The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  ‘Is that all home means to you? The place where one settles accounts?’

  ‘And if nobody in the family house pays their bills and everybody is afraid to enter the cellar – is that a home?’

  ‘We Poles have paid our bills. Unfortunately, we no longer have a house and the cellar is all that’s left of it. Very dark, full of the bones of good people who were sold to their enemies. We can’t hope to make anyone else settle those accounts. That is why that place is still our home.’

  We were silent. Le Gallois gently patted my shoulder several times, as if he were soothing a trembling horse. Then he said in English: ‘Fuck Mister Ketling, I smoke anyway. You?’

  ‘Thank you, no. But I have to speak to him.’

  I took ‘Ketling’ aside. ‘We have to talk. Something looks bad for you, also for me. In the next few days.’

  ‘Get your voice down! Can you find the way to Helensburgh? A couple of miles along this shore? The Clyde Café there, the Saturday morning that’s coming.’

  *

  Helensburgh is opposite Greenock, on the northern side of the Firth. When I was staying at Union Street, I used to look across the water to where, in the distance, I thought that I could make out rows of shining mansions, tall churches, the glint of unbroken windows reflecting the afternoon sun.

  On my shore was the half-ruined town leaking smoke through the din of the yards, where shabby crowds hurried to work and where it seemed always to be raining. On the other shore, a place of wealth and peace. A place often in sunshine, which looked to me like a home.

  So when I came to Helensburgh that morning I went to the pier and looked back across the miles of water to Greenock. It was a clear blue day. The wind had blown the smoke away, and not a sound reached me from the other side. But over there, tiny in its details, there sparkled another blessed, distant place.

  I seemed to see a serene Grecian city set out on the margin where the hills met the sea. I saw a grove of elegant spires, a proud municipal tower, a lattice of shipyard cranes in a frieze along the waterfront. Of the bomb damage, the jostling people, nothing could be seen.

  I had arrived early. Now I walked slowly about this town which had tricked me, which after all seemed to be composed only of dull and wealthy stone houses, and I felt despair.

  Long ago, in the Union Street kitchen, I had told Helen that I didn’t need a home. Now, suddenly, the lack caught me by the throat. No door would open on faces happy to see me. My spirits wouldn’t jump as I came to a familiar birch tree at the last turn in the track. No room with a warm tiled stove waited for me, no salon in which I could finger my stack of unopened letters, yawn while that glass of tea cooled, reflect on how to settle my accounts.

  No house at the end of this journey. But along it, I had met so many comrades, both men and women, who still carried a bunch of keys with them – keys to a manor house now lost in the Soviet Union, to a Warsaw flat long bombed to dust.

  When I was young, I never felt this longing for the place I always thought of as ‘my parents’ house’. Now I was sharing a grief I had sensed in other people, but never before in myself. I envied them, with their orphaned keys. They had something to imagine and to mourn, even if it was only a bricked-up gateway with nothing but a charred gable beyond it. All I had was a mirage, glimmering across deep water.

  Self-pity! To pull myself together, I began to march rapidly along the seafront. Left, right! I repeated bracing things to myself in English as I marched. Helensburgh folk glanced at this daft Polish soldier tramping along the pavement, muttering to himself: ‘Pack up yer troubles in yer old kitbag and smile...’ Singing helped. ‘Hitler’s only got one ball...’ How did it go on? It ended ‘And Goebbels has no balls at all.’ But what came in between?

  ‘That’s you needing a doctor, son,’ said a milkman, glancing up from feeding the horse on his wagon. I stopped, realising that I had been chanting aloud. Behind the wagon, on the other side of the street, was the Clyde Café.

  *

  In there, a bunch of British sailors had dumped their kitbags against the wall and were settling to play pontoon. ‘Twist!’ There was a shout of laughter and a clink of coins. The proprietress burst out from behind the counter. ‘Whit ye daein? Gambling! Away with thae cards, or I’ll get the polis, so I will.’ A man coming through the door stopped very still.

  I went over to Johnston and made a show of shaking him warmly by the hand. The sailors were arguing loudly with the proprietress. We sat down.

  ‘How did you no tell me you were coming to the ship? How did you know I would be there? What have you told yon French officer? What’s he after?’

  ‘He doesn’t know who you really are. But Johnston, do you know – did you know – Albert Kellerman?’

  He didn’t look frightened when I spoke the name, merely cross. Cross, vexed, as if I had spilled my cup of tea on his big black shoes.

  ‘It’s none of your business. But I’ll tell you. Now you mention it, I think that was maybe the name of the French fellow supposed to help me on the... ehm, the torpedoes, right? The fellow who gave the safety levers a big dunt and got blown overboard and drowned. Just an idiot, that man.’

  ‘Don’t fool around with me! Kellerman is alive. And he knows you are too – but not where. And he has made a statement. About what happened on Fronsac, and about you and him before the war. Is it true?’

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That you joined something? That you were a wee Fascist?’

  He made no reply. Instead, he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and slowly, carefully, tore out a leaf. I noticed that it was an accounts notebook, the pages ruled for pounds, shillings and pence. On the leaf, he drew two circles in purple indelible pencil. ‘That’s me. That’s you. Ye with me?’

  Then he drew a fierce arrow from the Me circle to the You circle, and another in the opposite direction. ‘Any time, Mike, I can smash you for what I know you did. And any time, you can smash me. So let’s be showing respect. Discretion – that’s the word. Discretion.’

  ‘But were you a Fascist?’

  ‘I was a daft kid. Well, when I was at the Academy, some of us boys were talking about Scotland. About nations. And there was this Captain Ramsay, going round the halls blethering about Hitler’s folk-community and how Scotland was threatened by inferior breeds. So, aye, I was fifteen, I joined. Mind, I was in the Boys’ Brigade too.’

  He grinned at me. He was powerfully at ease with himself, as he had been on the platform at Inverkeithing. What had transformed him from that shivering supplicator in wet denims? Shame and hatred, perhaps. ‘Any time you can smash me,’ he had said. Could I? It felt more like a warning than an admission.

  ‘Your turn to talk, Mike. Is it the police have Kellerman’s statement now? What’s to happen about it?’

  ‘He was in jail, Johnston. Not the British, a Free French jail. Worse! But now he is doing secret work for them. They don’t follow up his statement about Fronsac and you. Not unless he tries to cheat them. But he won’t. They’d shoot him, anyway.’

  ‘There’s no Johnston any more, Mike. Will you get it into your thick Polish heid? Johnston’s away, gone. See and remember that.’

  ‘Did you and Kellerman really make a plan when you met again? And the steel box. Where is it?’

  ‘Ach, that nonsense. I’ve made enough confessions the day. But, Mike, about the wee girl. Jackie, ma ain daughter. I’d truly like to see her. Does she...?’

  ‘Sure, she knows. That you are alive, but not where you are or what you call yourself. And she doesn’t know that she could just about see you from Union Street through the binoculars.’

  ‘Maybe it’s better she disnae see me. No yet. But you could bring her across to the ship – I can fix a launch and a permit – and I could get a keek at her. Or what do you say, Mike? How if I did just walk up and “Hello there” and a wee chat, is she old enough to keep that secret too?’

  I hadn’t expected all this. Suddenly now, fatherly feeli
ngs? ‘I wouldn’t count on it. She’s only thirteen. But I could maybe bring her across. If all you want is a sight of her.’

  We paid and stood up to go. I put on my beret. ‘That’ll be you away to France any day now, with the invasion?’

  I was about to nod. But a wary second thought made me say: ‘No, no, it’s Canada for special forces training...’

  ‘You’ll maybe be seeing Helen there?’

  I didn’t reply.

  22

  Yes, I would be seeing Helen, and very soon. But I didn’t know that when I left the Clyde Café. It was the next morning at Union Street, after Sunday breakfast, that the main door thumped and she walked into the kitchen, dragging a heavy leather suitcase behind her.

  ‘Could you not think to ring us up first?’ But Mrs Melville did not sound as put out as she would once have been.

  When Helen and Jackie had hugged, the pair of them began to push the big suitcase into a corner. I took over, did it for them. But there was more: a fat blue shoulder bag Helen had dumped in the hall.

  This arrival wasn’t like her. I had never seen her impeded, struggling under burdens. Usually Helen strode, travelling light. If there was more she needed, her style said, there would be somebody else to provide it. Now she sat down slowly, and only nodded when Jackie brought her a tea cup.

  In the shoulder bag there were gifts. For Jackie, a rubber diving mask with a glass window: ‘you can look your porpoise in the eye, the way they do in California’. On the kitchen table, familiar offerings piled up: another flask of maple syrup, a block of maple sugar, cans of orange juice, peaches, butter and ham, more lime juice.

  ‘Is there anyone biding in upstairs?’

  ‘Are you wanting your old room, then?’

  ‘Aye, well, Mabel, could I maybe stay a while longer this time?’ The ferrying of aircraft from Gander to Prestwick was winding up, she said. The new planes had longer range, bigger tanks. Now American crews could fly them direct from the factory in the States, across the Atlantic to the bomber fields in East Anglia.

  ‘So they’ll no be needing us any more. The hop yesterday, with a B-17: that was my last crossing seemingly. So it’s leave for me – I’ve two weeks’ leave. And then? No more flying, I guess. If I go back to Canada now it’ll be a job as a clerkess on some dreich airbase in Manitoba. Or maybe I could get myself a discharge, family grounds – something of that.’

  She undid her top tunic button, and sighed. ‘No thanks, Mike. I’m off the smokes just now. Queer, eh? Can’t fancy them.’

  When Mrs M and Jackie went off to church, I lit one myself. Helen got up, wandered about the kitchen and then put the kettle back for more tea. She picked up a waxed carton.

  ‘Are you still eating this dried-egg shite? Is that all the hens in Scotland called up for war work?’

  ‘What’s the news with Craig?’

  ‘I thought you were no interested in Craig.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s dead. That’s his news. Okay?’

  ‘Helen! Don’t talk like this. How – what happened?’

  ‘He got killed. Why are you on at me this way?’

  I saw that she was not so much in grief as embarrassed. Did she think this death was also her failure to keep her own life in the air?

  ‘How?’

  ‘Accident. He was flying a Mitchell, training a British guy, and it went into the Gulf of St Lawrence. Both engines failed. Some smart fellow put fuel filters back the wrong way round. So Craig bought it. So I’m a widow-woman, and no pig farm in Ontario for Mrs Mary Helen Douglas MacPhail.’

  ‘Douglas? Was that Craig’s name?’ I put my arms round her but she stood slack, indifferent.

  ‘Don’t get the idea I’m biding here in Scotland. Craig’s folks took against me even before he died, so I’m better off here with Mrs M for a while. But it’s Canada for me and Jackie when everything settles down. When the war’s over.’

  She glanced up. ‘Mike, that could be soon, right? The invasion’s coming any time. And you – are you going with it?’

  ‘Could you keep a wee Polish count away from a fight?’

  She smiled, but it was just a fond smile. There was something altogether unfocused about her today. I suddenly thought: she’s pregnant. Why did the thought anger me?

  ‘Mike, I need to talk to you. D’ye know where Johnston is?’

  ‘He’s on a ship.’

  ‘Will he be back soon? See: without Craig, and the end of the war coming, and me wanting citizenship over there... and I’ve to think of Jackie’s future, I need to get things straight. With him. Cut through the fankle, so I can forget about all that time. And him too.’

  ‘You can forget without seeing him. Helen, don’t you remember you’re both officially dead? The widow Douglas, born MacPhail, has nothing to do with the widow Melville, born Houston, who went missing at sea. And nothing whatever to do with the new name he’s got now. So just keep clear of it all. Stay dead, the pair of you!’

  ‘No, Mike. That’d be no fair. Ye think I’m a hard bitch – that’s the way you liked thinking of me. But there’s another side to everyone.’

  If there was another side to Helen today, I wasn’t in the mood to explore it.

  ‘I tell you he’s on a ship. I don’t know when it comes home – maybe never. He thinks you are settled in Canada. He won’t want to see you anyway; he doesn’t need trouble. Helen, why don’t you just go back to Manitoba or wherever and find... well, a new life? Like you did before. The way Johnston’s done.’

  She sat quietly. The sun was out; I could hear a bell tolling from the West Kirk. Two women were passing down Union Street and laughing.

  ‘Scotland’s looking quite good today. Quite good.’ Helen sounded surprised at herself. ‘Are the boats running to Bute and the Kyles yet? I could maybe take Jackie “doon the watter”.’

  There was a long silence. Helen poured herself more tea; she didn’t look up at me.

  I stood up and reached for my beret. ‘Helen, my leave is over – embarkation leave. So this is big goodbye, you and me. Listen, if something happens to me, if you’re still here – can I give your Mrs Douglas name? For stuff that I leave in Scotland, any money – you know.’

  ‘Sure you can. So it’s any day now, is it? See and keep your poor wee head down.’

  Our embrace was muscular, hard, like two old comrades. I kissed her cold cheeks in the way of my country, three times.

  I had given Helen my advice. If she didn’t take it, there was nothing more I could do for her. So I told myself. Then I went to the war.

  *

  It was early June; school term just about to end. Jackie was making her way up to the station for the Kilmacolm train when Miss Coutts came whirling round the corner. Jackie was disconcerted. The lofty goddess who used to bestow history at Campbell Street was giggling and jouking about as if she was trying to be a girl. The sun shone through her golden hair as she cried: ‘Isn’t it just wonderful? Isn’t it great news?’

  ‘No, I mean hello Miss Coutts. What news?’

  ‘They’ve landed, they’ve landed! It’s the Invasion, Jackie. Did you not hear the bulletin?’

  Jackie thought: What’s gone wrong with Miss Coutts is that she’s history. Over, and out of date. So if I said something to her about biology, or larval flatfish eyes migrating, or Zostera marina, or even said ‘Ecology’ to her, she’d go daft.

  ‘That’s fine, Miss Coutts. I’ll tell the others on the train.’ The teacher swooped on downhill, waving a hand over her shoulder. Later that day, with everyone at St Columba’s blethering on about the Second Front, Jackie remembered that Uncle Mike was going to be part of the Invasion too. Lucky him, he’d be right famous. But how would Mother take it? Better leave her to bring it up first.

  *

  The peacetime paddle steamers, taking Glasgow families down the Clyde for day trips with music and booze, were only a memory now. But the MacBrayne’s mail boats were still running to the Argyll coast, carry
ing civilian passengers, seamen with kitbags and terrified calves swaddled in sacking.

  Helen and Jackie took the steamer through the Kyles of Bute to Tarbert, where Jackie had been a few years before with her grannie and Françoise. They stayed the night with the same Mrs MacQuarrie, and then took a bus down the Kintyre shore until they came to sandy beaches. There was a chapel looking out over the sea, huge boulders of black basalt and an arc of empty white sand.

  The sun came out. Helen stood on a rock to see if she could catch sight of Ireland. Jackie had already put on her swimsuit under her dress; now she wasted time trying to put on the diving mask with one hand while unbuttoning her dress with the other. She perched her spectacles on a slab of driftwood.

  ‘Are you not coming in?’

  ‘No, kid. The sea and me have seen enough of each other. In the air or on dry land, that’s where I belong.’

  Jackie was already a good swimmer, even very good. She had a certificate of proficiency for swimming and another for life-saving, written on thin ‘economy’ paper, but she hadn’t been in the proper sea since she was paddling. As Jackie waded in deeper, the cold bit into her legs with a pain she hadn’t expected. She frowned and kept going until the water was up to her armpits.

  ‘Baby, you okay?’

  Jackie replied with a loud groan. Then she settled the mask over her face, thrust her whole head and body under the water and began to swim.

  The tide was low. She was gliding over zones of sand and tangle never dried out or exposed to the sun. Small fish; scallop shells lying on a clearing in the weed. The trails of hermit crabs across the seabed. A flounder, nestling down into the sand until only its gleaming eyes were visible. Jackie swam to the surface to draw breath, then dived again.

  Now the seabed abruptly shelved down. She saw, deep and dim below, an open plain of sand, and on it a live queenie-scallop, its half-open shells fringed with diamond eyes. As Jackie watched, it suddenly flew upwards, its shells batting like a butterfly’s wings, sank away and landed a few yards further off.

  Another rise for breath. Then down. She couldn’t find the sand plain with the scallop again; the current was drifting her along the shore. But a pale shape was twisting among the huge brown fronds of the Laminaria; a dogfish. Such a big one; was it a nursehound, like in her book of fishes?