A Place Of Strangers (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

McCall locked the dacha door and made for Francis’s other
refuge, the church of St Mary and All Angels. He reached the porch to a drum
roll of thunder from a bruised sky. McCall sat in the Wrenn family pew and
stared up at the cross and its tortured man, skewered through the bones of his
wrists and praying for the end to come. McCall feared he would not be equal to
Francis’s impending death, not up to the ordeal of coping with this parental
loss. Those who remain must look deep into themselves, at who and what they are
and where they have come from. McCall couldn’t know... not for sure. He was
suffering a kind of double vision, confusing the outlines of two fathers, two
mothers... two lives.

A volley of hail hit the stained glass windows and a litter
of unswept autumn leaves scratched across the draughty nave. Someone touched
his shoulder and McCall started back in alarm. But it was only Mrs Bishop, a
finger to her lips.

‘Putting flowers on David, I was. Come in here to shelter.’

McCall motioned her to sit by him. Mrs Bishop was not
conventionally religious. God sinned most foul against her once and that she
could never forgive. But village always bent the knee to church. That was the
way of it so she attended on her terms, prayed in her way. She looked closely
at McCall’s darkly drawn face and knew he was still sick – but whether in body
alone, she could not be sure.

‘You’re upset about poor Mr Wrenn.’

‘Yes... it’s harder than I ever thought.’

The gradually rain moved west into Wales. They went outside
and stood amid the graves. Flowers in jam jars had been beaten down and drooped
across little hand written cards, rinsed of love and memory now.

‘You must look after yourself better, Francis.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Come over to me. I’ll feed you up.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘Then we can have a talk, like we used to in the old days.’

‘What would we talk about, Mrs B?’

‘Anything what’s bothering you, my lovely.’

They paused. The sound of thunder came again but
distantly, like a fading migraine. McCall did have a question which only Mrs
Bishop could answer.

‘It was you, wasn’t it, Mrs B?’

‘It was me
what?
’

‘...that sent that photograph of me to school, me as a baby
with my parents?’

‘Don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Come on, Mrs B. It’s your writing on the envelope.’

‘That a fact, is it?’

‘I think so, yes. But where did you get the picture, Mrs B?’

‘I’m not saying I did.’

‘I can keep a secret. I just want to know more about them,
that’s all.’

Winnie Bishop took time buttoning up her shapeless coat and
adjusting her hat. But she was reared to tell the truth and shame the devil.

‘I found it.’

‘Where did you find it?’

‘Up at Garth.’

‘In which room?’

‘Can’t remember exact... one of the guest bedrooms.’

‘You mean in a drawer or a cupboard?’

‘No. On the floor. Someone dropped it.’

‘Why didn’t you just give it to Bea or Francis to pass onto
me?’

She was starting to fidget and look uncomfortable.

‘It wasn’t theirs.’

‘Whose was it, then?’

‘Your mother’s.’

‘My mother’s? How on earth do you know that?’

‘Because I do.’

‘But she never came to Garth.’

‘Didn’t she, now?’

‘No. Bea said they never had any contact with her.’

‘Well, all I know is what I know.’

‘You mean you actually saw her there?’

She began to walk away, along the glistening gravel path
towards where David lay beneath the fallen white petals of the roses she had
left. McCall followed close by.

‘Did you, Mrs B? Did you see her at Garth?’

‘Leave the dead and dying in peace, young Francis.’

‘But we’re talking about my mother.’

‘You haven’t done much of that in the past, or about your
Dad.’

‘God, Mrs B. Don’t make me feel any worse.’

‘Then take my advice. Leave well alone.’

‘But you said we could talk about anything that’s bothering
me.’

‘I didn’t mean about that.’

‘About what?’

Mrs Bishop had gone too far already. McCall knew he would
not pressure any more out of her. He let her go. She was bitter and old and
could get things wrong – but this ? McCall owed all he was to Bea and Francis.
They had no motive to hold back on something so trivial as his mother visiting
Garth Hall. Yet he knew Bea was mistaken to say they had shown him the footage
of his father. McCall’s story was in those seven seconds. Each and every one he
would have remembered.

And if Mrs Bishop was right, it would mean he had been
misled twice. However frail he was feeling, the hack in McCall wanted to chase
down the lie to source. But these were raw times – for him and for Bea. He
could not go in hard.

McCall found her struggling down the attic stairs with a
bucket of rainwater from the leaking roof. He emptied the others for her though
the effort exhausted him. She made him sit and rest with her in the kitchen. He
told her he had just seen Mrs Bishop.

‘We got talking about the past and she started to tell me
about the time she’d met my mother, years ago.’

‘Really? Old Mrs Bishop said that? I’m sure she’s mistaken.’

‘She seemed pretty certain to me. Said my mother had been to
Garth.’

‘Never. Your parents didn’t meet until after the war and
we’d all gone our separate ways by then.’

‘So my mother never visited here?’

‘No. Why ever would she?’

‘Well, Francis knew my father so he might’ve known my mother
as well.’

‘It’s a bit sad really but dear old Mrs Bishop was always
getting things mixed up with the housekeeping and everything. I’m afraid her
memory is playing tricks again.’

Chapter Seventeen

Adultery, n.

Violation of the marriage bed, whether one’s own or
another’s – Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary.

It is a grubby, blowzy word, a word with a past, a word that
loiters in cheap hotels or back street restaurants where alibis are cooked up.

Bea knows all this. She should feel guilt and shame but
doesn’t, only a rush of anticipation as she pays off her taxi and walks the
last hundred yards to Arie’s flat. It is mid afternoon, hot and dusty. She
always has to ring the bell twice then cross Gower Street to wait by the bus
stop opposite till she sees his curtains drawn. Arie is never less than
conspiratorial, a bit shady but exciting, too.

Buses come and go. Then she sees his signal. She walks up
four flights of bare wooden stairs. He waits for her in his clerk’s serge suit,
as distracted as ever by matters he avoids discussing. Bea puts down the
shopping bag of curtain material she has bought to explain her trip to Francis.
Arie kisses her lightly on both cheeks, more brother than lover. He smells of
French cigarettes and whatever he slicks on his tight gypsy curls.

‘There is tea. Would you like some?’

‘Tea, Arie? I’d hoped for something a little more risqué
than that.’

‘Please Beatrice. You don’t understand how high the stakes
are.”

But she does. That is what she loves about their affair. Yet
how can she tell him Francis would not mind? She knows because she is certain
of everything... as certain as only those who believe the world revolves around
them can be.

‘I will have to go for a bottle of milk.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No. You must stay out of sight.’

‘Why? What are you afraid of?’

‘Stay here, Beatrice. Do not leave this room.’

His order allows for no dissent. She watches him go then
thinks she will take a bath, cleanse herself of the city’s dirt and heat. She
kicks off her high heels and lets her pleated tartan skirt fall to the floor,
then the jacket and white silk blouse and each item of underwear. Her moves are
slow and deliberate as she imagines those of a whore might be... brassiere,
stockings, suspender belt, knickers, all cast down on the worn carpet in this
shabby little attic.

She luxuriates in the freedom of her pale nakedness – her
seductive, unsuckled breasts, the smooth unstretched belly arching down to the
dark reaches of her sex which yearns for Arie.

She pads softly into the narrow bathroom. The linoleum is
cool to her feet. Tepid water, slightly rusty, spits down the knocking pipes
and into a bath which needs bleaching. Bea leans against the door as the bath
fills. The austerity of Arie’s life is clear – one chair, one plate, one
suitcase. He lives like an outlaw. There is a trapdoor set in a dormer of the
sloping ceiling, leading to a zigzag metal fire escape at the back of the
apartments.

Arie could vanish at the ring of a bell.

This is the first time she has ever been alone in his flat.
His desk is empty, which is odd. It is usually full of papers or articles he is
writing. But they have all been moved away. Everything about this man still
intrigues her. She peeps into his empty wardrobe, under the mattress of his metal
camp bed, even in the food safe which contains nothing but an onion.

Bea shuts the door harder than she intended. Something
wedged between the food safe and the wall falls to the floor. It is a brown
envelope. Inside is a page ripped from a London street map and marked with
three inked crosses in the area of Westminster. There are several sheets of
Hebrew writing she cannot read – and a photograph.

It is of a man in his sixties with heavily framed spectacles
and gun metal hair swept back from a wide, belligerent forehead. The face
stares directly into the camera, tough and uncompromising. Bea recognises him
immediately. This is Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary. Francis
introduced her at a reception after Labour beat Churchill to take power last year.

Arie says Bevin is responsible for stopping the Jews Hitler
did not manage to kill from entering their homeland in Palestine. But why does
he need a picture of him?

Bea hears faint footsteps on the stairs. She replaces the
envelope and makes it into the bath as he opens the door. She splashes herself
then wraps a towel around her waist and pulls the plug.

Tiny pearls of water course down her neck from strands of
wetted black hair and run to the buds of her breasts.

Arie makes their tea at a gas ring and looks up as she
leaves the bathroom. She pauses and he smiles. He comes to her. The towel falls
between them. In his eyes, she sees a child, an assassin, and all the prepotent
forces beyond the weakness of man to suppress. Not a word is spoken. He takes
her where she stands against the wall, this gentle, violent, soldier-poet,
lusting like only those who have lived with sudden death can do.

When it is over, when they are finished, they sink to the
floor, exhausted. They lie on the gritty carpet, their chests damp in the warm,
still air.

Far below in a world beyond the curtains, cars crawl through
the sun-blocked streets, a thousand miles away.

*

‘I’d like to meet your husband one day.’

‘Meet Francis? Wouldn’t that complicate matters for us?’

‘It’s a risk I would take. Anyone in the British Foreign
Office is of interest to me.’

‘But Francis is only on attachment. He’s not really a career
diplomat.’

‘But I’m told he’s taking a special interest in Palestine.’

‘How on earth would you know that?

‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer – isn’t
that what they say?’

‘Francis never talks to me about his work.’

‘Nor should he. But I might be able to help him.’

‘How could you do that? Have you got information?’

‘I’ve told you. We Jews will fight for Palestine. There’s
going to be a war and wars are not just fought with guns.’

‘It sounds to me as if it’d be more use for you to talk to a
military man like Peter Casserley.’

Arie exhales a white flag of smoke.

‘Did you not hear about Casserley?’

‘No. What happened to him?’

‘He got betrayed. Right at the end.’

Bea might have married Casserley once. Now, it is as if she
never knew him.

War blunts all sensibilities. So many have died horribly.
Even the human impulse to give meaning to random, chaotic events is overwhelmed
and made redundant. She gets up and gathers her scattered clothes.

‘All I can say is that you’re mistaken if you think Francis
has any influence with Mr Bevin.’

‘He’s on the inside, Beatrice. That’s what’s important.’

‘Maybe but he’ll not be able to open the gates of Palestine
for you.’

‘Bevin has made some serious enemies by his actions. Just
ask your husband.’

Bea begins to dress herself. She becomes Mrs Francis Wrenn
once more. But she feels like an actress after a matinee. There is still
another performance before she can rest that night.

‘How would I explain to Francis that I knew you?’

‘Tell him the truth about how we met, how you got me to
England.’

‘He might think it very odd that I never mentioned such a
thing before.’

‘Say it was of no consequence to you, now we’ve met again in
London by chance.’

It would be the truth but dressed up in a falsehood. Bea is
not sure.

‘Francis is the dearest of men, Arie.’

‘Which is why you must have married him.’

‘I would hate to cause him any hurt. Do you understand me?’

‘Of course. We must all be careful.’

*

Francis was seconded from the RAF to the Foreign Office
shortly after his father died. The old judge, wizened and cotton-haired, held
on for the last months of the war, shuffling between the rooms of memory at
Garth Hall, not always knowing where he was.

He took to his bed as the victory bonfires blazed across
London, concerned only that Francis was safe. Lavinia assured him Francis had
survived and he seemed content at that. His sister held a glass of champagne to
his thin, dry lips. He managed a sip or two then fell back on his pillow.

Lavinia telephoned her nephew who drove north early next
morning with Bea. The judge lay open-eyed, unable to speak or comprehend. He
must have seen that look so many times before, on the faces of those gripping
the brass rail in the final assize.

Within a month, Judge Wrenn’s coffin – oak from the Powis
Estate – was carried on the shoulders of his son and Mr Bishop with four
Shropshire Yeomanry veterans from the Great War. They trod a slow path under
the bird-call canopy of Garth Woods where the old judge had played as a child,
across the brook he had dammed and fished, then up the field to St Mary and All
Angels. He was placed on a bier with care and respect then wheeled to the
altar, above the vaulted remains of his ancestors.

It had been a bright, clear day, full of May blossom and
promise yet Bea had found it all quite melancholy. Not many relatives answered
the summons of the single, tolling bell. The family was thinning out, even
then.

All hope turned on her.

*

A year on and Francis is less of an innocent in Whitehall.
He had taken his ‘walk in the park’ when the funny people from Intelligence
gave him the once over and set a few harmless tasks to see if he could spot a
tail – or shake one off. He told Bea he was supposed to think it all very
exciting.

‘I said if they’d ever had a bloody Messerschmitt shooting
at their backsides then they’d know the meaning of the word.’

Bea spends part of the week with him at her mother’s old
apartment in Great Titchfield Street, refurnished and decorated now for the
entertaining they have to lay on for foreign diplomats. On Thursdays, she
catches a train back to Ludlow for long weekends at Garth Hall. Francis joins
her when he can.

Lavinia keeps the house going with part time help from Mrs
Bishop. Most rooms are shut off since the fuel crisis but they have logs enough
to heat the ones they use. Bea sometimes feels there is an atmosphere, that
Lavinia and Mrs Bishop resent her – this absentee new chatelaine who has still
not guaranteed the line. Maybe she is too sensitive, imagining slights which
have not been made. Mrs Bishop’s baby girl is nearly two now, a bubbly little
thing, toddling about with a rag doll, always smiling. Bea hates it when the
child is at Garth.

It brings back the pain.

*

‘Are you sure you’ve never had a miscarriage or some pelvic
infection?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, that’s hard to believe. There’s evidence of scarring
here.’

There was. And not just in her tubes. But she had been too
terrified to seek help. Her doctor also attended Daddy. How could she dare take
that risk? She had scrubbed the flat from top to bottom, fearful his eye would
fall on some spot of sin still to be erased. She thought she had atoned but God
punishes in mysterious ways.

‘You do realise what this means, Miss Bowen?’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

‘What are you... 25, 26 ? Well, I doubt you’ll ever be able
to have children of your own.’

Bea had stared at him, this bristle-stiff medical officer,
not truly understanding his verdict was final and beyond appeal. The weight of
his words did not sink in, not then... not with Arie just gone from her life
and the threat of invasion and death on everyone’s lips.

‘Am I fit enough to join the WAAFs or not? That’s all I need
to know.’

‘Didn’t you hear what I just said, young lady?’

‘Yes. Perfectly – but there’s a war on, isn’t there? We must
do our duty.’

*

Now, six years into her marriage to Francis, the truth was
getting harder to hide as every bloody month went by.

‘Anything to report, darling?’

‘No, not this time.’

‘We’ll soon have to get you checked over by that vet in
Harley Street, won’t we?’

She’d laughed at first. They both had.

*

It was Francis who suggested Arie should spend a weekend at
Garth Hall.

‘If he knows as much as you say, maybe I should give him a
punt.’

‘It’s certainly getting nastier in Palestine. The papers are
full of it.’

‘You don’t have to tell me. Those damned Jewish terrorists
have even started blowing up our planes.’

‘You know it’s all Bevin’s fault, don’t you, Francis?’

‘Maybe it is but we haven’t enough rope to hang all these
Jews and even if we did, there’s plenty more where they came from.’

Bea listens for Francis getting back from Ludlow Station.

She said Arie looked like a highly strung violinist who had
lost his instrument. Lavinia will join them for supper. It will make
conversation easier. Even before Arie arrives, Bea is reliving the high wire
giddiness of Prague. But she knows it is a long way to fall.

Mrs Bishop is staying late to help. She needs the money.
Alf’s finding work in civvie street hard to get. Francis rings from the coin
box at The Feathers.

‘Just buying our friend a pint of best. Back in half an
hour.’

Supper is Welsh lamb and a great success. Francis and Arie
could have been friends for years. They talk of war and politics and the
seismic shifts in the power of nations. Bea feels almost excluded – and is
afraid Lavinia is suspicious about Prague.

‘How could you not have told us about such an adventure,
Bea?’

‘We simply caught a train together, that’s all.’

‘But the risks you must have taken. One only reads about
such things in novels.’

Arie senses danger.

‘Beatrice is guilty only of modesty... a charming trait of
the English.’

‘And when did you say you met again?’

‘Two weeks ago, in Bedford Square. Beatrice was coming out
of a shop.’