The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  As it happened Rusty did not lean back when the news came up on the screen and item after item went merrily by, stirring stories being made of everything and anything, good cheer pouring out of both the commentary and the images from somewhere in England, because she knew that to do so would be to make some kind of commitment to the evening. Finally, as yet another item came up, showing jolly British troops enjoying themselves in a camp, peeling potatoes, waving to the camera, as certain of victory as the audience were not, Rusty found herself leaning forward even further. More than that, she found herself clutching the seat in front of her, half standing in her excitement.

  ‘Peter, look! Look! See that boy,’ she did not turn to look at Peter, afraid of missing a moment, staring up all the time at the screen, ‘see, look, that’s – that’s my brother Mickey.’

  DECEMBER 1943

  Chapter Fifteen

  The result of the great battle being fought at that moment near Cassino, in Italy, was not in the forefront of Lionel’s mind as he went upstairs to see his young grandson tucked up in bed. He was looking forward to listening to the story that Mattie would be going to read to Max. And whereas formerly when Maude was alive, or when Lionel became a widower, he would have moved his chair close to the wireless to hear the voice of Alvar Lidell, or Bruce Belfrage, read the latest news, now he was much more interested in the adventures of Little Grey Rabbit, and Hare joining the Home Guard, which both Lionel and Mattie joked they probably enjoyed more than Max, who was still a little young for the lively duo.

  And yet when Hare fired his sandwiches at the enemy, and Little Grey Rabbit put on her spotless white apron, there was no doubt at all that the Eastcotts felt more secure, and as the sound of bombers passed overhead their world seemed more than doubly precious.

  So it was that the importance of the stirring news from abroad did not hit him until much later, when he and Mattie eventually sat down to eat their two sardines with boiled potatoes, and sip their much appreciated tots of whisky, as they both listened intently to the news on the wireless. It seemed that the battle for Italy was under way.

  Somewhere in Europe Meggie was listening to the same news as the Eastcotts, but not read by Alvar Lidell or Bruce Belfrage. She was listening to it in German, and as usual wondering how to translate the more ambiguous details.

  She had been dropped into France upwards of half a dozen times now, and, as she and Hugh knew but never mentioned, each drop increased the risk of exposure. The more she made contact with the French underground, and strolled about the streets of provincial France, albeit causing valuable disturbances, the more likely it was that she would, finally, be betrayed.

  Yet, for some reason that she did not fully understand, of late she had lost all sense of anything but exhilaration. She knew that Madame Gran would murmur, Your blood’s up, darlin’, nothing to be done. And possibly that was more true than she cared to think. Her blood was up. She hated the Nazis more than she could ever say. Their reprisals – shooting whole villages in return for the ambush of one of their cars, torturing a local priest, the officer in charge bringing his floozies to watch as the man was slowly put to death – made Meggie more than ever determined to carry on with her work, which was, as Hugh Tate had reminded her many times, disruption at all costs.

  Some events had proved not just exhilarating, but almost hilarious. Hearing two ambushed Nazis begging tearfully for mercy to be shown towards their beautiful new Mercedes motor car, before driving it, and them, into the sea. Surprising a local Nazi officer in bed with not one but three local prostitutes, and making quite sure to send a photograph of the event back to his wife in Germany. Which, as Meggie remarked, ‘might just help to lessen her grief un tout petit peu, n’est-ce pas?’

  When she looked back Meggie realised that everything would have been all right that particular day, now six months ago – she was posing at the time as a provincial French girl working for a doctor in a local practice – had she not strolled out of the surgery and gone to seat herself in the sunshine in the little square. Of course there were German officers lunching in the restaurant there, but then there were German officers lunching there every day; it was just that this particular day, as she glanced up at one or two who were passing her to go inside, she found herself looking straight into the eyes of the man who, what now seemed a lifetime ago, had refused to shoot her in the Normandy field.

  All at once they both knew.

  He knew.

  She knew.

  And do what she could, there was nothing to be done.

  ‘Ah, mademoiselle,’ he said, pleasantly. ‘We meet again?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Meggie agreed, hoping that the sweat was not apparent on her upper lip, or her hand as she shook his much larger one.

  ‘Why don’t you join us for luncheon, mademoiselle?’ he went on. ‘Yes, please, do, join us for luncheon.’

  ‘That will be difficult . . .’

  ‘For my sake, for Heinrich’s sake.’

  ‘That will be difficult, Heinrich.’ Meggie smiled into his pale blue eyes. ‘You know I have to get back to my job at the doctor’s surgery.’

  ‘Ah yes, how is the good Dr Ebel?’

  ‘He is very well, a little overwhelmed with all the work – as you can imagine. The children in the village are much in need of vitamins, and they are difficult to get hold of.’

  ‘Come and have luncheon, and I will personally see to it that whatever he needs is facilitated.’ He put his hand under her elbow and guided her firmly into the restaurant.

  To try to eat while seated between two Nazis was about as easy as trying to eat in front of a starving man. And to make matters worse, the proprietor could not look Meggie, or Martine as she was known there, in the face. Why would he be able to? These were men who would have helped to hand over men and women from surrounding villages to the Gestapo. These men with whom Meggie now shared a table would not just have blood on their hands, they would have torture.

  After what seemed to be the longest three courses of her life, watching the older man, his gold teeth flashing in the light of the café, telling a story of catching some of the Maquis and handing them over to the so-called proper authorities, Meggie found herself longing for the friendly little cyanide pill with which Hugh Tate always made sure that all his agents were issued. And Heinrich, who had once saved her life, now also made sure to guide Meggie back across the square, in the full view of what felt like half the town.

  From that moment on, both he and she knew, Meggie would be put down as a collaborator at best, a double agent at worst, and her greatest danger would come now not from the Nazis, not from this handsome German officer who had already spared her life once, but from the Underground.

  The Maquis would never forgive, could not afford to forgive, a double agent. She would be lucky if she stayed alive until morning. She might as well take her own gun and shoot herself, or swallow her pill.

  And yet of course Meggie could not help thinking, as the officer followed her into the worthy Ebel’s house, how her Bad Man would laugh at her situation. She imagined him saying to her, Well, Meggie, you really are in hot water this time, old darling, aren’t you? There’s going to have to be some pretty quick thinking to get you out of this hole.

  ‘I can’t spare you twice, you know that, don’t you?’

  The handsome officer in his enemy uniform looked down at her politely, not sorrowfully. They both knew he was right. This was war, and sparing people was not what war was about.

  ‘Of course not. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed my last meal, so why should you spare my life? And, I mean, you paid for it, which was jolly kind of you.’

  Meggie took her hat off and shook out her long, blond hair. This time she knew that she had really had it at last, but reasonably she realised that she had at least had a good long run for her money.

  And what was more, and what was better, she had given those bastard Nazis the same – a good long run for their argent!

  ‘Why are you
shaking out your hair like that?’

  ‘Because, Heinrich, if I am going to die, which I realise I surely am now, I want to look my best, don’t I?’ She took out a comb and flicked it casually through her tresses. ‘Besides, you’ve really buggered everything up for me anyway this time, haven’t you?’ she said, jokingly using the colloquial German word, which she knew would shock a man from his obviously patrician background. ‘I really must thank you from the bottom of my heart for making sure that you were seen drawing my hand through your arm as you crossed the square. So, really, you might as well shoot me here and now, if you don’t mind, before the Maquis do it for you. Anyway, being a crack officer you’re more likely to be accurate. I’d rather be shot by a professional, thank you.’

  Heinrich did not seem to have taken the point because he said, ‘What time does the doctor get back from lunch?’

  Meggie stared at him.

  ‘About three o’clock – you know us French,’ she said, carefully keeping to her disguise. ‘Why? Do you want an appointment?’ she added facetiously, determined to remain flippant to the end.

  ‘Very well. You wait out the back, and I will collect you. Your only chance is for me to continue to pass you off as a double agent. Your one and only chance. I am due to be moved to Cologne today. You can come with me, and the Maquis will not find you there.’

  ‘I can’t just walk out of my job. Anyway, if you don’t mind my saying so, I really don’t want to go with you, as you call it.’

  Heinrich, tall, handsome, blue-eyed and extremely fit, gave Meggie what is called in French ‘le regard rouge’, that look that passes between men and women who within seconds of meeting each other know that they could and will please each other.

  ‘You have two choices, Mademoiselle Cool Eyes,’ he told her quietly. ‘Either you come with me, or, as you say, you are shot by the Maquis and laid out by the good doctor, in the morgue.’

  Meggie shrugged, her mind already formulating a plan. If she went off with Heinrich she might at least gain access to more information than either Hugh or herself had ever dreamed of, and that, when it came down to it, might be more positive than being shot, either by him or by the Maquis. The truth was the German officer was right; she did have no real option. Meggie smiled, and putting her hat back on followed him out of Dr Ebel’s back door, and so to a whole new history.

  All that was now history, and as she sat listening to the same news as Lionel and Mattie, albeit not in Magnolias in Bexham, but in an elegant drawing room in Cologne where Heinrich had found her not only lodgings, but work as a receptionist in a well-known local restaurant, Meggie found herself praying not only for the Allied forces in Italy, but also, perversely, for Heinrich.

  He had already been wounded once on manoeuvres, seriously enough to be sent back to Cologne to recover, becoming in the process a more than willing patient to Meggie’s ministrations. But on finding Meggie’s apartment too bleak to be romantic he had promptly moved her to his own family’s apartment, housed in one of the most lovely and elegant squares in the city.

  To Meggie this had, at first, seemed ill advised, although now that she was actually living there with Heinrich, his sister Anna, and a large but generally silent household staff, she had to admit that the cleanliness and order of the place, if appealing as both immoral and illicit in time of war, was also comforting; and since Heinrich’s father was permanently absent in Berlin, she did not seem to be in any immediate danger.

  She hardly spoke to Anna, leaving, whenever possible, too early for Heinrich’s sister to have finished breakfasting, and coming back too late for her to be still up. Naturally, once he had moved her to the family apartment, Heinrich could not understand why it was that Meggie wanted to go on working in the restaurant. Meggie sensed that he considered it more than a little unsuitable for someone associating with him, but she nevertheless insisted on doing so.

  She had good reason.

  First, if the war turned against Germany, as it well might, judging from what they were not being told, she would need some civilian occupation to pass herself off as part of the local scenery. And secondly there was Anna, Heinrich’s sister, Anna in whom her brother could see no wrong.

  ‘Anna is a lovely girl,’ Heinrich would say.

  ‘A laugh a century,’ was Meggie’s laconic reply.

  Heinrich was different. Despite the war, despite his kidnapping of Meggie – which it undoubtedly was – despite his falling in love with her and her finally falling in love with him, thereby placing them both in the gravest danger, Heinrich loved to laugh. Perhaps that more than anything had finally made falling in love with him so easy – that and war.

  Heinrich had never even bothered to protest to Meggie that he was not a Nazi. The moment he let her escape from the field in Normandy, Meggie had known that he was no supporter of Hitler. And, again, the moment he looked down at her and his cool blue eyes met her cool blue eyes in that square in France, she had known that the same thing applied. Just as, the moment she removed her hat and shook out her long blond hair, and the expression on his face turned from one of concern to momentary amusement as he appreciated that like the good agent she was she was using her hair to make him take his eye off the ball, Meggie had known that she would end up in bed with him, and not, if she was honest, just for espionage purposes either.

  Worse than that, she suspected that her courage and belief in Allied victory might yet fail her, when it came to having to kill him.

  For the moment, thankfully, he was alive and she was alive, and they were both, as people in war can be, in love with each other. Yet despite his assertions that Anna and his valet Klaus were not Nazis, Meggie continued to avoid them as much as she could, particularly when Heinrich was away. She clung to her job, working in the restaurant, and maintained her separate lodgings in the old cheap quarter of the city.

  Rusty had never really liked Dr Adams, not since she was a small child, but now she thought she might truly dislike him, as he leaned forward and putting his head in his hands said, ‘Tell me, can none of you think of getting married first?’

  Rusty’s hazel eyes focused on Dr Adams’s bald spot, which she found particularly uninteresting.

  ‘It is just a little difficult, Dr Adams, in case you haven’t noticed, to get married when your – fiancé-person – only has forty-eight hours to be with you. Only just time to get pregnant, and not enough time to buy a marriage licence,’ she ended sarcastically, still hating the doctor as much as she ever had; perhaps even more.

  Of course the reason that Rusty felt so particularly unhappy with Dr Adams was that she herself had been horrified to find out that she was pregnant.

  She had already seen one birth, and now, having seen it and been terrified by its reality, and having been unable to forbear congratulating herself on not being in any danger herself, she had fallen in love with Peter Sykes, and not just in love. She had truly fallen, for his baby.

  ‘Does your father know about this, Miss Todd?’

  There seemed to be a veiled threat in the question. As if Dr Adams was saying, Because if he doesn’t know already, just wait until I tell him.

  ‘I don’t think my father knows about much these past years, Dr Adams, but of course my mother and I will tell him. He might even sit up and take notice a bit more if there is a squalling baby in the house, who knows?’

  Rusty sighed. She knew that Dr Adams abused his position as a medical man, taking gifts from under the counter, queue jumping at any opportunity, and making sure that everyone in Bexham was in his thrall, and therefore quite likely to be putting him in their wills too. And goodness, were wills important in wartime!

  So, with a bit of luck, Dr Adams might even make more money than some of the counterfeiters, thieves and arms makers who would end the war far richer than they had ever dreamed possible. Because, it had to be faced – and having seen life from behind a desk in the Food Office, Rusty was well aware of this – there was still a double tier of people in Bexham,
the haves and the have-nots. It was just that they had all changed positions since war was declared. The people who plundered buildings and shops after a bombing were the most despicable, of course, but there were others nearly as bad, and Dr Adams was one of many. He would not be found giving up his rations for some poor child, he would not be seen collecting week in week out for the Penny a Week fund, he would not even busy himself all day and all night at the hospital as other doctors in the village were doing. No, Dr Adams was always ‘called out’, and the name of the lady who was always ‘calling him out’ was all too well known in Bexham. It was obvious that he was in such a filthy mood this morning because, for once in his life, he had actually been found in.

  ‘Been a bit sick, have you?’

  ‘Could say. Bit of a waste of my egg ration this morning, let’s put it that way.’

  ‘Putting on weight?’

  ‘What do you think? I’m certainly not taking it off.’

  Such stupid questions. Dr Adams always asked such stupid questions. It was as if by asking stupid questions, which you could only answer stupidly, he could prove to himself just how stupid his patients really were, and therefore justify his neglect of them.

  To take her mind off the questions, and his form filling and chit chat about orange juice and green cards, Rusty remembered the night she had walked back to Peter’s house with him after seeing Mickey on the newsreel. It had been one of the high points of the war, seeing Mickey, after that awful twenty-four hours, with Mattie’s baby being born, and Virginia being killed. It seemed to her that there was a God after all, and that He really had looked down on her and smiled, because like it or lump it, Mickey had always been her special brother, and not just because he liked sailing.

  Peter seemed to feel the same sense of euphoria and they both ran through the darkness, laughing and talking, so that by the time Rusty pushed in after him into his house, and they were floundering about in the darkness trying to find some candles and matches because he had no light bulbs left, and anyway they were in terribly short supply, she could not believe that before setting out that evening she had sat down in all solemnity and made out a list of subjects for her and Peter to talk about.