The Clouded Land

by Mary Mackie

  ‘I’m not a child any more. If I’m to be asked to take sides—’

  ‘No one is asking that. Nor do I expect you to think badly of your mother. But what happened, happened. Your grandfather…’ Pain veiled her eyes for an instant, then was gone, put aside as sternly as she put aside most human emotions. ‘He was a very sick man. He didn’t know what he was saying. For that reason, it should be let alone, Catherine. We shall put aside past mistakes, whether your mother’s, or yours, or mine. We must go on, not look back. Now that you’re here, I should like to get to know you. You’re my granddaughter, after all. And, until you’re of age, you are my responsibility.’

  ‘No!’ I found myself on my feet, trembling. Until I was of age? Three whole years? ‘No, you needn’t worry about that. Thank you for the offer, but I think I shall go back to Berlin on the first boat.’

  ‘No, Catherine. You will not.’

  ‘But I want to be with my family! I’ll go into town tomorrow and buy a ticket. Uncle Frank—’

  ‘Frank won’t help you,’ she cut in, her voice hardening. ‘Neither will anyone else here. If you ask, you will be disappointed. The decision has been made. You will not go back, Catherine.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘You can’t hold me here! If I decide to leave—’

  ‘The decision is not yours to make!’ Realizing she was losing her temper, she took hold of herself, drew herself up and compressed her lips, letting her breath slowly out through her nostrils. I almost expected to see flames ignited by the blue fire in her eyes. ‘I don’t intend to argue,’ she said, then, ‘My dear child… I don’t blame you, entirely. Your mother has obviously allowed you too much latitude.’

  What? I felt as if I had run into a sudden bank of mist that hid every familiar landmark. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Her eyebrow arched with fresh impatience. ‘Of course you do, Catherine! You understand me very well. Let us have done with this pretence! Your mother has written and told me the whole sorry story.’

  ‘You mean… about Carl-Heinz?’

  ‘What else?’ Her lips formed a slit in her face as she got to her feet, smoothing down her black silk bodice with thin, gnarled hands. ‘You will not leave. You will stay, here in England, for the foreseeable future.’

  A knock on the door interrupted my incoherent protests and through a fog of exasperation I heard the butler inform Grandmother that Mr Wells had asked to see her.

  ‘Ask him to come up, Billing,’ she replied, and glanced at me. ‘You may go, Catherine. Let us hear no more of this.’ Her mind was already on more important matters as she turned away.

  I made for the door, inwardly seething, but stopped to look round and say hoarsely, ‘My name is Kate. Not Catherine – Kate. Kate von Wurthe. And I’m proud of it!’ I, too, let the door slam behind me.

  In my room, I stood staring out as the sun set behind the thick carpet of mist that was slowly dispersing as the air cooled. I watched it ebb like a tide, washed pink by afterglow. Red sky at night… Yet again, I turned for answers to Carl-Heinz’s letter of rejection, but it only said what it had said before – lies and untruths. He loved me, I knew he did. But Willi, and the others, had made him write and say…

  Of course! That was why I had to stay away – because Carl-Heinz did love me, and if I were in Berlin they feared what might happen. We might elope, or kill ourselves, like the tragic royal lovers at Mayerling…

  Sitting at the little desk, I wrote again to Carl-Heinz, pleading with him to reply. I told him I was being forced to stay away from him, that I would love him for ever. But please would he write and let me know for sure what he felt? Until I heard from him my life was not worth living.

  * * *

  The morning brought a steady, depressing rain, and letters for me, but nothing of import. My friends’ lives were going on; Mother and Pa and the little men were well and sent their love – she told me nothing new. She was part of the conspiracy of silence, it seemed.

  For a day or two the house was busy with the aftermath of the funeral. Extra men came in to heft luggage down the stairs and ferry people to the station, while women stripped the beds and cleaned the guest rooms. When the last guest had gone, Grandmother and Vicky spent a day in Lynn with Saffron and the baby. I would have gone with them, but Grandmother said that I might better spend my time doing some reading in preparation for the college entrance exam which I was to sit that Friday. She felt sure I would find something of use among the collection in the library.

  She was wrong – I did glance along the library shelves but none of the titles struck me as particularly useful. Anyway, I wasn’t interested in the entrance exam. I didn’t care whether I passed or not.

  Tempted out by the fairer weather, I changed into clothes suitable for outdoor activity and, wondering if I might find a bicycle to borrow, I went down to the yards. Bed linen billowed in the breeze, festooned from long lines held up by props. With the same breeze tugging at my well-anchored boater, I petted the carriage horses in their stable, and saw that Frank’s car was gone.

  ‘Hello, Kate!’

  ‘Oh – Tom, hello. I didn’t see you there.’ He had appeared from behind a corner of the stables, carrying a kitten which seemed contented under his stroking fingers. In his smiling face, blue eyes gazed incuriously under a mop of tousled fair hair.

  ‘They’ve gone into Huns’ton,’ he said.

  ‘Who have?’

  ‘Emmet and Frank. Gone to Huns’ton to see if they can get the mudguard fixed. It was bent.’

  ‘It’s lucky nothing else was damaged,’ said I. ‘I thought for a while I might have wrecked the car.’

  But since Tom hadn’t been there when the ‘accident’ happened his memory didn’t stretch that far, so he couldn’t follow my logic.

  ‘Do you want to come and see the kittens?’ was his reply.

  The kittens and their mother were installed in a nest of hay at the back of one of the old carriage houses. Above them, swallows flitted in and out and sparrows chirped from the rafters, scavenging for seed. An old dog lay on guard in the sunlight by the door, somnolent and grey.

  Tom took me to see his aviary, where in separate cages he had a parrot and a mynah bird. The latter kept saying, ‘Where’s Tom, then?’ in an uncanny imitation of Emmet’s voice, and answering himself, ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ in Tom’s excited chuckle. Not far away another cage held canaries and budgerigars, flitting their bright wings from perch to perch. Tom kept rabbits, too, some chinchillas and one huge white fellow with pink ears and red eyes. ‘I call him Ghost – because he’s white and scary. But,’ Tom solemnly assured me, ‘he wouldn’t hurt you.’

  Wondering if he shared my ability to see glimpses of the other side, I said, ‘Are ghosts white and scary?’

  ‘Only in stories,’ said Tom, eyes steady as a child’s. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts, not really. And this is my newest one – Frank found her hurt in a field. She’s a wild rabbit.’ He slid me a sly look, adding, ‘Don’t tell, but I call her Toria. She scratches.’

  We shared a conspiratorial smile as I guessed that poor Tom was still suffering his sister’s impatience. ‘I won’t tell,’ I promised.

  Despite the birth-trauma that had left him so sadly damaged, Tom was the gentlest of creatures, and cared well for his animals. He had built their pens and cages himself, with help from one of the gardeners, and his brothers brought gifts for the pets – mirrors for the budgies, water bowls for the rabbits. ‘Emmet bought the cat’s bell, to warn the birds when she’s coming. She’s very bad. She kills birds if she can.’

  ‘Well, yes, cats do kill things.’

  ‘Well, they shouldn’t!’ His face went red. ‘Things didn’t ought to die. I don’t like it when they die. I didn’t want Pater to die!’

  ‘I know, Tom.’ But as I reached to touch him in comfort he jerked away, scrubbing at a tear.

  ‘Well…’ I sighed, not knowing what else to say. ‘I came out hoping to go for a bicycle
ride. Is there a bicycle I could borrow?’

  That distracted him. ‘I’ll show you.’

  Another outhouse stored half a dozen bicycles of various shapes and sizes. Tom helped me choose one suitable for myself, and pumped up the tyres for me, then decided, ‘I’ve got to go. I promised to groom the horses. Goodbye, Kate,’ and he was gone as quickly as he had appeared.

  Making down the drive on the cycle, I soon came to the main road and turned north, an invigorating ride in a gusty breeze, freewheeling at speed into the hollow, then riding up the next hill until my protesting legs obliged me to dismount and walk. Fields lay all around, some of them still busy with harvest, men with scythes sweeping at the grain, other folk behind tying it and stacking it in stooks; gulls wheeled, trees rustled, and away to the left the sea lay blue in sunlight. Carts and wagons carried goods from village to village or farm to farm, and I passed a rumbling, hissing steam wagon laden with barrels of beer.

  Another young woman cyclist seemed pleased of company as we walked up a long incline, but when she said, ‘Where you now from, then? You don’t wholly sound English,’ my reply made her stop and stare at me in fright. She pretended that something had gone wrong with her wheel. ‘No, that’s all right, go you on. I can fix that myself, thank you.’

  In Hunstanton, I found summer visitors strolling round the shops and enjoying the promenade, the pier and the views from the cliffs – a merry scene with flags flying, skirts and ribbons fluttering, and children dashing about. On one of the sloping side streets above the broad green that fronts the sea, I spied a butcher’s shop with the name ‘Ehrenfried’ over it. There, I asked for some offal, intending it for Tom’s cats.

  The butcher had a strong south German accent and was pleased when I asked him in his own language where he came from. Frankfurt, he said. And I? Since he had no other customers at the time, we fell into conversation and I told him of my encounter with the girl who had been so worried to learn that I came from Berlin.

  ‘It’s a problem,’ Mr Ehrenfried agreed. Local people were suspicious of him and his family, though he’d lived in Hunstanton for twenty years. It was ludicrous! His neighbours knew he was a decent, God-fearing man, but anti-German comments in newspapers, cartoons, advertisements, plays and even jokes all worked on underlying fears. He had heard one mother threaten her child that, if he didn’t behave, ‘Butcher Ehrenfried’ll come and chop off your head. That’s what Germans do!’ His business was beginning to suffer. He was thinking of changing his name.

  ‘Harald!’ his wife admonished, appearing from the back and drawing our attention to two or three customers who had come in. So we switched to English, I paid him for the meat and withdrew, smiling and greeting the other customers, ‘Good morning, ladies, what a lovely day!’ but not one of them replied and I was aware of hard stares following me.

  Just as I was deciding that I didn’t much care for Hunstanton, I met Frank and Emmet, who teased me out of my irritable mood. We all had lunch at the Sandringham Hotel, and later they tied my cycle to the back of Frank’s motor and we went home in style.

  That evening I sat down to write an article about the anti-German feeling which pervaded even sleepy Norfolk. I wrote it in German, and packed it off to my schoolfriend Gudrun Thunissen, for submission to a magazine in Berlin, which had published pieces of my writing before. It seemed to me that Berliners ought to know that malicious rumour was making life difficult for their countrymen in England. Yet the ordinary German man had no more desire for war than had the ordinary Englishman.

  I settled down in bed that night, trying to distract myself with an old copy of Strand Magazine which Uncle Frank had given me. It contained the H. G. Wells story, ‘The Land Ironclads’, and within a page or two I was engrossed by the tale of armoured battle machines that could cross any terrain and surmount any obstruction, dealing out death as they went. The graphic description of trench warfare bothered me: I couldn’t help but imagine Carl-Heinz and Fritzi – and other young officers of my acquaintance – engaged in such a struggle. Could it be true, as Frank had implied, that the Thorne-Thomas factory was experimenting with battle machines like these?

  * * *

  Next morning, my uncle and I made an early start, catching the train before eight o’clock, bound for London, where I was to sit the entrance exam for a course at the School of Economics. Frank proposed that we should stay at the family’s Mayfair apartment until the Monday, when he had an appointment to see someone who had commissioned a picture from him. Grandmother didn’t entirely approve, but I suppose she knew Frank would take care of me.

  The local train was quite full, but we found two seats together. Tired after a restless night, I told Frank that I had read the beastly story: ‘It gave me nightmares.’

  ‘It was intended to. Wells is trying to warn us what science can do if we don’t keep it in check.’

  ‘So it’s not true? Thorne-Thomas Engineering isn’t really making some dreadful battle machine that wi—’

  The look on his face stopped me – a look of alarm with wide, warning eyes that made me aware of other ears in the carriage. Our fellow travellers were carefully not looking at us, but they were all listening.

  Next second, Frank’s laugh was scorching me with mockery. ‘Of course not! It’s a story, silly goose! Good heavens… you’ll be asking me next if there’s really such a thing as a time machine! Mr Wells is a genius at imagining such things. Maybe you’re not old enough to appreciate him yet. Stick to Alice in Wonderland.’

  Mortified, I turned my burning face away and didn’t speak to him again until we arrived at Lynn. Indeed, conversation between us was spasmodic all the way to London on the crowded express.

  Under a pall of smoke that greyed the sky and caught at the back of one’s throat, pedestrians crowded city pavements, news vendors cried the latest headlines, and roads ran thick with motor omnibuses and trucks, horse-drawn traffic, steam wagons, a few private cars, delivery vans… Frank hailed a one-horse hansom and directed its driver to Mayfair.

  ‘We’ll get settled in and then have a quiet lunch. The exam isn’t until two o’clock. You need to be relaxed for that.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ I sighed, watching the traffic and the dirty grey buildings go by.

  ‘Of course it matters! It’s your whole future.’

  The doorman in the foyer of Mayfair Mansions greeted him warmly by name – apparently Frank often used the apartment when he was in town. The block contained half a dozen serviced flats, with the doorman to check all callers, and valets and maids on duty night and day. Our apartment lay on the top floor, reached via a lift, the rooms large, airy, panelled in oak and newly decorated art deco style. I didn’t have time to study the place in detail; Frank was hungry, eager to be out in the city, and rattled by the tension that still lingered between us.

  As we rode down again in the lift, he demanded, ‘What’s wrong with you, Kate? Would you rather be studying here in London, with some degree of freedom, or stuck at Denes Hill, at Mother’s beck and call, like Vicky?’

  ‘I’d rather go home!’

  ‘Well, that’s out of the question, isn’t it?’ His glance said he knew the whole story and, flushing with annoyance, I turned away as he added, ‘I don’t believe you’d be happy squandering your talents. You’re an intelligent girl.’

  ‘I thought I was only fit for Alice in Wonderland!’

  He made an impatient sound, grasping my arm. ‘Look at me, Kate. You know why I said that, surely? We weren’t alone on that train. You don’t seem to realize… I was fearfully indiscreet ever to mention the subject to you. It’s secret. Top secret.’

  My heart seemed to contract. ‘You mean, there really are horrible machines like that? Being made by Thorne-Thomas?’

  He watched me intently, a deep furrow biting between his brows. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this. But since I respect your intelligence I also trust you to understand… No, there aren’t any such machines, as yet. But prototypes are b
eing tested. Even the men who’re working on the frames don’t know exactly what those great metal boxes are for. Tanks, they’re being told. Storage tanks, for water and such like. If the truth got out and the Germans got hold of it… God knows, even as we speak, Berlin is probably working on something similar. They’re not fools. H. G. Wells isn’t the only one who can foresee where mechanization is heading.’

  ‘But that’s frightful!’ I breathed.

  ‘I agree. I can’t imagine anything more horrible than men in machines cold-bloodedly killing each other. Land ironclads. Aeroplanes. The next war, when it comes – and it will come, sooner or later – is going to be the bloodiest, beastliest yet. You and I should take no part in it. Let’s not play their game.’

  A shiver ran through me. ‘No, we won’t.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Parliament’s just passed an Official Secrets Act, you know. If you breathe one word of this… If you write it in a letter…’ The lift stopped, the door rattled open and the doorman emerged from his little office to touch his peaked cap and usher us out.

  But I understood well enough. If I wrote about this, even to Mother, Frank would be in trouble. I had half been planning to write another article to send to Gudrun. Indeed, if I had read the story before I wrote the first piece I might have… Mensch! If I did that, I really would be a German spy. But wasn’t that what I should be, out of loyalty to my stepfather and my friends in Berlin?

  * * *

  Only a few of us took the special late-entrance exam for the course beginning that autumn at the London School of Economics. We sat at desks spread wide apart in a large room with high windows, while a female invigilator paced up and down, her heels heavy on bare floorboards and a ruler tapping against her skirts. I don’t remember what questions the paper posed. I kept my head down, writing and writing, part of my mind far away. Dear God, let there not be a war!