After they had lost the baby, his mother had gone through a short period of sobriety and, despite her dislike of Francisca, the two of them had come to some kind of accommodation. It was an accommodation that filled Harper with disgust. His mother’s love of tragedy was well established. When Francisca had been his pretty, happy girlfriend, then wife, Anika couldn’t have been less interested. Then Francisca became a weeping stick with a lost child and all at once his mother couldn’t wait to claim her as her daughter-in-law, to have a piece of all that drama. They even went shopping together a couple of times, met up for hot chocolate, until his mother’s relapse back into drunkenness.
Francisca’s response was, as ever, less cynical. ‘Oh Nicolaas,’ she sighed to him, when he expressed his exasperation at his mother’s sudden interest in their lives, ‘hasn’t it occurred to you, she lost her granddaughter? It was probably her only chance at a grandchild. Of course she has a right to grieve with us.’ His frank opinion was that Francisca was being far too generous.
*
Francisca returned from visiting Aunt Lies at the end of the afternoon and they cooked pasta together in the kitchen, him slicing garlic and tomatoes, her making the salad. They made companionable conversation about the relative states of health of the two old women and Francisca said, ‘You know, for some reason Aunty Lies got on to how your father first came to the house, in Leiden, and how crazy your mother was, how handsome he was, this army officer, it was really sweet. I didn’t know the rest of the family never spoke to her again, because she went back to Indonesia with him. Imagine. Her stepfather gave permission then cut her off without a penny. Crazy, huh? Did you know all that?’
‘Yeah. .’ he murmured, rinsing a tomato beneath the tap and placing it on a wooden chopping board.
‘You’ve never talked about it much, don’t you think that’s a bit… well. .’
He had his back to her. He rolled his eyes, knowing she couldn’t see him do it, and brought the knife down on the tomato, which was pale, unripe. The knife was blunt and the skin resisted the pressure of the blade, then parted. ‘I hope she didn’t tell you he was the love of Anika’s life and she’s never recovered. Anika was saying the same thing about Michael this morning. Michael was the love of her life, apparently. Next week, she’ll be saying it about Jan.’ Jan Aaltink was the barrel-chested farmer Anika had married on her return to the Netherlands in 1952, the second of four stepfathers she offered her son over the decades.
Francisca didn’t reply. She was standing over the salad bowl and turning lettuce over with her fine, pale hands. Harper knew that silence — it was the one that descended when Francisca was deciding how to phrase a criticism in the most non-confrontational manner possible. ‘Why are you so hard on your mother?’ she said eventually. ‘It was a brave thing to do, don’t you think? Marrying a mixed-race officer, in that day and age, going to the other side of the world with him, then a war breaking out, stuck there. Don’t you think you could forgive her for once? Everything she went through?’
He wasn’t in the mood for this. He slammed the knife down on its side on the chopping board, exhaling with a derisive ugh sound, turning.
‘Okay okay!’ Francisca said quickly, lifting her hands.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about everything she went through all my life, over and over again, I’ve heard about how awful it was, giving birth to me in the camp, her endless suffering. . Everyone, everywhere, has always let her down. .’ He glared at Francisca. ‘Funny, though, I’ve never once heard her say anything about how it might have been quite hard for me, her behaviour.’
Francisca’s voice became calm and measured then, with that placating wheedle that annoyed him so much. She would wheedle for the first half hour of an argument, then snap. It was always a relief when she snapped. ‘I know it was hard for you too. I’m able to see that because in comparison with you, I’ve had an easy life, but the things that happened to your mother. .’
‘Yes, yes, don’t you think I’ve had this conversation?’
‘She saw it, Nicolaas.’
They stared at each other across the small kitchen. Malachi, their thin grey cat, slunk through the small gap in the kitchen door, which was ajar, walked across the room with her tail in the air, leapt up onto the counter-top and then looked at them both, unblinking, waiting to be picked up and dropped back down onto the floor.
Francisca turned, reached out an absent-minded hand and stroked Malachi’s head. ‘She saw it, you know. I don’t think either of us can imagine what it must be like to see something so horrible at such a young age, how it must affect you.’
He looked at her.
‘Aunty Lies told me today. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not. I was thinking about it all the way home. I don’t know why she started talking about it now but she did. I think maybe she was upset. You never go.’
Francisca had always been much better at visiting Aunt Lies than Harper, or Anika for that matter.
‘I said something about how I wished that you and your mother got on a bit better, and we were talking about how angry you always are with your mother.’
He thought, you know, sometimes I get really sick of women talking about me behind my back.
‘And she said how your mum had always told you the heroic version of your father being killed in order to protect you, so that you would remember him as a heroic soldier, holding out in battle in the hills. She thought it was important for a boy to feel that way about his father, particularly one who died in the war, you know, that time, all the boys who lost fathers, they all had to believe they were heroes, died saving comrades or something, not real, not how things really were.’ Francisca stopped stroking Malachi, bent and kissed the top of the cat’s head, picked her up and put her gently on the floor.
Harper returned to chopping tomatoes. ‘Yes, well, Lies is forgetting she told me the real version. The end of the street, just because he was caught out after curfew. She told me when I was very young. And actually, I think it’s stupid to make out he was a hero. He was entitled to be terrified, in those circumstances, to try and save his own life and his wife’s life too, anyone was.’ He had always wondered why Aunt Lies had told him the real version of his father’s death. She had told him in great secrecy one day when his mother was out, and made him promise never to ask his mother about it.
‘She didn’t forget that actually. She remembered, she was halfway through telling you the whole story but you were only small and she stopped short. She remembered the whole conversation. What she didn’t go on to tell you was that your mother saw it.’
‘Saw what?’ he said, stupidly.
They were facing each other now, him still holding the blunt knife and Francisca’s fine, narrow features stretched, open-eyed, in an expression that swam with pity, but whether the pity was for him or his mother or simply all the suffering in the world, he couldn’t surmise.
‘Oh Nicolaas, your mother saw your father beheaded. She heard a commotion at the end of the street. Pregnant with you, just a girl, imagine that. She ran down the street and she saw her husband beheaded in front of her. She had no one but him. And you wonder why she has been drunk half her life and spent the other half trying to steal other women’s husbands?’
Harper turned violently then and stared down at the chopping board, so angry that he couldn’t speak. Malachi the cat had been winding round his legs while Francisca had been speaking but now slunk swiftly towards the door.
Francisca returned to the salad. ‘You think anyone ever really recovers? Seeing something like that?’