A Place Of Strangers Read online

  Garth Hall, half-timbered Tudor with a Georgian wing of soft red brick, rested in weak winter sunlight, the ribs of its sagging roof shading through like the carcass of an exhausted animal. McCall had never thought of Garth as anything but unassailably permanent, rather like Bea and Francis themselves. But that morning, he saw the house for what it had become – hauteur all gone and as impoverished by age as an ex lover met by chance. Yet the remembered pull of this place on McCall would never slacken. This was where his life began and all his journeying would end.

  Bea was pegging out washing on the orchard lawn as McCall drew into the stable yard. He thought her a princess once, someone conjured from the pages of a picture book. Even now, silvery-haired and buttoned into the pelage of Francis’s old gardening coat, she kept her allure if not her elegance.

  ‘Mac – you lovely boy. Come here.’

  It had been almost a year since his last visit. They embraced then each smiled into the face of the other with wordless affection. Bea seemed hale enough but close-to, McCall detected a slight yellowy greyness about her face. They went indoors, arm in arm. Margaret Thatcher had all but broken the miners’ strike yet Bea’s kitchen was still full of candles in wine bottles in case of more power cuts.

  ‘That damned woman, Mac. Working people deserve a decent wage.’

  ‘Of course, but she thinks the strike’s all been a plot by the hard Left – ’

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘– and the miners just pawns to break a democratic government.’

  ‘Because the workers won’t bend the knee, it’s all a communist conspiracy.’

  Bea shooed her ginger cat off the table and served leek and potato soup. Politics were put aside then. The talk was only of all their yesterdays. It felt to McCall as if he had never been away. Garth always took back its own eventually, made them warm, made them safe so they never wanted to leave again.

  ‘Where’s Francis?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Gone to Russia.’

  ‘Where else would he be?’

  *

  The eastern boundary of Garth’s ten acres was Pigs’ Brook, haunt of kingfishers and grass snakes and fat little fish. It eased off to a trickle in summer but with the rains of winter, it became a swell of fallen branches and debris washed down from the Shropshire hills. Over time, it had elbowed its way into Garth Woods, nibbling at the banks where oaks, beech and ash held sway. This was where Francis built his shed, his dacha, like those he had seen in the Soviet Union during missions in the iciest days of the Cold War.

  On weekends home, he would shout ‘Off to Russia!’ then be away in Garth Woods till supper, writing official reports to the accompaniment of gramophone records. But often, he would just sit and listen to the wind in the trees and the wash of water over pebbles for Francis had much to forget.

  The dacha was constructed of timber and sheeted in corrugated iron, painted red oxide. Inside were two rooms with shelves of books and files, a pot-bellied stove and a pair of soft leather armchairs. Power came from an overhead line beyond Pigs’ Brook so it had electric light and sockets for a kettle and toaster. This was Francis’s demesne.

  McCall’s earliest memories were in this private, brambled place, overgrown with rhododendrons and trees that shielded the dacha from those who would steal its secrets. When it snowed and the light faded, Garth Woods became quiet. Creatures that hunted, creatures that cowered, none moved in a landscape sewn into a winding sheet of its own making, tired and needing to rest.

  McCall, the urchin child, would stand with his backside to the hot stove like Francis the man, Francis his hero. There would be stories then, tales of battles and bravery and the way the world had been before God’s British Empire was blown to bits.

  *

  McCall saw Francis through the dacha’s side window, setting up the Eumig projector he bought during a posting to Vienna. Francis was rarely without a little movie camera. Much of McCall’s childhood was preserved in the square yellow boxes of mute Kodak stock lining the dacha shelves.

  Francis laced in one of the black spools, unaware of McCall by the door. He closed the curtains and switched on. The Eumig’s worn cogs squeaked and its light cut a beam through a swirl of twinkling motes.

  Then they were in the past.

  Somewhere on an empty beach where sunshine splintered on the crest of every wave, a man and a woman run barefoot across gleaming wet sands. They stop short of the camera, put their arms around each other and dance a can-can, breathlessly hoofing their legs in the air till they collapse in a heap, happy and giggling. The picture changes and there is Francis again, an Englishman-on-holiday – trousers rolled to the knees, bowling a ball to a kid in a vest and flappy white shorts, slogging away with a new cricket bat and running like the wind. Bea, her long black hair untidy in the sea breeze, smiles as she returns from the Alvis with their basket lunch. Francis chases the boy across the hummocky sand dunes then carries him, kicking and bucking through the spiky grass and back to Bea at their beach towel camp.

  The child blinks against the sun then grins at the camera and is gone.

  It was as if some escape hatch had opened from all the hideous and bloody complexities of the day and McCall had slipped back to life as it once was but could never be again. He had no recollection of that trip to the sea, only of what was lost.

  The footage tailed out. Everything in the dacha went dark. Francis switched on the light and saw McCall. Both were trapped between then and now and it took a moment for them to shake hands, almost formally.

  *

  McCall lit a fire to get the panelled drawing room warm for supper. Bea wore a sheer silk dress stitched with beads of French jet and in the half light of evening, still looked like a beguiling Deborah Kerr cast against Francis’s ageing David Niven.

  McCall told them about Evie and asked if she might come for Christmas. Bea could hardly contain her delight. Francis remained quiet as he had for most of the meal. Then he left, saying he had matters to attend to.

  Bea and McCall moved to the wing backs either side of the sooty brick inglenook. She rested her feet on a small, embroidered stool. The table candles died one by one and the pious whiff of wax drifted in the silence between them.

  ‘I’m overjoyed you’ve got a new girl, Mac – ’

  He nodded and fixed his gaze on the child’s alphabet sampler behind her, sewn in the days of smocks and fealty.

  ‘– because you have to start afresh. Never forget that one gets over absolutely anything in the end.’

  ‘Is that what you believe, Bea?’

  ‘It’s what I know, dear. Love’s a cruel sickness... never easy to recover from it.’

  The wind was getting up. It tore through Garth Woods and bits of twig shot against the drawing room’s leaded windows as they talked. The forecast was for rain turning to snow. Bea asked McCall to check the buckets for her.

  ‘What buckets?’

  ‘In the attics. The roof’s leaking all over the place.’

  ‘Why don’t you get the builders in?’

  ‘Have you any idea what that roof would cost to repair?’

  The six attics were reached by a narrow wooden stairway, winding up from the back landing which servants once used to get to their beds.

  McCall unlatched the wide plank door and felt at once the draught of childhood unease which frightened him the first time he dared to walk up. The treads were gritty with peeling lime-wash and grains of fallen plaster. Here and there were the folded husks of dead bats amid the frass and fume of decay.

  A moment later, he stood where once he played in the magical land of his own imaginings – a kingdom only he could see, only he could rule.

  He saw again the forgotten soldier’s helmet from the Great War, the guts of old wireless sets, broken tinplate trains, brown boots and white pumps, sepia portraits in wormy frames and drawers full of gossipy letters from the Empire’s outposts, slowly being torn to bedding by the generations of mice whic
h ran in the dancing dust.

  Here were ghosts and treasures caught in the cobwebs and slanting sunshine where he would hide and seek that which could not be found or properly explained. All was as it had been and it transfixed him now as much as then.

  Who am I... who am I?

  A jump cut newsreel of memories flickered through his head – rope swings, secret hide-outs in the woods, a cowboy outfit and a silver six-shooter firing caps in a cornfield bloodied with poppies... always a confusion of poppies, soaking into the earth.

  Bang! Bang! You’re dead.

  And they all fell down and didn’t get up again but it was only playing, wasn’t it?

  *

  Alone at her bedroom dressing table, Bea was conscious of not feeling entirely well. An odd, almost out-of-body sensation came over her, as if she was drifting away from her reflection to somewhere between this world and the next.

  She was an intruder in a house she knew intimately and wanted to cry out but the mouth in the mirror would not form any words. Then, without warning, Bea dropped to the floor. Her face pressed into the rough carpet pile yet she could not move – not her hands, her legs or even her eyelids to blink. All that was familiar became remote. It felt like dying, afraid and alone, her confession unheard, her sins unforgiven. She saw the first flakes of snow blow across the window. And Bea was drawn back into a past she had never left.

  *

  It is dawn, pitilessly cold but the sunrise sky is clear. The puddles in the narrow street of worn cobbles glisten gold like pools of smelted metal. They catch Bea’s reflection. There is fear in her eyes. Something is happening, something full of dread. Dark figures flee through cramped alleyways below the verdigris cupolas of great baroque churches and across the ancient bridge above the sly waters of the Vltava. Its stone saints look down upon them, powerless in the face of the coming enemy. A clock face moon and sun spin in their orbits and a clashing of metal hammers signals the end of time. All colour drains from Bea’s world. A column of troop carriers grinds over the granite setts of the sepia streets, guns snouting for prey. The hot breath of cavalry horses condenses in the chill air and soldiers in greatcoats, rifles raised, march where only trams once rumbled by.

  Still the mechanised invaders come, drilling across the martyred square until, in one final balletic movement, their weapons all point at her head and her eyes are drawn into the infinite blackness of their barrels. As this image dissolves, so Bea hears the droning of bombers and fire begins to fall to earth from a molten sky. Then she is running, running through empty medieval cloisters, past campaniles ringing with muffled death... running so hard her lungs feel full of powdered glass. A door is opened and she is suddenly within a walled yard with tall iron gates. And in the icy street beyond stands a human tide of shadow men, each sewn with a yellow star, eyes wet with weeping, wide with terror, soft with pleading.

  Help us... save us... help our children.

  Who are these people? What is she to do... what can she do? She sees one man, alone... one among so many. His beautiful, agonised face implores her like Christ’s on the cross. Bea goes to him, takes his supplicating hand and leads him away as she knows in her heart only she can do.

  And as she does, so the engines of destruction start up and the black gas begins to seep through every street and house, over the green fields and silver trees and into all of God’s holy places for there is nowhere this poison cannot reach.

  Chapter Three

  McCall woke. He thought someone was crying but with the gale outside, he could not be sure. It was a wild night. He needed to pee so crept along the landing to the loo. As he passed Bea’s bedroom, he heard her muttering. He opened the door quietly and saw Bea slumped by the bed in her favourite dressing gown, the one patterned with irises. She seemed to have no idea who he was.

  ‘Get out, get out. They’re up at the castle.’

  ‘Who’s up at the castle?’

  ‘The Nazis – Hitler, all of them.’

  He tried to lift her but she resisted, suddenly made strong by fear.

  ‘No! Can’t you see their guns?’

  ‘There’s no one here, Bea. It’s a nightmare.’

  ‘I’ve got to get away.’

  ‘Come on, you’ll be catching cold like this.’

  ‘Leave me alone! They’ll find me.’

  ‘No one’ll find you if you’re back in bed.’

  ‘I’ll be tortured.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to torture you?’

  ‘To find him, of course’

  ‘Find who?’

  ‘They mustn’t do that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’ll kill him. They want him dead.’

  Francis was nowhere to be found. McCall struggled to manoeuvre Bea back into bed on his own. He pulled the covers up to her chin and she lay rigid until whatever was in her head passed and she lapsed into an uneasy sleep. She looked as pale as her pillows, so vulnerable without the artifice of cosmetics and deathly still, too.

  It was a strangely transfixing moment – an affecting image of her mortality he had never had to confront before. Something once so solid beneath his feet was giving away and he had hardly noticed. He could only stare at what she had become and remember how she had been.

  McCall held her hand and thought what a terrifying place the subconscious could be.

  *

  Some frames of memory get frozen, others fade to black. But what if all which had been lost could not be found and cut together again? Who will ever make sense of what has happened?

  Show us the pictures in your head, little boy.

  What pictures?

  The ones you’ve turned to the wall.

  McCall was always haunted by a vision of his childhood self, crawling like an insect across a sleeping face. But who was this person – a Sir or a Miss? And why wouldn’t they wake?

  He remembered a street of shops opening onto a village square where markets and fairs were held. They were all closed, their windows hidden under canvas awnings and untroubled by trade. There was a blue-brick house and a housewife getting him dressed, preparing him for a journey. Then some other people came.

  Say hello to the lady and gentleman.

  But he couldn’t. He stiffened and backed away so he and his cheap cardboard suitcase were carried outside to a car. Then began a long ride into the unknown, down an endless tarred road shimmering wet with heat haze and cutting as straight as a ley line across the flat black earth until at last he reached Garth Hall.

  Here, they gave him porridge with golden syrup because they seemed to know he liked the sleeping lion on the tin. The new people sat and watched him eat every spoonful, fearful he might escape if they turned their backs for a minute. And when evening came, they took his reluctant hands and led him upstairs to the bathroom at the far end of the landing and helped him to brush his teeth.

  In his bedroom, freshly decorated, his red leather sandals were unbuckled and he was helped off with the once white shirt and the wide flannel shorts that made his legs look like sticks. He got into the striped pyjamas they had bought and the lady counted his ribs as she fastened the buttons. They gave him a teddy bear to hug and he held it by the paws. Next month, there would be other presents. He was going to be four.

  Bea told him years later that she had leant against the open window, bare arms folded and staring at the stars of the satin black night. Francis read a story about a magician who made wrong things come right. His words carried on the evening air, still heavy with the heat of the day. Bea shivered and did not know why. She had drawn the curtains and knelt beside the bed. Mac’s closely clipped hair smelled of disinfectant.

  In all that time, he uttered not a single word. They made sure he was asleep before creeping away to the drawing room. Francis poured them each a whisky and they sat in their own chairs either side of the big brick inglenook, grey with wind-blown ash from a long dead fire. The hall clock marked the passage of their thoughts which they did not
share. Bea put a match to the table candles and sat in their shifting yellow shadows. She had got what she wished for and there was an old saying about that. Here was the child who would be their arrow to the future – but not if the world’s new warmongers dropped an atomic bomb on Korea.

  *

  Doctor Preshous examined Bea later that morning. He did not think she’d had a stroke as McCall feared and advised only bed rest. Francis was not as concerned as McCall thought he should be. But ever since McCall arrived back at Garth, Francis had been cool towards him, almost as if his presence was unwanted.

  After the doctor left, McCall sat by the hall phone, unsure about cancelling Evie’s visit. Bea might not feel like entertaining. Yet without Evie to lighten the mood, Christmas could be a miserable affair.

  It was beginning to feel right to let Evie see behind his curtain a little, to ask questions so she might understand. But he had let his guard down before. For now, he stalled and went to check on Bea instead.

  She was asleep. One of the attic letters she had been reading had fallen under the bed. McCall laid it with the others in her bureau. The bureau was not locked as it usually was, neither were its hidden compartments behind the alcove’s twin carved pillars. In a house of so many unknowns, McCall the child had always been drawn to this most secret of grown up places.

  ‘Show me, Bea. Go on. Let me see.’

  ‘No. These are my treasures in here.’

  ‘Can I play with them?’

  ‘No, Mac. They’re too precious for little boys to play with.’

  But now, thirty years and more on, he could look.

  The left side compartment was full of sealed envelopes, some rings and pieces of costume jewellery. The other contained only more letters and personal papers – and something soft and folded, made out of dark material. Even as he took hold of it, Bea stirred. A buried memory of guilt and fear McCall knew so well almost set him shaking again.

  ‘If I find you’ve been snooping, I’ll cut off your fingers with my scissors.’

  Bea could wake in a moment. McCall stared at what he had pulled from its hiding place. It was an armband, old and frayed and bearing the inscription Schutzmann sewn in silvered Gothic lettering. He had no idea what it meant or if it was simply someone’s name.