Chapter 40 Kate

ALNWICK, ENGLAND | DECEMBER 2010

Audrey, what do you mean?” Kate asks, touching the silver locket in the folds of her cowl neck.

“That is Ilse’s locket,” Audrey says. “My Ilse. How do you have it?”

Kate’s brow furrows. “My parents gave it to me on my twentieth birthday. It has my initial on it, see?”

Audrey’s eyes are wide. “I would know that locket anywhere. Let me see it.”

“What?”

“I need to see it,” she snaps.

“Okay, fine,” Kate mutters, unclasping the necklace and wondering what the hell is going on. She passes it to Audrey, who picks up her glasses from the table beside her chair, perches them on the end of her nose.

Kate watches her examine it, the small oval piece with a scrolled K on the front. “It was a gift,” she says again. “I haven’t worn it since the accident, and—”

“I need to open it,” Audrey says, cutting her off. “What’s inside?”

“Photos,” Kate says. “Of my grandparents.”

“My fingers can’t manage it. I need you to open it.”

“O—okay,” Kate says.

“Don’t give me that face. I’m not senile.”

“Okay,” she says again, and presses on the tiny clasp to expose the inside of the locket. “Look.”

Audrey lets out a deep breath and slouches back down a little in her chair, eyes still on the photos. She runs a hand over her forehead. “I’m sorry, Kate,” she says. “We’ve been digging up so much from the past, I think I’m seeing things that just aren’t there.”

Kate purses her lips, wondering if she should ring Ian. Something is clearly not right. “Should I call someone, Audrey?” she asks. “I think—”

“Wait. Have you ever—” Audrey’s voice cracks, and she sits up a bit straighter in her chair again. “Have you ever taken those photos out? Did you put them inside?”

“No. They were in there when my parents gave it to me.”

Audrey frowns, eyes on the locket, and then she pins them on Kate. “What is—was—your father’s name, Kate?”

“Joseph Barber.”

Audrey stares at her, disbelief and fear and a dozen other emotions flickering across her face, one after the other.

“Audrey, what is going on?” Kate demands. “Tell me! I’m worried about you.”

Audrey holds up a hand, the misshapen fingers trembling. “Are you lying to me, Kate? You said you had stopped lying.”

“What do you mean, lying?”

“Have you been lying all along? You didn’t just stumble across that job advert, did you? You knew what this place was.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kate says, palms out in frustration. “I told you, my parents—”

“Came here for their honeymoon, you said?”

“Yes!” Kate is scrambling to catch up. “They met you then. I have a photo. I was retracing their steps, like I told you, and—”

“Bring me the photo,” Audrey says shakily. “Now.”

Kate backs away, exasperated, and leaves the room, heading upstairs, still utterly perplexed. She seizes the photo from her dresser, then thunders back down to the sitting room.

“Here,” she says, striding toward Audrey with the picture held aloft. “Look.”

Audrey brings one hand to her cheek, staring at the photo. Her eyes are wet.

“Audrey, for the love of God, tell me what’s going on,” Kate pleads. “What does this locket you say is Ilse’s have to do with my dad?”

Audrey exhales fully, and a tear slides down her wrinkled cheek. “Kate, your father was Ilse’s son. Your father was Daniel Abrams.”

Kate freezes. How can that be? Then an eerie sense of understanding trickles down from the crown of her head as she considers what she knows about her dad. He was adopted, but he’d never spoken about where he came from. Not even the one time Kate had asked, when she was ten years old and doing a family tree project at school. Her mother had told her he didn’t know anything about his heritage other than that he was Jewish.

“How can this be true?” she asks, her ears ringing.

Audrey pinches her eyes shut as though she can’t bear to witness the conversation anymore.

“Audrey?” Kate presses.

“Because it is true,” she says, looking at Kate. “That photo wasn’t taken during your parents’ honeymoon. It was taken when your father came to meet me after tracking me down. I took it.”

“But the photos…” Kate trails off, then remembers: the photos from this trip were stuffed between the pages of the honeymoon album. Kate had made an assumption, but they weren’t from the same trip. Her eyes start to prick as the bizarre acceptance sets in. “But you said you were going to bring Daniel to Alnwick. Wasn’t that your plan?”

“Christ.” Audrey shifts in her seat with Sophie firmly entrenched in the valley of her lap. “I did. I brought him here after Berlin. I tried to make a go of it. I really did.” Her eyes are shining. “For Ilse’s sake, because I said I would.”

“Well, what happened?”

Audrey looks to the ceiling as though appealing for help from above. “Sit down, Kate,” she says. “Please.”

Kate obliges, eyes locked on Audrey as her mind trips over itself in an effort to piece this all together.

Audrey takes a long drink of water, sets it back down with a tap on the wooden coaster. “When we left Berlin, we came straight to London so that I could manage my father’s estate. Get everything sorted, sell the Kensington house, et cetera. It had all just been sitting there on ice since his death in ’38. I visited the solicitor in Lombard Street, but he’d been killed during the invasion of Sicily, so I dealt instead with his father. He was one of the most hollowed-out men I’ve ever encountered, just shattered by the loss of his only son. In any event,” Audrey continues in a hard tone, “there was no home to sell. The house on Argyll Road had been destroyed during the Blitz.”

Kate gasped.

“I went to see it with Daniel. Ours and the one to the north of it had been hit. Fortunately, ours had been empty.” She takes a deep breath. “But my father’s neighbours, the Andersons, were home. Both were killed, but their twin boys had already been evacuated to the country. Lucky devils or poor little bastards, I’ve never decided.” She shakes her head.

“So,” Kate ventures, “if you had gone home when your father wanted you to…”

“There’s a good chance I would have been killed in the Blitz, yes. I can’t ever know, but risking my life to stay in Berlin might have actually saved it.” Her lips twist into a wretched grimace. “We stayed in a hotel whilst I sorted out my father’s estate, then Daniel and I left London for the Oakwood. My aunt Minna was a help, and I did my best, but Daniel wasn’t adjusting well. He was heartbroken at the loss of his mother, as was I. I descended into a deep depression that I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of. All I could think about was the dead. Ilse, Wen, the other women who died on that minefield. The children we killed whilst trying to save the lives of countless others. Claus, the Kaplans, Daniel’s family. All the boys who wouldn’t be coming home to their mothers, the unnamed dead who hadn’t even yet been tallied. And my mother, who died trying to give me a life that made no sense to me now. Somehow I was the only one left standing.”

She strokes Sophie and steadies her breathing.

“I felt rather useless to Daniel then. He was a seven-year-old boy, active and inquisitive. And here we were, out in the middle of nowhere, really.” She gestures at the window and the frozen, sweeping property beyond.

Kate imagines her father at seven years old, kicking a ball around the grounds of the Oakwood. How could he have kept all this from her?

“He couldn’t make friends, and I don’t know if there were any Jewish children round here back then. None that I knew of, anyway. And that was a big part of it.”

“A big part of what?” Kate sniffs.

“I couldn’t raise him in his own faith, and I had none of my own left to pass on to him. I didn’t want to be a mother, and to be honest with you…” Her voice is thick with emotion. “After all he had been through, I thought he deserved more than a reluctant mother.” Audrey meets Kate’s eyes, whose tears mirror her own. “Promises are difficult to keep. Even for well-meaning people. But the way I see it, well… the promise I made to Ilse was that I would take care of him. And in the end, finding him a home with his own people, where he could live a good life with parents who wanted and loved him, felt like the best thing I could do to care for him. To honour her, and what she would have wanted for him, had she lived.”

The question forms in Kate’s mind, but Audrey beats her to it. “I tried to find some Abrams or Kaplan relatives in England, or even on the continent. But everything was such a disaster in the aftermath of the war and the genocide. I doubt there would have even been relatives to find, but the search was practically impossible. Europe was a shambles, still piecing itself back into something vaguely resembling its former self. So I took him to a Jewish orphanage in London. Most of the children who came over on the kindertransports in the thirties were now orphaned. There were plenty of them in need of homes. He was placed with your grandparents, the Barbers. And that’s, well…”

A long silence follows. Kate glances at the black voice recorder on the table between them. It’s still running, recording the threads of Audrey’s history that have just intertwined with hers.

Kate doesn’t know where to begin. She’s grappling with the sense of understanding this brings about her dad’s addiction. He was a high-functioning alcoholic, and she always knew he was trying to drown something. But it was too far below the surface for her to see what it was.

“So, that’s why my dad came here,” she says. “He was looking for you.”

Audrey nods. “Yes. He tracked me down through the adoption agency records in London, around the time he was, what, twenty-eight? I’d left my information there, with this address, when I dropped him off. I still had Friedrich’s trust fund to bequeath him, and I reckoned he would have questions. One day. And of course, he did.”

“Did you tell him everything you told me?”

“Most of it. He remembered me, remembered this place. And Ilse, and Friedrich. He asked me why I didn’t keep him, but I think—I hope—in the end, he understood. He had a lovely childhood, he said. Loving parents.”

“He did,” Kate whispers. “My Bubbe and Zayde. They were older. He was their only child, and they doted on him.” She smiles sadly. “And me.”

“But I think…” Audrey shakes her head. “He had so many upheavals, so young. And his memories of Ilse were complicated.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, the earliest memories he had were of her, but also of Friedrich, a man who left the house every day in a Nazi uniform. A man whom he called Papa, who played with him, hugged him, just as a father would. I explained it all. Who Friedrich was, who Ilse was. What we had all tried to do, and how we failed. Friedrich’s double life, and mine. Ilse’s, too, in a sense. And I gave him Ruth’s necklace, as Ilse had asked me to. But to tell the truth, I’ve never been convinced he believed me. Not entirely.”

Kate nods. He would have assumed Ilse and Friedrich were Nazis. She can only imagine what those memories of Friedrich must have done to her dad once he learned of the Holocaust more broadly.

“I hoped the photos in Ilse’s necklace would help, over time,” Audrey says. “I would be surprised if he ever spoke of that bit to anyone. Possibly not even your mother. And the Barbers only ever told him that he was adopted from Berlin at the end of the war, when he had no family left.”

“Did they know more than that?” Kate asks.

Something akin to shame colours Audrey’s face. “They only knew what I had told the orphanage in London. For obvious reasons, I kept it simple.” She takes a deep breath. “He did ask for the address of the Abramses, said he needed to go learn more. I never forgot that house. I saw it in my dreams, for God’s sake. I assumed they had all died, but he said he needed to know for certain. Though I’m not sure he was ready for what he found.”

A chill runs down Kate’s spine. This is her family history. “What did he find?”

Audrey hesitates. “The Abramses were all murdered at Mauthausen. He wrote to me, just once, to tell me what he had learned. It was mostly… informative in tone.” She sighs. “I think his feelings about me were very complicated. I don’t know how much closure I was ever able to bring, or whether it would have been better for him if he’d never sought me out. It is so difficult to know what knowledge will do to us. I think a part of him wished I hadn’t found him in the house that day.”

Kate’s nose begins to swell, and she rolls her shoulders inward against the pain in her chest. She fingers the necklace in her hands and starts to sob. The Abramses, and the Kaplans, too, in a way—these were her ancestors. And if not for Audrey, Kate wouldn’t be alive at all.

Her father was a sole survivor, as she is now. A twisted connection she now shares with him, a paradox that folds in on itself. But she’ll never be able to tell him that she understands him now, finally. Never have a chance to ask him how to live with it. Her stomach feels as though it’s rotting. It was horrendous enough to be responsible for her parents’ deaths, but now, knowing that her dad had escaped such odds, that he was lucky to have even made it to childhood to begin with, just makes it all feel that much more senseless. But all she can do now is honour her family. See it all as a gift, like Ian does.

Just live.

“Why did he never tell me any of this?”

“Oh, Kate,” Audrey says. “Come here.”

Kate kneels at Audrey’s chair as the old woman’s arms enclose her. Sophie licks her arm, and Ozzie scoots closer too. They all hold one another for a long time. The animals stare up at their mistresses with wide eyes, knowing something has happened but unsure of what it means. Kate isn’t entirely sure what it means yet either. But a dam of some sort has broken, she knows that much.

When she pulls away, she snatches a tissue from the coffee table and notices the lamplight reflecting off the glossy tan surface of the baby grand piano. “Why did you bring the piano back?” she asks. “Isn’t it just a constant reminder of all the loss? Of Ilse, and the Kaplans? Your gift?”

“Yes,” Audrey says. “That’s why I wanted it. And why I never had the water ring removed. Forgive me for asking, but if you could erase those scars, would you?”

Kate pauses. There was a time, months ago, when she would have said yes unequivocally. But she knows better now. The scars and the memories they hold are a part of her. Even if she’d tried, they wouldn’t ever actually be erased. She would still see them beneath the surface. She’s about to respond when a thought occurs to her. “Did my dad play your piano when he was here? He was a player. Not professionally or anything, but he was good. I think… I think it was therapy for him, in a way. He’d play a lot more when his depression was winning.”

Audrey smiles sadly. “Yes, he did. I even showed him ‘Ilse’s Theme,’ taught him how to play it. Again. He…” Her voice cracks. “He remembered it from when she was dying.”

A realization hits Kate with a hard jolt to the chest. “Does Ian know it?”

Audrey nods. “The composition is in the piano bench. I wrote it out and asked him to learn it so I could hear it again, somewhere other than my own dusty mind.”

“He played it the first day I met him, when you were at the doctor. There was something about it, like I knew it…” A warmth spreads in Kate’s chest, despite the heartache the day has brought.

“Well,” Audrey says quietly. “I’m glad your father played it. It helps keep Ilse’s memory alive.”

“Could I…” Kate hesitates. “Would it be okay if I had a look at the letter my dad sent?”

“I’ll swap you. Your dad’s letter for a few minutes with that necklace.”

Kate helps her up from her chair.

“Just give me a moment,” Audrey says.

Kate sits back in her chair again and watches the gold and orange flames dance and crackle in the fireplace. Somehow everything has changed, and all too late for her to do much about it besides mourn. It’s an odd conflict when happiness and sadness coexist in your heart. It’s tight yet expansive, warm but painful.

“Took me a minute,” Audrey says, returning from the office. “Here.”

Kate takes the letter, a leap in her chest, and passes the locket back to Audrey. The two women sit in silence, examining their shared treasures as though they were indeed rare gems. Reading through her dad’s letter, fresh tears drip down Kate’s face. It’s strange, she thinks, when we reach adulthood and realize that our parents are just flawed humans like we are; when the veneer wears away, and we find a person who’s just doing the best they can with what they have to work with, the trauma they’re lugging with them each day.

She glances over at Audrey, who looks up from the locket with glassy eyes. “What is it?” Kate asks, then sees that Audrey has removed the tiny photos of Kate’s grandparents. “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Look,” Audrey says, handing her the necklace.

There are two portraits inside, sepia-toned and aged, and Kate’s breath catches.

“That’s her, then. Ilse.”

“And her brother Ephraim.”

Kate takes in the dark-haired young woman with large eyes, arched brows, and a small mouth beneath a straight nose and high cheekbones. She’s friendly looking, despite the neutral expression she’s adopted for the photo. She looks pretty much how Kate had pictured her, but it’s striking and emotional to finally see the face of the woman who captured Audrey’s heart, altering the course of her life, and who nursed Kate’s father back to life and loved him as though he were her own.

“These were in my necklace the whole time,” she whispers. Her father’s family secret had lain against her own skin for years, and she hadn’t any idea.

“Just behind your own photos.”

“How did you know to look?”

Audrey gives a little shrug. “I wondered what else your father would have done with them.”

“Do you think he ever planned to tell me?”

“We can’t know, of course,” Audrey says. “Although he did give you the necklace without removing them first. He must have known you’d discover them at some point. Maybe on some level he wanted you to.”

“It seems strange to cover these up again with my own photos. Do you want them? Do you have another photo of Ilse?”

“No,” Audrey says. “But I think it’s lovely, actually. You’ll keep your own family close for your sake, and you’ll keep Ilse close for your dad’s.”

“And yours,” Kate says, a tear slipping into her lap.

“Thank you, dear. That means a great deal to me.”

Kate can feel her exhaustion finally taking over.

“Where are they buried?” Audrey asks. “Your parents?”

“In London. The Liberal Jewish Cemetery. It’s interfaith, so he and my mum could be buried together. Why?”

Audrey sits up. “I think I would like to go visit his grave.”

Kate looks down at her lap. “I haven’t been since the funeral.”

“Then I think we should go. Together. I want to visit my father’s grave too. To say goodbye before I say hello again.”

“Where is he?”

“Brompton Cemetery, in Chelsea. Not too far from yours.”

Kate fingers the locket, avoiding Audrey’s gaze. “I’m just not sure I’m ready to go back again.”

“I think you need to go back whether you’re ready or not,” Audrey says. “In my experience, a person will never do anything if they always wait until they’re ready. We have to make ourselves uncomfortable, Kate, in order to move. Otherwise we get stuck, stagnating, until we lose the ability to move anywhere at all.”

“I know,” Kate says, tapping the tip of her finger at a spot on her glass. She keeps her eyes downcast. “But I’m afraid.”

“I know, dear,” Audrey says gently. “We all are.”