‘I’ve no idea. That was his world, not mine.’
‘So it was just his paranoia coming through?’
‘Francis has much to be paranoid about.’
McCall refilled her cup and put the coffee pot back on the wood burner to keep warm.
‘Tell me about him, Bea... about how you first met.’
She looked through the curtains of rain at the misted window.
‘It was at a dance... such a hot night, early summer. He was so handsome... so dashing. But he was an officer and I was just a driver and it wasn’t the done thing for officers to start affairs with junior ranks. They could sleep up but not sleep down so the camp commander had him in but Francis just told him to go to hell because he was going to marry me whatever anyone said. Francis was like that, very buccaneering... could get away with murder but all the men loved him and he’d already flown a lot of raids so I suppose a blind eye was turned to us, especially because my father was an Air Marshal and no one dared upset him. Anyway, we got married later that same year... 1940. But they were cruel days, Mac... so many never came back. We lived near the base... a little cottage we found... and he’d fly off on these night missions and I’d wait in the garden at dawn and look for him landing because his plane had KMS on the side which Francis said stood for Kiss Me Sweetheart but I knew if I didn’t see it, I’d probably be a widow.’
The cloying, honey-butter scent of the daffodils, part bouquet, part wreath, saturated the air they breathed. The rain did not relent.
‘And the wedding itself... was that a splendid affair?’
‘It was up at the church here. All the village turned out.’
‘What a glamorous couple you must have made.’
‘We did, rather. Haven’t we ever shown you the film of it?’
‘What film? I never knew it’d been filmed.’
‘You know Francis. He filmed anything that moved. He got one of his crew to do it, not very well as it turned out but we’re all recognisable.’
‘I must see it. Where will it be?’
‘Somewhere about, I suppose. All his films are in here, mouldering away.’
It took twenty minutes to locate a Kodak box marked Big Day, lost behind a row of ring binders. McCall wound it into the Eumig. Bea waited, suspended between joy and anguish at what she was about to re-live. Then the sandstone porch of St Mary and All Angels appeared on screen and Bea and Francis walked into the bright sunshine of a September day long ago.
McCall’s earliest recollections of her were not wrong. She was truly a radiant princess, casting her cinematic smile at the laughing well wishers who would throw their confetti for ever more.
Francis looked every inch the sardonic immortal McCall remembered – the man who had pitted his life against the Nazi hordes and won. He stood proud in the Number One uniform of a Flight Lieutenant with patch pockets and two braids on his cuff. They gazed lovingly at each other before Francis took Bea in his arms, kissed her for the camera.
The shot changed to show Garth Hall’s front lawn set with trestle tables under the shading trees and laid for a feast of country food not available on ration coupons. There were bottles of wine from the old judge’s cellar, chickens and beef and a keg of beer to toast the joyous couple. Bea passed happily between her guests in a woollen shirt dress, slightly waisted, with bell sleeves and a corsage of creamy white lilies pinned at the left shoulder.
‘I pressed those flowers later. They must still be in the attics, I think.’
‘Is that Mrs Bishop waiting on?’
‘Yes... she’d not long married herself.’
Some of the lost faces at the feast danced across the grass to a wind-up gramophone with a polished brass horn and in her head, Bea could almost hear Lew Stone’s band playing. The camera position moved again, this time from the other side of the tables to reveal the old house and the entire pastoral wedding scene in a last, elegiac composition in the setting sun.
Just before the footage tailed out, one of the airmen – rather serious-looking and little more than twenty – walked across the picture, turned and looked into the camera then made towards the open porch door of Garth Hall. McCall shivered. He knew that face... knew it so well. But why wouldn’t he? It was almost his own.
*
The rain stopped and McCall took Bea home. Mrs Craven said Francis had not moved. The doctor rang to say an ambulance would collect Francis at nine next morning.
Bea looked unsettled by the speed of events. McCall went to check on Francis. He lay foetally in the bed where he had been born and McCall feared for the visions tormenting his subconscious. Was he up in his bomber, sweating with terror or down below in the smouldering wasteland with the corpse rats or the fattening maggots and putrefying remains of those whose unknown lives he had blown out? Who wouldn’t lose their mind at such thoughts? McCall had to get back to Garth Woods.
*
The wind still carried through the trees, water still polished the smooth black pebbles in Pigs’ Brook and fire still burned in the dacha’s pot bellied stove.
Yet everything seemed different to McCall. It took only a minute to re-lace the wedding footage into the Eumig, for it to clack through the cogs and gates. And there was his father, young and alive and in this place – Garth Hall. Here was the man who had put McCall into his allotted time and space yet left little or no evidence linking one to another.
He ran the film again and again. He had to know his father, to see into that nervous, uncertain face, the close cut of his fair hair, the uniform that clothed his slight frame, even how he moved in the seven seconds it took for him to walk from the wedding breakfast to the porch. Seven seconds of light and shade and shadows on a tiny strip of emulsified film. It was not much to make up for a lifetime of not knowing.
Chapter Fourteen
Two paramedics arrived with the ambulance and led Francis through Garth Hall’s red and black tiled hallway.
‘Come on, Mr Wrenn. You be a good boy for us.’
Francis looked bewildered. Eyes which once danced with brilliance were now lifeless and dull. It was as if the sun had set on his soul. Again, McCall could not square this man with the picture in his head.
‘Are we going to the embassy?’
McCall had no words to reply. Drops of overnight dew fell on Francis from the wisteria above the porch and ran down his cheeks. McCall watched him shuffle out across the slab-stone threshold... one father passing the ghost of another.
His captors manoeuvred him into the ambulance. They wrapped an orange blanket around his shoulders and fastened a safety belt across his middle. Bea climbed in and sat beside him. They held hands then the ambulance doors closed like curtains at a crematorium and they were gone.
McCall followed on an hour later. The hospital had been a Victorian asylum, planted with flowers and cedars to soften its hard brick face. But the windows remained barred. McCall walked down a long narrow corridor painted cream and green. Ludford Ward was overheated and smelled of urine and institutional food. The thin arms of the nearly dead waved at him from seas of white sheets, drowning.
‘Come to your Daddy.’
‘When can I go home?’
‘Are you the doctor?’
McCall tried to look straight ahead, not wanting to see into their eyes. Francis sat on a plastic-covered chair in the ward’s communal area, wearing a hospital gown of faded blue cotton. Bea stood next to him. McCall had to force himself tread those final steps... to stand in plain sight, complicit in having Francis put the wrong side of Bedlam’s iron gratings. Somewhere, deep within his disordered mind, Francis might remember what he had lost – and who had stolen it from him.
‘Where am I?’
‘You’ve not been very well, dear. The doctors are going to make you better again.’
‘Has the ambassador arrived yet?’
Bea and McCall looked at each other. The pace of Francis’s decline had thrown them both.
McCall had much to ask him about h
is natural father now he had watched the wedding film. Edward McCall had not really seemed entirely real till then – just a small figure lost in the landscape of the past, defined only by those who had been there. But seven seconds of mute footage changed everything... that half smile then the short walk into Garth Hall where his son, yet to be born, would live and be brought up. Here at last was something tangible, some shared ground between them on which he might find and build his own memories.
This was not to deny the affection he felt for Bea and Francis, simply to affirm his debt to those who had put him on the earth. What was harder to confront was the guilt of failing to do so long before.
*
Bea loved riding in the Morgan. She would want the hood down and the wind in her face, to feel young again and remember those happy-sad wartime days, spinning down country lanes with all those laughing boys who flew into the night but were no more.
McCall drove her from the hospital to the mountain wilderness of Long Mynd where kestrels hovered in the cloudless silence to swoop for a kill amid the purple heather.
‘I hated seeing you get in the ambulance with him... those doors closing.’
‘Old age is like that, Mac – doors closing, one by one.’
McCall parked and they got out to look west towards the poet’s blue remembered hills. He wondered if Bea might cry but was not surprised when she didn’t. Like Francis, Bea had warrior ancestors, too. The drive back to Garth took them by a carved fertility figure on a Norman church. It was believed to ensure better harvests and fill the wombs of barren women so they might be prized like others.
McCall deliberately mentioned the wedding footage again.
‘Why did you never show it to me before?’
‘I’m sure we did, years ago.’
‘No. I’d have remembered.’
‘You’d only have been little.’
‘My father was in it, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s why we’d have shown it to you.’
‘Well, I’ve no memory of it.’
‘How did it make you feel, seeing him in life?’
‘I used to think that what you never had, you never missed.’
‘And now?’
‘I’ve changed my mind. Is there any film of my mother?’
‘No, nothing. We never had any contact with her, I’m afraid.’
*
It could have been the debilitating consequence of illness or the unravelling of all he held dear but McCall felt physically and spiritually empty, needing to hold tight to someone or something that would not give way. They arrived back at Garth and he wanted only space and air. He left Bea ringing Mr Fewtrell, the Wrenn family solicitor in Ludlow. Francis’s complicated affairs would require much sorting out. McCall went instead to Garth Woods to pay a last homage.
He sat on the wooden bench Francis had built by Pigs’ Brook. He closed his eyes as Francis would do and let the sound of water and wind carry his elemental, wordless prayer to whatever force directed men’s lives. Francis had died in all but the final diagnosis and had left them in a limbo of grief. What was there to do but hope it would end soon – and that there might be forgiveness for even admitting such a thought into his head.
The pot-bellied stove in the dacha was cold. McCall brushed out the ashes then filed away all the old RAF pictures and reports Francis had left lying about. He stowed the Eumig in its case and put the reels of film back in their yellow boxes on the shelf.
When all this was done, he took a last look round. Never again would he stand here with Francis, never sit in the battered armchairs talking about battles and war or listening to all those coded stories of his unreported skirmishes with the Soviets.
McCall wept then, wept for all that had gone and all he had never known.
Chapter Fifteen
Some of the attic letters lay unread on Bea’s bureau. Their echoes of Empire, who had done well at polo or badly at bridge, were of little interest now... not with Francis so tortured. One of Bea’s uncles suffered the same way. He physically survived the Great War but in his head, remained trapped in that continent of mud and corpses from which no man ever truly escaped.
Mac had told her of Francis’s remorse for bombing German cities. He must have forgotten their honeymoon in London. She never would... those Nazi bombers laying waste to all the tenements along the Thames. So many thousands of people were to die in fires which made the sun grow pale. Her mind had archived the alien drone of Hitler’s air force. It could still wake her at night... that and the nightmarish vision of his doll-like troops, marching in perfect unison through Prague without a soul between them. Memory stores fragments of experience like these, keeps them safe for when they will be needed.
The war years of Bea’s marriage were book-ended by atrocities.
She remembered a newsreel... a steel-bladed bulldozer pushing a hill of human remains towards a mass grave in a liberated concentration camp. Naked, emaciated bodies slicked with watery excrement, people without names or dignity or gender, flopping into a pit – offal from a butcher’s block. Others, not yet dead, lay in their own diseased waste on shelves in verminous, unlit barracks and stared into the unblinking camera, living skulls hanging like lanterns in hell.
History had never recorded sights like this before.
When the cinema’s house lights came up, Bea did not move – could not move. Arie had not exaggerated. This had been Hitler’s plan for every Jew in every shtetl, town and city where they could be whipped into trains of cattle wagons for transportation to these abattoirs at the edge of the universe.
For Bea, the cultured German people were responsible for all this. The inheritors of Beethoven and Bach, Nietzsche and Goethe, transmuted into a nation of baying executioners.
Their jurists legalised murder, engineers and architects perfected the machinery of mass killing, doctors selected who should undergo barbarous experiments.
And all the common people joined in to man the guns and gates against those marked down for extermination. Bea was overwhelmed by a powerless rage at what she had seen. For her, this nation had anointed itself with the essence of wickedness, distilled it from the human tar pouring from their crematoria chimneys. Francis should feel no guilt.
Her hatred festered within her like grief at the loss of a child.
The ward sister rang Bea to say Francis had spent a restful night. Bea never trusted hospitals. Her father had barely lasted five minutes in one – not that she grieved much for him. He never forgave her for siding with her mother, still less for Prague and the Jew boy. How fitting that when Daddy departed this life, so Arie returned to it.
She never expected to meet her lover again. It was less painful to believe Arie killed in the war. Bea drew comfort from her mental image of the son they should have had. She even gave him a name – Liad. It meant ‘eternal’ in Hebrew.
It was possible for Bea to hear the sound of his laughter, to feel his little arms around her neck, his tears against her face. Sometimes, walking in sunshine, Bea fancied she saw his shadow at her side, holding onto her skirt.
Liad was real and would never leave her... but then, neither would the guilt.
…the parcel in her pocket weighs heavy in her hand though it’s only small, no bigger than a kitten and just as soft, wrapped in sheets of tissue paper…
Where was the absolution for that?
*
St Clement Dane is packed with bottle-nosed dignitaries and politicians for the Air Marshal’s memorial service, all wanting their names in The Times. Francis departs early for a meeting in Victoria he cannot miss. The choir finishes Lead Us Heavenly Father. The padre blesses the congregation. Bea walks to the marble-floored vestibule. She dutifully glad-hands the uniformed buffers who loathed the man whose praises they had just sang. Then she has had enough. Outside, a September wind gusts off the Thames and lifts the black veil of her hat. She could cross over to Essex Street where Daddy’s solicitor waits with forms to sign. Or she could go the o
ther way, between the buses and cabs crawling along Fleet Street where there are coffee shops and time to think. A world can turn on such an inconsequential moment. She goes left and edges through the traffic towards the plane trees outside the High Court.
The pavement is a swim of jostling office workers, barristers, reporters and clerks. Rival newspaper vendors shout their invocations like believers at a shrine. Bea looks back along the Aldwych. And in the press of people approaching, her gaze is drawn to a life that is hers and a face which is back from the dead. Arie is walking towards her. Arie, her persecuted Christ, greyer now, leaner. To see him is to doubt the evidence of her own eyes. How can this be explained, this second coming? Are the orbits of their worlds always destined to pass so dangerously close?
Bea feels an almost electrically charged tremor of excitement. But she is nervous, too, afraid almost. She tries breathing deeply. Arie gets closer. He walks not two yards from the tree which conceals her. He limps slightly, appears more tormented than she remembered, brutalised even. But who wouldn’t after what has happened?
She buttons her long angora coat for warmth and follows him... as she knows she always will. The ring on her finger looks gold but is turning to pinchbeck with every moment.
Arie folds up the collar on his brown jacket. It makes him look like a black marketer with something to hide. A flat-bed truck loaded with huge rolls of newsprint reverses between them and into a delivery bay. She loses sight of him for a second and panics. But he is only across the street. She steps into the road. A taxi swerves. A car horn sounds. She makes it to the other side and sees Arie approach a blue-chinned man in a trilby on the corner of Bouverie Street. Bea holds back.
Arie pauses by the man and says something discreetly. As he turns to leave, an envelope or small package passes between them. Bea only sees this because she is looking. No one else would notice as their coat sleeves brush together. The man disappears into the crowd. Arie carries on towards Ludgate Hill.
A Place Of Strangers Page 9