Chapter 11 Kate 
ALNWICK, ENGLAND | NOVEMBER 2010
Kate sits back in her armchair, brow furrowed in sympathy. Since Ian left two hours ago, she’s been listening as Audrey relayed her experience of her time in Berlin before the war broke out. Her childhood, all the way up to the Night of Broken Glass in the fall of 1938, Ira Kaplan’s murder, Ruth and Ephraim’s abduction. Working for the Nazi officers when they confiscated the house. Her father’s sudden death.
Sue was right: box o’ secrets, indeed.
There’s a queue of questions in Kate’s mind, and she stares at the fire, wondering where to begin. She added a log a while ago; it’s low and glowing now.
“Did you know, after the fact, the extent of the pogrom during Kristallnacht?” she asks.
Audrey presses her wrinkled lips together. “Yes, we heard stories of that night. Hitler’s ultimate objectives became clear very quickly after that. I overheard more detail from Müller and Vogt than what was in the papers. And later, at work, I learned things.”
Kate waits for her to elaborate, but Audrey shakes her head.
“It doesn’t bear repeating, my dear. There are some things we can’t ever unsee. Unhear. Even if we want to. I won’t be the one to put those images in your head.”
“I understand.” Kate’s dad was Jewish. She’s well educated in the Holocaust. She can imagine what Audrey’s referring to. “How did you manage it?” she asks instead. “Living in the house with those monsters? Keeping Ilse hidden from them?”
“Immense caution. A great deal of sacrifice. And pure determination, I think. It was incredibly difficult.”
She’s already provided some glimmers of the answer, but Kate ponders how to frame her next inquiry. It wouldn’t be a loaded question for a woman of Kate’s generation, but Audrey’s time was very different.
“So…” she starts. “You said that you stepped out with Ian’s grandfather when you came back from the war.”
“In the fifties sometime, yes, for several years. We were very fond of each other; he was a good man. Soft and transparent and kind. Just like Ian. Refreshing, particularly for a man of his generation. But I broke his heart. It is one of my greatest regrets. And I assure you,” she says with a knowing look, “that is a competitive category. I thought I could stiff-upper-lip my way into a new life, you see. Everyone was carrying on, after the war. Trying to forget the impact the whole thing had on the world. On their friends, families. Everything they had lost and would never know or see again. The entire axis of the world shifted, but we were meant to just keep on because there was no other option. You’ve run up here for a new life, Kate, because your old one caved in beneath you like some great sinkhole. I came up here, met Martin, and ran headlong into a courtship that was doomed from the start because I was desperate for companionship and stability and a fix for all that had gone wrong. For requited love. But I failed. I failed in moving on, and I failed in loving Martin as he deserved to be loved because I hated myself,” she says. “And a person can’t love through a shield of self-loathing. It simply doesn’t work.”
They meet eyes, and there’s a vulnerability in Audrey’s that pushes Kate forward.
“You were in love with Ilse, weren’t you?”
“Oh, yes, very much so,” Audrey replies, her eyes bright. “It was the most consuming love I’ve ever experienced. I don’t know whether you’ve known that kind of love, Kate, but my God. It changes you on a cellular level.”
Audrey’s frankness surprises Kate: the guilelessness with which she speaks about her feelings for Ilse brings a lump to her throat. She picks at the cuticle on her thumb, uncomfortably aware that she doesn’t, in fact, know the kind of love Audrey is talking about.
“What happened to her? To Ilse?”
Audrey drops her gaze, taps the edge of her mug. “I don’t believe I’m ready to talk about that yet, dear. In fact, I think that’s all I can manage for now.”
They sit in silence together for a few minutes as Kate’s mind fills up with more questions. Audrey seems to see them floating to the surface before Kate has even opened her mouth.
“That’s enough for today.”
Kate nods, trying to figure out how to move on from such a weighty conversation. “What would you like for dinner?” she asks finally. “I’ll go—”
“Don’t worry about it, dear.”
“But I could just knock up something simple. Beans and toast?”
“For yourself, if you like. But I must confess this exchange has rather sapped my appetite. I’m tired.” She pushes herself out of the chair with a grunt and stumbles a little, shifts her weight from one foot to the other, working out the stiffness.
“If you’re sure,” Kate says, watching her with concern. Though she isn’t very hungry herself either.
“I am. I’m going up. Good night.”
As she passes by, Audrey squeezes Kate’s shoulder in an affectionate sort of way—hesitant, but tender—and it catches Kate off guard. She rests her hand on top of Audrey’s papery skin just as the older woman is pulling away.
As Audrey disappears up the stairs, Sophie trotting along in her wake, Kate’s mind turns to her own family. When she was seventeen, not long before her maternal grandmother passed, her dad had taken a photo of her hand on top of her mother’s and grandmother’s, three layers of generations together, the skin progressively thinner, more mottled. Kate had always liked the photo, but wasn’t old enough to fully appreciate that her time with her grandmother—and her parents—was limited. That the opportunities to ask about their lives, hear their wisdom, were withering by the day. There’s a lot she wished she had asked that was now unknowable.
Her parents’ hands never even got a chance to grow old.
Later that night, Kate takes a long, hot bath, still ruminating over the conversation with Audrey. She pulls on flannel pyjamas and makes herself comfortable on the bed with Ozzie. She picks up the novel she’s been chipping away at over the past couple of weeks, a contemporary anti-rom-com about single life that she’d hoped would raise her spirits. Her eyes slide over two pages until she realizes she isn’t taking in a word of it. She keeps thinking about what happened to Ilse. Unable to stand it much longer, she tosses the book aside, seizes her laptop, and opens a fresh search tab.
She’s about to google “Ilse Kaplan” when a prick of guilt pokes at her. Audrey is sharing her story for the first time ever. She’s put an enormous amount of trust in Kate, and it would be disingenuous to listen to her experiences whilst secretly knowing the details. Besides, given the survival rates of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, she can pretty much assume what happened to Ilse, and Ruth and Ephraim too. It’s understandable that Audrey doesn’t want to talk about it. At least not yet. But Kate feels a need to know something. The name Ilse Kaplan wouldn’t necessarily retrieve anything concrete in a search… but the names of the Nazis might. She picks at a nail bed. Surely it wouldn’t be a breach of confidence for her to know who, exactly, the men were. Whether they ever received their comeuppance for their participation in the holocaust.
Kate adjusts her glasses. She can’t remember the surnames of a couple of the poker night men, but Friedrich Müller she knows. Audrey hadn’t mentioned Vogt’s first name. And there was a Ludwig. Ludwig Thurman.
She starts with Müller, and finds his name and Thurman’s on a list of men in the Nazi High Command who were tried at Nuremberg in 1948. As Ozzie snoozes beside her, she reads that Müller was sentenced to life imprisonment. There is no mention of his death on this page. Thurman got sixteen years. She can’t locate a Vogt that fits Audrey’s description in any kind of definitive way, and wonders what happened to him. Plenty of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, fleeing to Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. Maybe Vogt slipped out. He wasn’t as high-ranking as Müller, though. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Maybe he was tried in some lower court, or at a later date.
She stares a little longer at the web page, at the names of the men who systematically destroyed the lives of so many millions. Overwhelmed, she shuts her laptop, runs her fingers over the scratches on its once-pristine surface, lost in thought.
After she turns off the bedside lamp, she lies awake for a long while. At least Kate can grieve the loss of her family in safety and comfort. She closes her eyes and imagines Ilse up in that drafty attic, with its bare floors and spiderwebs and Ephraim’s toys and games. The remnants of his interrupted life. She can almost feel the chill of that old Berlin house, and pulls the duvet farther up her shoulder. It’s well after midnight before she drifts into a fitful sleep, her unsettling dreams painted red and black and haunted by the faces of the dead.
“Dark roast, ground. Two pounds.”
Kate repeats the order to herself as she drives into town to pick up coffee. Audrey likes a particular blend sold at Barter’s, the local bookshop café, and apparently no other brew will do. Kate doesn’t mind though. Other than a run through the woods around the inn a couple of days ago, she hasn’t left the Oakwood since she arrived and she could do with a reminder that other humans exist. The inn has a dreamlike quality to it, set on the edge of town with the crows and old creaking trees. Kate could spend a decade there, wandering the dark halls or lounging by the fire with Audrey as the snow piled up around the foggy windows, to find that only a few days had passed. Living at the inn was like falling into Narnia, or some sort of slipstream in time.
Head bowed against the misty autumn drizzle, Kate ducks into the shop and is greeted by several rows of fiction, the scent of coffee and dust, and a couple of patrons browsing the shelves. There’s a small brick fireplace to her left with several cushy red chairs clustered around the flickering flames. She wanders farther into the shop, which opens up into a larger, brighter space with even more shelves. At a ticking sound, she glances up; above her head is a children’s electric train, the tracks suspended from the ceiling, circling their way around the shelves beneath a peaked glass ceiling. Her jaw falls open a bit.
“It’s quite something, eh?”
Kate turns to find Ian, smiling politely a few feet away.
“Oh, hi,” Kate says. “How are you?”
He pushes his glasses up. “I’m well. How’s the roof doing in this rain?”
“It does seem to be holding. Thank you.”
He sidesteps to allow a pair of exuberantly chatty women to pass. “You just in to browse?”
“I was actually looking for the café. Audrey sent me here for beans. Some kind of magic beans, I take it.” She raises her eyebrows. “She lives on the stuff, eh?”
Ian laughs heartily. “I’ve wondered more than once whether coffee is the elixir of life. It would seem to be for Audrey, anyway.”
“How old is she?” Kate drops her voice conspiratorially, as though she’s uttered something indecent.
“In her nineties, for sure. At any rate, if you’re getting beans for Audrey, why don’t you get a cup now too? My shift just ended. I’ll join you.”
Kate hesitates for a moment. She did want to get out and about a bit today before tackling Audrey’s filing system in the front office this afternoon. It’s ancient and can certainly be digitized.
Ian’s smile is so genuine. She’s interested in finding out more about him—and Audrey. She can stay for a cup and still have time to get a bit of work done before supper.
“Yeah. That sounds great. Where is the café, anyway?” She glances around at the rows of books and bustling shoppers. The place is busy for a weekday. It must be a popular spot.
“Have you not been here yet?” Ian asks, a little incredulous.
“No.”
“It’s a bit of a tourist trap in the high season, like most of the town, with the castle and everything,” he explains. “But it’s good for business. And the café has the best chips around. Back here.”
He leads her farther inside. The store appears endless, and is already decorated for Christmas. Fairy lights drape over and between the towering rows of books. Large red armchairs call out to patrons to settle in for the afternoon, and Kate can’t tear her eyes away from the interior brick walls and the thousands of books in her view.
“It’s an old train station,” Ian says, slowing down to match Kate’s pace. “The trains stopped running here sometime in the sixties, but they didn’t tear it down. Later they renovated it into this.” They enter a small room off the main shop with several two-person tables. “This was the waiting room.”
“You’ve given this tour before, haven’t you?” she asks, smirking.
“Once or twice, yeah.” He winks, then approaches the counter. “What would you like?”
“No, no,” Kate says, a little flustered at the offer. It’ll feel too much like a date if he buys. “Thanks, but I’d really like to get these. I’ll order.”
Ian shrugs good-naturedly. “If you insist. Hey, Craig.” He nods at the barista. “Flat white, please. And a plate of chips.”
“Chips?” Kate queries. “With coffee?”
“Chips are an anytime food. Didn’t you know? I’ll go find a table.”
Kate gets a coffee for herself and when the order’s ready, she joins Ian at a table near the fireplace. She sets down the drinks and plate of greasy chips, slinging her jacket over the back of the chair.
“You don’t mind hanging about after your shift? Don’t you want to get home?”
“Nah,” Ian says. “I love it in here. And you can’t have a proper coffee shop without lines of spines. No point going anywhere else.”
Kate smiles. “I can appreciate that. What’s with the mugs?” She gestures to their white cups, which are emblazoned with the familiar KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON phrase printed in dark red.
“Ah, this?” Ian lifts his. “You know this was an old wartime morale poster, right?”
Kate nods.
“So funny enough, these are the best known, but they never actually got posted anywhere. Almost all the copies were destroyed after the war, but the owners of this shop found one in a box of books they bought at auction a decade ago.” He can’t talk without his hands. If you asked him to sit on them and tell a story, Kate’s sure his elbows would just start dancing instead. “We’ve got the original up behind the cash desk. You can see it on the way out. The shop’s famous for it.”
“Huh,” Kate says, inspecting the words on her own mug.
Ian reaches for a chip. “Help yourself.” But Kate shakes her head, clocking the calories. “So how’d you end up at the Oakwood, anyway?” he asks. “Audrey didn’t say.”
“That’s because she didn’t know I was coming,” Kate replies. She explains about the advert Sue posted, and her arrival.
Ian chuckles. “Audrey can be… brusque. But why the Oakwood?”
It’s a simple question, a polite inquiry, but the answer is so complicated. She sees all the factors and moments and bad fucking luck that got her to this point line up in her mind before the first domino begins the cascade, one falling into the next until Kate packed up her car and arrived at the inn.
“A new start, I guess,” she says, a grossly inadequate summary, but the closest thing she can say that sounds like a normal reason.
“Oh yeah?”
She meets his eyes but doesn’t say any more. Soft instrumental Christmas music floats around them like snow. Kate doesn’t spot any obvious speakers; it’s as though the music is issuing from the walls themselves, reminding her that the holidays will be everywhere soon, and she can’t dodge it, no matter how much she might want to this year.
Ian takes the hint and another chip. “You’re up from London, then? Your accent.”
“Yeah. Never been this far north before. It’s beautiful. Have you lived here your whole life?”
“Mhm. Everyone always wants to leave for the bigger cities, but I love it here. My dad died when I was a teenager, but my mum’s still here.”
Something familiar plucks at Kate’s insides. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. He had a degenerative disease called Huntington’s. Affects the brain. He didn’t last more than a couple of years after he was diagnosed.”
Kate’s brow knits. “That’s awful.”
Ian clears his throat. “Yeah, it was. Particularly hard on my mum. But we mustn’t let these sorts of things define us, right? I had fifteen years with my dad, and thirteen good ones. I’m grateful for the memories I do have.” He sits back a little. “Are your parents still in London, then?”
“No.” She’s hesitant to share, but Ian’s transparency has put her more at ease. “They’re dead,” she says, the words gritty on her tongue.
“God, sorry,” Ian says. “What happened?”
Kate looks down at her coffee, swallows her fear.
What happened, Kate?
“There was an accident,” she says. “Last winter.”
Ian looks pained, but she doesn’t take it as the same brand of pity she received from well-meaning friends who couldn’t relate. Ian’s been in these particular trenches. He knows that you never quite get the mud out from beneath your fingernails when you’re trying to climb back up to the surface.
Her stomach jolts, but she tells him. “A car crash. They died. I didn’t.”
He doesn’t press for details, though his eyes scan the scar on her cheek.
Kate blusters on. “And I guess… well… I picked the Oakwood because they stayed here on their honeymoon. I just kind of wanted to see it.”
“I get that. So is this your first Christmas since they’ve been gone?” he asks gently.
“Yeah. Hanukkah too. It’s going to be hard. And—”
Her mind wanders to Adam, wonders for a moment whether this holiday would have been any easier if they were still together. But she knows the answer to that.
“It’s shit, honestly,” Ian says.
Kate lets out a weak laugh. “Got any advice for me?”
Ian heaves a breath. “You can’t expect it to feel normal, but you also don’t have to enjoy it. Not for a while, at least. Took me a few years.”
Kate feels certain it will, at least, be marginally easier to manage the holidays if she spends them in an unfamiliar place. No heirloom tree decorations, no missed rituals. No tripping hazards.
“But,” Ian continues, “in the end, the only way out is through. Though I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.”
They’re both quiet. Even though they’re just getting to know one another, it’s a comfortable silence; their loss has forged a quick bridge. This is what happens when people share parts of themselves, Kate thinks. Maybe that’s why Audrey connected with Ian. He’s an open book that welcomes you to sit down and read.
Kate attempts to lighten the conversation. “Do you have any siblings?” She immediately regrets the question, fights a cringe. It feels like first-date banter.
“Yeah, a brother. Doug. Bit older than me.”
“Does he still live here too?”
“Nah. Manchester. We don’t really get on.” He doesn’t elaborate and Kate senses something silent pass by. “How about you? Any brothers or sisters?”
“No. Just me.”
She takes a big sip of her drink, scrambling for another question to ask. Her eyes flick over the slogan on her mug. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. A bit of a condescending mantra for anxious introverts and the trauma-plagued. But it reminds her of the war.
“I’ve been talking with Audrey about her time in Germany,” she says.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Well, so far it’s the time before the war, but she was in Berlin.” Kate stops, unsure she should be divulging this to Ian, who, however fond Audrey may be of him, clearly hasn’t heard it from her. “I’m hoping to hear more.”
Ian’s eyebrows pop up, impressed. “How’d you get her to talk?”
She thinks about the water ring and her immediate suspicion that Ian had been the culprit. “We sort of stumbled onto it.”
He’s expectant, but Kate sips her coffee. Her cup is nearly empty, but she finds herself debating on a refill. It’s rather cozy here in the café.
“I’ve been thinking more and more that she should write it all down,” she says. “Her story.”
“She doesn’t want to?”
“I get the sense she just wants to talk about it.”
Ian pushes up his glasses again, runs his thumb over the handle of his own mug. His brow knits below his sweep of fringe.
“Well… what if you wrote it down for her?”
The next day, Kate is cleaning the kitchen after supper whilst Audrey finishes some business paperwork in the office. She’s been private about the financials, and Kate wonders how she’s going to successfully take on her new role as the administrator when her employer appears hell-bent on refusing to relinquish any modicum of control. Perhaps this job will turn out to be a failed experiment, but at least she’ll have gotten to spend some time here, tracing her parents’ footsteps and getting to know Audrey, who mentioned during supper that she wanted to have another of their “chats” tonight, a euphemism for opening up again about her story.
Kate sets the final dish on the rack beside the sink, puts the coffee on, and heads to the sitting room. Audrey is already settled into her usual chair, Sophie on her lap.
“Coffee’ll be ready soon,” Kate says.
She gives Ozzie a thorough belly rub over on the dog bed before taking the seat across from Audrey. The curtains have been drawn since dusk—four o’clock this far north, at this time of year—against the snow that began late this morning. A fire crackles on the hearth.
“Did you enjoy your trip to Barter’s yesterday?” Audrey asks her, stroking a deliciously relaxed Sophie, who closes her eyes against her mistress’s hand. If she were a cat, she’d be purring.
“Yeah, it’s a great place. Ian showed me around.”
“You ran into Ian?”
“Yeah. We had a drink when I got your beans.”
“How is he doing? I haven’t talked to him since he was last here,” Audrey says.
Kate doesn’t feel qualified to answer, really. “He seemed fine. Good. We had a chat.”
“Oh yes? What did you talk about?”
Kate’s getting used to Audrey’s directness, though sometimes she feels a little like she’s being interrogated. “This and that. He told me a bit about his family. His dad. Sad story there.”
Audrey nods slowly. “It was a dreadful thing, that. Tore the family apart.”
Her words chafe at Kate like rough wool. “He said it was particularly hard on his mum.”
“Oh, God, yes. I don’t think Janet’s moved past it, all these years later. And for what the whole Huntington’s business did to the boys…”
“What do you mean?” Kate asks.
Audrey shoots her a sidelong look. “How much did he tell you?”
“Er, well, I don’t know. He said his dad died of a brain disease when he was fifteen. And that he and his brother don’t get on, but his mum is still here in Alnwick.”
Audrey shifts in her seat. “Huntington’s is hereditary. Ian’s father didn’t know he had it until after they’d had the boys. There’s a blood test to determine it. I don’t think Janet wanted them to take it, but both boys did, several years ago. Doug has the gene. Ian doesn’t. And it ripped them apart.”
Kate gapes in dismay.
Audrey sighs. “Doug hasn’t spoken to Ian in years. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why poor Janet was against the testing. Perhaps she foresaw the impact on the family, of knowing another of them was doomed to the same terrible fate. Or perhaps she didn’t want to know herself.”
Kate considers it for a moment. “I can understand wanting to know, though. I think I’d want to know, if it were me.”
Audrey watches her. “Why’s that?”
“I like knowing what to expect,” Kate says, swallowing hard. “I’d want to… I don’t know. I’d want to be able to plan. Decide what I’m doing with the time I have.”
“Isn’t that what we all do, every day?”
“Yeah, but you know what I mean. It’s different.”
“Mm. I’m not so sure,” Audrey says. “I wouldn’t be too hasty for knowledge you can’t unlearn. Particularly with something so profoundly impactful. Too much information can paralyze a person.”
Kate feels a twinge of judgment. It’s different for someone like Audrey, who has lived for so many years. Maybe it seems more comfortable at her stage of life to not know when the curtain call will be.
“I couldn’t have managed half the things I did in my life if I’d known what was coming,” Audrey says. Her face is grave, but a spectre of something else shadows her features. Amusement? Satisfaction? “In Germany there were plenty of times I thought I was about to die at any moment. Had I known I was going to make it out alive, I wouldn’t have had the sense of imperativeness that I did. There’s a lot to be said for the power of raw nerve, of adrenaline, in pushing a person to the verge of her ability.”
“Like when?”
Audrey doesn’t answer.
“Audrey,” Kate says, meeting the old woman’s eyes squarely, “I know you’ve wanted to keep these conversations casual. But from what you’ve already told me, your story is important. I think it warrants a record of some kind, beyond my own recollections of our chats.” She hesitates a beat, thinking of her parents, of the unknown stories and secrets that must have died with them. “How would you feel about me writing your story down?”
Audrey is quiet for several long moments as Kate waits. She takes a shaky breath. “Yes,” she says finally. “Given what’s to come… I think perhaps you should.”