A Place Of Strangers (14 page)

Chapter Twenty Three

Francis Congreve Wrenn died soon after six the following
morning. A nurse rang McCall thirty minutes before the end. The phone bell
tolled down the long landing and through all the empty rooms before he and Evie
woke and knew at once a death was being announced. They arrived at Francis’s
bedside a few minutes too late. The curtains were already drawn and porters on
the way up from the morgue. McCall touched Francis’s face and felt the life
cooling from it. He had rehearsed this moment for months yet could never be
word-perfect. Here was McCall’s past, in the clay of this shrunken effigy.
Somehow, it must be understood... understood then laid to rest.

*

‘Where’s Bea gone, Francis?’

‘She’s had to go away for a few days.’

‘Is she coming back?’

‘Oh, yes. She always comes back to us, doesn’t she?’

‘But who will look after us if she doesn’t come back?’

‘You mustn’t fret about that. She’ll be back in her own good
time.’

‘What shall we play till then?’

‘Let’s make a camp fire in the woods and see if we’ve any
sausages in the pantry.’

‘We’ll tell Bea all about it when she comes home.’

‘That’s right. We’ll do just that and she’ll be so upset
she’s missed a treat.’

‘Why’s she gone away again, Francis?’

‘Best not keeping asking me, little friend. I haven’t the
answer.’

‘So we’ll just have to pretend to be brave till she gets
back, won’t we?’

And so it was. Always pretending.

*

A nurse eased the plain gold ring from Francis’s wedding
finger and McCall signed for it. He was told a doctor could break the news to
Bea if he wished. He said he would do it himself. This was a filial duty. Evie
waited in reception.

McCall felt weightless, as if observing himself from above,
floating down a corridor towards an intense blaze of white light. Death and
fasting keen the senses.

Breakfast was being delivered to the ward. All the female
patients looked alike, pale bed jackets, paler faces. Bea saw McCall before he
saw her.

No words were needed between them. McCall took her left hand
and placed Francis’s ring in the soft warm palm and closed her fingers over it.

*

For Bea, Francis had died long since. She had already mourned
his passing, wept in silence for the man she had loved and hurt for so many
years. What else was there to say in a world where she could hardly speak
anymore? It was fitting for Mac to bring the final message. Why had she never
had the courage to tell him the truth? There was still bitterness in his eyes.
A falsehood repeated often enough attains a sort of reality but is still a lie
at its black heart.

But Francis always said only the present and the future
mattered, that the past was a foreign country beyond our power to conquer and
change. He believed we were the sum of our experiences, good or bad, and the
drama of life flowed from how we dealt with the calamities our foolishness
created.

Bea wanted to think she had always done her best, done what was
right. So had Francis. But now, as she could also see the end of it, Bea was
required to offer up a more persuasive plea of mitigation.

*

‘Mac? Where are you?’

‘Come on out, little friend – don’t hide from us.’

‘Francis has got something for you. Come and see.’

They are in Garth Woods with Arie. Francis has just
collected him off the London train. Arie is soon to leave for Budapest to cover
the growing political crisis there. They have bought Mac a present on the way
home from the station – a cricket set.

‘You’ll never guess what’s here for you, Mac.’

Bea is worried about Mac. Mrs Bishop’s boy died last week
and Mac saw her almost fall into the grave with grief, screaming David’s name.
David was Mac’s friend and Bea did not think the teachers should have allowed
the children to see the burial. Mac could go mute again, as he had been when
they first took him in – and when Lavinia passed away, too. A specialist said
Mac’s only way of dealing with loss was to disappear inside himself. But it is
so frightening when he does. He shuts himself down mentally and it is as if
there is no one inside him for days on end.

They see a movement in the big chestnut tree overhanging
Pigs’ Brook. Mac drops down and runs towards them, shorts torn, shirt filthy.
He has always been a ragamuffin of a child.

‘There you are, Mac. Come and meet a friend of ours.’

‘Hello Mac, I’m Arie.’

‘Hello.’

‘You can call me uncle if you want.’

‘Hello, Uncle Harry.’

They laugh but Mac does not see why. Then Arie gives him the
new cricket bat so he doesn’t care. They knock the wickets into the orchard
lawn and try to teach Arie the rules. But he does not understand them and Mac
bowls him out. The child immediately trusts this stranger – and that is rare.
He takes Arie back into the woods and shows him the rope swing over the brook
and bets Arie can’t guess where his dens are hidden. Arie’s skin is very brown
and Mac has never seen someone this dark before.

‘Are you from a long way away, Uncle Harry?’

‘Yes, a long way away.’

‘My other Daddy’s name was Edward. You’re not a German, are
you?’

‘No, I’m not a German, Mac.’

‘My other Daddy and Francis killed lots of Germans in the
war.’

‘Why did they do that, do you think?’

‘Because the Germans are bad people, that’s why.’

Over supper, Bea watches Mac’s commensal eyes study their
visitor with a child’s fascination for the exotic. Arie’s hair has grown long
again and hangs in girlish ringlets over the open collar of his blue shirt. He
stresses words and ideas with an invisible baton between finger and thumb and
his coal-black eyes can still go afire with all the passion Bea remembers. They
talk of Hungary and what is to happen now its communist rulers have become a
hated elite. Francis dryly asks Arie if this is the socialist paradise he
espouses.

‘Of course it isn’t. Socialism has no place for torture
chambers and show trials.’

‘But that’s what it has come to, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes... the secret police are no better than licensed
murderers.’

‘And what do you think the ordinary people will do, Arie?’

‘My guess is they’ll rise up and demand their political
freedom.’

‘And Moscow will answer in the only bloody way it knows
how.’

They drive to Anglesey early next morning. Arie sits in the
front of the Alvis with Francis. The weather is hot and the white sands of
Aberffraw are deserted. Mac chases off to find the gang of smugglers he is sure
are hiding beyond the waving grasses on the dunes.

Arie uses Francis’s cine camera to film him and Bea dancing
across the beach. Their feet leave a trail of happiness across the watery
sands. Then Mac and Francis play cricket and Bea goes to the car to fetch their
lunch of fish paste sandwiches, apples and bottles of beer and lemonade. She
pauses, holds back her breeze-blown hair with a free hand and gives Arie a
movie première smile.

They finish eating and Arie takes Francis to the water’s
edge where they walk and cannot be overheard. Their friendship is very
masculine. They trade secrets, for information is power in their trade. Bea
feels more left out than ever. But then, so must Francis when she travels away
for her reasons. And he never asks questions.

Maybe he does not need to. Someone in Francis’s world of
shadows probably tells him that is going on. She hopes he realises she loves
them both... equally and forever.

How could he possibly not know that?

Mac is digging a moat around a sand castle and talking to
the commanders of his invisible army who will lead the attack he is planning.
He trots to the sparkling sea to fill his bucket. The air is filled with the
sounds of waves and gulls. Bea lies on a large white towel... lies very still
with her left arm under her head and her right folded across her stomach.

Mac runs back to his castle. He sees Bea and stops. He
stands absolutely motionless. The tin bucket drops from his fingers and the
water soaks into the sand.

In a moment more, he is at Francis’s side, grunting not
speaking but terrified of something he cannot describe. He keeps pointing
toward Bea’s prone body. Francis is alarmed and takes Mac in his arms. The
child is breathing hard and his little chest pumps against Francis’s like
bellows. They run back to Bea who is obviously asleep. She stirs and comes back
to life. Mac stares then turns away and hides his face against Francis’s
shoulder.

Almost three weeks pass before he says another word. He
never told them what was wrong. But they knew, anyway.

*

The funeral director was not happy when McCall said
Francis’s coffin had to be carried from the house, through Garth Woods and
across the brook to the church field and St Mary and All Angels beyond.

‘Might it not be more dignified for the deceased to be
driven to the service?’

‘Mr Wrenn wished to be carried in this way. It is a family
tradition.’

‘What if someone trips and we drop the casket?’

‘Then I’m sure he won’t mind in the least.’

All repair work on the roof was suspended for that day. The
mourners assembled in the stable yard. Mrs Bishop was there with her daughter,
Mrs Craven, and a dozen or so villagers. Mr Fewtrell attended with a few other
elderly men, black-coated and rheumy-eyed at yet another funeral for a friend.

Only Bea would be driven to the church, accompanied by a
nurse. Bea’s attendance was against all medical advice. But she scratched a
jumbled message on her pad – funeral, must go. I not be stopped.

The procession filed behind the coffin, carried by six
suited bearers. They followed McCall across the orchard lawn into the woods
where he paused them outside the dacha and closed his eyes. All that could be
heard was the slow tic... tic... tic of a cock pheasant and the swilling waters
of the stream.

McCall moved on. Each slow step was a retreat from the
past... by the clump of ash trees where his play house rotted in peace, by all
the hides and secret places to which he could never return.

The rector stood at the bridge over Pigs’ Brook and led from
there. Bea waited in a wheelchair in the porch below the church tower’s
bickering black crows.

She could see where the sexton had been digging,
close by the yews where she and Francis first lay on that windless summer morning
in 1940 and he died his little death, knowing it might happen for real before
many weeks were out. The symmetry of life is only revealed to those about to
depart it.

McCall wheeled her to the Wrenn family pew where they sat
together. Even through her fur coat, he could tell how reduced she was
becoming, how impermanent.

He looked round for Evie who had promised to take time off
work to come. The church was barely half full but he could not see her. The
choir sang
The Lord Is My Shepherd
then the rector spoke.

‘Today, we must pray for ourselves, not just for Francis.
There may be those here who need to search their souls, to ask what they are
running from. Maybe it is God himself, so they must answer honestly the
question
who am I in his purpose?’

McCall mounted the pulpit steps. The lies Bea and Francis
had told him seemed less important, now. His mouth was dry, his eyes wet. He
started to talk, but almost inaudibly. Two people entered the church from the
porch. One was Evie, the other an old man he did not recognise.

‘We each have our memories of Francis and that’s what they
should stay... our own. All of us here have somehow fitted into his
extraordinary life, a life that was complex and exciting but about which few
people know much. It’s probably better that way. But we who are left salute a
hero, a patriot, a man of honour and integrity we all loved and were proud to
call husband, friend, comrade... or father.’

He looked down at Bea. She was close enough to touch the
coffin. But there were no tears behind the veil of her black velvet hat, just
the faintest of sad smiles.

The choir ended with Housman.

‘Take my hand quick and tell me,

What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;

How shall I help you, say;

Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters,

I take my endless way.’

Then they put Francis in his grave.

*

Bea and the other mourners left for Garth in three polished
funeral cars. McCall set off alone, walking down towards the woods. Evie
hurried to catch up and began dragging him back towards the church.

‘Quick – there’s someone you’ve got to see.’

The man who arrived late with her was saying goodbye to Mr
Fewtrell by the lych gate. He was tall once, straight-backed and sinewy, but
looked arthritic and bent now, like an old soldier on Remembrance Day, anxious
to be out of the cold.

‘It’s
him
, McCall. I swear it.’

‘Who?’

‘The man in the cine film – the one holding you as a
baby.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I’ve just been sitting next to him, haven’t I?’

They were about a hundred yards apart. McCall immediately
began running up to the graveyard. But the man’s chauffeur was already closing
the rear door of a silver Jaguar. McCall shouted and waved but the car
accelerated away. All he could see was its diplomatic plates as it disappeared
down Church Lane.

Chapter Twenty Four

The hospital nurse clucked over Bea in the back of the lead
funeral car.

‘Your husband wouldn’t have wanted you risking your health
today of all days – ’

Bea prayed for her power of speech to return, if only to tell
this drone to shut up.

‘– you’re very wilful and if I’d had my way, you’d still be
on the ward.’

Bea closed her eyes. Francis was gone. It was all over –
done and finished with forever. The future was Mac’s, now. Yet how ruined he
seemed at the graveside, even more so than those who had played the great game
with Francis. Mac might never truly forgive her or stop worrying whatever bones
he had unearthed. But she could not even beg him to anymore.

What an odd little boy he had been... robust enough on the
outside but God alone knew how fragile within. Francis always said they must
see him as a blank sheet of paper on which they could write whatever they
wished. Nothing was that simple – not when the child was the sum of its fears.

At least Evie showed up. Such a striking woman should not be
in church for a funeral. She and Mac could make much of a life together.
Everything in Garth would be his. She and Francis had only wanted the best for
him... only the best.

*

‘Mac – I’ve got the biggest surprise ever for you.’

‘What is it?’

‘We’re going on a long journey in an aeroplane.’

‘Are we Bea, honest? An aeroplane like Francis used to fly?’

‘No, not quite like that. One that carries passengers. We’re
going on a little holiday.’

‘Where to?’

‘To see Francis... to where he’s working.’

Francis had wangled a Foreign Office jaunt to lecture on
Cold War politics at a NATO training base in the Bavarian mountains. Mac misses
him and his face lights up at Bea’s news. A week later, they are in a London
taxi heading from their hotel to the airport. He is excited at all the
capital’s famous sights but grips Bea’s hand during take-off, afraid yet trying
to hide it. A stewardess asks if he would like to meet the crew.

Mac is led to the flight deck, wide-eyed. His only question
is to ask if the pilot is going to drop any bombs.

‘No, ’course not. All that’s finished now. The war’s over.’

‘Francis was a pilot.’

‘And who’s Francis, young man?’

‘He’s my new Daddy and he and the old one used to bomb the
Germans.’

‘Well, not any more. We’re all on the same side, now.’

The aircraft banks low for its final approach into Munich.
Through the cabin window Bea sees specks of humanity moving in the streets
below. Here are shopkeepers, mothers, teachers, railwaymen, musicians, clerks,
librarians, architects, engineers, decorators, scientists, doctors.
Unremarkable citizens. Ordinary people. Just like us.

But for Bea, each was the tiniest of cogs in the factories
where Hitler industrialised murder. They obeyed his order to hate their
neighbours, the Jews, hounded them into ghettoes, stole their belongings and
ensured every cattle truck was full of human cargo for the journeys that few,
if any, would survive.

Bea feels nauseous with revulsion. She will soon have to
move amongst them... to smile, talk and eat with them while never believing
they stopped being Nazis when their Fuhrer fired a bullet into his unhinged
brain.

It had become politically expedient for all the untold
crimes of these new allies to be forgotten. But why should the agony of the unavenged
dead go unheard? Bea knows she must rein in her loathing. If Arie can operate
here, so must she.

*

Francis has organised a NATO driver to meet them in an
official car. Mac sleeps in Bea’s arms on the long journey through streets once
tyrannised by the fascist Brown Shirts, then out into the countryside towards
their hotel.

Mac remains underweight for his age. There is still a
vulnerability about him which remains immune to all the security they offer.
She pushes the flop of brown hair from his innocent face and wonders about the
man he will become.

Francis says he will need to go away to school soon if he is
to toughen up and make anything of himself. He insists Mac will be able to
cope. Bea is far from convinced yet still they put his name down for Francis’s
old school.

She looks at the passing scenery. It is an overcast day and
there has been a shower. There are birch trees everywhere... hunched and heavy
with rain and paler than bones, like markers in the land of the dead.

What in the name of Jesus must it have been like?

She puts her free hand close to her face and peers through
the bars of her fingers. That was all there would have been – thin cracks
between the metal-strapped planks of the wagons to gulp a breath of air or lick
a flake of snow. No food, no water, no space to sit or rest. Each was a coffin,
deep in human waste in which the sick would die and those without hope go mad.
Iron wheels on iron rails, the beating machinery of destruction, all day, all
night... screaming, screeching, pouring out smoke to blow like wraiths through
the branches of trees.

Birch trees. Everywhere.

Birkenau.

*

Bea and Mac leave the
Hotel Alte Post
and go to meet
Francis in the square. The village is in a deep bowl of oppressively close
mountains. Mac stares at all the life-size bible scenes painted in bright
colours on the outsides of shops and houses. He has seen nothing similar before
and does not like the frightening depiction of Christ nailed to the cross,
oozing blood.

‘Why do they do these pictures, Bea?’

‘It’s the way the people round here have of thanking God.’

‘What are they thanking God for?’

‘For keeping them free of the plague a long time ago.’

‘What’s the plague, Bea?’

‘It was a most terrible disease.’

‘Why was it terrible?’

‘Because big red marks came on people’s bodies then they
died soon after.’

‘Was it to do with the war, then?’

‘No, Mac. This happened hundreds of years ago when there
wasn’t any medicine.’

‘So weren’t the people here marked by the plague?’

‘Some of them were but most of them escaped so that’s why
they still paint their houses and put on special plays to give thanks.’

They see Francis and Mac runs to him to be lifted high in
the air with delight. Bea and Francis embrace and Mac babbles his news about
what he has seen and done in Garth Woods.

They go to a small restaurant and sit below a wall of
antlers from deer shot in the forests nearby. Francis orders spatzle for them –
small egg noodles, gently cooked and served with a basket of black bread. All
around are German men... chewing slowly and efficiently. Mac feels their gaze
upon him because Bea and Francis are speaking English. He has only ever seen
Germans snarling orders in comics and heard stories of how they tried to kill
Francis and his first Daddy. Mac thinks them even nastier in real life. He
moves his food round the plate and fixes them with all his impotent hostility.

‘So, little friend... what would you say to another
surprise?’

‘What sort of surprise, Francis?’

‘Well, the Germans are very good at making toys and in this village,
there’s a shop that sells the finest wooden toys in all of Bavaria.’

‘And I can have one?’

‘Yes but only because you’re the best little boy in all the
world.’

Francis leads the way through cobbled streets full of more
weirdly painted houses. The shop they are looking for is in an alley of three
storey buildings between a bakery and a jeweller’s. The window is cluttered
with every sort of toy – puppets, dolls, Noah’s arks full of beasts and birds.
Inside, Mac does not know what to look at first. A young woman emerges from a
back room. She has golden hair coiled in a bun and a long white pinafore stuck
with curly wood shavings. Francis could only be English in his tailored Norfolk
jacket and brogues. But he remembers enough German from the days when he might
have had to bail out of his bomber.

‘The lady says to choose anything you like, Mac – whatever
takes your fancy.’

Mac picks up a wooden car and a helicopter then sees just
what he wants – a fort with a working drawbridge. Francis insists Bea has a
present, too. She selects an exquisite Madonna and Child which the assistant
herself carved from a log of lime wood.

Francis pays cash and praises her great skill. Then he gets
out his cine camera and asks if he might film her at work.

She is embarrassed but Francis is all charm and she agrees.
They are taken into the little grotto of a workshop behind a beaded curtain. It
smells of linseed oil and sawdust. One shelf is lined with the decapitated
heads of clowns waiting to be given sad or smiley faces.

Francis goes down on one knee to shoot his sequence then
pans across to another wood carver whittling a thin plaque of alder on his
bench. The man’s hands are a fascinating contradiction – thick, heavy, almost
brutish, yet able to guide a narrow-bladed chisel like a surgeon’s knife. Every
trim and slice of the pale-grained wood slowly coaxes out the tormented despair
of Christ crucified hidden beneath.

For Bea, what is being revealed is the face of another
anguished Jew.

Francis moves in closer. The wood carver does not let his
concentration lapse. He is in his mid fifties, fit and strong with the leathery
bald pate of an Alpine climber. The films runs out and Francis bows in
gratitude.

‘Wie heissen, Sie?’

The wood carver hesitates, but only for a moment.

‘Frank... Wilhelm Frank.’

*

Breakfast next day is hard boiled eggs, ham and radishes.
Bea and Francis tell Mac to eat up as they are going mountain walking. They set
off down a street named after King Ludwig, cross the clear, icy waters of the
Ammer river and pass chalets with big gardens and trees full of linnets and
blackbirds. The metalled road gets steeper and gives out to a dirt path. It
hairpins up and up, through woods of spruce, linden and birch.

Mac loves it. He has brought his toy pistol and runs ahead
to make sure it is safe. They turn a corner and find another image of Christ
hanging on a cross, thirty feet high and sculpted from blocks of cloudy Kelheim
marble. Mac jumps out from behind a tree.

‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead!’

Bea and Francis pretend to fall down then find a bench where
they sit and admire the scenery. Mac heads back into the trees to look for
spies. Far below, the bell of the village church marks the hour and echoes
round the circling mountains from its golden-domed tower. Francis checks his
watch.

Bea calls Mac to her and gives him a bar of chocolate.

‘Can I go and play again now?’

‘In a minute, Mac. Just be good and wait here till I say.’

Beyond the figure of Christ, a man appears from within the
semi-circle of trees which are its backdrop. Mac spins round and points his gun
at him.

‘Bang! Bang!’

‘No, Mac. Stop it. Don’t do that now.’

Francis quickly walks across to the man. They shake hands
and talk for a moment. Then the man disappears back into the trees and Francis
returns to the bench.

‘What’s Uncle Harry going here?’

‘That wasn’t Uncle Harry.’

‘It was. I could see him.’

‘No, Mac. It wasn’t anything like him. It’s just someone I
had to meet here.’

‘But you gave him something.’

‘No I didn’t. What a good story-teller you’re becoming, little
friend.’

Bea and Francis both laugh. But Mac knows what he saw.