The received history was as follows: Agnes was half French, half English, and had lived in Paris during the Occupation. She was there when the black shroud from burning oil reserves hung over the city. She saw the German troops taking photos of ‘La Marseillaise’ on the Arc de Triomphe. She heard the thin, high voice of Marshal Pétain say he made a gift of himself to France, that he would seek an armistice with Hitler. About this period she was able to talk. It was the time after that had to be handled carefully, if at all. As a child, Lucy was small enough to inch under the fencing with her curiosity, moving from one month to the next, into the following years. But always the details from her grandmother became sparer, begrudging; her mood increasingly unsettled, her replies sharper, until Lucy learned she was approaching the place of shadows where she could go no further: where, as Freddie once spat out to his burning shame, Agnes became ‘La Muette’: the dumb one.
Of course the family knew what lay beyond the wire. A town and a village: Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. As to the why and wherefore, that was a mystery. Susan often said that only Grandpa Arthur knew where she’d been and why, but Lucy, as usual, moved as close to the line as possible trying to find out.
‘No, I was never in the Resistance,’ Agnes said wearily to one of Lucy’s unremitting schoolgirl questions.
‘Did you know anyone who was?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘So you were involved with them?’
‘Not really I was just on the edge.’
‘Were they brave?’
‘Very brave. ‘
‘So you must have edged towards bravery?’
Agnes became very still, distracted. ‘We were all so young, so very young.
‘So you did do something?’ pressed Lucy, eating chocolate.
‘Nothing much to write home about. Now, stop your questions.’
That was usually where the probing ceased. But this time Lucy chanced her arm, pushed into the place of shadows: ‘You can’t have a big secret and not tell us what happened.’
Agnes gave a low animal growl through bared teeth. ‘Enough.’
It was Lucy’s first experience of atavistic fear. She became scared of her own grandmother. For Freddie, who was sitting in the corner, watching over a collapsed newspaper, it was simply another example of his mother’s hopelessly introspective temperament. But Lucy, aged fourteen, still possessed the awesome non-rational percipience of childhood, and was young enough to be acutely sensitive to something neither she nor anyone else could name or know It was that which made her shrink instinctively back: a smell on the wind.
So the reason for arrest and what had happened during two and a half years of incarceration lay out of reach.’ The narrative trail resumed, through Lucy’s persistence, at the moment of Agnes’ release, as if nothing had gone before: ‘A Russian soldier stood gawping at me. He was no more than a boy, and his gun looked like a battered toy He couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak.’ I was standing with children on either side. He cried.’ We just watched him.’ Eventually he said in English, “You’re free now.”‘
Agnes wearily passed a blue-veined hand through her grey hair, rearranging a silver clip, and added, ‘I got out of Babylon, but there was no Zion. No promised land.’
‘What’s that, Gran?’ Lucy enquired, puzzled.
‘Just an old song about homesickness. And hope.’
‘By Boney M?’
‘A psalm.’
It was an opaque exchange, and all the more peculiar because Agnes was not a religious woman.’
After the war Agnes returned to Paris where she met Captain Arthur Embleton in a hospital. They were married within two months, staying on in France for the next couple of years, during which time they had twins: Freddie and Elodie. After leaving the army Grandpa Arthur brought the family back to a suburban existence in north London.’ He became a solicitor in a large London firm and their life was superficially comfortable and predictable, except for those who knew otherwise. After Lucy’s unnerving exchange with her grandmother, Freddie told Lucy about his own inexplicable childhood memories.
At times Agnes was captivating and extrovert, Freddie explained, but could suddenly and for no apparent reason become swamped by abstraction.’ It was as if the apparatus of her personality shut down, like a vast generator losing its source of power. The life in her would drain away until all the lights blinked and flickered before going out. And then she was gone, even though she was still in the same room, and everyone else was left adrift and awkward, trying to make contact across the space left by her absence.
This was the kind of thing Grandpa Arthur called ‘a tactical withdrawal from the field of conflict’, which was his thin attempt to joke with the children. But it also named a truth. Ordinary life was a battle for Agnes. Lucy’s father also remembered those frightening moments: when Agnes suddenly froze, as if gripped by vertigo, shaking and sweating, holding on to the rim of the sink, the edge of a table, the back of a chair, until talked down by Grandpa Arthur.
Later, when Lucy’s relationship with her father became more complicated, her mother .passed on a little more history so that Lucy might better understand the man she had ceased to know in a simple way
‘Try to understand your father,’ Susan said appealingly. ‘It wasn’t easy for him as a child, even though Grandpa did his best.’
Grandpa Arthur, she said, had tried to provide some consistency for Freddie and Elodie, giving them what he thought was a warm English upbringing, with lots of Gilbert and Sullivan, Wisden annuals (which Elodie loved) and regular tea at four o’clock. But he could not completely protect them. Where Agnes had been approachable and inviting one day, Freddie in particular would run towards her the next only to find her withdrawn. There had been one little incident that Freddie had never forgotten:
‘Mum, look what Alex gave me. It’s Excalibur. The sword pulled from a stone.’
Freddie held out the plastic brand with both hands, holding tight, just in case anyone actually tried to take it. Agnes slowed for a moment, but carried on peeling carrots.
‘Mum, look, it’s Excalibur. Alex gave it to me.’
Agnes continued roughly peeling off the skins, aware that Freddie was at her side, unaware he held out the toy he no longer wanted.
And Susan continued: ‘You see, it wasn’t easy for your father. It wasn’t that bad for Elodie.’
‘Why?’ Lucy asked, and was granted more history.
Part of the problem for Freddie was that Elodie did not need Agnes like he did.’ Ironically, that made relations between mother and daughter moderately relaxed. Elodie drew water from another well. She naturally gravitated towards her father, with their shared love of cricket, leaving Freddie behind, resentful. Batting averages held nothing for him and he vainly searched for something he could bring to his mother, but she gave no lead. So he found himself unable to reach his mother and jealous of his sister. When they grew up and left home, the distance between siblings was weakly bridged by Christmas cards and awkward phone calls, the most memorable of which was when Elodie rang to say she had cancer. Freddie didn’t know what to say and to his horror said nothing of consequence. He groped for the language they had once shared as children but that was long gone. He asked questions but could not remove the note of polite enquiry. He said goodbye as if nothing had really happened. The illness took its time, drawing Elodie down despite treatments, prescribed and otherwise. Curiously, as Freddie heard the details of decline he felt the need to talk to her. He rang spontaneously, often in the middle of the day, without knowing what he would say. More often than not conversation flowed easily, and something began to grow He paid a few visits, always arranging another. And then Elodie died, sedated and beyond the comfort of her family, aged thirty-two. He blamed himself for having become a stranger.’ And, somehow, Freddie blamed Agnes.