I Can't Begin to Tell You (20 page)

Had she failed in any way?

Was she missing anything?

It wasn’t to her credit, but Tanne took to watching her mother and found herself questioning why she kept her bedroom light on so late. Why did she insist on going for walks at dusk? Why was she growing so thin?

On one of the harshest of February days she bumped into Arne on the back stairs. He was carrying a paint pot and brushes. Tanne followed him up to the room which, years ago, had been occupied by the English nanny. Since then, too far from the main family area and difficult to heat, it had remained empty. Besides, it was considered that the steps leading up to it from the garden posed a security risk. Its one advantage was its magnificent view of the lake.

‘
Herregud!
’ she exclaimed, then repeated herself in English: ‘Good heavens.’

The room was freshly painted. Its woodwork gleamed, chintz curtains were at the windows and a larger curtain had been hung by the door that opened on to the garden steps.

This door had been propped open and the unforgiving cold chased the smell of the paint out into the frozen landscape.

‘Arne … what’s going on?’

Arne kept his back to her. ‘Ask your mother.’

The refusal to meet her eye was indicative. She knew Arne and evasiveness was not in his nature. Arne, therefore, had been drawn into a conspiracy – or an understanding – which had something to do with her mother’s uncharacteristic behaviour.

Hovering in the bright, cold room, she felt impatient, bewildered and more than a little lost.

Returning to her room, she threw clothes into her case ready
for a trip to København and the ballet. Suitcase in hand, she emerged, only to overhear her parents engaged in heated argument in the hall.

‘How could you, Kay?’ said her father.

A mutual bitterness and distrust rose like smoky breath … Tanne had never heard or witnessed the like before.

Turning away, she took herself down the back staircase. Elation and high spirits were things which now belonged to the past. The war was exposing weaknesses, drawing lines, pushing people into different camps.

As usual, she was welcomed in København by Grete and the others. But it didn’t take five minutes for Tanne to see that the group was subdued and anxious, especially Hannah, who looked frighteningly gaunt and jumpy. Many of them had taken to smoking furiously, and drinking whatever they could lay their hands on.

They told her the latest news. The Hotel d’Angleterre had been requisitioned by the German military and the German flag hung over it. The previous October, the King had fallen from his horse and no longer rode out daily from the palace through the city. Instead, Grete told Tanne, there was a song now doing the rounds: ‘
Der rider en Konge
’. ‘If you hear it …’ She tapped her nose. ‘It means you don’t agree with putting up with the Germans.’

Worse, far worse, Hannah’s brother had been arrested and she was in a bad way about it. ‘You should have told me,’ Tanne said. ‘What was he doing?’

Hannah gestured with both hands. ‘Can’t say. Not safe.’

The lack of confidence stung. ‘Hannah, are there things going on I don’t know about? Please tell me.’

‘Well,’ said Hannah – and the implication was that Tanne’s ignorance was shameful. ‘There are people who are working for Denmark’s freedom.’

‘Who are they? What don’t I know?’

Again the hand gesture.

Hannah
also reported that there was to be a new German unit, the Waffen SS Division Nordland, which was to be recruited from the Danish people. ‘They don’t like Jews,’ she whispered. Ministers were being sacked because their faces didn’t fit. Danish laws were being meddled with and Danish dairy products whisked out of the country.

Predictably, the ballet was
Sleeping Beauty
. To the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky’s ravishing legato strings and harp glissandos, and poised on a superbly arched pointe, Princess Aurora made her choice in the Rose Adagio by refusing to select any one suitor before pricking her finger and falling asleep.

How differently Tanne interpreted it this time. It was quite clear to her now that Princess Rose’s romantic confusion could be interpreted as resistance. Had Tchaikovsky understood this? Didn’t his music reverberate with sadness and longing for a better life?

Returning to Rosenlund in the early evening and finding no one around, she mounted the back stairs to the nanny’s old room to discover her mother on her hands and knees in front of a cupboard, stowing bandages and disinfectant in it. The curtains were drawn and the room had been made very attractive, with comfortable armchairs, a desk and a chair, a lamp, and a fire burning in the grate.

‘I thought I’d find you here,’ Tanne said from the doorway.

Her mother started.

‘I don’t often see you doing any housework,
Mor
.’

‘Don’t sound so suspicious, darling.’ Her mother sat back on her heels. ‘I’ve been meaning to organize myself an office for some time. I need somewhere to do my accounts.’ She smoothed down her skirt. ‘We talked about this before, but in future we’re going to have to do a lot more for ourselves. And I need a bit of peace. You know how your father fusses.’

‘Peace, yes. But bandages?’

‘There’s a war on, darling. You never know.’

Tanne
held out a hand to help her up. ‘You mustn’t lose any more weight,’ she remarked.

‘My appetite’s not so good these days.’ She gave one of her little smiles. ‘Perhaps I’m not so greedy?’

Tanne tried to analyse her mother’s expression. Intense? Alive? Perhaps ‘intense’ was inaccurate. Perhaps ‘excited’ was a better term. Whatever … Kay appeared to be lit up by an inner conviction.

Was she jealous of her mother? Tanne hoped not.

Later, when they were drinking tisane after dinner, her father said, ‘I wish we still had Lippiman’s gingerbread.’

He fixed a cold eye on her mother.

‘I do hope he’s safe,’ said her mother. ‘No more apricot pastries.’ There was a silence. ‘Someone must take over the bakery.’

‘No one made
brunkager
like Lippiman,’ said her father.

Her mother addressed her father directly. ‘Bror, I’m sorry about the gingerbread. I’ll ask Birgit to find it somewhere else.’

Her failure to call her father ‘darling’ was very apparent. Rosenlund was a house from which endearments had been banished.

‘You know the parents are sleeping apart and have been for a while?’ Tanne had informed Nils when she visited him one afternoon in his unkempt, cluttered set of rooms at the university.

‘Wouldn’t you? You get a better night’s sleep.’

‘They don’t talk to each other either.’

He wasn’t that interested. ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

That night, Tanne dreamed of her father eating the spicy, brittle gingerbread which he and she so favoured. Snap, it went.
Snap
. In her dream, she was trying to decide if she was becoming more like her mother, or not.

She woke hungry but not for food. Her body was crying out for something she could not name. Was it physical satisfaction? Emotional satisfaction? A sense of belonging? Overriding these confusing urges was the one which Tanne understood perfectly:
the need to go out to walk the land which one day she would inherit. After breakfast, she pulled on her leather boots with the thick-ridged soles and a padded jacket, and went in search of Sif and Thor. But they were already out with her father.

It was chilly heading for the lake and she pulled her hat down over her ears.

A faint spring sunshine was beginning to penetrate the perpetual grey. The thaw was making inroads into the lake ice, which cracked and hissed, shuffled and shifted. On the island, the place Sophia-Maria had favoured for her summer picnics, all the vegetation had been fossilized with frost but Tanne could just make out emergent patches of brown. Ice puddles on the path were growing liquid hems.

Tanne liked to think that she knew everything there was to know about the estate … where the first tiny yellow flowers of spring were to be found, or where the birds nested and the deer rutted, where the winter ice was likely to be at its most treacherous.

Rounding the western point of the lake, she turned to head back up to the house. The seldom-used path that led up to the outhouses was slippery, forcing her to concentrate on where she was going. When she next looked up, it was to see a man with a cap pulled down over his face letting himself into the pigeon loft.

Strangers were not unknown at Rosenlund, particularly these days. From time to time a tramp or someone out of work pitched up, spent a night in an outhouse and everyone turned a blind eye. She made a note to tell Arne.

It was then that she spotted her mother. She was also heading for the pigeon loft. Every so often she stopped and looked around. On reaching it, she ducked inside.

There were … there could be … several explanations as to what her mother was doing with a strange man, but only one made sense.

The teenage emotions which, years ago, Tanne had so often
battled to master now resurfaced. Rage, real rage, and disgust, and astonishment.

It was none of her business what her mother did.

Yes, it was.

Neglected for so long, the door to the pigeon loft was swollen and didn’t want to budge but she pushed hard and it yielded.

Her mother and the stranger were crouched over some sort of instrument. He had exchanged his cap for a pair of headphones.

The scene was disconcerting enough. More frightening was the pistol the man snatched up and pointed at her chest.

Her mother interposed herself between Tanne and the gun. ‘It’s all right, Felix.’

‘Who is she?’

To her astonishment, her mother, instead of revealing who Tanne was, said: ‘I can vouch for her. I know her.’

‘But who is she?’

This was ridiculous. Tanne said, ‘She’s my mother.’ Turning to her, she demanded: ‘What
are
you doing?’

‘What are
you
doing, Tanne?’

Her mother’s hostility shocked Tanne. ‘I saw this man, and then you.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought you must be meeting him.’

‘It could be put like that.’ Sounding more like her normal self, her mother prised the gun away from her companion. ‘You’re to get out of here.’ She snapped on the safety catch of the pistol, put it into her pocket and hustled Tanne over to the door. ‘
Go
.’ There was real fear and distress in her voice. ‘Go.’

A pigeon called from the cage. Tanne shook herself free and swung round. A bird, its bright eyes gleaming in the shadow behind the bars, looked back at her. ‘Whose is this?’

‘Quiet.’ The stranger held up a hand for silence and with the other adjusted a knob on the machine. A light glowed. He pulled the headphones over his ears and began writing on the paper in front of him.

A
curious noise sifted through the loft. High-pitched.

Her mother looked from him to Tanne and Tanne thought she saw tears in her eyes. ‘God forgive me, Tanne, you’ll have to stay here for the moment.’

Tanne watched as the man, rigid with concentration, took down groups of letters.

‘What –’ she began but her mother put her finger to her lips, crossed over to the door and peered out.

Was it five hours later, or only ten minutes, when the stranger tossed aside the headphones and stood up? Older than Tanne – she guessed – he was dressed in overalls, unshaven and obviously angry.

‘Who’s this?’ Tanne asked.

‘Felix,’ replied her mother, who seemed more composed.

She addressed him: ‘Is that your real name?’

‘The only one I answer to.’ He was concentrating on the piece of paper in his hand. ‘You’ll have to deal with her, Freya.’

Freya?

‘You must be quiet,’ ordered her mother.

Tanne asked herself if it was because an essential element of her brain had gone missing that she was failing to understand what was going on.

There was a whiff of ancient bird dung … there were tins of creosote and lime whitewash stacked under the bench, an abandoned rake …

Time shifted and she and Nils were back playing in the pigeon loft. Tanne pelting Nils from above with pebbles. Nils vowing instant death. The hay fight from which they had both ended up catching fleas.

Felix began to pack the equipment into the case.

‘Freya, get her out.’ He did not look at Tanne as he coiled a length of wire.

‘I have every right to be here.’ As soon as the words were uttered, Tanne regretted how childish she sounded.

He
gestured to the instrument that she had – finally – realized was some sort of wireless set. ‘Are you being deliberately stupid? You’re putting yourself in danger. Think of your mother, if not yourself.’

Her brain was moving slowly, ponderously. She was trying to make connections, and trying to make sense.

‘Are you sending messages?’

His eyes reflected irritation and impatience at her and her questions, but what did he expect?

‘Felix,’ her mother’s voice held a warning.

Felix shut the case and snapped down the locks.

Her mother was checking the door. ‘Someone’s coming.’

Without warning, Felix grabbed Tanne and covered her eyes and mouth with his hands. He was strong, very strong. ‘Not a word,’ he breathed in her ear.

His feet braced, he held Tanne hard against his chest in a grip impossible to escape. She was both hot and cold with outrage, with fear and … with a strange excitement.

Inside the pigeon loft, she could hear her mother moving around. Then footsteps could be heard padding along the tamped-down mud path outside and the pressure on her mouth increased. No one moved.

Eventually, Felix released her and gave her a little push. She blinked and found her balance. He went to the door and peered through a crack. A little out of breath, her mother leaned on the broom.

Tanne scrubbed at her mouth. ‘That was unnecessary.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ He did not bother to look round. ‘Don’t make the mistake of imagining anything is unnecessary if it keeps one safe.’

‘What have you done with the … whatever … that thing … the set?’

‘You don’t know,’ said Felix. ‘Understand?’ He turned his head. ‘Freya, will the coast be clear?’