The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  I’ll be buried with it. So that will be Wisia’s funeral, too, who never had a proper one and had nobody alive but me to care about her. I’ll not mind dying so much if I know somebody will put it in my coffin. Near my lips.

  Maybe Jackie will do it. Helen wouldn’t, even if she came back to see me off. But only a woman would, and I couldn’t imagine any other women I used to know who might be around. And I needed somebody around. In the months after giving Wisia’s ashes to the sea, I had tried to find a somebody.

  *

  After that encounter at Faslane, we had driven away in silence. We headed back to Greenock the way we had come, crossing the Clyde by the old Erskine ferry. As the ferry’s engine thumped and its chains rumbled, Jackie climbed out of the car and stood beside me.

  ‘I’m done with this business,’ she said. ‘I’m not seeing him ever again. It’s hurting me more than it’s hurting him. And Grannie’s hurting, too, you can see the bad colour she’s taken.’

  ‘But he knows you know.’

  ‘So what will he do?’

  ‘He’s damaged goods now, can you not see that?’

  The following week, the Glasgow Herald reported that Mr Alexander Ketling of Scotbreaker Metals had withdrawn his nomination for a Labour seat in Parliament. Pressures of work were cited. Six months later, a note in the business pages wished ‘Big Alex’ Ketling, late of Scotbreaker, good luck with his new shipyard venture in Vancouver Sound.

  Miss Isabella Fowler sang her way into adoption at a happy meeting in Molendinar High School, and at the by-election two months later won the seat with a fat majority. When I heard that Tibbie MP was to speak at the Polish Combatants club in Molendinar, I ironed my best jacket and tie and went to Glasgow. But my train was late, and she was latching her guitar back into its case when I found her.

  ‘Why I left the Party? It was Hungary that did it for me. Tanks against the workers’ councils? The Party line – no way could I thole that. My God, Lenin would be birling in his tomb!’

  Tibbie was glowing. Westminster was just a daft big boys’ club, she told me. ‘I need Robbie to hold me to the real world.’

  Robbie? ‘Aye, how d’ye not know Robbie Aitken? Convener of shop stewards at Fairfields? Everybody kens Robbie. Left the Party same time as me. We’ll be married in the spring.’

  ‘You should have married me.’

  Tibbie began to laugh; she grabbed my arm and shook me tenderly.

  ‘No chance, Mike. You’re lovely. You’re just about the oldest friend I have left, from the war days and Balbrudie. But no the marrying kind. If you had ever asked, I would have said like we say in Fife: “Away tae Freuchie and fry mice!”’

  She put on her coat.

  ‘Get fixed up, Mike. Get yourself a home of your own, anywhere in the world, before it’s too late. And somebody to bide in wi’ye.’

  Tibbie’s laugh was warm, an old tune. Helen’s had always been a discord. It hadn’t changed when she walked into the kitchen at Union Street two years later, as usual without telling anyone she was coming, and startled me into knocking my chair over.

  She kept laughing as she helped me pick the chair up and stared around the room. ‘So my key still works. And the old cooker’s there, but did you never hear of a fitted kitchen? And no icebox, in the 1960s? Ach, for God’s sake!’

  She didn’t give me time to reflect that we hadn’t seen each other for ten years. My tall, illegal wife. She hugged me rapidly, pleasantly, then sat down across the table and studied me.

  She must be fiftyish. I had long stopped writing to her, because she had stopped answering. Spectacles now on those narrow blue eyes watching me; I didn’t care for their sparkly frame. That hair: not short and yellow any more but gold-tinted, down round her ears. Only a faint crease on her white neck.

  ‘Why am I here? My old man. The flight was late into Prestwick and, well, he was in a coma by the time I got to the Infirmary. I sat with him, but he never spoke. Never woke.’

  ‘Why did you not let me meet him?’

  ‘Mike, we weren’t close. He was hard on me and whatever I did. When I married Johnston, he took a scunner at him and we barely spoke. But you did so meet him, once.’

  ‘How? When?’

  ‘He saw you in the Auchmar Vaults. A night or so after the explosion. I’d talked about you, so he knew you by the Polish uniform. He was that shaken up by what he saw and heard with the rescue boats, like I never saw him. That’s why he broke his auld rule against the bevvy and went for a dram at the Vaults.’

  ‘Big man with white hair?’

  ‘That was him. He told me after that he didn’t care for the look of you. A wee foreigner in that pantomime officer get-up with the fancy boots, that was how he put it. He thought you had no business to stand there listening.’

  ‘I’ll never forgot what he said.’

  Then I began to tell her about our day at Faslane and what had been said by Jackie and by Johnston, and how it ended. But I soon saw that she was losing interest. Once I could always hold her fascinated with a story, make her laugh. Now she smiled and interrupted. Her voice turned more Canadian: ‘That was one king-size waste of time! I warned daughter dear, but no, she knew better. C’mon, Mike, fix me an old-time cup of tea.’

  We talked. She told me about Hughie, at college studying something called cybernetics. She told me about managing her own successful hotel staff agency; I told her, reluctantly, that I sometimes did shifts as barman at the Tontine.

  ‘But that’s great,’ she said seriously. ‘You always had that barman’s look, that tell-me-your-troubles face on you.’ No, I told her, that’s for American movies. This is Scotland. Those homeless foreign officers thirsting for gin and sympathy are long gone, and Greenock barmen don’t hear confessions. ‘It’s councillors and lawyers and dentists at the Tontine now. They don’t waste drinking time on me.’

  ‘You’re not old yet, Mike. Are you going to spend the rest of your life here on Union Street? Where’s home for you now?’

  ‘I have a British passport. For many years.’

  ‘Answer me! Was it not you and I sat at this same table, all those years ago, and played words for tears? Home? You couldn’t take it! You said you never needed a home.’

  ‘Helen, I am at home in Scotland.’

  ‘So what’s Poland to you now? When we went there – the big mistake of my life – I could see you never felt: “Here I am in my own right country”. And yet you knew you belonged there. I could see you trying to do what you thought you needed to do. Like trying to tell a father: “Okay, I swear I’ll always be your loving son but can I go now?”’

  She put her cup down, and reached across to touch my hand.

  ‘I’m taking you back to Canada with me, Mike. If you don’t like Toronto, you don’t need to stay. But I’m here for four days: the funeral, then a day with Jackie and Malcolm, then the plane. I’ll buy your ticket, no bother. So Prestwick! Be there at half past nine Saturday night. I’ll be waiting on you at Departures.’

  *

  When I reached Prestwick that Saturday, I couldn’t see her. I stood with my passport and my suitcase at Departures for a long time, peering at the queues shuffling past to the gates. The ticket desk didn’t have anything for me. It became ten o’clock, then half past. The Toronto flight was called, then final called.

  I rang Jackie. ‘Mum? No, she went back on Friday. Aw heck, poor Mike: did you go all the way to Prestwick to see her off and get the wrong night?’

  A week before Christmas, a heavy airmailed package arrived at Union Street. The postie had to help me carry it into the kitchen. It contained a block of maple sugar, a flask of maple syrup, cans of salmon caviar and Saskatoon berries and a half-bottle of Newfoundland Screech rum. Posted from Hamilton, Ontario. There was no letter with it.

  *

  In the years that followed I have often stayed with Tadek and Margaret at Balbrudie. It became a custom to have dear old Mike as guest for Christmas and Hogmanay. Every year, Tade
k announces plans to turn the castle into a hotel. Every year, my breath blows a small frost-fog in the hall and I notice more damp strands of wallpaper hanging from dark corners.

  We sit round big fires, we play cards with Margaret’s young nephews and nieces who come over from an estate the other side of Forfar; we go for the slow walks that I can still manage in my late seventies. Tadek proudly shows me his forestry, and his vegetable business in the old walled garden.

  How rarely we talk Polish these days, even when we are alone together! But one winter was different. They had taken me with them to their converted farmhouse in southern France, meaning to go on into the Alps and ski. I persuaded them to visit the address which Luc le Gallois had given me forty years before.

  We found the small town near the Durance river, and a sharp-eyed lady in black who opened the door turned out to be his daughter, Françoise. I wouldn’t have known her again. But, getting over her astonishment, she began to talk happily about Jackie and Union Street.

  And the Commandant? She spread her hands. Then she showed me the small room which had been his study: his papers still on the desk, held down by a heavy, empty ashtray. On the wall facing his chair, there hung a long framed photograph showing Fronsac at full steam ahead, across a background of summery Mediterranean mountains. As I had feared, the Commandant had gone to his family tomb a few years before. So much I still wanted to ask him, to tell him. But after offering my grief to Françoise, I asked if she had heard of a certain Jean-Marie Guennec.

  ‘Ah, ah! Him! He had come here to ask Papa to be a witness for him at his trial after the war. But when Papa saw who it was, he shut the door in his face. Not a word: just closing the door. And then – well! He ran to Algeria. When the rebellion began, he interrogated prisoners in the prefecture at Blida. But one day no Guennec, just an empty car with blood on the front seat. Rouge-Midi, the Communist rag, wrote a story about it. How long ago that seems!’

  Françoise made us stay to lunch. We were glad of the invitation; even in Provence, it was a bitter winter out of doors. Afterwards we set out to drive to Avignon, but police in white gloves were halting the traffic in the middle of the city.

  Rhythmic shouts and chants in the boulevard, banners, a procession walking, stopping and walking under the bare plane trees. But the banners were red and white. I saw a girl in Kraków costume, holding up a cardboard white eagle with a crown. ‘Liberty! Solidarity!’

  Tadek and I went to the girl with the eagle. ‘Martial law! Tanks on the streets!’ The boys and girls around her, Polish students in a French crowd, all spoke at once about mass arrests, curfew, gunfire. As the parade began to move forward again, they called to us: ‘Who are you?’

  ‘We are Polish soldiers,’ said Tadek.

  At that, a young man with a blond pigtail turned back towards us and cried in a sonorous voice: ‘Bóg! Honor! Ojczyzna! God, Honour, Fatherland!’ There was clapping. They were clapping for Tadek and me.

  That night, in the cottage kitchen we quarrelled in our own language. Margaret watched us, understanding most of what we were saying but not why we were saying it.

  Tadek was shouting: ‘Can’t you see that this is victory, not defeat? To declare war on the whole Polish people – terminal madness! The regime tries to murder Poland, which means it’s committing suicide.’

  ‘And then what sort of Poland, Tadek? Back to God, Honour, Fatherland? If that is going to be the programme, then we have learned nothing.’

  ‘Maurycy, you are hopeless: you can’t admit it, but you are still thinking like some kind of sentimental Marxist. Listen, when this Communist corpse rolls off us in a few years, we have to return to our true roots. We have to take back Poland!’

  We ended up glaring, banging the table. But next day, when they dropped me at the railway station on their way to the snow slopes, Tadek and I embraced as tightly as ever.

  *

  A year later, the Pope came to Scotland. Our Polish Pope – how could I not feel conceited about him, in spite of all my unbeliefs? How could I not go to see him at Bellahouston Park, with all Scotland’s Catholics and all Scotland’s Poles?

  I was close when he came through the crowd. A woman was holding up a tiny girl in red-white folk dress. He stopped, and asked the child in our language: ‘Gdzie Polska? Where is Poland?’

  She looked back at him bewildered. The Pope took her small fist, pressed it against her heart and said: ‘Poland is here.’

  I was furious to find my eyes filled with tears. Why? Such cheap sentimentality! Such shameless conflation of soul with a stretch of land, such an inoculation of that old God–Fatherland serum into the blood of a child!

  But then I remembered that I had done the same to Jackie when she was not much older than this little girl. ‘Poland, where is Poland?’ Except that, back then, I had thumped her fist against my own chest: ‘Polska tu! Poland is here!’

  *

  ‘Home: a sort of honour, not a building site...’ An English poet wrote that. Honour – but not God, not Fatherland? So if I have lived honourably, then I have been at home all the time without knowing it.

  I am surprised to find that now, writing these last lines, I am in my eighties. And, looking back, I am not sure about the adverb to describe how I have lived. Honourably? Irresponsibly? Our Polish theologians now think that Descartes was wrong. It is not that I think, therefore I am. It is that I recognise the reality of another person, therefore I am.

  Wisia, Tibbie, Tadek, many others but above all Helen? I don’t think I have recognised or accepted the full humanity of any of them properly. Not sufficiently to be certain of my own existence.

  I want to stop this writing now. The days and months are passing with such velocity; the slope to my end is steepening. Great and small events pass like posters glimpsed on a down escalator. Events? For example, Poland threw off Communism and returned to democracy only a few months ago.

  Once, that news would have sent me running to the travel agency. To be with the crowds on the streets, to join the singing. But today I don’t think about ‘the nation’. Instead I think about a small, very important duty which I can now fulfil.

  My Colonel died five years ago. When the Apéritif restaurant closed, he had moved to London to work as a military archivist for the Sikorski Institute. After his death, his Scottish widow told me that, in his will, he had asked that Major Szczucki – ‘my loyal comrade’ – should transport his ashes back for burial ‘in a free Poland’.

  I don’t know why he chose me. Perhaps he thought I had nothing better to do. More likely, that I needed to remember how to obey orders.

  So I will go to the travel agency, in my own time. It seems that it’s already a common experience on flights to Poland to find yourself sitting beside an old gentleman with an urn of ashes on his lap.

  It turns out that the Colonel still has relatives over there. His nephews will meet me at the airport with a car. They live in a town on what is now the eastern frontier of Poland, which is about as close as you can get these days to that city which was dear to me and Wisia. I gather that the funeral will be a big affair: a bishop at the church, speeches at the town hall, an escort of soldiers with fixed bayonets, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides lining the streets, the firemen’s band playing: ‘We of the First Brigade...’

  Fine! But I wouldn’t want anything like that for myself, even if I had a home town to go to. My life has been shaped by these Scottish waters, and by what happened to a ship here, and by what the fate of that ship did to a group of men and women who might otherwise have lived very differently.

  Home. I close my eyes and I see that glass of tea steaming gently in its saucer, placed on the polished table by someone who must have loved me. I open my eyes and I see this dark, stony country of Scotland which has been kind to me. A poor, hard country but a good one, deserving to live in its own choice of freedom. A part of what I mean by home is here.

  They say that wherever a Polish soldier is buried, his blood turns the soil into po
lska ziemia – Polish earth. That rhetoric is not for me. I ask for a privilege, not a miracle: that my ashes go into these cold waters until, sorted and delivered to the shore by many tides, they become part of Scottish earth. No more.

  Epilogue

  School of Pelagic Studies

  University Avenue

  GLASGOW G12 8QQ

  November 6th, 1992.

  DEAR MARIA,

  I’m sure you remember how we had lunch at Howie’s, when I was through in Edinburgh and you helped me track those fishery archives in the National Library.

  I told you about this old Polish friend of mine, Major Szczucki, who stayed in Greenock and had been writing a long memoir, partly fiction based on fact, about wartime experiences in Scotland – his and mine. He was a sort of unofficial uncle to me. You said it was just the kind of material you were looking for, and did I think he might deposit it with the Library?

  Well, I must confess I never got round to asking him. Is this what David Hume called ‘the indolence of old age’ setting in? Anyhow, much to my sorrow, ‘Major Mike’ as we called him has suddenly died.

  He went to the funeral of a friend of his in Poland, although he was well into his eighties. They told us he knelt down to put a box of ashes into the grave and then couldn’t get up again. He was wet through with the rain, and having chest pains when they got him back to his hotel, and they were trying to fix a hospital bed. But he set off by himself; somehow caught a train to Warsaw and then the plane. He left his bag behind in Departures, no label on it. Security told us there was nothing inside but a few nice old shirts.

  When the flight was coming in to Glasgow over the Firth, he apparently undid his belt and stood up. The stewardess told him to sit down, but he was shouting something they couldn’t understand in Polish and pointing down to the water below. They got him back into his seat. But when they had landed, he just ‘didn’t respond’ as they say in hospitals. His heart, of course. Poor Mike. But I hope we all go as easily.