Kendrick would not have dared to propose to her again. No one proposed to Ellen in those years since Marek vanished. Isaac was sheltering in Gowan Terrace, waiting for his visa to the States, when Ellen came back from Hallendorf. He had seen in an instant that his case was lost, and shown his quality by leaving her alone. And the procession of young men who came to the house after he left for America, though they fell in love as they had always done (she was perhaps more beautiful than ever) knew better than to declare themselves. Perfectly friendly as Ellen was, there was something in her manner that put that out of court.
It was Ellen who informed Kendrick that if he was willing to consider a marriage of the old-fashioned kind, for the management of land and the care of children, she was prepared to become his wife.
Sophie and Leon met during their lunch break in Hyde Park to discuss the news of the engagement. Sophie’s father, complete with experimental rats and Czernowitz, was now installed in a big house in Surrey and her mother was in Scotland, so she spent the week boarding in Gowan Terrace.
The bedding plants had been removed and the ground divided into allotments so that Londoners could dig for victory; the gas masks abandoned during the phony war now hung again from people’s shoulders – but Sophie, who had been so terrified of rejection and abandonment, found herself less frightened than she had expected at the prospect of invasion and total war.
‘Why is she doing this?’ Leon asked. He was working as tea boy in a film studio, but still enjoyed the comforts of his parents’ mansion near Marble Arch.
‘She’s sorry for Kendrick and the evacuees, and Aunt Annie has to have a gall bladder operation, and she wants us all to go there when the bombing starts – or even if it doesn’t.’
They were both silent, remembering Ellen driving off with Marek; the joy on her face – the absolute happiness that transformed everything about her – and her return after the fire.
‘Do you think he’s dead?’
Sophie shrugged. ‘I almost wish he was; she wouldn’t be so hurt that way. Anyway, whether he’s dead or not doesn’t make any difference.’
‘No.’
Ellen had explained to them carefully what had happened at Pettelsdorf and why she would not be seeing Marek again. She had stayed on for the autumn term, the last term at Hallendorf, and packed up the children’s trunks and helped to clear the building. She had taken the tortoise to Lieselotte’s house and then everyone left. Two months later, Hitler had marched into Vienna and been greeted by jubilant and cheering crowds. Finis Austria . . .
‘No storks have come yet,’ Liseselotte had written that spring and the following spring – and then she became ‘the enemy’ and could write no more.
‘I suppose I’d better go and congratulate her,’ said Leon now. ‘I’ll come round on Sunday.’
But on Sunday the inhabitants of Gowan Terrace, having baked an egg-free cake in his honour, waited in vain, and when they phoned him, the telephone rang in an empty house.
The wedding was planned for December, but long before then the poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning – and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those ‘enemy aliens’ who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time.
Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the Tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling.
Leon happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age, packed his current film scenario – and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.
The views of the landladies evicted from their villas – from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven – are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused ‘enemy aliens’ arrived – Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.
Although it was obvious to even the thickest British Tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’
At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia.
He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the fall of France.
Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant.
‘If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,’ he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. ‘Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp – I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat – and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better – anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.’
‘Thank you for telling me my business,’ said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner.
‘You say you’re a Czech.’
‘I don’t say I am; I am,’ said the prisoner unruffledly.
‘So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.’
Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed.
‘Your name is German.’
‘Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.’
‘The dogs?’
‘There was a whole compound of stray
dogs which the Tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk – you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round –’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis – and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital – the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill – if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.’
‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives.
It was to him that Marek spoke. ‘Most of the people in here understand what has happened – that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business – interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler – is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.’
‘So what is it you want?’ asked the commandant.
‘A piano,’ said Marek.
As he came out he found a knot of excited people standing in the street.
‘I told you,’ cried a young man, scarcely more than a boy, who rushed up and threw his arms round Marek. ‘I told them it had to be you! I said if someone had defenestrated Unterhausen it would be you! But you aren’t German, are you? How did you get here?’
‘How did you get here?’ said Marek, suddenly angry. ‘You can’t even be seventeen.’ Were they interning children now?
‘I told them I was older,’ said Leon. ‘When they came to take my father, I wanted to come too. My mother and sisters are in a camp on the other side of the island.’
Leon’s father, Herr Rosenheimer, now came forward to shake Marek’s hand. Though he had filed naturalisation papers the week before his arrest and his export-import business employed more than four hundred British workers, he seemed to be without bitterness, and had persuaded the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) to save the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers, so that he could keep in touch with the stock exchange.
Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the erst-while flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse . . . and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate.
But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories – and Leon, whose reminiscences would lead to Hallendorf and thus to Ellen, had straight away to understand that there would be no discussion of the past.
‘There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,’ he said. ‘We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed – anything. We’re going to give a concert.’
‘Of your music?’ asked Leon eagerly.
‘No. Not now.’
‘Of what then?’
Marek looked round at the weary men, the drab streets, the barbed wire.
‘There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?’
‘Johann Sebastian Bach,’ said the flautist.
Marek nodded. ‘Exactly so.’ For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his erstwhile representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig. Would it seem sacrilege to the old man to put on his masterpiece with an exhausted chorus of amateurs and an orchestra which, if it could be found at all, would be a travesty of what Bach had demanded? Yet it was this monumental work, which embraced the whole of the human condition, from the painful pleading of the Kyrie to the blaze of jubilant ecstasy of the Resurrexit, that these bewildered exiles needed and deserved.
Marek made up his mind. ‘We’re going to perform the Mass in B minor,’ he said. ‘And no one had better release us till we’ve got it right!’
After the fire Marek had spent several weeks in hospital in Prague. He’d been moved there from the local nursing home when it became clear that although his apparent injuries had cleared up quickly – a burn on his temple where a beam had glanced his forehead, the smoke inhalation which had saved his life by rendering him unconscious before he could go far into the building – there was something else most seriously wrong.
At first the doctors and psychiatrists who examined him, the nuns who nursed him, put down the patient’s other symptoms to grief for his parents’ death, but as time passed and he became wilder and more distressed, the possibility of brain fever or dementia was seriously discussed.
Marek had not resisted the move, for the contacts he needed to carry out what he now saw as his life’s work could be assembled best in Prague, where the headquarters of resistance to the Germans had recently been established.
It did not take him long to prepare a dossier on the man who had set his home alight and killed his parents, Oskar Schwachek, who had also killed Franz by the river and tried to murder Meierwitz, was a Sudeten German who since the age of fourteen had been a member of the Nazi party – a fire raiser as a child, a disturbed and vicious adolescent and now, at the age of twenty-five, a killer who put his evil talents at the disposal of those who wanted to hand Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis.
Stepan and Janik had seen him near the house on the day before the fire; old Lenitschka, who had perished with the Captain and his wife, had warned them. Every servant at Pettelsdorf was looking out for him and every member of the resistance.
‘But I want him alive,’ Marek said. ‘I want him to know who kills him. And he is not to be shot. It will happen slowly . . . very slowly.’
During those days of convalescence when the specialists conferred and the nuns prayed over his bed, there were only two visitors Marek did not want to see.
The first was his grandmother, Nora Coutts. She had been going for one of her famous walks when the fire began and had survived unscathed. Nora had lost her only daughter, whom she adored, and her son-in-law. She looked ten years older and something had happened to her mouth, which had been set in a firm line and now, on occasion, had to be covered with her hand. But Marek’s obsession with his vendetta, which grew with his returning strength, shocked her deeply.
‘Your parents died together and almost instantly, I understand. What do you think they’d feel if they knew you were going to poison the rest of your life with this hatred? What do you think they would feel if they knew what you were doing to Ellen?’
But Marek was deaf and blind. Ellen was a danger. Ellen, who came every day and sat quietly and patiently by his bed, waiting for him to become sane again . . . Ellen, who was so beautiful and whole and true, would weaken him. Even less than his grandmother did she understand that nothing but hatred must now rule his life. To track down Schwachek, to kill him very slowly and carefully, explaining at each stage what was happening to him and why – nothing else existed. And when this was done, to face prison or hanging on his own account without regret, knowing that Ellen was out of it and safe.
‘There will be no more love and no more weddings,’ he had said when she first came.
But she had not believed him. She thought as the nuns thought that the shock had temporarily unhinged him. That he should wish to avenge his parents’ murder was understandable perhaps, but to make this vendetta his only reason for existing seemed impossible. Surely somewhere the man who cared for every livin
g thing could not be wholly and permanently dead?
But the weeks passed and Marek became steadily more hostile, more obsessed, more angry. Even so, it was not till the doctors who were treating him told her that she was making him worse and delaying his recovery, that she gave up.
He was standing by the window of his hospital room when she told him she was leaving. A tortoise-shell butterfly was beating its way against the window, and as he caught it in his hand she held her breath, for she expected him to crush it between his fingers, so mad had he become.
But he opened the window and released it carefully into the summer afternoon. That was her last memory of him: the killer with the scar on his forehead, gently freeing the butterfly – and then his bleak, toneless and unadorned: ‘Goodbye.’
The betrayal of the Czechs at Munich came soon afterwards. Marek joined the Czech Air Force, flew his plane to Poland when the Germans overran his country, went on fighting with the Poles – and when they were beaten, with the French.
When the Germans advanced through Northern France, he was flying Potez 63s with a reconnaissance squadron of the French Air Force, never sure whether the airfield from which he took off would still be there when he returned, attacked both in the air and on the ground.
The occupation of Paris in mid-June put an end to these adventures. The crews were summoned, given rations and their pay, and told they were on their own. Marek was caught up in the demoralisation of the retreating troops, the fleeing refugees. Separated from his crew, he reached Brittany at last, found a fishing boat willing to take him across to Dover, and opened his eyes to the extraordinary sight of dozens of baying, quarantined dogs.
The slobbering, excited animals had given him his first glimmer of hope – for it struck him as possible that a nation mad enough to carry stray dogs on to the boats that took them off the beaches might – just might – be mad enough not to surrender simply because all hope was lost.