Because I wanted to see as far as possible what Tilda had seen, and experience what Tilda had experienced, I drove to Harwich and sailed to the Hook of Holland. I’d had my car expensively serviced at a garage a few days before, to be sure that it lasted out the journey. The boat docked at half past five in the morning and, as I travelled north to Amsterdam, I thought what a neat, bright little country it was, the fields and dikes and rows of flowers everything they should be.
Amsterdam was messy, though, curls of litter on the cobbles beside the canals and graffiti on the walls. It was hot and the traffic was awful, and by the time I found my hotel my silk shirt was stuck to my back with sweat. I lugged my suitcase up to my room, showered, and collapsed on the bed, the towel wound round me. I wanted to sleep but could not: my mind would not wind down. It leapt with disconcerting facility from Tilda to Daragh to Patrick; it muddled up the chill bleak waterways of East Anglia with the tidy canals I had glimpsed that morning. It conjured with an aching desire the illusion that Patrick was beside me, that his naked skin touched mine, that the warmth of the sunlight from the unshuttered window was the warmth of his body. I longed for him: with every obsessive thought, with every fast pulse of my heart. It was only when I sat up straight, heart pounding, eyes wide open, having heard the aeroplanes dive-bombing the glittering roofs of Amsterdam, that I knew I had slept and, if only for a moment or two, had returned to the summer of 1940.
I dressed and, armed with a map, went out to find coffee. I had visited the city twice before, with Toby. I remembered the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum, and the water-buses on the canals at night, their reflections shimmering in the moonlight. I had only two days in Amsterdam; on Thursday I would drive to Scheveningen to interview Leila Gilbert, Hanna Schmidt’s daughter, so I could not afford to waste time. I caught the water-bus and sat with the students and the tourists, looking down at the olive-green waters of the canal and across to the old houses of the wealthy merchants. Tilda and Max had moved to Amsterdam at the beginning of 1940. Before that, they had spent a few months in Paris. Holland had maintained a neutral status after the outbreak of war, though Max, of course, saw the fragility of Holland’s position. Rosi Liebermann, as she herself had told me, had remained in England with Sarah Greenlees. Max had been convinced that to take Rosi abroad would be to risk her life. Not for the first time, nor for the last, Tilda had had to make an agonizing choice between people that she loved. But Tilda had enjoyed Amsterdam: Jan had joined the Dutch army, leaving Emily to run the business while Tilda worked as a volunteer in the refugee hostels. Their friendship flourished once more.
Alighting from the water-bus, I began to walk to the van de Criendts’ house. Jan van de Criendt had sold furniture and fine rugs. He had imported the rugs from the East, and the furniture from all over Europe, including England. He had retired to the coast years ago, and now the van de Criendts’ former house was a bar, and tourists gathered at the little tables on the forecourt. I sat down at a vacant table and ordered a sandwich and a beer. I peered into the darkened interior of the house, but failed to imagine Tilda and Emily laughing together amongst Persian rugs and chests and old clocks. While I waited for my lunch, I took my notebook out of my bag and leafed through it. In April 1940 the German army had invaded Norway, and Max had almost sent Tilda and the children home. But Joshua had measles and was too ill to travel, and by the time he had begun to recover the British navy had reached Norway with the intention of securing its liberty. Max’s pessimism had bowed, not for the first time, to Tilda’s optimism and joie de vivre. She had been unable, she had explained to me, to believe that the worst could happen. Tilda had looked at the canal-boats laden with red and yellow cheeses and gorgeously coloured tulips, at the housewives scrubbing their front steps, and had been unable to believe that such tranquillity could be brutally and deliberately destroyed.
I drank my beer and ate my sandwich. Then I wandered slowly back to my hotel, enjoying the early evening sun on my bare arms and legs. The city seemed populated only by lovers: they lounged at the bridges, adoring their reflections in the water; they kissed at street corners, limbs entwined, their mutual passion excluding the rest of the world. I thought of Patrick, of the afternoon at the farmhouse and of the night we had spent at the small hotel in Penrith, and I closed my eyes and shut away the noises of the city, and longed for him. And I wondered whether Tilda’s fear of separation from Max – an uncharacteristic fear for so independent and spirited a woman – had not been connected in some way with Daragh. Whether under-occupied and alone, her thoughts – her desires – returned to her first love. I thought of Tilda here, in Amsterdam, in 1940, waiting for the storm to break.
She never slept well when Max was away. In the early hours of the morning, she heard his key turn in the lock. Tilda switched on the lamp.
‘Max.’
‘Ssh.’ He put his finger to his lips, and came to sit on the bed beside her. He had been away for a fortnight; he still wore his raincoat, and Tilda saw that his shoes were caked with mud. There were deep shadows of weariness around his eyes, and his face looked thinner.
‘Are you hungry?’ She seized his hand. ‘Shall I make you something to eat?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, darling – didn’t mean to wake you. Go back to sleep.’ He peeled off his raincoat and jacket, and unknotted his tie. She did not sleep, but watched him.
‘Was it awful?’
‘Pretty bad.’ He never said more than that. Max had two compartments to his mind: the work one and the family one. He took great care to keep the two divided.
‘Are you coming to bed?’
‘Not yet.’ In the dim light, his eyes seemed not blue, but black. ‘Tilda, I’ve booked a passage back to England for you and the children and Charlotte.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. I meant to get back sooner but I was held up. You must leave, Tilda.’
‘And you?’ she whispered.
‘I’ll be staying on for a while. Martin Willet will pick you up at lunchtime and drive you to the Hook of Holland.’ Martin was a stringer for one of the Amsterdam newspapers. ‘I have to leave before midday.’
She felt cold inside. ‘Max, you must come with us.’
‘I can’t.’ His expression was grim. ‘I have to stay until the end, don’t you see?’
She thought that ‘the end’ had such an ominous ring. She was leaving Max alone in a crumbling, dangerous Europe. She hugged him, pressing her face against the folds of his shirt so that the tears that stung the corners of her eyes were blotted, invisible.
In the morning, the task of packing, of deciding what to take and what to abandon, did not detract from the anxiety of seeing Max leave. Tilda took the lucky coin that she wore around her neck, that she had found all those years ago in Southam, and put it over Max’s head. Then she held him very tightly. When he had gone, she stood for a moment at the window, her back to the children, her eyes closed. Then she became very busy again, running round the house, making sure that they had left nothing vital behind. She found a rag doll under Melissa’s bed, and a snowsuit belonging to William van de Criendt stuffed down the back of a chair. When Martin Willet arrived, she helped him assemble the children and Charlotte Sykes and put the luggage in his car. Then she locked the front door, put the key through the letterbox, and did not look back.
Now that the decision had been made, the journey through the network of narrow, cobbled streets and humpbacked bridges seemed frustratingly slow. She wanted to be away, she wanted to be settled again. Martin stopped the motor car outside Emily’s shop, and Tilda grabbed William’s snowsuit, and ran in. The shop was deserted, the dark, polished tables, the painted chests and carved mirrors gathering dust. Tilda called out, and climbed the steep, narrow stairs.
Emily was in the kitchen; William was sitting in his high chair. Emily looked pale and drawn.
‘I think William’s going down with a cold. He was up all last night.’ Emily looked at Tilda. ‘What is it, Tilda? Tell me.’
‘We’re going home. We’re to take the midday ferry.’
‘Oh.’ The single sound was a small, painful gasp.
‘Come with us, Emily, please. If Max says we’re to go, then it’s because he thinks that Germany’s about to invade.’ Tilda saw the tremor of shock in Emily’s eyes. ‘He’s usually right about things like that. You can’t stay here, you might not be safe. Come back to England with us.’
‘I can’t leave Jan.’ The sunlight cast dark hollows onto Emily’s face. She tried to smile. ‘I’ll be all right. I’ve loads of tins of sardines and things stored up in the cellar, just in case. And it won’t last long, Jan says. The Germans can’t defeat Holland and Belgium and France, can they?’
Tilda’s throat ached. She remembered Ely and Miss Clare’s Academy, and how both Emily and she had fallen in love with Daragh Canavan. She said gently, ‘You don’t look well, Em.’
‘It’s just the curse, I think.’ Emily’s skin had no colour, and her eyes seemed to have sunk back into her skull.
‘I’ll have to dash.’ Tilda’s voice faltered.
‘Good luck, old thing.’ Emily turned aside, but not quite quickly enough.
‘Emily?’ The expression on Emily’s face frightened Tilda. ‘Emily, what is it?’
Emily gasped. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’
‘Emily.’ Tilda covered Emily’s clenched fist with her hand. ‘You’re ill, aren’t you?’
Emily didn’t speak at first, and then the words tumbled out. ‘I have the most awful pain in my side. I’ve had it for two days now and it’s getting worse and worse. I’m afraid, Tilda—’ She broke off and closed her eyes, and when she spoke again it was with a trace of the old, confident, bouncy Emily.
‘It’s all right, it’s nothing. You must go, Tilda – you’ll miss the boat. Go. Please.’ She turned her face away.
Tilda hesitated, and then hugged Emily, and ran back out to the car. Throughout the drive from Amsterdam to the Hook of Holland, the children asked her questions and demanded drinks and entertainment, and she answered them mechanically. Holland’s green, flat countryside unreeled behind her, but she did not see it. She saw only Emily’s face, sick and frightened and alone.
At the Hook of Holland, Martin unloaded their luggage from the car, Charlotte took Melissa’s hand and Tilda carried Joshua. They pushed through the crowds of soldiers and sailors. Joshua almost swooped out of Tilda’s arms, eyes wide, when he heard the hooting of a ship’s funnel. Gulls shrieked, and the air was thick with fish and salt and diesel.
The queue at the ferryport snaked across the foyer. Tilda turned to Martin. ‘You go back to Amsterdam, Martin. We’re fine now.’
‘Max said—’
‘Honestly, we’ll be fine.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘You get back to the office.’
Martin raised his hat, and disappeared into the crowds. The queue shifted slowly forward. Melissa grew bored, so Tilda played I Spy with her. Joshua wriggled out of Tilda’s arms and shuffled around the hall on his bottom making hooting noises. Tilda hauled him back every now and then and thought about Emily. Jan was away, Emily did not know where. William had a bad cold. Jan’s only relative was Felix, his younger brother, miles away in north Holland. Most of Emily’s neighbours were single men or old couples: she knew no-one well in Amsterdam, and her Dutch was still uncertain. Tilda bit her nails and wiped Joshua’s nose and escorted Melissa to the lavatory and remembered the way Emily had said, I have the most awful pain in my side.
They had reached the counter where their tickets were checked. ‘Four passengers?’ asked the steward.
‘Three,’ said Tilda suddenly, and handed Joshua to Charlotte. ‘I have to go back to Emily. She’s ill.’ The decision, now that she had taken it, was unavoidable. Charlotte gaped at her. She looked frightened.
‘You’ll be fine, Lottie.’ Tilda scrabbled in her purse and extracted all the English money that Max had given her. ‘Get a train from Harwich and a taxi from Liverpool Street. Here are the house keys. I’ll be back in a day or two – I have to make sure that Emily’s all right.’ She moved a step forward; she could hear grumbles from the queue behind her.
‘Mr Franklin—’ said Charlotte nervously.
‘Max will understand. And besides, I shall be back before him.’
From over Tilda’s shoulder, an upper-class English voice said loudly, ‘I say, do put a step on there—’
‘Remember Joshua’s chest-rub and make sure you watch Melissa when she brushes her teeth at night, or she’ll eat the toothpaste.’
‘Frightfully inconsiderate—’
A steward had taken their luggage; Charlotte stepped onto the gangway, Joshua in her arms, Melissa holding her hand.
‘And they must both take their malt extract. Josh likes his spread on a rusk.’
Melissa, her eyes and mouth wide with alarm, stared at her retreating mother. Josh waved a grubby hand. Melissa’s face screwed up and she tried to pull away from Charlotte. An elbow jabbed Tilda in the small of her back. Charlotte looked back once, smiled a watery smile, and disappeared with the two children and the steward into the ferry. Melissa’s wail was a thin, high-pitched lament at her abandonment.
There was a pain beneath Tilda’s ribs. She thought it was her heart. She stood aside, aware of an awful loneliness, and a conviction that she had done something irretrievable. A group of travellers, the men in striped blazers and straw boaters, the women in silk dresses, pushed past her. Tilda took a deep breath and elbowed her way back through the ticket office, towards the railway station.
All her doubts disappeared when, back in Amsterdam, she ran up the stairs behind the van de Criendts’ shop, and found Emily curled up on the couch, a hot-water bottle on her stomach. William was playing on the floor. Emily’s eyes widened when Tilda opened the door, and she tried to get up. Emily protested; Tilda promised to catch the night ferry if the doctor said that Emily was well enough to be left alone. But the doctor, hauled by Tilda out of his surgery, diagnosed appendicitis and operated that evening. Tilda remained in Emily’s apartment, looking after William. It was 5 May. On the evening of 9 May, Emily discharged herself from the nursing home and took a taxi back to her home. On the morning of 10 May, the German army invaded Holland.
Tilda was giving William his breakfast when the first of the aeroplanes swooped over Amsterdam. To begin with, she cursed it because she was afraid that the noise might wake Emily, who had had a bad night, and then, when that plane was followed by second, and a third, she was seized by a terrible fear. When William had finished his bottle, she put him back in his cot and ran outside in her dressing gown. The street was full of people, looking up. The aeroplanes drew circles in the sky, and on the tail of each one was a swastika.
With Emily propped on the sofa, wrapped in blankets, Tilda watched the soldiers dart around the roads and the high, narrow buildings, as though they were playing a game of hide and seek. Throughout the day, rumours reached them – that the Dutch had capitulated, that the Germans had been overwhelmed and had withdrawn, that Nazi paratroopers had landed in the polders of north Holland and were blowing up the dikes that protected the land from the sea. On 11 May the order went out for all German refugees in Holland to remain inside their houses. On 13 May, Emily’s neighbour, tears streaming down her face, told Tilda that Queen Wilhelmina had taken ship for England. Emily refused to believe her. The bakers’ shops were still open, the housewives still cleaned their steps; everything seemed so normal. The following day, the man who sold flowers in the streets told them that the Nazis had bombed the port of Rotterdam and that thirty thousand people had been killed. The dull pounding and the distant plumes of black smoke lent credence to the rumours.
Tilda packed her bag and stayed up through the night washing and cooking, so that when she left Emily would be able to manage on her own. Emily had dragged herself out of bed, shuffling around the flat, the persistent pain of the stitches making her stooped and old. The wireless was on constantly, Emily retuning the dial as the signal was lost in crackles and screeches. The news from the BBC was optimistic. They could only understand parts of the Dutch broadcasts. When, every now and then, she found a German station, Emily cursed and flipped over the dial, her small round face creased with fury.
On the evening of 15 May, there was a hammering at the door of the shop. Tilda ran down the stairs to open it. An elderly woman stood on the doorstep, two children beside her. She spoke in Dutch, too fast for Tilda to follow her, but her gestures and expression were distressed.
‘She says that there’s a boat sailing from Ijmuiden to England tonight.’
Tilda turned to see Emily, crouched on the stairs in her dressing gown.
‘This lady’s husband sometimes works for Jan,’ Emily explained. She asked the woman something in halting Dutch. Another torrent, incomprehensible to Tilda, followed.
‘I think she’s saying that the children – Hanna and Erich – are German refugees, of Jewish extraction, but Christians, and that she must get them to Ijmuiden so that they can board the ship to England. But she can’t drive and hasn’t a car. She wonders if I can help.’
The woman fell silent, exhausted. The children, a teenage girl and a boy of about nine or ten, looked white and frightened. Emily said, ‘You must take them, Tilda. You must take Jan’s car and drive to Ijmuiden.’ She smiled. ‘William and I can manage. I’m better now. You must go home, Tilda.’
Within half an hour, she was driving out of Amsterdam. The roads were clogged with people: cars and bicycles and coaches and small, hurrying groups of pedestrians. The children, Hanna and Erich, sat beside Tilda on the wide front seat. The car, which Jan used for transporting furniture, was big and heavy. Her arms ached as she swung the lumbering vehicle round corners, overtaking vans and bicycles, driving as fast as she dared through the crowded streets.
On the road to Ijmuiden, their pace slowed. Cars jostled with army trucks and jeeps. A soldier flagged them down, and peered through the window. The little boy, Erich, seemed to shrink into himself, to become stiller than Tilda had thought it was possible for a child to be. Tilda tried to explain where they were going, and the soldier waved them on. A long queue of cars trailed slowly along the other side of the road, heading back to Amsterdam. Fear squeezed her stomach again. A second soldier stepped in front of the car, forcing Tilda to brake suddenly. Again, Erich froze. Hanna put her arm round him. The soldier barked questions at them, and they were waved on once more.
She had to be in time. She had to be.
The flat fields, with their grazing cattle and their narrow dikes, so familiar to Tilda from her childhood in the Fens, crawled slowly by. There was not room enough to overtake the traffic, and the steady stream of motor cars and bicycles back to the city was ominous. Tilda’s jaw ached with tension. At last, they were in sight of the port. She could see the silhouettes of the ships in the dock. She parked the car at the side of the road, gave Hanna and Erich their suitcases, slung her own bag over her shoulder, and ran, a child’s hand clutched in each of hers. Voices – British voices – echoed around her. British soldiers had landed at Ijmuiden. Her heart lifted. Clouds of smoke clogged the horizon, and the sparks and flashes that intermittently brightened the darkening sky were like fireworks. Aeroplanes swooped overhead. Cars and coaches clustered around the dockside. Tilda could see the ship, a battered steam freighter. She could read the name written along its bows: the SS Bodegraven. She was within a hundred yards of it when it upped anchor and began, very slowly, to sail out of the port.
She stood there for a moment, gasping for breath, staring at the ship. The horror of her situation almost overwhelmed her. She was stranded in a Europe about to be engulfed by war, the immense distance of the North Sea between herself and her family. She might be separated from Max and the children for weeks, months, years. Dutch and British voices shouted to everyone to clear the port. Aeroplanes screamed as they dive-bombed the SS Bodegraven. She was not afraid for herself, she was afraid only of the acres of time and space that separated her from those whom she loved most in the world. Then she saw that beside her the boy Erich had sunk to the ground and curled up in a small, stiff ball. Tilda knelt down and stroked his curved spine. He rocked to and fro, humming softly to himself. Hanna was staring at her, her eyes wide and anxious. Tilda picked Erich up in her arms and carried him back to the car.
When the British blew up the pier and the Royal Dutch oil tanks, the flames reached into an ultramarine sky, tarnishing it, casting a black shadow across the sea. The roads had cleared as Tilda drove back to Amsterdam. When she reached the city and saw the lights that burned in every window, she knew that Holland had surrendered.
Emily fed the children, and Tilda sat on the sofa, eyes wide, staring at the wall. She couldn’t think what to do, her mind no longer seemed to be working properly. Emily pressed a cup of tea into her hands, but Tilda could not yet drink it. The striped wallpaper, with its framed pictures of Emily in her wedding dress, and Jan and Felix sailing the Marika, blurred whenever she thought of Melissa and Josh.
She blinked and her sight cleared as she stared at the photograph of the boat. She remembered happier days: herself and Max on board the Marika. The tea slopped in her saucer, and she whispered, ‘Felix.’ Then she stood up, and began clumsily to put her coat back on.
‘Tilda?’ Emily moved away from the children, who were seated at the table. ‘Tilda, where are you going?’
She told her. Emily stood quite still for a moment, eyes wide. Then she disappeared into the bedroom, and Tilda heard her open a drawer. When she came back, she was carrying something wrapped in a length of cloth. She sat on the sofa beside Tilda.
‘It was Jan’s father’s,’ Emily whispered. ‘Jan made me keep it when he went away. Just in case.’ Emily unfolded the cloth to reveal the old army revolver. ‘It’s loaded,’ she said softly. ‘You must take it, Tilda.’
Tilda wrapped up the gun in the cloth again and slid it into the deep pocket of her coat. Just in case.
The roads were empty now. There was an eerie, uneasy silence, as though the city itself could hardly believe its defeat. For the second time that day, Tilda steered the heavy motor car out of Amsterdam.
She had to switch on the headlights because it was dark and she did not know the road well, yet their conspicuousness in the quiet countryside alarmed her. Hanna and Erich sat beside her, as before, Erich’s small hand clasped in Hanna’s. The map was spread out on Hanna’s lap. Emily had given Tilda detailed instructions of how to find Felix van de Criendt’s house in Den Helder. She and Max had visited Felix several times, but she did not trust herself to find the way in the dark.
As they drove north, the road became less even and the car rattled and lurched in the potholes. The sky was clear, inky black, pocked with stars. The aeroplanes had gone. Tilda went through it all again in her head, just to make sure. The route took her through north Holland, via Alkmaar, past the dikes and dunes that held back the North Sea.
She smiled at the children, beside her. ‘Not far to go now.’ Hanna smiled. The boy worried Tilda. He did not speak at all. Hanna had told her that Erich was ten years old, but the expression in his eyes seemed much older. The road was unfamiliar and narrow; afraid of overturning into a ditch, Tilda slowed down. Thoughts of Max, of the children, of the precarious future darted into her head, and were pushed ruthlessly away. She focused her mind on the task in hand: reading the map, looking for roadsigns, reaching the coast before daybreak. The countryside was flat, crisscrossed by dikes, the only trees tall, spindly willows. It occurred to Tilda that such a countryside offered nowhere to hide. A sudden movement to the side of the road made her jump, but it was only a fat red cow, strayed out of her field. She broke off bits of chocolate and fed them to the children; Erich stored his furtively in the pocket of his shorts. It was late; she estimated that they had only thirty miles or so to travel. She had been awake since half past five that morning; her eyelids were growing heavy. Let Felix be at home, Tilda prayed, let him be at home. Grant that no hobgoblins fright me, no hungry devils rise up and bite me. Something moved at the side of the road. ‘It’s only another—’ Tilda began, and then she gasped, a sudden sharp intake of breath, and stamped her foot on the brake. The car shuddered to a halt in the middle of the road.
I reached Scheveningen, on the Dutch coast, in the early evening. The town glittered in the sunshine. I booked into a small hotel, and quickly showered and unpacked. I had arranged to visit Leila Gilbert at half past seven. Mrs Gilbert’s apartment was only a ten-minute walk from my hotel. She greeted me warmly, and showed me into her living room. Through the front window I saw that the North Sea was now Prussian blue, flecked with silver, instead of the sullen grey that had accompanied my voyage from Harwich. A few children lingered on the beach, piling sand into plastic buckets.
I heard Leila Gilbert say, ‘It is beautiful, no?’ and I turned round as she placed a tray of coffee and biscuits on the table.
‘Beautiful,’ I echoed.
‘My sons think that Scheveningen is the dullest place on earth. But I like to be by the sea.’
Leila Gilbert, who was Hanna Schmidt’s only child, had two teenage boys. The apartment was littered with evidence of them: Doc Martens in the hallway, a rack of T-shirts dripping in the bathroom and loud music from one of the bedrooms.
I indicated a photograph on the sideboard. ‘Your mother?’
Leila nodded. ‘She died three years ago, as I told you. I still miss her dreadfully.’ She handed me the photograph and I looked down at it. There was a marked similarity between mother and daughter: both had high, broad, bony foreheads, long, thin noses, and bushy, light brown curls. Hanna had become a surgeon, Leila taught at a girls’ school in The Hague.
Leila poured coffee, and called to her son to turn down the music, and I flicked back through my notebook. ‘Your mother lived with Tilda after she left Holland, didn’t she?’
Leila handed me a cup and saucer. ‘At the end of the war, she went back to Europe, to see whether any of her family had survived. They hadn’t, I’m afraid. So she returned to England and took up a scholarship at Cambridge, to study medicine. Rosi Liebermann went up at the same time to read English. They both stayed with Tilda in the vacations. Later, Hanna studied in Paris for a while, and later still she worked in Israel. We travelled a great deal. I was born in Paris, but I went to school in Belgium, and I married an Englishman. And now I live in the Netherlands.’
‘I’m interested in how your mother came to leave Holland in 1940. I’ve spoken to Tilda already, but I wondered whether Hanna ever described the journey to you.’
‘She told me about it a few weeks before she died. She was so ill that I think she had begun to live more in the past than the present. I knew some of it already, of course.’
I sat, pen in hand, scribbling notes as she spoke. Much of what Leila Gilbert told me I had already learned from Tilda. Hanna Schmidt had left Austria in 1938 and had been adopted by an elderly Dutch couple living in Amsterdam. Although Hanna was a Christian, she was of Jewish origin, and thus persecuted by the Nazis. In 1939 the Dutch couple had adopted a second child, a boy, Erich Wirmer. Hanna had felt safe in Amsterdam, and had believed that her parents and elder brothers would eventually join her there. That illusion crumbled in May 1940, when Germany invaded. Because Hanna and Erich were not of the Jewish faith, they were in touch with few other refugees in Amsterdam, and failed to receive the vital message telling them of the coaches that would take them to Ijmuiden. When they heard that a ship had been chartered to ferry the Jews to England, Hanna’s adoptive parents, who had no car, asked Mrs van de Criendt if she could drive the children to Ijmuiden. Mrs van de Criendt was unwell, but an English lady staying with her offered to help.
‘Tilda,’ said Leila. ‘The English lady was Tilda. My mother always remembered seeing her for the first time in Mrs van de Criendt’s shop. She said that she was like an illustration of a princess in a Hans Andersen book.’ Leila smiled.
Tilda had driven the two children to Ijmuiden. Leila mentioned, as Tilda had done, the many interruptions to their journey. The Dutch army had not been forewarned about the SS Bodegraven.
‘The ship was half empty – many more refugees could have been taken to safety had they been able to reach the port in time. Tilda and Hanna and Erich were too late – the boat had already sailed. After the first shock was over, my mother wasn’t frightened. She was always a level-headed person, and besides, as soon as she met Tilda she was convinced that she would be safe. But poor Erich …’ Leila shook her head. ‘He had seen such terrible things. He was only ten years old.’
They had driven back to Amsterdam, to Emily van de Criendt’s house. Leila told me that Hanna had remembered that Emily had given them special little chocolate biscuits to eat. Then, before she had time to finish her tea, she had to put on her coat again, and they had driven out of Amsterdam once more.
Leila left the room to tell her son to turn down the volume of his CD-player. I looked out of the window again. The little groups of children had left the beach. I knew the next part of Leila’s story. Tilda had driven from Amsterdam through north Holland, to the town where Felix van de Criendt lived. She had woken him up, and—
Leila took up her story again. ‘It was late, and Hanna was very tired. She kept drifting off to sleep. She read the map for Tilda and held Erich’s hand because she knew that he was frightened. Hanna wasn’t frightened at all until the soldier stopped them.’
I looked up. ‘Soldier?’ Tilda hadn’t mentioned a soldier.
‘A German soldier. A stray paratrooper, I suspect, who had become separated from the rest of his battalion. He was wounded – my mother noticed that he was limping. Anyway, he flagged down the car.’
I had stopped writing. Nirvana pounded from a nearby room, but I hardly heard it. ‘Was he armed?’
Leila nodded. ‘My mother said that she began to be afraid when he spoke to them in German. He told them to get out of the car. He was pointing a gun at them.’ She paused. ‘So they got out of the car. My mother’s legs were shaking so much that she was afraid she would not be able to walk. The soldier told them to stand at the side of the road. Then Erich began to scream about his things, and he ran back to the car.’
I asked, ‘What things?’
Leila looked sad. ‘Apparently, he’d a few items belonging to his family in his suitcase. Nothing of value, but they were all that he had.’
I repeated, ‘Erich ran back to the car …’
‘The German soldier raised his pistol. And Tilda shot him and pushed his body into the dike.’
I stared at Leila, unable to speak.
She started up the car again. There were scarlet flecks all over her clothes. Hanna was crying. Erich clutched his suitcase to his chest. A sour smell filled the car. Tilda saw that Erich had wet himself.
She couldn’t steer properly at first; they veered from one side of the road to the other, as though she was drunk. But she managed to get hold of herself, and to straighten up, and to tell Hanna to pick up the map from the floor. She thought that she ought to speak to the children about what had happened, but she couldn’t. She didn’t think that she’d ever be able to speak about it to anyone. She did what Max did, and put it in a little compartment in her mind and shut the door.
Hanna had unfolded the map again. The tears had dried on her cheeks, and she had begun to follow the line of the road with her finger. The air that issued through the open window smelt salty. They were near the sea, thought Tilda, and her heart lifted slightly. In the aftermath of what had happened, she felt terribly tired and all her muscles ached. Hanna read out directions and she followed them like an automaton. When, after another hour’s driving, they reached Den Helder, she braked and sat for a moment, unable to move.
The girl, Hanna, stepped out of the car and opened the driver’s door. ‘Here,’ she said timidly, and handed Tilda a handkerchief. When Tilda glanced in the wing mirror, she saw that her face was spotted with red. She spat on the handkerchief and scrubbed her face hard, and then, leaning out to the verge, she was very sick.
Afterwards, she felt better. She stripped off her coat and flung it into the back seat of the car, and helped Erich change into dry clothes. His skin was pale and waxy and his eyes glassy, and he still hummed the tuneless little song. Then she gathered suitcases and bags and children together. Though it was still dark, she found Felix’s house easily. When she hammered on the door the sound, breaking the ancient silence of the port, was as shocking as a gunshot.
After a few minutes, Felix opened the door. ‘Tilda!’ His hair was tousled, but he was fully dressed. ‘I’ve been listening to the wireless,’ he said, as he ushered them into the house.
She explained quickly about Emily’s illness, and Hanna and Erich and the SS Bodegraven. Felix, seventeen years old, looked excited rather than concerned. She did not tell him about the German soldier. When she had finished, she added, ‘Felix, I have to get back to England. Hanna and Erich will not be safe in Holland. I wondered—’
‘The boat,’ he said. His eyes, the same grey-blue as Jan’s, were big and round and delighted. ‘You want me to sail you back to England.’
‘Yes.’ Voiced, the idea seemed ridiculous. Mad and dangerous and irresponsible. ‘Jan—’ she began uncertainly.
‘Jan wouldn’t let me join up. But this’ll be much better fun. I was planning a fishing trip next weekend, so she’s all fitted out. And there’s tins and things in the larder.’
He turned to go, but she grabbed at his sleeve. ‘Felix, it’ll be dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt.’ Though he was six foot tall and rangy, Felix seemed suddenly so young. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t—’
‘It’ll be splendid,’ he said. Smiling broadly, he snaked his hand and made shooting noises. ‘Don’t worry, Tilda, she can get up quite a good speed with the wind behind her. Almost four knots.’
Two days after leaving Holland, they dropped anchor near Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. There was barbed wire on the beach and a great fuss of oldish men in assorted uniforms, one of whom brandished an ancient rifle until Tilda wearily explained who they were, and why they were there. Now, wrapped in borrowed blankets, they sat in the firelit parlour of a pub. The man with the rifle still watched them, though his suspicion was gradually being replaced by disappointment.
The English coastline had been swathed in fog. Once, orange sparks and an intermittent crackling noise had told them that someone was firing at them. Felix had sworn under his breath and cursed the difficult sandbanks and tides of the eastern coast. The wind, which had filled the sails and blown them across the North Sea, had died. Felix had started up the little outboard motor; its chugga-chug-chug had broken the silence and taken them towards a pebbled beach. The floor still moved beneath Tilda’s feet.
‘They’ve got that number for you, lovey.’ The innkeeper’s wife gestured to the telephone. The children were curled up together in front of the fire; even Felix had fallen silent.
The effort of crossing the room to the telephone was almost too much for Tilda. Her legs shook, and she leaned against the bar as she took the receiver.
‘Harold? Harold, it’s Tilda – Tilda Franklin.’
Harold Sykes’s voice boomed at the other end of the line. ‘Tilda! Lottie told me you’d stayed behind in Holland.’
‘I’m in England now, Harold.’ The line was bad, and she had to shout. ‘I’m in a pub in Aldeburgh. On the Suffolk coast. Max is still in Europe and I’ve no English money, and I didn’t like to disturb Lottie so late, and I thought perhaps you …’ Her voice wobbled; she was horribly near to tears. She felt none of the delight she had anticipated on reaching England, only an almost unbearable desire to be in her own bed, in her own house, with her family around her.
‘Suffolk?’ Harold seized on the salient point. ‘How on earth did you get to Suffolk, Tilda?’
‘By boat,’ she said. ‘Emily’s brother-in-law – you remember Emily, don’t you, Harold – has a boat.’
There was a pause. Tilda wondered if she had been cut off. But then Harold said, ‘Tell me the name of the pub, darling Tilda, and just wait there. I’ll drive up to fetch you.’
I took the overnight ferry back to Harwich. A wind had got up, and in the restaurant my plate slid drunkenly from one side of the table to the other. The restaurant was almost empty, the weather putting people off their food. In the bar, a woman sang and played keyboards. I listened to her for a while and then wandered up to the deck. Grey-faced passengers, like a Ford Madox Ford painting of emigrants, huddled on benches. I folded my arms on the barrier rail and looked out. The waves were iron-grey, crested with foam, the clouds that massed in the sky a similar shade. I imagined crossing this sea in a little Dutch fishing boat, as Tilda had done. The wooden hull lurching with every wave, spray crashing over the bows and soaking the deck. And it had been wartime: every dark shadow in the sky could have been an enemy plane; every distant vessel must have given Tilda and Felix reason to fear.
The newspaper articles about Tilda’s voyage had been written by Harold Sykes. Harold, that seasoned journalist, had given Tilda – against her will, I suspected – her first taste of fame. Her triumphant story (‘ANGEL OF AMSTERDAMS HEROIC VOYAGE’) would have been a useful antidote to the dark days after the fall of France. The rescue of the two refugee children from Holland had brought Tilda to public notice for the first time. From that small beginning her celebrity had grown. A practical woman, she had used her fame to further the causes dearest to her heart, to open doors hitherto closed to her, to help the unhappy children she loved.
But I thought that I understood now the cause of Tilda’s reticence. For her, the escape from Holland would always be tarnished by an incident that she had hidden. If what Leila Gilbert had told me was true, then there was an aspect of Tilda that she preferred to keep from the rest of the world. However justified the killing of the Nazi paratrooper had been, to have taken another human life must have haunted her. What bothered me – what hurt me, I suppose – was that she had not confided in me. I had thought I knew her well; now I began to wonder whether I knew her at all.
I left the deck, aware of an urgent need to be back in England. I needed to look again at Tilda’s story, to see it in a slightly different light. I wondered what Patrick was doing, where he was. I slept little that night. The ferry rose and plunged with the waves, and its engines, which sounded as though they were in the next door cabin, roared alarmingly. When we docked at Harwich the following morning, I was relieved to drive out of the ship’s hold into the sheeny drizzle of an English June.
I spent the weekend with Patrick in his flat in Richmond, a tasteful little mews with ivy-leaved geraniums and an entryphone. Inside, the rooms had polished beech floors, cream-coloured blinds, and furniture that was matching, elegant and expensive. When I complimented him, he said, ‘Jen chose it,’ and silenced any further conversation by kissing me.
We did not leave the flat; we scarcely talked. The language of the body: skin against skin, the echo of another’s heartbeat behind layers of muscle and bone, and air expelled fast from the lungs. We parted on the Monday morning, Patrick for his chambers, me for my flat. I sang as I flung back curtains to let in the sunlight, and when I opened the windows even London air seemed sweet to breathe. I made myself coffee and idly leafed through yesterday’s Sunday papers as I drank it. Government scandals, Northern Ireland, the drought.
I could so easily have missed it, but I did not, it seemed to sear my eyes, that small, unimportant paragraph tucked in at the foot of a back page.
Human remains have been discovered in a Cambridgeshire dike. The grim discovery was made by workmen during routine repair work to the bank of a dike near the village of Southam. The waterway was rebuilt following the floods of 1947, and Cambridgeshire police, investigating, believe that the body may have been concealed at that time.
Daragh, I thought. I can’t explain why I was so certain. Daragh.