Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Veronica?”

  “I think that was her name.”

  “She died of whooping cough.”

  I remembered, very vaguely, discussions about the whooping cough epidemic and of Veronica. We had all been infected at a party, I was far too young to remember but all of us had been ill, Carl and Charles and me.

  “So we were cousins?”

  “Well it’s a bit convoluted, her mother was your grandfather’s sister.”

  “So she was my mother’s cousin? Did she know? But she was so much younger.”

  “Generations aren’t always clear cut you know. David was still quite young when your mother was born and Elizabeth quite old when she had Veronica. And no, Alicia never knew of the relationship. She certainly never knew David, or that her mother’s husband wasn’t her natural father, though she always believed she had nothing whatsoever in common with her brothers.”

  “Unless Max told her, during their affair.” I knew Max Fischer and my mother had had a relationship that had lasted several years. “I can’t understand them being together, he was old enough to be her father.”

  “Not quite. There was probably no more than ten or fifteen years between them. I don’t think either of them would have talked about anything that really mattered. I don’t think they had that kind of relationship. But maybe they did.” She seemed to have forgotten I was there as she added wistfully. “Perhaps it is impossible to truly know what goes on between two people.”

  That afternoon I made the first of many visits to David.

  “I am so pleased you are here, Annie, darling. I have so much to tell you, to ask you to do for me. I don’t need to keep secrets any longer, now Edith’s gone.” He spoke the words as if he had to in order to remind himself that he was alone. He seemed twenty years older than the last time I had seen him.

  “You must stay and talk to me. There are so many things I haven’t done, so many things I should have done but didn’t because I couldn’t upset Edie.” He stopped talking, a tear running down his cheek. I couldn’t bear his pain and could say nothing while he collected himself. “How are you getting on with your studies?”

  He listened while I told him something of what I had been doing. “I must thank you David. Really. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have got involved in such a fascinating period. I would probably have done Napoleon or Edward III. But you put me on to a period where there are still people alive who can tell me things that aren’t just to be found in books.”

  “It worked then.”

  I made two mugs of tea but I had hardly sat down before he spoke urgently, as if he had been wondering whether to say anything but, having decided to, had to blurt it out.

  “There are things that must be done. There are things that must not die with me. You will do these things won’t you?”

  “I won’t know until you tell me what ‘these things’ are will I?” I tried to sound cheerful.

  “I’ve told you something of what my life has been, I’m sure Maureen has told you more, if she hasn’t she will. You must write it all down and to tell everyone when it is time.”

  “When will I know it’s time?”

  I was surprised by his answer.

  “Ted will tell you.”

  “How do you know Ted?”

  Nothing at my mother’s funeral had been as it seemed. I had assumed they were all strangers but David and Max had known each other, David had known Ted, and Maureen had known them all. Perhaps I hadn’t looked closely enough.

  “I have known Ted for many years and we met again at your mother’s funeral. We have kept in touch. He is the single most responsible member of your extended family.”

  “But he’s not family.”

  “Not in the strict sense of blood and parentage but has he ever let you down? Has he ever not been around when the right thing had to be done? Isn’t that what ‘family’ means? I’ve always thought too much was made of blood ties. It is love that matters and Ted loves you dearly.”

  “Sometimes he’s seemed the only friend I’ve had.” As I spoke the words I realised the truth in them.

  Ted had been there throughout my childhood, he had been there when I had desperately needed a friend in the final days of my marriage and in the days immediately following Joe’s death. He had been there for my mother in her final months and had let me live with them and learn about her before it was too late.

  “Ted is a lonely man. He was mesmerised by your mother many years ago and has spent his adult life looking after you and your brother in deference to that feeling. He is very fond of you all.”

  “I haven’t been in touch with him for years.”

  “Don’t worry. You will when you need to be.”

  On my visit the following day his sadness had become a belligerent defiance against convention.

  “I won’t go to Edie’s funeral. I hate funerals. I’ve said goodbye and neither of us believed there was anything after life has left the body. What’s the point? She lived, she made me happy, I hope I made her happy and now she’s dead. Singing songs won’t do any good.”

  “You went to my mother’s.” I pointed out perhaps with less tact than appropriate because he looked at me with something approaching irritation.

  “I didn’t go to Alicia’s funeral to say goodbye to Alicia. I went to be with Edie. She wanted to go. She had to go. I was with Edie. That and ….” I wondered if what he had left unsaid was ‘that and to see Max’.

  “Talk to me David. Tell me more of those times. Tell me about Max.” I would try anything to take his mind away from Edie. “Tell me more about your work, in the 1930s. You began to tell me two years ago but there were so many gaps.”

  “You know so much already.”

  “Never enough.” I sat with him, holding his hand, trying to ease some of the pain of his loneliness.

  “I told you my job through those years was to develop contacts.” He began hesitantly. He hadn’t but I didn’t argue with him.

  “Was Max one of them?” I remembered him saying he would answer direct questions if I asked them. Now seemed the time.

  “Yes, he was. I knew of him, indeed I knew a lot about him but I didn’t have to meet him until 1935.”

  “What were these contacts for?”

  “They were people who would be able to go into unfriendly countries.”

  “This was before the war though?”

  “I’ve told you we all knew the war was coming.”

  “Who were they?”

  He began to relax a bit and his answers flowed more freely. “Anyone who we could trust we recruited to report what they saw as they travelled around Europe. Actors, businessmen, anyone who could legitimately be in Germany, Austria or Hungary at that time. We had a wonderful network of information but everything we did was secret.”

  “How did you know of Max?”

  “He was a young lawyer, learning his business. He was ambitious but it wasn’t long before he realised that a great many of his contemporaries were more successful without having to do the work.”

  “They came from the right families.”

  “Indeed. Max’s family was lower middle class, his parents were shop keepers. He had none of the advantages of his contemporaries and he felt it keenly. Max needed to be accepted as a person as well as someone good at his job.”

  “Just like you.”

  “Not quite, but you’re right neither of us would have been expected to do well. I think we always understood that about each other though we were practically different generations. When I was born Queen Victoria had nearly ten more years to reign. I was 44 and he was not yet 30 when I met Max.”

  “And in meeting Max everything changed?”

  “For him, certainly, meeting me opened doors to an entirely new life. He had a chip on his shoulder, he was sure he was a better, possibly more intelligent, certainly more devious, lawyer than the people he wished were his friends. He spent drunken evenings in bars thinking that if he acted a
s they did he would be accepted, but at the time he didn’t realise quite how much they despised him.”

  “Did they know he was Jewish?” I had always suspected this and it seemed a question worth asking.

  “Max was not Jewish. His mother was probably of that faith, his grandparents certainly were. But it was not his religion that set him back in life, it was his class. And, Annie, before you argue with me, they are not necessarily the same.”

  “Some religions have always been…”

  “Underdogs? Scapegoats?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that, I was going to say economically disadvantaged.”

  “What a peculiar way of putting it. If Max was ‘disadvantaged’ it was because his family were shopkeepers, not because his mother’s parents were Jewish.”

  “But why was he a shopkeeper?”

  “Because he was not a farmer.” David’s tone was final. He was not going to pursue that conversation. “Max acted as though he were the aristocrat he wanted to be but since he couldn’t achieve a position of power and authority by right of birth, he had to do it through hard work and luck. Max’s life and mine have been inextricably linked on many levels. In the beginning I was the one who dictated to him and at other times the roles were reversed and he was able to dictate to me, but for over 40 years we have not been free of each other.”

  “That’s an odd way of putting it. Weren’t you friends? Didn’t you like each other?”

  “No, I can honestly say neither of us has ever liked the other.”

  “Even though you were brothers-in-law?”

  “What do you know about that?” He spoke sharply.

  “Elizabeth… your sister… ” I didn’t answer properly, I had been shocked by the pain in his voice. Please tell me about her. I’d love to know more about her.”

  He thought for a while before answering.

  “Elizabeth’s story isn’t just about her, it is about the influence she had on others. She had no life of her own. She was simply a pawn in a bigger game.”

  “A game?”

  “A game between me and Max.”

  Chapter Nine

  It was 1948, more than 27 years after he and Edie had last met that David unlocked his mail box in the dark lobby of the block of flats in Connaught Square where he had lived since his mother had been killed in an air-raid in the early days of the war he had worked for more than 20 years to help prevent.

  Every evening he walked from his office to St James’s where he would spend an hour having two drinks in the peaceful smoking room at his club. He was 57 years old and would be retiring soon, it was not a welcome prospect. He knew he would be leaving loose ends and he felt disappointed with himself. He remembered how, when he had been young and new to the service, he had resented and despised the time servers, now he had become one of them. Whatever purpose he had was now over, those skills he had were no longer needed. Unusually he had not been offered a knighthood in recognition of the grade he had achieved in the ministry. He recognised that would only be because too much was known of his failures, his mistakes and his questionable activities. His work was particularly difficult as the new post-war generation took over and he had had great difficulty pursuing his own objectives. He was involved, much against his better judgement, in helping one of his fishermen to bring a young woman in from France under the refugee evacuation programme. And he had lost contact with his second, final, surviving fisherman. Loose ends which would only cause problems.

  After his hour at the club he would thread his way through the streets and squares of Mayfair to the company flat that he would have to leave when he retired. It was another reason for his depressed mood. He didn’t like change. He had always resisted it and worried about it as it became increasingly imminent.

  He put his hand into the dark wooden cubby hole and drew out a clutch of envelopes. He knew immediately who the letter in the blue envelope was from. Edie rarely wrote to him but when she did she always used the same Basildon Bond notepaper.

  Climbing the stairs to his first floor flat he wondered what his life would have been if he had not had to go to work on that Saturday morning 30 years earlier. Would he have met someone, perhaps had children that he could openly care for? Would he have had a happier more fulfilled life? Would his work have been any different? But he knew he could never have felt for any woman as he felt for Edith and that he could never have been happy with anyone else.

  He placed the envelopes on the small round table and carefully arranged them so that all overlapped by the exact amount and all angles were perfectly right. He placed the tumbler and the bottle of malt next to the envelopes, carefully edging them this way and that to form a perfect pattern. He then turned away to his small kitchen and opened the oven to see what Millie had left in the oven for his sustenance this evening.

  Millie came in for an hour every day during the week to clean the flat and to leave him ‘something hot’ on a plate in the oven. It was never very appetising, but it was food and he was grateful for that. He knew men who ate every night at the club, but it was enough for David to endure the club’s turgid cooking at the weekends. He lifted off the covering plate to display a meal evenly divided into three colours; one third brown stew, one third yellow potato and one third green cabbage. He put the plate on the small Formica topped table and ate his dinner with no pleasure. Placing the knife, fork and plate in the small sink he returned to the sitting room, altogether, he thought, a more civilised room.

  Sitting down in his leather wing armchair, he carefully poured the malt into the tumbler, as he always did, thinking to ration himself to half a glass for the evening ahead.

  He looked at the envelopes on the table. He was going to leave the blue one to the last.

  It was some years since he had last had a letter from Edie. She had written early in the war to tell him that Alicia had been involved in a bad accident ‘Her back is broken …she is desperately depressed but Bert will not let me visit her … the accident was his fault … I will never forgive him.’ A letter a year later told him of Alicia’s marriage to Arnold and another, shortly after, to inform him that he was a grandfather. ‘I don’t like the name Charles,’ she had written ‘it is a very pompous name and it will undoubtedly be shortened to Charley which is very ugly’. There had been a long gap to the letter he had received the previous year announcing the birth of their second grandchild, Susannah. ‘I’m pleased it’s a girl then there will be no comparisons with her older sibling, she will have a chance to have a life of her own’ David had tried not to read her own pain in the words.

  He had only received letters when there was something important to record. ‘I dislike giving important news on the telephone,’ she had said to him early in their friendship, ‘there’s no record to look back on, no piece of paper to take from a drawer and re-read to experience afresh the joy of hearing good news. Even bad news should be recorded in this way, otherwise it is almost as if it didn’t happen or it wasn’t of any importance.’

  David, my dear

  Bert is dead.

  He has not been well for some years. I don’t think he ever recovered fully from the accident. We all rather overlooked what it must have done to him to damage the life of our daughter so. I think perhaps he was rather fond of her in his own way.

  It was the cold weather that finally brought his suffering to an end. His mind has been wandering and he has been living so much in the past. Our neighbour found him sitting on the ground that had been his allotment. He was frozen to the marrow, he thought he was back in the trenches. I put him to bed but he never woke up.

  Perhaps that’s the way to go, David dear, in one’s sleep.

  We have been good friends, you and I, for many years, but you must not think that the news contained in this letter puts you under any obligation.

  If you want to contact me I am here.

  If you don’t wish to I will understand.

  David re-read the letter, trying to identify Edie’s true f
eelings from the words she had written. Was she sad? Was she relieved? What did she want him to do?

  He drank the whisky and, breaking his self-imposed rule, poured himself another.

  He knew there was only one thing he could do.

  He would go to her.

  “Edith my dear,” David sat in the comfortable kitchen of the house that was now their home, “come here will you, stop that washing up, I’ll help you later.”

  Edie wiped her hands on the dish cloth and sat down opposite her husband of two weeks. For two people well into their middle-age and who didn’t really know each other very well they had settled into married life together remarkably easily.

  “What is it David? You look worried.”

  “No, not worried, nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “I think perhaps I’ve married you under false pretences. You haven’t asked any questions about my life. You haven’t asked why I use a different name, what I have done for a living, what I do for a living. You have asked me nothing.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “You’ll tell me what you want to, when you want to.” Edie was calm and secure.

  “I might be all sorts of things, a criminal even.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “Didn’t you think it odd that you are Mrs McKennah not Mrs Redhead?”

  “I knew there would be a good reason.”

  Edie sat patiently waiting for David to tell her what he had to.

  “After the Great War my job changed. I still worked for the government but what they wanted me to do was wrong, they were planning for peace when they should have been planning for another war. I worked for a branch of the government, always remember that, what I was doing was not for myself, it was official, perhaps not something the governments of the time would want publicised but certainly necessary.”

  “It sounds very mysterious. Were you a spy?”

  “Spy is such a silly word.”

  “Sorry.” Edie was quick to sense she had done something wrong.