“Yes.”
But looking into her face, whose implacable sanity reminded him somehow of Ellen, he began to realise how mad he had been. “I should have done it myself. I wanted them to find him but it was for me to do.”
“It’s done now; there was no choice.”
But she said no more, for the fracture in his leg was a multiple one and he had a dislocated shoulder — and now he was to be separated from his comrades and the work he loved.
Lying back on the pillows, weary and in pain, Marek reached out once more for the triumph that should have been his-and once again it eluded him. Schwachek had been bound for Russia. That horrific campaign in which the Germans were dying like flies might well have done Marek’s work for him. His grandmother was right; he had been mad.
“Do you ever think of Ellen?”’ she asked suddenly.
Marek turned his head on the pillow and smiled.
“What do you think?”’ he said.
After she left Marek, Nora Coutts did something she did very seldom; she hesitated.
She had not hesitated when she told the Russian anarchist not to be silly, and she had not hesitated when she left all her possessions behind and walked to the Czech border, arriving there an hour before the Germans invaded, but she hesitated now.
“Do you ever think of Ellen?”’ she had asked Marek, and got her answer.
But Ellen was married. In the world into which Nora had been born that would have been the end of the matter. But in the world as it was now, where human beings were shot out of the sky, or torpedoed or gunned down, was it perhaps important that people should part without misunderstanding, with the air clear between them? She did not for a moment consider that Ellen would leave her husband, and would have been shocked if anyone had suggested it-but would it comfort Ellen to know that Marek was aware now of his madness? That it would console Marek to see her before he sailed, she was certain.
In the end she decided to do nothing, but a month after her visit to the hospital, a troop ship en route from Canada was torpedoed.
Two days later, she set off for the north.
Nora walked from the station; at eighty-two she would have scorned to take a taxi for a distance of two miles. Marek had been discharged from hospital and was waiting for his orders to sail. Glad though she was that he was no longer flying, she would miss him badly when he went overseas. He talked of her joining him in Canada, but she would stay now and die here.
Once again the Lake District failed to live up to expectations. It was not raining; the late summer afternoon was golden and serene; after the devastation of the cities, this piece of untouched countryside with its dark, leafy trees, its running brooks, its silence, was Paradise indeed. Nor did the first sight of Crowthorpe dismay her; she had after all been born when Queen Victoria was on the throne; the gables and turrets and pointless timbering did not trouble her. She herself in Folkestone had been brought up in a villa not unlike Kendrick’s house.
But at the gate she hesitated. She had not told anyone she was coming; only Ellen knew her — to anyone else she would be just an old lady in stout shoes going for a walk. Her case was still at the station-she had wanted to leave her options open — and now she decided to take a path that led towards the back of the house and seemed to slope upwards towards the hill. In this country of ramblers it was probably a right of way, and she wanted above all to get the feel of the place, and of Ellen’s life.
She had not told Marek what she was going to do, for the simple reason that she did not know herself. To see if Ellen was happy? Nothing as simple as that-yet there was some question that she expected this visit to answer.
In a small meadow by the house she saw a flock of Angora goats; beautiful animals, their bells reminding her of the cowbells in the Bohemian hills and bringing a sudden stab of homesickness for Pettelsdorf. Down by the stream in the valley, children were paddling and calling to each other in Cockney accents. Evacuees. Yes, there would be evacuees; Ellen would welcome them with open arms.
She had come to the kitchen garden; looking through the gate in the wall she saw tomatoes ripening in the greenhouses and well-kept vegetable beds. As she gazed, a land girl came by trundling a barrow, but Nora was not ready yet and turned away. What had been a lawn had been ploughed up and planted with potatoes. As she might have expected, Ellen was presiding over a house and grounds most excellently and patriotically kept, and in a countryside of unsurpassed loveliness, and to her own dismay she found herself experiencing a pang of disappointment. Yes, there was no other word for it, and she was shocked. Had she wanted to find that Ellen was unhappy, full of regrets… even ill-treated or misunderstood? Had she wanted to take the girl in her arms and comfort her and tell her that Marek still loved her, and marriages could be annulled?
Surely not, thought Nora, shocked at her own thoughts. Her father had been a clergyman; she had the strongest views on the sanctity of marriage.
She walked on, making a loop behind the house. She passed a flock of bantam hens, their feathers brilliant in the sunlight, a little copse of foxgloves and meadowsweet-and found herself by the edge of the orchard.
The plums had been picked, and the cherries, but the apples were ripening: red and gold and green. Between the trees two washing lines were strung and a girl was hanging out the washing. Household washing: tea towels and pillow cases, shirts… and nappies; a lot of nappies. She moved gracefully, bending down to the basket, shaking out the garment, fastening it to the line, and because she had known at once who it was, Nora stepped back into the shelter of the copse so that she could watch unseen.
Ellen looked well. She was sunburnt, her faded cotton dress and sandals were the acme of comfort and ease; she was absorbed completely in her task; Nora could sense her satisfaction in seeing the clean clothes, caught by the breeze, billowing gently. There were three baskets: Ellen had emptied two of them, but now she turned, for from the third had come a small whimpering sound and she dropped the shirt she was holding back into the basket and went over and very gently picked up the baby that had just woken and put it over her shoulder, and began to rub its back. It was the essence of love, of motherhood, that gesture: the baby’s soft head nestling into Ellen’s throat, her bent head as she spoke to it, its sudden pleasurable wriggle of response… Nora could feel it as if it was her own shoulder that the baby leant against-so had she held Milenka, and so Marek, and the thought that this child could have been Marek’s child, flesh of her flesh, went through her, bringing an atavistic pang of loss.
But her question was answered and she could only give thanks that she had not made her presence known. A marriage could be annulled-an adult could take his chance and Kendrick must have known of the love Ellen bore Marek. But not a child; a child could not be set aside.
Long after she had made her way back and sat in the train as it crawled southwards, Nora still saw this idyllic vision: the red apples, the blue sky, Ellen with her windblown curls stroking softly, rhythmically the back of the child that lay against her shoulder, and somewhere in the orchard, a blackbird singing.
A man leaving wartime London, perhaps for ever, will say goodbye to a number of places. To St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear the Blind Choir sing Evensong; to Joe’s All Night Stall near Westminster Bridge where Wordsworth’s famous view can be combined with the best jellied eels in London; to the grill room of the Café Royal…
And to the Lunchtime Concerts at the National Gallery, possibly the best loved institution to come out of the war. If the British had heroines during these gruelling years-the Queen, tottering in her high heels through the rubble to bring comfort to those bombed from their homes, the Red Cross nurses accompanying the soldiers to the front-there was no one they loved more than Dame Myra Hess with her frumpish clothes, her grey hair rolled in a hausfrau bun, her musicality and her smile.