Capital Union, A (11 page)

She touched his arm and asked him to step back so that she could put the key in the lock. He stared at her.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

He didn’t reply and she repeated her question. I walked up to him and said, ‘There you are.’

I turned to the woman. ‘He is one of my neighbour’s
nephews
. He’s a bit shell-shocked. They’re hoping one of the
doctors
at the infirmary might be able to help.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ she said. ‘Life’s hard enough without
forgetting
how to open a door.’

I smiled. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I hope he hasn’t been a bother.’

‘You’re down on Falkland Terrace, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I see you sometimes when I’m visiting my Grannie. She’s at number twenty-three.’

‘I’ll wave next time I pass you,’ I said. ‘I’d better get this one home.’

‘Do you want a refund?’ she asked, turning towards the box office. ‘You’ve hardly seen anything of the programme, although the news is always good for morale.’

Hannes pushed against the door, although it said ‘Pull’ in large letters on a brass plate.

‘Someone’s keen to get home,’ she said, as if he was a dog.

I nodded and took his arm. ‘Don’t worry about the money,’ I said.

‘It’s nae bother,’ she replied, looking through the bunch of keys in her hand, so I said I thought he might be feeling sick, and she whipped the door open after that.

I held his arm; afraid he might run or do something daft. I was so angry with him I could hardly speak and I was afraid someone might hear us, or recognise me, if I bent his ear about how stupid he had been. It was still light but we only passed one woman and she was leaning over her bairn in a pram, shaking a little knitted teddy at its tear-stained face.

In the park, I turned to him. ‘Edinburgh is a village. Do you understand? Everyone knows everyone. Don’t ever do that again.’

He was looking at me, more upset than I had ever seen him. I wondered if he knew people in the bombed town. A tear was running down his cheek. Somewhere a craw called and flapped in the branches above my head.

‘Please come home,’ I said.

He walked beside me, followed me up the stairs and I let him into Professor Schramml’s flat. He never said a word and I left him there with whatever was going round in his head, unable to help him. My mother would have said he had brought it on himself, but I wasn’t sure it was that simple.

I couldn’t sleep all night, worrying that Hannes might try to escape, and I jumped at every little sound in the street. After a bath, I lay on the divan in Jeff’s study at the front so I could hear if the door opened downstairs, although I didn’t know what I would do if he did slip out. I would have had to let him go, but I was worried he might hurt someone if he was cornered, or they might hurt him. Then I remembered Jeff’s identity card was still in the flat. I eventually found it in the drawer of the hall table. It was only six o’clock, but I ran upstairs, afraid I might lose courage before I could tell Hannes my idea. He was sitting in a chair near the back window, an empty glass beside him. He was surprised to see me so early. Using Professor Schramml’s dictionary, I told him I was taking him to my family’s farm near Ayr and then across to my Aunt Ina’s in Ireland. I drew him a rough map on the back of an old envelope. He looked dubious, pacing up and down the kitchen, until I showed him Jeff’s card and his raincoat.

‘You can pretend to be my husband.’ I pointed to my ring finger and then to him, and held up the coat. It looked like it would fit quite well. Jeff had always worn things a size up to make him look bigger.

He shook his head, lifting a handful of his dark blond hair, which was so different from Jeff’s curls. I got the last bandages
from the kitchen drawer and held them out to him. They would hide his hair, but he put two fingers to his head as if it was a gun and looked at me questioningly.

‘They won’t shoot you unless you try to run,’ I said, but I wondered if that was true. People did strange things when they were afraid. I tried not to imagine him falling dead on the concourse at Waverley with people running about screaming. It wasn’t possible, was it? ‘Just surrender,’ I said, putting my hands up. ‘Like this. Dinnae be feart.’

He stood at the window in the half-light, looking out at the trees. He was clean-shaven and thin. There were still dark hollows under his cheekbones. He was trapped here. ‘
Es ist auch für Dich gefährlich wenn ich länger bleibe. Ich soll doch weggehen, abfliegen
.’ He interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. ‘Okay, I go. Me here – is dangerous for you,’ he said, and rolled his shoulders like a swimmer preparing to dive.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, remembering his tears after the cinema.

He nodded and opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. He didn’t have the words to express what he wanted to say, or perhaps the pain of his emotion had crawled into this throat and gagged him. I took his hand. I was standing so close that I could feel his breath on my face as he sighed. He drew his gaze away from the window. Out there far from this island someone close to him was suffering, had suffered. Perhaps it was too late for them, he had no way of knowing. His eyes were naked when they met mine and I saw the man without his bravado, his deference to me, his social grace. He looked at me and I looked back. We were both wounded and saw the other’s pain, and then stepping forward he pulled me close. I leant against him, and it felt like a home-coming. His heart beat under my ear, fast at first and then slower, a steady beat, the pulse of his life.

He let me go as soon as I loosened my grip on his waist, lifting my hands from his back. They felt light and empty as if it had been right to hold him, as if I should go on holding him.

‘I will miss you,’ he said.

I nodded, distracted by the bow shape of his lips, which closed now waiting for me to reply. I looked down and my eye fell on his picture of Liesl tucked into the book he had been reading. He followed my gaze. ‘Goethe,’ he said.
‘Auf dem See. “Hier auch Lieb und Leben ist.”
There is… life here too.’

I stepped back and shook my head. ‘There is no life here for you in this war. You need to get away.’ A door banged on the stair and footsteps tapped on the steps, winding closer. There was a rattle of keys and the sound of Mrs MacDougall muttering ‘Hell’s teeth!’ as she dropped them with a clatter. A door banged shut and then, silence.

I wasn’t sure if he had understood what I’d said, then he sat down and nodded, putting his elbow on the table and
tugging
at his lower lip. I had his agreement, but I came down with something, and it was to be three weeks before I found the strength or courage to take him. I took to my bed, perhaps it was flu.

Fortunately, Mrs MacDougall, true to form, had knocked on the door to ask why I hadn’t cleaned the stair, and when she saw my peely-wally face, she took a spare key and agreed to fetch my rations. She gathered up the main book, yellow supplement book and points book, and went to sort out the new single book. I didn’t ask where she had registered me. ‘Don’t let a bad conscience affect your life, Agnes,’ she said as she brought through some porridge. ‘You are young, yet. There is a long way to go and you have a duty to our Lord to live the best life you can. “What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth?” Psalms 30:9. You should pay more
attention
to them, Agnes. They might benefit you. Keep you sound of body and mind.’

I grew stronger as best I could. I wasn’t sure I could take many more of Mrs MacDougall’s homilies. She telephoned the prison for me to say I was poorly. They were sympathetic and said to bring in the ID card as soon as I was well.

The night before I began to get better, I was woken by a great wailing, as if the city was screaming, and the sound rose and fell across the hills, echoing on the cold water of the Forth. It forced its way inside my head, but before I could try to get up, Mrs MacDougall had rushed through and pulled me from my new bed in the spare room. My legs buckled under me, and she couldn’t lift me, so she pushed me under the bed and crawled in after me. ‘What about Hannes?’ I said.

‘He’ll have to take care of himself as best he can. They are his bloody friends, after all.’

It was only the second time I had ever heard Mrs MacDougall swear. We lay there side by side, shivering until she pulled the quilt from the bed and we lay under it. There was no sound of planes passing over head, although I held my breath to listen. ‘Don’t worry about general engine noise,’ she said, ‘if it comes. You only need to worry if you hear a high-pitched, whining sound right over head. Let’s hope the guns on the Forth shoot them down, although I can tell you for a fact that more than one of the laddies down there has lied about his age.’

I could see the mattress bulging through the criss-crossed wire of the bed base. I tried not to think of the people who had been crushed falling on the stairs in the Tube in London, all the bodies piled up to make a wall of dead and not a single bomb dropped. There were so many ways to die. After an hour, the all-clear sounded and Mrs MacDougall helped me crawl back into bed, and then felt her way through the hall in the darkness. She returned with my taped-up torch and two hot toddies. ‘I was sorry to have to put Jeff’s good single malt in them, but I couldn’t find a blend,’ she said, as she passed me a cup. ‘Needs must, eh? Look on the bright side. At least if we drink it, it can’t fuel the flames if we’re hit. Not like those poor sods sitting on piles of the stuff in the distillery towns. They could go up in a fireball any day if the Jerries bomb them.’

The next morning, I huddled down in the bed, pulling the quilt and sheet up round the back of my neck. My feet were cold even in bed socks and although I was wrapped in
Mrs MacDougall’s old crocheted bed jacket, the draft from the chimney crept in around me. I pressed my chin onto my chest, but had to sit up as another coughing fit took me and all the heat flew out from under the covers. As I lay back down, I heard the key turn in the lock, then footsteps and a knock at the door.

‘Come in, Mrs MacDougall,’ I croaked. Hannes stepped into the room. He was balancing a tray on his hip and smiled before coming in, as if asking permission. ‘Sorry,’ he said,
waving
a hand at the walls of the bedroom as if it were somehow sacred space.

I pulled the sheet up over my chest.

‘Mrs MacDougall…’ He lifted up the tray before laying it across my lap. ‘…Away.’

‘Where?’ I asked, wondering if she knew someone affected by the raid.

He shrugged. ‘She say back tomorrow.’ A frown crossed his brow. I suppose he wondered if she might return with the police, although I knew she was more afraid of them than he was. We had hidden him for so long that she must have believed she would join Jeff in prison, if Hannes was
discovered
. A good name was not the currency it used to be, as she was so fond of saying. I was sure Hannes would never let on when we had taken him in, but the authorities knew the day the plane had come down, and that would count against us. I imagined them picking over the wreckage on the hill, and wondering why there was no body; looking over to the city just thirty minutes’ walk away, as if they might see him like an ant creeping past the flats. Perhaps they were still searching.

I looked up from the pale, yellow loops of the bed jacket, a soft chain mail of fan shapes. Hannes was watching my face.
‘Noch etwas?’
he said. ‘Something else?’ It sounded like ‘
zomzing
’ and I wanted to laugh.

‘Votter?’ he added, and I watched the language come apart on his lips in this house of words, where every syllable had been guarded, and it wasn’t funny any more.

I nodded, blowing my nose to hide my tears, and he took the empty jug from the bedside table and filled it in the kitchen. I saw him glance at the bread on my tray as he set the jug back down on its doily. He looked hungry. I held the bread out to him, but he shook his head. ‘Please,’ I said, worried that Mrs MacDougall hadn’t been feeding him while I was laid up.

He broke half of it off and put the rest back on the plate. ‘Take vegetables from the garden at night,’ I said. ‘No one will see you.’

He chewed without speaking, not understanding. I pointed at him and then towards the back wall with the garden beyond, mimed pulling up a carrot and nibbling on it.

He laughed and nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, and rubbed the crumbs from his hands on his thighs.

‘
Also
…’ he said, and paused. It was very quiet. ‘Goodbye.’ He glanced round the room, both of us aware that it was the empty guest room and not my own. His eyes met mine. There was something more than pity in them; concern, or a last flicker of anger against Jeff, or the war, or Mrs MacDougall, who kept him hungry. But above all, there was a kind of understanding that didn’t need words, a glimpse of the warmth I had seen upstairs. He took a step towards me and then stopped, looking at the bed as if he might sit on the edge. I pointed to the chair in the corner which he pulled over. It creaked as he sat down.

‘This room is cold,’ he said, looking round.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, but this time the tears came too fast to stop, and spilled down my cheeks. He passed me the napkin he had folded on the tray, and I blew my nose, then tried to smile. It was Jeff’s mother’s best linen. I laughed, but it came out as a burp.

‘Just cry,’ he said, and held my hand. The tears flowed faster and we sat in silence. The warmth of his grasp comforted me and I lay back against the pillows. He took the tray from my lap, and put it on the floor.

‘Sleep now,’ he said and leant forward. I flinched, I couldn’t help it. The light breaking in between the curtains and shining on the quilt had brought back memories of Jeff. I pushed it
off the bed, and it slithered onto the floor, a green snake-skin. Hannes picked it up and put it over the back of the chair. The room smelt of mothballs and beeswax. It seemed to stick inside my nose. I held my breath.

‘Agnes,’ he said. I looked at him, and he smiled, holding his arms out as he might have done to calm a frightened animal on his farm. He reached forward slowly and moved one of the pillows from behind me, tucking me up like a child as I slid down between the sheets. He lifted my head and held a glass of water to my lips.

‘Schlaf gut,’
he said, putting the glass down. ‘Sleep well,’ and he turned away, closing my door without a sound. I heard him pause at the front door to listen, and a minute later the pad of his feet passing down the hall upstairs. He whistled a few bars of a tune I didn’t recognise and then stopped mid-phrase, as if remembering that the price of his safety was silence; that
everything
inside him must be silent, too, without voice. He had become his own jailer, imprisoning the man he had been,
locking
away his identity to preserve his future, a day that might never come.

It was on the first of the bright September mornings, after walking out early to send my mother a telegram, that I shaved and bandaged Hannes’ head as if he was still injured. I
whitened
his face with the last of my talcum powder. His hair lay on the kitchen lino like the fur of a moulting animal. For some reason I couldn’t sweep it up. He took the dustpan and brush from my hand, and knelt down. I put the last of the bread and the dictionary in a small hold-all containing my clothes. I thought it would be best to travel in the early afternoon and catch the train to Ayr from Glasgow, so that when we arrived at the farm it would be later, and fewer people would be about. My pin money and the housekeeping would be just enough to get us there if we didn’t buy anything on the way. Mrs MacDougall watched from the window as we left. I waved, but she gave no sign that she knew us.

We walked down the back streets to Haymarket. Hannes walked slowly and stopped at the top of Viewforth to look at the estuary. I was afraid he was memorising the scene. It was hazy. I knew Rosyth dockyard was tucked away in the distance and tried to pull him on. He looked down at me, and his eyes held no sign of anything but warmth as he turned towards me. ‘
Schön
,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’

I looked over my shoulder when he said the German word, but there was no one nearby, just a woman pulling her dog, which was sniffing at a wall. Large, white clouds scudded over the Forth, and we walked on down the hill past the tenements, the gates to the brewery and the canal. The swans were sailing on the water with their cygnets, nesting under the bridge as they did every year, but no one brought them bread any more.