A Place Of Strangers Page 4

‘So how did the Wrenns get involved?’

  McCall went to his wardrobe and retrieved a shoebox – Boys Size 4, Oxford-style Allweathers. He took out a black and white photograph and handed it to her. It showed five young men with short hair, glossy with brilliantine, each togged up in fur-lined flying suits and leather gloves, and checking a map beneath the four propellers of a huge bomber. Evie recognised Francis immediately.

  ‘What an extraordinarily handsome man. Like one of those movie stars from the forties.’

  ‘Wasn’t he just? Francis was the captain and the guy standing next to him, the fair-haired one... that was my father.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why the Wrenns took you in.’

  ‘My father was Francis’s rear gunner.’

  ‘God, it’s unimaginable now, isn’t it? Every mission could be your last...’

  ‘Yes, thousands of young men... shot to bits, blown out of the sky.’

  McCall took a second photograph from inside an envelope addressed to him. Evie saw the same fair-haired airman but a while later, posing in a grey striped de-mob suit and proudly cradling a baby. A slim, dark-eyed woman in a light skirt and buttoned cardigan leaned against a sunlit picket fence. On the back, someone had pencilled 'Lizzie, Edward and baby Francis, Somerset 1946.'

  ‘So this is you with your mother and father?’

  ‘Happy families, yes.’

  ‘And they even named you after Francis.’

  ‘My father hero-worshipped him.’

  ‘Comrades in arms, I suppose.’

  ‘Skippers were more trusted than God. They got you home while the other guy was otherwise engaged.’

  They lay back on their pillows. Evie held McCall’s hand. Her gentle interrogation continued for she sensed this was what he wanted.

  ‘Do you have any memories of your parents?’

  ‘No... nothing at all.’

  ‘Which means you could never mourn them.’

  ‘How could I? I was too young to even know them.’

  ‘You’ll think this is psycho-babble, McCall, but not mourning isn’t healthy. Grief shouldn’t be left to fester in your head, you know. It needs dealing with.’

  ‘Maybe but all I’ve got to deal with is an old photograph.’

  ‘You must build a picture of them as real people, talk to Bea and Francis about them. They’ll have information, maybe more photographs like this.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t them who gave me this photograph.’

  ‘So where did it come from?’

  ‘It was just posted to my boarding school.’

  ‘But not from them?’

  ‘No, they were overseas and it was posted in Ludlow.’

  ‘Didn’t it come with a letter or a note?’

  ‘No, nothing and I didn’t recognise the writing on the envelope.’

  ‘But why would anyone think it important enough for you to know what your mother looked like yet not say who they were?’

  McCall reached inside his cardboard box again. He took out a torn piece of yellow newsprint flaking like leaf tobacco.

  A couple were killed on Monday when their Austin Ruby collided with a wall near their home at Mendip Cottage, Churchill. Elizabeth and Edward McCall died instantly. Mr McCall had a distinguished war record, flying numerous bombing raids as an RAF gunner. Their 3 year old son is now being cared for by friends.

  Evie shook her head.

  ‘How tragic... that lovely family picture then this miserable little paragraph.’

  ‘Doesn’t amount to much, does it?’

  McCall’s memory box was almost empty now. A thin gold ring and a cheap emerald brooch lay at the bottom. Before McCall closed the lid, Evie made out a few childhood birthday cards, some letters – and a colour photograph of a younger McCall, his arm around a smiling girl with striking ginger hair remarkably like her own.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘No one who’s around any more.’

  Chapter Six

  Bea could not sleep that night, either. To close her eyes was to see only a kaleidoscope of faces – of Arie, of the Francis she had loved, of Helen and her proxy three doors down the landing who might yet be Mac’s salvation, and of her long-dead mother and despicable father. But most of all at this time of Christmas, it was a child who kept her awake – the girl she was tutoring in Prague when Hitler’s troops stole in with winter and all was lost.

  That face, colder than marble, lived forever behind Bea’s eyes for in the innocence of her nine years, she knew what was to happen when few about her understood. Bea still grieved at the wickedness of it all and damned herself for not doing more. In the bureau was a letter she had written to her father on March 18 1939.

  I suppose the London papers will have reported the Germans occupying Bohemia and Moravia and now their troops are everywhere here in Prague. Those I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet have been civil enough once they established I was British. Mr Malindine at the embassy has been marvellous and you must not worry on my account. He is arranging my documentation and I will soon be home. I am told that Herr Hitler has installed himself up at the castle, horrid little man. There is a lot of confusion in the city and people are trying to leave for the countryside as no one feels very secure. The family I am with are Jewish and they and their little girl are trying to get to safety in Poland.

  On Bea’s last day, she had knelt, kissed the child and wept at having to be parted for there was love between them. The girl took both Bea’s hands and said she should go in life and peace for nothing else could be done. Bea ran down the steps and looked back at the house though she had promised herself she wouldn’t. And there at the window, set behind a small pane of glass was that austere little face, old beyond its years and framed forever in Bea’s time of fear.

  In the dark before dawn, Bea hears the music of Holst. Mars, Mercury, Saturn... the bringers of war and messages and old age.

  *

  She is in Celetna Street with Arie once more, hurrying through the Old Town Square where Hitler’s pennants ripple in the whip-crack wind. Arie’s hands are trembling. He reads and re-reads the documents in disbelief. They commute his sentence of death.

  ‘Why have you done this for me?’

  Bea smiles. She touches his hunted face with the backs of her fingers and knows Christ lives for she has saved him from Golgotha.

  ‘Because I can.’

  Her Jew will survive. Those others frozen outside the embassy railings, those lost souls trying to get exit visas like his, she cannot help. No one can. They will be moved, maybe not next week or next month but whenever the factories of destruction are ready.

  ‘We must leave before curfew.’

  Bea surprises herself with the authority in her voice. The occupiers patrol the muted town in bricks of six with rifles and dogs. Arie knows Bea is right. Only spies stalk this place. He must take his chance for the talons of the Nazi eagle are at the throats of all. Bea and Arie hurry away like lovers eloping. Men in dark, drab suits queue for their ration packs of Memfis outside the Municipal House. The cobbles and paving are icy underfoot, the air bitter sharp with the tang of their exotic oval cigarettes. There will be other queues later... for food, soap, coal, work, registration and the last queue of all – for the final journey of the untermenschen, north to Theresienstadt or later, the bathhouses of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But that is for the future, after Eichmann arrives.

  Bea and Arie board the tram to Wilsonovo Station. They pay and stare down at the slatted wooden floor. Nothing is said between them and the other straphangers. Silence is safer. They get off at the road junction where the road signs point to Wien and Brno and Kutna Hora. And everywhere around them, the beetle-black Tatra cars of the SS hunt the deserted streets.

  Bea and Arie walk quickly, hugging walls papered with announcements of the Fuhrer’s total power. It is getting late. The Art Nouveau beauty of Wilsonovo is lost on them. A policeman with a silver-buttoned tunic and holstered gun, checks their passports. He stares into their a
lien faces. A British passport. A French passport. Gestapo-stamped passes and British visas. Everything is in order – so why is he not letting them go? The fireboxes of the simmering locomotives glow crimson. They bellow and gasp, wanting to be off. Families and friends mill along the platform through breakers of rising steam, weeping and touching and passing oranges through open carriage windows to the lucky ones escaping to Warsaw. Lucky?

  God help them.

  Bea and Arie watch the policeman pick up the black telephone in his sentry box. Their knuckles grip pale around the handles of their suitcases. He talks quietly into the mouthpiece. His slit-trench eyes never leave theirs.

  *

  Lying on the bed where her mother in law conceived and delivered Francis, Bea was confronted yet again by the near molecular intricacies of those random decisions and events that shape any one life. To turn left or right, to take a bus or walk, accept an invitation or turn it down – each option is capable of creating a wholly different future. And within that altered life, other decisions will be taken so it, too, is endlessly reshaped till death intervenes. An entry in her diary for that March read:

  Caught the Prague-Nürnberg train and travelled via Cologne, Aachen and Dunkirk for the ferry home.

  But by then, she had already made a choice and her life would change forever.

  *

  Bea and Arie look from one to the other. The policeman’s superior arrives and examines their papers. The station is in chaos behind him, awash with humanity. He has no time to waste on this. Everything seems to be in order. He rebukes the officer and waves them onto the platform to be engulfed by clouds of engine smoke.

  They find a carriage and sit close together. The train shrieks and lurches forward, slowly grinding out of the suburbs. Their hands touch. Bea twines her fingers in his. They are on their way. They look straight ahead. The engine picks up speed. The heads of other passengers fall on their chests, lulled to sleep by the clattering monotony of the wheels on the rails.

  At Nürnberg, people come, people go then the train leaves the half-timbered town behind. Bea wipes condensation from the window with the sleeve of her coat. Out in the black night, factories blaze in full production for the war everyone is afraid must come. Great sheets of light and flame are thrown across the shadowed landscape. It is like staring into hell. Bea shivers and Arie puts an arm around her and she is glad. She looks into his sallow face, into the mournful eyes of her Jesus. How little she knows of him yet how unimportant that seems. It won’t always be like this. When they get to England, they will become very close. Bea has never been more certain of anything in her life.

  Chapter Seven

  Christmas lunch saw Francis in spirited form, if eccentric dress. He matched a dinner jacket to cavalry twill trousers and tennis pumps then harangued Evie about British unions marching to the beat of Moscow’s drum.

  ‘Arthur Scargill’s dupes, that’s what they all are. Don’t they see the threat?’

  ‘Mrs Thatcher says she does.’

  ‘And well she might. I hope you’re doing your bit to help her?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Come, come, missy. If people like you aren’t spying on all these communist infiltrators and terrorists, I want my money back.’

  Again, Bea could barely hide her discomfort. She cut distractedly at the Parson’s Venison and served it with potatoes and parsnips from Garth’s own kitchen garden. After lunch, they moved to the easy chairs round the inglenook and she was glad when Francis dozed off.

  McCall attended to the fire. Bea thought him rather dark-eyed and pale. He could be sickening for something. She always worried about Mac. He had too much nervous energy ever to put on any weight. She had a photograph of him covering some African war or tragedy and looking like a famine victim himself.

  Bea allowed herself a sideways glance at Evie. Her mind went back to a different conflict and the day of her own wedding, walking through Garth Woods to the church in that endless autumn sunshine with all those laughing boys who went away, never to return. How unreal those far off times seemed now, that conjunction of gaiety and death they came to accept as normal.

  Evie caught Bea looking at her.

  ‘Mac’s been telling me how his father and Mr Wrenn fought in the war together.’

  ‘Yes, but Francis doesn’t like talking about all that any more.’

  ‘No, it must have been a terrifying ordeal for them all.’

  ‘It was... more than anyone will ever know.’

  Francis sat up suddenly and fixed Evie with an almost angry stare.

  ‘Aren’t you the one who ran off with someone?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Wrenn. What did you say?’

  ‘Now you’ve come back.’

  ‘I don’t – ’

  ‘– look, everyone... Helen’s come to her senses.’

  *

  McCall took Evie for a walk in Garth Woods during the hour before sunset. He apologised again for Francis’s erratic behaviour.

  ‘He’s hardly the same person from one hour to the next.’

  ‘Spooks get like that.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. He’s never behaved like this before. I’m going to have to talk to Bea about him.’

  They leaned over the wooden bridge across Pigs’ Brook. Water rushed under a thin skim of ice. A full moon emerged from behind the tower of St Mary and All Angels. Night was closing in.

  ‘So Helen was a big love?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘The girl in your memory box – ’

  ‘– you saw her, then?’

  ‘Couldn’t miss her, could I?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Was Francis right... did she ran off with someone?’

  ‘With a friend of mine, yes.’

  ‘That’s hard.’

  ‘I’d no idea. Not a clue – and there’s me supposed to be a savvy hack.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone ever sees the signs... not till it’s too late, anyway.’

  ‘We were going up the hill there, getting married in the church.’

  ‘So Bea and Francis approved of Helen?’

  ‘Adored her, yes.’

  ‘They must have taken what happened badly.’

  ‘They did, very badly. They’d built up on her, you see... it broke their hearts.’

  ‘Didn’t do much for yours either, did it?’

  They headed home through the shivering trees, treading the paths McCall roamed as a boy and might have walked with a bride.

  Evie was not sure if hearing his back story made matters better or worse. The past was often best left to lie where it had fallen, not disinterred to offend the senses again.

  ‘I think this is another line you’ve got to draw, McCall.’

  ‘I try, believe me.’

  ‘But you’ve not succeeded, have you?’

  ‘No... I haven’t.’

  ‘What’s the reason for that?’

  ‘They had a child, you see... Helen and my friend.’

  ‘Ah, I understand. When did this happen?’

  ‘About seven months after we split up.’

  ‘So you think it might have been yours?’

  ‘I don’t know and that’s the bugger of it. I don’t see how I ever will.’

  *

  Supper that night was a poor affair. Francis’s mood changed yet again but not for the better. Bea got him to bed so she could talk to McCall. Evie stayed reading by the drawing room fire. Bea set a block of mousetrap cheese on the kitchen table with half a pack of water biscuits. McCall uncorked a bottle of Tanner’s Claret.

  ‘Come on Bea, what’s wrong with Francis? Why’s he like this?’

  She started talking, slowly at first, as if to herself.

  ‘I’ve known something wasn’t right for a while now but I’ve just worked round it, put it down to him getting older, being under occupied but I’ve been covering up for him so no one ever knows the potty things he does but it can be so maddening, getting s
omething so fixed in his head I can’t shift it no matter how hard I try and then he just laughs and says it’s a so-and-so, old girl and I give him a kiss and we start again but blow me if he doesn’t go and do something like putting the kettle down the loo because he thinks that’s the cooker.

  ‘I tell you Mac, it’s awful. Sometimes, he gives me these murderous looks like he did to Evie when he woke up this afternoon, evil almost.

  ‘There’ve been times when he’s waved his walking stick at me as if he’s going to hit me with it and he calls me all sorts of names, really wicked. Next minute, it’s as if nothing’s happened and he’s the same old Francis again. I just don’t know what’s going on anymore but I shall have to do something.

  ‘Maybe Doctor Preshous could come and we’ll see what he thinks because it’s all so dreadful, Mac... so bloody, bloody – ’

  The tears began then, smudging her careful make-up into a sad, creased mask. McCall shushed her gently. She heaved and sobbed and pulled so hard on the little golden crucifix at her neck, the chain broke.

  McCall let all this happen till at last she grew quiet and a sort of calm gathered around her. Bea poured the last of the claret.

  ‘Never forget, Mac – life can be a shit. An absolute S, H, one T.’

  Chapter Eight

  Bea knew time distorts and memory deceives, leaving only perception to endure as truth, for that is all there is. She hovered over the past like her own ghost, unable to exit the drama she herself had authored.

  *

  A storm rages as their train steams into the railhead at Dunkirk from Aachen. Bea peers through the blue beads of rain on the carriage window. The ferry they want pitches in the swell of the English Channel by a line of shallow draught barges. Arie takes her hand and they run through the downpour, clutching their suitcases. Bea’s coat is torn open in the gale and she tries not to catch her heels in the slippy steel tracks which lace across the quay. They buy tickets and board the boat. Freedom is but one more ordeal away, somewhere beyond the spuming waves.

  Other passengers shelter in stairwells and cabins or draw courage in bars reeking of spilt beer and tobacco smoke. The salt-spray air is filled with the cries of children and those being sick. Arie and Bea go up on deck and find space beneath a swaying lifeboat. They hold to each other and defy nature as they had defied the Nazis. And before long, the sea quietens and through the drifting grey mist, Bea points to a whitened strip of land dividing sea from sky.