The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  She rewrapped the photographs and retied the string, replacing them in the suitcase and storing it back under the bed.

  Mama could lend her a small suitcase – there was plenty of time to have it sent down from Shropshire.

  The sun came out again at the end of September. You could hire deckchairs in Hyde Park, though the man clearly thought that it was too late in the year and grumbled as he went to fetch them from his store. The flowerbeds weren’t at their best at this stage of the year, but at least there was a sense that a park might yet become a recreation area again rather than somewhere to graze sheep and grow food. Robert and Maud were sitting reading the Sunday papers. Her deckchair was set too low for her. ‘I’ll never be able to pull myself up again.’

  She waited for a moment to see if he’d help. When he returned to his newspaper she struggled to adjust the slats at the back. Robert watched her. He wore a light wool suit and one of the shirts he’d had made in Cairo and looked crisp and fresh. Young matrons bringing their children in to play in the park eyed him. One of his jacket buttons was coming loose.

  ‘I’ll have to sew that button for you. At least my war work taught me how to do that.’ Basic repair work had been covered in training. If your breeches or rucksack ripped out on the karst there was no seamstress to take them to.

  He sat up straight. ‘Never mention your war work.’

  ‘I just meant that I can actually thread a needle.’ He continued to look at her. She felt as she had in the classrooms in Cairo when he was training her. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything else.’

  ‘You never know who might be listening.’

  ‘To me talking about sewing on buttons?’ She waited for him to grin and make a quip.

  Robert sat back in the deckchair, opening the newspaper again. The very printed words on the front seemed to radiate anger. Had she been indiscreet? Nobody was anywhere near them. ‘Did you remember to call the plumber about that pipe in the bathroom?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s coming on Tuesday morning.’

  ‘But don’t you remember, darling, that I asked you to make an appointment for late afternoon so that I could leave the office a little early and be there too?’

  ‘I don’t remember you saying that, no.’ She was certain he’d never mentioned anything about leaving work early.

  He didn’t seem angry, though, at the challenge. ‘You need to relax more. I shouldn’t nag you about silly things, should I?’

  ‘I don’t mind doing them.’ It wasn’t as though her days were exactly full.

  He glanced at her abdomen. ‘It’s tiring for you. I should take over more of these things. I want you to concentrate on yourself. And the baby.’

  A few days later he brought a large rectangular parcel back with him from work.

  She unwrapped it. An easel and paints.

  ‘Watercolours?’

  ‘Poor darling, you must be feeling lonely.’

  ‘There’s the house,’ she said. ‘And the garden. All the vegetables to pick and preserve this time of year.’ She was proud of the produce the little patch had yielded. ‘Things to prepare for the baby.’

  ‘Even so. Those things are a drain on you. Didn’t you say you’d once enjoyed painting? I thought you could start again.’

  ‘Me? I never had myself down as much of an artist.’ She hadn’t even picked up a paintbrush since about the upper fourth at boarding school. Robert was looking puzzled.

  ‘I thought . . .’ He put a hand to the side of his face.

  But the idea of taking up watercolours enchanted her. She even went down to the library to see if there were evening classes she could sign up for. ‘Painting will help keep you calm,’ Robert told her.

  Was she so obviously jittery? ‘I could sit in the park and paint the Serpentine,’ she said. ‘The light from the water is so fascinating.’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled at her with real warmth.

  While he was at work she made some exploratory dabs. She liked the way the hard colour in the paint pallet became something fluid on the paper. But her brush strokes seemed only to produce spiky little trees. She tried to brighten up her attempt with some of the yellow paint and created what looked like a fire consuming the trees. Maud thought of the birds that might be nesting in the branches and felt nauseous. She tore up the sheet before Robert could see it. ‘Perhaps I’ll start with drawing,’ she told him brightly that evening. ‘Something simple, a wine bottle, maybe. To get my eye in.’

  ‘A schoolgirl still-life?’ He gave her a gentle smile. ‘I thought you might want to stretch yourself.’

  To paint to Alice’s standard?

  ‘You won’t have much time soon. Cecilia always tells me how much there is to do when a baby arrives.’

  ‘Yes.’ She hadn’t done much at all in the last week. It was so warm. Even bringing in the vegetables and washing them felt like serious labour. Yet by the time the clock hands had moved around to four, Maud felt restless. She’d taken to leaving the house, watching the men walking home and the children returning from the park. She walked across Hyde Park. Sometimes she skirted the northern fringe, emerging at the junction between Park Lane and Oxford Street.

  Her father had once told her that the site of the old Tyburn gallows was somewhere here. If she half-closed her eyes she could almost hear the hurdle scraping across the rough road, the jeers of the crowd, the horse, skittish at the noise. She’d walk on before more impressions of the hanging and drawing and quartering could come to her. It was more direct to walk diagonally across, roughly southeast, to Hyde Park Corner, crossing into Green Park and sometimes onto St James’s Park. But Tyburn drew her to itself. Some traitors were executed elsewhere, in the Tower, for instance, her father had told her, but so many must have come here to Tyburn to die: horribly tortured and maimed before they were killed. As a child, fascination had mingled with revulsion when he’d described the executions, until Mama intervened, telling Dad to stop his stories.

  Maud would stare at the road where the gallows had stood, then walk on as quickly as she could, resisting the urge to turn around and ensure that nobody was following her. As she approached St James’s her eyes would be peeled, wanting to see her husband before he spotted her. Each time she did, there’d be a sense of relief. He was always the most notable, the most vivid man in the crowds, his face tanned, his bearing athletic. Her husband, finishing a day at work, pleased to see his pregnant wife, but reprimanding her for walking too far.

  Just like a loyal retriever, darling. They would stroll home together, arm in arm, past the worn-out, dusty buildings and the weed-choked bomb sites on the way to the park, Maud wondering if the city could ever be put back together again. Sometimes they found a public house Robert thought suitable for her and he would buy her a shandy.

  One early afternoon, when nothing needed doing in the garden and the house was tidy, she left home although it was only half past two, Tyburn acting as a magnet. She stood gazing at the road, heedless of the cars, trucks, taxis and buses, wondering whether any of the German bombs that had landed near here had been powerful enough to blast away any lingering maleficence. One bad thing to kill another bad thing. Good coming from ill. Treachery could mean security. Death could mean safety. But, like a subversive imp, Amber whispered in her ear, telling her to pay attention.

  Maud walked her usual route to St James’s, but it was too early for Robert to be coming out of his office, so she continued on to Westminster then downstream as far as Waterloo Bridge. At this time of the year the evening came earlier and with it cooler air. She stood on the bridge above the Thames, thinking of those women who’d built it, wondering where they were now. Had they merged back into their pre-war lives with ease? Or had they found the transformation as baffling as she did? An elderly lady slowed as she approached Maud, frowning. Maud moved back from the parapet. ‘Just looking at the river,’ she muttered.

  ‘You need to put your feet up,’ the woman told her. ‘Tiring stage you’re at.’

&
nbsp; Maud walked back over the bridge and along the Strand towards Trafalgar Square, where she found a Lyons Corner House and drank a cup of tea and a glass of water. She should eat something, but couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm and continued on through Whitehall to St James’s, her energy returning with each block she walked, her mind sharper again. She felt Amber in her once more.

  In Victoria Street she crossed to the Army & Navy Stores. She would buy something for the baby, something less utilitarian than sheets and maternity jackets and muslin cloths. Maud found herself in the toy department. They hadn’t bought any toys yet. What would such a small baby like? Her eyes made contact with the bright button-eyes of a small fluffy rabbit. ‘No need to wrap it,’ she told the assistant, ‘he’ll fit in my handbag.’

  Maud left the store, checking her watch. Bang on time for Robert. The plump man in the tight suit seemed to materialise suddenly in the crowd without her having spotted him before. At first she thought he had accidentally bumped into Robert and was apologising. As she came closer she saw that they were talking: not just making conversation, but with intent, with emotion. Robert was shaking his head, trying to brush off the man, who put one hand on his shoulder to try and detain him.

  Robert succeeded in freeing himself and moved on. Tight-suit man grabbed at him with his other hand, the left one. The skin was pale. Maud could clearly see the hand outlined against Robert’s grey suit jacket. She looked at his little finger, at the stunted, stubby appearance of the digit. The man’s face showed near despair as he failed to prevent Robert from walking on. On his upper lip a moustache had grown back. He looked better with the facial hair, she thought.

  In the middle of a London street at half past five on an autumn afternoon, amidst the roar of buses and the shouts of newspaper vendors, Maud stood as Amber, out on the jagged Croatian limestone landscape, smelling its fresh air, an aroma which faded, replaced with that particular aroma of a schoolroom, old paper and chalk. And with the scent of blood. She felt something else, too, something that made her feel more alert than she had during the last heavy and flat-footed weeks. Pay attention, Amber said.

  Maud shivered, knowing that she must not let Robert see that she had witnessed this exchange, that he must not notice she was frightened. She turned for home, walking quickly enough to draw curious glances from those she passed.

  ‘A bit of a headache,’ she told him from her armchair when he came into the house five minutes after her. ‘I started to come to meet you but turned round.’ He might have spotted her walking back across the park. ‘Thought I should rest. Hope you didn’t miss me.’ She was impressed with her tone, how calm she sounded.

  He kissed the top of her head. ‘I did. I always do.’

  ‘You were frightened of your husband, of his knowing you’d witnessed this exchange with someone you had met overseas during the war?’ Dr Rosenstein asks.

  I nod. ‘I knew Robert would be angry. I had seen something, someone, he didn’t want me to see, found out something I wasn’t supposed to know.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘I’d seen fingertip man . . . where I was carrying out my operation. But I’d also met him in Cairo before we were flown out. He ate some of that Yugoslavia-shaped cake I told you about. He hadn’t lost the fingertip then.’ The fat man bursting into the room at Rustum Buildings while we were looking at the slides. Robert’s coolness with him. Had he – fingertip man – been a necessary but disliked ally? ‘Robert sent him to kill someone I worked with.’ I don’t say Naomi’s name.

  Dr Rosenstein studies me without a word.

  ‘And Robert did something else . . .’ I think of the burning Lysander, of the feathers floating down. ‘There was nobody else it could have been. Something that cost more lives. I really don’t think I’m mad at all, you know.’

  Dr Rosenstein leans forward over her desk. ‘Go on with your story, Maud.’

  ‘The next day I had another look in that suitcase under the spare bed,’ I say.

  Clever. Hide a key to a shallow desk drawer in a suitcase upstairs that itself could only be opened by finding a key in a different drawer of the same desk. Maud unlocked the suitcase, took out the photographs and desk key and packed it with her maternity clothes and those for the baby. She placed the case beside the front door, remembering that the toy rabbit was still inside her handbag, which sat on the console table by the door. It had taken her until this point in the afternoon, half past five, to make herself go through with it.

  Bring the desk key down to his study and unlock the drawer. It was raining, so he wouldn’t expect her to go and meet him. She unlocked the shallow drawer right underneath the desktop. Just big enough for a telegram to be stored.

  Confirm Ana part of group shot Maribor. Maud read the telegram twice, before returning it to its drawer and locking the desk again.

  The front door latch clicked. He was early – must have caught a bus to avoid the rain. Robert called out to her. He’d go into the garden, expecting her to be gathering the last of the beans, heedless of the weather, and then he’d look in the sitting room before going upstairs to their bedroom. He wouldn’t expect her to be here in his office, but wouldn’t be surprised: she sometimes came in to hunt for a stamp or envelope.

  Robert went upstairs. She heard the light tread of his pre-war handmade shoes on their bedroom carpet. He’d be removing his suit jacket, hanging it up. In another minute he’d come downstairs. Maud went to the bookcase and pulled out Robert’s atlas, opening it on the Balkans. When he’d taken her out to dinner last May, he had mentioned a village in southern Austria, not far from the Slovene border. Ana must have been repatriated, trudging along the road by the river Drau with the traitors, the sadists, the Fascists to Maribor, or Marburg, as this atlas still called it, on the same river Drau or Drava in northeast Slovenia.

  Robert came into the study. She knew she ought to have hidden the atlas but couldn’t bring herself to move. He stood in the doorway, looking at her. ‘Darling? I was worried that something had happened, that you’d gone into hospital.’

  She nodded at the atlas open on the desk. ‘You let me believe Ana was still alive. Why?’

  He sat on the edge of the desk. ‘You found the telegram?’ He took his tin of tobacco and a pack of cigarette papers out of his inside jacket pocket. Robert still preferred to roll his own. He took his time, removing one of the white papers and laying it out on the desk. ‘Why?’ she asked again.

  ‘When you went to Croatia in 1944, what you saw was just one piece of a puzzle.’

  Maud waited.

  ‘It wasn’t just about driving out the Germans, winning what we called “the” war. There were other wars we couldn’t lose.’

  ‘Other wars?’

  ‘Tito was pushing north. Was he going to keep on going through Slovenia into Austria? Grab some of the parts that had large Slovene populations for Yugoslavia? What territory might his friend Stalin claim next?’

  Maud was thinking of the way the mission had been derailed from the very first moment. ‘Your Chetnik contacts let you know they’d got Stimmer, an important military intelligence officer. You changed our drop site at the last minute so that I could pick him up. Stimmer knew you were secretly cooperating with the Chetniks. And thus the Germans.’

  Dangerous stuff when Churchill had severed links with the Chetnik leader, Mihailović. Explosive information when Stalin was still being wooed and was essential to victory. Stimmer liaised with Chetniks as part of his job in German intelligence. So very dangerous for Robert to have this secret known if it came out in an intelligence interview.

  ‘If Stimmer was sent to Cairo for interrogation, he might tell them that you were liaising with Chetniks, and thus the Germans. Fingertip man, your moustachioed plump colleague who likes cakes, was sent out just before us on some kind of secret operation. But the Partisans caught him and cut off his fingertip as a warning.’ She thought of Naomi. ‘Did he kill Naomi?’

  ‘Not himself,’ he said quietly.r />
  ‘But he was involved?’

  He bowed his head.

  ‘Fingertip man told the Ustaše she was sheltering in the doctor’s barn, didn’t he?’

  Silence.

  ‘Why did you have her killed?’ Her voice sounded tight, but controlled.

  ‘Naomi didn’t wait for new orders. She headed off towards Hungary by herself and stumbled into the wrong village at the wrong time and she saw the man you call fingertip man. Though he was still benefiting from an entire digit then.’ There was a note of amusement in his tone. It made her hate him briefly.

  ‘I saw fingertip man accosting you on the pavement near your office.’

  Robert looked startled. ‘You’re still sharp, very sharp.’ He couldn’t seem to help a little pride creeping into his voice. Well, he’d trained Maud into Amber, hadn’t he?

  ‘Couldn’t take the risk of Naomi surviving her mission to Hungary and telling someone that she’d seen a man who wasn’t supposed to be there.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘It was regrettable. Naomi was a fine agent.’

  ‘And Ana,’ Maud said. ‘Why couldn’t you save her?’ She thought of Ana’s younger son. ‘Did Miko know something?’

  ‘Miko wasn’t anyone who’d been involved in . . . my operation.’ She noticed how he’d slipped back into that indirect, passive way of describing events, as though they related to someone else.

  ‘But you couldn’t risk Ana telling the British or Americans in Austria what had happened in that little village where Naomi died.’

  ‘There was some uncertainty and some concern as to whom they might talk.’

  She pictured Ana, fearing she was going to be marched back to Yugoslavia, talking to British officers in the Austrian village, begging them to liaise with Robert and prevent her from being sent back to certain execution. Did she beg for Miko too? She imagined Ana growing increasingly desperate as her pleas went unanswered, her explanations of her war work with the Partisans ignored, her insistence that she was no Chetnik, scoffed at.