Last Telegram (13 page)

“Shhh,” I put a finger to his lips. “Let's not worry about that now.”

“But his daughter? He might not be pleased…”

“It would be best to keep it quiet, for a while,” I said.

“They think I am only seventeen. They must not know my real age.”

“It's our secret. Just between the two of us. Please don't worry,” I said, hugging him again. “We have found each other now; that's the most important thing. We will find a way.”

I was worried too, of course. Gwen's words echoed round my head. But as the rays of evening sun illuminated our little grove with a rosy tint, it all seemed a long way away. I was determined not to ruin this precious moment. I wanted nothing else but to hold Stefan's hand and watch the pinks and purples in the sky reflected in the wide, still water above the weir.

But then a horrible wail started up, rising and falling across the water meadow: an air raid siren. Stefan's eyes were wide, full of panic. “What is it, Lily? Is it an attack?”

I grabbed his hand and started running toward the copse. “It's probably just a test, but we'd better take cover, just in case.”

We pushed our way through the undergrowth and into the shelter of the trees, holding each other, hearts thumping, till the siren stopped. Time passed and nothing happened, but the spell was broken. War had arrived, whether we liked it or not.

The invention of the Jacquard machine at the end of the eighteenth century, and its introduction to Great Britain early in the nineteenth, had the effect of vastly increasing the demand for textile designs for both women's and men's wear as well as for furnishing fabrics, and led to rising prosperity for those manufacturers who embraced the new technology.

—
The
History
of
Silk
by Harold Verner

Despite the newspapers' gloomy predictions, the war made hardly any difference at first. John went off to the recruiting office and we held our breath. They told him he would hear from them soon, but the weeks went by and no letter arrived. He said nothing more, and I began to harbor absurd hopes that they had lost his address, or just forgotten him.

At work, we were busier than ever. We took on extra weavers and set up extra shifts to meet ever-increasing demands for parachute silk from Camerons and the other customers. In our “spare” time, we had to keep up with the instructions and precautions that the War Office issued on an almost daily basis: gas masks, blackouts, taping windows, filling fire buckets, reporting for local defense volunteers and fire watch duties. It seemed never-ending.

We had some leftover rolls of the thick black double-satin facing usually used for dinner jacket lapels that we'd never be able to sell in wartime, so this made excellent blackout blinds. We used all the packing room's supplies of parcel tape to crisscross three hundred and twenty individual panes of glass in the mill, and more in the house. The tacklers put up long rows of hooks in each area of the mill, to hang up the fearsome-looking gas masks everyone had been issued with.

Yet tucked away in East Anglia, those weeks truly did feel like a phony war. Air raid sirens wailed mournfully from time to time, but each time it turned out to be a practice drill or a false alarm—very jumpy fingers in the control rooms, we assumed. Other than that, life went on as normal.

Except that nothing was normal for me anymore.

Stefan had become the axis of my world. No need to consult Vera—I was in no doubt this time, and I knew with absolute certainty that he felt the same. All those
True
Romance
clichés I'd scoffed at were actually happening to me. I thought about him constantly, and found myself saying his name under my breath for the sheer pleasure of it. I started taking more care of my appearance, being careful, of course, not to make this too obvious.

When I saw him for the first time each morning, my heart really did beat faster. Embarrassing places in my body would experience sudden hotness at inappropriate moments. I lost my appetite, prompting Mother to speculate out loud that I might be mooning over Robbie. I didn't correct her—it was convenient to let them misunderstand.

Every day was delicious agony, working so close together yet unable to show any sign of affection toward each other. It was so difficult to be circumspect, when even whispers could be understood by our lip-reading fellow weavers. We were especially careful when Gwen was around—which was most of the time.

But we found other ways. When he walked past me, in the gaps between our looms, he would pause, oh so briefly, so that we could feel the heat of each other's bodies, drink in the smell of each other's skin. When we thought no one else was watching, we mouthed sweet nothings over the rage of the looms. Rather, in our case, sweet everythings.

He left little messages tucked under my shuttle or hidden in other places that only I would discover when I checked my looms at the start of each morning. He was a deft cartoonist and could portray with a few simple strokes a manic Hitler growing several heads, or Kurt and Walter having a pillow fight. Sometimes they were soppy, stick figures of couples kissing or holding hands that melted my heart.

Work filled most of our days, and finding a time or place to meet without being discovered was almost impossible. I never asked what stories Stefan told to Kurt and Walter, but at home I became a master of what I hoped were plausible excuses. Before the nights started to draw in, I took to taking walks after supper to “clear my head.” On Saturday mornings, a breezy, “Just popping out to the chemist” worked well for a while. No one would dare to pry into personal matters.

Whenever the weather promised to be dry, we met on the island, arriving separately so that we were less likely to be rumbled. We rebuilt the den from fallen branches and evergreen fronds to keep off the worst of the weather. He found an old tarpaulin and laid it over the peaty, sweet-smelling earth, and his long camel coat served as a blanket.

We laughed and learned about each other, unpeeling layers of understanding about our languages, our cultures, and how we saw the world, finding out how alike we were, and how different. One evening, we dallied so long we didn't notice how dark it had become. Feeling our way across the damp slippery wooden beam of the lock gates, with the water roaring beneath us, was terrifying.

We had to find another place, a dry, warm, undisturbed place, not too far from home, that we could both reach without being observed. But where?

The idea came to me one cold morning when I was rummaging in the hall cupboard for my scarf and gloves. I dislodged a net of tennis balls that fell open and rolled everywhere. As I collected them up, fretting because I was already late for work, I remembered the tennis hut. It was just at the end of the court, beyond the orchard. I could be there in minutes and in winter it was locked up. No one went there. I knew where the key was hidden. I scribbled a hasty note for Stefan, with a map, and slipped it to him at tea break.

That first evening, I remembered too late that I should have brought a torch. I fumbled for the key in its usual hiding place under the eave of the shed and knocked it onto the ground. By the time I'd scrabbled around to find it, my knees were muddy and hands covered in leaf mold, but I was triumphant. The lock was rusty and the key difficult to turn, but it finally gave, and I opened the door.

Inside was pitch black, dry and dusty, with a strong disinfectant smell from the tarry twine of the tennis netting. There was no electricity, of course, and any light would be too risky until we'd had a chance to black out the small window in the door. I stumbled over the rolled-up bundle of netting and then cracked my elbow on something tall and wooden blocking the center of the room. The umpire's chair.

I was cursing under my breath when Stefan arrived and I felt instantly better. He laughed at my misadventures, and we kissed hungrily; it had been a week since we had last met.

After a while, we started to explore the darkness together, pushing aside sticky filaments of spiders' webs and feeling our way toward the back of the shed where we discovered, against the back wall, a small garden table, a broken-down bench, and some lumpy cushions.

“It's like our own little house,” he said, cupping the flame with his hand as he lit cigarettes for us both.

It was perfect.

The next time, he brought blackout fabric and thumb tacks so that we could close the door and light a candle. With his coat laid over the prickly sisal matting, we held each other and kissed and tasted and smelled, discovering each other more daringly. Each time we met, our desire grew stronger, our exploration bolder. I loved the way his long, slim limbs wrapped themselves around me, and counted five newly sprouted black hairs on his otherwise smooth chest. He marveled at the softness of my skin—silken Lily, he called me—and discovered the birthmark on the back of my thigh I'd almost forgotten. “The shape of a mouse,” he said, kissing it, “
meine
Lilymaus
.”

“I've brought something to show you,” he said one evening, pulling a small buff envelope from his pocket. Inside were three small, dog-eared black-and-white photographs of his family, and handling them like precious objects, he passed them to me, one by one. There was his father Isaak, tall and serious-looking, with a full head of dark hair, so like Stefan. His mother Hannah, much shorter, had curly lighter-colored hair, with her arms protectively around two identical little girls, Anna and Else, like blond angels.

As we looked at the photographs, he started to talk more freely than ever before about his family and his childhood. It sounded idyllic; lots of friends, visits to the theatre, opera, swimming in the lakes in summer. But when I asked about the music, his mood seemed to chill. He reflected ruefully on the trouble he'd caused when he turned seventeen and started refusing to play his mother's beloved classical composers, learning jazz instead, hanging out with what he called a wild crowd, and wearing Bohemian clothes.

As life became more difficult, Stefan started to reject his Jewishness. He had no strong belief in God, and to his mother's great distress, he announced that he wasn't going to synagogue anymore. He declared himself to be an atheist.

Then he met the
Swingjugend
. Atheist or not, he realized that he would always be a Jew in the eyes of the government. As he was forced to change schools, endured the daily fear of walking the streets, of insults shouted and stones thrown, playing jazz became an act of defiance. Just as his parents were fearfully attempting to play down their heritage, he rediscovered it, openly defended it, and was arrested and beaten by the secret police for it.

As we met in the tennis hut over several weeks, the memories emerged slowly and painfully. At times, he would be wracked with anxiety about what had happened to his family, now that their letters had stopped. And he was terrified that his false papers might be discovered, of being deported. There was little I could say to comfort him. All I could offer was the present moment, and us.

“If none of this had happened, we would not have met,” I said. “I planned to travel and meet a dark, handsome stranger. But the war has brought him to me instead.” To distract ourselves, we made plans for the future. We would go to Geneva and then on to Hamburg. He would take me to meet his family and show me his country, the foods he liked to eat, the music we would dance to. He would teach me how to play the piano.

That hut was our little heaven, an oasis of happiness in a bleak time. But it couldn't last.

• • •

Father pulled down the blinds over the glazed partition that separated his office from the secretaries' area. From his grave expression, I knew it must be bad news—had we lost a contract? Or perhaps John had heard from the RAF?

“Take a seat,” he said. I waited anxiously as he filled and lit his pipe. “How are you getting on?” he said eventually.

“Fine. Working hard. We all are,” I said, wondering what he was coming to.

“You look weary, my darling. Time for a bit of R&R don't you think? Seen much of Robbie Cameron lately?” he asked puzzlingly. Why was he making small talk about my love life? Here at the mill?

“Not much,” I muttered, “what with one thing and another.”

“Pity,” he murmured through his teeth, clamped on the stem of his pipe. “Your mother and I think he's a topping chap. Lovely manners.”

If only you knew, I thought, still puzzled. And what he said next caught me completely off guard. “Now the thing is, Lily. This is a bit tricky, old girl,” he stumbled, frowning. “Bert came to see me this morning.”

“Go on,” I said, more bravely than I felt, as the hairs on my neck started to bristle.

“He's seen you and young Stefan Hoffman together. Several times. He didn't say exactly what he'd seen, but he suggested there's something between you. More than just friendship. Is he right?”

Bloody Bert, I thought. A nosy parker and a sneak. “What business is it of his?” I nearly shouted.

“Before you go off the deep end, just consider for a moment, would you?” Father said calmly.

“How dare he? I don't go round telling people what he's up to,” I muttered, furious now.

“In case you hadn't noticed, we are at war with Germany. Do you think it is very sensible, being seen out after dark, alone with a German boy?” Father said, more firmly now, “What do you expect people to think?”

I snapped. “That's ridiculous. Stefan might be German, but he is no threat. You know that. I know that. Why's everyone getting so het up?”

He interrupted sharply. “Watch your tone, Lily.”

“Or is it his Jewishness you object to?” I persisted. The implication would infuriate him, but I didn't care.

“Of course not,” he said, getting riled now. “In normal times…”

I interrupted him, “So what's the problem?”

Father stood up and turned to look out of the window behind the desk. I watched his shoulders slump as he took a deep, silent sigh.

“Listen to me, my darling. You have to understand. Stefan is a nice lad. But he's younger than you,” he said in a low tone. “Even in peacetime it might be considered unusual.”

“What do a couple of years matter?” I said, tempted to tell him the truth. “Anyway, I love him. Don't you remember what that feels like?”

“He's handsome, I grant you, different from the local boys,” he said. “Right now you may think you are in love, but in the longer term you'll choose someone more suitable.”

“Someone like Robbie, I suppose? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I hate that man, and nothing you say will ever change my mind.”

Father raised his eyebrows, but he didn't pursue it.

“It's not just that,” he said calmly, sitting down again and fiddling with the pens in the mahogany rack beside the blotter on his desk. “It's what people
think
. We cannot afford to have suspicions and rumors flying around the mill.”

“‘Suspicions'? Whatever are we supposed to be doing?”

His face was severe. “Do I really have to spell it out?”

I nodded, my mouth dry, half knowing what he was going to say.

“People think you are collaborating with the enemy.”