A Parachute in the Lime Tree (20 page)

‘Mick Rosney’s not bad looking at all,’ said Rita, ‘and sure looks aren’t everything.’ The Dalkey girls were nodding away like those little toy dogs with the wobbly heads. Rita looked sorry for her, and that was the giddy limit; that Rita Connolly should feel sorry for Kitty Hennessy, the spit of Hedy Lamarr.

When Kitty got up out of bed to go to the WC, she heard Effie padding around on the landing below. Effie was becoming ever more nocturnal. She spent the days dozing on her chaise in the Receiving Room and at night she sat up, watchful as a mouser. Kitty decided she might as well boil up some milk for them both, and see if that did the trick. When she went down to the kitchen, she found Aunt Effie already down there, a stole wrapped tightly around her thin shoulders. She had no make-up on, for once, and her eyes were small as currants. She looked so old, all of a sudden, so thin, that Kitty got a fright. She offered to make her something to eat, not expecting her to say yes. Effie never ate. To her surprise, Effie reeled out a string of instructions involving onions and cabbage and some left-over spuds. As she began chopping and dicing, Kitty wondered if Effie made a habit of visiting the kitchen at night. Maybe Ranjit cooked for her. She realised, then, that she’d no
idea where Ranjit ate or slept, or even what he sounded like. It was as though he had no existence beyond Aunt Effie.

‘He has the face of an angel, but his soul is all long division.’ Effie had a habit of saying things out of the blue but it was hard to be quick on the uptake in the middle of the night. Kitty turned from the stove, where she was trying to keep the onion from burning on the bottom of the pan. ‘Who has?’

‘For the love of Isis, child, your Mr Germany. Oh, he may have fallen out of the sky, all right. But he’s no dandelion clock. He’s got his heart set on something and he’ll not be blown off course.’

‘What makes you say that?’ she asked, as if Aunt Effie had ever felt the need for reasons.

‘Sure it’s plain as porridge,’ she said. ‘That boy has thrown himself out of an aeroplane. He’s turned his back on the place he was born, betrayed his family and his friends. He’s shut the door on everything he’s ever known, and in the middle of a war, too. He’s said goodbye, forever maybe, to the street where he lived. Now why did he do that?’

Kitty shrugged, not wishing to continue the conversation.

‘I’ll tell you why. He’s on a quest, your Mr Germany. This Elsa Frankel he’s looking for. She’s the only one can give him what he’s looking for. That’s my reading of it. Whether it’s love, I doubt. Forgiveness maybe. That might be more like it.’ She picked a crumb from the tablecloth and brought it to the edge of the table where she flicked it onto the floor. ‘He’s back, by the way. Ranjit let him in this evening. Said he looked shocking, like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. He went straight up the stairs and not a peep out of him.’

Kitty felt her heart open out like a flower. Making Aunt Effie’s supper no longer seemed a chore at all. They sat and ate together, even though by that time it was very late.

The first sounds were like the trundling of a heavy motor truck somewhere off in the distance. It was only afterwards
that Kitty realised that must have been the start of it. Next, she heard Oskar’s boots thunder down the flights of stairs overhead: clapping on oilcloth, muffled by carpet then scraping over the limestone flags outside the kitchen. She half raised herself from her chair, unable to contain her excitement, but when he burst in the door it was obvious that something was terribly wrong.

‘Get down!’ he yelled. ‘Under the table, now!’

Effie raised her hands to her face, her fingers spread out around it like the petals of a daisy, but she didn’t move. Oskar took her arm and guided her down off the chair. ‘Come on, Miss Effie. There is no time. You must move quickly.’

Effie’s knees cracked as she tipped off the edge of her chair and under the table. She was like an obedient child, still clutching her stole. Kitty was wide awake now but Effie looked like she’d gone into a trance. Her eyes were shut, her knuckles white, her red lips moving silently. Oskar’s eyes were closed too but she could tell he was listening hard. Right away she realised that he was listening for planes. She gripped his arm tighter than she meant to. She started to say her prayers in her head but she didn’t shut her eyes.

Dear God, don’t let us be buried under here for the rats to get us. Don’t let us die roaring or leave us in bits. If we have to go, make it fast, please, God. But let me see Dunkerin again, and Mother, and Con Redmond
. Con Redmond? She’d no idea what made her think of him, except that he was in the war and so, now, was she. She thought of the woman in Belfast who’d just stepped into her bath when the bombs got her.

The motor truck noise grew louder and louder. She felt Oskar slide his arm around her shoulders and draw her towards him. She tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let her go. As the noise reached a peak, she let her cheek fall against his shoulder, and finally she closed her eyes and clenched her fists so that her fingernails bit into the palms of her hands. She crouched there close to him as his friends prepared to do their worst.

When the explosions came, Effie let out a great wail. Her head was thrown back and she was howling away like a banshee. Suddenly, she remembered Oskar. She sat up straight and pointed a long red fingernail at him. ‘They’ll roast you, Mr Germany, and rightly so. Dolmens, my backside.’ Then, a look of horror spread across her face. ‘Ranjit!’ She sucked in, hard and sharp. ‘He’ll be a sitting duck in the white.’

Kitty felt Oskar let go of her shoulders. He propped her up against one of the sturdy table legs, then slid out. She heard his boots retreating down the corridor and up the stairs to the front hallway. The heavy front door slammed shut.

Within minutes of the planes’ retreat, the streets were full of people. Charlie decided that if he was ever to be any use as a doctor, this was the time to find out. The closer he got to the fires, the more hysterical the crowd. The LSF and the ARP had already put a cordon around the area, but Charlie managed to make his way through a side street that brought him out in front of a burning terrace where a huddle of people stared helplessly into the fire. The end house had gone, and all that remained of it was a ragged section of staircase, still precariously suspended, somehow or other, above the flames. It teetered there, before collapsing in front of him in a shower of sparks. The fire seemed too fierce and horrifying a thing to belong in the same night as the Shabbat dinner. And then a woman screamed and made it real. He was suddenly aware that people lived in these houses. The thought of that made him snap out of himelf. Someone beside him pointed to a small shape standing at a window of the house next to where the flames were raging. It was hard to see what it was: a dressing table mirror, perhaps, something hanging at the window? More debris tumbled into the blaze that raged where the end house had been, and then he saw that it was a girl, a child really. She started to climb out onto the windowsill, before thinking
better of it. People around him yelled at the fire, screamed for a fireman. They shouted at the girl not to panic, roaring their heads off at her, but nobody actually did anything. When Charlie declared himself a doctor, it was like a magic charm. The screaming tailed off and the onlookers stood back. It was only as someone hurried him through to the front that he realised that he was expected to be the hero.

When he got to the front wall of the building, he was not sure at first how to tackle it. From where Charlie stood, the girl looked like a small doll up there at the window, her face streaked in and out of shadow by the light of the flames. Someone gave him a leg up and he was able to hoist himself up to the first floor. He managed to inch his way along the ledge towards the tattered end wall of the house. Once he was up there, he felt like an imposter in a circus act, the top-billed high-wire act who was afraid of heights. He tried to block out the sound of the onlookers. He breathed deeply to steady himself but the dense smoke sent him spluttering as the wind changed and it billowed out in front of him. He could hardly see the girl anymore, but when he reached the window he felt her grab on to his arm. He was desperate not to lose the contact. Even if he failed at everything else – medicine, love, whatever – surely he could manage this. Slowly, slowly, he drew the girl out onto the windowsill. He looked down. Some superhuman effort had got him up here but now he felt sapped. As the direction of the smoke shifted again he could see the upturned faces of people in the crowd, like pebbles on a beach. Suddenly, he felt exhausted. Down below, some of the men had got their hands on a pinkish blanket and were shouting up at the girl to jump. She was cowering in towards the building and Charlie was on the point of trying to persuade her to go, in two minds as to whether they wouldn’t be better hanging on for the fire brigade when, suddenly, she dropped off the ledge and onto the out-stretched blanket. The
men clustered around her, then one of them gathered her up and carried her off through the crowd.

Meanwhile, the men with the blanket were re-forming below Charlie. He hesitated a moment, shook his head a little, moved in against the wall. Just as the fire tender finally appeared on the scene and just as Charlie had overcome his fear of making his jump, something happened that must have distracted the men. Perhaps they moved to the side to allow the tender to pass through the cordon. Maybe they were startled by the scatter of rubble from the burning house. Whatever the reason, when Charlie leapt from the building, he landed on top of the crumpled pink blanket they had discarded on the ground in front of them.

‘For the love of God,’ he heard as he was falling, ‘yiz all forgot about the doctor fella.’

It felt like they’d been under the kitchen table for half the night. Eventually, Kitty crept out. Aunt Effie’s leg had gone to sleep and Kitty had to drag her out by the arms. She was limp as a rag doll and seemed to weigh next to nothing. She didn’t say anything; just sat there where Kitty had left her. They were only out a few minutes when they heard the key in the door upstairs. Kitty had felt quite calm up until then. Suddenly, with the turn of the key in the lock, the realisation hit her that this was all part of real life. She began to shake, from fear, dread, excitement. Above all, she felt ashamed. She could hear her Mother’s voice in her head. ‘You see, Kitty was always herself. There was no talking to her. Mind you, even I’d have thought she’d have more sense than to harbour a German. A German, imagine, in the middle of wartime. We’re not that neutral, after all.’

Ranjit rushed over to Effie. He lifted her hand and dabbed it around his cheeks and forehead as though it had powers of anointment, and then he kissed it. Kitty turned away, embarrassed, as Effie rested her head in the crook of his arm.

Where had the parachutes landed, if there were parachutes at all? In the dead tree? Along by the canal? And were there more bombs to come? She went up to the Receiving Room and sat in the window seat and looked out into the night. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The moon hung unchanged over the houses opposite, a great big bladder of a thing. It was hard to believe that anything had happened at all. Well, he’d be gone for good now, she thought, now that he’d done his dirty work. She felt exhausted by everything that had happened; frustrated at her inability to work out how she felt about anything. It wasn’t long after that she saw him coming through the twisted gateway. He was walking backwards, turning around, looking at the sky. Always looking at the bloody sky.

She realised then that he wasn’t making for the house at all. He was walking in the direction of the Austin, still lodged in amongst the lower branches of the dead tree. She pulled up the sash and yelled out at him.

‘Oskar!’

His palms were on the back of his head, his elbows joined in a point over his forehead, like he was hiding from something.

‘Oskar!’

Without acknowledging her, he changed direction towards the house. She ran down the stairs to meet him. I am not dead, her head murmured: no other thought. I am not dead and neither is Oskar and one day it will all be over for both of us. He was kissing her and she was kissing him back and this was what filled the hallway.

‘I am not part of the war,’ he said suddenly, drawing back from her, gently pulling away a strand of hair that had become trapped in the corner of her mouth. ‘Kitty, you know I am not part of the war.’

It was like if he said it often enough he could make it true. He looked like he believed it, wished it maybe. But it didn’t seem to matter now, anyway. All that mattered was that he’d
come back. They were both alive, whatever might happen to them in the future. When she touched him, he gave a little cry that was so tender it almost frightened her. He asked her if she had ever made love to anyone before and she felt like asking him who the hell she might have done that with in Dunkerin. He just smiled and took her in his arms and carried her up the stairs, like she was someone so precious her feet shouldn’t even be let touch the floor. Each flight they climbed, the surer she was that she wanted him to be the first, and when they got to the top, to his room and the little narrow bed under the skylight, it seemed the most urgent thing she’d ever done, to make love with Oskar under the sky he’d come out of.

When she opened her eyes, she couldn’t believe she was back in Dublin, after all the places she’d travelled. Oskar was lying on his back, his eyes wide open, gazing at the skylight. When he saw her watching him, he just kissed her gently on the shoulder and when she closed her eyes again, she felt him wrap the sheet tight around her like a baby and hold her as the tears tumbled out of her. She didn’t know why she was crying because she’d never felt so happy and important and part of the big world that had nothing at all to do with Dunkerin. She closed her eyes and tried to separate moments from the whole so that she could keep them, boxed away like pearls.

She wasn’t quite sure what a French letter was. According to a girl that Rita knew, the man would get them across the border. She didn’t think Oskar had used one of them but she didn’t like to ask him, and anyway he had fallen asleep. Outside, she heard a siren and felt guilty to be happy on such a terrible night. She seemed to lie awake for hours, her mind racing through everything that had happened since the parachute fell, but she must have slept because she awoke to find light streaming through the skylight overhead. She edged her elbow across the narrow bed, and when she could feel no Oskar there, she blinked her eyes open. He was gone. Of course he was. The
disappointment was like a punch in the guts. It probably meant nothing at all to him. That Elsa Frankel, he’d probably done it with her dozens of times. She tucked her head into the crook of her arm. But then she heard his voice wishing her good morning. He walked across the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. She closed her eyes and breathed him in. He kissed her on the forehead, but from the look in his eyes she could tell they’d moved out of whatever world it was they’d been in last night and back into this one.