Exposure (9 page)

And here she is, at the kitchen table, with the file in front of her.
Top Secret.
She knows immediately that it ought not to be here. Simon has never brought anything like this home. He rarely brings work home at all. Perhaps it’s got nothing to do with him, perhaps someone just—

Crept into their hallway with a briefcase while her back was turned?

The case can’t have been there long. The children barging about for boots and dropped gloves would have found it.

For some time Lily sits there, looking down at the file. A blank, blind space surrounds her.

She no longer speaks German. It has all disappeared. She speaks English, French, Italian. She cannot remember. Even her father’s face is a pale disc.

‘Surely you must remember Strandbad Wannsee, Lily! When you were three – four – five – you would pester me every day to go there. Of course that was when it was still permitted to us …’

No. She can remember nothing. Not a twig, not a drop of lake water, not a grain of sand. Her mind fumbles, but it is all blank. Sometimes, now, her mother
would like to speak German with Lily: ‘Surely you can’t have forgotten the language you spoke every day until you were nearly ten years old!’

‘You always said: Speak English. If I spoke in German you wouldn’t answer.’

‘There was a war on, Lily. How could I have you speaking German in the streets? Better that you forgot.’

‘I did forget.’

Her hands reach out. She opens the file. On the front sheet there are three typed names, with initials handwritten against them. She recognises only one name: Julian Clowde. He has read this file. Here are his initials: JRC. She finds herself wondering what the ‘R’ stands for. Simon doesn’t like him.

‘Why not?’ she asked him once.

‘He’s a cold fish. But I don’t have much to do with him these days.’

‘He’s too important now, I suppose.’

‘It’s not just that.’

‘I thought he was a friend of Giles?’

‘Yes,’ said Simon shortly, and the subject was closed.

She has made a mark on the cover of the file, because her hands are dirty from emptying the vacuum cleaner. They will notice it. What is this file doing here? Julian Clowde signed his initials, after the other two men whose names she doesn’t recognise. And then, for some reason, the file was passed to Simon. He brought it home in a briefcase which isn’t his, and tucked it away behind the children’s boots. Never, not once, has Simon brought home any file like this. She feels again the
coldness of his body as he slid into bed beside her, in the early hours.

Lily turns to the back of the file, and then forward through the pages. Statistics, diagrams, tables, acronyms. A swarm of words and figures that mean nothing to her. And then, at the front, a page written in plain English. A briefing document. Words jab out at her. What they describe are underwater surveillance and detection techniques. The diagrams and graphs are illustrations to the text. ‘Ref. Fig. 1, acoustic field sweep. Ref. Fig. 2, sonar directional plotting range. Ref. Fig. 3, bearing and feed calculation.’

At the foot of the briefing document is written: ‘Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment’.

England is an island, Lili. That is why we will be safe there. England is surrounded by the sea, and armies cannot march across water.

It had made her feel very safe. Hitler will not get his boots wet, her mother said, when Lili was most frightened. The sea is England’s strongest weapon.

This file. This file in her hands. This is a weapon. Simon ate nothing this morning. He wanted to talk to her when he came in last night, but she fell away from him into sleep. In the morning it was too late. They looked at each other over the children’s heads, and he was gone.

No one but Simon can have brought this file into the house.

Lily sits with the file in front of her and her thoughts drumming. She will put it back behind the boots. She
will wait until the children are in bed and then she’ll bring it out and say to Simon, ‘What’s this?’

A train whistles, and the sound goes through Lily’s bones.
Don’t be frightened, Lily. You are in England now.

She is in England because her mother would not wait, not even for Lily’s father.

She must hurry.

Lily gets up, puts the file back inside the briefcase, and clicks it shut. It’s no good just getting rid of the file. The whole thing must completely disappear. No one must know that it ever came into the house.

Lily empties the sack of kindling that they keep in the cupboard under the stairs, places the briefcase in it and knots the sacking. She dresses herself in raincoat, hood, wellington boots, and goes to the back door. She looks all round, carefully. The garden is very private, but there are back windows, and now that the leaves are off the trees there might be someone looking out – No. All is quiet. She walks briskly down the crazy-paving path beside the lawn. Beyond the rose-trellis, there is her vegetable patch, the apple and pear trees, the gooseberry patch, and beyond it the wild, overgrown part of the garden that leads to the copse. No man’s land. She puts down the sack, and fetches the spade and fork from the shed. Here, by the compost heap, the soil is soft and there is garden rubbish piled up, waiting to be burned when everything is no longer sodden with the autumn rain. She shoves the rubbish aside with her spade, and begins to dig.

Digging a hole deep enough for a briefcase to be buried is harder than she thought. God knows what it would be like to dig a hole deep enough to bury a man. The topsoil is soft, fed with ash from years of bonfires, but below it there’s clay. She sweats inside her raincoat even as the rain falls harder. Rain is good. It keeps people indoors, not looking over their garden fences.

The spade hits something hard, and won’t go deeper. Lily gets the fork and levers out a chunk of concrete. Brambles whip at her and she shoves them aside. She’ll pull them forward afterwards, to hide where she’s dug. She chops at roots with the edge of the spade and hacks her way deeper.

At last, she thinks the hole will do. She stands, easing her back. The sacking is dark with rain. She drops the case in the bottom of the hole, and treads it down, crushing it into the dirt, before she begins to fill in. Every so often she tramples the soil down again. At last it’s level with the rest of the earth. She fetches the garden fork and pulls rubbish and undergrowth over the grave of the briefcase. When she’s finished, she walks backwards, smoothing away the marks of her boots. By the shed, she stops and looks back. There’s nothing to see. No one would know.

Lily takes off her boots before going into the shed, so that she won’t leave muddy footprints. She finds a rag and with it carefully wipes the tines of the fork and the metal blade of the spade; then she replaces these on their hooks before shutting the door. Even now, she doesn’t put her boots back on, but walks in stockinged
feet to the water butt, where she rinses off her boots carefully. At the back door she undoes her suspenders and strips off her stockings. She’ll wash them, and dry her raincoat on the clothes rack by the kitchen stove. With luck, her stockings won’t have laddered. Now, she must find another bag for the kindling.

She looks back over the garden. Her feet have left no prints on the grass. The rain falls more gently now, in a mist that almost hides the copse. She’ll have that cup of coffee now, and afterwards she’ll vacuum the bedrooms. Everything is just as it was.

A rainy November afternoon, and cold with it, but deliciously so now that the curtains are drawn, the fire lit and the sitting room’s clutter basks in soft, yellow, flickering light. Paul and Sally kneel on the hearth rug, taking turns with the toasting fork. Bridget isn’t old enough to toast crumpets yet, but she has her doll’s tea set with real tea in it, and is content. They have been out all day. Paul and Simon went to King’s Cross, Sally on a trip to the zoo with her friend Katie (Sally is a child whom other families are always eager to invite), Bridget and Lily to Highgate Woods in macs and boots, with Erica, Thomas, the baby and Coco, the King Charles spaniel that Bridget craves.

Erica let Bridget hold the lead, and Bridget took it reverently. Now, she was a girl with a dog. Anyone who saw them might think it was her own dog. The spaniel is appealing, although Lily has never taken to it. The glassiness of its eyes repels her.

Bridget raced ahead: ‘Come on, Coco! Good girl, Coco!’

‘How are you, darling?’ asked Erica. ‘Christ! I wish this rain would stop.’

‘Oh, you know. Fine.’

‘You look a bit down. Time for the convalescent home?’

This had been Erica’s fantasy, when Thomas was little. Thomas, although a lovely boy, as everyone quickly says, is not quite like other children. He is immature, perhaps. Slow to learn in most things, frighteningly quick in others. Although he is Sally’s age, he naturally plays with Bridget. As a baby, he slept perhaps six hours in the twenty-four. His temper, then as now, was explosive.

Worn out by sleepless nights and hours of screaming, Erica would dream aloud of a convalescent home deep in the country, wide-lawned and wreathed in wisteria, staffed by kindly nurses in white-winged caps who would wheel the mothers’ beds into the sunlight, bring them tea and cups of soup, murmur soothingly, ‘Your children are perfectly happy in the nursery. Your job is to rest.’

But even after all that, Erica had the courage to have another baby. Clare slept from seven to seven and cried only, it seemed, to remind her mother that she was a human child and not a particularly delightful doll.

‘You’re the one with the baby,’ pointed out Lily. ‘The rest of the children are quite civilised now.’

‘They look it,’ said Erica, as Thomas snatched the dog’s lead and Bridget roared and flailed at him with her fists.

‘I mean, they use the lavatory and eat at the table. Bridget, stop that
now
.’

‘Give me the lead, Thomas. If you two can’t behave nicely, then you can’t have Coco.’

Sullen, united, the two children slunk behind the adults.

‘But there is something, isn’t there? Or perhaps you don’t want to talk about it,’ added Erica hastily, for she had a horror of intrusiveness and the gossip of the playground.

‘I can’t, really.’ Erica was so quick: she always knew when things were wrong. Lily would have liked to confide in her, but it was impossible. And Erica would not press her.

‘Never mind, darling,’ said Erica. ‘Let’s go to the kiosk and buy ourselves a huge bar of fruit and nut.’ She raised her voice and glanced behind her. ‘The children will just have to watch us eating it.’

Lily lies back in her chair by the fire, eyes half-closed. Today, more than ever, she has been glad to draw the curtains and shut out the world. But who is she kidding, as Simon would say. The world has battering rams if it wants to use them. She heard those words:
dirty Jews.
It took time for her to apply them to herself. At first those words wouldn’t connect from her ears to the place where she understood herself and knew what she was. Their apartment in Berlin was small: kitchen, living room, her parents’ bedroom and a room for Lili that was big enough for her bed and chest. She had to put
her toys away into boxes that fitted under the bed, and her bookshelf was in the hall. But their apartment was in a very good area, her mother said, and that made up for everything.

To go home was to be entirely safe. There was the thick outer door, the lobby, the entrance hall, the lift with its gates that folded up like concertinas, the row of letterboxes with their polished brass name-plates. Lili traced their own name with her finger before she could read. She was allowed to go down all by herself to fetch the post, and up again three floors in the wheezing hush of the lift. Their own front door was made of oak, her father said. There were three locks, one at the top, one in the middle, one at the bottom. One day, when Lili and her mother came home, Mama took out a key Lili had never seen her use before. She reached up and turned the key in the top lock, and then she bent down to the very bottom, almost on the floor, and turned that lock too. From that time, if Lili came home and one of her parents was already inside the apartment, she had to wait while all three locks were opened. Soon after that, when she was on her way home from school, she heard it for the first time:
Dirty little Jew.
She turned. But it was a nice lady in a summer dress with yellow and purple pansies on it. She looked straight at Lili. Had she said those words? She looked like one of Mama’s friends. In fact Lili was certain that she recognised the face. A neighbour perhaps. But the lady’s face was cold. She twitched her eyebrows and turned away. Her skirt swished from
side to side as she walked off down the pavement in her high heels.

Lili went home. She felt hot and ashamed, as if she’d wet herself and there was a patch on her skirt. When she rang the doorbell she waited for the sound of the three locks being turned, one by one. Once she was inside, she said nothing about the lady.

The crumpets are ready now, piled on a plate by the fire to keep warm. Two each, and one left over. Paul and Sally have already eaten theirs and licked the butter off their fingers with cat-like neatness. Bridget’s voice badgers her gently: ‘Mum, do you want more tea, Mum?’

‘Lovely,’ she answers, without stirring from her own thoughts, and takes the minuscule cup with its dregs of cold tea.

‘Mum, you’re not drinking it.’

‘Yes, I am. Give Dad a cup too.’

Paul looks up from his pile of
Railway Magazines.
‘It says here, Dad, that derailments, broken rails, earth slips and engine failures are the most common mishaps that close the line. Do you think that the ten-thirty-six was diverted because of an earth slip?’

He can see it in his mind, Lily knows. The drama of it: the train panting to a stop; the piled, quivering earth. She remembers reading
The Railway Children
aloud to them.

‘I should think it’s more likely to have been routine maintenance. They do most of that on Sundays. Does anyone else want that last crumpet?’

‘You have it,’ says Lily.

He spreads the thinnest possible film of Gentleman’s Relish on to the crumpet, and bites into it. How young he looks, suddenly. Eager, and almost happy. He can’t have looked for the briefcase, or he’d have seen it was gone, and asked her about it. It can’t have been anything serious, not really. She won’t think about it any more. It is Sunday afternoon, and their door is closed on the world. Simon bites into his toast, and smiles at her. She’d never heard of Gentleman’s Relish until she met Simon. Those Callingtons. His mother and father and his brothers, all so full of themselves, knowing what is right. ‘It was a bit off,’ they’d say of someone’s conduct, and everybody was supposed to nod. None of them has Simon’s yellow-brown eyes.

‘What colour are your eyes?’ she asked him, not long after they first met.

‘Hazel,’ he said, but the word was too soft for their jewel-like brightness. They are not easy to look into. Bridget has exactly those eyes.

In the hall, the telephone rings.

‘I’ll get it,’ says Lily.

‘No, don’t get up. It’s probably for me.’

He goes out, shutting the door behind him. She hears the murmur of his voice but can’t make out any words.

‘Put some more coal on the fire, Paul,’ she says, more sharply than she intends, so that he looks at her in surprise.

The fresh coal makes the fire smoke. It must have got wet in the bunker. The smell catches at the back of
Lily’s throat, and she gets up to clear away the plates and cups. The empty crumpet plate swims with grease.

‘Five minutes until bedtime, Bridget.’

The murmur from the hall stops. Simon will come back in a minute. She looks away into the guttering fire as the door opens. She turns quickly, and then, as if scorched, her eyes drop. There is something in his face that is all too familiar. It’s like the look on her mother’s face when she turned the three locks with her key. Fear.

‘Who was that?’

‘Giles Holloway.’

‘What did he want?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Simon slowly. Her runs his hand through his hair until it sticks up. ‘I don’t know why he rang.’

‘I thought he was in hospital.’

‘He is. They’re hoping to move him to a convalescence place quite soon. He can’t manage in the flat yet.’

‘What does he want you to do?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Isn’t that why he rang last time? He wanted you to do something for him? So now what does he want?’

They are face to face now, locked, staring. Around her she feels the children’s silence. They sit as still as hares on the carpet. They know. Just as she always knew. When her parents talked together, all those frightening words. She listened while she pretended to read or to play. They talked about the documents that were needed, the embassies that must be visited, the forms
that must be filled in. Endless forms. She listened to their desperate urgency, cloaked in the everyday.

‘You might be going on your travels, Lili! Just you and Mama. To England, right across the sea. How would you like that?’

‘You know, Lili, like in
Peter Pan
!’

Peter Pan
! Did they think that they were going to fly to England? She watched their mouths, their eyes. They’d always told her not to be afraid. Of the dark, of the Kirchners’ dog that raved at the end of its chain. The dog would never be able to get at her. ‘See, Lili, how strong the chain is!’

Now her parents were afraid, and she soaked in their fear through the pores of her skin. People think children know nothing, that they forget, that they don’t feel things. But she knew everything. Her mother said, when they had been in England less than a year: ‘Lily barely remembers Berlin. She can’t speak a word of German these days.’

She stands up. She must put Bridget to bed immediately. ‘Simon,’ she says, with all her tenderness, putting her hands up to touch him, and she sees his face change, soften, dissolve, come back to her.

‘Lily,’ he answers, recognising her and opening himself to her again. He is about to speak, to tell her. Everything is going to be all right again.

The doorbell rings. A long ring, a short pause. It rings again. They are pressing on the bell. They don’t intend to go away.

‘I’ll get it, Mum,’ says Paul.

‘No! No.’ She collects herself. ‘Paul, Sally, I want you to go upstairs straight away, with Bridget. Sally, get Bridget ready for bed. Make sure she cleans her teeth properly. She doesn’t need to have a bath. Bridget, you must be a very good girl tonight and do exactly what Sally says. Quickly now! And shut the bedroom doors.’

Her children run upstairs without a word. She hears one door slam, and then another. Paul has gone into his own bedroom. Bridget is with Sally. It has all taken perhaps thirty seconds. The bell peals on and now they are rapping on the wood of the door.

‘I’d better go and see who it is,’ she says, but already she knows. Her heart thuds up in her throat, quick and hot. The briefcase is buried. No one will be able to find it.

All the lines and bones of his face stand out. He lifts his right hand as if to touch her, but it drops to his side.

‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ he says.

The hours stretch. The children are at Erica’s. Lily telephoned her, and she came immediately, swathed against the rain, her eyes big and fearful in her pale face. She thought there’d been an accident.

‘It’s all right, Erica, no one’s hurt—’

‘Your friend should wait at the front door, madam. No one must come into the house.’ He set Lily aside, and said to Erica, ‘We shall need your name, address and telephone number.’

‘My God, Lily, what’s going on?’

‘Madam, as soon as I have these details we’d like you to take the children and leave.’

Earlier, under supervision, Lily put the children’s overnight things in a bag, with their school uniforms for the next day. A policeman watched her all the time.

‘Excuse me, madam, I shall have to look through that bag before it leaves the house.’

He thought she had slipped something into the bag. His hands were practised. He picked through Paul’s pyjamas, Sally’s and Bridget’s nighties, the rabbit slippers, the toothbrushes and flannels, and he ran his fingers rapidly up and down the seams of their clothes. ‘You may close the bag now.’

Thank God that happened before Erica arrived. As it was, they’d treated her as if she, too, might be part of this. Whatever ‘this’ was. They wouldn’t answer any of Lily’s questions. When she offered them a cup of tea, they looked at her as if this were yet another of the gambits with which they were all too familiar.

‘Are you Lily Elsa Callington, formerly Lili Elsa Brand?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Brand was my maiden name.’ They had made it sound as if she’d changed her name to conceal herself. They wrote it down, even though it was clear they knew it already. She saw her place of birth further up on the form, which was already partially completed in a different hand. Perhaps they had intended her to see it.

The door shuts. The children are gone. Simon has gone. He has accompanied two officers to Scotland Yard
for questioning. He went so quickly, so undramatically that she barely had time to understand that it was happening. He looked at her as he was led down the hall. She saw the shock in him, the fear and shame that they were doing this to him and he could do nothing to stop it. ‘I’m sorry, Lil.’ He said that when they came to the door. He said nothing more, but he looked back at her.

Through the open door she saw that there was a car outside. It was black but not a police car, and there was someone in the driver’s seat. The rain was still falling, the same rain that had fallen on them earlier in Highgate Woods. Simon went down to the road with the two officers, and another man got out of the car. He was a policeman in uniform. He opened the door for Simon to get into the back and he put his hand over the top of Simon’s head as he climbed into the car. The engine was running now, and the car was moving away from the kerb.