by Iona Whishaw
“Stranger and stranger,” said Kenny. “Maybe Harris is right. We, aside from your good self, Lane, are all getting pretty ancient. Who but the Yanks, as he likes to call them, would have someone young come see them?”
“Except,” said Lane, “and I’ve just thought of this, I’d have put any money on his being English. I can’t even say why I’d say that. The Yanks have no experience with the English at all. They think we are all wonderfully quaint; me especially with my ‘cute’ accent.”
The sky, still light at nine-thirty, was nevertheless beginning to show a slight darkening of the complexion that presaged the coming of full night at ten. Lane wanted to get back across to hers while it was still light. As she was leaving with a couple of corked bottles of water for her morning coffee—she was loath to drink the water, which had finally begun to come through again late that afternoon, until some suitable period of time had passed after the body had been removed—Eleanor and Kenny stood in front of their door waving cheerfully.
“I hope Harris is okay,” she suddenly thought to say. “Should I give him a call, do you think?”
Kenny waved a dismissive hand. “I shouldn’t bother. He could have come to ours, and he was too bloody proud. Always has to hack through life on his own. He’d just be angry because he’d think you were implying he’s soft.”
Making a decision, Lane said, “I’m going up to town tomorrow. I think I’m going to splurge and buy myself a new hose. Can I bring you anything?”
“Goodness, yes! I need a sack of flour, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Eleanor.
“Done!”
It was, she supposed, too sanguine of her to imagine that this would be a normal night. If she had worried when she was first told that the ghost of Lady Armstrong resided in her attic, and was inclined to the action of opening windows, Lane quickly realized that imagining the ghost there was almost a protection from the internal spirits that haunted her. She had slept well enough on many nights since she’d arrived, though the nightmares were coming somewhat more often, albeit, she noted wryly, taking on a more and more metaphorical character. It surprised her that she was having more nightmares. She had been certain that she would have fewer with increasing distance and time from the war. She wondered if it was because the mind stored up the horrors for later when it was safe. Well, she was no trickcyclist. She couldn’t be fussing about with all that psychology business. Millions of people had had a far worse war than she had. She remembered her grandfather saying these things eventually passed. She hoped he was right. Her main thoughts, as she turned on her lamp and put her glass of hot milk on the bedside table next to her book, were reserved for Harris’s unsociable behaviour. She thought of him returning from an earlier war—shell shocked, his orchard burned, his wife gone. His age and bitterness seemed to tell the whole of his character, but she imagined him as one of the many young men she had known, early on, when they were still suffused with an eager, conquering spirit. They will all turn into him, she thought, propped up in bed, her book open but unread on her lap—all the ones who made it.
When images from the events of the day intruded, she pushed them back, and allowed only the medical van disappearing up her drive and the policeman with his hat in his left hand as he shook with his right, formal, unsmiling, unlike his constable, who gave her a cheerful smile and a wave as he climbed into their car. She did not even allow Inspector Darling’s charcoal eyes.
She always left her windows open. Everything was open. In this she’d taken after the late Lady Armstrong, who was so insistent on fresh air up in her little sphere, the attic. Now the silence gently blew in from the velvet dark outside. The silence was what she loved best. It was the antidote: the healing, green silence. She still had her last lot of letters on the bedside table. They would be neutral enough to read before she went to sleep. There were the two bills—these she put aside—and a letter from Mr. Nesbitt, the house agent from Nelson, asking after her and urging her again to reconsider living in town because, while the summers were lovely, the winters would be intolerable. She laughed at what Mr. Nesbitt must consider intolerable, and opened her last letter from England. It was from the first week in June, a time that suddenly felt months ago.
Darling Laneka, how are you? We are well here, though the rain has been unremitting. We never used to get rain like this in Bilderingshof, did we? Ganf is adjusting well to living here, though he misses the river. He scowls at the mailman with those great black brows of his when there is no letter from you. It is funny to be English but not. We are like strangers here. I have not been here since I was a girl, that dreadful time I came out in ’89, or ’90, I can hardly remember it seems so long ago, to see your grandfather’s sisters and they were so horrible to me. They’ve all died now, poor dears. It’s a good thing they missed this last war; they’d barely recovered from the first one. And we are all dispersed now, your sister to South Africa, you to Canada. I have heard that even the Watsons, who had thought to stay on in Riga, are coming back now. It will be nice to have someone to talk to who remembers our old life, but I suppose Mrs W. will be as tiresome about her health here as she ever was there. You would be pleased with the bed of black-eyed Susans you planted along the south border. They seem to thrive in this wet and are the most brilliant intense yellow, especially on grey days. They remind me of you. Please do not be downhearted, my love. I hope that you are finding ease and rest and forgetting.
Rest and forgetting. Her rest. Her forgetting. She folded the letter carefully back into the envelope, soothed somewhat by the very un-English outpouring of loving words that her grandmother always filled her letters with. This complete lack of the traditional taciturn stiff upper lip comes of being English, she thought, but living your whole life on foreign soil. And now she was doing the same thing. She sipped at her hot milk and thought again about her one great friend, Yvonne. Lane had known, after Angus, that she could not stay on in England and had tried France. Living with Yvonne in her great house in the Dordogne had been lovely, but France . . . too full of memories. Her nightmares were unrelenting there, as if the past could not be made to lie down but must be there with her every night. In the end she had said to Yvonne, who was being Gallicly tragic about not being able to help her, “I really must go somewhere far and new. Look at those posters advertising Canada—the beautiful young woman standing atop a ski hill looking across a range of mountains. That could be me.”
“You don’t ski,” Yvonne had reminded her coolly.
“I can learn. I am young.”
She knew Yvonne’s life must be busy. Full of her struggles with the local mairie over a building permit for an outbuilding for the horses she wished to raise. Yvonne had turned her energies firmly away from the war and thrown herself into horses, an expensive and all-consuming passion that her husband’s money allowed her. Lane was secretly pleased her own money allowed her nothing more than what she had: a house, a small living, and time.
SHE AWOKE SLOWLY from the dream, as she always did, rigid with fear that carried into waking and the darkened room. It made her afraid to move, and afraid to fall asleep. She knew that if she did not move, she would fall back into the nightmare as if she had not woken up. She lay with her eyes open, looking into the blackness, still hearing the roaring of the flames. She could not quite place where she was, and this confusion added to her fear. She moved her eyes slowly across whatever scene might be in front of her face, looking for clues—the grey from a window, the looming shadow of her wardrobe—and then she realized the wardrobe had been in her room in her brief childhood home in Kent. The curtains fluttered and seemed to be enough. “I am here,” she thought, and knew where “here” was.
It was the same dream again—the one that had so surprised her when it first came. She had abruptly stopped dreaming about the war: the dead faces she could not recognize when she woke but seemed to know so well in her dream; the many manifestations of missions she could not complete because she had lost some tiny piece of paper, or
had missed the transport, or could not find the ship. Now it was always a variation on the same dream: she was standing on the road that wound through the wood to her house in Kent, and the entire road was burning so that she could not get through.
She reached for the pull chain on the light and blinked at the brightness.
CHAPTER TEN
France, May, 1943
LANE BOARDED THE TRAIN, LOOKED right into the next car, and opted for the less-packed other side on the left. She’d only a small shoulder bag and elected to sit with it on her knee. It was funny, in the old days in her trips to France, she’d be wearing a flowered dress and would reach up and toss her bag in the overhead shelf and settle in with a book. Now she was dressed in a dull, and she hoped unremarkable, grey suit and a hat that was compact and businesslike. She put her hands on the bag and kept her eyes down or slanted toward the window. Of course, there was a war on, as they liked to say at home, but the atmosphere that pervaded was so unlike the way she remembered France that though this was her sixth trip in this capacity, she needed to try to identify what the difference was. It was drab, certainly, but there was a heightened sense of alertness. The niceties were more quickly delivered and somehow more strictly adhered to and then people seemed to sink deep into themselves. Even families with children travelling together scarcely spoke. Gone was the loose noisiness of the old train crowds, the careless manners and endless chatter among the passengers. Now everyone was suspicious. And suspect.
It still did not come home to her that she worked for Intelligence. It was a word she’d heard a great deal around her house as a child. Her father had been Intelligence in the previous war. He bashed about pretending to be a smooth, oily British businessman, but was actually sneaking about all over Russia and Germany speaking perfect Russian and German, working for the War Office. It struck her as a cold irony that she had never liked him much and here she was, aping him as if a script had been written for her. But she was convinced this was not the same thing. She didn’t have to pretend to be the enemy . . . just a few missions to carry messages. She could pretend to be French.
A man came down the aisle and stood by her seat. Like her, he looked momentarily up at the luggage rack, decided against it, and sat, holding his briefcase on his lap—a businessman going into Lyon. He nodded at her and murmured something she didn’t hear. She returned his greeting and then went back to looking out the window. The train started with a lurch. It was too warm and she wanted to open the window, but that would attract too much notice and probably lead to complaints about the through breeze, something continental Europeans in general seemed to fear. Instead she opened her book, Madame Bovary, and gave careful attention to appearing to read. What she did, though, was travel quickly down the corridors of her brain, into the place divided into different-coloured shelves, where she stored what she needed to know. This mission was on the green shelf, chosen maybe because it was nearly summer and even the war could not prevent that translucent yellow green that pervaded the trees and bushes of the countryside they were passing.
Mentally pulling each piece of information off the shelf, she reviewed again the codes that represented drop-off times and places. They meant nothing to her. It was coded information she must repeat to British officers, or French intelligence, or the resistance, but could not know the meaning of should she be captured. She didn’t think much about being captured. At twenty-four you don’t, even in these circumstances, though she had heard it could be extremely unpleasant to be pumped for information. She turned a page in Madame Bovary and reached into the green shelf for the map. She would get off at the village of Villeneuve, walk firmly along the road, and turn right up the street she felt she had already seen, as if she were calling on someone, and then continue to the outskirts.
She tried to imagine this arterial road that left the village to the forest northeast of it. She mentally looked up, a technique she had mastered to recall things into her prodigious memory, to see her handler, Bradley, telling her about it. She could see the backs of the heads of the people in front of her, and vaguely sensed the man next to her. Her eyes narrowed suddenly. There was something unusual . . . and she scanned back along the car. There were two men standing in the vestibule. Well, there were no seats, and it was an evening train. The two men were in conversation, leaning into each other in order to hear over the clatter of the metal. Their backs were toward her and their hats seemed to be the ones speaking to each other. Wondering why she had thought this unusual, she was about to look back at the tiresome Madame B., when one of the men turned slightly and she saw his face.
She felt as though the air had been smacked out of her. It was Angus. She looked away in confusion. How could it be? He had been going back to his base in Ireland the last time she’d seen him. Just a week ago? But here he was in civvies, a nice grey suit and dark tie, in a French train. She glanced at him and he stared blankly back at her. Blankly, deliberately not knowing her. Who was he with? She willed the other man to turn around but he did not. He was dressed in dark blue. He was shrugging in a way that was convincingly French.
Desperately, she wanted to look at the man next to her to see if he’d noticed her shock, her shortness of breath, her confusion; she was aware she’d opened and shut the book several times as she tried to come to terms with what it meant to have Angus on the train when he should be flying over the North Atlantic, or at least getting ready to.
Her neighbour seemed to be snoozing, swaying slightly. She risked another look at Angus. He still looked at her; his face still set in the disinterested lines of a tired traveller whose surroundings mean nothing to him. She looked into his eyes and tried to will his mind to pick up what she was thinking—that she longed to be able to openly know him, say she loved him, and that she could not, could not, understand why he was on a train in the middle of occupied France with her. In this confusing moment she had no way of knowing she would never see him again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
INSPECTOR DARLING STOOD WITH HIS hands in the pockets of his brown suit pants. He didn’t like the brown suit; it had been his brother’s. Darling hadn’t had a lot of money when he got back to Canada. He was looking with almost expressionless curiosity at the corpse on the slab.
“What do you reckon?” he asked, using an expression he’d heard often on his air base in the north of England.
“Caucasian, thirty-five-ish, relatively fit, though slight. Killed by a blow to the side of the head. Not completely true,” the coroner, Andy Gilly, corrected himself. “Felled by a blow is more like it. He seems to have drowned. No signs of struggle so I’d say he was out like a light when he was shoved in the creek. His feet are scraped and there’s skin pulled off his ankle bones. I think this happened when he was pushed into the whatever-it-is where the water comes out into the creek. Did you find his shoes?” If Gilly was resentful at being made to come in to work on the Dominion Day holiday, he did not show it. Darling took his hands out of his pockets and approached the feet of the now-waxy-looking mystery man. “No. Nothing at the scene. I’ll have to buzz out there again, I suppose. As it is, we’ve nothing else to go on. One crumpled bit of paper, soaked through in the pocket. It had something written in peacock ink, almost completely washed out. I’ve sent it over to Harrison to see if he can decipher anything with his magic potions after it dries. This blow that felled him, the classic blunt instrument?”
“Blunt, yes. No bits of evidence to tell us what, though. Hard, metallic; it could have really shattered the skull, but didn’t. The assailant pulled his punch a bit, but it was enough to knock him out. It reminded me of the kinds of wounds you saw in the war in close combat. A rifle butt, say, though this is narrower. Because of the location just here, above and slightly behind the left ear, it would have put him out, but not killed him. Not immediately, that is. I have seen people die from a subsequent blood clotting in the brain from these kinds of blows. So, the person either was not enormously strong or just didn’t hit him as hard as he
could. As I said, enough to put him out, but not enough to kill him.”
“I wonder if the woman is right about his being English?” Darling mused, not for the first time he was ashamed to admit to himself, on the intriguing Miss Winslow with her extraordinary sangfroid in the face of a corpse jammed into a creek on her property.
“She could be,” Gilly mused. “There’s something in the face that looks a bit toffee.”
Darling laughed suddenly, an unusual enough event itself. “You can’t tell that sort of thing. He could come from Salmo, for all you know. Now you’ve interrupted a train of thought. Why would she not seem surprised or distraught? Why the comment that he might be English?”
“You think the girl did it? Ames was complimentary about her. He didn’t think she’d whack a guy on the head. Too refined. Too beautiful.”
“Why shouldn’t she? Being beautiful never stopped a determined woman who wanted to bean a man, and you said yourself it’s not necessarily a heavy, masculine blow.”
As he left Gilly’s dismal little basement kingdom, Darling felt the impact of his last comment. It could have been a woman. He was extraordinarily glum when he got back to his office.
London, England, 1945
Jack Franks sat back in the uncomfortable wooden chair provided by the management at Somerset House. He felt nothing but weariness now that he knew. It was impossible to feel triumphant, or attached, or whatever one was supposed to feel. He had a name now, and it wasn’t Franks. He thought about his parents; both dead in the bombing, only they weren’t his parents. Someone else was. Elizabeth Conally. He wondered what she’d be like. She would be in her fifties. What would it feel like to see her? Nothing, he knew, like the sorrow he felt every day about the people he had always thought were his parents. It surprised and distressed him that their not being his parents took away none of the misery at having lost them. Outside, summer was trying gamely to assert its magic on the pummelled city. It had only just begun to sink in that the war was over. He’d had not a bad war, really, in Intelligence. Those friends who survived had all begun to realize that they missed the tension, the exaggerated jollity of surviving a mission and fetching up in a pub with plucky WAAFs who laughed at jokes and were less drippy than the pre-war girls they’d hung about with at college. Now they’d have to go back to some sort of lives. They felt too old to go back to finish up their degrees, those who’d left before they’d qualified. Jack was one of these. He was a year short at Cambridge, where he’d been reading history and Russian. Those years in Intelligence had fitted him to keep secrets. What, he’d wondered more than once in the last five months, might he do to make a living with such a skill?