You are, in fact, a full year older than you believe, I apologise for that too. I didn’t register your birth, I was hiding in a house on Herengracht, 389 and so, of course, it was impossible. Mr & Mrs Borst risked their lives to keep me, and then you. We lived in their cellar for nearly two years. We didn’t see the sunshine or the stars. For the first nine months you lived inside me, thankfully, and for the first four of those months I didn’t realise you were there. Mrs Borst was terrified, when at last I told her. She hadn’t planned on taking an even greater risk, for the chances that you might accidentally betray us, that someone might hear you were great indeed. Mercifully, you seemed to realise this – perhaps you absorbed my own fear through my milk – and hardly ever made a sound.
We were fed as best as they could provide, we were kept alive, though sadly my milk dried up after only three months. Mrs Borst grew to adore you. She had no children of her own but had always longed for them. She spent many hours with us, holding you and singing softly. Perhaps this was why they kept us. I think, if she’d been younger, she would have taken you and raised you as her own. Perhaps that would have been for the best. But, as it was, they halved their rations with us and it was just enough.
On May 9th 1945 – two days after the German forces in the Netherlands surrendered – we finally emerged from our hole. We were both quite sick from malnourishment and lack of real light. I had nothing to give Mr & Mrs Borst, for all they had given me. And they gave me everything, my life and yours. It is not possible to say how grateful – what an inadequate word – I was, I am, I always will be to them. Even if I’d had everything in the world to give, it could not have been enough. And I had nothing. Only myself, and you.
And that was how I met your father – the man you have always known to be your father, though he was not. Lucas Bastiaan Janssen was Mr Borst’s nephew. He was fifteen years older than me, not particularly attractive, but I was deeply grateful – that inadequate word again, do we have no others? – to say that I also owed him my life, our lives and I could never repay him – that he had helped and also risked his life for us, coming very close to losing it on two occasions.
But I rush on too fast. Of course, after the war ended, I went looking for Otto, for your true father. I will not tell our story here. I have neither the strength nor the ability to tell it any more. So, separately, I am leaving you my other letters, letters that I wrote to him while we were apart, letters that he never received, never read. You will find them in our attic. They will tell you so much, not enough, but a great deal about your real father. I wish I could have given you more, I hope you will understand why I could not. I wish I could have given you him.
I lived in hope for a few months. When I went to the house where he’d been kept, I found that he’d been discovered, that he’d been taken to Herzogenbusch in July 1943. I went to the camp, I waited for weeks as lists of the dead were uncovered and families were informed. Three months after we’d been freed, I learnt that my love, your father, our Otto, had been shot by the Nazis in Herzogenbusch on 23rd of December 1944. I later learnt that he’d stolen three slices of bread to feed a little girl whose mother had died of starvation a few days before. I am happy to tell you that the girl, Miep Gies, survived and we knew her while we still lived in Amsterdam. She told me about the last weeks of your father’s life. He was a very brave – yet another entirely inadequate word – man.
It was over a year before I finally agreed to marry Lucas. We still lived with Mr & Mrs Borst, though could now do so openly. We ate our meals with them, we slept in the attic. Every morning I held you up to the sunlight and we breathed the fresh breeze from the open window. Every night I opened the window again and showed you the stars. I found work in a shop. When I worked Mrs Borst cared for you. When I returned from a day away, I saw how happy she was, blurting out the details of all that you’d done – a new step, a new sound, a new smile – and I felt her slight sorrow when you saw me again and stumbled joyfully from her arms into mine.
When she first suggested Lucas, I confess I pretended not to hear, I pretended to be lost in wiping peas from the floor that you had spilt. But I knew, once we knew that we couldn’t hope for our Otto any more, that I couldn’t pretend for ever. Now there was something they wanted, these people who’d saved our lives, and now there was something I could finally give them in return and I gave it gladly.
I married Lucas Janssen on 1st April 1946. You were two years old. You’d never met your father and so, of course, you believed that this man, who you’d known all your life, was he. Lucas formally adopted you and we registered you, at last, with his names. I wanted to keep Otto’s name with you, at least as a second name, but it would have hurt Lucas’s feelings and I didn’t want to do that. He was a good man, and a good father. You know that. He loved me and he loved you too, very much. He always thought of you as his own. I’m afraid that I was never able to love him, not really, not as a wife should. But my gratitude for the second chance, for the life we’d been given when we otherwise would have had none, kept me through those years.
I confess, even after I knew he was dead, I still looked for Otto every day. I still hoped that a mistake had been made. I dreamt that he had escaped somehow, that he had defied death in order to come back to me, to us, just as he’d always promised he would. I looked for him even after we finally left Amsterdam – when Mr and then, two years later, Mrs Borst died. I looked for him in the faces of strangers when I walked through the streets. Once I pulled at a man’s arm and scared his wife with my voice, my tears. Now that I know I won’t be in this world much longer, I am happy in the belief that I will, at last, see my Otto again. And now, at last, I feel it’s time to tell you. I’ll leave the letter locked in my little writing desk and you will find it, after I’ve gone. I’m sorry that I cannot tell you myself, face-to-face, but I’m so used to writing everything of importance in my life now that I cannot speak these words, only write them to you.
I’m sorry you never knew your real father. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the gift of that. I hope that what I, we, gave you was enough. I hope that this story, this letter, and the ones I have left in the attic, will give you a part of your father and a part of yourself. You were born of great love and you survived against great odds. You were cheated but you were also blessed. I hope that I made the right choices. I made them for you.
Your loving mother,
Marthe
Later, Clara doesn’t know how long she sits with the letter in her lap. Slowly, everything is falling into place. Her grandfather had found the letters in the attic, but he’d never found the final letter locked in the desk. So he never knew about Otto, he never knew that Lucas wasn’t his biological father. Indeed, he must have assumed that the baby Otto was his half-brother who’d died. Clara feels sad at this, wishing he’d known the truth. But what can she do? Except, perhaps there is something. And, in that moment, Clara decides she will do it. Even if it won’t make a blind bit of difference. She will go to her grandfather’s grave and read him his mother’s final letter.
Just as Clara is mapping out the particulars of this venture, there’s a knock on the door. She glances up with a frown. Customers don’t usually knock; they simply push open the door and walk in. Still heavy with sorrow and the fog of first-trimester exhaustion, she refuses to get up, so just waits on her seat for whomever it is to come in. Then they knock again.
‘Oh, bloody hell.’ Clara pulls herself up from her seat, placing the letter carefully on the counter, smoothing the pages, before shuffling across the shop floor.
As Clara puts her hand on the doorknob she feels, for the very first time, a twinge in her womb. She’s never felt anything like it before. It can’t be the baby, of course, it’s too early for that. And yet … She presses her other hand lightly to her abdomen, waiting, hoping. So, when, distractedly, she pulls open the door, she’s not actually looking up at the person standing on the other side of it. And so, he sees her first.
‘
Hello.’
Clara drops her hand and, before she even looks up, her eyes fill.
‘You didn’t answer any of my letters,’ Pieter says, before she can speak, before he’s even stepped inside. ‘So I’m afraid I’ve been forced to take more drastic action. It’s quite unlike me. I do hope you won’t mind my turning up uninvited like this.’
Clara simply stares at him, shaking her head.
‘Does that mean: “No, you don’t mind” or “No, you don’t want me here”?’ Pieter asks. ‘I did ask for an invitation in many of my letters. And did warn you, in the last one, that if you didn’t reply I’d take that as a “yes”.’ He gives her a hopeful smile. ‘So, really, you’ve only got yourself to blame.’
Clara gives a little nod, tears slipping down her cheeks.
‘I must admit,’ Pieter says. ‘I played out this scenario in my mind many times. I thought, worst case, you’d slap me and send me packing. I thought, best case, you’d embrace me and smother me with kisses. I can’t say I envisaged making you sobbing and speechless. I am sorry.’
He reaches a tentative hand towards her and, suddenly, Clara steps forward onto the pavement and hugs him, hard and tight.
‘That’s better,’ he whispers into her hair, ‘that’s more like it.’
Then she steps back, wiping her eyes.
‘But, why are you here? You don’t want a …’ she trails off, finding herself unable to say the word, lest she upset the one she’s carrying within her. ‘And I, I … haven’t changed my mind. Nothing’s changed.’
Pieter frowns. ‘Haven’t you been reading my letters?’
Clara is silent, unwilling to admit that she has not.
‘Really? Really?’ Pieter’s frown deepens. ‘I thought it’d be impossible for you not to read a letter, given’ – he nods towards the shop – ‘your profession.’
‘You’re the reader of letters,’ Clara says softly. ‘I write them.’
‘But, after what Marthe wrote, after you read her letters to Otto, I thought …’ Pieter says. ‘So you let me go unheard. I spoke and you didn’t listen.’
Clara glances at the pavement. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to be cruel. I didn’t mean to punish, to make you suffer. It was just … too painful.’
‘But,’ Pieter protests, ‘if you’d read them, it might not have been. I told you I’d changed my mind, that I wanted you to come back, that I wanted to give you – us – everything, including …’
Clara gives him a sharp look. ‘What?’
Pieter nods. ‘After you left, I thought that I’d cope, I thought I’d survive, I’ve been doing it for long enough. But I found I couldn’t, I can’t … I don’t want to be without you. I need you near me. I need to read to you, I need to have you listen. It’s not the same without you, nothing is. It’s really all quite … unbearable.’
Clara’s eyes fill again, but she shakes her head. ‘You can’t agree to have a baby as a bargain, because you want to be with me. I’m deeply touched, of course, but that’s not a reason, it’s not enough.’
Pieter holds up his hand to stop her but she ignores him.
‘You should know that, you grew up with a father who wasn’t there and so did I, and’ – tears drop down her cheeks again – ‘I can’t let my child go through the same thing. It wouldn’t be fair. No matter how much I want to be with you, it just wouldn’t be fair.’
She turns back to the shop, blinking away her tears, fumbling to open the door. Pieter reaches and takes her arm, but Clara pulls away and pushes her way into the shop. Pieter follows.
‘Wait,’ he says, ‘wait.’
Shaking her head, Clara stumbles towards the counter and leans against it, catching her breath.
‘You’re not giving me a chance to explain,’ Pieter says. ‘I had a whole, very long speech, prepared. I’ve barely got through the first few lines. I still had much more. I still had to tell you that I don’t simply want a baby because you do. You … You’ve ignited something in me, something I’d never felt before. I want a baby because I want one. With you, yes, but not as a bargaining chip. I want a baby because it feels like the greatest expression of my love for you. I want to create life with you. I want, I hope to be blessed enough to be able to love, not just you, but any children we might create together. To have the chance to do that …’
Clara pulls a sleeve across her wet nose and gives him a sheepish smile. ‘I’m sorry …’ she takes a deep breath.
Pieter reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief. It’s wrapped around something and he unwraps it, holding the object in his other hand while he steps towards her and, very gently dabs her cheeks. Then he gives her the small square of embroidered cotton.
Clara sniffs. ‘I’m a mess.’
‘Not at all.’ Pieter smiles. ‘In fact, I must confess, I’m rather flattered. I never imagined I could have such an effect on a woman.’
Clara sniffs again, wiping her nose on the handkerchief. ‘I’m afraid you can’t take all the credit. My emotions are all over the place at the moment.’
Pieter nods. ‘Ah, you’ve got your …’ he trails off, looking slightly disappointed. Then he opens the palm of his other hand and holds it out to Clara. ‘It’s yours. I can’t keep it.’
Clara takes the pen. ‘But, I wanted you to have it. I’ve never written with it anyway. It’s such a waste. I thought—’
‘That I could learn to write letters with it?’ Pieter finishes. ‘And I did. All of them to you. And, if I do say so myself, they were rather beautiful. But clearly wasted on you.’
Clara smiles. ‘I said I was sorry. I’ll read them all today, okay? I’m sure they are very beautiful.’
Pieter grins. ‘Good, I’m glad to hear it. And now you have the pen back you can write something of your own.’
‘I don’t have anything to write.’
‘Not yet, perhaps, but you’re still young. You’ve got a thousand stories still waiting for you, a thousand wonderful, incredible, unexpected moments of joy, sorrow, delight, disappointment, laughter—’
‘Hopefully more of the good than the bad,’ Clara says, rubbing the pen between her thumb and forefinger.
‘Yes, of course,’ Pieter says. ‘I’ll try to give you at least a hundred delightful days for every disappointing one. And, as soon as you’ve finished your menstruation, I can get to work on giving you some particularly delightful moments, and perhaps we might even get—’
Clara laughs.
‘What?’
‘Menstruation? You’re so formal.’
Pieter frowns. ‘Not at all, I’m simply old-fashioned.’
‘Well, anyway,’ Clara says, ‘I’m not on my menstruation.’
‘No? But you said …’
‘Yes, I know. But, in fact, I haven’t had it for nearly eight weeks now.’
It’s a few moments before Pieter’s frown transforms into a look of shocked joy.
‘Really?’ he asks, his own eyes now filling with tears. ‘Truly?’
Clara nods.
‘Oh, my good God,’ Pieter says. ‘Oh, my—’
And then, all of a sudden, he bursts into sobs. Clara holds the handkerchief out to him.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘No need to have a nervous breakdown. I know you’re old, but you can still learn a few new tricks. Changing nappies isn’t all that hard, I hear, we can practise …’
Pieter lifts his head and looks at Clara with such total adoration that it leaves her quite speechless. Tears still falling silently down his face, he places his hands gently on her cheeks.
‘I have no idea what’s going to happen next,’ Pieter says, taking a deep breath. ‘Nor in the millions of moments to come. But, of all those I’ve had so far, I’ve never been as utterly, utterly happy as I am now.’ He kisses the tip of her nose. ‘Thank you, my sweet, sweet girl, for finding me and bringing me home.’
‘Ditto,’ Clara says, softly. ‘Ditto.’
Acknowledgements
Many
thanks to my agents, Andrea and Christina. Infinite thanks to all at Allison & Busby for championing all the books. Especially to Susie Dunlop, Publishing Director, for her indefatigable support. Also, Lesley Crooks, for her editorial eye and social media assistance. Great thanks to Ash, for reading every chapter as I wrote it and writing me glorious letters in return. Massive thanks to Al, as ever, for never missing a single mistake of mine. Huge thanks to all my readers – your loyalty and passion continue to inspire me. Enormous thanks, as ever, to Artur, for always making everything possible.
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ALSO BY MENNA VAN PRAAG
THE HOUSE AT THE END OF HOPE STREET
THE DRESS SHOP OF DREAMS
THE WITCHES OF CAMBRIDGE
About the Author
MENNA VAN PRAAG was born in Cambridge and studied Modern History at Oxford University. She lives in Cambridge and sets her novels among the colleges, cafes and bookshops of the city.
mennavanpraag.com
The Lost Art of Letter Writing Page 24