A Parachute in the Lime Tree (23 page)

Right from the start, Con behaved as though they already had an understanding. She didn’t realise then that war turns men soft in the head. They sat in the kitchen over a pot of tea, and he took her hand in both of his. He told her he recalled something she’d said about keeping to
terra firma
. He’d been afraid that was a bad omen when his battalion set off for Normandy on D-Day by glider but he’d got away with it all right. Afterwards, he was part of the final push through the Low Countries into Germany.

He came across such awful things in the last weeks of the war that he could never bear anything German afterwards. There was no talking to him. It was not something he was prepared to be rational about. His battalion was first into Bergen Belsen and, although he never spoke of it, she was sure that what he saw there remained always in the tiny fractures in his grey irises, in the thinness of his smile. Con was always searching for proof that innocence could be recaptured, dreams resealed. He couldn’t bear unpleasantness of any kind and, when the end came, Kitty was glad he had a nice clean death. He deserved that.

All through the pregnancy, she’d been raw with the thought that the baby she was carrying was not really hers. After all, the love that made it belonged to Elsa Frankel, not to her. So it was a wonderful gift Con gave her when he lifted Clara that day he came home from the war. ‘How’s my little angel?’ he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

It was as though Clara had been conceived at long distance, as far as Con was concerned. He never asked about the natural father at all. ‘It’s just one of the things that happens in a war,’ he said once, ‘and aren’t we the lucky ones.’

She didn’t look like Oskar but she wasn’t a Hennessy either. Clara had eyes like a cat and loose brown curls. Kitty used to
conjure up lost relatives for her from somewhere in the ruins of Berlin; people whose features she had borrowed while they did whatever they had done.

She had much to thank Effie for. Lately, there’d been a lot of hoo-ha about the Magdalene Laundries and how there were girls went into the homes to have their babies and ended up spending forty years scrubbing socks for their sins. Des made sure she was looked after on the medical side. Mother used to say he suffered for Kitty’s shame when he came home to Dunkerin to make his own practice, but Des never complained.

Marrying Con was easy. It didn’t seem wrong, even if it didn’t seem exactly right either. Each was the other’s protector. They bought a little house in a cul-de-sac in Stillorgan and Kitty counted herself lucky enough. Con worked in insurance and she had a job herself until she was able to give it up and concentrate on the amateur dramatics.

Even though she had no picture of him, no letter from him, no clear image of him in her head anymore, she sometimes thought of Oskar long after she’d got over the humiliation of landing up at the Curragh looking for a fellow who’d given her another name. Whoever he was, he wasn’t Oskar Müller. She sometimes wondered what the truth of it all was, whether there was really a girl or not, whether he was really a spy or not. Not that it mattered now, anyway.

Years later, a friend who’d once worked as a clerk in the Department of Justice told her that most of the men in the Curragh didn’t want to go back to Germany when the war ended. Some applied for residency, or whatever it was called, but the authorities wouldn’t let them stay. Once the news came out of the camps, no one wanted a German about the place. The only way they’d let one stay on was if he was marrying an Irish girl. Did it never cross his mind, she wondered, to come looking for her as he claimed to have done for Elsa Frankel? Even just to be allowed stay on?

She was over in Dunkerin the year before last, just before Con’s illness was diagnosed. It was strange to be back in the old house: one of those country house hotels now. She’d had afternoon tea there, in Mother’s drawing room. It was all painted white and smothered with brash canvases with great daubs of paint on them. They’d converted a couple of the outhouses to accommodation and at the time there were a couple of Germans and French staying there for the fishing. She didn’t mention that first German tourist but she thought of him all the same.

The bleakest day of her whole life was the day she went to the Curragh camp to find Oskar. She got the bus straight back to Dublin that same day, didn’t register a single thing about the journey. Just couldn’t wait to get away from the place. She’d had her answer from Oskar Müller or whoever he was. She remembered crying a lot. Aunt Effie had Ranjit up and down the stairs like a yo-yo with peppermint tea and nettle soup and God knows what. It didn’t help that she couldn’t keep anything down. Then one day she just decided to get on with it. She never tried to find him again.

Now that Con was gone, there was no need for secrets anymore. She felt fit as a fiddle. Still, there was no arguing with nature; the end would come sooner rather than later. In the year since Con’s death she’d been plagued with the thought that she should tell Clara the truth. Some Christmas in the unimaginable years ahead when she might be herself again. A few glasses of sherry and out it would come.

Clara had been an unadventurous child. She never asked questions. She did, by and large, what she was told and caused very little trouble for anyone. They’d never told her that she was anything other than Con’s daughter. Now and then, things cropped up that could have opened doubts in the mind of a different sort of child. The time Clara was mad keen on learning German and Kitty cried herself to sleep until she settled on Spanish instead. The time there was the school trip to
Berlin and Kitty refused point blank to let her go. Maybe Clara just didn’t want to know; maybe that’s why she’d never asked. Still, Kitty wondered whether it was right to let her grow old without knowing the truth. She had asked herself that many times and each time she had given up the deliberations for want of a satisfactory answer. Instinct told her it was safer to do nothing than to make the wrong decision.

Clara and the children arrive in the middle of a storm of driving rain: sheets of the stuff wash over the windscreen and the wipers are powerless to cope with it. At the airport, Kitty marvels at how nowadays, every time she visits it, they seem to have added another bit on or dug a great pit in the ground or enlarged a car park. Funny, she thinks, how it seems that for years and years everything just stays the same, and then suddenly you blink and it’s all changed entirely.

When Clara appears at the arrivals exit, she struggles to get through the crowds. There seem to be some footballers arriving in on the same flight because there’s a clatter of young fellows dressed in red and white calling for ‘Keano’. Clara looks very tired, she thinks. She’s beginning to seem her age now, after years and years of looking like a schoolgirl. The two boys trail along behind her, looking bored. One of them has an earring. Kitty is glad she hasn’t gone to too much trouble to find those old fishing rods; neither of them looks like the fishing type.

The boys slouch in the back seat. From the moment they arrive, she is uncomfortable with them and a bit self-conscious. In her fuss, she scrapes the door on one of the concrete pillars in the car park. She can hear one of the boys tut-tutting in the back. It makes her mad but she says nothing, and by the time they cross the East Link she has begun to relax.

‘So, what about you, Mummy?’ Clara asks. ‘What were you up to today?’

The only things that matter are deep inside her head. None of them fits the occasion, so she says something about going through the freezer. She even mentions the visit to Superquinn, even though it has always been her policy never to descend to discussing visits to the supermarket. She hears one of the boys move about in the back seat and whisper something to his brother.

They pass the National Museum. A great big tethered flag announces the exhibition: ‘Navigatio: Brendan and the Promised Land’. She opens her mouth to say something about Father and his model curragh, then remembers the boys whispering together and decides against it.

She gets home and makes the boys a supper of chicken nuggets and chips and heats up the casserole she prepared earlier for Clara and herself. The boys look sulkier than ever, until Clara explains, ‘It’s just, Mummy, they don’t really eat that kind of thing any more. They’ll just eat what we eat.’

Kitty feels for the second time that day that she’s failed to match up. She and Clara stay on in the kitchen after the boys have gone into the sitting room to watch television.

‘Did you think about joining something, Mummy? A charity maybe, something like that?’ Clara takes her hand and squeezes it. ‘You could go back to the Dramatic Society, help out behind the scenes. It must be so lonely for you now. I often think how lucky you and Daddy were to find one another, with a war between you. How lucky you were to find love at the end of the line.’

She’s right, of course. Clara has always been such a sensible child, with all the right instincts. Kitty looks at the face that comes from somewhere else and realises that it’s too late for German classes now. It’s much too late for new things. She will let it be.

At the airport in Frankfurt, Oskar slips away while Karl and Sophie argue over what kind of perfume to buy Ute, who doesn’t wear the stuff anyway. The electrical shop isn’t hard to find. Oskar has always liked gadgets; he likes them even better now they make them smaller, smoother, steelier.

He lets the Dictaphone sit snug in his palm and tries to remember the last time he used one. Not since retirement, probably. Greta? Gretl? Gisela? One of those nervy girls they employed to plough syntax into his wandering prose. The young fellow who sells him the machine is patronising, uninterested. Boredom is no excuse, and Oskar tells him so. Outside the shop, Oskar savours his acquisition. He discards the packaging, and turns the little steel machine over and back in the palm of his hand. Then he rejoins Sophie and Karl, who are waiting anxiously at the departure gate. Sophie is biting the corner of her lower lip just like her mother used to do. Karl is listening to his Tag Heuer, clapping it to his ear.

They give him the window seat. As he looks out over the cloud landscape, he thinks how some things never change. Even now he feels the catch of excitement at his throat. It was a grey day down there in Frankfurt but up here it’s radiant. Sophie and Karl are still talking about the presents they’ve bought Ute. Oskar knows Ute will thank them, then hide the items away or give them to friends. Ute: he’s looking forward to seeing her, spiky little thing. After a while, he’s surprised to feel his mood change; he is melancholy all of a sudden. Then he realises that they’ve commenced the descent. It always had
that effect on him, even back in the old days when he was cold and terrified, suspended there in the gondola. He always hated to leave the sky: things were always worse on land.

In the terminal, they stand looking blankly at the black flaps on the surface of the carousel. It starts then stops again. By the time the luggage chugs past them, Oskar is tired. He sits in the back of the rented car as they drive along winding roads flanked on either side by high hedgerows. Ute lives miles from the city, down among the ragged inlets that trail off the end of the map. When at last they arrive, he allows Sophie to help him out of the car. He declines the offer of coffee and lowers himself onto the narrow pine bed. He sleeps without dreams. In the morning, he wakes to wan light and birds. More birds than seem possible.

He gets out of bed and surveys the line of hedge on the other side of the window. There is no sound from Sophie and Karl so he does a little light unpacking. He too has bought Ute a present: a beautiful little clay pipe he bought in a Turkish shop near the station. No doubt she’ll have something to smoke in it. He lays out his things on the windowsill as though he is dressing it: a scarf for his throat, a small bottle of schnapps, and the journal. He wedges his clothes between his palms and drops them onto the floor of the wardrobe.

He has already decided to give Ute the journal of his time in Ireland. If not on this holiday, then he will leave it to her when the time comes. Just before this trip he reread it for the first time in decades. He reread it with a old man’s heart, knowing all the things he didn’t know at twenty-odd. He realised that what it needed was a dose of retrospective realism. He couldn’t change what he had written at twenty, nor would he want to, but he just had to point up the self-delusion in it, the folly.

He is past writing anything these days. It’s not that there’s any physical impediment; no arthritis in the hands, nothing like that. Somehow he just can’t make the time to form his
thoughts into sentences on a page. He can still talk, though, if it’s into a little machine.

At lunchtime, they visit the pub where Ute is working part-time behind the bar. The moment she sees them she makes straight for Oskar. That’s my girl, he thinks. When she speaks, he notices that her German is a little off-key. He wonders how soon that would have happened to him, had he stayed.

‘How are you, you old rascal?’ she says, punching him in the solar plexus.

‘Careful, Ute.’ Good old Sophie.

‘Oh, he’s solid steel,’ Ute says, punching him again, not so hard this time. Her hair is purple, her skinned tanned despite the climate. She is brown and purple, peat and heather, like her pots. He catches her hand and eases the loose package into it. She rips off the paper and waves the little meerschaum at her friend behind the bar. Then she takes Oskar’s face in her hands and kisses it. One. Two. Three. A man with a crumpled mouth looks up for a second, then returns to his pint.

‘So, Ute, what have you planned for me?’

‘I’m taking you for a walk this afternoon. I’ll call for you when I finish my shift, take you up on the cliff.’

‘That would be lovely,’ Sophie says.

‘Oh, I’m not taking you two. No offence, it’s just me and the old man.’