‘Well, that’s Francis, isn’t it ? He’s your special new Daddy.’
‘And where’s my other Mummy, the one I used to have?’
‘She’s gone away, my lovely.’
‘Is she coming back one day?’
‘I don’t think she is, no.’
‘Where is she, then?’
‘A long way away so it’s best you forget her. You’re Bea and Francis’s, now.’
So he does... and he is. They possess him, body and soul and mould the surrogate son they wanted. But McCall lacks their warrior streak. He is made of a much lesser clay – easily broken, hard to mend. Why didn’t Helen realise that?
‘I need to get away from all of this, Mac.’
‘All what? What do you mean?’
‘From London, all these wedding plans. It’s getting too much for me.’
‘Why don’t we go up to Garth for a long weekend?’
‘No, I want some time for me. A bit of peace and quiet on my own.’
‘Something’s wrong. What is it?’
‘Nothing’s wrong, honestly.’
‘So where will you go?’
‘I haven’t decided yet... somewhere wild, somewhere by the sea.’
‘On your own?’
‘Of course on my own. Silly.’
She holds his gaze for a moment longer than needed. Does he know then? Is this the moment he realises? She touches his cheek and smiles so he cannot see behind her soft green eyes. A taxi arrives. Her bag is already packed. Everything is planned. No words are spoken. So what remains fixed in amber from that day? Her marmalade hair, back-lit by the sun, new jeans, stone-washed, long legs wherein he would never lie again. Then she is gone with the life growing inside her.
He would sit in St Mary and All Angels. Here, they would have wed, have had their children baptised. McCall imagined all the revenant faces of those whose imbricated lives of farce and tragedy had played out in Garth, staring down the centuries at him, waiting for the next act... or the last call. After McCall, there might be nothing. Then he would have failed everyone.
*
Wintry farmland blurred by the carriage window as Evie made herself small in a corner seat with a book she could barely settle to read. Her mind was taken up with McCall, the lost boy, Francis going senile, Bea – clever, shrewd, wicked old Bea. Bea asked and never told. What a spy she would have made. Only the vetters knew something of Evie’s background – and now this old lady. How interesting. It was a question of trust, of unburdening oneself. And feeling the better for it.
The train came to an unscheduled halt between bare, tractor-rutted fields and ditches of dirty melt water from the thawing snow.
Evie shivered. She was reminded of home, of Rixton Moss and the peaty, black earth that heaved and shifted and could swallow a house. Gales would cut clean across the flat land from the Irish Sea, tearing the sedge-fringed birch woods and forcing smoke back down their chimney.
She would sit with Dad, still grime-eyed from his shift at Astley Green but with nothing to get washed for anymore. She had gone back to Dublin... his wife, her mother. Gone to whoring where she came from. Evie had not understood. Not then.
Mum had unruly red hair, too. Sometimes, father would look at daughter and she could not be sure if he loved or hated what he saw. They said bodies could rise from the peat, sacrificed centuries before with the fear still set in the face. Evie would dream of this, of finding her mother floating in one of the long, dark dykes on the Moss, her hair trailing behind like a wake of blood.
*
McCall had his chest X-rayed at hospital and was told he was still not fit to go back to work. That morning, he saw Mrs Craven who had inherited the role of Garth’s cleaner and occasional cook from her mother, Winnie Bishop. He asked after the old lady’s health.
‘Doing her best but showing her years like the rest of us.’
‘I could do with a walk. Maybe I’ll go and see her.’
McCall’s affection for Mrs Bishop ran deep. It was to her he looked during Bea’s long trips abroad with Francis. If Bea represented the manorial, Mrs Bishop was the village. And Winnie had her own reasons to covet McCall.
Garth Woods were eerily still that morning, dripping damp with fog. He crossed Pigs’ Brook and walked up the church field to the old people’s bungalows which backed onto the cemetery. Mrs Bishop greeted him in a clean white pinny, freshly ironed.
‘I’ve seen you look better, young Francis. Pneumonia isn’t to be sneezed at so you take care not to do too much too soon.’
Her kitchen table never lacked for cakes she had just baked. As she went to boil a kettle for tea, so the mournful church bell rang. Through the bungalow’s patio doors, McCall could just make out the black-caped vicar and a string of stooping mourners on a slow march through the mist. Mrs Bishop stood beside him.
‘There’s another one who’s got the secret.’
She was full of folk sayings and bits of country lore – could never abide knives left crossed on a plate, would not pass another person on the stairs. Misfortune needed no encouragement for Winnie Bishop.
Hers was slate and chalk wisdom. Book learning counted for little but she knew right from wrong.
Mrs Bishop fussed over McCall as she always had, making sure his plate was full and he was warm before the gas fire, shelved with the Toby jugs and pot dogs he remembered on her cottage mantelpiece above the cast iron range where she had cooked and he had felt safe. She handed him a fold of paper.
‘I’ve been clearing out. You have this... isn’t much.’
It was a crudely printed coloured map of the world at war in 1916, draped with Union Jacks and patriotic servicemen.
‘Got this for knitting a jumper for Empire Day.’
To Winnie Gwilt, who has helped to send comfort to the brave Sailors and Soldiers of the British Empire who are fighting to uphold Honour, Freedom and Justice.
‘It’s lovely, Mrs B, but wouldn’t your daughter want it?’
‘Doesn’t like history things, her. You have it, Francis.’
Few people ever used his proper name. Mrs Bishop always had from those first blank days when she had fed him beef tea and boiled eggs and let him play with anything he liked in the kitchen scullery at Garth Hall. She knew about the car crash and told Alf, her husband, she just wanted to take the poor little mite home because he didn’t weigh more than a ha’porth of copper and couldn’t speak a word from shock.
McCall smiled at her fondly – smaller than in memory, colour gone from her pot doll cheeks, her hair no more than a winter frost.
‘It’s really kind, Mrs B. A lovely present.’
‘I’ve writ some words on the back.’
He read them, smiling, knowing she meant every one. Then she produced an envelope of photographs and spread them across the table like Tarot cards. McCall had not seen these before – little Box Brownie prints of Alf, tie-less and tipsy and leaning against the chrome radiator of his Lanchester outside some pub, Mrs Bishop looking self-conscious on a day out, wearing other people’s cast-offs and hoping it didn’t show.
And there was a picture of McCall, no more than seven, laughing on Mrs Bishop’s back step with David, the boy she would lose to leukaemia and who now lay on the other side of her garden wall. McCall smiled to himself and shook his head.
‘God fits the back for the burden, Francis – ’
Both boys were in short pants, sandals, home made pullovers and happy. David was a late baby and all the more loved for that. But in the picture, his dark eyes were already hollowing out. She must have known, even then. She would have to give him back.
‘– but Alf was never the same after. Killed him in the end, it did.’
‘I can just about remember David’s funeral.’
‘I can never forget it.’
‘What a heartbreak for you.’
‘If you’d not been there to look after, Francis, I think I’d have done myself in.’
McCall thought he s
hould go. But Mrs B kept ruching the edge of her pinny and clearing her throat. She had more to impart, something bottled up and corked with age.
‘Never seemed right to me, not fair at all.’
‘You mean about David?’
‘Not just that though the Lord knows it hurt enough.’
‘What then, Mrs B?’
She picked at the tablecloth, biding her time. When her words came, they were as bitter as only the old can make them, dried in a heart shrivelled by hurt.
‘Them at Garth... didn’t always want you, you know... not as much as me.’
‘Bea and Francis? But they took me in when I had no one.’
‘Not your own flesh and blood, they wasn’t.’
‘No, but they were the next best thing – ’
‘– as I could’ve been. I prided in you. I was as close to you as them, wasn’t I?’
‘Of course – as good as any mother to me, you were.’
‘Well, there’s some that forgot that in all their goings-on.’
He walked home through the graveyard where David lay. The village children had filed into the dark church from the sunshine of their playground to sing All Things Bright And Beautiful for a friend who would not be coming back. McCall’s abiding memory of that day was being scared by all squawking birds falling about his head from the bell tower. David had been like a brother. But he, too, became someone else who vanished from his life for reasons he had not understood.
Maybe McCall had done something wrong or they did not like him. Until now, he had never put Bea and Francis in that number.
He was tired after his walk and went to his bedroom to re-read the words Mrs Bishop had written on the back of the map she’d given him.
To my boy Francis, to remember me by. Affectionately yours, Mrs B.
He opened his memory box and took out the envelope he received at school many years before with the photograph of him as a baby with his parents. Allowing for a bit of arthritis or failing sight, they had been written by the same person – no scholar but neat and tidy and legible.
McCall always suspected Mrs Bishop sent the picture. What he could not work out was why – or how she got it.
Chapter Ten
So Evie’s father had disowned her. Snap.
*
Bea leaves St Ermine’s Hotel and collects Arie from the café. They disappear into the discreet London smog, arms linked, safe from those who would not approve. Bea tells Arie that Casserley is interested in him.
‘He said they’re planning something special.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Casserley wouldn’t say but his people will contact you.’
They hurry along pavements lacquered by the harsh electric light spilling from little shops and restaurants. There is something of Prague’s menace about the darkened streets and the strangers passing by, eyes watchful from beneath the brims of hats. Bea, twelve years younger than Arie, intelligent but self-centred and mercurial, feels that aphrodisiac sense of power flowing from being privy to secrets. Matters of life and death are in her hands. She is taking part in history. But Arie says nothing will prepare her – or the world – for what is to come.
‘How can you know this?’
‘How does a poet know anything?’
‘But why would the Germans want to kill all the Jews? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Don’t you know? We and the Bolsheviks are conspiring to dominate the world.’
‘No one can possibly believe that.’
‘Hitler says it’s true so the German people believe it.’
‘But they’re so cultured. Everyone knows.’
‘Yet they will hunt us down like vermin until we are no more.’
Bea has no reference points – no folk memory of pogroms or burning ghettoes or a thousand years of Jew-baiting and blood letting. Arie says even those who have will not understand, either.
They reach Bea’s apartment where Arie will stay until the future is decided. Her father, the Air Marshal, will not be informed. Bea plans to see him in his rooms in Bentinck Street at the weekend. She had telephoned and told him more of her escape from Czechoslovakia and the peril she had been in.
‘We’re all in peril, Beatrice. That’s why there will be a war soon.’
Days pass. Arie goes out most mornings. He does not say where he has been or what he has done. Bea knows better than to ask but feels excluded and does not like that. He never returns before supper, sometimes even later.
Now he stands with his back to her, leaning against the sink. The trousers of his dark suit shine with wear. He looks through the net curtains at the children playing outside, swinging on a rope tied to the arm of a gas lamp. Their shouts and laughter come through the slightly sulphurous air. Bea wonders about Arie’s family. Where are they this night? She dare not ask – and he never talks of them.
Arie boils a kettle of water for tea. She notices how noiselessly he moves. He pours. His fingers are taperingly long, like a musician’s. He sips his tea which he takes with lemon, not milk, and one spoonful of white sugar.
Then Bea’s telephone rings out. The unexpectedness of the bell startles her. She rises to answer it but Arie is up from his chair first. He motions her to stay still and quiet then goes into the hallway and lifts the receiver. Bea hears him talking in a low voice but not in English. Arie returns and finishes his drink. He offers no explanation. His eyes are hooded and black. He is not sleeping properly.
‘Arie... look, I must know. I will be able to help you, won’t I?’
‘In what way do you mean?’
‘To help with whatever assignment Casserley gives you.’
Arie pours more tea for them, taking his time to find the right words.
‘Beatrice, what is to come will not be like Prague.’
‘No, I realise that.’
‘This war started for some of us long since and in time, you will see what happened in Prague was just a game... a little game like those children outside might play.’
‘It didn’t feel like a game to me. It just made me want to fight the Nazis even more.’
‘And so you will but you must not hope for something Major Casserley cannot allow. The war that is coming will be fought in many different ways and places. Do you understand?’
Bea understands all right. But she is not to have another starring role like Prague. She feels cheated and angry like a child that cannot get its own way.
‘Who was that on my telephone?’
‘Someone you would not know.’
‘Maybe not but who was it?’
‘Beatrice, please... I am humbled by all your kindnesses but I cannot answer.’
‘It was a woman, wasn’t it?’
‘No, not a woman – a comrade.’
Why should she believe him? She gets up and washes their cups at the sink so he does not see the tears she cannot stop. If it is not another woman then he is going to his death with Casserley and she will have brought it about and will suffer like all those widows after the Great War. Suddenly, she is aware of time passing.
‘How long before Casserley is ready?’
‘Soon, very soon.’
‘And then?’
‘I’ll be sent for special training.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘We’re not without friends, Beatrice.’
‘They couldn’t help you in Prague, could they?’
‘No, then there was only you.’
‘And why can’t it be me again... both of us – working here for Casserley?’
‘Understand this, Beatrice. There is a rope around our necks wherever we fight.’
‘Might you be sent abroad?’
‘I will be sent to wherever I’m of most use. Those will be my orders.’
Bea is unable not to cry openly now. Arie comes to her and holds her. He has not done this before, not in this way. There is a new tenderness about him... a compassion for her and maybe for himself. Arie
knows they are trapped in this hour glass together, helpless against the gravity of events.
They kiss, gently at first. She is aware of the roughness of his chin and the tight, tensile feel of his shirted back. It excites her like nothing she has ever experienced before. Bea knows what is to happen next. It is as if she has been created for this moment, this sweet meeting of destinies, pre-ordained like their first had been.
She prays he needs her as much as she wants him. Whatever she had been given in her indulged life was as nothing when set against her longing to possess this Christ-faced man.
She leads him to the bed where none but her has ever slept. The light outside is failing. The children have finished their game. Bea unbuttons her dress and allows it to fall to the floor. Arie watches but does not move. She takes off her remaining clothes, indifferent to modesty or convention and stands before him like an offering to the gods who cast them together.
‘Come, Arie... for me. Please.’
In a moment more, they are in bed. She takes him unto herself, takes the life which is hers and sustains her own, caressing, biting, loving the whip-cord body that writhes in spasm in her arms till he is spent and wordless in the dark by her side.
They lie covered by a white sheet like the newly dead.
Night passes. Bea stirs. She hugs Arie who has not slept. He is warmed by the closeness but afraid of the breaking dawn. She makes tea and brings it to him. They sit, backs against the bed head, still naked. Bea is vibrantly alive, initiated at last into womanhood and all its power. But Arie’s face is grey with guilt. Bea fears he will now talk of the wife he must surely have and the children he has lost in the east. She kneels astride him and takes his face in her hands.
‘What is it, Arie... what’s wrong?’
‘Why did you choose me?’
‘I didn’t choose you. It was written, it was meant to be.’
‘I do not believe in predestination, Beatrice. We all have free will.’
‘Yes, but in that queue, in the embassy yard... I saw you and I knew.’
‘You knew what?’
‘That our lives were somehow meant to join together.’
‘So because of a stranger coming to that place, I should live while others die?’
A Place Of Strangers Page 6