I had no chance to keep in touch with either Maureen or my grandparents during that first year working with Joy. I travelled to Austria and Germany several times and the work was very time consuming. When the year was up and I became a student again my life hardly changed.
I was determined to use the years that Max had given me well and so spent my time working for my degree and still undertaking specific tasks for Joy. David and Max could give me some help but I knew I had to know more about Europe in the 1930s to both ask the right questions and understand their answers.
I had little social life, soon finding that I had little in common with those students, only a few years younger than me, who were happy to waste their student years partying and drinking.
There was always so much to do that I never got around to visiting Maureen or my grandparents. I sent them postcards and wrote short letters but I hadn’t visited them since beginning at Sussex. The phone call from Maureen just after the end of my first year examinations was short and to the point.
“You must come back. Your grandmother has taken a turn for the worse. Get here quickly.”
I drove up the next day feeling guilty that I hadn’t made the short journey many more times in the two years I had been away. I arrived at Maureen’s cottage to be told I was too late.
“She knew it was coming, she was very brave.”
“Long illness bravely borne.” I quoted dryly.
I was more upset than I could explain. I hadn’t known Edith very well at all but I had liked her, and having learned what I had through the previous years there had been very specific questions I knew she could have answered.
“Somehow you think people are a fixture don’t you?” I asked Maureen as we sat in her unchanged kitchen drinking tea. “You think they’ll always be able to tell you what you want to know, answer your questions and just be there. There was so much I could have asked her and I didn’t, I always thought there’d be more time.”
“David is bereft. I really don’t know how he’ll cope being on his own. They’ve loved each other for so long. We must keep an eye on him, you must visit him. We both will.” Maureen was urgent in her concern for him.
“You knew them well.” I had never really questioned Maureen about how she came to be a friend of my mother’s parents and I hoped she’d tell me. I didn’t believe that she had just met them by chance on the train on the way to their daughter’s funeral. They had seemed to know each other a great deal better than that.
“I knew David better than Edie.” Maureen rarely answered a question directly.
“Had you known him a long time?”
“I was surprised to see them on the train to Liverpool on the way to the funeral. I recognised him but I wasn’t sure he knew me at first. It had been a long time, over 25 years.”
I did a quick calculation. “So you must have known him during the war? Tell me about him.”
It was some years before I realised what an opportunity I had lost by asking Maureen about David and not about herself.
She nodded briefly. “David is a wonderful man,” she said firmly “but he had to do many difficult things in his work. So much he couldn’t tell anyone, so many secrets…”
“Was he a spy?” I interrupted. David had talked of politics and intrigue.
“Such a silly word ‘spy’.” Maureen sounded weary “There are many different kinds of jobs that we hear so little of. For every James Bond there are ten, twenty, thirty people whose work involves nothing more exciting than commuting to sit at desks in gloomy rooms in narrow streets off Whitehall or in ornate rooms in grand houses tucked away in the country.”
“You sound like you know a lot about it.”
“It’s where I worked too.”
“I thought you did something academic.”
“No you didn’t, Annie, you thought I did nothing. That’s if you ever thought of it at all. Those days around Alicia’s funeral must have been incredibly difficult for them both. David and Max worked together for years but had never liked each other, and then of course Max had married David’s sister …”
“What?” That really was a surprise and diverted me from the fact that, again, Maureen had not taken the opportunity to be honest with me. Perhaps I hadn’t asked the right questions.
“It’s not common knowledge of course. Elizabeth had been left a widow quite early in the war. Max married her. I’m not sure whether it was a marriage of convenience or a love match. There was a daughter.”
“Veronica?”
“I think that was her name.”
“She died of whooping cough.”
I remembered, very vaguely, discussions about the whooping cough epidemic and of Veronica. We had all been infected at a party, I was far too young to remember but all of us had been ill, Carl and Charles and me.
“So we were cousins?”
“Well it’s a bit convoluted, her mother was your grandfather’s sister.”
“So she was my mother’s cousin? Did she know? But she was so much younger.”
“Generations aren’t always clear cut you know. David was still quite young when your mother was born and Elizabeth quite old when she had Veronica. And no, Alicia never knew of the relationship. She certainly never knew David, or that her mother’s husband wasn’t her natural father, though she always believed she had nothing whatsoever in common with her brothers.”
“Unless Max told her, during their affair.” I knew Max Fischer and my mother had had a relationship that had lasted several years. “I can’t understand them being together, he was old enough to be her father.”
“Not quite. There was probably no more than ten or fifteen years between them. I don’t think either of them would have talked about anything that really mattered. I don’t think they had that kind of relationship. But maybe they did.” She seemed to have forgotten I was there as she added wistfully. “Perhaps it is impossible to truly know what goes on between two people.”
That afternoon I made the first of many visits to David.
“I am so pleased you are here, Annie, darling. I have so much to tell you, to ask you to do for me. I don’t need to keep secrets any longer, now Edith’s gone.” He spoke the words as if he had to in order to remind himself that he was alone. He seemed twenty years older than the last time I had seen him.
“You must stay and talk to me. There are so many things I haven’t done, so many things I should have done but didn’t because I couldn’t upset Edie.” He stopped talking, a tear running down his cheek. I couldn’t bear his pain and could say nothing while he collected himself. “How are you getting on with your studies?”
He listened while I told him something of what I had been doing. “I must thank you David. Really. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have got involved in such a fascinating period. I would probably have done Napoleon or Edward III. But you put me on to a period where there are still people alive who can tell me things that aren’t just to be found in books.”
“It worked then.”
I made two mugs of tea but I had hardly sat down before he spoke urgently, as if he had been wondering whether to say anything but, having decided to, had to blurt it out.
“There are things that must be done. There are things that must not die with me. You will do these things won’t you?”
“I won’t know until you tell me what ‘these things’ are will I?” I tried to sound cheerful.
“I’ve told you something of what my life has been, I’m sure Maureen has told you more, if she hasn’t she will. You must write it all down and to tell everyone when it is time.”
“When will I know it’s time?”
I was surprised by his answer.
“Ted will tell you.”
“How do you know Ted?”
Nothing at my mother’s funeral had been as it seemed. I had assumed they were all strangers but David and Max had known each other, David had known Ted, and Maureen had known them all. Perhaps I hadn’t looked closely enough.
“I have known Ted for many years and we met again at your mother’s funeral. We have kept in touch. He is the single most responsible member of your extended family.”
“But he’s not family.”
“Not in the strict sense of blood and parentage but has he ever let you down? Has he ever not been around when the right thing had to be done? Isn’t that what ‘family’ means? I’ve always thought too much was made of blood ties. It is love that matters and Ted loves you dearly.”
“Sometimes he’s seemed the only friend I’ve had.” As I spoke the words I realised the truth in them.
Ted had been there throughout my childhood, he had been there when I had desperately needed a friend in the final days of my marriage and in the days immediately following Joe’s death. He had been there for my mother in her final months and had let me live with them and learn about her before it was too late.
“Ted is a lonely man. He was mesmerised by your mother many years ago and has spent his adult life looking after you and your brother in deference to that feeling. He is very fond of you all.”
“I haven’t been in touch with him for years.”
“Don’t worry. You will when you need to be.”
On my visit the following day his sadness had become a belligerent defiance against convention.
“I won’t go to Edie’s funeral. I hate funerals. I’ve said goodbye and neither of us believed there was anything after life has left the body. What’s the point? She lived, she made me happy, I hope I made her happy and now she’s dead. Singing songs won’t do any good.”
“You went to my mother’s.” I pointed out perhaps with less tact than appropriate because he looked at me with something approaching irritation.
“I didn’t go to Alicia’s funeral to say goodbye to Alicia. I went to be with Edie. She wanted to go. She had to go. I was with Edie. That and ….” I wondered if what he had left unsaid was ‘that and to see Max’.
“Talk to me David. Tell me more of those times. Tell me about Max.” I would try anything to take his mind away from Edie. “Tell me more about your work, in the 1930s. You began to tell me two years ago but there were so many gaps.”
“You know so much already.”
“Never enough.” I sat with him, holding his hand, trying to ease some of the pain of his loneliness.
“I told you my job through those years was to develop contacts.” He began hesitantly. He hadn’t but I didn’t argue with him.
“Was Max one of them?” I remembered him saying he would answer direct questions if I asked them. Now seemed the time.
“Yes, he was. I knew of him, indeed I knew a lot about him but I didn’t have to meet him until 1935.”
“What were these contacts for?”
“They were people who would be able to go into unfriendly countries.”
“This was before the war though?”
“I’ve told you we all knew the war was coming.”
“Who were they?”
He began to relax a bit and his answers flowed more freely. “Anyone who we could trust we recruited to report what they saw as they travelled around Europe. Actors, businessmen, anyone who could legitimately be in Germany, Austria or Hungary at that time. We had a wonderful network of information but everything we did was secret.”
“How did you know of Max?”
“He was a young lawyer, learning his business. He was ambitious but it wasn’t long before he realised that a great many of his contemporaries were more successful without having to do the work.”
“They came from the right families.”
“Indeed. Max’s family was lower middle class, his parents were shop keepers. He had none of the advantages of his contemporaries and he felt it keenly. Max needed to be accepted as a person as well as someone good at his job.”
“Just like you.”
“Not quite, but you’re right neither of us would have been expected to do well. I think we always understood that about each other though we were practically different generations. When I was born Queen Victoria had nearly ten more years to reign. I was 44 and he was not yet 30 when I met Max.”
“And in meeting Max everything changed?”
“For him, certainly, meeting me opened doors to an entirely new life. He had a chip on his shoulder, he was sure he was a better, possibly more intelligent, certainly more devious, lawyer than the people he wished were his friends. He spent drunken evenings in bars thinking that if he acted as they did he would be accepted, but at the time he didn’t realise quite how much they despised him.”
“Did they know he was Jewish?” I had always suspected this and it seemed a question worth asking.
“Max was not Jewish. His mother was probably of that faith, his grandparents certainly were. But it was not his religion that set him back in life, it was his class. And, Annie, before you argue with me, they are not necessarily the same.”
“Some religions have always been…”
“Underdogs? Scapegoats?”
“I wasn’t going to say that, I was going to say economically disadvantaged.”
“What a peculiar way of putting it. If Max was ‘disadvantaged’ it was because his family were shopkeepers, not because his mother’s parents were Jewish.”
“But why was he a shopkeeper?”
“Because he was not a farmer.” David’s tone was final. He was not going to pursue that conversation. “Max acted as though he were the aristocrat he wanted to be but since he couldn’t achieve a position of power and authority by right of birth, he had to do it through hard work and luck. Max’s life and mine have been inextricably linked on many levels. In the beginning I was the one who dictated to him and at other times the roles were reversed and he was able to dictate to me, but for over 40 years we have not been free of each other.”
“That’s an odd way of putting it. Weren’t you friends? Didn’t you like each other?”
“No, I can honestly say neither of us has ever liked the other.”
“Even though you were brothers-in-law?”
“What do you know about that?” He spoke sharply.
“Elizabeth… your sister… ” I didn’t answer properly, I had been shocked by the pain in his voice. Please tell me about her. I’d love to know more about her.”
He thought for a while before answering.
“Elizabeth’s story isn’t just about her, it is about the influence she had on others. She had no life of her own. She was simply a pawn in a bigger game.”
“A game?”
“A game between me and Max.”