The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  ‘If it had been left up to me I would simply have had Ana imprisoned for a while until things were quieter, persuaded her to keep her mouth shut for her own sake,’ Robert said. She noted that he was using the first person again now, as though finally letting himself admit his part in it all.

  ‘She’d rescued Allied servicemen, after all. But the logistics of extricating her and placing her somewhere safe proved too complicated.’

  Ana had trusted Maud so many times. When she’d begged the unit to take Stimmer into captivity. When she’d begged her to go after Naomi. Ana had risked the displeasure, perhaps even discipline of the Partisans. And above all, Ana had saved her from being burnt alive when the Lysander was blown up. Maud pictured her heading back in a line of broken combatants, elderly people and children towards the Slovene border, perhaps, expecting the shout, the tap on her shoulder, Not you, you can stay. Perhaps she had begged for Miko too.

  ‘Who else knows this?’ She spoke calmly, but the muscles tightened in her lower abdomen and she felt nauseous. ‘Apart from your fingertip colleague, who’s now back in London.’

  Robert said nothing.

  ‘Just you.’ She nodded. Something that was more than a muscle tightening but less than a pain made her sit up straighter. She wanted to place a hand on her abdomen, but Robert was watching her.

  ‘I didn’t mean you to find that telegram, Amber.’ She noted the use of that name.

  ‘You made a mistake? That’s not like you.’

  ‘Work has been distracting.’

  ‘Fingertip man has been harassing you, hasn’t he? Oh.’ She remembered something, something from a long time ago.

  He looked at her.

  ‘I was only fourteen or fifteen, but fingertip man came to the mine in Kosovo when we lived there, didn’t he?’ The memory sharpened. ‘And so did you.’

  Two men, but only one came inside. He ate three slice of Mama’s plum cake. The other man, slimmer, more active, stayed outside with Dad.

  Robert nodded.

  ‘That’s how you came to know about me.’

  Robert closed his eyes. ‘Maud’s father tells me proudly that she is skilled at canoeing and can hike for days at a time. She speaks Serbo-Croat and has a highly retentive memory.’ His face softened. ‘We wrote notes on your family, but it was the mine that concerned us most then, what might happen to it if the Germans invaded, what your father might do. But your family moved on and it was only later that we thought of you in regard to Balkan operations.’

  Maud breathed out slowly. ‘You made a mistake,’ she said, when the contraction had eased. ‘You should have destroyed the telegram. I would never have known for sure.’ Her voice sounded sad, but she was starting to find it hard to concentrate on her own words.

  ‘I forgot there was a spare key to that drawer in that old suitcase of Alice’s. It was her desk originally, you see, she lent it to me for my office in London because I didn’t like the one they gave me.’ He sounded distant. ‘But it’s reasonable to believe that you’ll do what is right, that you’ll understand that the future security of Europe was at stake.’

  Once again he was switching back into that distancing of himself from everything he’d done. Some of her contempt must have shown. ‘We couldn’t let it leak back to London or Moscow or Washington that we were still working with the Chetniks,’ he went on, sounding less detached.

  ‘And ultimately the Germans, in fact? Plotting with them to keep back the Communists?’

  He nodded.

  Maud stood up. The hand in her abdomen squeezed her hard. She clenched the desk.

  ‘Maud?’

  She couldn’t speak.

  ‘I know what’s happening. Your pains have started. And they’re coming more frequently, aren’t they?’ Robert sounded concerned. ‘It’s too early.’

  She forced herself to stand up straight, to ignore the pain. ‘You don’t get out of it that easily.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The words came out as gasps. She couldn’t say more now, had to let her body take over.

  Robert picked up the telephone receiver. ‘I’m calling James Holdern.’

  ‘He’s not my doctor.’

  ‘He’ll take care of things.’ Another pain grabbed Maud and she was unable to speak as Robert asked the operator for James’s number. Maud listened as he asked James to come round immediately, by car. ‘Surely you must see that we need to put this behind us now, Maud? For the sake of the child?’

  The contraction eased off. ‘You’re a traitor, Robert.’

  ‘I love my country,’ he said. ‘I love Europe. A free Europe. Look at what’s happening in the eastern European countries the Soviets have moved into: executions, torture, property requisitions. Just as I feared.’

  ‘You didn’t mind killing friends and allies for it. I can’t forget that.’ Tears pricked in her eyes because he was looking at her with such tenderness. ‘I wish I could, I really do.’

  As she looked at him, at that face of his, she longed not to have read the telegram, not to have recognised fingertip man on the pavement in St James’s. She walked towards the door. There was a telephone box down the road and her case was packed. ‘I’m sorry, Robert.’

  He looked at her very carefully. ‘You’re very dogged when you want to be, aren’t you?’

  ‘You always knew what I was like. You thought you were so good at manipulating me.’ She thought of her lapses of concentration in the early months of their marriage, of all the things she’d mislaid. Or had she?

  ‘You hid my things and cancelled appointments to make me doubt myself and feel insecure. Just in case I—’ Another contraction grabbed her. When it passed she saw that he had the tin of tobacco in his hand. He tipped out the tobacco onto the desk and pulled off the lid, which he threw onto the parquet floor. In a single swift and graceful move he bent and held the lid with one hand while he stamped it into a triangular shaped blade.

  She would have panicked if the contractions hadn’t started again. Surely the pains shouldn’t be coming this quickly so early? When it had passed she looked at the blade. Her horror must have shown in her face.

  ‘No, darling. You can’t think I’d harm you like that.’ Robert looked at his watch. ‘James will be here in five minutes. You won’t have to wait long. I hate to leave you in this condition.’ He sounded truly worried about her.

  Perhaps Robert had already made an emergency escape plan. Perhaps there were rail or aeroplane tickets. Or a car to drive him away.

  ‘I’m not running away.’ He could always read her mind. ‘There’s nowhere for me to go, that’s my problem.’

  He turned the blade so that it was pointing towards his own abdomen.

  ‘No.’ She hated him, what he’d done, but she couldn’t lose him, not now. Maud lumbered towards him, her labouring body seeming to lighten momentarily as she grabbed at his hand to stop him. The tobacco tin blade flashed as it cut through his shirt, instantly producing a crimson line. They fell together, landing on the rug. Robert landed on top of her. She felt his warm blood soaking into her dress. The blade had fallen, lying just a few inches from her hand. She picked it up. With her other hand she pushed her husband’s limp body off her.

  ‘I love you,’ he gasped.

  The next contraction took her. She rolled over onto all fours. James was standing over her. He must have had a front door key. Amber was noting the details as Maud struggled. He placed a hand on her back and said something.

  As the contraction passed she became aware of James running his hands over Robert, pulling up his shirt to examine the wounds, saying nothing to her. He picked up the receiver and asked the operator for a number. Another contraction rocked Maud. Liquid passed between her thighs, slightly bloodied: her waters.

  James asked for two ambulances. He opened up the brown leather bag he had brought with him and took out a syringe. ‘This will sting a bit but you won’t feel anything else afterwards, Maud. There’s a bed
in a clinic a few minutes’ drive from here. It will all be over soon.’

  ‘Robert . . .’

  ‘We need to be quick so he doesn’t bleed to death.’ He took her hand gently. ‘You’ll be fine, the baby’s coming early but not dangerously so. I’ll put pressure on Robert’s wounds. The police will understand, Maud. Your bag’s by the front door, I’ll make sure it goes with you.’

  The prick of a syringe in her upper arm.

  Then nothing.

  ‘I remember nothing after the injection,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein.

  ‘They must have used something called the twilight sleep on you, I believe it’s a mixture of morphine and amnesiac. You gave birth to your child without regaining full consciousness and without the event imprinting itself on your memory, though I suspect that it is still there, somewhere. When you woke up—’

  I take over. ‘I was in that first mental hospital.’ Drugged. Unable to remember anything, even that I had just become a mother. I was leaking milk and blood. I’d thought it was sweat and urine, but they’d bound me up so tightly I couldn’t feel much. They were kind, I recall now, and spoke to me gently. Perhaps even they had scruples about taking a newly delivered mother away from her infant. James Holdern had been there once or twice, too. I remember him sitting beside a policeman, shaking his head. Some kind of labour-induced psychosis . . . hormonal . . . Delusional. Dangerous to herself and others. Terribly sad about the baby, but we’ll look after him.

  17

  June 1947

  My memory has returned completely. My solicitor has been summoned. I’ve told him what I can of my wartime work and my suspicions of my husband’s treachery and his attempts to cover it up.

  Why did you never tell me about the baby? I asked my mother when I wrote to her.

  Dr Holdern told us it would upset you and precipitate another psychotic incident. Kinder to let you forget; at least until you were more stable and you could talk to Dr Rosenstein about it. But we obtained a copy of the birth certificate for your son, our grandson. His name is David.

  I burn at the loss of my son. I am surprised I do not sear through objects when I look at them. But the anger seems to ignite my memory. Dr Rosenstein cuts my drug doses again, but warns me that she will keep me on some of the tranquillising medicine until we know that the anger will not overwhelm me.

  ‘You are firing on all cylinders, old girl.’ Jim shakes his head admiringly when we’re out in the garden by the dovecot later and I tell him. ‘You’ll be out of this gaff before you know it. Your redemption is close.’

  ‘What about you?’ I ask, feeling a pang. I will miss Jim, my companion. ‘How’s it going with Dr Manners?’

  He sighs and shrugs. ‘Apparently I still say strange things. I know I think them. And dream them. They don’t like that . . . outside. Even though I’m not a threat to anyone, I’ll probably be a loon for the rest of my life.’

  ‘You’re not a loon, that’s a hateful word. You just don’t remember. That’s why you say things people don’t understand. Your memory’s still tied up in knots. When you unravel it properly, you’ll feel differently.’

  ‘You may be right.’ He looks doubtful, though. ‘But sometimes I wonder if we aren’t the only sane ones. You’d be insane to want to remember some of the things you and I saw.’

  I’ve never told Jim much about Yugoslavia. I know without telling him that he would understand the girl with a bloodied mouth slumping slowly over in her chair in front of a blackboard. A Lysander plane on fire, the men inside turned to shrieking live skeletons inside it. Downed pack ponies gazing puzzled at their own splaying innards. My back pushed down onto the rocky track and the sickly scent of a man’s hair oil in my face. But now these images remain in the past and will not bother me again.

  ‘What about those men who came to see you?’

  Jim looks at me as though he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  ‘Didn’t you have visitors?’ I put up the stepladder.

  He frowns. ‘Oh, them. They were nothing . . . just administrative.’

  ‘So you’re staying on here at Woodlands?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  Perhaps Jim will look after my doves when I have left? I will visit, of course. Or perhaps I could take them with me? I worry about the buzzard. I know, rationally, that my presence at Woodlands doesn’t mean that the doves are any safer from the buzzard, but my heart is telling me the opposite. I peer inside the dovecot and see what I was hoping I’d see.

  ‘They’ve hatched,’ I call softly to Jim. ‘Two chicks. Squabs, they’re called.’ I stand still, looking at them for a moment, and then climb quietly down.

  ‘You love those doves, don’t you?’ he says sorrowfully. ‘They’re the one thing about Woodlands you really do like.’

  ‘I like Ingrams and Dr Rosenstein,’ I tell him. ‘And I don’t know how I would have managed without you, Jim.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ He looks emotional. Perhaps I have been insensitive talking about my release. ‘I hope your doves will be safe, Maud. I hope the buzzard doesn’t get them.’ He wheels away, leaving me alone. Jim is still in limbo, knowing that remaining at Woodlands is the best he can expect for himself; fearing that the funds may not be available for him to stay and that he will be sent to somewhere less compassionate. I want to call him back. But something in the stiff set of his back tells me this is not the moment, that he needs to be alone.

  Dr Rosenstein and I have a further session a few days later.

  ‘Where is David now?’ I ask.

  ‘I am still finding out. Not with your husband, it would seem.’

  The baby would be about nine months old now. Still too difficult for a single father to bring up. Even with a nanny.

  ‘Did Robert have any family?’

  ‘No.’ He had told me that he was a single child, both parents dead. Then I have a revelation. ‘I think James Holdern’s wife has David.’ My dream about the woman stealing my pomegranate? That was Cecilia. Or possibly Alice, James’s sister who died in the Blitz before she could have a child herself. I tell Dr Rosenstein this. She raises her eyebrows. Perhaps it’s too fanciful. ‘Your solicitor will find out all the details about your son.’

  ‘David’s with the Holderns, I know it. Cecilia has a nanny for her own children – we met her coming out of the house just before we were married.’ Of course I will help, dearest Robert, I hear Cecilia say. What a tragedy. Poor little David. Poor Maud. Some women are too highly strung for childbirth.

  And having my boy would complete her family of girls and provide her husband with some kind of convoluted link to his dead sister. I muse on all this as I walk around the garden again. Another missile has landed on the grass by the wall. This time it’s a large stone, almost a rock in size. The boys have been in the lane again. Jim approaches.

  ‘Sorry about yesterday.’ He sounds calmer. ‘Don’t know what got into me. Must do more juggling: it helps me.’ He looks at the stone. ‘The local lads again? They seem to be stepping up their antics, don’t they?’ His expression is almost calculating, unlike his usual self. Perhaps there was once a more ruthless side to Jim, before it was stamped out of him by those days and nights in the lifeboat watching the children die. ‘Do you think they know where the doves are and are trying to hit them?’

  The dovecot is set up away from the wall, but not so far that a missile couldn’t strike it. Of course, the boys don’t even know it’s here so it would only be by pure fluke that they might manage to hit it. But even so.

  ‘Have you thought about how much you’ll miss the doves when you leave, Maud? Really?’ Jim sounds sad for me. ‘I mean, you can leave, of course, and try and get hold of your son, but there’s no guarantee, is there? At least here you have the doves. And Ingrams and Dr Rosenstein. And me.’ He comes closer and I see his face is like a mask trying to restrain the emotion inside him. ‘We care about you. You know you’re safe here, don’t you?’

  I step back. ‘Of course.’ H
is visitors have upset him; I’ve never seen him so unsettled. I’m surprised Dr Manners let them trouble him like this. ‘It’s all right, Jim,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll be safe outside Woodlands. And I’ll come and visit you. You’ll be juggling at least five balls by then.’

  ‘Oh Maud, old thing.’ He shakes his head, looking more like the old Jim. ‘Don’t listen to me. Of course you want to get out of here. Why shouldn’t you fly away like your precious birds? They shouldn’t . . .’ He breaks off, looking confused.

  ‘Who shouldn’t do what?’

  ‘They shouldn’t make it so hard on us,’ he says, sounding almost tearful. ‘That’s what I meant.’ He looks at his watch, which is probably showing the wrong time as he doesn’t always remember to wind it up. ‘I need to go, Maud.’ He walks over to one of the nurses who are always around when we’re outside and asks her to take him inside.

  I wonder what this thing is he needs to do. Ten minutes later, when I come inside with Ingrams, I see him emerge from the ground floor cubicle that houses the telephone. Although it’s for patient use, I have never made a call: it’s a complicated business involving forms signed by our doctors and by the director himself. Perhaps Jim’s financial problems are so serious that permission has been granted for him to call his solicitor or bank manager or whoever acts as his de facto guardian. His parents? Or maybe his recent visitors have requested he call them.

  I’m wearing rubber-soled shoes and Jim doesn’t hear me. I watch him shuffle towards the staircase, where another nurse waits for him. His shoulders are slumped, defeated.

  ‘Come along,’ Ingrams says. ‘Let’s sort out that dose for you, Maud.’ They’re reducing my medication every other day now and it won’t be long before I don’t take anything at all. I’m impatient, wanting to stop the drugs immediately, but Dr Rosenstein, though sympathetic and encouraging, is still keen to do it more gradually, in case the process proves difficult.