by John Tagholm
A pain had developed in her back, the tension of holding the thin blue paper on which he wrote and translating his words transferring itself to her body. She remembered that Joseph’s birthday was sometime in November and she carefully removed several letters from the centre of the pile and quickly scanned them until she found what she wanted, one dated November 1935. The first sentence was all she needed to know. “A boy! My life is complete and yet the pain is doubled. I will see him tonight. What joy and how brave you are.”
Beatrice hung her head and could barely continue. The tension she felt had frozen her fingers in position so that when she put down the letter she had to force them open and clench and unclench them to make them work. The back of her neck was also locked in position and when Simon came into the room she could not look up, even if she’d wanted to. Here it was, in dark blue ink, written with a thick-nibbed fountain pen, proof that Sebastian Traugott was Joseph’s father. She was stunned at what she’d learnt and overwhelmed by the consequences and what she still had to uncover.
‘Found what you want?’
She understood his flippancy. How could he be as engaged as she was with the pursuit of a story that was in the process of turning from a producer’s quest for a good film into something far more personal? ‘In fact, I have,’ she said eventually, managing at last to look up at him, hands on hips, above her. Would he want to know more? She hoped not.
‘I made you a coffee and I thought you might need this.’ He placed a glass of brandy by the cup. ‘You look as though you need it.’
‘Odile was a remarkable woman,’ she said, believing his kindness needed some sort of response. ‘Her relationship with Sebastian at the German embassy did produce a son, Joseph. Can you imagine what anguish that must have created?’
‘Tell me,’ he said.
She averted her eyes from his as she spoke. ‘It must have been difficult enough to be a Jew in those days and just as hard to be a single mother, with a child born out of wedlock. But for the child to be that of a German diplomat whose country was intent on eradicating the Jews.’ She shook her head. ‘Impossible.’
‘It makes a good story for you, doesn’t it? Sex, intrigue, Nazis. Forbidden love. You couldn’t have written it better.’
For a moment she imagined this would be the reaction of Graham Roth in London and she suddenly saw him clearly, his face in close up, pressing himself on her, intent on getting his own way, and she was revolted not so much that he should make a sexual advance to her but that she should ever want to share the information she’d discovered with him.
‘And imagine Joseph Troumeg’s reaction.’
She could see that he was detached from the emotional repercussions of these facts and, again, she excused him for she saw how deeply involved she’d become.
‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she said. He waited for her to continue. ‘Could you keep this information to yourself?’
‘You don’t want me to steal your thunder, is that it?’
She did not have it in her to explain how completely he’d missed the point, so she agreed. ‘Something like that.’ What she could see, though, was Joseph Troumeg in his kitchen in Marseille reading in the newspaper the story of his birth and she felt she wanted to protect him from this, even if some of it he knew already.
‘May I photograph one or two of these letters, please?’
‘Go ahead. I imagine there’ll be a fee if they’re used in the film?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But don’t forget about the non-disclosure.’
‘You should have made me sign an agreement.’
‘I should have, you’re right. But I trust you.’ Whether she did or not, she couldn’t say. She wanted to be away from him now, out of the room, back into the rain to feel it on her skin, to enjoy it on her face, to clean her hands and shake the tension out of her body.
Leaving was easier than she thought. He had clearly seen the intensity in her face and knew that any further overtures to her would be met with unconditional defeat. She said thank you with her back to him, slipped through the door with a promise to keep in touch about the progress of the film, took the stairs two at a time and pushed open the glass doors into the fresh air. It was still raining and after a while, her hair dripping down her neck, she stopped at a bar at the junction of the boulevard St Germain and ordered another cognac. Although she was aware of her surroundings, the football table in the corner, the zinc bar, the other tables, even her own reflection in the mirror on the back wall, what she saw was, if not out of focus, then distanced, unnecessary detail. She took out her phone.
‘Hello, it’s me.’
‘Is everything alright? You don’t sound yourself.’
A while later, when the rain had stopped and she was able to walk back over the Pont Royal and pause in the middle, she was not surprised she called Harry. She knew that his reaction to the events of that evening would be as correct as those of Simon Honeywell were not, that he would instinctively understand the impact of the information she’d discovered and predict, as he did, the possible repercussions.
‘Poor Joseph Troumeg.’
‘That’s exactly what I thought.
‘Even if he knows some of it,’ Harry had said, ‘he’ll find the rest difficult to take. From what you’ve told me, it will upset everything.’
It had been a comfort not to have to explain herself to Harry, to hear both support and sympathy in his voice and to have him second guess what she was thinking, sometimes arriving at conclusions before she did.
‘You’ll go and see him soon,’ he’d said, ‘but you’ve got some other decisions to make before then, haven’t you? Like, will you go ahead and make the film anyway?’
Some of the tension had left her and she walked past the glass Pyramid of the Louvre, heading roughly in the right direction for the hotel, not wanting, for the moment at least, to take a taxi or the Metro. She came to rue du Louvre by chance and at first could not remember why the name was familiar. She took out her camera and looked at one of the letters Sebastian had written to check the address of his apartment and began walking northwards, looking for the numbers. The building was a grand affair, with two enormous doors on either side of which, five metres high, two muscular cariates supported a stone balcony above which several further stories rose into the sky towards a top terrace protected by elaborate wrought iron railings. She stood and imagined which one had been Sebastian Traugott’s and tried to decide if Odile Leval had ever been able to visit him here or whether his neighbours, perhaps other diplomats, might have posed too great a risk. He would leave here, though, his coat buttoned up, his collar turned above his cheek, his hat pulled down, to take a cab up to her apartment by Buttes Chaumont where, for a while at least, they would be safe to discuss their predicament and later to play with the living proof of their impossible relationship.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The girl explores the river, drawn east as far as the great loop, where the marshes begin and to the west, as far as the monastery where, at low tide, there is a ford and she can watch the traders walk to the other bank with their loaded horses. But it is to the old bath house that she is drawn to most, playing there as her mother had done and where she feels a connection with her past and to the men and women who had built it and lived here before the trees took over, in a time that she tries hard to imagine but could not picture.
It is in the old bath house that she encounters the woman again, on a morning in winter so grey that snow could not be far behind. She is stepping on the stone stacks that had once held the floor, hopping from one to another until she reaches the part which has not yet collapsed and is covered with pretty little tiles that make up part of a broken pattern she cannot understand. Around the corner is an old window which looks along the river, through the tangle of the copse. Today, though, when she turns the corner, it is the woman’s face she sees framed in the space and her heart jumps in her chest and not even her hand can calm it. It is her mother’s f
riend, with the dirty face and hair and the eyes which penetrate her and seem to demand more. The girl stares at her and she can feel her beating heart beneath her hand. And then the woman is gone and in the space is left the outline of her head and the strange look in her eyes. The girl climbs up and stands on one of the remaining roof beams hoping to catch sight of her, but she is nowhere to be seen, and has disappeared directly behind the ruin, where the ground climbs steeply and is covered in bushes.
She returns along the river, watching for signs of her, wanting to make contact with her without knowing why. The snow comes, lightly at first, but then so thickly it is impossible to see. The shape of the ground changes, the mud of the foreshore flattened and strangely white against the dark river. Behind her she can see her own tracks and the coldness of her hands and legs are forgotten in the excitement of this new experience. The bridge looks completely different and lined in white against the grey of the sky and the water it appears to be floating. She wants her mother to see and turns around, thinking that she might be there, but there is no one. Further up the white shore, however, there is another set of tracks that leave the riverside and mark the steps that disappear into the quays.
She feels suddenly cold and becomes conscious of the silence all around her, the weight of the snow pressing down on the ground. But for the other footprints, she might be the only person in the world.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
And so she made the walk that Sebastian Traugott might have taken many times in those distant and uncertain days, across north central Paris towards the railway stations, through the first and second arrondissements, then the tenth and finally the nineteenth, all the way turning over the new information that had begun to take hold of her in the past few weeks, not simply the pursuit of Joseph Troumeg, nor the fascination with the girl called Flotsam, but the arrival of Dr Harold Wesley, unexpected, at first a bit player on the periphery of her vision but who had gradually moved to the centre stage of her mind. By the time she had reached the hotel, almost two hours after leaving the bridge, she wanted to speak to him again but he beat her to it and the moment she walked into her bedroom, as if somehow he had been watching and waiting for just the right moment, her phone rang.
‘And another thing I meant to tell you,’ he said, carrying on from their previous conversation, ‘will involve you having to come back to London. It’s about Flotsam and I need you here for what I have to say.’
‘Sounds serious.’
‘It might be. Whatever, you owe me a trip to the river. I’ve been waiting too long.’
‘I had thought about going on to Marseille.’
‘You’ve made up your mind, then, what you’re going to tell Troumeg?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘So come back here first and we can talk about it. I still think there are some pieces of the puzzle missing and until you have those you can’t be sure what you’d say to him.’
‘It’s what I’ve been thinking, as well…’
‘…like, for example, if Sebastian wasn’t in Paris during the war, if he was indeed killed in 1940, why did Odile have her head shaved for collaborating?’
‘Mmm, I’d been thinking about that as well. From what I can gather, immediately after the liberation lots of people were falsely accused of collaboration. Maybe she got swept up in that.’
‘Terrible times. And lots to talk about. So, it’s Tuesday tomorrow. Can you come to the museum, like before? Lunchtime?’
The next day, on the train again, the vast fields succeeding one another with frightening speed, she was glad of the pause between one thing and the next, although what she was coming from and where she was going were not necessarily clear. She needed to complete the picture, though, to explore the corners of the equation, to satisfy herself that she could go no further even if it meant leaving out a piece of the jigsaw puzzle because she had exhausted the possibilities of knowing more. The train galloped over the Medway and then down in to the Thames valley, to be swallowed under the river to emerge in the flat no-man’s-land on the north side, where she saw birds turn and dive over the marshy fields bounded by fenced off industrial sites lined with imported cars, or full of rusting machinery. She couldn’t quite see the river, but she knew it was there and thought of the Danish invaders moving upriver to leave behind them the arrowheads and armour, pieces of which Harry had shown her in the British Museum. The moment passed and she was down in a tunnel again, sucked under the accumulated suburbs of east London to arrive at St Pancras, three hundred miles behind her, time compressed and distance reduced in the blink of an eye.
He met her at the museum reception, enthusiastic and animated, his arms wheeling as he described what he’d been doing that morning, the assembly of a later skeleton which was laid out in his laboratory, almost complete as far as she could make out. ‘Probably mid-eighteenth century, buried certainly and curiously close to the lowest tide level of the river. Not sure why yet. It’s good to see you.’ And he was off again, towards the far end of the room where she had first seen Flotsam’s skull under the microscope and she followed, only for him to suddenly stop.
‘Sorry,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘You must be tired and I haven’t offered you a drink. I get carried away sometimes.’
It did cross her mind that he might want to put off telling her whatever it was he couldn’t say on the mobile the night before and when, eventually, he did she thought she might have been right. She said she was fine and so he sat her down on his stool, tipped the computer screen to make it easier for her to see and brought up Flotsam’s face with her fierce, brown eyes. It was a close-up without the naked body below.
‘But we need to go backwards now,’ he said, ‘so prepare yourself.’
It was unnerving to see the life disappear from the face, the skin retreat to leave the remnant of the skull and the empty eye sockets.
‘I particularly wanted to show you this,’ he said and then hesitated before doing anything. ‘Now that she’s become so real for both of us, you may not like it.’ With that, he zoomed into a small section at the back of the skull, almost at the base of the what remained of the dome.
At first Beatrice could not be sure what she was meant to be looking at until Harry pointed the curser at a small crack running from the edge of the remaining bone. ‘It’s hard to tell, but this may have been caused by a blow, perhaps the result of a fall, or something more sinister.’
Beatrice looked at the tiny crack, a minute line of evidence. ‘In other words, she might have died unnaturally?’
‘It certainly is a fracture and it happened before she died.’
‘You can tell this?’
He nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘And we’ve hardly got to know her. Do you think she was buried?’
‘There might have been a lower jaw if she had, the chances of it surviving from a proper burial in the right sort of soil being greater.’
‘But more than likely not.’
‘I’ll show you another image and I don’t know whether this will make things worse or not.’ He moved the curser and then, in layers, the full version of Flotsam that she’d seen in Paris appeared, only this time wearing clothes, a cloak over what might have been a plain dress, held at the centre by a brooch. Around her neck was the silver necklace, similar to the one at the British Museum with at its centre the rock crystal ball. ‘We’ve made her a young girl of rank, although we’ve no real proof that she was.’
He made no reference to the necklace, but she knew it was there for her and she felt herself grow even closer to the girl knowing that the necklace might just as well have been placed around her own neck. Her reaction to the image was the opposite of what he’d anticipated and she was glad to see the young girl given back her life and made real.
‘That’s what I’d hoped you’d say and why I kept this image until the end. It’s low tide in about an hour and a half. Shall we grab some lunch and return to where we found her?’
As
they walked over the road and into Smithfield market she told him about the journey from Paris, the sensation of time so speeded up and compressed that the past seemed to be pushed even further away, her understanding of Flotsam’s world even more difficult to comprehend.
‘We’re beginning to learn more and more about the Anglo-Saxons, but it’s still only fragments. Don’t forget,’ he reminded her, ‘that Flotsam might have been quite unusual. There is that dental evidence that she might have travelled, so her world could have been considerably larger than was usual. Who knows? I’m not allowed to make things up,’ he said, taking her hand to cut between a bus and a car, ‘but a little licence is allowed. Funnily enough, when you came into St Pancras the train almost cuts through the graveyard of the parish church which would have been in existence in one form or another when she was alive. For all we know, she might even have walked there, out of London as it was and across country. You never know.’