Lucy made a large mug of tea with two heaped teaspoons of sugar, to help swallow the unpalatable. Her mind turned bitterly to Schwermann, who lay protected in a monastery, and to Victor Brionne, the man of fine words, the collaborator who’d betrayed Agnes. But how did he get away after the war? Who on earth could have wanted to help a man deaf to the cries of children?
She poured the tea down the sink and made her way back to bed, knowing that a different person would see the morning. Her old self had closed her eyes for ever. Lucy glanced at the notebook lying open on the floor. What has happened, she thought, in my growing up that I can read such things and not even cry?
Chapter Seven
The first notebook of Agnes Embleton.
3rd April 1995.
Dear Lucy, I have just seen the face of the man who took away my life, on the very day Doctor Scott said I was going to die. I sensed that months ago, when the voices and faces of my youth came back, like rooks coming home. I should have known Schwermann would turn up as well.
I would have liked to talk to you about me, and my childhood friends, but I’m not able. Soon I’ll be gone and I do not want their memory to go with me. The time has come for you to know everything.
10th April.
I’ve often wondered why the path of my life diverged from what I hoped for, and sent me on track for what I got. But there’s no point in seeking explanations. There are no ‘might have beens’. So I look to London, and my birth in March 1919.
My father was French and came to England in 1913 to work in a bank. He met my mother, who was Jewish, at a work function. She was the daughter of a regional manager. Within the year they were married, and then I came along. They used to say I was the second great blessing of their life. The first was to have escaped the war. My earliest memories are of playing upon Hampstead Heath, threading daisies, half understanding conversations about ‘The Great War’ . Most of the people we knew had suffered loss, and even now the names of those terrible battles conjure up a strange remembrance of warm summer days and other people’s grief. You see, by some miracle (as my father used to say), the war had passed us by while touching all around us. And so I grew up feeling protected, as if God had carefully placed us beyond catastrophe. Until my mother died on 17th August 1929.
From that day my father wanted to go back to France, away from every reminder of her. I wasn’t surprised because England had never become his home. He was always making comparisons, which showed he saw things from the outside. Even the milk was better in France. He began to tell me wonderful things about Paris, and I would go to sleep seeing bridges, a shining river and tables in the street lit by thousands of candles. We set sail in early 1931.
I suppose he wasn’t to know He thought he would simply move back into his old bank. But those were hard times and no positions were available. I know that now. At the time I presumed we had landed on our feet. We lived in a nice flat, I did well at school and I wanted for nothing. I was especially good at the piano and my father bought me a monstrous upright for Christmas. Each week I went to see Madame Klein, my teacher, and each week I came home vowing never to see her again. She was a Jewish widow who lived in a magnificent apartment opposite Parc Monceau. My father told me she was one of the best piano teachers in Paris, and had once been a concert performer. That’s as maybe, I thought. Because every Saturday afternoon I climbed those stairs dreading the scowl that never left her face. I hated every second. I said she couldn’t even play For she nursed her right hand and only touched the keys with her left. My father laughed and sent me back each week. I have never written her name down before, and doing so makes me pause. I see her now as I saw her then, dressed in black silk with a vast coiffure of silver hair. She looks at me over quite useless glasses that seem to be part of her nose, her eyes impossible to read.
Anyway back to my father. I never thought to ask where he worked, or how he could afford lessons from such a lady But I came to recognise he was troubled, despite all his efforts to conceal it from me. Children may not know which questions to ask but they already sense the answers. He started scratching his arms, practically scraping the skin off. Before long it was all over his body He joked it was the lice. So I started itching, and together we’d scratch and scratch, laughing. One morning he said casually he had to go and see the doctor. I was fifteen so that would be roughly 1934. I came back from a school camp three days later and, to my surprise, was met by a young nun who brought me to a hospital. She kept glancing at me when she thought I was looking the other way My last memory of my father is that day, sleeping in a white room with a high ceiling, dressed in a white gown beneath white sheets, and a smell of strong disinfectant. The nun stayed with me, trying to hold my hand. A doctor came in and said my father had widespread cancer, and there was nothing they could do. I was left alone, me on a chair, my father asleep in a bed.
When I turned to go there was a priest standing behind me. He was short and badly shaven, with bags under his eyes. His name was Father Rochet.
12th April.
Father Rochet. He had known my father from school-days and would frequently drop by usually when I was going out. He always looked as if he’d slept badly I had never spoken to him for long as he was a man of few words. But I saw him a great deal, going into the flats in and around where we lived, which I suppose was strange because it was not his parish. He was a great one for carrying something under his coat. I used to think it was a bottle, though I know better now My father said he was always getting into trouble with his bishop, which Father Rochet thought very funny Anyway there he was, behind me in the hospital, looking as if he’d just got out of bed. I followed him into the corridor. Everything had been arranged, he said. I was to go with him and he would take me to the house of a friend. We would talk about my future another time.
Father Rochet took me in his car. Neither of us spoke. It was a black night and the rain was so heavy I could not recognise any streets or buildings. I remember watching the windscreen wipers and wondering how they worked. The water falling in sheets across the glass. Eventually we arrived. I opened the door and saw what I least expected or wanted: Parc Monceau.
Up those stairs I went, dripping everywhere. By now I was crying. When the door opened, Madame Klein scowled and shook her head. ‘For heaven’s sake, stop soaking the floor.’ Those were her first words.
My father died that night.
Father Rochet came to see me after the funeral. Again he hadn’t shaved properly, and this time I could have sworn he smelled ever so slightly of stale wine, which distracted me from taking on board what he said. It was my father’s wish that I now live with Madame Klein. He had seen to all the finances.
And so I believed family resources had sustained me in the past and would do so in the future. I didn’t realise they were both feeding me a story to save my dignity.
I wasn’t to know Father Rochet had introduced my father to Madame Klein when we first arrived in Paris; I wasn’t to know my father went out each day in a suit, then changed and earned his living cleaning floors. I wasn’t to know that Madame Klein was our landlady; that she had waived the rent from the outset; that she had given the piano to my father; that my lessons were free; that both of them were what some call saints.
13th April.
Madame Klein was the most extraordinary woman I have ever known. She must have been in her early seventies when I came to live with her. At first I thought maybe I was there to act as a nurse. Far from it. She was too busy to want any help.