The History Room (22 page)

‘We might have got around that, but I’d written some things for a student publication. All about artistic integrity and freedom. Foolish teenage pronouncements on the meaning of
freedom within a socialist system.’ He laughed drily. ‘The kind of thing our sixth-formers would write.’

‘So it seemed a good time to slip out of the country?’

He nodded. ‘Perhaps the Russians wouldn’t stay long. The West would roar and tell them they wouldn’t get away with it and they’d have to leave.’ He pushed his bowl
away, suddenly looking tired. ‘But it didn’t work like that. Nobody was going to risk war with the Soviet Union. Not with nuclear bombs on each side. Once I was across that border I
could probably never come home again.’

Home. He really did seem at home here, too. I was suddenly tired, for all the long and relaxing shower and the good meal in this womb-like cellar. Once again I sensed the presence of a family
history I’d prefer not to learn about. I was going to suggest leaving the rest of the story for another time, but something told me that it had to come out now.

‘What did you do when you reached Bavaria?’ It sounded such a long way away, but Germany was so near: only ten or fifteen miles away from this little hotel, if you were a bird who
could fly over forests and lakes.

Karel, 1968

It might have been only days since the guard had let him through the control post but his face already wore the mark of the refugee: hope mixed with doubt. He’d looked
away when he’d caught sight of himself in the mirror in the shower block this morning. It had taken him the three days to wake up to what had happened.

He’d written the letter in all the English he could muster, swapping his jumper for the help of a university professor who’d slipped over the border a few days after him. The
professor had learned his English before the war and admitted it was probably rusty. ‘I don’t know much of what the British call slang,’ he said. ‘But perhaps your friend in
England will think that a good thing.’

How do you write to someone you’ve never met? Karel ran through what he knew about John Andrews. His father had made this young British POW friend during the war when he’d been sent
as a slave labourer to work near a POW camp. John Andrews now taught at a school in Abingdon some sixty-odd miles west of London. Papa had spoken of this friend with real affection. ‘He is
the perfect English gentleman,’ Papa had said. John was still living in a village outside the town called Abingdon, because he’d written a postcard to Mama earlier in the summer,
telling her that she and Karel should visit him now that things were easier in Czechoslovakia.

He’d taken John’s address with him when he’d left home. Karel stuck the stamps onto the envelope and made sure that the sender’s address was clearly written so that John
could write back.

He knew it would be days, weeks even, before he heard anything.
If
he heard anything. He spent the rest of the afternoon walking slowly round the English Gardens, telling himself not to
hope too much. She wasn’t coming. She’d be here by now if she were. But even so, each time he saw a slender girl with auburn hair striding out through the falling leaves he held his
breath.

In the evening he returned to the temporary holding centre they’d set up for the Czechs in an old barracks and sat in the tent. There was nothing to distract him now. Every time a new
group arrived he scanned them intently. But not many were coming through the border any more. ‘You were just in time,’ a German official told him. ‘Were you looking for someone in
particular?’

‘No.’

The official blinked. Karel must have sounded over-vehement.

He scrutinized the clusters of people sitting around or standing and talking in low voices.
Sketch it,
something screamed inside him.
Sketch this tent and the people playing chess and
cards. Record the emotions on their faces.
But he didn’t want to reach for a pencil. He wondered if he’d ever want to draw or paint again.

Karel had taken to visiting the library and sitting with a
Times
and a dictionary, trying to force the synapses of his brain to accept the new language. He was going to learn to speak
this language so well people would be surprised to know he hadn’t spoken it from birth. He was going to stamp out everything linking him to the country he’d left.

At the refugee camp they interviewed him again and offered him the chance of staying in Munich permanently. He could study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Munich was a comfortable city and
not far from Bohemia. When things settled down perhaps he could even return home on visits. The woman with the horn-rimmed spectacles seemed to believe this was a possibility. But he waited for a
letter from Abingdon in England. A little bit of him still waited for Hana, too, but only because he couldn’t bear to tell himself to give up, let her go.

It grew chillier at nights and he wished he’d kept the jumper his mother had knitted for him. Each night he’d wrap himself up in his sleeping bag and drape his jacket over the top,
but still the cold seeped in. He was glad. Feeling cold distracted him. Fighting it meant there was no energy left for his regrets. Or his hopes.
Forget her.
One night, his cold fingers
twisted the buttons on his jacket. They were thick and padded, more so than he remembered. His mother had taken the jacket away on his last night.

‘Just want to press it,’ she’d said. He’d laughed at her fussiness. The buttons hadn’t been as chunky before that night. He’d never been able to do them up
since. He pulled at one of them. She’d sewn them on tightly. It took several minutes before he could pull it off. He detached the fabric from the base. Inside the layers nestled an old gold
coin with a middle-aged man’s head on it. An Austrian crown from 1915. He pulled off the next button and the next. Three pieces of gold. They’d probably belonged to her father, from the
period when their part of Czechoslovakia belonged to the Austrians. She must have hidden them all through the war and through the bad years when food was short. And she’d sent him off with
this last treasure so that he wouldn’t be penniless when he started his new life in the West.

Karel stared at the coins until his eyes ached.

A telegram came from England.
Dear boy, how soon can you come? Will wire you funds . . .

He showed the horn-rimmed lady the letter and she took it away with Karel’s identification papers for a few days to show to the British consulate. When she came back to see Karel she
passed him a brown envelope of papers: tickets, visa, cash for food for the journey.

‘I have these.’ He showed her the coins. ‘I was going to exchange them for sterling.’

‘Save your gold. Who knows when you might need it.’ She pushed the three coins back towards him. ‘You’ll find the English food unhealthy,’ she told him. ‘The
vegetables are overboiled. My advice is to think again, but if you really want to do this,
Viel Glück
, Karel.’ And the note in her voice as she said this made it clear she
believed he’d need luck to survive the kingdom of overcooked carrots.

But when the train reached Liverpool Street Station John Andrews was waiting for him. His thin face broke into a grin. ‘It had to be you.’ He patted Karel on the shoulder. Karel
already knew that the English were a reserved people. ‘Here.’ He handed him a folded raincoat. ‘It’s raining. I thought you might need this.’

Karel put it on over his jacket.

‘I imagine I probably ought to take you straight back home but I think we should make for the pub.’

John knew one round the corner from the station. When they were inside its warm and fuggy interior he set a pint of warm ale in front of Karel. ‘So you slipped out of Czechoslovakia
without any trouble?’

Karel made himself nod. The beer tasted different from what he’d drunk at home: heavy and oaky.

‘Good.’ He sipped his own drink. ‘I was sorry to hear about your father. He deserved more. But that’s all in the past. Question is, how we get your education back on
track. I think,’ John Andrews said, ‘we’ll work on your English first. Unless you still want to do the art?’

He made it sound like an interesting hobby.

‘No,’ Karel said. ‘That’s in the past.’ He said it with emphasis, just to be sure.

Meredith

A bell was chiming in my memory as he told me about his arrival in England. ‘John Andrews taught at Letchford later on, didn’t he?’ I remembered the tall,
lanky, elderly man with the sharp eyes.

Dad nodded. ‘He’d retired by then. He was sixty-eight, but his mind was that of a young man. His house had fallen into disrepair. He had to sell it because he couldn’t afford
to do the work. So there he was without a home and with not much of a pension. I needed someone who could cover maths for me.’ He laid his knife and fork together on his empty plate in the
four o’clock position. At home he’d always positioned them at six in the English way. ‘And help with some bursary work.’

The bursary role had probably been much more casual in what I viewed as the olden times of teaching, before computers. Bursars these days were usually professionally qualified people;
accountants, often, who were whizzes at spreadsheets and cashflow projections and ran schools just as they would businesses.

John had lived in the main house, I remembered, as befitted someone who was really family rather than a member of the teaching staff. After Mr Collins had left he’d inherited the room with
the large oak cupboard.

‘You look weary, Meredith. Let’s leave the rest of the story until tomorrow.’ Dad spoke softly to me, just as he had done when I was little. I’d been a high-spirited
child, a girl who needed reining in. He’d been liberal in his tolerance of my liveliness, except for that occasion when I’d defaced the mural. Of late that softness had disappeared.
While I’d been working at Letchford I’d felt a critical professional gaze on me. He didn’t know whether he could rely on me after that week when I’d flipped. But now the
gentler father I remembered was returning to me.

I thought the past would keep me awake, my brain trying to tie threads together. Something had happened at Letchford back in the eighties. I’d been there when it happened and it involved
my father and John Andrews. I’d thought that it would be Czechoslovakia itself that would unsettle me but it seemed as though the old house we’d left behind was at the heart of the
riddle.

My brain, incapable of forming the link, gave up the attempt. I slept long and deep, waking to the sounds of people talking softly in Czech in the courtyard below my window. Not understanding a
word they said was strangely restful. No need to process the information or feel embarrassed at eavesdropping. We’d agreed to meet for breakfast at half eight. No reason to rush, no dog to
feed and walk. I lingered over another hot shower before strolling down the wooden staircase to the sunny room where hot rolls and coffee were served. Dad looked bright-eyed this morning, his
expression similar to that on a day when he was expecting to watch the Firsts play a victorious home match.

He had an open map on the table beside him. ‘I’d like to go here.’ He pointed at a village. ‘That’s where the family house was. It may not still be
around.’

I spread cherry jam on a roll. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t want to return before and find out.’

‘Time was always at a premium.’ He caught my eye and gave a rueful smile. ‘No, you’re right. I could have come back before. But my parents were both dead.’

‘And there was nobody else to come back to?’

He stared at the broken bread roll on his plate.

‘No.’ The waitress brought a fresh pot of coffee. She smiled at the map and asked him something.

‘She wanted to know if I was looking for the lake,’ he said. ‘Apparently that’s one of the main tourist attractions around here in summer.’

I waited to see whether he’d return to the subject of the girl in the painting. He laid his napkin on the table. ‘Would you be ready to leave in about twenty minutes?’

As we drove away from the inn the forest continued, mile after mile. We hadn’t seen many houses now for some time. The area still seemed as depopulated as it had been when my father had
left.

I was looking at the map. ‘We’re not far from Bavaria, are we?’ We’d landed in Prague yesterday and driven the two hours to the hotel. I hadn’t realized quite how
close to Germany we were.

‘Or Austria. We’re right at the heart of Europe. Farther west than Vienna.’ Even as he said it he sounded more European himself, less the English gentleman headmaster, more the
Continental.

‘We had warmer weather than this.’

‘We?’

‘I came here from Prague with . . . a friend.’ He was holding the wheel so tightly I could see the whites of his knuckles.

A friend. I said nothing and waited.

Karel

He was always going to have to tell her. Of course he was. There’d have been no point in dragging her off on this pilgrimage otherwise. God knows, she’d got enough
going on in her life with Hugh and losing her mother.

Her mother. His wife, to whom he’d never told all this, not entirely, though she had probably pieced some of it together.

‘I was leaving with a friend. Hana, her name was.’

Meredith said nothing but he was aware of her shoulders stiffening beside him in the car.

‘Her name was Hana.’ He repeated the name because it felt right to be saying it aloud again and again after so long.

‘And you ran away together?’

‘I suppose we thought it would be romantic. Though, in fact, we didn’t really need to run. We borrowed bicycles to take us to the border.’ There he was again, being a pedantic
schoolmaster. ‘It wasn’t a long or hard journey. We had food and money and we’d started from my mother’s house, but Hana . . .’ He swallowed the end of the
sentence.

‘Did she make it over the border, too?’

He shook his head.

‘What happened, Dad?’