The Escape Read online

  The storm clouds are piling up, skies darkening overhead, and I decide to go and find Michael. An icy blast of wind tugs the scarf, and I wind it closer round my face, pushing my chin into my chest. I begin to walk along the path that winds in front of the church. There is frost on the ground: fallen leaves bronze-silver and slippery on the surface of the beige mud. A few ragged old rose bushes trespass spindly branches over the manse fence into the graveyard. One still holds half a yellow rose, quivering in the chill air.

  The track continues, past a flat piece of earth that is covered in a rectangle of concrete, with jagged spikes of rusted metal poking up above ground, and a dark hole with crumbling steps disappearing downwards – there would have been a large building there once, but all that is left is the cellar. As I pass I have another moment like the one just now: a swooning feeling and the scent of burning. Perhaps Michael is right and it’s just low blood pressure causing these odd sensations.

  The track narrows to a path and rises through some trees. There are firs like green bottlebrushes, and bare silver birches with blots of pale green mistletoe clotted on high branches. I can see the Schloss through the trees. I look up at the sky: the dense clouds make twilight of the daytime. The air feels charged. There is a rumble, like distant ordnance. I carry on walking, uphill, across the frosted ground.

  I see him then, between the trees, coming down from the Schloss, striding in his long, grey coat, with his fair hair dull gold in this strange light. As we get closer to each other I notice the chink of blue, as his eyes meet mine. There is an uncomfortable sensation inside me, like numb-cold fingers thrust in front of an open fire.

  And that’s when it happens: the sky is rent with electric yellow, and there is a blinding flash, followed a split-second later by a tearing roar, as the dark clouds rip apart above our heads. White snowflakes spew down. The storm has broken.

  I raise the Rolleiflex to the space below my heart. ‘Snow!’ Michael holds out his arms, lifts his head, then opens his mouth wide. I see him through the lens, caught in a moment of childish excitement. He snaps his mouth shut, looks across, and grins. ‘My first snowflake of winter!’

  He looks straight through the viewfinder, right at me, as if the camera isn’t there at all, catching my gaze and holding it fast. From this distance his eyes are like twin blue sparks seen through the snow-veil between us.

  That’s when I know. It’s only when I see him through glass that I realize: Michael is the man from the kerbside in Berlin, the one who called for me to phone for an ambulance, the one who used his long coat to cover the overdosed junkie, who waited on the kerb for the medics, the night the Wall was breached. It’s him.

  I click the shutter. I capture the moment.

  And it’s perfect.

  Chapter 41

  May 1945, England

  Tom

  As he reached for the buzzer his fingertips grazed the barbed wire that looped round the high gateposts. He pushed and waited, looking round. The skies above Nightingale Lane were the faded blue of baby clothes on a back garden washing line. Baby clothes on a line – he had a sudden image of the future, walking home from an ordinary job, down an ordinary street, perhaps with a paper tucked under his arm, and seeing Detta in a flower-freckled garden, hanging washing, with a pram parked under a cherry tree. He smiled at the mundanity of his vision, realizing it was everything he wanted now. The street of his dreams might be just like this one in Wandsworth: oak trees sighing with crowds of new leaves; distant traffic clattering and grumbling – an ordinary suburban street on an ordinary Spring day. Just like this, but different, with a wife and baby to come home to.

  Tom looked up at the ivy-fringed windows of Oak Lodge. Somewhere up there an extraordinary woman – his future – was waiting for him. But the gate remained clamped shut between the barbed-wire ringlets. He pressed the buzzer again. He wasn’t leaving until he got her out of this place. With its high walls and Victorian red brick, it looked just like the school it had no doubt been before the war – a good school in a decent part of London. But Tom knew from the barbed wire and the blankness of the shut gate what it really was these days: a prison camp. And there was no way he was letting her languish in there one second longer. He pounded the gate with his fists. If he shouldered it hard enough he could probably break it open, he thought. He would, if it came to it – break in, pluck her up, and carry her away, like a prince from a fairy tale.

  ‘Yes?’ A bored voice came at last through the intercom system. ‘Who is it?’

  Tom leant close to the punched holes in the metal plate. ‘Warrant Officer Tom Jenkins, here to collect my fiancée, Odette Bruncel.’

  ‘Have you got the relevant documentation?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘Let me in.’

  A sigh came like a hiss through the grille. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but Mr White’s gone home already, and I can’t authorize anything without his signature. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.’ The line went dead. Tom hit the buzzer again. ‘I said, come back in the morning,’ the voice repeated. The line went dead again. Tom felt the fingers of his right hand bunching into a fist. Little Hitlers, the lot of them. He flexed his fingers and let out a breath, rolling his eyes upwards. Was she up there, somewhere? He scanned through the branches, hoping to see a face at a window, but there was nothing.

  Above the oak trees a hazy cloud of starlings doodled and dodged, plummeting and whirling in formation, air dancing, just for the joy of it. The murmuration suddenly banked, swilling right across his line of vision, as if a distant squadron of planes were flying past. And he was taken right back to that day at the camp, watching the Russian bombers, the twist in his solar plexus at the thought of freedom.

  He turned back and pressed the buzzer again, hard, for a very long time.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘I’m here to collect Odette Bruncel. I’m her fiancée, and I’ve got her release permit with me.’

  ‘Well nobody’s told me anything about a release permit. Somebody should have telephoned.’

  ‘It’s here. Come and take a look.’

  ‘It’s not my job to come out and have conversations with visitors, sir.’

  ‘I’m not a visitor. I’m a liberator. Odette Bruncel is free to leave, and I shall push this buzzer all ruddy night if I have to.’

  ‘Now, be reasonable—’

  ‘Reasonable? That girl is free to come with me. You are holding her against her will. And if this gate stays shut then not only will I carry on buzzing this stupid thing, I’ll bloody well sue for false imprisonment.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone.’

  ‘For God’s sake, will you just open the damned gate?’ The catch was suddenly released, and he stumbled inside.

  A paved path led up to a short flight of steps. Dormer windows were a frown above the front door’s petulant mouth. He bounded up the steps, hearing the gate clank shut behind him. The front door opened on a chain to reveal a rodentlike face: prominent teeth and an upturned nose.

  ‘I can’t let you in until I have had sight of the official documentation,’ she said. Tom pulled the permit from his pocket and thrust it into the gap. A small hand plucked it from him.

  He touched the wings on his uniform badge, like a charm, leant forward, and called out into the dark hallway behind the half-open door: ‘I’m here, Detta. I got your letter and I’m here to take you home.’

  Detta

  Just as Detta was about to drop the useless remains of the postcard in the bin, the door banged open. It was the wardress, panting a little from the stairs. ‘Get your things, Miss, you’re going home.’

  ‘Home?’ Detta said. So it was true. They were sending her back to Germany today. She slipped the postcard back in her pocket as she went back over to her bed. She picked up the string bag and her fur coat. What would they do? Put her on a plane to Berlin? Who would pilot the plane, she wondered, perhaps a colleague of Tom’s? Perhaps if she could get word to him . . . ?


  No. Don’t be stupid. It’s too late for that.

  ‘Hurry up, Miss.’

  The baby had stopped crying, now nuzzling at Gabi’s swollen breast. Detta could hear voices from downstairs: a man and a woman. She quenched her hope immediately. Of course there would be a man’s voice, some lance corporal, tasked with bundling the ‘enemy alien’ away in the army car. She stepped across the floorboards and leant over to kiss Gabi on the cheek and the baby on its peachy head. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  Gabi looked up with round, weary eyes. They would have embraced but with the bag, the fur coat, and the suckling baby, it was impossible. ‘Good luck,’ Gabi said, almost managing a tired smile.

  ‘Come on,’ the wardress said. ‘He’s waiting for you.’ Detta turned and walked through the open doorway and into the dark corridor, her feet sliding a little, as they always did, in these cork-soled shoes, on the polished lino. The string bag bumped against her leg, and the fur coat slithered in her other arm. Thoughts whirled as she walked. She was stupid to think she’d fly to Germany. Someone like her would hardly be worth the expense. No, they’d send rejected refugees like her by boat: in her mind’s eye she saw those famous white cliffs dwindling to a small snapping white bite on the horizon behind her, as some old troop ship chugged across the Channel, eastwards, carrying her back, all the way back to where she’d come from.

  Detta could hear the wardress’s footfalls following, just out of step with her own as she made her way towards the stairs. Would she just get dumped at the port, or would she have a choice of where to go, a one-way train ticket to somewhere? If so, where? To Hannover, to try to find out if Aunt Hedwig had made it through alive? Or to Alsace, to try to track down Frau Moll and the girls, if they’d survived?

  She was at the stairwell, and put out a hand to grasp the bannister, mind still full of plans for the future that was being thrust upon her. She barely heard the voice calling: ‘Detta!’ She blinked, paused, staring down the stairs into the dark hallway, hearing a voice she thought she recognized. But it couldn’t possibly be . . .

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ The wardress prodded her from behind, and the silly summer shoes slipped on the polished lino, and suddenly she was falling, falling down and down-down-down into a spinning rush, and dark blackness.

  But then a panic gasp awake, and there were arms around her, holding her. ‘Got you. It’s okay, darling. You just blacked out for a second there.’ Strong arms holding her close, the scent and warmth of him. The feel of his uniform badge against her cheek. Yes, it was him. It was him.

  She looked up and his face swam into focus: the fair hair brushed away from his wide brow, the eyes such a dark blue in this light, they were almost lapis. ‘Tom?’ But it was too late. Too late. ‘They’re sending me back,’ she said, remembering what the wardress said, the khaki army vehicle waiting outside.

  ‘No. No, you’re not going anywhere without me – we’re getting married tomorrow. That is, if you’ll still be mine?’ A look of anxiety passed over his features.

  His face blurred out of focus again as she leant up towards him. ‘Always,’ she said. ‘I promise.’ She closed her eyes as her lips met his, soft and safe – home.

  Chapter 42

  November 1989, Plymouth

  Odette

  Who is this old woman with the droopy eyelid? I hold the mirror in my good hand and look carefully but I do not know the woman who returns my gaze.

  I know one fact about myself. My name is Mrs Odette Jenkins. It is written on my forms, and the nurses call me Mrs Jenkins when they come to take blood or help me to the bathroom. They have capable hands and tired eyes. One of them reminds me of my mother: worry lines, bony fingers, a smell of perfume, cigarettes and hard work.

  The face in the mirror doesn’t look like the remembered face of my mother, but it doesn’t look like me, either. I am away and somewhere else, even though the forms say I am Odette Jenkins.

  You were lucky, Mrs Jenkins, the nurses say, drawing the curtains round my bed, bringing food, or taking it away, inserting cannulas or dishing out medicines. Lucky your son-in-law saw you collapse, lucky there were trained nurses nearby, lucky there happened to be an ambulance in the area. Time is brain, Mrs Jenkins, and you were lucky to have survived your stroke.

  Lucky? I am reminded of a girl pop star singing about being lucky in love, and a man with sad, green eyes and a receding hairline. But I don’t know who he is, either.

  I have come to terms with the now. At first it was all a muddle of faces and sensations and noises that were so loud I felt sick. But now there is the regular gravy-drenched food in its plastic tray, the swish of the pale orange curtains, and the bleep of the machine, and the three old ladies in the other beds on the ward. This is my now: I know I have had a stroke and I am recovering in hospital. What I do not know is who I am.

  Through the window opposite my hospital bed I can see the sky. Throughout the day it changes colour: rose quartz, opal, topaz, and finally lapis blue. Now I close my eyes and wonder what colour it will be when I open them again, but when I do, instead of the sky, I see a face zooming in close up, a swinging brown-haired ponytail, someone speaking in a fuzzy voice, asking me my name.

  I can’t answer that one, even though I know. I know I am supposed to be Mrs Odette Jenkins. But I’m not. It might have been Mrs Jenkins in the mirror, which has slid out of my grasp and onto the bedsheets, but I’m not her. I have tried to explain this to the nurses, but nobody understands.

  Palsy, it’s called, the droopy eye, says the doctor in the white coat. My hand and leg are heavy on that side, and they tingle. The doctor smiles and says it’s nothing that physio can’t help with. She says I’ll need rehab, but the prognosis is very good.

  Prognosis? I repeat the word and hear myself slurring like a drunk.

  Yes, the outlook, the cheery ponytailed doctor says. We’re expecting a full recovery, given time, Odette. And you’re lucky you’ve got family locally who can help support you in the meantime.

  Lucky – that word again. Family? I remember my mother: her face and embrace and the smell of her. But I do not know where the memory is from. Do I have other family? A husband? Children? I must have, I suppose. I just wish I knew.

  The doctor wears a white coat and calls me Odette. The nurses wear blue tunics and call me Mrs Jenkins. There was another woman who came before. She didn’t have a white coat or a blue uniform. She had chestnut-coloured spiky hair and smelled of hairspray and perfume. I saw her hand resting on my bad one, but I couldn’t feel it because of the pins-and-needles. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them the sky had changed colour again, and the woman was gone. Maybe it was she who left this mirror, and the brush and lipstick, which I can’t use, because my bad hand won’t let me.

  The doctor has gone, now, and I look in the mirror again. The women in the other beds are old: grey hair and walnut faces. This face in the mirror is old, but not as old as the other women. Or, if she is, she is a little better maintained. At that thought, the reflection smiles a lopsided smile. The hair around the heart-shaped face is white, the eyes dark brown, the features tidy. It is a face that would once have broken hearts, I think.

  Were you a heartbreaker, Odette Jenkins?

  For a brief moment, then, I smell pipe smoke and feel inexplicably sad. But the moment passes, like a wave breaking on the shore.

  Outside the window I see a seagull rise on a thermal, and disappear into a sapphire sky. I close my eyes, wondering what colour it will be when I open them again.

  A touch on my shoulder. ‘Mrs Jenkins. Someone to see you.’ Hands help me to a sitting position. ‘I’m afraid she’s a little confused,’ the voice says, as I begin to open my eyes.

  There is a face: silver-blonde hair with dark roots beginning to show, a worried expression, a china-blue scarf. ‘Gran,’ she says, and suddenly there are arms round me. I think for a moment this person must have confused me with one of the old women in the other beds. Surely I
am not anyone’s grandmother? The voice just now said I was confused, but it is not confusion I feel, it is dislocation. There is an elderly woman in a hospital bed called Odette Jenkins, and she is embracing her tearful granddaughter. And I know I am this woman, but I am not her. I try to answer but my voice is stuck, so I let myself be held.

  She is crying, I realize, this girl: tears warm and wet, dripping on my floral nightie. I have no words, but I rock her, this woman-child in my arms, and it feels right. It is a comfort for us both somehow. ‘Ssh,’ I say to the crying woman in my arms. I pat her denim jacket with my tingle-numb hand. ‘Ssh. It’s okay, dear.’

  Eventually she stops crying and pulls free, looks at me through wide, watery eyes. She takes a tissue from the box on the locker and blows her nose. ‘I got it, Gran,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This.’ She reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a tarnished silver necklace with an oval-shaped locket. And there is a fizzing feeling in my head as she does so, like water on sherbet.

  I bring my good hand up to touch the patch of bare skin at the open neckline of my nightie. ‘Mein Halskette?’ The words spill without prior thought.

  ‘Yes, your necklace. At least, I hope so.’ She passes it to me. I fumble with it. Good hand, bad hand, struggling. I know I need to see inside the little blackened silver lozenge. ‘Here, let me help.’ She undoes it and places it open on my palm.

  It opens like a book. On the right-hand side is an old, mottled photograph of a woman holding a baby. I know the woman’s face. It is my mother. The baby must be me. On the left there is an inscription. Für Liebling Detta an ihrem 18. Geburtstag. Solange du lebst, wirst du mein Baby sein.

  ‘For my darling Detta on her 18th birthday. As long as you live, you will always be my baby girl.’

  As this young woman reads the words, my memories come, like a domino track in reverse, all suddenly standing up in line again. I see myself as a character in a story: a frightened secretary in an office, a girl with a blue scarf over her head, going out into the snowy woods, a stolen kiss with an escaping airman, mud, blood and my mother’s forbidden corpse, the interrogations, frozen fields, the steamship with the red funnel, the man with the kind blue eyes and the strong arms. I remember it all now.