Chapter 17 Kate

ALNWICK, ENGLAND | LATE NOVEMBER 2010

Kate can’t stop thinking about Audrey’s story as she scans old records in the Oakwood office. She’s spent most of this cold, snowy morning digitizing the inn’s files, finally getting somewhere with modernizing the administration after purchasing a brand-new scanner and shredder—neither of which Audrey had. She’s begrudgingly allowed some progress—albeit with ample doses of grunts and frowns—but she’s also seemed more preoccupied since she and Kate began their chats.

When Kate referred to her recorded experience as an interview last week, Audrey had scoffed. “Interviews are for employees and celebrities.” Kate had tried “memoir,” but Audrey flapped her hands and insisted on the term “chat,” clearly preferring to keep her recollections to Kate firmly—though ostensibly—casual.

As she scans then shreds the yellowed, typewritten invoices, working her way backward through the 1980s, ’70s, and now into the ’60s, Kate considers the monochromatic monotony of her previous work at the insurance company—the grey carpets, Lego block furniture, and inane corporate culture—things that feel laughably inconsequential in comparison to Audrey’s dive into the dark waters of the Third Reich. Kate’s gut would swirl over pissing off her bland, inept manager, and here Audrey was, spying on the German government with a false set of papers as she conspired about the downfall of the system.

Kate had been astounded at Audrey’s description of the Red Orchestra. “But why have I never heard of any of this?” she’d asked.

Audrey had shrugged, scratched her scalp. “I don’t write the history books, dear. And I’ve never met anyone who does. Have you? Makes you wonder where they get it all from.”

As Kate feeds the paper through the shredder—a task that’s immensely satisfying—she glances at the mess of pens, letters, and scrap paper across Audrey’s desk. She can’t quite believe how sloppy this office is. It’s evident that Sue never comes in here to clean. Either because it’s too untidy or because Audrey refuses, Kate isn’t quite sure, but she suspects the latter. Kate has always had a tidy and meticulous nature. A place for everything, and everything in its place, as her mum used to say. No anxious last-minute searching, no questions. Nothing missed or lost. It was one of the things that made her and Adam a good match at the time.

She pulls the manila folder for 1968 out of the old metal filing cabinet against the back wall, and her stomach lurches with excitement. The year of her parents’ honeymoon. Shoving some stationery detritus aside, she splays the file out and shuffles through, searching for the invoice from her parents’ stay. She’s sure it’s nothing special, not a handwritten note like her dad’s entry in the guest book, but it’s another piece of the picture, another thread of connection to the Oakwood, this place that’s starting to feel like home. She sifts through the file, but doesn’t see their names.

“Hm.”

Brow crinkled, Kate double-checks, but still, nothing. She pauses on the last invoice in the file, notices it’s been misfiled. This one is from January 1969. She sighs, unsurprised that Audrey’s record keeping hasn’t exactly been scrupulous. Maybe she’ll find her parents in the 1967 folder. Or maybe, she thinks with a prickle of irritation, she already shredded it with the 1969 batch. She hadn’t really paid attention to the details of the invoices, but she’s sure their names would have jumped out at her.

“Ah, here you are.” Audrey’s face appears in the doorway.

At the sight of the shredder, she gives an affected shudder, as though Kate were disposing of animal entrails and not decades-old paper. Kate only barely refrains from rolling her eyes.

“The toilet in the hall is on the blink. I rang Ian to come take a look at it,” Audrey says.

“What’s wrong with it? It was working fine earlier.”

Audrey pinches her lips the way she does when she doesn’t like a question. “No idea. That’s why Ian’s coming round.”

He arrives within an hour, brushes a dusting of snow off his wool coat, then hangs it in the hall closet. The battered toolbox in his hand is starkly at odds with his crisp khakis and tweed blazer. He moves about the Oakwood with a comfortable familiarity that somehow doesn’t overstep or presume.

He greets Kate with a genuine smile. “Nice to see you again so soon.” His glasses fog up a little in the warmth of the foyer.

“You, too,” Kate says. She realizes she means it, and it takes her a beat to recognize the feeling in her gut.

“So, it’s the toilet, this time, yeah?”

Kate clears her throat. “Yes.”

She follows him down the hall, then leans against the door frame and watches as he removes the tank’s lid and peers inside. His brow wrinkles in concentration for a minute or two.

“Hm. Interesting.”

Kate waits for the diagnosis. “What is?”

“It looks like the chain has just been pulled out. I have no idea how that would happen unless someone was mucking about with it. But you haven’t had any guests, have you?”

“No. Just us.”

“And you haven’t touched this?”

“I don’t make a habit of fiddling with toilet tanks, generally,” Kate says.

“Well, I can’t see how it happened. But at any rate, it needs a new chain. I can pop by with one later.”

As they return to the front hall, Audrey comes out of the office. She braces her weight with one hand on the wall, her stature stooping slightly.

“Ian!” she says, flashing him a tight smile, almost pained. “My dear boy, how are you?”

He sets the toolbox down and she pulls him into a hug, kisses his cheek as though she were indeed his own gran.

“Do you have a moment?” she asks him in an undertone.

He glances at Kate, then steps into the office. The door shuts with a soft thud and Kate moves into the sitting room, where Ozzie and Sophie are cuddled together.

Twenty minutes later, Audrey calls, “Lunch, Kate?”

Kate smiles. Anything Audrey asks her to do falls into that awkward ditch between a request and a direction.

“Ian is joining us,” Audrey says.

“Audrey,” Kate hears Ian protest, “I don’t—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, dear, you’re staying.”

In the dining room, Audrey appears as stoic as ever, but Ian looks distinctly rattled and his nose is pink. He remains quiet as they munch on a quick meal of tomato soup and cheese sandwiches, despite Kate’s attempts to catch his eye. She wonders what sort of exchange occurred to elicit this reaction from him. Audrey peppers Kate with suspicious questions about the new electronic filing system, then announces her need for a nap and heads upstairs, patting Ian’s arm on the way by. Sophie follows at her heels.

Ozzie looks rather lonesome and lost without his constant companion, and Ian is still acting odd.

“I thought I might take Oz out for a good walk around the grounds,” Kate says, taking their dishes over to the sink. “Want to join? Or are you heading out?”

Ian nods tightly. “Yeah, that’d be great actually. I need some air.”

Ozzie’s tail pounds against the hallway rug as they pull their coats on. Outside, the snow has stopped, leaving a thick dusting of fluffy white over the sweeping grounds. The smell of smoke from the chimney emits the scent of pine and nostalgia.

They forge a new path in the crisp surface of the snow. Some crows call out in the distance, protesting Ozzie’s presence as the three of them loop around the edge of the woods.

“So,” Ian says, stepping into conversation. “How are your talks going with Audrey?”

Kate turns her coat collar up against the cold. “It’s been good. I took your suggestion, and she agreed to tell me. I’m recording her so I can transcribe the whole thing later, and taking some notes too. We’ve developed a good rhythm.” She describes how they sit down after lunch or dinner nearly every day, how open Audrey’s been. “Every time she tells me she’s done for the day, I’m always left with more questions.”

Kate has done her best not to push, but there’s no denying that these talks have fundamentally shifted their relationship. The stories that fall from Audrey’s aging lips seem to linger in the air of the Oakwood from day to day, like the scent of strong spices wafting from a kitchen. Enticing, and certainly not unwelcome, but undeniably distracting for them both.

“She seemed a bit mysterious with you today, though,” Kate says. “Mind if I ask what that was about?”

Ian exhales, fogging the air. “She told me she’s been talking to you about Berlin, and the war. She didn’t say much about the details, though.”

Ozzie barks at a sparrow that’s landed on a nearby tree.

“Yeah, I sense a hesitation,” Kate says. “Like she’s scared to talk about it, but needs to.”

“We need to do the shit that scares us though,” Ian says. “Especially, well…” He shrugs. “I guess she won’t be around forever, right?”

Kate acknowledges the hard truth. “At least I feel like I’m really getting to know her now, and the people from her past too.” She thinks of Ilse, of the massive sacrifices and risks Audrey took to keep her safe. “She had a great love before she came back to England. Before your granddad.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And she was brave. My God, she was so brave.” Kate stuffs her cold hands deep into her coat pockets. “I’ll be honest, it’s made me consider the narrow parameters of my own life.”

“How so?”

“She was audacious, daring. Especially for her time. She defied so many conventions placed on women back then. And I’ve just…”

University. Unstimulating office jobs. Marriage. A plan for children that never materialized. Kate was never one for the spotlight—she hated it even at her own wedding—whilst Audrey leapt enthusiastically into the glare, ready to put on a show when duty called for it. Audrey led such a big life. When you live a small life, then lose some of the people at the centre of that limited circle, it has a way of isolating you in short order. Bigger lives with greater reach have more tethers binding them to the ground. If one of them gets cut, you don’t need to feel quite so vulnerable. There’s still plenty to hold on to. Kate lost so many people, so quickly. Her parents, her husband, her few friends and coworkers. Everyone disappeared, in some way, in the aftermath of the accident, consumed by the dark vacuum that follows tragedy. Her friends were good people who just didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to handle something so broken.

“Audrey’s remarkable, that’s all,” she says.

“She is,” Ian agrees, watching her.

Kate remembers his own losses, wonders if he’s ever felt this unnerving sort of weightlessness too. “She’s like family to you, eh?”

He nods.

“I’m sorry about your brother. The Huntington’s gene. Audrey told me.”

Ian stares down at the snow. “She’s a closed book with a big mouth, that one. Full of contradictions,” he adds. “Doug’s not sick yet. But he will be. It’s a time bomb. No one knows when it’ll hit. He decided he didn’t want to have kids. Didn’t want to risk passing on the disease. But his wife wanted children. She left him last year. He acts like he’s dead already, really. It’s like he’s just waiting for the beginning of the end.”

Kate feels a stab of guilt. She didn’t intend for them to veer into such dark topics, but Ian has proved he isn’t one for small talk.

“My mum didn’t want us taking the test, but we both felt we had to know,” he continues. “I just wish we’d both had the same result, regardless of what it was.”

“I’m so sorry, Ian. That must feel terrible.”

His Adam’s apple slides up and down as he swallows the pain. A strong wind blows from the north. The snow has started up again.

“It feels like…” He faces her. “Like I’ve cheated death somehow.” He gives an uncomfortable half chuckle. “Dodged some bullet that missed me by a hair, but hit my brother instead. Not many people can understand what I mean, but—”

“I can,” Kate says, shifting her cold feet.

“I know.”

Ozzie tugs on the leash and they resume their walk. They’re nearly at the front door of the inn now.

“How do you cope with the guilt?” Kate asks, watching Ian out of the corner of her eye.

He stands a little straighter. “I reckon it’s a bit different for me. I’ve had years more experience with it. But the way I see it, there’s just no point dwelling on it. There’s no trying to understand it. It isn’t my fault I didn’t get the gene. It isn’t your fault you survived the crash when your parents didn’t.”

She blinks back tears as they mount the stairs to the covered porch.

“Life deals out shit to some people and roses to others,” Ian says. “There’s no cheating it, no making sense of it. Maybe it’s easy for me to say, not being in my brother’s shoes, but I decided to live like the whole rest of my life was a gift. All of this,” he says, pulling his hands from his pockets and opening his arms wide, as though embracing everything around him, “is a bonus I could have easily been denied. So, I squeeze everything I can out of it. I try not to live with regrets. I try to just live.”

Ozzie tugs Kate toward the front door, eager to get inside.

“At any rate,” Ian says, clearing his throat, “I hope I haven’t scared you off.”

Kate shakes her head. “No. You haven’t. I don’t know anyone else who can relate. It’s been…” She tries to identify the feeling.

“Lonely?”

“Yes.”

Their eyes linger on one another, understanding passing between them.

“Well,” Ian says finally, “I told Audrey she doesn’t need to sabotage the house anymore to get me to come out here. I like spending time with her. And you,” he adds.

“What?” Kate asks.

“She ripped the chain off the toilet for an excuse to see me.” He rolls his eyes. “I told her she needn’t bother. I’ll come round more now.”

Her stomach flutters, and she recognizes why. It thrills and unnerves her. “Why’s that?”

“A couple of reasons,” he says. “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime, Kate?”

Her memory reaches deep into the past, recalling how she’d met Adam all those years ago. Her girlfriends from uni had dragged her out to celebrate a mutual friend’s engagement, and the guest of honour had chosen an overpriced basement cocktail bar in Soho with deafening house music and lighting dim enough to disguise the fact that both the establishment and its patrons were aging faster than they would care to admit.

Adam found her on the street outside the bar around midnight. He’d been eyeing her all night. He was a friend of a friend, one of those tertiary people in her circle whom she knew by name and face. They’d started walking, flirting as they enjoyed the evening breeze, and lost track of time. Adam ended up escorting her sixteen blocks across the West End to her flat’s door, inside, up the stairs, and into her bedroom. Things moved quickly after that. She’d said “I do” a couple of years later and figured she’d had her last first date, her last first kiss.

Best-laid plans and all that.

But this feels different. Ian is different. As he waits for her answer, she sees a vulnerability flicker in his eyes.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I would.”