The French Promise

by Fiona McIntosh

  ‘But you didn’t,’ he finished for her.

  She shook her head sadly and fell back against the pillow, looking spent. ‘I never saw him again,’ she said, her voice suddenly monotone. ‘He wrote infrequently and spoke to me as a good friend might. He’d tell me things about his life but never talked about the future, never once discussed us, although he always hoped I was well and safe.’

  ‘Did you write back?’

  ‘Yes, once. I don’t think he ever wanted me to, though – I’m assuming it was painful for him; your father was such a tough leader of men and yet here,’ she pointed at Max’s heart, ‘he was a tragic romantic.’ Ilse sighed. ‘It’s what I loved most about him. I was a scientist, a realist. Your father probably deep down wanted to believe in the tooth fairy. That one letter I sent was taken for me by a friend from Berlin, who could get the letter to your father through Wehrmacht means. I pieced together that Markus was in Russia for the early years, then I heard a rumour that he’d defied Hitler and was cast into exile somewhere in Germany. I had no idea he’d been posted to Paris. Just two letters in six years, but they’ve sustained me. I always thought he’d come back into our life and be a proper father for you.’

  ‘You got news of his death in 1946?’

  She shook her head. ‘He wrote his last letter in 1944 and the letter was posted in 1945. It went to the Geneva flat – it was the only address that he knew and it became lost for a while. It found me finally in 1948. He’d been dead for four years and I didn’t know. But perhaps I felt it and perhaps my body reacted to it in some roundabout way.’

  Max knew she was referring to the cancer.

  ‘It’s uncanny how much alike you are to him,’ she continued in a sad voice. ‘Identical eyes of a blue whose colour I can’t quite pin down; a colour that seems to change with your mood. Wintry today, should I be worried?’ He shook his head, said nothing. ‘And this bright golden hair. He wore his short, precisely parted, always neat. I’m not sure he’d approve of your slightly longer version.’

  ‘I’m considered conservative,’ he assured.

  She touched his face. ‘And this face. It’s all Markus; so Nordic. You’d make a good Viking, Max.’ She grinned. ‘It’s why I never needed anyone but you, darling. Markus was always here through you. You’re every bit as handsome.’

  His mind was numbed from the revelation but he sighed for her benefit. ‘That’s what every mother says.’

  ‘No, really,’ she replied wearily, breathing more shallowly. ‘Kilian was the most stunning man I’ve ever known. Tall, broad, with that fine Prussian bearing. And you echo him in every way, not just looks. Most of all, Kilian was also a good man, Max. Never forget that. He was a man of duty and strong principles.’ She pointed to a thick cream envelope lying at the bottom of the box. ‘In this I’ve tried to record everything I remember about him. I didn’t know him for very long but I didn’t have to in order to know him well. We were inseparable during our time together. And he would have been very much in love with you. You’re named Maximilian because he told me if he ever had a son that’s what he’d call him.’ Her head turned towards the window again and she looked exhausted. Pain was roaring in; he knew the sign. ‘You’d better call Arne,’ she murmured.

  He summoned Klein and took his shoebox to his mother’s writing desk by the window. He stared at the large, bold handwriting on the front of the top envelope. It was posted from Scotland, of all places. On the back was a name – L Ravens – and an address somewhere in the Orkney Islands. He didn’t even know where those were. He’d have to look them up.

  Klein moved to his side and spoke softly. ‘I’ve given her some morphine tablets. They’ll take a few minutes but she’ll drift off soon enough. It’s close, Max. Will you stay with her?’

  Max nodded, numb. When the doctor had departed again, she opened her eyes and winced. Even this small gesture was taking its toll.

  ‘Read it to me, Max,’ she said, sounding breathless.

  ‘Read what?’

  ‘His last letter … let me fall asleep with your voice and your father’s words in my mind.’ Max dipped into the box.

  ‘Read Ravensburg’s later. Your father’s is below it,’ she slurred slightly.

  Right enough, he pulled out a small white envelope bearing Nazi insignia. There was a brown smear across it. And he knew instinctively that this was his father’s blood. He touched the stain and felt the dark ball of tension loosen fully in his belly; he was unravelling. He refused to cry but he felt so emotionally charged that he was sure every hair was standing on end as he unfolded the letter of several tissue-thin pages. His father’s handwriting contrasted with the Frenchman’s. It was neat and spare in stark black ink and initially dated 3 May 1944. Max sat on the bed and held his mother’s hand.

  ‘My dearest Ilse, it begins,’ he said.

  ‘It’s spring … Go on,’ she slurred, her head turned away from him, facing the wall.

  He smiled sadly. ‘It’s spring’, Max began for her, ‘and I find myself in Paris, in another pen-pushing role, but if I’m going to rot at a desk, I’d rather it be here in this most beautiful of cities than anywhere else.’

  He read to his mother about Kilian’s new position as a conduit between German High Command and the French church, about how living in the Hotel Raphael was decadent in the extreme, and how the French had adjusted to life under German occupation. Kilian shared his pain at the Nazi tolerance for easy brutality towards citizens – not just in Paris, though – and lamented the ugliness of the swastikas draped all over the city, especially upon the Eiffel Tower, amused that the first had blown away, so a smaller one had to be flown. ‘The French are quietly proud that even though the Führer conquered Paris, he never conquered la Tour Eiffel,’ Max continued, glancing at his mother, whose face now wore a soft smile as she lost herself in memories. She knew the letter by heart, it seemed, but it appeared she was enjoying the novelty of having it read to her.

  He returned to his father’s writing. Kilian spoke affectionately of the Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Louvre and how a lot of its paintings had disappeared. ‘There is a rumour that a farmer somewhere in France is sleeping with the Mona Lisa staring down on him,’ he read, and Max could hear his father’s glee at such a notion. ‘I wonder if I shall ever send this? he continued. ‘If it were intercepted, my detractors would certainly feel their misgivings were well guided! So much for the proud Kilian military lineage, ending abruptly on the end of a rope.’

  His father switched subjects with the date change. Even the ink on the page looked different and his writing was slightly smaller as though he were trying to cram more onto one page.

  ‘I’ve decided to take only one meal daily. Given that many French are starving, my conscience won’t allow me to indulge as so many of my colleagues do. Dare I say wealthy Parisians are having a wonderful war, unlike our boys at the Front who are being slaughtered in unimaginable numbers. Believe me when I say we will lose this war because of our aggression in the east and grandiose aspirations to crush Russia. Anyway, enough gloom. This evening I am off to a famous Parisian watering hole that has been and still is host to writers, painters, philosophers … and of course us Nazis.’

  Max could almost hear the distaste in his father’s mind as his hand wrote that last phrase.

  ‘Lex Deux Magots,’ his mother sighed aloud as he read the same words. He increased his grip on her hand as hers seemed to lessen and continued.

  ‘I’m meeting a banker. Walter Eichel is a gentleman and has a fine appreciation for music, art and literature; he’s also a sensible German who I suspect shares my views on the folly of our ways. I think I shall be in good company this cold evening for a cognac.’

  Max looked again at his mother. The letter was written over several weeks, it seemed. As that was the end of the second entry, he thought it a good place to pause. Her lids were half-closed now.

  ‘Don’t stop yet,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’ Her voice sounded fa
r away.

  Max moved on to the next entry, dated 16 May.

  ‘Something has happened, dearest Ilse. Something as unexpected as it is perhaps faintly ridiculous. Forgive me that I share it with you but I have no other friend, you see. I spoke of meeting Walter Eichel earlier this month and on that evening I also met his goddaughter, Lisette Forestier. Her father was German. We’ve struck up an unlikely companionship and she is like a refreshing summer breeze to blow out the cobwebs of my grumpy mind. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was enjoying her presence. She works at Eichel’s bank but I’m hoping to persuade her to work for me as she is fluent in German and French, which is precisely what I require if I’m going to do the trip around France to meet the clergy that I’ve promised to do since I took over this curious role. Lisette is twenty-five and far too pretty and fun to be spending her time with me. Nevertheless, she has rekindled a sense of hope and more so a joy that has been absent in my life since the start of the German insanity’. Max wished his mother hadn’t asked him to read on – she’d known this admission was coming and even he found it awkward and painful. He could only imagine how she had felt when reading it for the first time.

  ‘Mutti,’ he said, as gently as he could. He could see her eyelids remained half-open. ‘Shall I stop there for today?’ he murmured, reaching to touch her shoulder. A soft but shrill alarm had begun to sound at the back of his mind that his mother was too still. ‘Mutti?’ He pulled his mother’s shoulder towards him and slowly she rolled onto her back with a low sigh, her mouth slightly open, and eyes staring sightlessly.

  The grief that had been threatening since Dr Klein picked him up at the railway station wearing a sympathetic expression that said far more than any words could, finally arrived and clogged his throat … heavy and painful. He put his arms around his mother and held her close, allowing himself to cry now through the churning feelings of relief and gladness that her pain was over.

  She’d left him without saying goodbye to spare him that trial. His mother had known she would die today. Why else had she chosen this morning to show him the letters, make her admission … confess her secrets to him?

  He hugged her for an eternity, it felt, but finally the sound of a door slamming somewhere snapped him from his silent mourning. He laid his mother back onto the pillow gently, as though she slept and he was determined not to disturb her. Max took time to close her eyes, ensure the satin bow on her nightie was tied perfectly – as she would want – and straightened the Hermès scarf, which had slipped to one side on her head.

  The ghost of the soft half-smile that she’d worn moments before her death haunted him; but she’d died on her own terms with Markus Kilian in her mind and her son’s voice soothing her off. Under the circumstances it was a good death, he reassured himself. It was painless and peaceful in the loving home of her childhood and she had drifted into her longest sleep with the two men she loved most at her bedside. It didn’t matter to her, he realised, that one was a ghost.

  But it did to him. It mattered enormously that this ghost now shared his life, walked alongside him. Was that a gift or a curse?

  Max gathered up the envelopes from the box and slid them into his backpack. He would read them at length later. Making a final check that his mother was fit to be seen, he kissed her cheeks tenderly before he stepped outside and called down the stairway to where he could hear Klein murmuring to his grandparents in the reception hall.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said, when all three looked up, and was surprised his voice was so steady.

  CHAPTER NINE

  London, England

  Jane ducked out of Swan & Edgar and experienced the strange sensation of walking into night while knowing it was late afternoon; winter was closing in fast this year. Britishers accepted the inevitable chill with good cheer but this October, barely the middle of the month, it was already the kind of cold that could not only bite at exposed skin but made a solid effort at penetrating even the most determined woollens. Jane’s fingers, still burning from the slow thaw she’d achieved inside the department store, now protested at being thrust into the freeze again. She’d been fleetingly tempted to warm them up in the ladies’ bathroom with hot water – just for a few moments – but experience had taught her it was the fool’s path. Initially the warmth brought respite but galloping behind that momentary pleasure was pain.

  Bear up, she’d told herself; it was one of her mother’s favourite sayings in her days of lucidity. How long ago was that now? More than a decade, she realised, unaware that a bitter expression now matched her mood; she caught a snapshot of herself reflected in a shop window, blinking at it as fresh despair washed over her.

  Farmers were predicting a bitter winter and forecasters were suggesting a white Christmas was riding in with the reindeer. She shivered beneath her thick coat, tugged her scarf up higher to cover her mouth and heard her mother’s voice in her mind asking if she was wearing a vest.

  Jane smiled sadly within herself as she emerged onto the corner of Regent Street, as frantic as ever with swirling traffic and pedestrians on a mission. Rain as light as fairy dust kissed her face but Jane could only see its shimmering presence because it was backlit by the lights of the London streets she was mindlessly walking. She’d not needed anything in the store but her roaming had chewed through another twenty minutes, taking her closer to the moment when she knew she couldn’t linger any longer in town and must begin the trek home.

  Jane looked up into the black dome of night and wondered what she would face behind her front door: would it be the needy, gentle John or the hostile demon that had possessed him well before she’d met her husband and was only now showing its sinister teeth? Curiously, he behaved well – if distantly – for the housekeeper who’d been employed by his family to give Jane some time to herself. Even his brothers could see that she’d given up enough for her husband: her carefree spinsterhood, her independence, her bright career, even her dreams; she’d be damned if she’d give up her weekly jaunt into the city to visit her beloved museums and galleries. There were moments when her Friday in the city was all that kept her going … just moments, though. Mostly she had become resigned to this strange life of melancholy and was sure plenty of other women were coping silently with similar post-war trauma with their men.

  She lifted the collar on her coat, dipped her chin further into her scarf, dug her hands deeper into her pockets and skipped out into Piccadilly Circus, ablaze with its cheerful neon signs. Healthful … Delicious … Satisfying, Wrigley’s promised. ‘Healthful’? Was that even a word? She shook her head and wandered by Saqui & Lawrence, remembering happier times when John had courted her, tricked her into telling him which of the rings in this very window she liked most. He’d presented the dark sapphire and diamond engagement ring less than a month later, on his knees, with her laughing hysterically because the grass of the picnic field he’d brought her to was still dewy and she could see the wet patches forming as the damp soaked into his trousers. She’d accepted. Of course she had! She had loved him. She still did, despite her despair, but she felt that love in mainly a dutiful way now, and was still hoping to rescue them both from the war. The Player’s sign winked at her. She’d give anything for a cigarette right now but had given them up when they’d married. She wanted children and her sister-in-law was the one who’d warned her off smoking.

  Jane looked away from the vivid neon advertisements and wondered at which point in her toleration of John’s decline into his mood swings had she accepted that she would likely never be a mother. That was probably the most painful resignation of all – that children were arguably out of her reach now, as she had no intention of bringing a child into their uncomfortable and tense existence.

  She crossed the street, intent on getting to the bus stop. Although the queue was long, she was sure she would be able to clamber aboard the next bus to Battersea.

  People hurried past her. Dark moving shadows each focused on getting somewhere to someone who was waiting
for them: a wife with a meal she was keeping warm, a child impatient for a bedtime story, a friend queuing outside a theatre to see a film. Or a rendezvous at a pub, perhaps; even a lover in a hotel room hoping for a few stolen hours. Jane envied all those who were waiting for their friends and loved ones … but she especially envied her fellow pedestrians who had someone on the other end of their journey to welcome them.

  She had only her memories to cling to, and those were being increasingly usurped by the ghost who masqueraded as her husband.

  John loved her. He always had, since that day at the museum when she’d shared a coy smile across the expanse of The Toilet of Venus, which they’d both chosen the same moment to admire in the National Gallery. She could remember the richness of the crimson velvet drape of curtain, painted so exquisitely to contrast acutely with the smooth, pale skin of the goddess.

  ‘She looks so at ease with herself, don’t you think?’ Jane remembered remarking to the stranger standing nearby, only vaguely conscious of the nudity in the portrait.

  She’d liked the way he’d cocked his head and studied the portrait, not saying anything for a few long moments. ‘Why do you think that is?’

  Surprised, she’d smiled again; having expected him to make a roguish comment perhaps along the lines of pinching the goddess’s exquisite bottom. She hadn’t been ready for his more philosophical enquiry.

  Jane had shrugged. ‘Contentment, I suppose. My sister-in-law tells me she’d never felt as confident and sure of herself as the day she first held my nephew. Here’s Venus, totally at ease with her body, knowing she’s achieved the most amazing feat a woman can.’ She’d gestured at the infant who held the mirror to his mother. ‘Cupid, her son.’