‘Mummy, is it true what they say? That there is going to be another war?’
‘I’m sure there won’t be.’
‘Is Father trying to stop it happening?’
‘Yes. In a way, yes.’
‘Do you mind Father being away so much?’
This came out innocently enough, but Rachael had to think about the scaffolding.
‘I do. Very much.’ As she said it, it didn’t sound like a complete lie. ‘Why do you ask me that?’
‘You don’t seem unhappy any more.’
Rachael was sure that Edmund’s uncanny perceptiveness was not simply the gift common to all children, but a kind of aberrative result of her own distractions and failings, a skill he had acquired quickly because he’d had to. It made her wonder if her neglect had been his gain.
‘Mother?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think Herr Lubert is clean?’
‘Yes. I’m sure of it.’
‘Not like Herr Koenig.’
The front-door bell rang. ‘No. Not like Herr Koenig.’
‘Is it all right if I like Herr Lubert very much?’
‘… Of course. I’d best get that.’
Rachael opened the front door to a cherubic captain clutching a box file with a parcel and some letters stacked on top of it. His Volkswagen was still chugging in the driveway. She’d not actually met him yet, but, from Lewis’s many descriptions of his number two, she guessed who it was.
‘Mrs Morgan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Captain Barker.’ He offered his hand. ‘Your husband’s stand-in. Or stand-up, depending on who you talk to.’
‘It’s good to meet you. Lewis speaks very highly of you.’
‘He won’t when he sees what I’ve done to his department. Anyway, he’s asked me to pass on this message.’ The captain was too cheery to be a harbinger of bad news, but a surge of adrenalin caused her heart to fibrillate as he read from a strip telegram perched on top of the pile. ‘It was dictated at the royal naval shore establishment this morning. “Delayed in Heligoland. STOP. Logistics demand stay. STOP. Expect March 1 return. STOP.”’
Not so long ago, she would have gladly leapt upon the coded endearment in the date 1 March – St David’s Day – the day on which Lewis had always tried to give her daffodils; now, all she could hear was what lay between the lines: STOP what you are doing. STOP while there is still time. STOP before it is too late.
Lewis back in a few days? He had been gone two months, but, to Rachael, it had felt much longer. The telegram was a rude snap back to a truer chronology.
‘Thank you.’
‘And I should have run these over sooner. They’ve been sitting in the office. Two months overdue, but better late than never …’
Barker handed her the letters and the brown-paper parcel, which was addressed to Edmund. It was from Lewis’s sister, Kate, and, judging from the softness and the weight, she’d knitted him the cricket sweater she’d promised. Thinking of her sister-in-law brought comfort and regret. She had a special fondness for her.
‘And this is for the colonel to look at when he’s back.’ He tapped the lid of the box file and handed it to her.
‘What is it?’
‘Just another nifty project he’s instigated. I don’t want it getting lost in the ether.’
He stepped forward to help her restack the parcel on top of it. ‘Shall I carry them in for you?’
‘No. Thank you. I’ll manage.’
Rachael wondered if Barker could see right through the exterior of the model colonel’s wife – assured, loyal, with a passing interest in her husband’s work – to the inner maelstrom.
‘Sorry not to swing by before. No peace for the wicked. I assume everything’s all right here. You look to be coping.’
‘We’re … all managing. How are things … in the department?’
‘Joking apart, I could actually do with your husband getting back before the whole bloody thing falls apart. He’s like one of those vital cogs you notice only when they’re taken out.’
The praise was hard to hear, but Barker’s warm words gave her an unexpected tingle of pride.
‘Anyway, I’ll be off,’ Barker said.
As he backed down the steps to his car, he raised a hand of praise to the sky. ‘Sunshine at last!’
Rachael watched him leave, feeling warmth on her skin. The wind was blowing from the west rather than the east, lifting off the lid of grey they’d been under for weeks, leaving the sky Meissen-blue.
She went inside, carrying the post to the study. She set the box file down on Lewis’s desk and opened the letters: two Christmas cards – one from Lewis’s mother, and one from his sister. The card from her mother-in-law was typically spare and to the point – Lewis had inherited his mother’s dislike of frills. His sister’s card – depicting a robin redbreast on the branch of a tree, the sickly yellow lights of an idyllic village glowing in the thighs of hills – was knowingly tasteless.
A scrawly note inside read:
Dearest Rach, In grip of most terrible winter. Alan and I have been stranded in a Trust Houses hotel in Ross-on-Wye for four weeks! I don’t know if this letter will ever get to you. Much complaining here about the state of everything. Austerity is the word. I hear life there is quite grand. Is it true you have servants? We have an agonized craving for the sun. The hotel serves dismal meals produced with a kind of bleak triumph that amounts to a hatred of humanity and humanity’s needs! Anyway, a very belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. At least this weather is good for knitting. Hope it fits! Love K and A.
Kate was the only other person in the world who called her Rach. Kate had huge affection for her brother, and that enabled her to get away with teasing him mercilessly. The first time Rachael had met Kate she’d looked at Lewis and said: ‘This is the first time you’ve brought a girl home who doesn’t have two heads and scales! What’s happened, Lew?’
Rachael looked at the box file. What had Barker said? ‘Just another nifty project he’s instigated.’ The captain’s affectionate compliments seemed to go deeper than mere professional admiration. Had she imagined it, or had Barker been trying to tell her something – something Lewis was too modest ever to do – that her husband was undervalued?
Rachael lifted the lid of the box file. The document was entitled ‘Missing Persons Register. Hospices and Hospitals. Kreis Pinneberg’. There was a handwritten note clipped to the top of the page: ‘NB See patient file, page 27. Any relation? Maybe nothing. Barker.’
She took the document, which was some hundred pages thick, from the box file and turned to page twenty-seven.
It was a patient profile. The typed sheet had a photograph clipped to the notes. It was a grainy shot of a woman seated in a wheelchair in a walled garden in summer, staring slightly off camera, posing as though for a portrait in a magazine rather than a medical mugshot. Although the woman was thinner and unmade up, her hair unkempt, Rachael recognized her immediately as Claudia. The Claudia of the unhung portrait: the heavy eyebrows, the determined intelligence. She read the notes:
Admitted September ’44 after being released from a hospital in Buxtehude. Suffered Primary Blast injuries. Patient unable to walk for several months. Hearing damaged. Started speaking last year. Suffers from chronic amnesia but making steady progress. Patient remembers a few details of her life. Gives her name as Lubert. Says she is married. Has a daughter. And used to live by a river.
Rachael went over the detail again – to be sure, to buy time – but she couldn’t get to the end of the page, and she didn’t need to. It had
imprinted itself in her mind with one stamp. As she looked at the photograph, she found herself touching Claudia’s face.
‘It’s you,’ she said. And then she slumped in the chair and wept bittersweet tears for the ladies of the house.
Rachael wore her hat at a steep angle and her coat collar high to minimize the possibility of being recognized. At the station, she saw traces of familiar faces in every passing stranger: the porter could have been Richard – or his twin brother; while the rotund ticket master reminded her of Captain Barker.
‘Two return tickets to Lübeck, please,’ she said in German as she showed her passport to claim her free travel. Her German was much improved, but not good enough to stop the inspector switching to English.
‘Who is the other ticket for?’
‘A friend.’
‘Is your friend here?’
‘Not yet. Should I come back when they get here?’
‘Your friend is English?’
‘German.’
The ticket inspector looked at her papers. ‘What is the purpose of your trip? Business or pleasure?’
‘The purpose …’
‘Yes. The purpose?’
‘Pleasure.’
‘There is no carriage for Occupation personnel on this train. You will be sharing with Germans.’
‘Fine.’
‘Is everything all right, miss?’
‘Yes … I have … a cold.’
‘Here. The ticket. For your friend.’
Rachael wiped her nose and went and stood, as agreed, below the clock with no hands. She set her valise between her feet, pressing her ankles against either side to hem it in, but after a few minutes it didn’t feel secure there, so she picked it up, looped her arm through the straps and held it in the crook of her arm.
She lit a cigarette. Birds were careening in and out of the glassless station roof. Smoking didn’t settle her nerves at all, and after just two puffs she dropped the cigarette to the platform. A man bent to pick it up and she felt wretched at her profligacy, guiltily handing him the rest of the pack.
A group of British military personnel walked past, and she stepped back into her disguise, angling her hat brim to the ground. She caught snatches of their conversation as they passed – something about ‘Brighton being grander than Travemünde’. She had no connection to, or particular nostalgia for, that particular English resort, but the name or the idea of it made her feel homesick.
Lubert appeared at the arched gate and, even from fifty yards, she could see his excitement at seeing her. He held a newspaper aloft, his arm like a periscope guiding him through the sea of people towards her. When he reached her, he kissed her without inhibition on the lips.
‘Stefan …’ She had to hold him back. ‘Your ticket,’ she said. ‘We must take our seats.’
Everyone in Hamburg looked to be catching the train to Lübeck, many of them Hamsterer, with baskets and bags for whatever food they could scavenge in the countryside and store away. The platform was already three or four rows deep, and when the train came in the crowd pushed as one to try to get a seat; young men without tickets jumped between the buffers and were pulled back roughly by whistling guards. The train was in a terrible state: bullet holes pocked the carriage sides and the seats were basic. Rachael planted herself on the hard bench between two women, keeping her case with her on her knees rather than putting it in the overhead rack. Lubert took a seat opposite her and made the passengers shuffle up so that he could be close. The carriage smelt of ersatz tobacco and body odour, and Lubert sniffed the air, mischievously implying that the two ladies either side of Rachael were the source of it.
One of the two women shifted to show her displeasure. Rachael signalled with her eyes to shush him. He leant towards her.
‘I have a question for you. Question 134 on the Fragebogen: is it all right to feel this happy?’
She had to look out of the train window to keep from having to answer him.
The skies had been clear for three days now, the sun allowed to do its work: melting snow in the fields of a subtly undulating and ancient-looking landscape that might have been Sussex or Kent rather than Schleswig-Holstein. She saw a farmhand cracking the ice in a trough with a hoe. In another field, a team of horses pulled a plough over soil that had been snow-covered for months. When the famous green spires of Lübeck came into view, Lubert got up from his seat to see it better.
‘The city of my birth,’ he said proudly. ‘See the spires …’
Rachael could see them: bronze-green spires puncturing the sky.
‘The spire of the Marienkirche is missing,’ he said. ‘But still: the loveliest church in Germany. You will soon see.’
At the station, he took her valise and, as they strode towards the city’s ancient gates, she took his arm.
‘Do you want to go to the hotel first, or see the city?’ he asked.
‘Let’s make the most of the light,’ she said.
Lubert was an erudite and emotional tour guide, showing her the house where he had been born and where his parents had lived, just outside the city gates.
‘The outskirts have suffered badly. The Royal Air Force tested the bombs that they used on Hamburg here. The old wooden houses burnt easily.’ As he took it in, he became more sombre. Memories of his old life came back to him. ‘My dear friend Kosse used to live just there.’ He pointed to a husk of a house. ‘He was obsessed with the movies. He would sell his grandmother for a ticket.
‘Now I will show you my favourite building in all of Germany.’ Lubert strode on, keen to share another essential part of himself with her.
They passed beneath the Holstentor – the city’s medieval entrance tower – and across the canal and up towards the red-brick Marienkirche. It was a grand but restrained structure, bomb damaged and perhaps more striking for it. Its main tower had been destroyed by fire and the roof was open to the elements, a great arch transept dividing a ceiling of air. Lubert entered the nave and instantly began rebuilding it in his head then drawing plans with his hands.
‘You can see how lovely it is? Even like this. A beautiful ruin. Perhaps they will rebuild the tower – in wood.’
Rachael was drawn to the two broken bells that had fallen from the tower and lay on the cracked and dented stone floor of the south chapel. The area had been sealed off and the bells left there as a memorial or, perhaps, as an apology by the British. What a sight they must have made: the silent weight of a 300-foot fall, then the mighty clanging at the shattering of crown, head and waist, and the splitting of the sound-rim. The two bells lay there side by side. They had endured a tremendous fall, but they were still somehow together.
Lubert misread her tears. ‘You are moved. And rightly so. It is quite something. Quite something.’
He put a hand to her elbow to steer her onward. ‘There’s much more to see,’ he said. ‘The streets where I played as a boy; my old school, the greatest marzipan shop in all the world.’
The personalized tour continued, and the more he shared his memories the more conscious of her own she became. When she’d married Lewis, the priest had said that two biographies had become one history. Was their story over? Despite everything that had, was still, and might yet conspire to end it, she did not want it to be.
At the Hotel Alter Speicher, Lubert signed them in as ‘Mr and Mrs Weiss’ in anticipation of his Persilschein being granted soon. Their room was modest and decorated in a homely way. A sentimental depiction of a rural mountain scene in Bavaria hung over the bed. ‘The picture is bad,’ he said. ‘But right for the room.’
Rachael took off her hat and shook out her hair, laying her disgu
ise on the table by the window. Outside, the sun was still visible and sanguine. Lubert joined her at the window and studied her face as she studied the view. He traced the line of her jaw with two fingers.
‘You know me a little better now.’
He kissed her, but she broke off and pressed her cheek against his coat and hugged him, less like a lover, more the way a sister might. She held him like this and tried to find the words with which to begin.
‘This long winter is coming to an end,’ she said.
‘Now you are talking about the weather!’ He lifted her chin with his finger to better search her thoughts. ‘What is this code? What are you thinking? At this very moment now.’
‘I am thinking that I am glad for you, Stefan. I am glad that you … that you have a future.’
He tried to kiss her again, but she held back. She needed him to come down from the heights of the day. She took his hand and looked at the lines on his palm. She saw a map of roads, forking and intersecting, abrupt terminations and fading endings.
‘I think your future will be good, Stefan. You have plans. Good plans. To rebuild your life. Your city. You must realize them.’
A crinkle formed across his brow.
She went and opened her valise and took out the box file that was underneath her one change of clothes. She had never packed so badly in all her life. She’d forgotten her beauty bag and put in a book she was surely not going to read. She opened the file. Barker’s handwritten note was still clipped to the top.
She turned to the relevant page and held it out for Lubert to see.
Lubert took it and looked at the photograph of Claudia. He stared at it for so long without betraying any emotion that Rachael suddenly doubted the veracity of the photograph. He continued to stand there, not moving, for a long time. And then his head moved from side to side, very slowly, and his features formed an expression of pained incomprehension. He took the photograph from the clip and held it at arm’s length, eyes askance. He tried to hand it back to Rachael. ‘This is a trick,’ he said. ‘I looked for her. For months and months. She is dead.’
The Aftermath Page 27