Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  Katerina cocked her head. Fräulein Koppel was fiddling with the paper in front of her. A little bloom of a blush spread across her freckled complexion, and for the first time Katerina realized that she was probably not much older than Sonja. Perhaps she had a family, and younger sisters to care for. Did she live nearby?

  ‘We’ve had a letter concerning you from the office of the Propaganda Ministry.’

  She picked up a sheet of thick, expensive notepaper with tentative fingers, as though it might explode if carelessly handled. Awed. Almost scared to touch it.

  ‘The Minister says it has come to light that you have problems with your leg and only healthy and racially pure children are eligible for adoption. The facts of your case should have been made clear to us by your relative . . . that’s your sister Sonja, isn’t it? . . . and failure to disclose it was a breach of Reich regulations.’

  ‘Sonja’s away,’ said Katerina stubbornly.

  ‘All the same, the Ministry will want to speak to her about this.’

  She could hardly get the words out of her mouth. Katerina could see the little gulp of her throat as she paused.

  ‘Frau Schneider has discovered that you used to wear a caliper. Is that true?’

  She nodded.

  ‘If we had known that you might have been sent for treatment much earlier.’

  The gravity of her circumstances was beginning to dawn on Katerina. She imagined the secretary at the Propaganda Ministry who had produced that missive, puncturing its expensive emptiness with a fusillade of letters, typing away with a machine-gun rattle. The signature in sharp black ink, as though the words were twisted from barbed wire. The letter, lying diagonally across the desk in front of her, was not so much an unexploded bomb as a piece of smoking shrapnel from the defect that had already detonated her life.

  ‘But Sonja said . . .’

  ‘We’ve tried to contact her with no success. We’ve even checked with the police. I’m afraid there’s no sign of her.’

  ‘I told you, she’s away. She has singing engagements, abroad.’

  ‘Well until she comes back you are the responsibility of the NSV and Frau Schneider has been empowered to decide on your future.’

  Fräulein Koppel’s kindly eyes were glassy with tears, but she breathed deeply and tucked an errant piece of hair behind her cap as if taming some irregular feeling.

  She stood up, signalling the end of the interview, but Katerina sat immobile, as if lost in the sounds and sensations of the world around her – the harsh prickle of the uniform on her skin, a distant song on the radio, the mingled tang of that night’s supper and disinfectant from the bathroom next door.

  ‘What is my future then?’

  It was a forlorn question; a query that would never be asked on a Reichsführer-Fragebögen, yet both knew it was the only question that mattered.

  ‘She has arranged for you to be treated at a special hospital.’

  Suddenly the nurse leaned forward, clasping Katerina close to her starched brown chest, before releasing her just as quickly. Her voice trembled with nervous urgency.

  ‘God bless you, Liebchen. Keep your leg as straight as you can. And smile.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Even in the short time since Clara had seen Ned Russell, he had changed.

  In the half-light he looked immense and solid, like one of the statues in the square around them, his face carved in marble, the eyes dark as peat. The clothes were no more likely than they had been before – patched flannel trousers, a workman’s dusty blue tunic and soft cap and a scarlet scarf tied Spanish-style at his neck – but compared to the state of reflective calm in the Parisian attic room, his demeanour was now alert and nervous. Clara’s astonishment could not be greater if he had been a ghost, but no ghost would grip her hand so tightly, or swing an arm round her shoulder, pulling her urgently towards him.

  ‘Keep walking. Forgive me. You’ll understand when I explain.’

  His hand on her upper arm was firm. She had to hurry to keep up.

  ‘You can’t possibly go back to your pension.’

  There was an authority in his voice that forestalled her questions. He would have made a good schoolmaster, she saw.

  ‘I don’t have anywhere else to go.’

  ‘There’s a place down in the old fishermen’s district.’

  ‘Amigos bar?’

  ‘I’m amazed you know it. It’s a hole in the wall.’

  ‘I only know it by reputation.’

  The bar that Ian Fleming had mentioned was situated in a back street leading away from the docks, its sign, spelling out the word Amigos in guttering neon, hanging at an appropriately drunken tilt above the door. The place was deserted. Ned led the way through the darkened bar and pushed into a back room with a cracked tile floor and a single high barred window. He shut the door behind them and gestured to the lumpy bed covered with a thin, flowery cotton spread. There was nowhere else to sit. He poured beer into two enamel mugs and offered her one, then leaned against the wall looking down at her.

  They had managed to commandeer a taxi to bring them along the coast from Estoril and Clara had taken the basic precaution of remaining silent in the presence of the driver, but now she said, ‘Why can’t I go back to the pension?’

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘How on earth would you know?’

  ‘I’ve been there. I was looking for you. Peter sent me with a message.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Peter.’

  His face was blank, impassive.

  ‘Big chap, around thirty, curly hair?’

  ‘I have no idea who that could be.’

  ‘Forgive me. I was under the impression that he was your boyfriend.’

  Clara shook her head, dumb with puzzlement.

  ‘You’re going to have to explain.’

  ‘The day we met, a few hours after you’d gone, a couple of men arrived in that place in the Rue Vavin and told me it was time. They’re part of an organization run from London – MI9 – who are devising escape routes for people like me, down through France and Spain. They brought documents and a change of clothes and took me out of Paris in a van.’

  ‘That must have been dangerous.’

  ‘It was chaos. The roads were solid with traffic, bumper to bumper, and in places nothing was moving at all because cars had run out of petrol and been abandoned. People were taking everything they could. There were grandparents being wheeled along in carts, and smart ladies carrying hat-boxes. Hatboxes! I thought have they no conception of what is coming behind them?

  ‘It was dreadful out in the countryside. In some places the Germans had strafed the roads and there were bodies lying there, dead or dying. People starving at the roadside with no food, or water or shelter. You can’t imagine the horror of it. It was worse even than when I was taken prisoner. Then it was just soldiers who were suffering. Now it’s women, girls, old men, little children.’

  He paused and Clara guessed that he would never be able properly to articulate what had happened to him on that road, or how it had changed him. The damage in him went far deeper than the gash in his side. She reached out a hand and touched his arm lightly.

  ‘Was Peter the man who drove you?’

  ‘No, I only met Peter briefly, just before I left Paris. He told me the plan was to get me down to Portugal and he said that if I made it to Lisbon he wanted a favour from me. He wanted me to get a message to his girlfriend. He gave me the address of your pension and told me to look out for a woman with dark hair and blue eyes. About your height. He wasn’t going to give me her name for her own safety. Anyhow, I got to Lisbon this evening, went straight there and the hotel owner told me that there was a pretty lady staying in that room, but she’d gone out. I could think of nothing else to do except wait. There was a bar a little way up the road so I settled down with a drink and kept an eye on the hotel entrance and very shortly a chap turned up, looked up at the window, then went straight in. He went into on
e of the upper rooms and pretty soon afterwards he was leaning out along the street, as though he was expecting someone. It wasn’t hard to guess he hadn’t called in for a cup of tea. Shortly afterwards he came dashing out and made off up the street. It was obvious the woman I was sent to find was under suspicion, so I strolled over and asked the owner where he thought his beautiful guest might have gone. Made out I was a disappointed beau who had been expecting to take this lady out to dinner and found himself stood up. Anyway, the fellow must have felt some solidarity because he winked and said the other chap had asked precisely the same thing, but he’d kept his mouth shut.’

  ‘So why would he tell you?’

  ‘Said he reckoned if you were the kind of girl who had two men in tow, you could probably look after yourself. Told me you’d gone off gambling to the casino.’

  Ned shook his head in wonderment.

  ‘I still had no idea who I was looking for. You can imagine my shock when I saw it was you.’

  ‘Wait a minute. This man who came to my pension and looked out of the window. Describe him.’

  ‘Tall fellow. Well-dressed, broken nose. Ran like the wind.’

  A flood of relief came over Clara. Her cover had not been blown. Ian Fleming had seen the handkerchief and reacted accordingly. He was probably even now scouring the streets of Lisbon for any trace of her.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘It’s fine. He’s friendly, Ned. He came to see if I was OK.’

  He massaged his brow and vouchsafed her a puzzled glance.

  ‘I hadn’t realized, after what you told me about your fiancé, that there was anyone else. I had no idea that you and Peter . . .’

  ‘We aren’t. Of course not. I’ve never met him. I’m not the woman you were sent to meet.’

  Into his grave eyes came a mixture of confusion and relief.

  ‘In that case . . . If it’s not you I was sent for then . . .’

  ‘Peter’s girlfriend was in my pension. She’s been arrested.’

  ‘Is she alive?’

  ‘She’s in prison, though I hope she might be released soon. I think she was picked up trying to contact the Duke of Windsor. I suspect she wanted to pass a package of diamonds to him.’

  ‘To that man! He’s a traitor to his country.’

  ‘He might be. But whatever they say about him, and even if he is a traitor, he agreed to transport a cache of diamonds out of Europe.’

  ‘Probably wanted to keep them for himself.’

  ‘Whatever he intends to do with them, he’s taking them out of Nazi hands.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I’ve just given them to him. At the casino tonight.’

  Clara paused.

  ‘What was the message? That this Peter wanted you to pass on?’

  ‘There was a break in the line. Someone was arrested in Paris and they may have given her name. So she needed to be careful. But it looks like it came too late. My efforts were in vain. And yet . . .’

  He sat beside her on the cotton coverlet and his hand sought hers.

  ‘I found you again.’

  In the half-light, Clara looked across to him. Beneath the black curve of his eyelashes his eyes were steady and unblinking. She couldn’t help but recall what he had said when he thought he was going to die in that field in France. The thought that I’d never again hold a woman in my arms. Feel the softness of a woman’s skin, or the scent of her. At the time, though she did not even admit it to herself, his words had sent a deep, sensual shiver through her. Now she felt acutely aware of his body close to hers, the heat coming off him, the fleeting touch of his knee against her own.

  There was something secure and unflinching about Ned, like a rock on a moor. The feeling of not being alone, of having a brief respite from solitude, was so intense that a wave of exhaustion engulfed her and she had a deep urge to drop her guard and secrete herself against him. Before she could, with a sense of inevitability, like the deep blood returning to the heart, he leaned over and kissed her.

  They spent the night talking. Clara’s life, which had in recent months sped up and lost all direction, like a film flown free of its spool spiralling into a grainy blur, seemed to slow down and gain definition again. They spoke of their childhoods, of the books they had read, ambitions they cherished. Of their parents, his three brothers who had all, unlike himself, turned into farmers. Of Angela and Kenneth. The freezing bedsit he occupied in St John’s Wood and the time he spent in the British Museum Reading Room, astonished to be in the same place that Marx, Lenin, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle had frequented before him. How he had grown up in a church-going family, but that all the fighting and death he had seen had caused him to lose his own faith. Faith was dangerous, he believed, whatever guise it came in – ideologies like Communism and Fascism caused more misery than consolation. She liked the way he spoke – with deep, thoughtful pauses, his conversation leavened with laughter.

  The future they didn’t talk about at all.

  At midday they walked up to the castle of São Jorge, through the pine-shaded courtyards towards the ramparts that looked westwards towards the harbour. Below them a vast liner could be seen, the Excalibur, faint gouts of steam emerging from its funnel and an American flag painted on its black and white prow. All around it a flotilla of small tugs milled, ferrying supplies, and on the dockside a small mountain of crates and luggage was piled.

  The stone was warm beneath their hands, gossamer threads drifted through the air and Clara felt dissolved into everything around her, the scent of orange blossom, the ravishing clarity of the light, and the creeping wisteria cascading over the wall. High above them a flock of birds with long pointed wings and forked tails were hovering and calling in the dazzling morning light. They tilted in the air, balancing on the warm currents like a circle of snowflakes against the cobalt sky.

  ‘Migrating terns. Soon they’ll be off to winter in the Caribbean, just like our royal friends.’

  ‘I always wonder how they know the way.’

  ‘I’m glad you asked that. A little piece of crystal in their beaks helps them sense a magnetic field. I wrote a paper on it once. For an ornithology journal called British Birds.’

  Ned turned to her, his mouth twitching with amusement.

  ‘Eccentric chap. That’s what you’re thinking. With all his talk about birds. I’ve always been that way. Right from when I was a boy on the farm. There was a lake close to where we lived, and every winter a pair of Bewick swans would appear regular as clockwork, all the way from Siberia. I’d look forward to them coming and think of all that distance they travelled. If they arrived early it meant we were in for a cold winter.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s eccentric. It’s just that I knew another birdwatcher once.’

  She thought of Leo watching the starlings in the trees outside her apartment. The sun lighting the coppery tinge of his hair. She thought of Leo and then . . .

  Ned Russell. Edward Russell. She had once asked Leo if he had ever told anyone about their relationship and he said there was only a single person in the world who knew. It was a man called Edward Russell; an old friend he had run into one day on the Strand during his long years in England without her. It had been a typically leaden winter’s day and Leo was feeling hopeless. Over a drink together he poured out the story of his love for Clara, but even as he did he never doubted his friend’s discretion.

  Edward Russell was a common name. It must belong to thousands of men. It was a coincidence, no more.

  ‘I wonder. I have something to ask you.’

  The question danced in her mind. But even before she could frame the words he replied.

  ‘You want to ask if I knew Leo Quinn.’

  Clara nodded dumbly, electrified to hear the syllables of his name hanging in the air. To hear his name given breath and life again.

  Ned’s face was a mixture of recognition, and profound sadness.

  ‘I sensed it was you when we met. Y
ou’re right. Leo was a dear friend of mine. He once confided to me that he was in love with a woman – the only woman he had ever loved, he said. Her name was Clara. She was Anglo-German and lived in Berlin. When you told me you lived there and that the man you were engaged to had been killed, I hoped desperately that it wasn’t him. But I feared it must be.’

  Leo. Just hearing his name gave her the electric sense – the sense she had had many times since he died – that he was standing right beside her. As though his own voice was carried on the air, and now, through Ned Russell, a luminous thread connected her with him. It was both a searing comfort and almost too painful to bear.

  Ned placed his arms around her and pulled her close.

  ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. We met in April 1933.’

  The days that they had spent together, even weeks on a few occasions, and the years that Leo had lived in her mind contracted together like the squeeze of a heart.

  ‘He left again for London the same year. He had wanted us to marry but I stayed in Germany and I didn’t see him again until 1938. Then we were together again for a short while until he went back to England to work . . . In some ways we were scarcely together at all. He was always . . .’

  Always leaving, always receding into darkness.

  ‘You miss him.’

  ‘Very much.’

  Training her eyes on the flotilla in the harbour Clara felt her words like paper boats, sinking under the weight of feeling they had to bear. Ned sensed her hesitation and stepped back.

  ‘Do you mind this? Talking about him?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just . . .’

  Just that for months Leo’s memory had been hers to cherish and jealously guard. To argue with, nurse, reproach and lament. His memory was where she returned in her darkest moments, sustaining herself with the images of him and the cruelly brief time they had together. He was her first thought in the morning and her last at night and his memory had been hers alone. Now there was another who shared it.

  ‘You want to talk about him, but you don’t want that to change how you feel. It won’t, Clara.’