by Kate Hewitt
“Sophie,” Lily said quietly.
Sophie raised her eyebrows in challenge. “What is there left to do but to drink?”
Matthew took her glass and made his way back to the bar.
Sophie continued to drink steadily through the evening, despite Lily’s gentle reprimands. Matthew thought of refusing her requests for more drinks, but he suspected Sophie would just ask another GI, who would be all too willing to oblige. At least he was able to ask the bartender to water them down, but at the rate she was going that hardly mattered.
As the evening wore on, Sophie became louder and wilder, gesticulating with her arms, her bitter laugh like a bird cry, while Lily grew more anxious. It was hardly the respite from their troubles that Matthew had intended it to be, and conversation came in desperate fits and starts, with Lily doing her best to talk normally, until halfway through their steaks. While Lily was telling him about the WI effort to collect rosehips to make syrup for children, Sophie slammed her glass down so hard on the table, they all jumped.
“Oh, shut up, Lily,” she said in a voice that now carried through the whole dining room; a hundred GIs and their dates had fallen silent. Sophie pushed back from the table, standing up as she raked her hands through her hair, causing it to tumble from its French roll. “Just shut up,” she repeated, loud enough for everyone to hear. “What is the point?”
“Sophie, please,” Lily said quietly.
“What is the point?” Sophie repeated, her voice rising to something between a snarl and a wail. “What’s the point?” She gazed around the dining room, pinning people in their places with her contemptuous gaze. “You’re all sitting here guzzling your beer and sawing at your steaks, and I’m asking you, what’s the bloody point? Of any of it? If I were a man—my God, if I were a man—I wouldn’t be here, sitting back and relaxing. I’d be out there, shooting every damn German I could in the head. I’d be winning this war, I tell you, not typing a bloody letter or knitting some poor sod socks.”
“Give that girl a gun,” someone called out, and a titter ran through the room.
It wasn’t malicious, Matthew knew. It was meant kindly, a way to defuse the awful moment. He saw pity in people’s faces, but he knew Sophie didn’t see it, and he thought that was perhaps a good thing.
“Damn the whole lazy lot of you,” she cried, and then she stumbled from the room, with Lily lurching up after her.
Matthew threw some bills on the table before he hurried after them, catching up with them on the pavement outside. A light drizzle was falling, beading in their hair, and Lily’s arms were around Sophie as her sister sobbed as if she’d been split right in half.
“I’ll get a cab,” Matthew murmured.
A queue of hopeful entrants to Rainbow Corner watched the scene play out with a weary sort of curiosity that soon slouched into indifference. There had been too many similar scenes already; every street corner had become a stage for someone else’s tragedy.
Thankfully they didn’t have to bear the strangers’ apathetic scrutiny for very long. A cab came, and Matthew ushered the sisters into it.
Back at the set of rooms the Mathers now called home, Matthew stood in the kitchen with Richard, both of them silent, as Lily helped a now alarmingly docile Sophie to bed. It was as if the fight had drained right out of her, her face and hair both pale, her expression deadened. She said not a word as Lily ushered her into the bedroom, and Richard watched them with tired eyes.
“Carol would have known what to do,” he murmured. “She always knew how to handle Sophie, God bless her.” With a shake of his head, he reached for his newspaper. They no longer had a wireless.
After a few moments, Matthew excused himself and went to wait outside in the hall. Even though the older man wasn’t unfriendly, Matthew felt as if he were intruding into an intimate family moment. Out in the hallway, he could hear a baby crying upstairs and there was a persistent smell of boiled cabbage and drains. He waited, unsure if Lily would come out or not, and yet not wanting to leave.
After about twenty minutes of uncertainty, the door opened and Lily stood there, her dress rumpled, her smile tired.
“I was hoping you’d have waited,” she said quietly and then she stepped closer to Matthew, and he put his arms around her, a matter of instinct rather than decision.
Lily leaned her forehead against his shoulder and closed her eyes. Neither of them spoke. There felt like nothing to say, and yet a lifetime of conversations seemed to pass through the air between them, questions asked and answered, understanding given and taken in the mere drawing of their breaths.
“She’ll be all right,” Lily said after a few moments. “She just needs to sleep.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.” He had to say it, even though he didn’t want to. “I’ve got to report to Nottingham by four o’clock.”
Lily nodded, her eyes still closed, the top of her head brushing his chin.
“May I see you before I go? During your lunch hour, perhaps?” He knew Lily had already been given all the leave she was likely to get for her mother’s death.
“Yes, of course.” She opened her eyes and leaned back to look at him. “Where will you go, from Nottingham?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or can’t say?” She didn’t sound reproachful, just tired.
“I really don’t know. Maybe up to some POW camps in the north. Maybe back to Europe.”
Lily nodded slowly. “Do you think it will be over soon? I can’t even imagine it anymore, what it would be like to not be at war.”
“It will.” Matthew spoke with conviction, because he had to. “The Germans are surrendering in thousands. They want the war to be over. It can’t be long now.”
“If everyone wants it over, why isn’t it?” Lily said sadly. “Can one man really have so much power, to keep half the world in thrall?”
“It appears so.” Matthew heard the thrum of tension in his voice, and knew Lily heard it, too. He’d been feeling so weary these past few days, but now the old rage licked at him again, firing his insides, making his fists clench even as he held Lily to him.
She laid one hand against his cheek, her skin pale and cool. “Don’t,” she said softly, and then with her other hand she reached down and unclenched his fingers.
At noon the next day, they met at a Lyons Corner House near the station and drank cups of well-stewed tea, their knees touching under the table, his kitbag at their feet.
“How is she?” Matthew asked of Sophie, and Lily sighed.
“She went to work. She seemed determined, but I feel there’s so much she doesn’t tell me.” She glanced out the window, at a muted London going about their weary business. “We used to be so close. Perhaps when Tom visits, it will lift her spirits. If anything can—” She glanced back at him. “Have you seen much of him, over there?”
“A bit.” After those three endless days tramping through fields, searching for their unit, Matthew had spent very little time with Tom Reese, which was how he suspected they both preferred it. “He told me he’s been writing Sophie.”
“Yes, quite a lot. They’ve even talked of getting married, although I don’t know if that is just because of the war. When things seem so uncertain, people make rash promises.” She looked away, blushing a little.
Matthew tried to think of something to say, and found he couldn’t.
“Do you want to go back?” Lily asked after a moment, as she lifted her cup to her lips and then put it back down without drinking from it. “Are you—I know it sounds strange, but are you hoping to?”
“Yes.” Now that the possibility lay before him, Matthew knew he wanted it quite desperately. “I need to find out what happened to my family.”
“Gertie,” Lily said, her gaze flickering over his face. “And your brothers?”
“Franz and Arno.”
A look of surprise flashed across her features as he said their names. “Your name isn’t really Matthew, is it? Or Lawson. Of cours
e it isn’t. It can’t be.”
He smiled wryly. “My name is Matthaus. The German form.” He hadn’t said it in such a long time.
“And your last name? I can’t believe I don’t know it.” She shook her head, looking troubled by the thought, as if it actually meant anything.
“You know me, Lily,” he said, and reached for her hand across the table. Even though they’d spent so little time together, even though they’d said so little to one another, he knew it was true. She knew him, just as he knew her, a deep knowing that needed no words, no idle conversation or chitchat to prove it.
“Will you tell me what your surname is?”
He paused and then said, “Weiss. I am Matthaus Weiss.” It sounded strange on his tongue.
“Matthaus,” she repeated wonderingly, and then let out a little laugh. “Matthaus Weiss. It suits you.”
“Does it? I’m not sure I feel like that man anymore.”
Lily squeezed his hand. “It will come back.”
“What will?”
“The person you were. Your sense of self, I suppose. You might not feel it now, but he’s still there. Matthaus.” She gave him a small, teasing smile, an effort. “Can I call you that now?”
He smiled back, just a little. “If you want.”
“Do you want me to?” She looked at him seriously.
“Yes,” he said, but he wondered if he did. If he was Matthaus Weiss, he was even more of a foreigner, an alien, a Jew. Was that man someone Lily could contemplate spending her life with? Had she even thought that far ahead?
And yet maybe she would never have to. The war wasn’t over yet, for either of them. Right now he was simply spinning dreams. Anything could happen. The thought made him squeeze Lily’s hand. Another V-1 rocket… if he went back to France…
“Then I will call you that,” Lily said. “Matthaus Weiss.” She nodded, seeming satisfied. “I like it.”
“Good.” Already time was slipping away, like pearls off a string, precious and fragile, and so very fleeting. His train was due to leave in fifteen minutes. Matthew slipped his hand from hers and she nodded in understanding.
“Is it time?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Matthew paid for their barely drunk teas and slung his kitbag over his shoulder while Lily gathered her coat and handbag. A thousand scenes like this were being played out up and down the country, so familiar they were becoming trite, but they still garnered a sympathetic smile from the tired waitress at the till.
“Take care of yourselves,” she said, a command, and they both nodded like children who had to obey. If only they could.
They walked in silence towards the station, joining the stream of men in uniform and the women who were accompanying them, a parade of sacrifice and duty. With every step, Matthew had the urge to both hang back and break into a run; he wanted Lily to walk away quickly, and he wanted her to take his hand.
Everything felt impossible—the 508th waiting in Nottingham, the war in Normandy. His family in Fraustadt, or not. And Lily here, in a set of shabby rooms, her mother dead, and he’d never even told her he loved her. He couldn’t say the words now. It didn’t feel fair. It would be a conjurer’s trick, magic words that meant nothing, considering their situation. He might never see her again. Considering the 508th’s casualties so far, it was all too likely. The last thing he wanted to do was bind her to a broken promise.
And yet if he didn’t say them, she might never know. That seemed impossible too, a burden neither of them should have to bear, the unbearable ignorance of it, to journey on into the unknown without that sure and certain knowledge that pulsed inside of him.
They wound their way through the crowded station, people surging forth, a sense of brittle expectation crackling in the air like static as a train whistle blew, and another let out an impatient breath of steam.
His train was already there, GIs striding up and down the platform, laughing, smoking, catcalling, kissing their girls, all trying to cram as much of their lives as they could into a matter of minutes.
Lily turned to Matthew, an uncertain smile making her mouth waver.
“I’ll write,” she said.
“As will I—”
“You don’t have to. I know it must be hard.”
“I want to.”
She nodded, and Matthew hitched his bag more firmly over his shoulder. Now was the moment.
A soldier walking past them bumped into Lily and she stumbled slightly. Matthew reached for her arm to steady her, and then he drew her to him and kissed her softly on the lips. She yielded beneath him, and as he closed his eyes, he let the world fall away for a moment. He knew it would all come rushing back again—the noise and the duty and the fear—but for now, for this, he allowed himself to feel a burgeoning sense of promise, a fragile and yet certain hope.
He opened his eyes as she smiled up at him, and the words came naturally, as essential and elemental as breathing. “I love you.”
Her eyes widened, and her smile curved deeper. She laid one hand on his cheek, her skin soft and cool. “And I love you,” she returned simply. Suddenly it had become easy.
A whistle blew. Matthew kissed her again and then, as he stepped back, Lily gave a little wave.
“Goodbye,” she said, and he boarded the train.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
September 1944
“Let me tell you what I know.”
Matthew gazed at the anxious Wehrmacht soldier sat forward on a chair in a room in an abandoned monastery by the Waal River and did not reply.
Three days ago, after cooling their heels in Nottingham for six weeks, paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division had been dropped over Nijmegen, with an order to secure the bridges across the Waal and Maas rivers immediately, to prevent the Germans from blocking the Allies’ relentless push into Germany.
The jump, made on a sunny day in mid-September, had gone well, with all but two of the planes reaching their target areas. Matthew had landed with a dozen others in a muddy potato field, the sky full of planes and parachutes, the drone of engines filling the air and thrumming through his chest.
The nearby antiaircraft guns did not release a single shot as the sky darkened with the relentless force of the Allies’ assault. The artillerymen had their hands up in surrender as the paratroopers landed, and Matthew began his interrogations that evening, in this abandoned monastery overlooking the medieval city of Nijmegen, the 508th fighting in its streets towards the bridge over the Waal River.
Interrogations had become, for the most part, ludicrously easy—soldiers babbling in their eagerness to reveal what they knew, and to be considered helpful to the onslaught of Allies. Matthew struggled against a complicated disdain for men who so quickly abandoned the cause they’d fought for, even as he knew how evil that cause truly was, and was convinced with the utmost certainty they were doing the right thing, if not always for the right reason.
Yet many of the conscripted soldiers, he’d come to discover, were not actually Nazis. Many weren’t even Germans. They were desperate Poles, disaffected Communists, dissenters and free thinkers and undesirables of any sort who had all been forced to fight under the swastika banner. While many were volunteering information simply because they wanted to save their own skins, others did so out of a genuine desire to help the Allied cause.
Since the Allied forces had dropped down into the Netherlands, the Germans were surrendering in droves, entire units and battalions at a time, hurling their guns to the ground and their hands up into the air, so the Allies were struggling to find places to contain them. It hadn’t taken long to realize this part of the Netherlands had been a neglected corner of the Nazis’ war strategy, and was populated with units of barely trained soldiers who had been forced, often under great duress, to march and to fight.
It was Matthew’s job to ask them questions, note their information, and sift through the useless chaff to find the all-important
grains of wheat. He’d become both assured and hardened in his interrogation manner, refusing to be moved by a Communist weeping that he’d never wanted to fight, or an eighteen-year-old recruit shaking so much he couldn’t even hold the cigarette Matthew always proffered.
Matthew knew he was playing a role, whether it was soothing confidant or disdainful officer; whether he was thanking a penitent private or dismissing the information an officer offered as unimportant even when it was actually crucial. Never, ever giving the game away—for that’s what it was, a game, and yet one on which they were all gambling their lives.
That afternoon, Guy Wessel had gone with another team to attempt to convince a nearby German unit to surrender, a job considered now to be a veritable stroll in the park. Matthew was here in the monastery with a soldier who had promised to tell him whatever he liked.
The trouble, Matthew had discovered, was that what the man told him could just as easily be a lie. He had to sift the truth from the wished-for; frightened soldiers would sometimes pretend they had more knowledge in order to be helpful, which wasn’t, of course, helpful at all, especially when they plucked numbers and positions out of the air.
“What is it you think I wish to know?” he inquired of the man, his hands in his pockets as he leaned against the curved arch of the monastery’s window.
The man shrugged. “Numbers of guns? Troops?” His eyes darted to the right and left, and then back again. “I know there are explosives all along the Waal bridge—”
“We have already secured that bridge,” Matthew told him. Even though it had come at a bloody cost, with two hundred lives lost as they’d fought their way up the steep riverbanks, straight into gunfire, three days after they’d been meant to secure it.
The soldier shrugged again, looking defeated now, with no more to offer. “Do you have a cigarette?” He looked hopefully at Matthew’s pocket.
“No, I’m sorry. I do not.” The man didn’t know anything more. Matthew had done dozens, even hundreds, of interrogations by this point, and he had learned to tell when a prisoner was out of information. He nodded towards the GI waiting by the door. “Take him back, Private.”