When she got back to The Watch and rounded the corner of the cottage, out of sight of any onlookers, she pushed her shoulders back and straightened her spine, and a joyous smile broke out across her face. She had hidden Charles in the privy again, and he wept with relief when she let him out and told him that it was all over, that nobody else would be coming. He clasped her tightly and sobbed like a child.
“You must hide me, Mitzy! I can’t go back,” he mumbled. Dimity held him and sang to him until the fit passed; then they went back into the house together, slowly, like the walking wounded, and she shut the door behind them.
But… I heard somebody moving around in here. I heard it! I’m sure I did… you heard it, too, right, Dimity?” said Zach. He waited for a reply from the old lady, but she seemed lost in her own mind; her gaze settled on him when he took her hand but it was diffuse, absent. Hannah shook her head.
“You know how old houses move around and creak. Plus the window’s been broken for ages. I offered to get it fixed for her, but she point-blank refused. Because it meant opening the room, I guess. But the wind’s been blowing through here for months, shifting the papers around, making the floorboards damp…”
“No, I heard a person. I’m sure of it,” Zach insisted. Hannah threw up her hands and let them fall to her sides.
“You can’t have, Zach. Unless you believe in ghosts now.” She meant it as a throwaway remark, but Zach noticed Dimity’s eyes flicker as she said it, and then follow Hannah as she paced the room restlessly. Zach took a deep breath and wondered what surreal world he had stumbled into that night. An odd other world where he fled from place to place through a dark night, smuggling people, avoiding the law; where huge collections of art lay hidden, like buried treasure, left by a man who had lived far beyond his own death. None of it seemed quite real.
It was late, and Zach and Hannah sat at the kitchen table with cups of tea going cold in front of them. Ilir was in the living room, keeping vigil over his wife and son. Bekim was fast asleep, laid out on the sofa with a moth-eaten blanket draped over him. Rozafa sat by the child’s head with one hand on his shoulder, her head tipped back, also sleeping. Ilir curled his body over them protectively, as though now he had them back he would let nobody near them, and no distance come between them. Zach wondered how long Ilir had been in Dorset; how long had it been since husband and wife had seen each other. Dimity was still upstairs in the little room full of pictures. Zach had taken her some tea, but the old woman was quiet and still and would not come downstairs. Uneasily, he’d noticed the way her chest rose and fell, quick and shallow. Sipping at the air as if she couldn’t quite reach it.
“Tell me how you saw him. How he was. What happened that night,” said Zach. Hannah sighed, and got up.
“We need something stronger than tea,” she muttered, and pulled open kitchen cupboards until she found an ancient, sticky bottle of brandy. She poured a good measure into two mugs and brought them over to the table, sliding one to Zach. “Cheers.” She knocked hers back in one, then rolled her lips over her teeth in protest and shuddered slightly. “Mitzy came down to the farm late one evening. It was in the summer and it had only just got dark, so it must have been ten or half-past ten. She was confused, panicking. She asked for my grandmother at first, and didn’t seem to remember who I was until I explained. I knew at once something was up. She hadn’t come knocking on our door for… well, for as long as I could remember, anyway. She asked me to come back with her, and wouldn’t say why. Practically towed me out of the house. ‘I can’t do it by myself,’ was all I could get her to say. And so I went with her, and she brought me here, and up to that room, and there he was.” She exhaled heavily.
“Dead?”
“Yes. He was dead,” she said. “Mitzy said we had to get rid of him. Hide the body. I asked her why… why we couldn’t just call an undertaker. But she was convinced that the police would come, if anybody knew; and she was probably right. Sudden death and all that, and he wasn’t even supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to exist. I gathered this slowly, as she told me who he was.”
“But… he must have been ancient,” said Zach.
“Almost a hundred. But then, he’d lived a very… sheltered life. The latter part of it, anyway.”
“And you had no idea before that that anybody was living here with her? All those years and you didn’t suspect a thing?”
“All those years. Not so surprising when you consider how cut off her cottage is. The farm is the only place that looks onto it, and we never made a point of looking. And besides, he never came out of this room. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’d been inside The Watch before that evening, and I’d never been upstairs, not once. How would anybody have known?”
“Did you… Did you know who he was?”
“Not at first, no. But when Dimity told me… I’d heard of him, of course. My grandmother used to talk about him all the time. And then I saw the pictures, and I knew it had to be true. It had to be him.”
“But… how the hell did he get here? His body was buried on the Continent-it was found, identified, his death was recorded, and he was buried…”
“A body was found. A body was identified. A body was buried. I don’t know how much you know about the retreat to Dunkirk?”
“I’ve… seen films. Documentaries.”
“It was chaos. Thousands and thousands of men on the beach, waiting to be evacuated, and hundreds of small boats coming over from England to help. Fishing boats, charter yachts and pleasure boats, cargo ships. Charles got on one of those small ships. It brought him all the way back to England, and then he… slipped away. Made his way back to Blacknowle somehow.”
“You mean he deserted?”
“Yes. AWOL. Dimity told me… she told me he was quite happy to stay here. Very happy. That he insisted he couldn’t go back. He wouldn’t go back. Hiding for the next sixty-odd years might seem a bit extreme, but it sounds to me like he had a breakdown of some kind. Post-traumatic stress or something. And I guess once you’ve been hiding for a certain length of time, it stops feeling like hiding and starts to just feel like… the way you live.”
Hannah got up for the brandy bottle and topped up both their mugs, even though she was the only one who had emptied hers. Zach tasted it and grimaced.
“I can’t believe any of this,” he said, shaking his head. “How did he get back here? Who was buried in France if it wasn’t Charles?”
“Who was buried? Can’t you guess?” said Hannah. Zach thought hard, but could make no sense of it.
“No. Who was it? Who did they bury in 1940, thinking it was Charles?” Hannah studied him for a moment, her eyes switching rapidly back and forth across his face.
“Dennis,” she said eventually. “They buried Dennis.”
Charles told Dimity about it in one of his outpourings-his rare outpourings. Usually he would only talk about his drawings, or request art supplies, or tell her the odd food cravings he would get. Cherries one day, French onion soup the next. Once he wanted smoked salmon, and Dimity fretted and fussed and took days building a smoking barrel in the backyard, since there was none to be had in the shops and she could never have afforded it if there had been. The result was a tough and overdone trout, the flesh almost leathery, but Charles swallowed it down without complaint, smiling appreciatively. Dimity wondered then if she’d needed to bother-if she could have given him fresh herring and told him it was smoked salmon, and he would have eaten it with as much relish. But she would never try such a deception. She would always strive to give him whatever he asked for. Making him happy was all she could do for him, and all she could do for herself. Protecting him assuaged the feeling of falling that she still woke up with every single day.