Shadows of War

by Michael Ridpath

  15

  Kensington, London, 11 November

  Millie and her father walked briskly along Kensington High Street towards the park. Lord Oakford was in good spirits, which pleasantly surprised Millie. An argument with his son about war and peace was just the kind of thing that could set Lord Oakford off on a week-long bad mood. Added to which, it was Armistice Day, which Millie had feared would only add salt to the wound. No one had mentioned the date yet that morning, although the newspapers had been full of the plan to move the two-minutes’ silence to the following day, Sunday, in order not to interrupt war production.

  She was glad she had put her foot down at dinner. Although the evening had become uncomfortable, it could have been a lot worse. She hadn’t realized until she had said it how aware she had been that this might be their last time together: that something might happen to one or other of them. And she didn’t just mean Conrad. It was only then that it had truly sunk in that what she was about to do had its own danger, that she might be the one not to come back. For a moment she could feel the fear enveloping her, but she beat it back. Millie de Lancey was a brave woman, at least as brave as her elder brother.

  She hated deceiving him, but she had had no choice. She couldn’t tell him she had already found her war work, which was why she was in London.

  ‘Where is Conrad off to?’ she asked. ‘I assumed he was returning to barracks, but he was a bit evasive. Is his battalion going over to France?’

  ‘Heston Airport. He’s flying to Holland to see Theo,’ Lord Oakford said.

  ‘No!’ That made Millie think. ‘Do we still go ahead with our plan?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Oakford. ‘It will be all right.’

  ‘I hope Conrad never finds out. He would be furious.’

  ‘He won’t find out,’ said Oakford.

  Millie had been excited to help her father. She had been brought up by him as a pacifist, as had Conrad and the other de Lancey children. She understood what her father was trying to do, and thought he was right to do it. But she knew Conrad wouldn’t approve at all.

  ‘Here we are.’

  They were outside a grand white house just to the south of the park, which had been converted into flats. Lord Oakford rang a bell, a maid answered and they followed her up some stairs to the second floor.

  ‘Lord Oakford and Miss de Lancey, sir,’ the maid announced as she led them into a drawing room.

  Sir Henry Alston rose to greet them.

  Millie repressed a shudder as she took his hand. Alston was a fellow director of her father at Gurney Kroheim, her father’s merchant bank. She had met him on a number of occasions before – at dinner parties at Kensington Square and he had been to stay the weekend at Chilton Coombe – yet she had never quite become used to his ravaged face.

  ‘Millie, there’s someone I want you to meet.’ Alston turned to a pale, dark-haired girl of about Millie’s own age.

  ‘Lord Oakford, Millie de Lancey, this is Mrs Scott-Dunton.’

  ‘Constance,’ said the girl, holding out her hand to Millie. She was smiling broadly. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you. This is going to be quite an adventure.’

  Bloomsbury, London

  It was easy for Anneliese to identify Bloomsbury House; it was the impressive mansion on the southern side of Bloomsbury Square with the queue of Jews outside it. It reminded her a bit of the British Passport Control Office in the Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin. There the Jews were queuing for visas for Britain or Palestine. Here they were queuing for food, distributed by the Jewish Refugee Committee. Just as Anneliese had managed to slip ahead of the queue in Berlin with Conrad to see Captain Foley, the Passport Control Officer, now too she walked right in, feeling just as guilty. But she had an appointment.

  Wilfrid Israel had a tiny office in an upper floor of the building. He had thinning blond hair and blue, tired eyes. His suit was immaculately cut and, despite his fair complexion, he exuded the sophistication of a wealthy Berlin Jew. And he was wealthy, or at least he had been. His family had owned N. Israel, one of the most upmarket department stores in Berlin, until he had been forced to relinquish it to Aryan owners.

  ‘Fräulein Rosen! I’m so pleased to meet you at last,’ he said in German, smiling. ‘And in safety too. Please. Have a seat.’

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ said Anneliese. ‘And in particular, thank you for getting me out of the camp.’ The wife of the commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp loved to shop at N. Israel, which had given Wilfrid some influence.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Wilfrid. ‘Mr de Lancey and Captain Foley were quite insistent.’

  ‘I owe you my life,’ Anneliese said. ‘As I’m sure do many of the people out there.’

  Wilfrid gave a tired smile. ‘Yes. But there are so many more back in Germany whom I couldn’t help.’

  ‘When did you get out yourself?’

  ‘In the spring. Berlin finally became untenable. How do you find London?’

  ‘It’s hard,’ said Anneliese. ‘My father is a doctor, but they won’t allow him to take a job. And my mother is a cleaner.’

  ‘At least you have found something,’ Wilfrid said, indicating Anneliese’s nurse’s uniform.

  ‘Yes, I’m working at St George’s Hospital. There are good things about London. My family is safe. And when you bump into a bobby in the street he is more likely to give you directions than lock you up.’

  ‘And they know how to queue.’

  ‘And if you tread on their toes, they apologize.’

  Wilfrid laughed. ‘But they can be difficult to get to know. Even the English Jews.’

  ‘I thought you were English yourself?’ Anneliese said.

  ‘Half-English,’ Wilfrid said. ‘But I miss Berlin. The old Berlin.’

  ‘Before the Nazis came,’ said Anneliese.

  Wilfrid nodded. Then he checked his watch. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you Fräulein Rosen?’

  ‘I wanted to see if you could help me find some work.’

  Wilfrid’s expression became more businesslike. ‘I’m afraid we employ all the people we can already here. And besides, I can see that you have a worthwhile job already. Unlike most of the people out there.’

  ‘No, not working here,’ said Anneliese. ‘Doing something for the war effort. Against the Nazis.’

  Wilfrid raised his eyebrows. ‘And how would I be able to help you with that?’

  ‘Perhaps through Captain Foley?’ said Anneliese. ‘I did help him with some secret work once in Berlin.’ She had persuaded her uncle, who worked for an aeroplane manufacturer, to pass plans of a new fighter plane to the British. Conrad had suggested it as a way of encouraging Foley to issue her father a visa for Britain. ‘I could do it again. I speak German, obviously. I am willing to take risks. And I need to do something, anything, to stop Hitler.’

  Wilfrid hesitated, and then smiled. ‘All right, I can ask Captain Foley when I next see him. He’s stationed abroad at the moment, but we do see each other when he is back in London. I can’t think what you would do for him, but he took quite a shine to you in Berlin.’

  ‘Thank you, Herr Israel. I won’t take up any more of your time.’

  Anneliese had a spring in her step as she made her way back towards Goodge Street tube station and the Northern Line. The idea of trying to do something herself to fight the Nazis had come to her after she had seen Conrad. She had no idea where he was going, but he had said he was planning to see Theo. Which meant he was doing something to actively oppose Hitler. Something more direct than simply joining the army and training in the English countryside.

  Anneliese couldn’t join the army in an active role, and there was no doubt that being a nurse was helping the war effort, even if at this stage of the war she was dealing with traffic-accident victims rather than air-raid casualties. But now, for the first time since she had arrived in England, she saw a point to life, rather than mere survival.

  If only Captain Foley would take her on.
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br />   She had suffered a lot in her twenty-eight years. When Hitler had come to power, she had been a medical student at the University of Halle. She and her boyfriend had taken to the streets to protest. They had both been arrested and despatched to concentration camps; she came out after six months, his ashes after two years. Then her father had been locked up for giving his Jewish blood in an emergency transfusion to an Aryan casualty. Desperate to get him out, she had begun an affair with Klaus, a former university friend who had joined the Gestapo. That had not ended well. But somehow, in Berlin, she had always found the resilience to battle on.

  In London, things were different. The grey misery of the city, of her family situation, of the loss of the Germany that she loved had borne down heavily on her. She also felt a burden of guilt. It was irrational, but she couldn’t make it go away. She felt guilty about her affair with Klaus. Guilty that she and her family had escaped when millions of other Jews were left in Germany to take their chances.

  And she felt guilty about Conrad. About betraying him with Klaus. About her own feebleness. About dragging him down with her. She couldn’t marry him. He came from a wealthy aristocratic British family. She was, now, a penniless, worthless Jew. Who had deceived him. Who had run away from her country.

  She knew he loved her. And she loved him, that was the worst part. That was why she didn’t want to drag him down with her. She remembered how in Berlin he had accused her of using her relationship with him to get her father out of jail, in the way she had used Klaus. He had been right.

  She had tried to explain all this to him, but he hadn’t understood. Sometimes, often, she thought: Why don’t I just say yes and marry him? In the old days, she might have done – she would have done. But now? When she had first been locked up in Moringen in 1933, she had coped well mentally. But after Klaus had discovered her affair with Conrad, he had had her arrested. The solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen and then in Lichtenburg Castle had finally broken her spirit.

  Conrad couldn’t help her now; she was beyond help. He would lead a much better life without her. She could at least give him that; it was all she could give him.

  Life was a miserable grind, with no end in sight, which was why she had persuaded her parents to go to New York. America was the country for fresh starts. Yet it was proving extremely hard to get in, and even the process of trying was making her feel guilty. There were so many Jews in Germany and Austria whose need was greater.

  But if she could do something for Captain Foley or one of his colleagues in the secret service, maybe there would be some point to her life after all.

  16

  Leiden

  The bus from Schiphol Airport dropped Conrad by the railway station, and he walked towards the centre of the town, passing canals, barges and a couple of windmills along the way. He was looking forward to seeing Theo, to finding out what the hell had happened at Venlo.

  On the bumpy flight over the North Sea, he had mulled over what his father had said to him the night before. The argument over peace or war had been inevitable, but it rattled him, nonetheless. He wished that somehow he could get his father to see his point of view.

  Lady Oakford always said that of all her children, Conrad was most like her husband. As a boy he had always been proud of that, because he was proud of his father. There could be no better badge of distinction in the post-war years than a Victoria Cross. But it wasn’t just that; there was bravery in Lord Oakford’s pacifism, in his willingness to take on a cause that was unpopular with his contemporaries and to pursue it no matter what. Lord Oakford had principles, and so did his son. And in Spain Conrad had discovered that he had bravery, or at least the ability to channel his fear into a spur to defeat the enemy and protect his comrades. When Conrad had voted against the motion that he would fight for King and Country at that infamous debate in 1933, he knew his father was proud of him; he could almost feel the old soldier standing there at his shoulder in the Union.

  Then things had gone wrong. Lord Oakford had never really liked Veronica and had disapproved of their marriage. He had certainly disapproved of Conrad’s decision to go and fight in Spain, and then to join the British Army. His father had been right about Veronica. He may also have been right about Spain: although Conrad had no doubts about opposing Franco, he had seen the government forces undermined by Soviet commissars. David Griffiths and Harry Reilly had both taken bullets in the back while they were storming Mosquito Hill, bullets from a Popular Army unit with Russian commissars.

  But Conrad was damned sure his father was wrong about appeasing Hitler.

  Then there was Anneliese. Was his father right or wrong about her? Perhaps she didn’t need Conrad after all, at least not for a while. But he hated the idea of abandoning her when she seemed so desperate.

  He had no idea what to do.

  He turned into the Rapenburg, a canal flanked by old university buildings. It was a Saturday, so the student bicycle count was down on his previous visit, but they still buzzed about him. The sun shone low over the gables, glinting off the still water of the canal and the damp orange leaves on the street running along its edge.

  The Academy was easy to spot, a lofty hall that had the appearance of a red-brick religious building from the seventeenth century, guarded by high iron gates. Conrad walked past and then doubled back, checking for watchers. He couldn’t see any, but then he wasn’t a professional and they probably would be. Somehow he doubted that in its present circumstances the British secret service in The Hague, or what was left of it, would have decided that following Conrad was its chief priority, but perhaps the Gestapo would be on his trail. He had no idea: he would have to rely on Theo.

  He walked through the iron gates and stopped at what looked like a porter’s lodge. The porter didn’t speak English but was expecting him. He led him up some ancient stairs and showed him into a small room with nothing but a table and four chairs in its centre. The porter shut the door behind him.

  There was something about the proportions of the room that reminded Conrad of a cell. He was drawn to the table, which was made of old gnarled wood and covered with carvings, initials and dates. He examined them: the oldest he could see was 1641. The walls, too, were almost entirely covered with signatures from floor to ceiling.

  Was this some kind of bizarre interrogation room? Was he going to be grilled by the Dutch secret police? Conrad shuddered as he remembered the night he had spent in the basement of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, with its own sad graffiti. His thoughts turned to Payne Best and Stevens, and Klop if he was still alive.

  After five minutes the door opened and a short man with thick dark hair, a full greying moustache, and a waistcoat and watch chain bustled in.

  ‘Mr de Lancey? I am Professor Hogendoorn.’ The man gave a sort of high-pitched giggle as he held out his hand. ‘Do you speak German, by any chance? My English is not so good.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Conrad in that language.

  ‘Excellent,’ said the professor. ‘I hope you don’t mind waiting here.’ The professor giggled again. ‘It’s known as “The Sweatbox”. It’s where the students wait before they defend their theses in the room next door. As you can see they carve their initials while they are at it. It seemed a proper place for a spy to wait.’ Another giggle. ‘More importantly, it’s empty and we cannot be overheard.’

  ‘I’m not exactly a spy,’ said Conrad, stifling his irritation.

  ‘No, of course not. Herr von Hertenberg said you were an academic from Oxford University, a historian. But I think if anyone here asks you, you should say you are a chemist. Polymers. That’s my speciality.’

  ‘I will do that,’ said Conrad. ‘Now, how do I meet Herr von Hertenberg?’

  Professor Hogendoorn ignored the question. ‘It’s good to meet an Englishman who appreciates modern Germany. But are you English? De Lancey sounds French to me.’

  ‘Huguenot,’ said Conrad. ‘My ancestors fled France a couple of hundred years a
go. One of them fought at Waterloo, but not on the French side.’

  ‘Very wise of them,’ said the professor. ‘France’s democracy is even more decayed than England’s. As a scientist, it is clear to me that Germany represents the future. Strength, efficiency, progress. We Dutch should realize that. We are not so different from the Germans. We have the scientific knowledge. We should be their partners, not their enemy. Don’t you agree, Herr de Lancey?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Conrad, wanting to shut him up. ‘Herr von Hertenberg?’

  ‘Ah, yes. You should go downstairs, go through the arch into the Botanical Gardens and walk on until you get to the observatory. Turn around and walk back here. If you are not being followed, Herr von Hertenberg will approach you. If you don’t see him, it’s because Herr von Hertenberg has spotted something, so return here tomorrow morning and we will have a different plan.’

  He led Conrad down the stairs to the entrance to the building, and shook his hand. ‘I don’t know what you are up to, but whatever it is, I wish you luck.’

  Slightly disconcerted by his brush with the professor, Conrad strolled through an arch into a courtyard, which had been turned into a formal garden of square plots of tiny hedges, in each of which were plants and labels. Given the time of year, most of the plants were brown and stunted or slumbering underground. Conrad continued on beside a large tropical glasshouse to a canal lined with sycamores. There were half a dozen people nosing around the gardens: a young couple lost in conversation with each other; three women bending down and pointing; a couple of other lone strollers. Conrad couldn’t see Theo.

  He walked along the canal as far as a grand white building with domes sprouting from its roof: the observatory, no doubt. He stopped, turned around and headed back. Unlike other canals in Leiden, this one wasn’t straight, but seemed to bend, with green space on either side. Conrad speculated it was a moat around the old town.

  And there was Theo, sitting on a bench, hunched in a coat. Conrad sat down next to him.