‘I couldn’t be more proud of you, you know. You are going to be a great artist one day.’
Her cheeks colour a little. ‘Thanks.’
‘Bye then. I’ll ring when I get to Oslo.’
‘Bye. Oh, almost forgot.’ Hannah sets down the urn on the pavement and rummages in her bag. ‘Here, take this. Don’t open it until I’ve gone.’
Edward takes the rolled-up piece of paper and slips it in his pocket as they hug goodbye. Something about the tension with which he clings to her, a rigidity of his muscles, gives her the impression that he is pushing her away as part of the same gesture.
As they step back from each other, she crouches down to pick up the urn. Straightening her back again, she hears her father mumble something and, raising her head to listen as he lowers his, their lips touch by accident. It is so glancing a contact, Hannah almost doubts it even happened. Only her father’s embarrassment as he backs away again confirms that it did.
As she walks down the street she can feel his eyes on her, and she half expects him to call her back. When she reaches the end, she turns and sees he is unrolling the paper. She wonders if he will recognize his own writing. Wonders if he will remember giving her the same piece of paper on the day he went to Afghanistan. Three short words.
V
London. Winter 1956
AFTER SHAKING HANDS WITH THE WARDEN AND STEPPING OVER THE
lip of the door into the outside world, Charles stands for a moment, feeling disorientated. Tucked under his arm is a cardboard box tied with white string. The ‘civilian’ clothes he is wearing are now, after a year of prison food, baggy on him. His collar, loose by two inches, is nipped together by his tie.
He turns and leans back as he takes in the Gothic gatehouse towering behind him. The sky above it is slate grey and seems to be bulging petulantly. As he contemplates it, the first drops of rain arrive and he turns up the collar of his overcoat. He feels beaten by his year in prison. It has robbed him of his humour and optimism. But he nevertheless feels relieved to be on his way back to Anselm, his home.
When the door closes behind him and its bolt clatters into place, he regains his focus and notices the short, hoary-haired man who is standing under an umbrella next to a Humber Pullman with white wall tyres. He raises a gloved hand.
As Charles walks towards the man, he transfers the box to his left arm and holds out his right. ‘Funf,’ he says as they shake. ‘Merry Syphilis.’
‘And a Happy Gonorrhoea.’
Eric Secrest holds the door open as Charles gets in and acknowledges a man wearing a trilby and scarf sitting rigidly in a shadowed area on the far side. He has pouchy cheeks and an unused smile. Eric pumps his umbrella a couple of times before getting into the driver’s seat.
‘This is Mr Barnard,’ Eric says over his shoulder as he starts the engine. ‘The gentleman I mentioned in my letter.’
‘How do you do?’ Barnard says.
The two shake.
‘Thank you for the lift,’ Charles says to Eric.
‘You are heading to Germany, I gather,’ Barnard says.
‘Yes.’
‘Would you like us to stop off at your house en route?’ Eric asks as he flicks a switch on the dashboard and pulls out into the traffic. As the indicating finger slides out from the side of the car, he adds, ‘To collect anything?’
‘No. I don’t have a home in London any more.’
Barnard takes out a pipe and begins filling its bowl from a pouch. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says to Charles, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. ‘Do you mind if I …?’ He holds up the pipe.
Charles is examining the walnut fillets in the door panel. ‘Not at all.’
Barnard strikes a match and sucks wetly on the pipe a couple of times before winding down the window and throwing the spent match on to the road. ‘I don’t know how much Dr Secrest has told you already,’ he says, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth, ‘but I’m part of a committee investigating the current law on homosexuality. We are being chaired by Sir John Wolfenden.’
‘Yes, I’ve read about it.’
‘We’ve been hearing evidence from a range of men who have been affected by the law as it stands and your case was of particular interest to us.’ He takes a small notebook and pen from his pocket. ‘May I?’
Charles notices the crisp white handkerchief in the man’s breast
pocket. Realizes he hasn’t seen anything so elegant in a year. ‘By all means,’ he says.
‘May I enquire why you are going to Germany?’
‘Because that is where Anselm lives.’
Barnard makes a note of this. ‘Anselm was your …?’
‘Is.’
‘And he was the one you were living with in Chelsea at the time of your arrest?’
‘Yes, him and Inis.’
‘There were three of you sharing the house?’
‘Yes. When I was arrested, Anselm was deported to Germany. Inis followed him a few weeks later, after she had had the baby. She was pregnant, you see. Anselm was the father.’
‘I see. And you, meanwhile, were charged with gross indecency and given a custodial sentence?’
Charles catches Eric’s eye. ‘Yes. One year. That’s the maximum sentence allowable for my … crime. I was given the choice of that or a course of hormonal treatment.’ He runs his hand over the cardboard box between them on the seat. ‘Designed to reduce the libido. Chemical castration, in other words.’
Barnard looks up from the notes he is making. ‘Why did you not take that option?’
‘Didn’t exactly work for Alan Turing, did it?’
‘Yes, an unfortunate business, that.’ Barnard taps his notebook. ‘Tell me about Inis. Did you have a relationship with her as well?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you discover you were bisexual?’
‘When I was twenty-four.’
‘So before that time you assumed you were heterosexual?’
‘No, I assumed I was homosexual.’
‘Are you planning on sharing a house with Anselm again in Germany?’
‘No. We have learned our lesson. I will take an apartment nearby. Anselm and Inis are living together as man and wife.’
‘But they are not married?’
‘No. And can you make sure not to identify them by name in your report, please?’
‘Of course. May I ask, were you blackmailed in any way, before your arrest, I mean?’
Charles ponders this. ‘No.’
‘Do you know who reported you to the police? What their motive was?’
‘No.’ Pause. ‘Perhaps they were jealous of what we had. Me, Anselm and Inis.’
‘What did you have?’
‘We loved each other, all three of us. It was love.’
When Charles sees a sign for the airport, visible briefly between beats of the windscreen wiper, he smiles. Barnard notices this, tightens his lips and nods.
VI
Cornwall. Present day. Late autumn
FOR A FEW MINUTES AFTER TURNING OFF THE VOLVO’S ENGINE,
Hannah stares at the rainwater on the windscreen. She opens the window and a salty gulp of Cornish air jolts her from her reverie. Mingled with it is the resinous smell of bladderwrack, an evocation of childhood summers. She turns the key enough for the windscreen wipers to come back on and the rubber drags and squeaks in protest. She can make out the misty sealine now and the narrow, slate inlet where the cliffs fall sharply into the tide. It is nearly dawn.
There is a pile of newspaper cuttings on the seat next to her, dozens of items she has collected over the years – from her father’s kidnapping to Niall’s resignation. Her therapist has suggested she put them in chronological order, maybe even make a scrapbook of them as a way of coming to terms with events. But when she looks at them now she sees only layers of sediment at the bottom of a clear river, layers it would be best not to disturb.
Instead she picks up a copy of the
Guardian
which she bought a few hours earlier from a service station near Exeter, turns to page 17 and re-reads the ‘correction and apology’ printed there, complete with the misspelling of the victim’s name.
On 17 September this year we reported that Friedrich Walser, an investment banker, was the son of a senior SS officer who had been the commandant of a concentration camp during the Second World War. We now accept that this damaging allegation is unfounded and should not have been published. We apologise unreservedly for any distress and embarrassment our report may have caused Mr Walser and his family. A significant donation has been made to a charity of his choice.
She feels partly to blame for the mistake, having told Martin Cullen about the Nazi memorabilia she found in Walser’s château in France. When she texted him to apologize he texted back to say that it was OK, but that she must make amends by being his date for the
Guardian
Christmas party. She agreed. That is three weeks away. For now she carefully tears the apology out and, placing it on top of the cuttings pile, tries to work out its significance. It seems connected in some way to the letter that arrived from Norway the previous day, but she has yet to figure out how. She retrieves this from her rucksack, which is jammed in the footwell on the passenger side, and, though she has already memorized it, reads the final page of it again.
As you know, I was born in Aachen in 1964 and then returned to London with my father a year later, when my mother died. What I didn’t know until quite recently is that he hadn’t been living in the same house as my mother in Germany. She had been living with a German, Anselm, who was the father of another child of hers. It’s complicated, but the three of them were in some kind of relationship. Anselm was a convicted homosexual and, fearing arrest by the German authorities after my mother died, he and my father decided it would be best if they went their separate ways. A few months after my father returned to London with me, Anselm came to an arrangement with a Turkish woman seeking German citizenship. A marriage of convenience.
I’m telling you all this because I think it important that you understand. Anselm and Charles clearly loved each other, but they separated for the sake of their children. If my father had been arrested in Germany, I would have been taken into care. He sacrificed his own happiness for the sake of mine. He left Anselm out of love for me.
I hope you are closer now to understanding why I have had to cut myself off from you. I hope too that you will one day be able to forgive my act of surgery. I know it must be difficult for you, but it means you will have the chance of a relatively normal life. My time in Afghanistan has put that permanently out of reach for me.
It is beautiful here in the snow. And I now know that this place is as close as I will ever come to finding peace, and privacy. The cabin is like a monastery to me. I’m growing a beard! You may not believe me, but I am actually feeling sane again here.
Sometimes we have to make sacrifices and trade-offs. I have had to trade a lesser freedom for a greater one: a life free from guilt, from moral responsibility, from choices – free from that capricious organ, the heart.
Thank you for keeping that note all these years. I sleep with it under my pillow. I meant it, by the way. And still do.
Dad
Hannah touches the letter to her lips before slipping it back into the rucksack. From the same pocket she takes out a torch, turns it on and, against a gathering breeze, pushes open the door. When she walks round the car and opens the passenger side to collect the rucksack, the newspaper cuttings spiral up, carried on a gust. She tries to grab the nearest, but the sight of them caught in the torch beam, rising like untaken souls, is strangely liberating. They belly like small white sails against the dark sky, before plunging limply and then drifting off again.
As she walks away from the car she shrugs the rucksack on to her back, over her cagoule. It feels lighter than it ought to, as if the things that are weighing her down are left planing and circling around the car – the newspapers, the rest of the world with its
morality, with its value system, with its bourgeois judgements about what is right and what is wrong.
The short walk up the road is steep and winding and, once she reaches the crest, she catches her breath. There are no cars. Cornwall is empty. She shines her torch at the familiar sign marking the way to Doyden and notices that the silver National Trust oak leaves are the same as those worn by Nazi officers on their collars. It gives her a sense of being connected; of how the world reveals its own connections, in its own time.
She follows the muddy path through the kissing gate and has to negotiate what looks like frozen smoke, a tunnel of blackthorn that reminds her of the coils of barbed wire surrounding the concentration camp in Alsace. The castellated folly on the promontory looks lonely as it takes shape in the gloom. She can hear the cannonades of breaking waves, the ocean’s roar as it thunders into the narrow sea-caves below, before rearing back against itself.
A few minutes later, at Doyden Point, she sets down the rucksack and looks out to sea, to where the first hints of dirty light are marking the horizon. She feels exhausted yet content, as if after a lifetime of running over mountains, ice fields and deserts, she has finally reached the coast and can rest. Her mother used to say that Cornwall reminded her of home, of Norway. The coastline at least. The deep fjords inhabited by trolls, creatures of shadow and darkness. Any troll who was exposed to direct sunlight would be turned to stone.
The horizon is clearly visible now, grey and baggy. Feeling vertiginous, she gets to her knees and crawls over ground that is slithery with white lichen. The entire cliff seems to sway. To anchor herself she fixes on the barren volcanic shelves of slate. The rocks below them are black, but white with spray and foam and jets erupting through blowholes. Where it has had the chance to pool, the water seems to boil up then ebb away – black and white bubbles swirling, swelling, bulging. She sits in the hollow, draws her knees up under her chin and, as she stares at the veined sea-campion buds around her, she wills herself not to faint.