The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t come sooner. Wretched FO, keeping you there, heartless I say, but there you go.’ There was a single worry-line on her mother’s brow. She didn’t extend her arms or lean her face forward for a hug or kiss. Honey went to her anyway and her mother accepted the hug and put her thin fingers into Honey’s wild hair. The gesture made her feel young and weak. She looked for somewhere to sit.

  It was then that she saw her stepfather was in the room too. Henry Deschamps, ever in the shadows, always discreet, sat on the bed beyond a set of open double parlour doors. The outlines of his face were blended into a mist of cigar smoke. Honey couldn’t be certain but she thought there was a dark look on his brow. He hadn’t yet stood to greet her, although he did now.

  ‘How did you get here?’ His bulky body clasped her behind layers of suit and waistcoat fabric and watch chains, and he smelled the way he always did, of a myriad of different types of soap, one for the ears, one for shaving, one for the face, one for the body. ‘If a factory man,’ he used to say, ‘won’t trial his own products, what faith can he expect merchants to put in him?’ This was Henry; practical and good as his word. Up close, Honey saw the blood threads in his wet eyes, as she had noticed her mother’s marble-dry face.

  ‘It was bound to happen,’ said Martha from the couch. Honey’s ears were still muffled by her stepfather’s arms but she heard. ‘I’m sorry if you think I’m callous but I can’t even cry. That boy went about recklessly, saying things, doing things, not caring—’

  Honey pulled away from Henry. ‘How are you, ’on?’ That was what he called her, ‘Hon’, but without the H, as if she was French. He had been born in Dijon and there were still little affectations he liked to play with. And it was, after all, just a different diminutive of her real name. ‘You’re not just some little Honey,’ he used to say to her when she was at school, and then at university. ‘Remember your real name.’

  ‘I don’t know how I am,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

  Over on the chaise her mother threw her head back and swallowed heavily.

  ‘I’ve cancelled her concerts,’ Henry said.

  ‘I am here. I can hear you.’ Her mother sounded very far away, like she was in the corner of the room instead of just in front of them. It took a while for Honey to notice that faint music was playing on a wiry gramophone; a scratched and worn record, a tiny baroque voice, Monteverdi or Bach.

  ‘I keep trying to tell myself that there are other mothers. Mrs Harvey, you know, that woman who charred for next door, who sometimes helped cook at our parties, she lost a son. Bunty Niven, she’s volunteering as an Air Raid Warden, do you remember Bunty, she used to give you tangerines at Christmas? She lost one of hers last year, the middle one I think, Percy. Percy the Pilot, he had terrible acne, like a seed cake he was, we all said he’d never get a girlfriend, and then once the uniform was on he was peeling them off like leeches.’ She paused and looked at her muscled hands. ‘But it’s not the same, is it? And then sometimes it is.’

  She looked up again and her gaze roamed idly about the room. Sometimes she studied Honey, but not her face: just her clothing and her cork shoes. ‘You know, you’re very lucky being a girl. The number of girls who will die in this war—’

  There was a silence; the last vestiges of niceties died away.

  ‘Shall I ring for some tea?’ Henry asked.

  Honey unclipped the latch of the gas mask box. ‘The thing is,’ she said, then stopped cowardly as she saw them watching her. ‘The thing is, there’s something I have to ask you.’

  ‘Not now, please, my girl, not now.’

  ‘Yes, now.’ She met her mother’s eyes and there was an understanding there – that the air was liable to turn unpleasant.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Martha said.

  ‘A friend drove.’

  ‘Your feet look filthy. Did they make you pedal the car yourself?’

  Honey shook her head, not as an answer, just at the criticism. She thought of Felix’s finger, that he said had blown off touching an incendiary, climbing across rubble to reach his mother. A grasping for something she wanted to feel but didn’t clawed deep in her. She got up and looked out of the window at the brown sea with its wet sandbags and concrete barricades. She felt Henry’s eyes on her back.

  ‘You have to tell me,’ she said to her mother. ‘You have to tell me about Ivan Korichnev.’

  There was a pause. Then her mother laughed – just briefly, a roguish, uncharacteristic tinkling. ‘I beg your pardon.’

  Honey turned suddenly and the anger in her flashed. ‘Every time, every time I asked, until I grew ashamed of asking. But you could never stop Dickie telling me the truth. You can never stop the truth from growing and spreading because it will always be there, waiting to get free.’

  ‘And so will a lie.’ Martha used the full power of her mezzo-soprano voice. The fork on the cake stand trembled. Silence spun out between them; in the time it took Honey to speak a spider could have crawled along a thread from one to the other.

  ‘You always denied it. But he’s alive and he wants to know us. Dickie knew it. Dickie knew he would come looking. And now . . . so do I.’

  ‘I think . . .’ Henry stood up, pulling at the knees of his trousers ‘. . . I should like to go for a walk.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, where?’ sang Martha. ‘Along the fine promenade of the seafront? Up where the soldiers take their mistresses? Or where the Home Guard are doing rifle practices? Good luck and—’

  Henry cut her off. ‘Don’t lose both your children in one week.’

  Martha glared at him until her eyes boiled. ‘Go.’

  Honey waited until Henry had finished tucking himself into his waxed coat and collecting various things to put in his pockets, until he had very quietly clicked closed the door, before she retreated from the window to the couch on the other side of her mother’s coffee table. With a shaking hand Martha reached for her cigarettes and her lighter, picked one out and sparked it up. She took a long dignified draw. ‘Dickie told all sorts of stories when he was young. We never paid him much attention. Children say things. Little girls pretend they’re abandoned princesses. Little boys . . .’

  ‘Pretend they have a father. Stories come from somewhere.’

  ‘Books, fairytales, operas. Ballet.’ Martha sat up fully, pulling a paisley cashmere shawl from the arm of the couch and draping it about her as if she were suddenly cold or shy. ‘Secrets are given to children on a need-to-know basis.’ She smoked her cigarette.

  With her own hand trembling, Honey unclipped the gas mask box and prised open the lid. She took from it the bitten fur, the bound loot.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. But first, what happened to Ivan Korichnev?’

  ‘Honey, you know what happened, I’ve never lied to you. He never existed.’

  ‘He must have done.’

  ‘It’s a fairy story.’

  ‘So I’m a fairy story, am I? Dickie, your son, is a fairy story?’

  ‘Dickie wanted to believe he was Russian because he was in love with Russia. Obsessed with the damned country. He was just like those fools, those fools who think that communism will save their souls. It was that ballet mistress of his, filling his head with nonsense, making him . . . Boys develop crushes in strange ways. Dickie’s wasn’t with a woman or a man. It was with a country. It was a child’s story, Honey.’

  ‘Dickie said,’ began Honey, ‘that Ivan fled to Russia, that he joined the revolution. He was a composer and later he became custodian at one of the palaces.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He showed me newspaper clippings. With his name in them.’

  ‘And how would he have fled to Russia? You tell me. You think the Bolsheviks let anyone in? You know nothing. Did you know that Stravinsky – Dickie’s beloved Stravinsky – hasn’t even returned to Russia? He’s in America. Your father never knew him, by the way.’

  Martha took a moment to swallow. She leaned ba
ck in her chair, far enough to see through the window. ‘Your father was half-German, half-Scottish. He died of the Spanish influenza just before you were born.’

  ‘Lies!’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Cap—’ She stopped herself. ‘I heard, I heard from someone at the Foreign Office, someone who does our security checks, that he died in a brawl. Dickie said he escaped to Russia. You tell me he died of the flu – who am I to believe?’

  ‘Why do you care, Honey? You have a father. You have Henry. What has he ever done for you that hasn’t been good enough?’

  Martha leaned suddenly forward and grabbed her daughter’s hand with three punishing fingers. Honey could feel the pressure of the rings her mother wore, cold on her pulse. The world had not stopped swimming for two days and nights, since the hour the policemen had found her, but now the waves were high. She was on a fairground horse, a runaway carousel, and she felt sick.

  ‘I need to know who I am because I need to know what I am fighting for.’

  Martha’s hand snapped back. ‘You are fighting because you believe in good. You are fighting to end torture and murder. You are not your blood, Honey. You are not your country. You are you.’

  ‘Then where is the harm in telling me the truth?’

  Martha waited. Honey, her head bent, heard the breath rise and fall in her mother’s lungs. ‘Look at me,’ Martha said. ‘I am telling you the truth.’

  Honey lifted her head.

  ‘He was called Ian, not Ivan. Ian Kurtz. Ivan was an affectation. It was what I called him. You know the way I sometimes say “Honora” or “Deechie”, it was just a silly nickname because I didn’t like his name. But I suppose Dickie’s story has to have its roots somewhere.’

  ‘What about Korichnev?’

  ‘Madame Korichnev? The ballet mistress, don’t you remember? With her hair scraped back and her red lipstick and cane?’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes. He died just before you were born. It was the tail end of the Great War. We’d been back from France for a year but it took some time for them to catch up to him.’

  ‘Who are they? What do you mean, catch up?’ The echoes of Dickie’s story rang in her mind. He had been on the run from someone. Two men, he’d said. She waited. Her mother paused.

  ‘I’m not really surprised the FO didn’t want you to know this.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Honey felt her voice growing tight. She looked into her mother’s eyes and saw a flash of panic. She could taste the truth now, she could smell it coming.

  Martha’s voice was quick and level. ‘Look, the government was rounding up anyone with a German name, they had been since the start of the war. They called them Enemy Aliens. They sent them to internment camps.’

  Honey felt her hand, as if it wasn’t hers, rising to her mouth in horror.

  Martha went on. ‘He did die of Spanish flu or pneumonia, I don’t know which and the inquest wouldn’t say. There was nothing I or anyone could have done for him.’

  ‘Camps?’

  ‘Internment camps, they called them. They’re doing it again, this time around.’

  ‘Yes, I know. The Germans, the Italians.’ There had been a ship, a couple of years back, a ship that had been torpedoed and sunk, carrying, what had they called them? Yes, ‘Enemy Aliens’, they had called them. ‘Internees.’ The newspapers said they were all the same – dangerous, fifth columnists, people feeding information back to their families in other countries, spies. Hundreds had drowned being deported across the sea to Canada. It was for British safety, the government had said. ‘Collar the lot!’ Churchill had cried, before they set sail. She couldn’t remember the name of the ship.

  ‘He was a spy?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Good God,’ her mother said, and for a second there was laughter in her voice. But when she saw Honey’s eyes her own turned with sorrow. ‘Spies no, these men aren’t spies, they are ordinary men. Ordinary men, born where they were born, now living in Britain with the wrong name. Even second-generation Germans were rounded up, people who didn’t know they had German ancestry until the knock on the door came, rounded up, taken away to be incarcerated for the war’s duration. Spies . . . No, Honey, your father was not a spy. He was a pianist. A hotel pianist with a German father.’

  A hotel pianist. Just like Tiver had said.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me? Why did it take me to want to hurl myself from a window until you’d tell me something, anything, about my father? Why am I twenty-four years old and only hearing this now?’

  Martha mashed her cigarette in a nearby cup, so hard it rattled the table. ‘You don’t talk about the death of your first husband. You don’t talk about your first husband getting arrested and bundled into an Enemy Alien camp because he had the wrong nationality. You don’t talk about him catching pneumonia and dying a cold little death in a filthy prison. The shame they bring on men, the shame. There, you want to know who your father was? The lover of Martha Deschamps, the opera singer? He died a shivering, wronged man a month before his daughter was born.’

  When Honey looked up, Martha was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked a little like the Madonna from the truck, the blue and white paisley shawl slumped over her shoulders, a caricature of piety. She had been worried about the shame then, had she? And yet at that moment it was not her father of whom Honey felt ashamed. To lie to your children, to abandon a person not for what they had done, but for what had been done to them . . .

  ‘On my birth certificate, it doesn’t say the name Kurtz, it says Kitts, doesn’t it?’

  Martha nodded. ‘We were still at war. Having a German name was enough to be made a pariah. Those camps? Dickie, wanting to be what he is, growing up with . . .? Look what’s happening now, again. I didn’t want you – I didn’t want us – to have a German name. I destroyed that part of you.’

  Her mother opened her mouth, took a small suck of air in, and, as if the sigh had been interrupted, let it out. She shook her head lightly. ‘You don’t understand this country. Look around and see how some people treat the refugees now . . . They put the refugees in camps too, it didn’t matter. Neighbour, migrant, if you had German ancestry that was that. You were looked on with suspicion. The war might have ended, but the feeling dragged on. It dragged on, Honey, and I did what I did to protect you. Do you think you’d be working for the Foreign Office with that name? Do you think you’d be treated the same? Dickie, he’d have been incarcerated, he could have been put on one of those sinking ships.’ She shook her head.

  Honey picked up one edge of the black fur and lifted it. The amber panels tumbled out. With shaking hands she grasped the main panel with the metal mechanism. Finally she removed from the case the tiny muffled shape of the firebird, and peeled it from its furry skin. ‘Then explain these.’

  She shifted the cake plate with her arm, dropped the furs onto the floor and placed the amber pieces out on the table. Next to the yellow and blue icing of the stale fancies the resin looked gothic and rich; its carvings, its bubbles, its scars, veins and its peculiar smell.

  ‘What are they?’ Martha reached forward and picked up one of the panels. She held it up to the light, wincing as if it pained her to focus. ‘They’re carved.’

  Honey found herself fighting disappointment. She didn’t know what she had hoped for; rage perhaps, rage would have ignited her hope that everything Martha had just told her was a lie. But there was none. Martha turned the piece around, staring at it from different angles.

  ‘Do you remember the code book Dickie had?’

  She looked at Honey sharply and her eyes shot wide. ‘You think Dickie made these?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She thought she had said it with intention but her mother looked blank. Honey asked, ‘Where did Dickie get that book, that book of ciphers?’

  ‘Oh, Figley’s . . . whatever it was. I think he found it somewhere, in a Barnardo’s bazaar or a church fete. Yes, it was a Barnardo�
�s bazaar because – well, I don’t remember. But it was.’ After a moment she brought the amber piece close to her nose. ‘What do these smell of? They smell of something.’

  ‘Amber.’

  ‘Amber base notes, but they’re too sweet for pure amber. Soir de Paris, that’s it. Golly, whichever boy made these for you has it bad.’

  Honey’s voice was quiet. ‘You think they were made by a boy.’ It had been Moira’s first reaction too, even before she knew what was inside the parcels; that little smile of hers in the hut. Only boys send extravagant gifts, only frivolous boys, not long-lost family.

  ‘I thought. . . I thought Ivan was sending them to me from Russia. He’d smuggled them out from the Amber Room, and was sending them. They came in packages postmarked Leningrad. I thought he was there, in Russia, now, smuggling them to me. If it’s not him, who else can they be from?’

  Her mother looked at her for the first time with pity, her mouth straight and even, her eyes downturned, the same pity she had shown Honey that time when she locked herself in the bathroom. Was pity what it took to bore through Martha Deschamps’ ice? She was not capable of affection, but her love sneaked through in extravagant gestures, in songs she sang on stage, and in pity.

  ‘The carvings on the side come from an old hand cipher, one that I think was in Dickie’s book.’

  The walls of Honey’s belief – a belief constructed from snippets of information she had gleaned through her childhood and built into the secure walls of a room – began to dissolve. She saw empty black craters beyond them. And then it dawned on her. Everything she knew about herself, about her father, she had learned from Dickie. Everything went back to Dickie.