At first the doctors and psychiatrists who examined him, the nuns who nursed him, put down the patient’s other symptoms to grief for his parents’ death, but as time passed and he became wilder and more distressed, the possibility of brain fever or dementia was seriously discussed.
Marek had not resisted the move, for the contacts he needed to carry out what he now saw as his life’s work could be assembled best in Prague, where the headquarters of resistance to the Germans had recently been established.
It did not take him long to prepare a dossier on the man who had set his home alight and killed his parents. Oskar Schwachek, who had also killed Franz by the river and tried to murder Meierwitz, was a Sudeten German who since the age of fourteen had been a member of the Nazi party-a fire raiser as a child, a disturbed and vicious adolescent and now, at the age of twenty-five, a killer who put his evil talents at the disposal of those who wanted to hand Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis.
Stepan and Janik had seen him near the house on the day before the fire; old Lenitschka, who had perished with the Captain and his wife, had warned them. Every servant at Pettelsdorf was looking out for him and every member of the resistance.
“But I want him alive,” Marek said.
“I want him to know who kills him. And he is not to be shot. It will happen slowly… very slowly.”
During those days of convalescence when the specialists conferred and the nuns prayed over his bed, there were only two visitors Marek did not want to see.
The first was his grandmother, Nora Coutts. She had been going for one of her famous walks when the fire began and had survived unscathed. Nora had lost her only daughter, whom she adored, and her son-in-law. She looked ten years older and something had happened to her mouth, which had been set in a firm line and now, on occasion, had to be covered with her hand. But Marek’s obsession with his vendetta, which grew with his returning strength, shocked her deeply.
“Your parents died together and almost instantly, I understand. What do you think they’d feel if they knew you were going to poison the rest of your life with this hatred? What do you think they would feel if they knew what you were doing to Ellen?”’
But Marek was deaf and blind. Ellen was a danger. Ellen, who came every day and sat quietly and patiently by his bed, waiting for him to become sane again… Ellen, who was so beautiful and whole and true, would weaken him. Even less than his grandmother did she understand that nothing but hatred must now rule his life. To track down Schwachek, to kill him very slowly and carefully, explaining at each stage what was happening to him and why-nothing else existed. And when this was done, to face prison or hanging on his own account without regret, knowing that Ellen was out of it and safe.
“There will be no more love and no more weddings,” he had said when she first came.
But she had not believed him. She thought as the nuns thought, that the shock had temporarily unhinged him. That he should wish to avenge his parents’ murder was understandable perhaps, but to make this vendetta his only reason for existing seemed impossible. Surely somewhere the man who cared for every living thing could not be wholly and permanently dead?
But the weeks passed and Marek became steadily more hostile, more obsessed, more angry. Even so, it was not till the doctors who were treating him told her that she was making him worse and delaying his recovery, that she gave up.
He was standing by the window of his hospital room when she told him she was leaving. A tortoiseshell butterfly was beating its way against the window, and as he caught it in his hand she held her breath, for she expected him to crush it between his fingers, so mad had he become.
But he opened the window and released it carefully into the summer afternoon. That was her last memory of him: the killer with the scar on his forehead, gently freeing the butterfly-and then his bleak, toneless and unadorned: “Goodbye.”
The betrayal of the Czechs at Munich came soon afterwards. Marek joined the Czech Air Force, flew his plane to Poland when the Germans overran his country, went on fighting with the Poles — and when they were beaten, with the French.
When the Germans advanced through Northern France, he was flying Potez 63’s with a Reconnaissance Squadron of the French Air Force, never sure whether the airfield from which he took off would still be there when he returned, attacked both in the air and on the ground.
The occupation of Paris in mid-June put an end to these adventures. The crews were summoned, given rations and their pay, and told they were on their own. Marek was caught up in the demoralisation of the retreating troops, the fleeing refugees. Separated from his crew, he reached Brittany at last, found a fishing boat willing to take him across to Dover, and opened his eyes to the extraordinary sight of dozens of baying, quarantined dogs.
The slobbering, excited animals had given him his first glimmer of hope-for it struck him as possible that a nation mad enough to carry stray dogs on to the boats that took them off the beaches might — just might-be mad enough not to surrender simply because all hope was lost.
Closest to his stretcher was a pointer bitch with anguished eyes. Marek soothed her, was overheard by an exhausted sergeant who was trying to sort out the flotsam that still came over the Channel in the wake of the debacle-and presently found himself on the Isle of Man, watching Erich Unterhausen polish his boots and give the Nazi salute.
It had been Ellen’s intention to get married quietly in the Bloomsbury Registry Office, invite a few friends back to Gowan Terrace, and go up to Crowthorpe the next day.
But in September the Blitz began. Broken glass was swept from the streets along with the autumn leaves; the scent of smoke was seldom out of people’s nostrils; nights spent in shelters or the basements of their houses left everyone exhausted-and a new band of heroes emerged: the pilots who went up each night to give battle to the bombers that came across to devastate the cities. Doris and Elsie and Joanie, who had crept back to their parents in London, were sent back to Cumberland, the cook general who had struggled on at Gowan Terrace left to make munitions and at the end of October, the Registry Office received a direct hit.
Under these circumstances it seemed sensible to have the wedding at Crowthorpe, and if the villagers were not to be upset, to make it a wedding in the local church-and this in turn meant Sophie and Ursula as bridesmaids and inviting the guests to stay the night before, since travel on the blacked out trains was far too unreliable to make a day trip possible.
Announcing her engagement to the ladies with whom she made sandwiches, her fellow firewatchers and the women who bandaged her on Thursday afternoons, Ellen now became lucky. She knew she was lucky because everybody told her so.
“Lucky you, going to live in the country, away from it all,” or “Lucky you, not having to worry about the rations; they say you can get butter and eggs and everything up there,” or “I wish I was you, getting a good night’s sleep.”
Ellen’s response to her great good fortune was unvarying; she instantly invited whoever had congratulated her to Crowthorpe: the milkman’s sister who had taken over his round when he was called up, an old man who came to lick envelopes at Gowan Terrace, and an orderly at her mother’s hospital. It was as though the provision of fresh air, birdsong and undisturbed nights was what made being so very lucky endurable.
But it was her family-her mother working too hard at the hospital, her Aunt Annie whose operation had been postponed as the wards filled up with the casualties of the Blitz, the aunt who ran a bookshop, and, of course, the Hallendorf children — for whom she particularly wanted to provide sanctuary.