Gifts of War (12 page)

She finished her gin.

“Tomorrow I’m giving a party at the flat in London, where I shall be surrounded by all my friends. Nurses, theater types, American spies, soldiers on leave, strippers and croupiers from seedy nightclubs, painters, writers, doctors, black-market spivs. What will happen? Something certainly, because a few days later I leave for France and”—she snapped her fingers—“who knows?”

She smiled—a tender, sisterly smile that took me back again to our childhood. “I’m a bit light-headed, Hal, but that’s because it’s all so intense. But this is an intense time—and if you’re not part of that intensity you … you’re missing out.”

Izzy’s eyes shone, her skin glowed, and her hair had a sheen to it. She was fired up, all right. She was not my younger sister anymore.

I’d been overtaken.

The next morning I walked Isobel to the station, for the early train to London. We hugged on the platform.

“Thank you for the lecture last night,” I said.

“Was I overbearing? Oh Lord. It comes from having to order patients about. I’m not quite the loose hooker I made myself out to be.” She turned her brown liquid eyes up to me.

“Izzy,” I said softly, kissing her forehead. “I’m proud of you. Make sure you write.”

“Make sure you get to London,” she whispered back as she kissed me. “You’re wasted here. I’ll get leave in about six months and we can
have a party at the flat. I’ll show you off to all my friends. That sexy limp, your craggy looks, all that book learning. Who knows what might happen?” She kissed me again and was gone.

Sam agreed to go out with me again on the following Saturday, only this time she chose where we went. I was to meet her at the station at noon exactly, and was told nothing more. When I arrived, she was already there with Will, a pushchair, and a picnic basket.

I took the basket from her and asked, “Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise,” she said. “Though don’t get carried away—it’s not a very
big
surprise.”

We took the 12:15 train, which headed south, to Walton Hill, Lower Lea, and Hookend Halt. We got out at Hookend, and were the only people to do so.

“Can you manage that basket?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It’s about a ten-minute walk from here.” She strapped Will into the pushchair.

“What is?”

“The river Irwell. Then you’ll see.”

There was only one lane leading away from Hookend railway station and we took it until we came to a bridge over a stream. This, I assumed, was the river Irwell, for we turned off the road and onto a path, a mud path through the grass alongside the water. The meadow next to the river was very bumpy. The grass was lush, but only grass grew here. The banks of the river were marked by weeping willows, some of which had been pollarded, interspersed with other trees and bushes, which formed a green tunnel over the river.

Sam struggled with the pushchair until we were about halfway between the bridge, where we had turned off the road, and some buildings
I could see in the distance. She seemed to know the place she was looking for.

“That’s Blacklands Abbey,” she said, indicating the buildings. “It’s actually a monastery, still going strong.”

We had reached a clearing between some trees where there was a small natural beach formed by the river. She parked the pushchair, took Will out, and gave him to me to hold. I put the basket down and Sam took a blanket from the pushchair that Will had been sitting on and laid it out on the grass. She took back Will, set him gently on the blanket, kneeled down herself, and began to unpack the picnic.

“Corned beef,” she said. “It’s all I could get.” She had a tin, some bread, margarine and tomatoes, two apples, two bottles of beer and one of lemonade.

“Why didn’t you let me bring something?”

“You did your bit last week. Fair’s fair.”

“Independent, aren’t we?”

She looked up at me. “I have a child. I have to be.”

I took off my jacket and sat on the blanket. Will stared at me.

“Is this the surprise?”

“Not yet. Be patient.”

She got the food ready and I poured her a shandy and myself a beer. There were a few insects about—flies and wasps—and she fitted Will with a hat with a brim. He seemed happy enough.

“How did you find this spot?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute—let me just finish these sandwiches.”

After a moment, she held up an enameled plate with a corned beef sandwich and a tomato on it, and a hard-boiled egg.

“A feast,” I said, and it was. “The open air always seems to make food taste better.”

She nodded, her mouth already full. “I’m starving.”

We munched and sipped our drinks in silence.

“Now,” she said after a while. “Let’s see how observant you are. What’s unusual about this river?”

“Ah! The surprise.”

“Come on, it’s easy enough.”

But I couldn’t see anything unusual. “It looks like any other river to me.”

“Look up and down it. Tell me what you see.”

I did as I was told. I stood on the small beach and looked upstream and downstream. “I still can’t see anything unusual.”

“All right, then. How
far
can you see upstream?”

“Half a mile, I suppose.”

“And downstream?”

“About the same.”

“And why can you see all that?”

She had lost me. “I don’t know. Because the river is straight?”

“Yes!
At last. If you can see upstream for half a mile, because the river is straight, and you can see downstream for half a mile, that must mean the river is straight for a whole mile.”

“So?”

“So?
So?
Have you ever known any other river that is perfectly straight for a whole mile?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose so.”

“You don’t
suppose
so? I can tell you it’s
very
unusual.”

“So is this the surprise?”

“No, not yet.” She wouldn’t let up. “Why do you think this river is so straight?”

“Something geological?”

“No, look at those bumps in the meadow: see? Didn’t you notice them when we were walking here?”

“Well, yes, I did.”

“And what do you think they are—or were?”

“Aha! I see now. The old riverbed.”

“At last, the penny drops.” She let out a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh. “These bumps are old oxbows from medieval times. The monastery over there”—and she nodded—“has been here since the eleventh century, when waterwheels first came into use. The monastery has a big waterwheel and, so as to drive it faster, the eleventh-century monks straightened the river for a mile upstream, to speed up the flow of water.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Is
that
the surprise?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Not yet. We have to wait for Will to fall asleep. It has to be quiet. Let’s just lie here softly talking for a bit.”

We lay down, digesting our lunch, finishing our beer and shandy, listening to the gurgle of the water in the river, the
zzzz
of the insects, Will babbling to himself, and the occasional birdsong.

“So,” I said. “How
did
you find this place?”

“Wilhelm, of course. He had come here with others from the school where he taught, in Stratford, locals who knew all the interesting places. There are trout in the river, though we never caught any.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about Wilhelm, but Sam obviously did.

“Did he like Stratford?”

“I think so. Before he worked in Göttingen, he had grown up in big urban sprawls, so he liked the ease with which he could get into the countryside here. And he liked the small scale of everything, especially the small churches—not so imposing as in Germany, he said, but more human.”

“I think Will is asleep.”

“Uh-huh. We just keep lying here, talking quietly. You’ll see the surprise soon enough.”

I said nothing.

“Wilhelm didn’t get on with his father, but he is close to his
brother, Dieter. They both took up mountaineering in their teens— you know, roped together, for safety. He said they had both saved each other’s life. What a thing that must be to have happen. It’s strange,” she said and looked up with a sad smile. “His whole family are Anglophiles—they all speak English. I was looking forward to— Well, now all this has happened.” She tugged at a clump of grass with her fingers.

“Tell me more about your sisters.”

She wiped crumbs from her lips. “Ruth is the tomboy, I told you that. Or she was. She has turned into a very good seamstress and works in a uniform factory in London. She’s a bit forceful, but that’s no bad thing—it’s a responsible job that she has. Faye is the wild one. Very attractive—blond, good figure—all the men chase after her, and she loves staying out late at night. In Bristol she was always down at the docks, where there are clubs and bars, even though we weren’t allowed there. Faye knows how to live—she has the wildness of our father.”

She sipped her shandy.

“Lottie is the dreamer. She always wanted to go on the stage, she likes dressing up, always has us playing charades at Christmas and birthdays. She and Faye got hold of makeup long before I did, even before Ruth did.”

“And you, where does your—”

“Look! There! Now!
Look!”

Sam was pointing upstream.

It took me a while to focus, to grasp what she was pointing at, what she meant. And then I saw it, understood why she had brought me to this place: a flash of blue glinted brightly as it struck a shaft of sunlight slicing through the foliage—and a kingfisher zoomed down the green tunnel, barreling along about four feet above the water, flying straight as an arrow and faster than a train.

Before I could breathe twice it had gone.

“That’s what I
call
a surprise,” I said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“Kingfishers like a straight river—that’s what Wilhelm told me. So they can let themselves go. Isn’t it a marvelous sight? And they like silence, and stillness, which is why we needed Will to be asleep. He’ll be back before long. We just sit tight.”

“Okay. I’ll try not to fidget. I was about to ask where your wanderlust came from. Your father, difficult as he was, must have had something to do with it.”

“I suppose so.” But she sounded doubtful. “My father did come from a family of sailors but my mother’s father was in the army and served in India—it could have come from there. She had some lovely old photos of India—you know, those sepia prints showing elephants and tiger hunts, and the crowded Indian trains, with people sitting everywhere. But she had them on the
Titanic
and they all perished with her.”

She patted Will’s head. “I haven’t done any real traveling yet but I love trains and ships. I love the bustle and busyness of big railway stations, the smell of engines, all the ropes and rigging and clutter you get in the docks. It’s all so full of
… possibilities
.” She removed her Alice band and shook her hair free. “I love luggage in shop windows—it always makes me want to start packing. I just adore being
in
trains, on the move, rattling along, on the way to somewhere, anywhere. But there are such exciting-sounding places—Valparaiso, the Irrawaddy, the Orinoco. Imagine having
been
to the Orinoco. I read somewhere that the native Indians there can tell what river
water
comes from just by the taste. Imagine seeing a volcano erupt—spit fire high into the sky— or listening to a glacier crack and creak. I know there are oxbows
miles long
on the Mississippi.” She refitted her Alice band. “I know, I know, I’d probably get yellow fever or malaria the minute I set foot somewhere exotic. But I’d love to risk it.”

“You sound dissatisfied with Middle Hill.” My beer was finished. “Do I want to travel? I can’t say I’ve thought twice about the smell of railways, but I did like being in Germany—”

“Look! Here he comes again—”

Sure enough, the blue flash zoomed past us going in the opposite direction.

“What is he doing, do you think? Collecting food for Mrs. Kingfisher or just letting off steam?”

“I’m sure there’s an answer. I’ll get one of the children at school to look it up.”

“Do they always do your dirty work?”

She grinned. “Just one of the perks of the job.”

I was going to ask her if she would miss teaching if the verdict went against her but decided against it. Maybe another time. In any case, Will was stirring, so we began to pack away the picnic things and prepared to return to Middle Hill.

Life at the Ag gradually got harder—and that was fine by me. After a few weeks, it was no longer good enough to translate accurately and in detail: we were forced to translate faster and faster without losing accuracy
or
detail. Clearly, in a war, efficiency and speed matter. Accordingly, after we had been in the course for about a month, examinations were introduced on Friday afternoons. We had to translate increasingly technical pieces and we had to do it in a specified time; the time varied with the length of the piece and the difficulty of the vocabulary and syntax.

Because I had spent two years in Germany I had no difficulty with this segment of the course, and neither did two of the others I had by then got to be on nodding terms with. Bryan Amery and Rollo West had both suffered from TB, which is why they weren’t at the Front.
Like me, both had been in Germany before the war, Bryan in, I think, Frankfurt, and Rollo in Hamburg. Rollo knew quite a bit about shipping and had an even better vocabulary than mine and an almost native accent.

“Are you sure you’re not a Fritz?” I used to tease him.

“I might easily have been,” he replied once. He explained that he came from Southampton and his family had some ships and his mother had traveled with his father—and had nearly given birth while the ship was in dock in Hamburg. He had three brothers and three sisters and between them, he said, they spoke fourteen languages. He was a little too earnest for my taste, and worked harder at the course than he needed to have done, given his proficiency with the language. But he had plenty of money and spread it around in the pub. That made him popular.