong with her, he said.
On the fourth day Sarah ripped all the pages out of her Heidi book, and tore them up into tiny pieces, which she sprinkled on the floor. They fell singly and in drifts, like leaves, pale leaves that could be blown and scattered on the wind.
‘Oh, lovey!’ said Auntie Enid, coming into the room with a mug of Ovaltine. Sarah was twelve now, nearly thirteen, but Auntie Enid still treated her like a little girl. ‘What have you gone and done that for?’ She stooped and picked up the cover, the empty hard cover; she turned it over and looked. ‘It’s Heidi! Your favourite!’
‘I don’t want it any more,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s only a story for little children. And it’s German. I don’t want German.’
It was the first time she had spoken. Auntie Enid clucked and fussed, put a hand on her forehead. ‘Feeling better now, lovey? Got your voice back? Won’t you come down now and have something to eat? I’ve got a nice bit of fish for our tea.’
Sarah had hardly eaten for three days, but now she ate hungrily. She ate every last scrap of fish, and mopped her plate with a bread crust to get every oily smear. With food rationed, you were supposed to chew each mouthful slowly, so that you tricked your stomach into thinking it had had more; so that you got as much eating as possible from the meagre plateful in front of you. But today Sarah ate fast, greedily, her eyes on the spare crust of bread on the board in the middle of the table. Eating was a way of proving she was alive. Eating was a way of widening the gap between herself and the skeletal figures behind the wire.
‘I’m an orphan now, aren’t I?’ she said matter-offactly.
‘But we don’t know—’
‘I do. I know. I haven’t got a Mutti or a Vati any more. I’ve only got you. Will you adopt me?’
‘Lovey, it’s too early to talk about that. Much too early. If the time comes – well, we’ll talk about it then.’
In May the war ended, at least the European part of the war. Hitler was dead. Dead, the Führer! He had shot himself in a bunker, and Eva Braun with him, when the various armies had converged on Berlin – the American, the Russians, the British. The Germans were defeated. Or perhaps Germany had defeated itself.
There was flag-waving and celebration, there were parties in the street, there were victory parades. It was like having ten birthdays rolled into one, Uncle Donald said: the best present possible. He and Auntie Enid were happy because they knew that, in time, Eric would come home. Sarah felt like someone who had sneaked her way into a party she had no right to attend. If she stayed around the edges, no one would notice her.
It was better than being like Helga. Helga was pale-faced and tearful. There was an air of reproach about her, of martyrdom. She will never let me forget, Sarah thought, as long as I am friends with her. She will never let me forget that I am German and Jewish. She wants to drag me back.
Sarah went into town with Patsy instead, and waved a Union Jack flag and went to the victory parade in the Market Square. Helga was too old now, anyway. She was sixteen and much taller than Sarah. She wore heeled shoes, and dresses nipped in at the waist to show her grown-up figure. She was courting Daniel, a boy she had met at the synagogue. As soon as the war was properly over, she said, she was going back to Germany to look for her parents.
Look? Look where? In the smoke from the chimneys? In the dust on the ground? In the ashes of the ovens?
Never. Never. I shall never go back, Sarah thought.
‘When Auntie and Uncle adopt me properly, I shall have a new name,’ she told Patsy, as they walked home from town.
‘Sarah Thornton?’ Patsy tried.
Sarah shook her head. ‘No. I don’t want Sarah any more. I want a completely new name.’
‘Can you really choose your own name?’ said Patsy, round-eyed. ‘Does that mean you could have anything you like?’
They were overwhelmed by the enormity of choice. Sarah thought of trying on different names, like dresses, to see which she liked best. It had to be a happy name. Sarah Reubens was an announcement of Jewishness, a confession of a tragic past. It was time to leave all that behind. There was nothing left of it, anyway. Nearly all the houses they passed had V-signs or flags draped in their front windows. No more need for the shelters, the sirens, the gas masks. The war’s over. The war’s over. In town, people had been linking arms, singing the wartime songs as if they didn’t want to let go of them. Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run. There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.
‘You could be Elizabeth! Or Margaret! Like one of the princesses!’ suggested Patsy. ‘Or Veronica! Bette! Loretta! Like a film star!’
It felt like being in a sweet shop, looking at the rows of jars and packets, with money to spend on anything she wanted. She would not hurry over the choosing, because for as long as she was undecided, the possibilities were limitless. Her new self would grow into a young lady like Helga, like the older girls Sarah saw about the town. She would wear lipstick and nylons; she would perm her hair. She would be a happy, untroubled person with a mum and dad at home. Could she call them Mum and Dad?
She could not sleep for the excitement of the victory celebrations and the new mood that was everywhere. Still awake in the early dawn, she heard birds singing outside and knew that her new name would be Heidi. Of course. She had been jealous of Heidi, but now she need be jealous no more. In her new post-war life she would be as happy and as lucky as Heidi had been. The name Heidi would account for the German accent she could not completely hide, but Heidi wasn’t a Jewish name. No one need know.
‘How can you?’ said Helga, when Sarah/Heidi told her. ‘How can you betray them like that? What are your parents going to say, if they come looking for you, and find you’re ashamed of being Jewish? Of your Jewish name? You’re betraying us all. Those of us who escaped, and all the hundreds of thousands who died!’
Helga had not got that quite right, Sarah/Heidi was to realize later. It was calculated that six million had died. But six million was such a huge figure that it was almost comforting in its meaninglessness. Her brain wasn’t capable of imagining six million.
‘That’s stupid!’ she told Helga. ‘It’s only a name.’
It was so typical of Rachel to come back to her in a dream, refusing to be locked in the past. Rachel was staring at her through a wire fence, her eyes pleading. She was pushing her hands through, stretching them towards Sarah. And the odd thing was that while everyone else behind the fence was pale and naked and skeletal, Rachel was the same as she always had been, her hair plaited into earphones, her clothes neat, her shoes polished. ‘Go away!’ Sarah shouted, though her throat was constricted in sleep. She had to force out the words. ‘It’s your own fault! Why didn’t you get away properly?’ Rachel said nothing, but her eyes were huge and dark, pulling Sarah dizzily, irresistibly towards her. Sarah tr
ied to dig in her heels, but the dream-ground was soft and gripless. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ she tried to yell. ‘I told you before, I hate you! I hope I never see you again!’
Chapter Twenty-one
Secrets
I’m just a jealous guy.
John Lennon, song lyric
‘So,’ said Tessa, as she and Hilly boarded the bus on Monday morning. ‘Tell me all!’
‘You can have edited highlights.’
‘No, everything,’ Tessa insisted.
‘What’s this, the Spanish Inquisition?’ said Hilly, just like Zoë. They made their way to their usual seats at the back.
‘First things first.’ Tessa settled herself comfortably. ‘Is it Lurve?’
‘Well – if I were twelve years old I’d be writing his name all over my pencil case.’ Hilly was conscious of a silent and possibly eavesdropping woman in the seat in front. ‘In fact I might, anyway—’
‘So it is! You’ll be hoarding all his text messages next. Come on! I want the unexpurgated version.’
Hilly gazed out of the window. Today was appropriately wet-Mondayish, damp and drizzly, turning yesterday into a sunlit dream of crowds and privacy, of city streets and river solitude. It still felt like the after-effects of some hallucinatory high: she was smiling, floating on her thoughts. Because it must have been a hallucination, surely? This sort of thing didn’t happen to her.
‘I’m not telling the whole bus,’ Hilly protested.
‘Well, whisper then.’ Tessa huddled close.
‘OK. We went to an art gallery. And we went to the park. That was nice.’
The Museum of Modern Art – white walls, cool spaces and minimalist exhibits – could have been arranged for her satisfaction. The university park, where people threw balls for enthusiastic dogs and the river Cherwell rippled through a tunnel of willows, seemed to have made a special effort to present itself at its most appealing.
‘Then what?’
‘We bought sandwiches to eat by the river.’
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