‘I know you’ve lied to the Guards, in your letter. They know that too.’
It wasn’t quite the truth. The only policeman who knew was milking cows in West Wicklow. The priest didn’t reply. His face was expressionless, but in his silence she could still feel his pain, even though she couldn’t get hold of what it was. They were in the gardens now, among the linden trees and the close, neat box hedges in front of the Bishop’s Palace. He had said hardly anything, but already he wasn’t what she had expected. He was quieter. There was nothing about him that felt like the man Susan had described, talking endlessly, passionately, excitedly through a whole night as they walked the streets of Dublin. He finally spoke again, slowly at first.
‘I didn’t know she was dead. It was only when the Gardaí contacted me that I found out. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed hard to believe.’
‘But not very hard to lie, to pretend you hardly knew her.’
‘I’m not proud of that. But I couldn’t change anything.’
‘And that makes it all right?’
He shook his head, looking down at the ground.
‘I’d already told lies. I didn’t know how to undo those. There were a lot of things I couldn’t face. I kept lying.’
She almost felt sorry for him as he looked up, but not for long.
‘You know where they found her?’
‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to think about that; it was in his voice.
‘He’s left Ireland now, the man Keller, the doctor. He’s been gone for months. They don’t know where he is.’ She wasn’t asking questions now, simply stating the bleak, unhelpful facts to herself. ‘So no one can ask him. No one wanted to ask him though. People even helped him leave Ireland.’
As she watched Francis Byrne she could see something else in his face now; it looked like fear. It hadn’t been there before; that was something else, more like self-pity. But suddenly he seemed oddly far away, as if what he was feeling had nothing to do with her or with anything she was saying.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again bleakly.
Hannah persisted, pulling him back to what mattered.
‘What happened the day she went for the abortion?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t with her.’
‘But you knew she was going?’
‘We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a fortnight. I was about to leave Ireland to go to Germany. It’s what we’d agreed. We both needed to start again. Once we knew it was over, Susan was the one who – she was very firm about what we had to do – even about – she said the end was the end.’
Hannah heard Susan’s voice in those last words; that at least was true.
‘Didn’t you try to find out if she was all right?’
‘We’d made our decision. It’s what she wanted.’
‘You could have asked Mr Keller.’
‘Do you think I felt easy about dealing with a man like that?’
‘No, it must have been unpleasant for you, Father.’
‘That’s not what I meant. Not at all.’
The self-pity was back. It was enough of what he meant.
‘I don’t know what happened. I can’t even begin to imagine – obviously something went wrong with the operation. I didn’t have any idea.’
‘You did send her there. You paid for it. She told me.’
‘Yes. It was wrong. All of it.’
‘Perhaps it was God’s judgement on her, is that it?’ she snapped.
‘Do you think I didn’t care about her?’
‘I don’t know. I know she cared a great deal about you once.’
‘Look, Hannah, I don’t know what she said about me.’
‘Why does that matter now?’
He didn’t reply, but it did; it still mattered. She was uncomfortable with him. He felt unexpectedly a part of Susan, in a way that confused her. She didn’t know what was true now. She didn’t know if she believed any of it.
‘There was a time I did try to talk to Susan, about another way, about leaving the priesthood. It wasn’t a long conversation. She said she didn’t want me to do that. I think we weren’t very good for each other really. She felt that more than I did at the end. We’d both made a mistake. Susan said she didn’t want me to destroy my life for that. We went our separate ways.’
‘What about her life?’
‘If I hadn’t cared about her life, do you think I’d have gone through with it? There was a child, a child we – it was what she wanted. I owed her that, even if the price was a sin.’
‘I don’t care about your sins. I only care about my friend!’ There were tears of anger in her eyes.
Her voice was softer suddenly, almost pleading.
‘There must be something else you can tell me!’
‘I did love her. I don’t know what she felt about me. I never did.’ It felt like the truth, but it was his truth, selfish, secret, self-absorbed.
Hannah wanted to turn on him and scream. She couldn’t give a fuck about his feelings, but the words startled her. No, he never did know. She saw something she hadn’t seen before, something she had never caught in Susan’s letters. The words were in her head again and she could hear Susan’s voice saying them; the words tumbling over each other as they did when she spoke. Susan had always used the word love too easily. There was attraction, friendship, fun; there was intellectual fire; there was the joy of a passionate secret; there was sex. She used to laugh at Hannah because she held on to the word love and kept it close, as if it was too precious to use. As Hannah looked at he priest now he seemed weaker, smaller. She wondered if he ever had been quite the man Susan wanted him to be, the man she wrote about when she first met him. Did he really know nothing? After all this time, was it just that he simply didn’t know?
‘I need someone to tell me why my friend is dead,’ Hannah said, her voice more measured again ‘You’re the only person there is. Can’t you understand?’
‘I don’t know. I only know I wish she wasn’t dead. I wish she wasn’t.’ He whispered the words over and over again, like a prayer. ‘I wish she wasn’t.’
As he spoke, the first of the Angelus bells tolled. Father Francis Byrne crossed himself. It was as if he had put on a new face quite suddenly; the vulnerability was gone. He seemed stronger. She knew he would say no more now. He had told her enough of the truth for her to almost lose her way in it. But it still wasn’t the whole truth. She knew that. She shook her head.
‘I won’t let her be forgotten. I won’t stop!’
She spoke quietly, fixing his gaze as she had when she first saw him in the cathedral. Then she turned away, walking faster and faster. The sound of the Angelus bell filled her head. Perhaps it had stopped, but as she hurried out through the park, back towards the road, she could still hear it ringing.
Francis Byrne watched her walk away. He heard the bell too, in his own head. It was a daily sound of reassurance and faith in his life. Now it hurt. The strength Hannah had just seen in his eyes was an illusion. As he whispered the familiar words to himself they seemed less familiar, less comfortable, less reassuring, as if they no longer quite belonged on his lips. ‘Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.’ The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. ‘Et concepit de Spiritu Sanctu.’ And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
*
Hannah sat in the restaurant in Frauengasse for a long time that night. She wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t want to go back to her room at the Danziger Hof. She needed to do something. She felt a long way from the people she cared about, the people who cared about her. But she wasn’t sure being with them would help. Her mother and father thought she was in England. That was a simple enough lie. Other lies weren’t so easy. Her mother probably knew some of them, but she would never say anything. Sarah Rosen had always believed that life’s difficulties would go away if only you spent long enough not talking about them. Hannah’s father never spoke when things went wrong for different reasons; he didn’t notice. She loved them; him for his fo
nd blindness, her for her indefatigable hope in a natural law that said things got better if you left them alone and didn’t pick at the bones. As a Jew it was an approach to life that set hope defiantly in the face of experience.
Hannah had always envied Susan’s family its furious passions and even more furious arguments. In the Fields’ house everyone talked about everything; every slight, every mood, every love, every hate. Sometimes it seemed as if the smaller the problem the more noise it generated, as the whole family, mother, father, grandparents, children, dissected and criticised each other’s opinions and moods. They lurched from laughter to tears and back again with chaotic intensity; they were rude, dismissive, sarcastic, intolerant and unforgiving, sometimes for as long as a whole afternoon. They told each other everything and if there were no secrets or conflicts or emotional disasters to be revealed, they’d make some up anyway. Hannah’s house was, by contrast, a place of small gestures of fondness rather than fierce statements of love and despair. They never said exactly what they felt. And yet it had all changed for Susan. Her mother died, her sisters left Ireland, and after a while her father’s voice was only heard in the synagogue. With all the open hearts that had surrounded her as a child, she found no one to talk to in the face of what became the last as well as the first real crisis of her adult life. Perhaps Hannah and Susan weren’t so different. Or perhaps there were times you were alone, simply alone, and that was it. Hannah felt that now.
In Palestine Benny was waiting for her to come back. And it was back, not home. Whatever she sometimes wanted to believe, Ireland was still home. It had seemed like a good idea for her to spend these months in Europe. There was the money to collect and send on its circuitous way through Europe to Palestine, to buy arms for the Haganah. There was a system in place and no shortage of helping hands along the way. It wasn’t dangerous. Hannah was a courier, no more than that. But she knew why Benny had pushed her forward. It gave her the chance to spend some time with her family in Ireland. He knew she needed to try to find out what had happened to Susan Field too. He wanted her to get it out of her system. Not just Susan. Ireland. He understood that she had to come to terms with her friend’s death, but he didn’t understand everything it had stirred up. Finding out about Susan was complicated. It was not only a reason to go home; it was also an excuse.
When she first left Ireland for Palestine, Hannah was determined she wouldn’t live anywhere she was ill-at-ease. She had felt the darkness in Europe drawing in. She wanted Ireland to be immune from that but it wasn’t. Yet Jewish Palestine hadn’t become the place she wanted it to be. She was ill-at-ease there sometimes as well. She had poured her passion into it, and if that flagged she had Benny now; he had enough passion for both of them when it came to Israel. But it wasn’t enough. She had left her home behind, with the full consciousness that she wanted to escape the kind of mild and unemotional ordinariness of her mother and father’s marriage, yet she was going to marry a man she felt friendship and admiration for, rather than love and passion. All around them there were extraordinary things happening. And there was nothing ordinary about Benny Jacobson. Life was too important for ordinariness as far as he was concerned. They were creating a new Israel. But when the door closed on that, and they were alone, she wasn’t sure she knew him. When they stopped talking breathlessly about the future of a nation, she wasn’t sure they had anything else to talk about. Perhaps he had used up all his passion. He never argued with her; he never lost his temper. How could she tell her parents she was afraid of a life that was only distinguished from theirs by the sunshine?
Hannah and Susan had never lied to one another in their letters, but there was a truth that neither of them recognised in the other. Susan read about Hannah’s relationship with Benny, already a second-generation Jewish immigrant in Palestine, with envy. When Hannah first read about Susan’s secret love affair, she was sometimes envious too, simply because it was full of the passion she told herself didn’t matter. That envy faded on Hannah’s part as she became more and more anxious about her friend’s hopeless relationship. But both of them were lost in different ways; perhaps they had both sensed it in each other. If they had, it was too late to say anything now.
The waiter poured her another glass of wine. As she drank it she felt the events of the day blurring with all the other things that were in her head. The person she needed to talk to was Stefan. He would have got more out of Francis Byrne, much more. Her journey was ending and she still hadn’t achieved what she had set out to achieve. There were still no answers. She was angry, with herself as much as with anyone else. As she left the restaurant and walked back to the hotel through the narrow, ancient streets, the swastikas fluttered above her all the way. They seemed to hang at every window, flapping and cracking threateningly in the wind blowing from the Baltic.
In Langgasse an open truck drove past. In the back were young Nazis in uniform, electioneering; making sure that any opposition that dared to appear on the streets was beaten to a pulp. After two months there was no one really left to beat. Shouts and wolf-whistles were flung in her direction from the truck as she turned into Kohlenmarkt. The lights of the Hotel Danziger Hof shone brightly ahead. The square was full of people. Coming towards her was a brass band, flying the obligatory red, white and black and playing ‘The Watch on the Rhine’. The crowds around her were applauding and singing. ‘Zum Rhein, zum Rhein, zum deutschen Rhein, wer will des Stromes Hüter sein?’ The Rhine, the Rhine, our German Rhine, who will stand watchman on the Rhine? She took no notice of the cars outside the hotel or of the uniformed Danzig policemen at the door. She had no reason to. Even if she had noticed the man in the leather coat talking to them she wouldn’t have known he was a Danzig Gestapo officer. Suddenly a car door opened in front of her. She almost collided with the man who leapt out. ‘Jesus, look where you’re going!’ He was young, twenty-five. He looked at her hard, but there was a smile on his lips. He saw she was a little drunk.
‘Fräulein Rosen?’
‘Yes,’ she said automatically, unthinkingly in English.
He grabbed her wrist. Now she was aware of another man behind her, holding her other arm. She struggled and started to call out. ‘What are you doing? Let go of me!’ The second man put his hand over her mouth and then she was inside the car, the two men on either side of her. She was still being held tightly; her mouth was still covered. There was no room to struggle. The driver put the car into gear and pulled away. It had taken only seconds. No one had heard her over the sound of the brass band. Most of the people in the square hadn’t even noticed. Those who had were too used to seeing people pushed into cars by the Schutzpolizei or the Gestapo, or being thrown off the back of moving trucks by Nazi stormtroopers, to feel there was anything unusual going on. There was, after all, an election to win. It was just the rough and tumble of democracy. Inside the car the grip on Hannah Rosen’s arms was unyielding. The hand over her mouth pushed her head back even more painfully into the seat. There was no point fighting.
14. Danzig-Langfuhr
The De Havilland Dragon Rapide rattled down the runway at Baldonnel and pulled up into the sky south of Dublin. Below Stefan Gillespie were the hills that stretched down into Wicklow. It was a clear April morning, a little after nine o’clock. It was the first time he had been in an aeroplane. He was surprised how unsurprising it was. There was a sense of exhilaration when the bi-plane lifted off and he first gazed down at the countryside below, trying to recognise where he was as they headed east towards the sea. He looked at the fields pegged out with sheep and cattle, sloping up into the Dublin Mountains. He followed a road as it wound through the fields and the bare hillsides into thick, dark woodland. Somewhere underneath him were the slopes of Kilmashogue, where the bodies of Vincent Walsh and Susan Field had been buried. He had been a long way from that. He knew from Dessie MacMahon that the investigations had stopped. But unexpectedly it wasn’t over; that was why he was here. It was why he was flying to London, to take the Deutsche Luft
Hansa plane from Croydon Aerodrome to Berlin and Danzig.
Very quickly the mountains were gone. The plane hummed with the steady drone of the propellers. They were over the sea. Stefan sat at the back of the plane. Only two other seats were occupied. The other passengers were Irish civil servants, travelling to a League of Nations meeting in Geneva. At Baldonnel they had plied him with questions. He had been pushed on to the flight by someone who knew someone, so there had to be something interesting about him. He made sure there wasn’t. They soon found his polite monosyllables irritating and the role he had come up with – a cattle dealer looking for new markets in Germany – decidedly down-the-country. He sat far enough back to make conversation impossible on the noisy two-hour journey to Croydon. The grey sea spread out below them, the waves catching the spring sunlight. There was a boat sailing to England. He looked down as the plane passed over it, and watched it until it had disappeared.
The months had passed quickly at Kilranelagh as winter moved into spring in the mountains. Stefan had plunged himself into work at the farm with an energy that absorbed his days and left him tired enough to sleep at night. The smell of stone and earth and animals was something to hold on to, and the longer the days were out in the fields the less time there was to talk about the threat that still hung over him and his parents, and over his son. Tom’s fifth birthday had come and gone now and he still knew nothing about the curate’s plan to send him to live with his uncle and aunt. Stefan had made it clear over and over again that he would never agree. There had been a brief exchange of letters between his solicitor, Emmet Brady, and the bishop in Carlow, then nothing. Tom was happy at school and happier still because, for reasons he didn’t understand, his father was at home. Father Carey was polite whenever Stefan saw him and had not referred to the matter since February now. David and Helena had read into that silence a truth Stefan was far less sure about. They thought it was done. For more than a month now none of them had discussed the threat as they had through the long winter evenings after Tom had gone to bed. But there were still nights when Stefan couldn’t sleep, however hard he worked. The curate’s bitter determination was still a shadow over him. He would lie awake, turning Emmet Brady’s cautious words around in his head for the hundredth time. He heard himself in the Four Courts, trying to persuade a judge not to take Tom away. And sometimes, as he imagined the judge telling him he was unfit to be a father to his son, he thought about the answer that was there, always unspoken, the answer even his mother and father must know had to be in his head. If it wasn’t finished, if it wasn’t forgotten, if the threat was as real as the old solicitor claimed it was, then one day the only option might be the journey to Dún Laoghaire, and the boat across the Irish Sea he had just been looking down at. But all that was for another day, however, a day he still hoped would never come. Now he was casting his mind back to the events of the previous morning and the reason he was on a plane to London.
The City of Shadows Page 22