The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

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The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 10

by Neal Ascherson


  ‘Me? I am in no danger.’

  ‘Ach, Mike! It’s not bombs and that. It’s what’s going on inside of you. I never knew, and I don’t know now. Do you know it yourself? All the time we were together, you never asked me what I felt about you, and I was feared of putting questions. You were that charming, aye, and sensitive – I could tell you things I never thought I could tell a man. But then I would think: there’s a door closed here. He’s away taking a walk, he’s daundering through life, and I’m just an interesting piece of scenery. You’re a sarcastic man, Mike. Everyone’s just a bit of a joke to you, right?’

  ‘So what did you feel about me?’

  ‘Trust a man to miss the point! It’s you we’re talking about, you. What’s it you care about? Get a grip, Mike, or the wind will blow you away like my hat.’

  When we reached the Bay Hotel, Helen took the cap off to give me a sharp kiss. Her cheek was cold. She gave me a long, critical look, not smiling. I thought that if I were a pilot I would feel safer with this young woman beside me, her small blue eyes fixed on the altimeter and the airspeed dial. Then she walked off down the slope to the station. I could see the Canadian officer standing outside the station gate, glancing at his wristwatch and then at passers-by. Before he found her, I turned away.

  10

  I made my way to Mathie Crescent, where the ‘nice daughter’ fried egg and chips for me and my Polish fellow lodger. She had black curly hair and seemed shy. Her mother stood in the kitchen watching us while we ate. After a few minutes, she remarked that Mary-Margaret was engaged to a fine young man in the bank where she worked as a clerkess. ‘Liam lives a clean life; he’s one of us. This is a Catholic house. You being Polish, you’ll feel at home here.’

  I glanced at the shelf sagging under a procession of devotional china, the swags of beads casting their shadow on the wall, the crucifix over the hearth, the portrait of the Holy Father smiling thinly through his spectacles. ‘Why do they exaggerate so?’ muttered the sergeant, in our own language. ‘It’s like being in a pilgrimage shop at Góra Kalwaria.’ We sniggered together, as if we were schoolboys.

  Mary-Margaret took our empty plates. She said, apparently to her mother: ‘Now that Liam’s getting called up, I’ll not see him for ever so long.’ She turned slightly pink. The sergeant sighed.

  It was warm in the kitchen that night. The range, damped down under a shovelful of slack, made feathery sounds and the wind tapped against the blackout board on the window. I was comfortable in my narrow bed, but for the first hours I could not sleep.

  I had let Helen off so easily. Sentences I hadn’t spoken paraded past me. I wanted to have told her that she was the first truly immoral, totally egotistic person I had ever met. Paris whores, Kraków con men, all had some grimy loyalty to someone, to something. But you, Helen... you are like a damned Russian Bolshevik: you don’t live by any fixed standards at all. You respect nothing. You think: today I will have this country and no more that country, I will have this man and no more that yesterday man. A child? I will wave at her from my aeroplane. Bye-bye, look at me, see how your clever mama can fly away.

  I cursed her. In the dimness, I could make out the outstretched arms of the crucifix on the wall, the sombre rosary festoons beside it. Last night, in the glare of the electric light hanging from the ceiling, they had seemed risible. Now their vague shapes seemed grave and familiar, childhood anchors which I had cast loose so long ago.

  They had no power over me; I would never be a believer again. But suddenly, half asleep, I desired Helen to be here in this kitchen with me. I would force her to look at these things! With one hand, I would hold her arms behind her back; with the other I would cruelly grip the nape of her neck and twist her face towards that wall.

  She must not say a word. Minutes would pass. Then I would feel her slacken in my grasp, and I would say: ‘You see? This was here centuries before you were born, watching over a million families whose children can imagine other lives but put a common good before their own fancies. It will be here centuries after you are dead. Something outside has to tell you how to live; you aren’t meant to make up your own rules. Submit! Learn how to respect!’

  Now I was fully awake. I pushed back the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed, finding that I was damp with sweat. My fantasy disgusted me. In the Bay Hotel, Helen would be sleeping tranquilly beside her Craig, embarkation order and identity papers clipped together on the bedside table, uniform hanging clean and newly pressed in the cupboard. Soon the alarm clock would ring, and she would set off into another complicated, well-organised day. How could I say that her life was lawless? Whose rule did I observe in mine?

  *

  I trudged back to Union Street in bright May sunshine. The French headquarters was on my way, now flying a Cross of Lorraine as well as the tricolour, but I didn’t feel like calling on Commandant le Gallois. All I wanted to do was shoulder a bag with Johnston’s belongings and hurry back through to my own people, to easy companions and petty routines.

  The stove in the company office would be hot, there would be the rhythmic tramp of men marching back from morning drill. The phone would ring to announce some tiny crisis. We had a joke that it would always be an anxious voice saying: ‘o sprawie tych koców – about those blankets...’ I would go to see the adjutant and begin: ‘About those blankets... is it true the Brits are going to give us a real tank for training?’ We would both laugh. Meaningless and unfunny when remembered afterwards, but these things dropped a sweetness into military life, a sugar lump in a bitter mug.

  Mrs M had cleaned her uniform and was waiting to go back to her Red Cross post. In the hall beside her there was a brown suitcase. ‘There was a label with Johnston’s name on. I snipped that off, no bother.’

  I lifted the case to try its weight, and at that moment heard someone coming up the steps from the street. We looked at one another. The bell jangled. Mrs M took the case out of my grasp and swiftly stowed it in a cupboard under the stair.

  ‘My word!’ said Eric. ‘Just the chap I needed to talk to. Great day for the race, isn’t it. Can we all sit down somewhere?’

  ‘Why, Eric, how are you keeping? I was beginning to think we had lost you.’ She spoke brightly, but Eric ignored her. He was watching me and nodding. His old air of vagueness had gone. I noticed that he was carrying a briefcase, and had grown a small, ugly moustache.

  We went into the kitchen and sat down. Mrs M did not offer to make tea. Eric pulled an army foolscap jotter out of his briefcase and spread it on the table.

  ‘I’m afraid this is not a friendly visit. Not a chat. Nobody is to leave this house until you have answered my questions. There is a police car outside. So let’s get started.’

  He turned to me. ‘I’ll begin with you, Major. Mrs Melville, I want you to leave the room until I call you back. No phoning. Thank you.’

  Eric pulled a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles out of his breast pocket and put them on. They changed his face. He looked unexpectedly wise.

  ‘Now, Major, we know that you have been in contact with two German prisoners. Wuttke and Nuttgen. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I took part in their interrogation.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s not quite true, is it? The second man you spoke to wasn’t Nuttgen. And I think you knew it wasn’t. You see, Lieutenant Nuttgen has turned out to be a most cooperative bloke. He hates Wuttke. In fact, he hates the Nazis. But very patriotic, doesn’t want to be disloyal to Germany. That’s why he tried to escape – to get home, but also to get away from the SS crew he was locked up with. He’s a pious type. Belonged to some Catholic youth group in the Rhineland which didn’t approve of Hitler. Anyway, he has agreed to help us. He tells us what the other prisoners are up to in the camp at Abercultie.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Wuttke suspects something. That’s why we had him in a punishment cell for a bit. He threatened Nuttgen with some sort of Nazi honour court. But of course that’s not all Nuttgen has been telling us. W
e know a bit about how he escaped from that truck, and the deserter they picked up on the road. And I am ninety per cent sure I know who that was.’

  Eric paused. ‘Now look, Major. The fact is that officially there’s nothing I can do to you. You are not under our jurisdiction, and it will be up to the Polish army to deal with you. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes when that happens. But they don’t have to find out. If you help me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want you to help me with Nuttgen. Major, can’t you see that Wuttke is getting ready to prang our whole eavesdrop operation in the camp? What I need, fast, is evidence hard enough to put him away in a proper jail – and keep our source in place. And you will be present, Major, when we try to get that evidence out of Nuttgen. You have to testify in front of him that you never saw him before. You have to confirm that Wuttke – and you – both knew that the man you talked to in the police station in Kirkcaldy was somebody else.’

  He wagged a finger at me, shook his head very slowly. ‘My word, Major, I really do wonder who that man was. Don’t you? Old chap, it would be such a help if you really told us everything you know about Johnston Melville.’

  I thought fast, but could see no way through this. ‘I could arrange to be at Abercultie when you are there. As an Allied intelligence officer.’

  ‘So far, so good. Where is Johnston Melville?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you really going to stick to that? Does Mrs Melville know where he is?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  Eric, I noticed, had written nothing in his big exercise book. Now he took out a pencil and tested its point on his finger. He rose and walked over to open the kitchen door. ‘Mrs Melville?’ I noticed what a small, frail man he was. Maybe I could find somebody to kill him.

  Mabel Melville came in and sat down on a wooden chair, across the table from Eric.

  ‘Where is Johnston?’

  ‘I really can’t say. I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, at least you aren’t pretending he’s dead. That’s a start.’ He wrote something down, then leaned back.

  ‘Now listen to me very carefully. I want you to understand just what a mess you have got yourself into. When we arrest your son, we are going to charge him with treason. Not just with desertion, but with assisting the enemy in time of war. And possibly with sabotage as well. Is that clear to you so far?’

  Mrs M looked levelly back at him. She kept silent.

  ‘Your own situation isn’t much better. I could take you down to the police station this minute and have you charged with conspiring to conceal a deserter, with deliberately obstructing the police and security in the exercise of their duties. We would make an example of you. It will be in all the papers – we can see to that. The prison sentence for that offence in wartime would be a long one.’

  I said: ‘Are we in Nazi Germany? All this lady did was natural, not a crime. She was a mother, she helped her son. She is a good woman, who works for others in the Red Cross, who has bombed-out families in her house. And what would happen to her grandchild, to Jackie?’

  ‘Ah, Jackie. I was coming to her. It’s a pity that none of you spared a thought for that child, when you started lying and deceiving. Her father, assuming now that he’s alive and not dead, has abandoned her. So did her mother, although she lost her life running away. Scarcely what decent people would call a loving family.’

  I saw Mabel Melville lick her dry lips. She said with difficulty: ‘Go on. Go on with what you are going to say.’

  ‘Well, Jackie won’t be left on her own. Of course not. She will be taken into care and sent to an orphanage, or a home for children from criminal families in the slums. The Quarrier Homes at Kilmacolm take in orphans, though they’ll be pretty full just now after the big raids. But the best solution is Australia. Yes, the Aussies are taking hundreds of children shipped out from bad homes. They get put out to foster families. Change their names, get a new life down there. Yes, in my judgement Australia is where Jackie will probably end up.’

  ‘No,’ I was saying. ‘Mabel, no!’ I was gripping her shoulders, pushing her back into her chair. Eric watched calmly, as if he had been through scenes like this before. Mrs M let out a long, harsh breath and became still again.

  ‘Now then. Let’s be clear, Mrs Melville. None of these things has to happen. It’s entirely up to you. And I’ll let you into a little secret: I haven’t told my colleagues, my bosses, about this case. Not yet. Well, they know the rough outlines – tracking down a deserter – but not the names or the places. If they knew just how big it’s getting, all the juicy details like a Polish involvement, then they would barge in and take it off me. But I’m rather an ambitious type. I’ll only put them in the picture when I have everything wrapped up – in a parcel with my name on it.’

  ‘Why did you tell us that? Something we didn’t have to know?’

  ‘Well spotted, Major. But then you are a sort of intelligence officer yourself, aren’t you? You see, I want you to trust me, so I am taking a little risk and showing I trust you. All I need from Mrs Melville is where to find her son. Then we can forget this chat. No prison, no headlines in newspapers, and Jackie goes on living with her granny in Union Street.’

  ‘But she doesn’t know where Johnston is. She told you.’

  ‘Then perhaps you can help her. I’m not making any suggestions about what you may know, Major. I’m just floating a thought.’

  ‘I will come with you to the camp – yes. But about Johnston, Mrs Melville and I will have to talk. Can you give us time for that?’

  ‘No rush, Major. A day or so. But no more. As for Abercultie, I have arranged to be there tomorrow afternoon. Is that convenient?’

  Mrs M rose from her chair and went slowly towards the door. She was pressing a handkerchief to her mouth. Eric made no move to stop her, but called out: ‘My men will search the house now, Mrs Melville. I’ll want you to be present, and show us Johnston’s room.’

  I said: ‘I must return to duty. You know where our unit is. Pick me up there tomorrow.’

  ‘Righty-o, Major. That’s the ticket.’ He slid his notes into the briefcase and went out into the hall. The two policemen came in, nodding awkwardly to Mrs Melville. She and I exchanged a glance before they all went upstairs together. When they had gone, I took the suitcase out of the stair cupboard and stepped quietly out into the street. The police car was empty — no driver to notice what I was carrying. Only the big white tom cat, the one who was supposed to kill dogs, glared at me from a wall and bristled its dirty fur.

  *

  Next day Eric’s car, an old blue Rover, was parked in a corner of the parade ground. As we walked over to it, I said: ‘I heard you asking for me in the Orderly Room. How did you learn to pronounce my name? You are the first Englishman who could.’

  ‘Well, I speak German. Some of the same funny noises. I hope you have enough German for today’s job.’

  ‘I can understand. Speaking is not so good. You have my name, but you never told us yours.’

  ‘Kent, as in the county. Eric Kent.’ We drove north towards Perth. The roads were narrow, often blocked by crawling convoys of army lorries. It was spring, and on the slopes there were whin bushes in golden flower. Lochs and ancient castles, green mountains hunched over sparkling rivers, peaks silver with snow along the horizon. I had never seen this Highland Scotland. For a time I forgot my anxieties, my anger, and thought about climbing holidays in the Carpathians, about forested gorges beneath towers tipped with red-white flags.

  Near Perth, we stopped for petrol next to a draughty café. While Eric negotiated his petrol coupons, I ordered tea and toast. He came back and sat down, warming his hands on the cracked white cup.

  To break the silence, I asked: ‘Where did you learn German?’

  ‘In Germany, old chap. I was brought up there.’

  ‘English people living in Germany? Was that normal?’

  ‘Well, actually we were German. Were
, so to speak. Moved to London before the war. Before Hitler, in fact. My dad saw it coming, so he decided it was better to become English. He wanted America really, but we couldn’t get the papers. So we got naturalised here.’

  ‘So Eric Kent is refugee? Not English? How do you speak it so perfectly?’

  ‘If you weren’t Polish, you’d pick up a touch of an accent. Other people do.’

  ‘Your father had wrong politics? You aren’t Jew – you don’t seem like a Jew.’

  ‘Oh, yes. At least other Germans thought so. Family name was Kantor. Kantor, Kent, get it?’ I began to laugh, and tapped with my spoon on his cup, so that he had to look up at me. ‘And you, Kantor-Kent, will send Jackie to a foreign country, and make her change her name and become a different person? You?’

  ‘Well, at least the Aussies speak English. Up to a point.’

  I must have looked dangerous, for he got to his feet and went over to the counter to pay. ‘Time to hit the road again, Major.’

  The camp, with its wire fences and ranks of Nissen huts, lay on the floor of a broad, beautiful valley. The air smelled good. I stood and smoked a cigarette while Eric went to report to the guards at the gate office. He came back in a fury.

  ‘The camp commandant won’t let us take Nuttgen out. I was going to take him to a safe house – well, the village police station over there. Some nonsense about me being a civilian, should have had a special military permit from Edinburgh. Well, we’ll have to do it inside the camp. There’s a library hut we can clear everyone out of.’

  The camp guards turned out to be Polish. ‘Put it like this,’ said Eric, ‘we can rely on them not to do German prisoners any favours.’ We went through two gates heavy with barbed wire. Inside, there were prisoners in groups doing callisthenic exercises, prisoners walking about reading books, prisoners just leaning against the huts and watching us.

  A Polish sentry brought Nuttgen into the library hut. He was young and thin, with black hair and striking dark blue eyes. He looked terrified. Eric stepped over and pulled the curtain across the hut window, but not before I had seen several prisoners outside strolling casually past. They seemed to take care not to glance in our direction.

 

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