I Can't Begin to Tell You (5 page)

One
by one, she placed the flowers into a glass vase. Catching up the black dahlia, she rolled it between finger and thumb and realized its stem was thicker than the others.

She understood.

Her fingers shook as she unwrapped the piece of paper folded tightly round the stem and read:
Darling Freya, you have forsaken me for Felix
.

It was signed:
Odin
.

Carefully, she inserted the dahlia into the arrangement.

Her name was Freya.

By Day Three, she was better organized.

She had boots and a thick jacket, plus the torch. Letting herself out of the kitchen wing, she made her way down to the lake by the path she and Bror had taken on Day Two. It was the best route because it had the virtue of being out of sight of the house.

This time, she had made sure that Birgit served tea to Bror in the office, where he was labouring over accounts. ‘Plenty of gingerbread,’ she instructed Birgit. ‘And make sure you refill the pot.’

Even a thicker jacket provided no real barrier to the cold snaking through her body. She tightened its belt. Soon, all too soon, the sun would disappear from the land and winter darkness would lock down over Denmark.

Then the real cold would arrive, catching Jutland, Zealand, Funen, Lolland and the hundreds of other islands in its icy grip. It would drive roots deep into buildings, into the sea, into the earth, and it would colonize water. As it intensified, ice fantasies would build, crystal by crystal, in rivers and streams and, under the freezing onslaught, even the toughest trees would stoop in homage to the cold.

Making stealthy progress through the trees, Kay kept a check on the time. Every so often she stopped to take stock. A deer startled in the undergrowth crashed away, insects scuttled over
the leaf fall. Halting finally at a curve in the path where three birches grew close to an elderly oak, she settled to wait.

What was that?

Three days of vigil. Had they sapped her courage and resolve? Had they strengthened them?

Five-thirty.

In the undergrowth there was movement. A twig snapped.

Kay held her breath.

A figure wheeling a bicycle materialized out of the darkness.

She breathed out.

He was tall, as tall as Bror, and whippet thin. As he drew closer, she could see that he was young, early thirties perhaps, and dressed in worker’s overalls.

The figure stopped, hands clasped tight around the handlebars. ‘What are you reading?’

The voice was hoarse and tired.

She couldn’t answer immediately – for she was struggling with a sense of unreality. Pulling herself into order, she managed: ‘Steinbeck’s
The Moon is Down
.’

‘Freya.’

‘Felix, welcome.’

For Felix – not his real name but he almost preferred it to Kasper – this rendezvous was the culmination of a profound change of heart, of philosophy, of a way of life.

Two years ago, as a committed pacifist, he was pursuing an ordered and predictable existence. Now he couldn’t even be sure that he still had a life ahead of him. No one could have any illusions: doing what he was doing dramatically shortened life expectancy.

The morning on which the Nazis invaded Denmark, he and Jette, his girlfriend, were in bed in her København flat.

A neighbour banged on the door. ‘Get up, the Germans are here.’

Jette didn’t stir. Hers was always the deepest of sleeps.

Padding in bare feet over to the window, Kasper, as he then was, looked out. Scattered across the pavements and the square opposite were handfuls of leaflets which had been dropped by aircraft. One of them rested on the window ledge and he grabbed it. It was German propaganda and the message was clear:
accommodate, adjust, cooperate
.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he observed the tousled, unconscious Jette. Reaching over, he woke her and told her the news. Later on, they listened to the wireless and heard the announcement that the Danish Government was prepared to accept and to work with the new Protectorate.

‘Kasper, don’t look like that.’ Jette was boiling water for much-needed coffee. ‘We’ll survive. We’ll just keep our heads down and carry on as before. You have houses to build. With your status, it doesn’t matter who the government is.’

She was complimenting him, the award-winning architect he
had become after hard thinking and hard work … the architect who specialized in light, airy, practical social housing conceptually light years away from traditional Danish design.

‘You believe that?’

She poured the water over the coffee grains. ‘If you’re a true democrat you can’t reject the vast majority. The Danes want peace and the government has ensured that they have it.’

In her white wool blouse, pleated green skirt and a necklace of tiny glass beads, Jette looked so clean, so neat … so immovable. In that moment, irrationally, and certainly unfairly, for his beliefs on non-violence were as strong as hers, Kasper hated her.

‘So you don’t mind what has happened, Jette?’

A thoughtful person, she took time to answer. ‘Of course I
mind
. But I’ll live with it. So will you.’

The coffee grounds sifted through the boiling water to the bottom of the pot and Kasper reflected on Denmark’s military weakness, on the geographical impossibility of fighting and on the two hundred and more Danes who lived on the border in North Schleswig, who would suffer if there was trouble.

‘I’ll live with it.’

The words did not sit easily on the tongue.

Later, he found they had spread like an ink stain. They were whispered in the office, on site, in his inner ear when in bed with Jette. They were repeated in other ways and in other places by those whose manner varied from the angry and resigned to the smug or subversive. Yet the unease grew.

Poor Jette. As Kasper was dragged increasingly into his preoccupation with the war, his temper shortened.

She tried to make sense of the puzzle Kasper now presented.

‘I don’t understand you, Kasper. I don’t …’

Question to himself: why was he spending more and more time with the groups whose aim was to create ‘a just anger’ against the occupation, especially as quite a few in the groups
were writing and printing underground literature? One of them – dark, Jewish and far too thin – asked Felix to help distribute them. Which he did.

‘Living with the status quo,’ he explained to the bewildered Jette, ‘does not mean you approve.’

Question: why was he talking to those who had contacts with the tiny, still shaky, resistance in Denmark? And why was he so interested in the whispered accounts of escapes to Sweden and London?

Question: why was his vocabulary expanding to include words such as ‘sabotage’, ‘infiltration’?

He was learning how powerful the unconscious was when it desired its own way – how it pushed and prodded. He went out of his way to seek out examples of Nazi brutality and repression. When fighting broke out in the København streets, he rushed to observe. When his friend, a communist journalist, was thrown into the Vestre prison, he bribed a guard to let him visit and came away seriously disturbed by what he had seen.

One morning in the spring of 1942, he woke up and told Jette that he was leaving.

She turned a gaze drenched in misery on Kasper. ‘It’s someone else.’

‘No.’

She pulled together the tattered remnants of pride and her always predominant desire to be rational: ‘If you go now you will never come back.’

He took in the peachy skin, the silky hair, the kind earnest expression, the anguish which lay under it. A mixture of relief that the matter had been brought to a head, guilt at the relief, affection and a giddy-making sensation of liberation, rooted in his chest. ‘I understand.’

Half an hour later he let himself out of her apartment. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye. ‘You’ve changed. You’re not the man I first knew.’

Within days he had shut down the architectural practice, sold
his flat and deposited the money in the bank. Instinct told him to cover his tracks, and Kasper observed it by cycling to Frederikshavn, where he bought a passage in a fishing smack over the Øresund. Once in Sweden, he made contact with ‘Richard’ in Stockholm, a fellow Dane to whom he had been directed by the daughter of his old professor. Richard, he was told, could put him on a plane to London to meet ‘certain’ people.

Richard was cautious. He wanted to know who Kasper was, what were his motives and contacts, and he forced him to kick his heels for a week while he ran a check. ‘Don’t speak to anyone while you’re here and do your best to be unobtrusive. Spies are like rabbits in Stockholm, and it’s impossible to tell which is which.’ He grimaced. ‘Most of them are probably double agents anyway. We’ll get you out when a decision has been made.’

Then it was all systems go.

With masterly understatement, Richard warned Kasper of the rigours of the flight. ‘You’ll be rammed up the bum of a British Mosquito for the duration. Since the Luftwaffe also use the airport, it can be a bit tricky getting you on board but it shouldn’t be too bad. It’ll be bloody cramped. Use the oxygen mask. You can get brain damage at that altitude.’

‘Who will I be meeting?’

‘Can’t answer that, old chap. You’ll have to trust me, Kasper.’

That was the last time he answered to his real name.

Funny that. He didn’t miss it.

As soon as the Mosquito landed he was bundled into a car and driven to London. Still groggy, he peered out of the window, sorting out impressions. His parents divorced when he was ten, and his mother fled from Odense to England, where she married an Englishman. The result was that he was shuttled between Britain and Denmark as a teenager, and he became familiar with England and London. Peacetime London, anyway: the prosperous and bourgeois one, smugly grand in places and more or less clean, if smudged with tar and smoke.

King’s
Cross, Marylebone Road …

Clearly, the war had changed the city in subtle, and not so subtle, ways. Two years into conflict, the dirty, pocked streets spilled out their innards and heaps of rubble lay all over the place. There was what he could only describe as a rot, miasmic and despairing.

The car crawled through the streets, swerving to avoid the potholes and the patches of water seeping from fractured water mains, and he longed for something reassuring, even a coffee, a good coffee. But that, as he later discovered, was nigh-on impossible in England.

Having arrived at his destination, he began the process of initiation into The Firm. ‘Your name is Felix,’ he was told. ‘You will answer to no other.’ At a series of meetings he was addressed by the heads of the intelligence, signals and Danish sections. Their briefings had been, more or less, unanimous.

Our organization specializes in the unorthodox and clandestine … Our approach is unusual, unconventional thinking is our point, and it is so secret that total silence is demanded of you
.

He learned that there had been very little undercover activity in Denmark to date. A couple of radio operators had been smuggled in with their sets earlier in the year but both had gone silent. The worst was feared.

What we want you to do, Felix, is to light a flame of Danish resistance and stoke it into a sodding great bonfire.

He warned them of the extreme difficulties of operating under a puppet government with legions of informers on all sides.

To their credit, the section heads listened with care, then they issued their directives.

We will train you, and then you will go and do something about it.

So far, only the communists had made real efforts to resist and they paid the price by being frequently rounded up. To make headway, Felix would need to build alliances and coalitions with them.

Do
deals with the Reds, make a few promises but don’t offer too much …

Wasn’t that just like normal politics? He would have to find ways of burrowing into an acquiescent population. Of course, it might prove to be easier than he estimated now the Nazis were busy draining the country of its meat and dairy, and pinching the able-bodied men to work in German factories.

After his induction in London, Felix was sent for training to a number of Special Training Schools, the STSs, run by The Firm.

One of his first tasks was to learn Morse code. That had been a pig. In The Firm’s slang, Felix was not a natural ‘pianist’. ‘Pity you’re not musical,’ observed the Morse instructor. ‘The musical ones do best.’

Forced to practise hard and often, tapping out the rhythms on any flat service, he found his dreams were invaded by its staccato bleeps.

‘
- -..,-.- -,.-
’ This was his call sign: ZYA. It belonged to him, and to him alone. He would use it to contact the Home Station, back at base.

ZYA.

Home Station allocated times for agents to make contact, and he’d been told that whenever his scheduled call, his ‘sked’, was due, the signals clerk allocated to him at Home Station would patrol the airwaves, waiting patiently for him to transmit his call sign. It would be a moment of trust, of faith that the letters oscillating through the frequencies were precise and faithful to the message.

A signals clerk would have no idea who Felix was, or where he was, and the not knowing was a requisite for this shadow existence. In fact, by the time The Firm had finished with Felix – driven its tentacles into his psyche and changed the patterns of his thoughts – he’d been hard put to know who he was as well.

Going into the field meant that an agent carried several
identities stacked one on top of the other. Felix’s call sign was ZYA but his code name, the one he would use to transmit his messages, was Mayonnaise. His field name was Felix – the name he would be known by as he worked to build resistance in Denmark. He was also in possession of a couple of aliases, complete with identity papers sewn into the lining of his jacket.

There was much to take in.

Learn every detail we’ve given you. Your birthplace, your background, your uncles, your first woman, your pet rabbit. This is not a joke.

So it was that, as a fully trained undercover agent working for what was known as The Firm, Felix found himself being driven by a FANY to a secret airfield somewhere in England. From there he would be parachuted back home into Denmark.

His right hand beat out a tattoo on the leather armrest:
- -..,-.- -,.-

The FANY had dark hair bundled up under a cap and the back of her neck was clean, pearly with youth and inviting. Who was she? One of the hand-picked girls who were trained by the undercover services to help with practical matters, to drive, courier and God knew what else. At the STSs, FANYs – the initials stood for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a hark back to the First World War – were everywhere. They were polite, even-tempered, necessary. Trained into absolute discretion, too. Neither she of the pearly neck, nor he, would talk on the journey other than in the barest of exchanges.

The car blinds had been pulled down but not quite far enough and, here and there, he caught flashes of buildings. Felix peered out to witness the weary and dun-looking population picking its way around the rubble in the street. Back to their homes? Out for the night? He spared a thought for the inconvenience and exhaustion of shopping, keeping clean, travelling … These were the topics he used to consider when he dreamed up onto paper his light and airy houses, back in the life which he had left behind.

At the final meeting with the chiefs, he had been given an unequivocal and bleak picture.

There is some activity on Jutland. We’ve managed a couple of arms drops there but not much else.

In the driver’s seat, the FANY jabbed her foot on the brake. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said as they jerked to a halt. ‘Pothole.’ She added, ‘It wasn’t there yesterday.’

Having headed north for approximately an hour the FANY turned right and drove along the road which, so pitted was it, clearly led to hell. The car axle shrieked in protest and the wheels rattled. Next, they appeared to be in an ordinary field with a farmhouse and a barn beside it. However, to their left, an aircraft taxiing down a runway suggested that this was no typical farm. The growl of its engines split the night’s silence. A uniformed man emerged from the farmhouse, introduced himself as Felix’s dispatching officer and ushered him inside the barn.

Inside, equipment was stacked on shelves lining the walls and a fire burned in the grate. A group of men checked over piles of stuff on the table.

‘Now then,’ said the dispatching officer, issuing Felix with overalls and a parachute. ‘Here we go.’

There were a couple of other ‘Joes’ waiting to go in with Felix. Both Danish. The first was tall and sandy-haired, with the kind of flat features which Felix disliked. He gave the barest of greetings before demanding a drink and then a second, and paid no further attention to Felix. The second Joe appeared to be a different kettle of fish. Short, with thinning hair, slightly bandy-legged, he was nothing to look at. Schoolmaster or a clerk in an obscure ministry? Or something like that. Would he handle anxiety and fear well? He was not in the least heroic-looking, rather the reverse, cutting an unremarkable, almost anonymous figure. Paradoxically, despite his obvious jumpiness and a dry little cough, he looked a better bet for the undercover life than his nervy companion.