A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  ‘When? When are you coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know yet but there will be something I’ll need your help to do.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘It’s safer you don’t know for now.’

  ‘You’re lying, Arie. I know you are. You just want me to go quietly.’

  ‘No, there isn’t time to explain but just think of Prague. It’ll be like that again.’

  ‘I love you Arie.’

  ‘I know – and I love you both.’

  Before she can say another word, he takes a packet from his overcoat pocket and gives it to her. Inside are the photographs they had taken on Westminster Bridge. He’d had them specially developed.

  ‘In photographs, it is possible to be happy forever.’

  ‘Please don’t go, Arie.’

  ‘I have no choice.’

  Then Arie smiles with those infinitely sad eyes and is gone into the crowd and the rolling waves of steam from the train which pulls him out of Bea’s world once more.

  *

  Alone in the empty flat one evening a week later, Bea answers the telephone. A woman asks for Mr Wrenn in a voice which is hesitant and unsure. For an irrationally jealous moment, Bea suspects Francis is having an affair of his own.

  ‘I need to speak to him, you see. It’s very important.’

  ‘Have you tried his office?’

  ‘I don’t know the number.’

  ‘But how do you know our home number?’

  ‘Mr Wrenn gave it to me.’

  ‘Well he’s not here. Is there anything I can help you with?’

  ‘No, only Mr Wrenn can help me.’

  ‘Who shall I say called, then?’

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘Elizabeth who?

  But the caller’s money runs out and the line goes dead. After supper, Bea remembers to give Francis the message. There is a slight distance between them since Arie left. But Bea’s period has come again and these perpetually barren days create their own friction. Francis puts down his official papers when he hears Elizabeth’s name. Bea wants to know who she is.

  ‘She’s Edward McCall’s wife.’

  ‘Didn’t he serve with you?’

  ‘Yes, rear gunner. He was at our wedding. Morose sort of chap.’

  Bea remembers – troubled and darkly introverted but joined to Francis and the rest till death by the terrors they had seen and experienced over Germany.

  ‘But why’s his wife ringing you?’

  ‘Edward’s still in a bad way, apparently.’

  ‘So she’s rung you before?’

  ‘Yes, but you know I keep in contact with all the old crew.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He’s been drinking all the housekeeping, apparently.’

  ‘Selfish pig. But that’s no concern of yours, is it?’

  ‘It is, rather. I’ll have to drive down and see if he can’t be made to mend his ways.’

  *

  The clouds shifted across Garth Woods, shutting out the sun. Bea felt chilled and thought about getting home. In her hands were the remaining two photographs Arie gave her all those years before. If the first pair brought back memories of joy, these revived only hatred and the desolation of incalculable grief.

  Six million dead.

  Say it quickly. It could be the entire population of London... all murdered.

  Children, women, men, old, young, sick, fit, clever, stupid, deaf, blind, gassed, shot, hung, beaten, tortured, burned. All Jews.

  How could the human mind conceive such a crime? Who could be an instrument in this meticulous slaughter and ever sleep again?

  Bea held a picture of some who had found this no trouble at all.

  Nine men pose in grey army tunics, fastened to the neck with seven silver buttons. Most are about forty, some a little younger. They carry side arms in polished leather holsters and have just arrived in a town square wearing black riding boots polished till they gleam. Each has a stout suitcase with heavy brass locks. Their rifles are reared up on the paving stones like the poles of a wigwam. The unit’s tenth man takes the photograph to send home to his wife and children for the album about Papa’s war.

  There is little of note about any of them. One has prominent ears, another rather thick lips. Two more have aped their Fuhrer and grown absurd toothbrush moustaches. They are tradesmen or innkeepers or men passing by on a tram, never to be remembered again.

  They are also killers, these fathers and husbands and brothers.

  This is an Einsatzgruppe – a squad of travelling executioners from the SS whose function was to murder Jews wherever they could be cornered by local collaborators in every country the Nazis over ran.

  They are the monsters within us all.

  Never forget.

  That is what Arie told Bea. Nor would she. His fourth picture made sure of that. A line of women and children stare from beyond death itself. They plead with the viewer to pause a while, to think what they and their issue might one day have become. Here were some of the six million as they wait to be murdered – the real faces of the abstract arithmetic.

  Bea would always try to imagine their names and stories, how their voices sounded and how warm their smiles would have been. The women might just have come from market in headscarves and pretty floral dresses. The children are in bonnets and boots and white socks. Those too tired or too young are carried. One mother’s fingers are spread in support behind her baby’s tiny head.

  And just beyond where they all wait are the cattle trucks that had brought them to this spot.

  There are no Nazis visible, no guns or whips or savage dogs. Yet they are there, out of frame, waiting... but not wanting to appear in a family photo album.

  Bea’s gaze went – as it always did – to the face of a girl of about twelve. She reminded her of the prescient child she had cared for in Prague – thin straight legs, clumpy black shoes and gripping a small woven straw basket in her right hand.

  And in that eye-blink of time as the shutter opened and closed, so her other hand goes to her gaping mouth to cover that human reaction of shock and fear. She has suddenly realised what is about to happen on the ramp of the Auschwitz railhead that day.

  This picture always had the power to tear at Bea’s heart. She felt such an affinity with these women and their children. Was not the father of her child a Jew? Hadn’t she been as forlorn as these pitiable mothers when her baby’s blood ran through her hands?

  Her son should have been a grown man by now – a scholar, a poet, a musician and so much more. She could not bear to think about it. The Nazis did not just kill the living. They stole the future.

  Bea looked at the girl again. History is always black and white. It makes such dread events seem so long ago, less to do with us now. And that is a blessing for our God would never allow such cruelty to happen under a clear blue sky... would He? But Bea knew from Arie’s picture that the sun did shine on Auschwitz that day.

  The little girl threw a shadow across the earth where she waited. That was all she would ever be.

  That is what she had understood.

  *

  A sudden faintness welled over Bea. She rose unsteadily knowing she must get back to the house. Her heart was thumping out of her chest, her legs ready to buckle. She opened the gate onto the orchard lawn and heard Mac’s car. She cried out and McCall came running with Evie close behind. Bea fell then, unable to stop herself folding beneath the apple trees as surely as if she had taken a sniper’s bullet.

  McCall was with her in a moment, full of guilt and remorse at his anger but aware he could yet be cheated out of the truth.

  ‘No, Bea – please. Not now.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, leave it, Mac. I’ll go and phone an ambulance.’

  ‘Bea? Bea? Listen to me.’

  But she was slipping from him, seized by the same fear of those forever condemned to die with her on the grass where she lay.

  Chapter Twenty Two<
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  Garth Hall was hidden behind scaffolding and long drapes of protective blue plastic, waiting for the builder to start work on the roof. A slight wind ruffled the sheeting and waves of aquamarine-tinted sunlight lapped through every window. It seemed to Evie as if the house was sinking to the bottom of the sea.

  McCall still was not back so she was alone in this lost world of other lives. Going from room to room, she experienced again that feeling of being gathered by the spirits in this place, even before those of Bea and Francis had departed. Evie did not believe in a god’s will theory of pre-ordination. That denied all human choice in the infinite randomness of existence. Yet everything happening to her now simply felt as if it was meant to be.

  She sat at Bea’s dressing table, a trespassing child trying on a brooch of Baltic amber then spraying her neck with perfume from a cut glass globe. The room filled with the warm summer scent of azaleas. And as she breathed it in, so Evie caught the memory of another’s face, imprisoned within her own in the mirror.

  She had thought her mother beautiful, back-combing her Titian hair, reddening her cheeks with lipstick. Then it would be a kiss and a smile and she would disappear, a painted moth drawn by the arc of light over the port of Liverpool which glowed like the setting sun in the night sky. Evie imagined her in a ballroom, its arched windows swagged with velvet, an orchestra playing and handsome men turning as she glided by. She could be gone for days, to sing and dance who knew where and without a thought to all the love she had left behind.

  Evie raised the lid on Bea’s little ivory musical box and listened to its tinny, sad song.

  Good night, go to sleep.

  Bea must not die. It was not only McCall who didn’t know her well enough yet.

  *

  Bea survived her blue-lit ride to hospital but the stroke she suffered weakened her entire right side. Her speech might never fully return. They gave her a pad and pencil and she had already summoned her solicitor, Edgar Fewtrell. McCall was to have power of attorney over her affairs.

  He got his anger under control though Evie knew it still blew about his head. But the sight of Bea being fed and washed like the infant Francis across the corridor was the cruellest of images. The socialite and the spy, locked inside themselves with all they knew.

  McCall went to Mr Fewtrell’s house in Mill Street. It had a fine eighteenth century brick façade hiding a much earlier building framed in oak gone silver with age. They sat in Fewtrell’s ordered study drinking dark aromatic tea from Africa without milk or sugar. Fewtrell had a venerable presence but the impatient directness of a don.

  ‘Upsetting for you, Mac... seeing them the way they are now.’

  ‘It’s very painful, yes.’

  ‘But are you coping with it?’

  ‘I’m trying to.’

  ‘It’s like being inside a collapsing tent, when one’s mother and father die.’

  ‘Oddly enough, it’s making me think more about my natural parents.’

  ‘Why is that odd?’

  ‘Because I haven’t done much of it before, I suppose.’

  ‘We all need to know who were are, where we’ve come from.’

  ‘I was never sure that applied to me.’

  The hour chimed from a long case clock with a painted face of fruit and roses.

  ‘Francis always told me about the scrapes you got up to, out in war zones and such.’

  ‘Nothing I’ve ever done compares to his, I suspect.’

  ‘He was always so proud of you, Mac... never forget that. I doubt if your natural father could’ve loved you more.’

  Fewtrell poured himself another cup and held the saucer below his chins so nothing spilled on a waistcoat that would not fully button up anymore. McCall steered him back to what he really wanted to know.

  ‘Why can I find no paperwork about how the Wrenns become my guardians?’

  ‘Fewer forms and regulations back then, I suppose.’

  ‘You mean orphans could just be handed out, no questions?’

  ‘Not exactly but why do you ask?’

  McCall sensed Fewtrell’s guard going up.

  ‘Because I think there’s more to what happened to me than I’ve been told.’

  ‘What makes you say that, Mac?’

  ‘I believe Bea and Francis could have misled me about my parents.’

  The old solicitor’s wire wool eyebrows drew together. He put his cup and saucer on the desk with some delicacy.

  ‘Misled you? In what way?’

  ‘Oh, little things... would you believe like when they died, where they died, maybe even how they died?’

  ‘I must sat that doesn’t sound like them at all in my experience. Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ve been looking through the public record.’

  ‘And what have you found?’

  ‘That there’s a year’s missing from their account of my early life.’

  ‘But what possible motive could they have to mislead you about such a matter?’

  ‘I was hoping you might know.’

  ‘Well, I don’t and that’s a fact.’

  Another hint of unease passed across Fewtrell’s unblinking eyes. McCall pressed on instinctively. It is rarely the lie which sinks the guilty. Damage is more often done by the cover-up.

  ‘I now know Francis was sending cheques to my mother every week from when I was born until the time she and my father were supposedly killed. I think that’s curious, don’t you?’

  Fewtrell stood up, suddenly every inch the advocate in court. He became at once the Wrenn family’s legal adviser, not simply their friend.

  ‘You should take great care in this matter, Mac. The situation demands nothing less.’

  ‘What situation?’

  ‘My advice is to do nothing to jeopardise your position as sole heir and beneficiary.’

  ‘I don’t follow. I’m only trying to find out what really happened to my parents.’

  ‘I’m sure you are but let nature take its course.’

  ‘You mean let Bea and Francis die first?’

  ‘That’s precisely what I mean.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I can’t know the accuracy or otherwise of what you may or may not have discovered but I do know that were Beatrice or Francis to get wind of it, however unlikely that might seem, it could cause them untold upset when they are no longer in a position to speak for themselves or explain what may or may not have happened years ago.’

  The phone rang in the hall and cut short his submission for the defence. He excused himself and limped away to answer it. McCall scanned Fewtrell’s study with a hack’s eye for anything interesting. A photograph on the mantelpiece showed a group of unsmiling men on the steps of a sombre official building. The caption read: United Kingdom Legal Team, War Crimes Tribunal, Nuremberg 31st August 1946.

  He immediately recognised the patrician gaze of Hartley Shawcross, Britain’s chief Nazi prosecutor. And three places to his right stood Fewtrell, younger, thinner but with those same uncompromising eyes.

  McCall had never figured out why Francis’s unorthodox affairs were handled by a country town solicitor and not some whiz of a firm in London. Here was a clue. This inconspicuous, crippled man had helped to put a rope round the necks of Hitler’s willing executioners.

  There was more to Edgar Fewtrell than anyone might guess.

  *

  McCall was aware of Evie watching him from a landing window. She had wanted them to walk down to Garth Woods together, not for him to be on his own. But solitude was exactly what he wished. He was in mourning – but whether for the dead or those about to die, he was no longer sure. His loves and loyalties were never more confused. He thought ahead to autumn, to when this trial might all be over and the leaves would drift to earth once more as they had when he first arrived at Garth Hall.

  *

  ‘Do you think he’ll ever grow to like us?’

  ‘Give the poor little blighter a chance.’

  ‘He looks
like the wind could blow him over.’

  ‘Then we’d best hold onto him, hadn’t we?’

  *

  He might be witnessing his own delayed birth, emerging fully formed from a long gestation into a world of colour where everything was new and he could run and climb and do anything he might wish. So in these early years, McCall comes to exist in his head, to star in the stories he tells himself.

  Agent M is hiding under the bridge across Pigs’ Brook. The Germans are combing the countryside for him. They have guns and dogs with sharp yellow teeth and orders to kill on sight because Agent M has uncovered top secret information. It is so important, it will save lots of lives. He has to get a message to London. He crawls on his belly through the thick undergrowth to where his transmitter is hidden.

  Agent M reporting in. Stop. Nazis have put special device in Daddy’s plane. Stop. Will explode over water. Stop. Warn Francis repeat, warn Francis. Stop.

  He tortured ten Nazis for this now they are bent on revenge. The stream will put the dogs off the scent but Agent M slips on the pebbles and his sandals get soaked. But it doesn’t matter. Daddy must be saved. He has never been in so much danger.

  Agent M pushes on through nettles and thorns then scrambles into his camp under the big holly bush. He hears voices. Two voices. Real voices. One of them is Bea’s. The other belongs to a man.

  ‘It won’t be easy, Beatrice. He’s got protection at every level.’

  ‘Our friend thinks it’s almost certainly Cologne.’

  ‘But we’ve got to make sure of it.’

  They pass by, not six feet away and Agent M hears no more. He cannot see the stranger’s face but he must be one of Bea’s best ever friends. They are holding hands.

  *

  McCall watched a nuthatch pecking for insects in the rot of a shallow-rooted beech, felled by winds two winters before. The composting trunk gave off an earthy smell of decay. Unseen and deeper into the trees, owls waited to hunt, foxes sniffed the late afternoon air for prey. Here was the inescapable natural order of things – an unforgiving cycle of life, death and renewal, lacking all sentiment or regret.

  He unlocked the dacha and sat in Francis’s ripped leather chair, unconsciously assuming primacy. At the hospital last night, McCall broke a bar of chocolate into tiny pieces and gently put them between Francis’s lips. He took them into his mouth in some latent instinct to survive. His misted eyes never left McCall’s face though the clouds did not part this time. There was no sunshine of recognition, no words uttered... just the taste of sweetness remembered.