Read A Place Of Strangers Online
Authors: Geoffrey Seed
He walked home through the graveyard where David lay. The
village children had filed into the dark church from the sunshine of their
playground to sing All Things Bright And Beautiful for a friend who would not
be coming back. McCall’s abiding memory of that day was being scared by all
squawking birds falling about his head from the bell tower. David had been like
a brother. But he, too, became someone else who vanished from his life for
reasons he had not understood.
Maybe McCall had done something wrong or they did not like
him. Until now, he had never put Bea and Francis in that number.
He was tired after his walk and went to his bedroom to
re-read the words Mrs Bishop had written on the back of the map she’d given
him.
To my boy Francis, to remember me by.
Affectionately yours, Mrs B.
He opened his memory box and took out the envelope he
received at school many years before with the photograph of him as a baby with
his parents. Allowing for a bit of arthritis or failing sight, they had been
written by the same person – no scholar but neat and tidy and legible.
McCall always suspected Mrs Bishop sent the picture. What he
could not work out was why – or how she got it.
So Evie’s father had disowned her. Snap.
*
Bea leaves St Ermine’s Hotel and collects Arie from the
café. They disappear into the discreet London smog, arms linked, safe from
those who would not approve. Bea tells Arie that Casserley is interested in
him.
‘He said they’re planning something special.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Casserley wouldn’t say but his people will contact you.’
They hurry along pavements lacquered by the harsh electric
light spilling from little shops and restaurants. There is something of
Prague’s menace about the darkened streets and the strangers passing by, eyes
watchful from beneath the brims of hats. Bea, twelve years younger than Arie,
intelligent but self-centred and mercurial, feels that aphrodisiac sense of
power flowing from being privy to secrets. Matters of life and death are in her
hands. She is taking part in history. But Arie says nothing will prepare her –
or the world – for what is to come.
‘How can you know this?’
‘How does a poet know anything?’
‘But why would the Germans want to kill all the Jews? It doesn’t
make sense.’
‘Don’t you know? We and the Bolsheviks are conspiring to
dominate the world.’
‘No one can possibly believe that.’
‘Hitler says it’s true so the German people believe it.’
‘But they’re so cultured. Everyone knows.’
‘Yet they will hunt us down like vermin until we are no
more.’
Bea has no reference points – no folk memory of pogroms or
burning ghettoes or a thousand years of Jew-baiting and blood letting. Arie
says even those who have will not understand, either.
They reach Bea’s apartment where Arie will stay until the
future is decided. Her father, the Air Marshal, will not be informed. Bea plans
to see him in his rooms in Bentinck Street at the weekend. She had telephoned
and told him more of her escape from Czechoslovakia and the peril she had been
in.
‘We’re all in peril, Beatrice. That’s why there will be a
war soon.’
Days pass. Arie goes out most mornings. He does not say
where he has been or what he has done. Bea knows better than to ask but feels
excluded and does not like that. He never returns before supper, sometimes even
later.
Now he stands with his back to her, leaning against the
sink. The trousers of his dark suit shine with wear. He looks through the net
curtains at the children playing outside, swinging on a rope tied to the arm of
a gas lamp. Their shouts and laughter come through the slightly sulphurous air.
Bea wonders about Arie’s family. Where are they this night? She dare not ask –
and he never talks of them.
Arie boils a kettle of water for tea. She notices how noiselessly
he moves. He pours. His fingers are taperingly long, like a musician’s. He sips
his tea which he takes with lemon, not milk, and one spoonful of white sugar.
Then Bea’s telephone rings out. The unexpectedness of the
bell startles her. She rises to answer it but Arie is up from his chair first.
He motions her to stay still and quiet then goes into the hallway and lifts the
receiver. Bea hears him talking in a low voice but not in English. Arie returns
and finishes his drink. He offers no explanation. His eyes are hooded and
black. He is not sleeping properly.
‘Arie... look, I must know. I will be able to help you,
won’t I?’
‘In what way do you mean?’
‘To help with whatever assignment Casserley gives you.’
Arie pours more tea for them, taking his time to find the
right words.
‘Beatrice, what is to come will not be like Prague.’
‘No, I realise that.’
‘This war started for some of us long since and in time, you
will see what happened in Prague was just a game... a little game like those
children outside might play.’
‘It didn’t feel like a game to me. It just made me want to
fight the Nazis even more.’
‘And so you will but you must not hope for something Major
Casserley cannot allow. The war that is coming will be fought in many different
ways and places. Do you understand?’
Bea understands all right. But she is not to have another
starring role like Prague. She feels cheated and angry like a child that cannot
get its own way.
‘Who was that on my telephone?’
‘Someone you would not know.’
‘Maybe not but who was it?’
‘Beatrice, please... I am humbled by all your kindnesses but
I cannot answer.’
‘It was a woman, wasn’t it?’
‘No, not a woman – a comrade.’
Why should she believe him? She gets up and washes their
cups at the sink so he does not see the tears she cannot stop. If it is not
another woman then he is going to his death with Casserley and she will have
brought it about and will suffer like all those widows after the Great War.
Suddenly, she is aware of time passing.
‘How long before Casserley is ready?’
‘Soon, very soon.’
‘And then?’
‘I’ll be sent for special training.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘We’re not without friends, Beatrice.’
‘They couldn’t help you in Prague, could they?’
‘No, then there was only you.’
‘And why can’t it be me again... both of us – working here
for Casserley?’
‘Understand this, Beatrice. There is a rope around our necks
wherever we fight.’
‘Might you be sent abroad?’
‘I will be sent to wherever I’m of most use. Those will be
my orders.’
Bea is unable not to cry openly now. Arie comes to her and
holds her. He has not done this before, not in this way. There is a new
tenderness about him... a compassion for her and maybe for himself. Arie knows
they are trapped in this hour glass together, helpless against the gravity of
events.
They kiss, gently at first. She is aware of the roughness of
his chin and the tight, tensile feel of his shirted back. It excites her like
nothing she has ever experienced before. Bea knows what is to happen next. It
is as if she has been created for this moment, this sweet meeting of destinies,
pre-ordained like their first had been.
She prays he needs her as much as she wants him. Whatever
she had been given in her indulged life was as nothing when set against her
longing to possess this Christ-faced man.
She leads him to the bed where none but her has ever slept.
The light outside is failing. The children have finished their game. Bea
unbuttons her dress and allows it to fall to the floor. Arie watches but does
not move. She takes off her remaining clothes, indifferent to modesty or
convention and stands before him like an offering to the gods who cast them
together.
‘Come, Arie... for me. Please.’
In a moment more, they are in bed. She takes him unto
herself, takes the life which is hers and sustains her own, caressing, biting,
loving the whip-cord body that writhes in spasm in her arms till he is spent
and wordless in the dark by her side.
They lie covered by a white sheet like the newly dead.
Night passes. Bea stirs. She hugs Arie who has not slept. He
is warmed by the closeness but afraid of the breaking dawn. She makes tea and
brings it to him. They sit, backs against the bed head, still naked. Bea is
vibrantly alive, initiated at last into womanhood and all its power. But Arie’s
face is grey with guilt. Bea fears he will now talk of the wife he must surely
have and the children he has lost in the east. She kneels astride him and takes
his face in her hands.
‘What is it, Arie... what’s wrong?’
‘Why did you choose me?’
‘I didn’t choose you. It was written, it was meant to be.’
‘I do not believe in predestination, Beatrice. We all have
free will.’
‘Yes, but in that queue, in the embassy yard... I saw you
and I knew.’
‘You knew what?’
‘That our lives were somehow meant to join together.’
‘So because of a stranger coming to that place, I should
live while others die?’
Arie is confronting an idea far outside political theory and
rationality.
‘That you should come from your country, Beatrice... should
be there at that exact moment and feel this way about me, a foreigner you’ve
never met. Explain this to me, please.’
‘I can’t but it was like I’d always known you’d be there,
waiting for me to arrive.’
‘No, I cannot understand. It is beyond all calculation.’
‘But that’s what I felt. That’s what happened.’
His face betrays confusion and helplessness.
Somewhere, hidden within him, there is also a terrible fury,
blown from the desert of grief he has left behind. For the moment, it is
controlled but its day will come.
Before more can be said, the apartment’s front door is banged.
Arie gets out of bed quickly. He pulls on his clothes, unwashed in a heap on
the floor, and orders her to answer. Bea wraps herself in a dressing gown.
Standing on the step is Peter Casserley and another man in civvies. Casserley
tips his trilby to her.
‘Beatrice, good morning. Your guest decent enough to receive
visitors, is he?’
He pushes passed her unbidden and enters the flat. Arie
emerges from the bedroom, fully dressed and holding the brown suitcase he had
carried from Prague.
‘Minsky – glad you’re ready. Say your adieus, there’s a good
man.’
Bea knows from Arie’s eyes what has been done behind her
back. She can think of nothing to say, not in sorrow or anger or supplication.
Events she herself contrived are in spate. The urge to kiss him, to cling to
him or demand of Casserley his safe return – all this must be suppressed. She
can do nothing but hold his poet’s hands in hers and grieve. Arie is marched
from the flat as if he is being arrested and taken into custody. Casserley
leads the way. Arie gets into the back of a waiting saloon.
Bea, alone and cold on the pavement, tries to glimpse a
final image of the face she adores. Then all that is precious and all that is
rightfully hers is driven away.
Another car is parked across the street... a Humber with a
uniformed chauffeur and a limp RAF pennant on its black polished wing. It, too,
moves off.
And as it does, so Bea sees her father staring at her with
contempt and distaste.
McCall took a welfare call from a freelance cameraman who
once shared a ditch with him during some minor African skirmish they had both
almost forgotten.
‘You need a holiday, chum. Somewhere warm. Pneumonia is
serious.’
‘So they tell me.’
‘Did you hear Ricky Benson’s died?’
‘The stills guy? But he’s younger than me.’
‘That’s my point. But it was him in the coffin, believe me.’
‘You went to the funeral?’
‘Of course. I said
to his wife “Ricky’s looking a bit peeky” and she says “well, he’s not had a
drink for three days.”’
‘What price the love of a good woman?’
‘Listen, McCall – do yourself a favour and get on a plane
and get some sunshine.’
‘Yeah, but where’s the buzz lying on a beach?’
‘There isn’t one but it’s a damn sight safer than getting a
tan while some bastard’s shooting at you.’
It took all morning for the results of McCall’s second
hospital X-ray to come back. The inflammation in his lungs had not reduced
enough to sign him off. He drove back to Garth and found Bea’s note propped
against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. With it was a photograph of his
father he never knew existed.
Thought you might like this, Mac. Forgotten we
still had it, somehow lost in all those old letters in the attics. Am shopping
with Mrs Craven. Try to keep an eye on Francis.
Here was only the third picture of Edward McCall he had ever
seen... this stranger who gave him life. It was black and white like the others
and showed the same intense young man, but strapped in a bomber’s tail gun
turret as it prepared to leave on another mission.
His pale, aesthetic face looked so unsuited to the
utilitarian mechanics of aerial warfare. But it was the eyes that riveted
McCall, big with dread and seeming to draw his son into that claustrophobic
bubble from which there was no escape. Kill or be killed. On the back, he had
written :
All tail gunners must surely all go mad. It is like
being suspended in space, looking into a void with no sense of being part of
the aeroplane or the crew. I feel so detached, just me, running my own little
war against the enemy, waiting and watching.
Francis always said Edward had nerves of steel and they
brought each other luck. That was how they survived. McCall held to this as he
put the picture in his memory box and closed the lid.
But something nagged at him, some little pinch of guilt he
had first felt at Evie’s questions. Why had he shown so little curiosity about
this unlikely warrior, still less about the woman he had married and borne him
a son? Who were these people, what were they?
He forced himself to imagine his father taking off that late
afternoon, the blood, guts and fragile bones of the man, so aware that a single
burst from an enemy gun could cast him down to earth, screaming at the stars as
he fell. Only a fool would not be terrified.
McCall, weaker than he would admit, became nauseous at the
very thought. He went to the bathroom and sank his face in a bowl of cold
water. For a brief second in the mirror before him, McCall fancied he
recognised this man he never knew. He went to touch his reflection but there
was nothing... just silvered glass and a memory of terror not properly
understood.
*
Evie gazed towards Piccadilly from behind the long net
curtains of her anonymous office in Leconfield House. Distant, anonymous
figures came and went, heads down through the drizzling January day, each
unaware of the plots and conspiracies fomenting on her desk.
Here were transcripts of phone intercepts, tape recordings
from listening devices in office walls and Special Branch memos written by cops
who had got their press and trade union snouts pissed in Gordon’s wine bar by
Charing Cross Station or the Blue Posts pub in Soho.
But the miners were now a broken force, down on their knees,
never to rise again. Mrs Thatcher had slain the enemy within as surely as she
had seen off the Argentine generals without. Dancing on graves could now begin
in the Carlton or Travellers clubs or wherever power took money to bed and
fucked the rest of us.
Evie had tried to warn her father without showing out too
much.
‘You’re being led to defeat, Dad... why don’t you start
thinking for yourself?’
‘Like you do, you mean – spying for the bloody bosses?’
He accused her of treachery in the row that followed. That
cut deep. But her father was not a wicked man, nor did the Realm need defending
against him. He had never even been to London and only got to Oxford once – by
motorbike when she went up in the year of revolution which was ’68.
Evie took him for tea along The High. She had already
assumed a new accent which he mocked as la-di-dah. He was soon gone home again,
back to the world he knew. Evie had wanted him to feel proud of her, not ill at
ease. But in a place of funny gowns and silly hats, it was him who was the
oddity. It was kinder never to invite him again.
She remembered a covertly filmed baton charge by lines of
police on horseback. Miner standing with miner, forming a single, fluid mass
like starlings yawing from a hawk. The camera zoomed in to the main
troublemakers. Each face was a contorted image of alarm and hate, hands raised
for protection against the stamping hooves. Evie actually knew some of these
men – one especially. Not that his name ever went into her official report.
Something Bea said reminded her of all this.
‘Never forget, Evie – every law is man-made. Some are so
morally wrong, it can be one’s duty to break them.’
She had taken to Bea
but the old lady’s Leftist sympathies seemed out of character. Then again,
communistic traits often ran in the duplicitous ruling classes of England.
*
Doctor Preshous had ordered McCall to exercise. He had taken
to walking Garth Woods each afternoon, barrowing back fallen branches to saw
for logs. He needed to rest up every so often and would sit listening to the
stream just as Francis had. Nearby was the great crown of an ash tree and the
tree house had Francis built for McCall. Here was childhood in a box of planks
with a make-believe chimney and windows, slowly rotting in the seasons and no
longer a place of safety.
Garth Woods were overcast. But its dun earth would soon
lighten with snowdrops and yellow aconites then daffodils, anemones and
bluebells.
The woods were all about life, death and renewal. He turned
towards the bridge over Pigs’ Brook then saw something which made no sense –
bits of paper the size of playing cards, impaled in the trees along the path.
McCall reached one down – a page ripped from a hymn book with a verse
underlined in green pen.
O Lord, turn not thy face from me,
Who lie in woeful state
Lamenting all my sinful life,
Before thy mercy gate.
Others were highlighted with a verse from the same
hymn.
And call me not to strict account,
How I have sojourned here
For then my guilty conscience knows,
How vile I shall appear.
Some mad ritual was being carried out. As McCall retrieved
the last one, the young rector came across the bridge carrying all the hymn
books that had been vandalised then strewn across the church field. He seemed
distressed but relieved to see McCall.
‘This is Mr Wrenn’s doing. A lady in the bungalows saw him
and rang me.’
McCall hardly knew what to say beyond promising to pay for
the damage. He turned back towards the dacha where smoke rose from its metal
stovepipe. He heard raised voices coming from inside. Bea and Francis were
having a row.
‘You’re spying on me again... spying, spying, spying – ’
‘Don’t start all this again, Francis.’
‘You shouldn’t be in here. Get out. You’re not allowed in
here.’
‘Please, Francis. Stop this. I just want you to come home
and have some food.’
‘You think I don’t know about your little game, don’t you?’
‘What game, Francis?’
‘I’m onto your secrets and don’t think I’m not.’
‘I haven’t got any secrets.’
‘Oh, no?’
‘No, I haven’t. Now are you coming to eat or not?’
‘Just clear off, you witch. Leave me alone – do you hear?’
Bea emerged in her long gardening coat and green boots. It looked
like she was crying. McCall caught up with her and asked what was going on.
‘How do I know? I’m not a doctor. But I can’t take much more
of this.’
He found Francis staring into the wood burner which roared
with flames. He looked up at McCall as if he were a complete stranger.
On the floor were more ripped pages from Hymns, Ancient and
Modern and a slew of aerial reconnaissance photographs of German cities he had
bombed. Francis threw one at him without preamble.
‘See? What can’t speak can’t lie.’
‘It was dreadful, Francis. All war is dreadful.’
‘You know nothing, boy.’
‘No, I wasn’t there.’
‘Well, I was. I saw it all from my aeroplane.’
‘But it’s all over, now.’
‘Not for me, it isn’t.’
‘Tell me why, Francis.’
Francis started rocking in his chair in great distress, back
and forth, back and forth, fingers gripped around his knees.
‘Firestorms firestorms. Bombs and incendiaries... thousands
of tons of them. Everything destroyed, all the people. All destroyed. A wind of
fire so terrible...’
‘You were doing your duty, Francis.’
‘My duty, was it? My duty to turn my fellow beings into
living torches?’
‘It was all a wicked waste.’
‘Not wicked, boy – pornographic.’
McCall saw other photographs under Francis’s chair –
close-ups of German civilians Francis helped to incinerate. Men, women,
children like seared logs, reduced to a third of their size, twisted in pools
of their own liquidised fat.
‘Come on, Francis. It’s getting late. We should go back to
Garth.’
‘No. She’s there. That bloody spy. Thinks I’m not onto her,
you know.’
‘Bea’s concerned about you, Francis. She loves you.’
‘Strange sort of love, boy... still, she’s covered her
tracks pretty well.’
‘What tracks do you mean?’
‘You’ll find out one day.’
‘Why not tell me now?’
‘Because information shared is an advantage lost.’
‘But Bea’s your wife – ’
‘She’s much more than that, little friend... much, much
more.’