The English Girl: A heartbreaking and beautiful World War 2 historical novel

by Sarah Mitchell

  ‘Toby.’ This time it’s not a question. Slowly, Viv stands up. One hand touches her forehead, the other presses Alice to her thigh.

  Then she starts to wave. ‘We’re over here, darling! We’re right here.’

  * * *

  Thomas and Fran are lingering by the edge of the water. Since they arrived, the tide has turned, releasing the beach in tiny increments. There are stars again too, and a slice of moon sliding between ship-like clouds.

  ‘You’re a hero. You saved them both.’

  ‘It wasn’t so hard.’ His focus lingers on the invisible horizon. ‘Major Markham wanted to be found, I think.’

  ‘Why did he take Alice?’

  Thomas shrugs. ‘I don’t know, perhaps he started with bad intentions. Or perhaps he meant only to go for a walk. He was very upset, very angry. And also, very confused. He needs a doctor, I think. Maybe a hospital.’

  ‘And the gun?’ Fran is beginning to wonder if she dreamed the rifle shot, if they all invented hearing the blast through some horrible collective feat of imagination.

  ‘When I got close, Major Markham panicked. Luckily for me, it was dark. Luckily for me, he missed.’

  ‘He aimed at you?’

  ‘He didn’t know who I was. And after he fired the gun, Alice began to cry. I think it helped to make him see some sense again.’

  Thomas sighs.

  ‘You must be so tired,’ Fran says. Not just tired, she thinks. Under the dim moonlight he looks utterly spent. And older too, as if the pale and silvered man beside her has stepped back from a future decade. She longs to kiss him, touch the fine lines suddenly visible in his face. Instead she squeezes his arm. ‘You need to sleep.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thomas?’

  He jumps at the change in her tone.

  ‘You realise this could change everything? When Captain Holmes finds out about this, you really will be a hero. There’s a good chance he would write to the government and ask if you can become a civilian. At the very least the camp might let you stay while a request is made.’

  ‘Fran…’

  ‘You must ask him! You will ask him, won’t you?’

  ‘Suppose they find out about you?’

  ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, not anymore.’ She beams at him. ‘Don’t you see? You haven’t only saved Alice; you’ve saved us too. How could anyone think badly of you now?’

  He puts his arm around her shoulder, presses her close. ‘Fran…’

  ‘Fran, we need to leave!’ Martin’s voice calls from the shingle bank.

  ‘We’re coming!’ Then to Thomas, hushed and urgent. ‘Promise me, you’ll go straight to Captain Holmes first thing tomorrow.’

  He doesn’t reply.

  He’s exhausted, Fran thinks. Utterly exhausted.

  * * *

  On the far side of the shingle bank Martin is standing beside the door of his car. Alice is already squeezed between her parents on the back seat. ‘I’ll take them home first,’ Martin says. ‘There’s not enough room for everyone. I’ll come back for you both as soon as I can.’ Then to Thomas, ‘You must have had quite enough walking for one day.’

  ‘You can come back for me,’ Thomas says. ‘There is space for Fran on the front seat.’

  She smiles at him, ‘I don’t mind waiting with you.’

  ‘It’s very late. I expect your parents will be worried.’

  ‘It doesn’t—’ Fran starts, then stops. She’s happier than she has felt all winter. Happier, in fact, than she can remember ever feeling. The events of the evening seem almost to be a gift. She will see Thomas soon, she can be certain of that. It’s unthinkable he will be forced to leave the country now. Major Markham or Captain Holmes must be able to stop the repatriation. He only has to ask them, surely? If I had to, she thinks, I would wait a thousand winters for him. Yet I only have to wait until Monday.

  From inside the car, Alice coughs.

  ‘Fran? We need to go.’

  Thomas is right, her parents will be anxious to hear everyone is safe. And June too. After tonight her sister is bound to accept that Fran was right about him all along.

  Alice coughs again. A thin, raking sound that makes her mother tighten the blanket around her shoulders.

  ‘I’ll come now, Martin.’

  And kissing Thomas on the lips, she hurries towards the passenger seat.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  10 March 1947

  Fran sits on the edge of the stage, a sheet of music dangling from her hand. After the concert the chairs were stacked away, the china washed, and the hall swept, yet the evening has left its mark nevertheless: a solitary teacup on the windowsill, a crumpled handkerchief by the main door, and the stray piece of music, a map of grids and squiggles which might make perfect sense to Thomas, but not to her.

  She has been waiting for over an hour, racing to the village hall the instant the hands of the clock crawled to the five. Not that anyone would have stopped her from leaving work early today. With more than half of the prisoners gone, the place had a sad, deserted air. She had little contact with anyone all day. Daisy had sent a message to say she wasn’t well and didn’t know when she might be back. Fran was relieved to receive the note since she didn’t feel ready to talk to Daisy quite yet.

  As for Captain Holmes, he seemed to be permanently engaged on the telephone in the meeting room. Fran could monitor his strident conversations through the wall and heard enough to understand he had officially taken over from Major Markham – for as long as the camp continued, at least. It sounded as if the remaining prisoners would soon be repatriated too, which presumably means her job will come to an end as well.

  At least she will be able to spend longer with Thomas.

  Her heels thwack against the boards. Did she arrange to meet him at a particular time? She’s certain he only said after work and already the clock on the wall is approaching half past six. Perhaps he was sent to clear mines again and didn’t return until late? Surely, she frets for the hundredth time, he would have asked Captain Holmes to cancel or delay the repatriation order and surely, Captain Holmes would have agreed?

  Once, during the day, she very nearly approached the captain herself. As her knuckles were poised over his door, she heard him say into the telephone, ‘An affair, apparently… Yes, the far end of the point, and with his daughter. God only knows what he was thinking.’ Then, ‘One of the prisoners, a plucky fellow…’ It seemed the perfect opportunity, until Captain Holmes’s voice took on a clipped, more sombre tone, and the direction of the call changed. ‘We’ll have to see,’ he said. ‘He won’t come back for a while. It’s rather obvious the chap is in a bad way… A spell in hospital, I suppose, then home to his wife. As long as she doesn’t bugger off with another bloody American.’

  In the end Fran accosted a prisoner near the sluice hut. But it was hopeless, the German hardly spoke English and didn’t appear to know who Thomas was, let alone where he might be. After that, she lost confidence. Suppose, her doubts whispered, Captain Holmes had refused to write to the Home Office? Suppose he didn’t have the authority to change the repatriation order? Perhaps Thomas found he had no option but to abscond from the camp and hide. The more people she alerted to his absence, the less opportunity he would have to find somewhere safe and the greater his chance of being found and arrested. After two circuits of the whole site, when she was still no closer to knowing what had happened, she decided to be patient.

  Now the light is dimming fast. Colour has seeped from the room and the hall is a palette of browns and greys, a faded photograph of the present. She stops drumming her feet and after a moment slides off the stage. From the side door she can look both ways up the street, but there is nothing to see except the lengthening shadows and a team of pink-footed geese banking high above the marsh.

  A nub of panic tightens her throat.

  Maybe she has misremembered.

  Perhaps Thomas told her to meet him at the beach? Or he has gone to t
he beach mistakenly, where this very moment he is wondering, worrying, where she might be. She dithers, undecided. Trying to quell her alarm, she counts out loud. One, two, three, four… forcing herself to retrace and repeat the counting whenever the numbers gather momentum and race away. The instant she reaches one hundred, she shuts the hall door and hurries towards her bicycle.

  On the coast road, the sea air feels thick as treacle. She focuses on pumping her pedals, on breathing deeply, but she has the sense of making no progress, getting no closer to her destination, like the kind of nightmare where her legs won’t work, or nobody can hear her, or everything happens in slow motion. When she gets to the blockade, she finds the wire reinstated, the pallets in place, and the struggle to haul the bicycle around the barrier makes her weep with frustration.

  At the edge of the shingle she drops the frame and scrambles quickly up the ridge. Ahead the beach opens out on both sides, the reach of pebbles hazy in the weak light, the water darkly luminous.

  Nobody is there.

  She calls anyway.

  Any second he will appear, she tells herself. Where were you, he will say. What took you so long? I’ve been waiting.

  The wind rips his name from her mouth.

  Shouting is futile.

  She blinks, rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes, looks again.

  The beach is still empty.

  Numb with terror she scrabbles down the bank, back to the lane. She should never have left the village hall. He probably arrived the second she left, and is this very moment pacing the room, checking the clock, watching the door. Too nervous to light a lamp in case he is discovered.

  At least the wind is behind her now. Head down, she pedals furiously, cursing the impatience, the doubt, that made her so quick to abandon their meeting place. Yet when the village hall finally comes into view, the energy seems to flood suddenly from her legs and her speed drops away so that she covers the last hundred yards practically at walking pace.

  Slowly she dismounts and props the frame against a tree trunk. In her absence the building appears to have acquired a newly forlorn and abandoned air. The afterglow of the sun has drained from the sky, leaving the evening bleak and grey as if all the sadness of the last six years is somehow leaking through the dusk. Fran swallows. She hardly dares peek in the window.

  If he is not inside, what then?

  A pedal has holed her stocking and grazed her leg. For a long moment she watches as a bead of blood trickles sluggishly down her calf. Then she licks the palm of her hand, rubs the broken skin and approaches the glass.

  ‘Fran!’

  His voice fells her like a bullet.

  ‘Thomas!’

  She stops, spins and sprints towards the side door.

  To the figure waiting in the shadows.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Deciding what to do kept Martin awake all night and made him delay so long leaving the house that when he arrived and found the hall empty, he thought he had messed everything up anyway. For a while he paced inside, clutching Thomas’s letter, wondering, as the light dipped and the room stilled, whether he was brave enough – selfish enough? – to capitalise on his enormous stroke of fortune. A piece of luck that could spin his entire life on a sixpence. After a past of loneliness and failure, a future of all he could ever want was literally within touching distance.

  A stray sheet of music lay abandoned on the stage. The excerpt was from one of the compositions played at the jazz evening, the saxophone’s part, he guessed, and immediately the thought struck him he had to sit down. The memory of watching Fran, that moment of revelation when he realised that she loved the German, filled his soul with a deep, cold ache. Martin folded the paper up and shoved it away in his pocket. He was only too aware he was not her first choice. She would never feel for him the overwhelming desire he felt for her. Yet she would grow to care for him, surely? Now that Thomas was out of reach. Particularly, he brooded, if the German should turn out not to be quite the hero she thought. If she had reason to doubt the man loved her as much as she believed him to have done.

  If Martin kept the letter, the explanation meant for Fran, to himself.

  He was outside the hall, about to give up and leave, when her bicycle came into view. Overcome with uncertainty, he hurried to the back of the building where the church loomed over him, sombre and huge. He was about to break her heart, he knew that. But afterwards, what he did next, that was the thing he couldn’t resolve. He hated for her to suffer, and yet, and yet… If he couldn’t avert her pain, why not give himself, give them both – for in the long run wasn’t a sense of finality, of stability, in her interests too? – the greatest chance of happiness. How, he agonised, was he supposed to know whether it was nobler to tell the truth, or better, more sensible to keep quiet? He needed to see into the future, their future, to be able to judge that.

  Returning the letter to his trouser pocket, he inhaled a lungful of dank air and stepped around the corner.

  ‘Fran!’

  ‘Thomas!’

  * * *

  She runs towards him, her face alight. For an instant the sun returns, the dreariness demolished by the blitz of her smile, before her face freezes and she comes to a halt.

  ‘Martin! I thought you were Thomas.’ She peers around him into the gloom. ‘I was meant to meet him earlier, but I’m late. I wondered if I ought to be at the beach instead. I expect he came while I was there. So stupid of me, I can’t think why—’

  ‘Thomas has gone.’

  ‘I knew I should never…’ She closes her eyes in frustration. ‘How long ago? Did he say where I can find him?’

  ‘Thomas has gone to Germany.’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, Martin. That’s not right. He was supposed to go back to Germany, but he asked to stay longer. After the awful business of Friday night, he thought Captain Holmes would be able to pull some strings; and if the captain couldn’t, or he refused, well’ – although they are alone, she lowers her voice – ‘actually Thomas planned to abscond. To hide and find some work on the farms until we can get married. He’s a hero now, saving Alice and Major Markham like that. I don’t think anyone could possibly—’

  ‘Fran,’ Martin places his hands on her shoulders, tipping her slightly towards him. ‘Thomas left yesterday evening. He went on board the trucks with the other prisoners who were being repatriated.’

  She stares at him. ‘That can’t be right. He wouldn’t leave without telling me. He wouldn’t leave at all. You’re lying! You just want me to believe he’s gone.’ Wrenching free, she runs a little way into the dark. ‘Thomas? Are you there? It’s me, Fran!’

  When she reappears, her face is white. ‘Where is he? What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s gone, Fran,’ Martin says quietly. ‘He’s gone home.’

  She shakes her head again, more slowly this time. ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fran. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No.’

  Martin steps forward and wraps her in his arms. To begin with she seems as rigid as a mannequin, then all at once she crumbles and he has to hold her upright. As she shakes against his chest, he tightens his grip. He inhales the smell of her hair, feels the press of her against him and knows that part of him, most of him in fact, is not sorry at all.

  ‘Fran?’

  Eventually, she lifts her head.

  With his heart sinking, Martin reaches into his coat. She must, he has concluded, have the chance to read the letter, to know whatever explanation the German has come up with for abandoning her like this, even if seeing that letter means she might never let the man go. Might never give up. Might never stop hoping. Might never love Martin nearly as much as he loves her.

  He proffers the crumpled paper. ‘Thomas told me to give you this.’

  ‘You already knew he was leaving? He asked you to come here tonight?’

  ‘He spoke to me on Friday, while we were in my car together. I agreed to meet him yesterday before the trucks left. Tha
t was when he said he was going home, and I should come here this evening – for you.’

  ‘But why didn’t he tell me himself?’ She stares in disbelief. ‘We had enough time at the beach, plenty of time!’

  ‘Maybe he hadn’t decided.’ Martin recalls how in the car the man’s voice had wavered. How the German seemed to be staring blankly out of the window for the entire journey. At the time, Martin had put his behaviour down to fatigue. After all, who wouldn’t be exhausted after carrying a little girl all the way back from the point? It was probably not something he could have managed, even with his new healthy heart. He says carefully, ‘I suppose Thomas might not have made up his mind until the very last minute. Or…’ he pauses, ‘or if he did, perhaps he just couldn’t bring himself to tell you.’

  For a moment Fran seems to sink deep within herself.

  Then she fumbles with the folded paper.

  She stops. ‘Do you know what this says?’

  ‘No.’

  He closes his eyes.

  Waits. Already, he wishes he had kept hold of the letter.

  ‘What is this?’

  She’s gazing at the item in her fist with incredulity.

  ‘I think…’ Martin stops. He blinks. His amazement matches her own. He has pulled out the sheet of music, the saxophone score, from his pocket instead of the envelope. How could he have been so idiotic? As he delves into his coat again, he watches her face fill with fury. Fury, and a horrified sort of comprehension. I love her, he thinks desperately, every tiny, every flawed piece of me loves her. And I am here, right now, wanting to spend the rest of my life with her.

  If she will have me.

  If she can forget the other.

  Slowly he retrieves his hand.

  His empty, letter-less hand.

  He clears his throat. ‘I believe the music is for the saxophone. The piece Thomas played at the concert.’

  For a long second she stands utterly still.