The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  Of course, many other people had been expected to fall back into peacetime existence. I think of Jim, expected, he’d once told me, to return to his father’s insurance syndicate in the City while the fingers of drowning children clawed at him each night. I’m not sure whether I can bear to relate my own early days at home. ‘I had to get on with my life. And I have to do that again now.’ I can hear something that sounds like impatience in my voice. I like Dr Rosenstein, I have found this process of untangling my past satisfying and illuminating. But I’m growing weary of it all now.

  ‘Were you debriefed?’

  ‘No. At least, not formally.’ It had puzzled me. ‘At first I thought it was because everyone was tied up with the invasion of France and pushing up through Italy and Yugoslavia.’

  ‘You lived with your parents in Shropshire? How was that?’

  ‘It was fine when I could get out of doors. I worked on a local farm as an unofficial land girl. I could cycle there. Being outside was easier for me. The farmer was an obstreperous old so-and-so. That suited me. I helped with the harvest and then lambing in the new year.’

  ‘The rhythms of the natural world were perhaps a help?’ Dr Rosenstein scribbles something. Perhaps she’s going to see if I can help out on a farm near Woodlands. I might actually like that.

  ‘By late spring 1945 the farmer’s son, who’d been invalided out of the army, was fit enough to help his father again. He didn’t want me around. Even though – or probably because – his injured leg made farm work hard for him.’

  My father found me a job in the bank in the local town, but it was clear that this wasn’t ideal: either for me or for the unfortunate bank manager. ‘I felt lost,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein. ‘Abandoned. I’d sit with my sandwich during my lunch break and feel as though I’d fallen down a rabbit hole.’

  One evening, I took out the beret I’d worn in Croatia, removed the soil and placed it carefully in a paper bag and put the beret on my head. Had I ever worn this to carry out my wartime work? Why didn’t anyone from SOE contact me? By ‘anyone’ I meant Robert. Had my failure to get Stimmer to Cairo counted against me? Or did the loss of Naomi rankle with them? Nobody needed to punish me for either failure. I could do quite enough of that myself every night when I lay sleepless in bed, missing the hard physical farm work, rerunning events in my head. If I’d stopped Naomi from leaving, fetched Samuel and Daniel to help me persuade her. If I’d posted better lookouts at the airfield . . .

  ‘Your parents didn’t return to London once the V2 rockets were put out of action?’

  ‘Our flat had been damaged in an air-raid. It needed repairs.’

  ‘So by the time Robert made contact with you, you were in what kind of frame of mind?’

  How to explain the cocktail of feelings? ‘Angry. Frustrated. Confused.’ I pull each ingredient out of my memory. ‘It sounds so pathetic when so many people had lost lives, families, homes and countries. But I felt as though I’d been dropped, as though I wasn’t worth anyone’s time.’

  ‘And Robert?’

  Much of my frustration and anger arose from feeling abandoned by him. I was barely smoking since I’d returned to Shropshire, but I’d take out Robert’s lighter and roll it round in my hand. I had to be careful not to do this in front of my parents, because that would have meant explaining where I’d acquired it.

  I look directly at Dr Rosenstein. ‘It was him I was missing. The feelings I had for him had grown stronger since I’d returned. I . . . I suppose I loved him, really. Even though months had passed since I’d seen him. Every morning I’d check the letters in the post in case there was something from him.’ I’d creep downstairs as soon as I’d heard the letterbox clatter and search through the mail before my parents came down.

  I had wondered if Robert might actually be dead. The fear had taken seed inside me. It would explain the silence. I hadn’t prayed for years, not even on the operation, but I found myself standing at the bus stop in the mornings repeating something that sounded very much like a prayer: Please don’t let him be dead. Even if he doesn’t love me, don’t let him be dead.

  Maud and her parents were sitting around the wireless listening to the announcement of Victory in Europe when the telephone rang. Nobody much telephoned her parents and the three of them had looked at one another, shocked, almost uncertain what the sound was. Her father’s voice sounded uncertain and quavering when he picked up the receiver, agreeing after a pause that this was indeed the correct number for Miss Maud Knight.

  ‘You’re probably doing valiant work growing turnips,’ the familiar male voice said when she took the receiver.

  ‘I’m actually working in a bank.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure it’s fascinating,’ Robert said, as she struggled to switch her brain up a gear. ‘But I know you, Amber.’

  Amber.

  ‘Not out celebrating tonight?’

  She mumbled something about not having petrol to drive down to the nearest village.

  ‘You’re a girl who’d give anything for a trip to the city and a slap-up dinner. Shall we put something in the diary?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask the bank manager for leave.’

  ‘Tell them you have an end-of-service medical. In Harley Street. Say it’s mandatory.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Complete work of fiction. But it will impress your boss. Damn it, when I first met you, you had a job in a doctor’s surgery yourself, and that sounded grim enough, but working in a small-town bank sounds entirely unlike the Amber I once knew.’

  ‘There’s a certain satisfaction in making sure the work’s done properly.’ Hearing his voice was thrilling but had the effect of making her defensive, justifying herself.

  ‘I hate to think of you stuck indoors, counting grubby bank notes or reconciling accounts.’

  ‘It won’t be forever. Once I’m back in London, I can find something better.’ She hadn’t the faintest idea how she would do this. Perhaps Robert would know people who might be interested in someone like her. ‘I’ve picked up some new skills.’

  ‘I remember what a whizz you were on the wireless transmitter. One of the smoothest touches on the keyboard your instructor had ever seen, he told me. Nimble little fingers you’d rather like to glide across your skin.’

  She felt a blush spread over her cheeks. ‘The pips will go in a moment. I’d better go. Tell me where I should meet you in London.’

  ‘Eleven lives,’ Robert told her, pouring her another glass of wine. She barely needed alcohol. Seeing him had made her feel inebriated. She studied the menu as though she had never seen anything so fascinating. ‘Eleven men returned to combat, or to medical care. Four of them highly trained US airmen, gratefully received back by our allies. And the Partisans supplied with weapons that helped them fight the Germans.’ He smiled at her. ‘Found something you’d like to eat? That menu promises much but the reality is probably whale.’

  ‘I don’t mind whale.’ God, she sounded like a little girl trying hard to please. Why did he have to make her feel like this? She was trying hard not to stare at him, not to be a fool. She wished her heart would stop racing. Perhaps if she had another sip of wine . . .

  This restaurant still wore the streamers put up to celebrate Victory in Europe. They had taken on a drunken air, some of the tacks having come undone. She wanted to compare Robert’s real-life features with the memory of his face she’d carried to Yugoslavia. He looked a little more wrinkled around the eyes, perhaps a little thinner. But otherwise he was unchanged. Even if the menu was limited, the wine was good.

  ‘All because of you, Amber.’

  She looked down at the threadbare tablecloth. ‘But I lost . . .’

  ‘Every operation has its failures.’ She’d forgotten how softly he could speak, that sudden gentleness in him.

  ‘Stimmer—’

  ‘Icing on the cake. He was never part of your original objective.’

  Help the Partisans rescue POWs and airmen. Set up parachute drops
. Report back on their organisation. She’d done these things, she supposed.

  But Stimmer and what was in his head had been lost. She could still see the blackened-stains on the grass from the Lysander’s burnt-out wreck. Singed white feathers had blown around the site for days afterwards, as though an angel had been set on fire, the farmer’s wife had said. And then there was the loss of Naomi, too. The cost had surely been too great.

  ‘You’re thinking of Naomi, aren’t you?’ Robert reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘I’ve known it go far worse: whole networks wiped out, agents executed, their families sent to camps, whole villages burnt down. We aren’t still aren’t sure how many of our agents ended up in German camps by the end.’

  ‘I still don’t know where Ana is. She went north to help her younger son.’

  ‘A younger son?’ He looked interested. She told him what she knew about Miko.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘If she’s still with him and got caught up in the retreat, she probably headed north into Austria to try and surrender to us there.’

  ‘With the Chetniks, and the Slovene Home Guards, and the other pro-German forces? Ana was never one of them.’

  He shrugged. ‘She was treating one of their wounded.’

  ‘Can’t we do something? You must know someone in the area who can find them for us, who can explain who Ana is, and what she did for us?’

  ‘She may well have been sent on to a displaced persons camp in Austria or Italy.’ Robert frowned. ‘Though she might be seen as a collaborator if she was caught with Chetniks.’

  ‘I told you, she wasn’t a collaborator.’ He looked surprised at the vehemence in Amber’s tone. She smiled, forcing herself to sound softer. ‘She just went to operate on Miko.’

  Robert ordered food for both of them. She couldn’t even register what he’d selected.

  ‘At least they’re honest and not claiming it’s chicken.’ He filled her glass. ‘It was pretty chaotic when the Chetniks and their allies surrendered. They were piling into this small Austrian town, tens of thousands of them, with the Partisans firing at them as they tried to surrender to the Allies. It was a mess.’

  ‘What will happen to the Chetniks?’

  ‘The decision may be taken to return them to Yugoslavia.’

  Perhaps the restaurant’s taped and grubby windows made the spring light look drab, as though it were still winter. Perhaps it was what was inside Amber herself that felt washed out and tired, incapable of responding to the blossom and tulips outdoors and the relieved faces of those still celebrating the peace; or to Robert, the one she’d been waiting for. In the days before she’d built up an image in her mind of how this evening would go, but it was shattering.

  ‘The decision may be taken?’ She repeated the words, which sounded so official, so impersonal.

  ‘Yes.’ He lit his cigar, studying it carefully. ‘Something like that would be decided at a high level. Politicians are getting very nervous about offending the Partisans, or Tito’s frightening big brother, Stalin.’

  Amber thought of Ana, fierce, loyal Ana, trying to explain to some Partisan who didn’t know her that she had fought the Germans and Chetniks in Croatia, that she had walked hundreds of miles with the wounded, caring for them, that she was not a traitor, and had only been with her Chetnik son because he had been injured. Would they listen?

  ‘You’re saying we sent people back to Tito, even though we knew they wouldn’t be treated according to international law?’

  ‘You know Yugoslavia, darling. It’s a place like no other. Old hatreds. And now a new order running the country.’ He puffed on the cigar, his eyes on her.

  She thought of the Ustaše militiamen and camp guards on their knees in front of ditches, about to be shot, feeling the fear their victims had felt. A little part of her rejoiced.

  Ana was a Partisan doctor who’d saved so many of the executioners’ comrades’ lives: she could give them names and locations, prove her credentials.

  ‘We sent back thousands of Ustaše. Surely you’re delighted to hear that those bastards got what they deserved?’

  ‘I am glad that some of those evil men are being executed,’ she said slowly. ‘There was something that happened to me while I was briefly captured, something I haven’t told anyone here about.’

  An emotion that she could not interpret passed over his face. She remembered Ana warning her not to tell anyone about what had happened. She related the story of the rape briefly and as obliquely as she could. The colour seemed to leave his cheeks.

  ‘That’s appalling. We didn’t really debrief you, did we? We should have made sure you were all right. I can only apologise.’

  ‘I wondered when that was going to happen.’

  ‘Regard this as the unofficial official debrief.’ He smiled at her. ‘More comfortable than going into some stuffy office.’

  ‘It seems . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A little delayed. And don’t you need to make notes on what I say?’

  ‘You’re absolutely right. Unfortunately, I was tied up abroad. There was nobody else I could assign your debrief to. Nobody else I would want to do it.’ He picked up his knife again, even though he’d finished the food on the plate. ‘And don’t worry, the details will be committed to paper. I will remember everything you’ve told me.’

  She stared hard at her plate and the unfinished rabbit on it.

  ‘For some men rape seems part of the armoury.’ He was speaking very quietly now and he’d moved forward over the table so their heads were almost touching.

  ‘Stimmer stopped them.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Robert put down his knife and looked at his empty glass. ‘I think we need another bottle.’ He put up a hand, summoning the waiter.

  It seemed the conversation was over. She was half relieved, half surprised. Ana had been right to warn her not to try to have the conversation. Ana.

  ‘Can you ask someone about Ana?’ she said. ‘Find out where she is? She saved my life, twice.’ She told him how Ana had shot the Ustaše’s car and later on pulled her clear of the burning Lysander when she’d lost consciousness. Robert seemed to sit up.

  ‘It will be looked into,’ he said. ‘But as I said, she’s probably in a displaced persons camp, safe and sound.’ He gave her that sudden warm smile of his. ‘I can see why you made such a good operative, Amber. You care about the people you worked with. Some people claim it’s all about being objective, dispassionate. But loyalty matters too. People feed off it.’

  He understood. She felt a lump form in her throat. Oh God, she was going to blub. She’d held herself together so well at first, reminding herself that so long had passed since she’d last seen Robert. Perhaps he had another woman now. Perhaps he was even married again.

  He put a hand out across the worn linen tablecloth and squeezed her hand. ‘It’s hard when there’s nobody to talk to, isn’t it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘If you were a man there’d be bars you could go to, people drinking there who’d know the kind of thing you’d done. But you’re a woman. Stuck in the country,’ he went on. ‘Working with girls who spent the whole war in Shropshire, worrying about getting hold of nylons and wetting themselves about a dance in the village hall. How could they understand what it was like over there?’

  She blinked. It was if he could see into her head. Two brandies appeared. They’d already drunk most of the second bottle of wine. Amber hadn’t had as much alcohol since Cairo.

  ‘You felt lonely out on the karst when Naomi left you. But you made friends with those Partisans; you worked closely with them. But now you find yourself back at what’s supposed to be your home. And the people you should feel closest too, your family, have no idea what you did. And you can’t tell them. That’s loneliness, Amber, isn’t it?’ She felt as though a warm cloak had been swept around her, shielding her from the world. ‘I know what it’s like,’ he said softly. ‘I understand. You had that awful experi
ence with the Ustaše. Then you saw that Lysander blown up on the runway. People killed. You nearly died yourself.’

  ‘There were these feathers.’ She swallowed. Silly, really, she’d barely thought about the down that the young POW had carried onto the plane. Except for once, when the farmer in Shropshire had killed a chicken and plucked it in the barn and the sight of the feathers had made her feel nauseous.

  ‘Feathers?’

  She told Robert about the down floating, singed, from the sky.

  ‘Like angels burning,’ he said. ‘Strange how it’s the small details that make the greatest impact on us. They’re symbols, aren’t they? We invest them with meaning.’

  Darkness fell. The waiter pulled the blinds down, hiding the grubby windows. Soft lamplight bathed the restaurant and the diners. This was peacetime as it should be: knowing you were safe, and nobody was going to try to kill you. When they left the restaurant, the streetlights were on. She didn’t even have to worry about toppling into the road and being knocked over by a vehicle lit only by feeble blackout lights. Robert took her arm. ‘Let’s stroll down to the river,’ he said.

  It was hard not to check a street for possible dangers; it was a habit she was trying to shed. The Shropshire town where she worked would not harbour snipers. Nor were there Ustaše patrols or Germans in London. She thought of asking Robert if other returning agents ever felt like this, but worried about sounding hysterical. He led her to Waterloo Bridge, now reconstructed. ‘Did you know that women completed this bridge?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t finished when the war started and then the Luftwaffe bombed it. There weren’t enough male labourers because they’d all gone into uniform.’

  She hadn’t known this.

  ‘So many things done by women that we would never have thought you could do. And now you can go back to your pre-war lives. Happy, knowing you served your country when it needed you. What now for you, Maud?’

  She stiffened at the use of that name, which seemed to mark a step back from the intimacy of the restaurant. Was she now Maud again, for good? What was she supposed to do with Amber: discard that persona like a snake shedding a skin?