The Escape Page 28
As I watch, I see sudden bright sparks in the sky, and hear a distant crackle, like gunfire. Then a neon chrysanthemum blossoms, and spears of incandescence shoot upwards. A firework display, of course, something else to remember the 3rd October for.
As the anthem comes to its rousing close, I hear the fire door open behind me. A moment later I feel his arms round my waist and his face in my hair. He says sorry for leaving me alone like this. The flight was delayed, and getting to the centre of town was a nightmare, crowds clogging the roads. I lean back into him, say it doesn’t matter. Mum, Gwen and Keith were here for the preview, and the exhibition will be on for weeks. ‘I just feel so incredibly lucky to be here,’ I say, feeling the warmth of him encircling me as we watch the remains of the fireworks and the fluttering flag of a united Germany.
‘Me too, schatzi,’ he says, kissing the nape of my neck. ‘Me too.’
Afterwards, when the last firework has fizzled away, he pulls free from the embrace. ‘Where are you going?’ I say.
‘I’m going to take you home – unless you’d rather be down there with the revellers?’
‘No, I always feel so alone in crowds.’
‘I know you do, so let’s just go back to our place, have our own private celebration of unity.’ He reaches for my hand. The diamond on my ring finger sparkles as it catches the light from the gallery behind us. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes, Michael,’ I say. ‘That sounds perfect. Let’s go home.’
Chapter 45
October 1990, Exeter
Odette
At the sound, my fingers still. I was about to type the letter ‘s’. The type hammer has stopped halfway to the paper. My ring finger quivers above the key, the gold wedding band catching the lamplight. The carriage clock has just chimed quarter to. Fifteen minutes to go. I let out a breath, flex my fingers above the keyboard, push the release, lift the lever and turn the platen knob. I pull out the sheet of paper, and place it in the yellow file marked ‘memoirs’.
The letter ‘s’ still hovers indecisively above the keyboard, so I push it down into position and get up to turn on the television, where the sandy-moustachioed news anchor announces that they are going live to Berlin for the reunification celebrations. I take the champagne from the ice bucket and pop the cork.
He should be home by now, I think, checking the champagne glasses for dust. On the TV screen the Reichstag is floodlit, and the red, yellow and black German flag billows out above the jostling crowds. He said he’d be back in time for this. Where is he?
I go to the window, lift the heavy chintz curtain and look out into the darkness. I see the door of the Clarence Hotel opening: an oblong of yellow light. There is a conjoined silhouette, two figures together in the hotel doorway. At first I think it can’t be him, because he’d be alone, but the two shadows begin to walk across the cathedral green towards my flat, and I hear through the glass the muffled sound of his voice, and a woman’s laughter, lifting up towards the dark autumn skies. I let the curtain fall.
Symbiotic is the word, I think. Jono helps me with the practical things: shopping, cooking, putting out the bins – things that were once easy, but I still struggle with, despite almost a year of physiotherapy. I help him with routine, reminding him to take his pills, eat regularly. Over the past few months my flat has been busy with visits from social workers, community nurses, family, supporting us both in our new lives. At the start we tiptoed round each other, relying on polite notes and rotas. But these last few weeks we have relaxed. I shout at him for leaving his sweaty football socks on the bathroom floor, not putting the toilet seat down. He nags me to give up smoking and write my memoirs. And now he has a part-time job as a bar man at the Clarence Hotel. And, it seems, a new girlfriend.
On the television the crowds are cheering as the German national anthem strikes up: Deutchsland Uber Alles. Who would have thought such a display of German nationalism would be tolerated on the BBC, let alone celebrated? Forty-five years ago is another life, another world, I think, as I scribble a note to Jono to help himself to the champagne, and prop it up next to the glasses.
I leave the television on, hear the pop and spit of fireworks above Berlin as I go to the bathroom. I slather cream on my face and wipe it off with cotton wool. The mirrored medicine cabinet doors bisect my reflection. I am Odette Jenkins. I am Detta Bruncel. I am British. I am German.
I am.
I hear the front door being pushed open, two sets of footsteps in the hallway. Good for him, I think, brushing my teeth. I hope she is understanding, and kind. Whoever she is, this new girlfriend, I hope that one day when people ask how they got together he says, I looked into her eyes, and I just knew.
As I leave the bathroom and cross the hallway to my bedroom I hear the chink of glasses from the living room, the sound of laughter. I pause to unhook the painting of the prison camp watchtower from its place on the hallway wall, and take it with me into the bedroom. It doesn’t feel right there anymore, and in any case, I need to make space: it won’t be long before there’s Miranda’s wedding photos to hang.
I prop Tom’s painting up on my bedside table and change into my night things, taking off the silver locket and hanging it on my dressing table mirror.
Through the walls I can just about make out the muted voices from the other room. They have turned off the television, put on the radio: voices, music, the sound of a man and a woman beginning to share their lives, fall in love, perhaps.
As I push back the bed covers I smell tobacco smoke, feel the familiar current of emotion running through me. I turn to switch off the bedside light. I lie between the cool sheets and put a hand out to stroke the empty pillow. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ I say. ‘We’re home.’ I smile and close my eyes.
The torn-apart feeling has gone.
Author’s note
Although The Escape is a work of fiction, I must credit Michael Hingston’s book Into Enemy Arms (Grub Street, 2006), for providing the stepping-off point; I am indebted to Hingston for recounting the remarkable story of his aunt’s flight from Germany in 1945. Another work of non-fiction that helped inspire the 1945 timeline of my novel is John Nichol and Tony Rennel’s The Last Escape (Penguin, 2003), which details the forced march that British POWs had to make ahead of the incoming allied forces at the end of World War Two. And anyone who has read Ian Walker’s fascinating Zoo Station, adventures in East and West Berlin (Secker & Warburg, 1987) will find echoes of his observations of Cold War Berlin in The Escape’s 1989 timeline.
If you’re interested in discovering more of the books and films that helped create The Escape, take a look at the ‘extra material’ page of my website: clareharvey.net
Clare Harvey
The Night Raid
World-renowned war artist Dame Laura Knight is commissioned to paint propaganda portraits of factory girls and is sent to the ordnance factories in her hometown of Nottingham. At first, she relishes the opportunity for a nostalgia trip, but when she starts work on a portrait of two particular women, Violet Smith, and her co-worker Zelah Fitzlord, memories begin to resurface that she has spent half a lifetime trying to forget.
Violet is an industrial conscript, and her wages help support a sprawling family back home in Kent. But working in munitions also meant freedom from a small-town mentality, and the disappointment of a first love turned sour. For Zelah, too, working in the gun factory meant escape after her dreams of the future were dashed in the carnage of the Plymouth Blitz.
But, just like Laura, Violet and Zelah have something hidden: mistakes that they have tried to leave behind.
Will the night shift keep these women’s secrets, or will the past explode into the present and change all of their lives forever?
AVAILABLE NOW IN PAPERBACK,
EBOOK AND AUDIOBOOK
Clare Harvey
The English Agent
How far will two women go to survive WWII?
Having suffered a traumatic experience in the Blitz, Edie feels utterl
y disillusioned with life in wartime London. The chance to work with the Secret Operations Executive (SOE)helping the resistance in Paris offers a fresh start. Codenamed ‘Yvette’, she’s parachuted into France and met by the two other members of her SOE cell. Who can she trust?
Back in London, Vera desperately needs to be made a UK citizen to erase the secrets of her past. Working at the foreign office in charge of agents presents an opportunity for blackmail. But when she loses contact with one agent in the field, codenamed Yvette, her loyalties are torn.
AVAILABLE NOW IN PAPERBACK,
EBOOK AND AUDIOBOOK
Clare Harvey
The Gunner Girl
Bea has grown up part of a large, boisterous Kent family. But she hasn’t heard from her soldier sweetheart in months and her mother is controlling her life. She needs to take charge of her future.
Edie inhabits a world of wealth and privilege, but knows only too well that money can’t buy happiness. She wants to be like Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary, to make a difference.
Joan can’t remember anything of her past or her family, and her home has been bombed in the Blitz. Desperate, she needs a refuge.
Each one is a Gunner Girl: three very different women, one remarkable wartime friendship of shared hopes, lost loves and terrible danger . . .
AVAILABLE NOW IN PAPERBACK,
EBOOK AND AUDIOBOOK
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to my editor Jo Dickinson and my agent Teresa Chris for support, encouragement and patience (and a couple of rather tasty lunches) during the writing process.
Thank you to my children for having to suffer a research trip to Berlin that was thinly disguised as a family holiday, to my husband for all his help on my freezing cold weekend of ‘optical research’ in Poland in February, and to my mum and sister Tessa for looking after kids & dog whilst we were away.
And thanks, too, to anyone who has had to read any of my unedited shizl or put up with me banging on about plot wrinkles, etc. whilst The Escape was still a work-in-progress. You know who you are, and you are all fab.
Thank you xxx
P.S. I nearly forgot – thank you to the ‘real’ Miranda Wade (she knows why).
Clare Harvey is a former army wife. Her mother-in-law’s experiences during WWII inspired her novel, The Gunner Girl, which won both The Exeter Novel Prize and The Joan Hessayon Award for debut fiction. Clare lives in Nottingham with her family. Find out more about Clare on her website: http://clareharvey.net or catch up with her on Twitter: @ClareHarveyauth or Facebook: ClareHarvey13.
Also by Clare Harvey:
The Night Raid
The English Agent
The Gunner Girl
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2019
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Clare Harvey, 2019
The right of Clare Harvey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-6189-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-6188-9
Audio ISBN: 978-1-4711-7628-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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