A Parachute in the Lime Tree (21 page)

‘They will put me in the camp,’ he said, ‘or whatever they do with German airmen.’

‘Well, they haven’t picked you up yet. And it’s not like you’ve exactly kept a low profile.’

‘Everything has changed now.’

She gathered the covers up around her collarbone and tried to think of something positive to say. But then she pictured Bobby Coyle and she knew he was right. ‘You’ll need to keep your head down for a while. No gallivanting off around town and talking to people in parks. Maybe it’ll blow over, if no one’s been hurt. The last time they dropped bombs, over at Donore Avenue, nobody got hurt then.’

The bombers were German. Four bombs had fallen, and over on the North Strand the devastation was terrible. There were reports of piles of dead people and others with horrible injuries. Kitty’s heart sank. Later that morning, Effie summoned everyone to the Receiving Room. She was lying on her chaise, draped in a jumble of shawls and stoles and wearing a long white dress. Ranjit was sitting beside her and Kitty realised it was the first time she’d ever seen him sit down. No one spoke at first but it was clear that Oskar was the one who was expected to say something. ‘I could wish that these things didn’t happen, but they will happen anyway.’ The words were not what was needed, and they hung there uselessly in the semi-dark.

‘You need to get off the fence, Mr Germany. Before they blow that up too. You can’t run away, you see. There’s nowhere left to go.’ Effie’s voice softened a little, ‘Have you found what you’re looking for? Have you found this girl that has you tied in knots?’

He looked down at his boots and Kitty wanted to shake him. Surely he didn’t need to worry about this Elsa Frankel one now. Didn’t he have her? Wasn’t that enough for him?

‘Did you think they’d stop dropping bombs if you weren’t there, Mr Germany? And as for the girl, what good did you think it would do her, you jumping out of a plane and haring across Ireland after her? Sure if she’s here, she’s saved already, and no thanks to you. All you’ve saved, Mr Germany, is your own skin.’

Oskar turned and began to walk towards the door but Effie hadn’t finished yet. ‘No doubt you’ll last out this war, Mr
Germany. But who knows how you’ll see it all later, when all you’ll need to know is that you did the right thing.’

Kitty followed him out to the hallway but he was already putting on his coat: Desmond’s coat. ‘You need your head examined. The place’ll be crawling.’ She turned away from him angrily. ‘Why do you have to go off again?’

When he walked out the door, he was wearing the yellow scarf. When she saw that on him, she knew he wouldn’t be coming back.

Next day, mid-morning, Bobby Coyle came to the door. He was in uniform and he looked tired, older. She realised then he’d probably been called up to work round the clock on account of the bombs.

‘I came to see how you were faring.’

‘We’re faring fine.’

‘I wonder is this the start of things?’

‘Isn’t it the end of things, Bobby? Isn’t that what it is, the end of the play acting?’

‘The Guards arrested a German off Dawson Street. The blighter was wandering around like he wanted to be caught. He’d a scarf as yellow as a dandelion on him. God only knows what the fellow thought he was doing. He had some half-baked story about not being part of the war. That’s what the sergeant said, anyway. Just like we’re not part of the war either, I suppose.’ Bobby had a funny look on his face. Almost sheepish, he looked.

Kitty didn’t even try to hide her feelings. ‘Where did they take him?’

‘Oh, it’ll be the Curragh, more than likely. Athlone, maybe, if it comes to it and he’s a spy.’

‘Will they hurt him?’

‘They roughed him up a bit, but Kitty there’s good people suffered terrible things from those bombs. And us neutral; what do they think they’re doing, dropping their bombs on us?’

Bobby made his way down the steps, then stopped a moment to look at her over his shoulder. ‘I suppose we’ll leave the Zoo Dance then?’

When Elsa was a child, Papa had given her a picture book of dinosaurs. The one that captured her imagination was the pterodactyl. Even then, she used to consider how she might hide from it, deep in the undergrowth of some prehistoric jungle. Although it was immensely powerful – fed on the blood of its victims – it seemed almost too heavy for the air to bear it up. She imagined a time when it would fall to earth, defeated by its own inexorable growth.

Some tried to say the bombing wasn’t the Germans at all; just the English trying to make it look like it was the Germans so that Ireland would join the war. Elsa dreaded the thought of that, because she clung onto the hope that Ireland might still receive refugees from Amsterdam, even now. Deep down, everyone knew it had been the Germans but no one knew why, and that was the most terrifying part of it. Elsa felt the fragility of her refuge. Then guilt that she had a refuge at all when Mama and Papa did not. Then fear for what else might come.

Before the bombing, she’d seen Charlie almost every day. Not once since. It was Bethel who said the hard thing to her, when she sat at the window at teatime and looked out to see if Charlie was on his way. ‘Perhaps, Elsa, he just decided to stick to his own. You know, sometimes that’s the best for everyone.’

She shut herself in Hilde’s parlour and played all the Nocturnes – Chopin and Field – until she no longer knew whether she was playing them for Oskar or Charlie or just for their own sake. She tried to work out what reason there could be for Charlie’s absence, then she realised she’d no idea how to contact him. She knew none of his friends; didn’t even know his address. That’s when it struck her that she hardly knew him at all. She was sure that something had happened
between them at the Shabbat dinner, and that he cared enough to want to make her happy, but perhaps she was mistaken. Then again, perhaps he felt something that he just wasn’t ready to feel. Maybe he’d frightened himself into stepping back from her for a while. Perhaps he realised she would be harder work than some girl from home. Yes, she thought, maybe Bethel was right. Maybe, like Oskar, he found in the end that he wanted to stick to his own.

Another week, and a man she didn’t recognise came to the door. He was small, shabby-looking, and his glasses were bottle thick. He asked for Bethel first, then Hilde, but everyone else was out. ‘Well, Missy,’ he said, ‘I suppose you must be Elsa Frankel.’

She said she was but when she saw the nod of his head, the small victory in him, she wished she hadn’t. He said he was from the Castle, that he was some kind of government employee come to serve a notice.

‘There’s a letter here for Mr and Mrs Abrahamson,’ he said. ‘Pass it on now, Missy.’

That night, the Professor came back. Over the years, he’d become no more than a childhood bogeyman, a shadow glimpsed at the end of a very long corridor. Now he had returned, with his gaping mouth and his slurred eyes and the Party pin in his lapel. He was wearing the official’s bottle-thick glasses and slavering like a dog on heat. Oskar was in the same dream, standing at the gate between their gardens. He didn’t speak, seemed barely to notice her. He was holding something but she couldn’t see what it was. She smelt the bonfire in the Müllers’ garden, heard the clang as they hacked at her piano to add it to the flames. When she awoke, her pillow was wet. She thought of the photograph forgotten on the hall table, the lock of Oskar’s hair she’d thrown away. She wished she had Herr Goldmann’s spools, the ones she’d twirled and worried in her pockets until the threads became all tangled, orange, purple, pink. And then it dawned on her; Oskar had been holding the
painted-over icon, the thing that had absorbed all their hatred and kept the Frankels safe. Because she hadn’t got to the end of the dream, she’d never find out if he had retrieved it for her or whether he was about to add it to the fire.

The last time she’d written to Mama, just before Holland was overrun, she’d broken another spell. ‘How are you really, Mama?’ she’d asked. There were no more letters after that. What happened when all the magic charms had gone, when all the things that kept you safe were lost? What happened when pterodactyls could grow and grow and still stay aloft?

Charlie was used to hospitals but at first he couldn’t work out why he was the one in bed. The nurse looking after him said her name was O’Neill and that she was from Monaghan. He liked Nurse O’Neill. She was very sensible, with large pink hands. She sluiced and primped him for the doctors like she was preparing him for a dog show. In spite of all her attentions, Charlie was troubled, his memory incomplete. He could still see the man who had beckoned him to jump but he could not picture the child, and it worried him to not be able to put a face on her. He’d no idea how long he’d been in the hospital but his memory of things beyond the fire had only just started to return. At first, Elsa was like a vapour for him. Something, he knew, had made him happy once. The touch of his own skin one day made him sure it was a girl and, little by little, Elsa took shape in his mind. He remembered her hiding the fish that Hilde had served up for the Shabbat dinner under a layer of mashed potato, her thick dark hair dancing on her shoulders as she turned to look at him. When Nurse O’Neill brought him his morning porridge, he asked her if he’d had many visitors.

‘Droves,’ she said. ‘Now eat up.’

He tried again later, when she took him in a bite of lunch. She laid down the tray and stood back from the bed with her arms folded. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘spit it out. Did I remember?’

‘Who came?’

‘Well I wasn’t asking for their birth certificates.’ She cocked her head and sought inspiration from the long crack that ran down along the side of the wall. ‘Okey dokey. Here goes. Your sister’s been in here umpteen times. There was a rake of fellows from Surgeons. Another crowd who said they were from a musical society. There’ve been a couple of lads in sports jackets. I suppose there might have been a few girls in the musical crowd,’ she looked at him shrewdly, ‘but I couldn’t put a name on any of them.’

‘Was there a girl came on her own at all?’ He tried not to sound too pathetic.

‘No,’ she said, straightening her belt, preparing to get on. ‘Definitely not. I’d have noticed that.’ She was all efficiency again but then she stopped a moment. ‘Are you sure she even knows you’re in here?’

He’d just assumed that all the different parts of his life would magically connect without him. The thought that Elsa mightn’t have any idea what happened troubled him all night. His memory was returning in a haphazard, random fashion. By morning he had remembered Stamer Street.

It was the day for the consultant’s ward round. Mr Dowling seemed to take particular exception to Charlie, perhaps because he was a medical student who therefore shouldn’t also be a patient. For this reason, Charlie normally tried to keep a low profile. Now, though, he was desperate. He blurted out his question when Dowling stopped at the foot of his bed, his students trailing behind him like a streak of misery. ‘Have you any idea how much longer I have to stay here?’

Dowling took off his little gold spectacles. Charlie didn’t need to hear anymore. He was already an expert at reading consultant mannerisms.

‘Do I have any idea?’ He looked at Charlie with disdain, ‘I thought Dr Kenny already told you it would be another
week at least? Sister tells me that you have some medical training yourself?’

Charlie nodded.

‘Then you should know better than to shop around for an opinion that suits you.’

As the last of the students trailed out of the ward, Charlie realised that compared to them, he was a free man. At the end of the day, he could do what he pleased, and he’d no intention of staying here longer than he had to. He shuffled over to the side of the bed and began to lower himself off it, gripping onto the metal bedstead and bracing himself for pain. Once he realised that he was able to hobble painlessly away from the bed, he was mad at himself for not having left days ago. He concentrated all his energy into mastering that walk from bed to wall, and back again. By the time he’d managed three trips back and forward, he had already decided that he would make his way over to Stamer Street, even if it took him all day and all night. He scribbled a message for Nurse O’Neill across the top of his medical notes and that was that. Nobody stopped him, even though he spent half an hour or so trying to negotiate the back stairs. Once he was outside and no longer had a handrail for support, his progress was very slow. Although he’d managed to grab his overcoat, he’d not been able to change out of his pyjamas. He probably looked like an escaped lunatic but he stuck his thumb out anyway, on the slim chance that someone would offer him a lift. No luck. The few vehicles on the road were already stuffed to the gills. By the time he reached Stamer Street, he was exhausted and his leg had begun to throb.

Bethel’s face was solemn. Normally, he’d have thrown the door open right away but this time he only opened it a crack. Charlie tried to smile, though by now his leg was killing him. His ribs, too, had begun to hurt again, though he thought they’d healed. He held out his hand but Bethel didn’t take it.

‘Can I see her?’

‘She’s not here.’

‘Don’t shut the door on me, Bethel.’ Charlie tried to keep his voice level, ‘For God’s sake, say something. What’s happened to her?’ He noticed that Bethel was only now beginning to take in the leg, the pyjamas. He began to try to explain but Bethel turned away. ‘We’ve had a terrible time ourselves.’

‘Just let me see her, Bethel. Please.’

‘Some Jumped-up Johnny came calling on us last month. External Affairs, Justice: one or the other. Did I know it was a crime to harbour an illegal alien? Alien, if you don’t mind. Like she was something dropped out of outer space. Miss Frankel, he said, your lodger, she’s liable for deportation under section something or other. Deportation? I ask you, Byrne. Deportation to what?’

Charlie had begun to feel weak, and the pain in his ribs had sharpened. Bethel took his arm. ‘You look like death warmed up, Byrne. Let’s get you sitting down inside.’

They sat in the front parlour, as they’d done that first day. Charlie felt a little better now that he was in a place he’d been with Elsa, though his head refused to stop spinning.