A Stranger in the Family (13 page)

‘Yes, that does make sense. But did she tell you about a meeting?’

‘Oh no. And I never would have asked her. I helped her with family things but I didn’t participate.’

‘But did you find out anything about her father? That is how you came together, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Hilda remembered her mother saying her father was in Vienna, remembered her waiting for letters with Austrian stamps. That’s why Hilda first came to see me.’

‘So you took this … this case, this enquiry on board and tried to find out about her father and his fate.’

‘That roughly covers it – but don’t make it
sound too much like a private detective’s brief: I went through notes on past enquiries, and when new ones came along that could possibly be related to him I brought his name into the conversations. That was almost the sum total of what I could do. What I have is a desk job, not an expanding brief.’

‘I see that. But you did have some results?’

‘That’s putting it too definitely. I got some ideas.’

‘Can you share them with me?’

‘I don’t see why not. There was a character, quite prominent in Jewish circles in Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck and so on. His name was Walter Greenspan. Round about early 1938 he faded out, but there was another man called Ludwig Weisskopf who was doing the same sort of thing.’

‘And that was?’

‘Getting money out of Austria and Germany so that the people he did it for had some remains of their capital when, or if, they escaped – to Britain, France (God help them!), Canada, USA and so on.’

‘You got the idea that Greenspan and Weisskopf were the same person, did you?’

‘Yes. I think he adopted a new identity and maybe a new appearance when things got hot for him.’

‘And what did you find out, or conjecture, about him?’

‘I conjectured that he worked with the Germans, which is to say the Nazis. Or, perhaps more likely, he worked with a German in an influential position.’

‘That is a pretty staggering accusation.’

‘Yes,’ said Nora, nodding. ‘Particularly on the basis of guesswork. There is more to find out – much more – than I ever proved. But what struck me was the result of all his undercover work. First of all, plenty of the people he helped – there should be inverted commas around that word if I am right – got out of Austria and made good use of the money waiting for them. The success rate – let’s call it that – was rather higher than that for people who got out by their own endeavours. It needed to be, to make the business viable.’

‘There’s a “but” coming.’

‘Yes there is. When those who got out were ready to resume control of the part of their wealth left in Austria at the end of the war they found much of it was gone – dissipated, taken over. An even bigger “but” exists over those clients who weren’t successful in getting away.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you go through the long list of people who got themselves involved with Mr Greenspan aka
Weisskopf, there is a group who were very much richer than was generally known.’

‘How did you get to know about them?’

‘Because it was whispered in the Jewish community of their respective hometowns, but not known to the Aryan majority. A large number of Weisskopf’s clients – let’s call them that – were taken by the SS and were sent to concentration camps, where invariably they died. And here I’m talking about the late Thirties and early Forties, before the camps became mere staging posts on the road to a mass gassing.’

‘In other words they were betrayed by Greenspan aka Weisskopf, who would then get a share of the proceeds?’

‘Yes. That’s what I think. In fairness I should say, though, that there could be other explanations: if the wealth of these people was known in the Jewish community, anyone in that community could have acted as a traitor to the individual or the community.’

‘True … Two things occur to me: it seems likely this enterprise would have to be more than a one-man operation.’

‘I thought of that. You’re right. He would need people he could rely on to follow up rumours, if possible firm them up, check, arrange false papers and so on.’

‘The other thing is, he must have been in a position of great danger himself. His German contact, the moment he felt the net closing around him, would have thrown Greenspan to the wolves. Inevitably, Greenspan would have been advertising his own position as a Jew every day of his life, unless he could use non-Jewish underlings to do the work for him. If he tried to operate mainly by telephone he was risking the distinct possibility that the line would be tapped. Most lines were.’

‘You’re not asking me to admire him?’

‘Certainly not. But it seems a remarkable achievement if he could be proved to have survived the war.’ He thought hard for a moment. ‘I shall need to go to Vienna,’ he said. ‘There must be survivors, people who remember what was going on at the time.’

‘I think you may do better by going to the States,’ said Nora. ‘More of them are there, if you can only get some sort of entre.’

‘But everyone there will be so far from those events. There must be some survivors in Austria, and their memories must be vivid, and revived every day as they see the place and the people.’

‘There will, I suppose, be some. Indeed, I know there are. But most of the people who said Vienna was their home and they would go back
to it because they had no other – most of those are dead or, quite often, have gone to Israel in an equally vain attempt to find a home. Homes are not so easily found or refound, particularly when it was that home that first cast you out and killed the remnants of your family.’

‘I know it’s not so easy to find a home,’ said Kit.

Kit settled himself into the train that left King’s Cross a little after twelve. He folded his
Times
so as to have the crossword grid and its clues in the same segment, and then glanced at promising-looking clues. No revelation occurred. He remembered with a grin his father’s tetchy complaint a few weeks before he died: ‘There’s new people setting the crossword and they have no idea of the ethics of clueing.’ Kit wondered whether people had been saying that almost from the day, eighty-odd years before, when the stately matron among newspapers lowered her sights so as to take in word games. He had no doubt that his father’s death from heart failure had not been caused by his irritation, but
perhaps it had contributed an iota to it.

He got up and went to the buffet car. The sandwiches were the same boring choice that had been presented to him on the train down – maybe the same as on the train down from Glasgow to Leeds, the first stage of his search for his birth family. He chose the inevitable BLT and went back to his seat. Four people in his compartment were talking into their mobiles – conversations of the most indescribable banality which made one wonder what God’s purpose in creating language had been.

Back in his seat he collected and revised his thoughts: the journey from Glasgow to Leeds had not been the opening round in his search for his birth family. That had been his mother’s injunction a month or so after the specialist had delivered her death sentence. It had been on one of her bad days, and when she was lying there, her face grey against the pillow, her hand in his, she had suddenly said: ‘Your mother’s name and address – they’re in my address book.’

The words stayed with Kit for the rest of the months remaining to his mother, though he avoided subjecting her to an inquisition. Nightmare images presented themselves of having to check out all the women’s names in the book – the detritus of a busy and successful life as an
art historian. Genevieve read his thoughts, and towards the end she said: ‘You’ll find it without any difficulty. It’s in Leeds.’

Actually, Kit had been toying all those months with the idea that he might do nothing with the information that Genevieve had presented to him – might throw the address book away unopened. But that, he thought, would require still more strength of mind than following up the book’s information: he would be committing himself to not knowing for the rest of his natural life.

He couldn’t do that. Well, he’d done all he could: located his real mother, his brothers and sister, maybe his real father too. But everything that he had found, every person from his first three years of life, told Kit about himself but left one greater mystery unsolved: why was he abducted, why was he given (sold?) to another British family? What, if any, was the connection with the Nazi persecution, then murder, of Central European Jewry?

He could not abandon the investigation where it was now. On the other hand he did not see its future progress coming from the Novello family of Pudsey, or his birth mother. The future seemed to be more with Jürgen, his adoptive – but to him always his real – father.

He gazed out at the scenery. It was flat – very flat, although it was not Norfolk. He didn’t
like to think of himself as the product of a flat landscape. He preferred to remember himself and his father and mother walking and motoring in the Highlands. He wondered if Jürgen had had any early memories of Bavaria and the landscapes around Munich. Holidays were probably unknown in Jürgen’s early years. Holidays in the Lake District and Scotland had left Kit with happy, contented, sometimes exciting memories, and Leeds had not presented anything that illuminated his soul as the north of Scotland did – not to mention the holidays he and his parents had had in Norway and Switzerland.

Leeds, he realised, meant nothing to him.

It also, he suddenly decided as he was biting into the boring BLT sandwich, represented a false trail, or at any rate a trail that was a subsidiary part of the total mystery. And pursuing that part had led him away from the important things that really should be occupying his mind and heart. He wondered whether it was time to shuffle off Leeds and take his course in the direction of the central mystery of his early life. It would mean shuffling off some very ordinary characters: Micky, in thrall to a stronger but limited wife; Dan, an ego-mad, second-rate football player; a father who denied his paternity and whose main interest to Kit was his peculiarities.

And when he had shuffled them off, he would
be taking on someone whom even now he could not quite visualise. Was he an enterprising, various, exciting figure? Or was he unadulterated evil?

His adoptive grandfather.

Kit brought into his mental gallery a double portrait: one of his birth father, one of his adoptive father. ‘Look, here on this picture and on this.’ His adoptive father, Jürgen, was surrounded by an atmosphere almost entirely warm and bright – gilded by the love he and Kit had borne one another, the vivid interest each felt in the other’s activities. The memories included theatre visits as well as children’s Meccas such as Disneyland; it included walks too, and boat trips once his parents had found he liked them – and Genevieve had come too, even though boat trips didn’t like her. The three of them did everything together if they could. And they talked about the special treats in advance, and often discussed their memories later.

And Jürgen was careful that, when Kit hit adolescence, he was left to himself as often as he liked, never forced into family activities that he was in the process of growing out of – or thought he was. If it was an upbringing that was well thought out, much premeditated, it was also spontaneous. ‘Let’s go and see’ would be the cry of one or other of his parents and they would
go and thoroughly enjoy an unplanned treat.

But what could you say of the other picture – that of his oh-so-clever birth father? Kit had had no clues as to what he might expect, and if asked in advance he would probably have said that he and his father would have to build up a relationship slowly, because they were building from almost nothing.

What he would never have guessed was that he would be totally rejected: that his father would deny that he was his son, with a ridicule of all Kit’s claims that, if Kit were honest, was a response that had hurt him. His father was ironic, sarcastic, totally unmoved by emotion – at least where the conventional emotions were concerned; he was only interested in cutting down, undermining, exploding by ridicule. Kit felt for his father no more of the conventional affectionate impulses than his father felt for him.

Except that he wanted to understand him, because that could be the precondition of finding out what had happened to him, Kit, when he was three, and of understanding not just how, but why it had happened.

He wondered if a similar contrast could be drawn up if a portrait of Genevieve was placed beside a portrait of Isla. No, of course it couldn’t. He was becoming fond of Isla, he felt he understood her, even to her reluctance to
join him in his investigation of his abduction. She was an alternative mother, where Frank Novello was never in a million years going to be an alternative father. But as the spire of Doncaster Parish Church came into view he suddenly asked himself a question: was he beginning to love Isla? And then another one: did he really understand her reluctance to take up again the matter of his abduction? Did she have something to hide?

He wished he could talk to his siblings without his mother being there. Can one ever be totally honest about one’s parents when they are present to hear? He was willing to bet that the presence of siblings would not inhibit the Novellos. But being with their mother – the only parent to make a big contribution to their lives – had stopped a great many things being said.

When he got off the train at Leeds he went straight to one of the station’s payphones, found out the number of Ada Micklejohn, then rang it. She was probably deep into one of her Barbara Cartlands but she answered immediately.

‘Kit! Oh, my handsome toy boy! I got terribly mixed up last time, didn’t I? Your mother and I had an awful time sorting it out. You want to see my collection again?’

‘Unlike Dan, I’m not handsome, and I’m nobody’s toy boy, not even yours. And I don’t for
the moment want to see your collection, but I am going to ask a favour of you.’

‘Oh, men! They’re always asking for favours, never giving them!’

‘Is that a piece of Cartland wisdom? I will prove it wrong by devoting the rest of my life to finding the missing titles in your collection. I love second-hand booksellers, you see.’

‘You won’t find my missing titles there. They don’t even acknowledge them as books. So what is the favour you want?’

‘Could you ask Isla out in the next few days? It doesn’t matter what it is – dinner, theatre, concert, whatever, though it would be best if it’s something in the evening.’

‘And what is the purpose of this invitation? What is she being got out of the way for?’

Kit decided to confide in her.

‘I think my brothers and sister would speak much more openly and candidly about the Novello family if she was not there.’

‘Ah! So you want Isla out of the way so that the family can dish the dirt on her?’

‘Not at all. Though if you’d said Frank instead of Isla Novello you would have been nearer the truth.’

‘But Isla being there would not stop them dishing the dirt on Frank. Quite likely she would urge them on.’

‘Would she? I wonder. They were married for ten or fifteen years. They must have things in common that they’d rather people did not know about. Anyway, I think it’s worth a try.’

‘Well, I will do it. For you, my handsome Scottish beau, I will take her to
The Merry Widow
at the Grand. Such gorgeous melodies! You don’t get such melodies from Mr Webber, do you? I don’t get the same thrill from songs sung by lonely cats on the tiles. Anyway, regard it as done, my
preux chevalier
– regard her as out of the way, at least until about ten.’

Kit was received with an enthusiastic embrace by Isla, but she did not follow it up by any enquiries about what he had been doing. Isla’s thoughts were taken up with the birthday of her grandchild and what she would do for her birthday if she could, but of course she wouldn’t be allowed to because Pat would make all the decisions, and there wouldn’t be any fun in them at all. It was all done in a resigned voice, as if she had long ago had to accept that any contest between her and her daughter-in-law had been conceded to the younger and stronger party.

‘I see the ashes of a long struggle for the post of matriarch,’ said Kit.

‘No such thing,’ said Isla. ‘I wouldn’t deign
to struggle. And the mother was bound to win, wasn’t she?’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Kit. ‘I’ve seen some pretty shameless grandparents among Jürgen and Genevieve’s Scottish friends. They practically seduce the little ones.’

‘What a word to use! I love them all, but I wouldn’t fight over them.’

The next day, at breakfast, Isla said to Kit: ‘I’m going out with Ada on Thursday.
The Merry Widow
– not really my cup of tea. I’d prefer Gilbert and Sullivan. But she was very insistent. Can you get your own dinner?’

‘I think I can manage that. Or I can get someone to come out and eat with me.’

‘In Leeds? You don’t know anyone except family.’

Kit smiled and didn’t say that wasn’t true, or that family was precisely who he wanted to have dinner with. Later Isla went shopping and he phoned an Italian restaurant he’d passed that advertised a large and a small function room and booked the latter for Thursday evening. Then he rang round to Micky and Maria, getting their agreement to come to a meal, and in the case of Micky to contact Dan and pressure him and Wendy to come as well. Then he arranged a menu with La Cena Italiana and sat back thinking his morning had been well spent.

When Thursday came, the party assembled in the function room two by two, with a certain false jollity about them. Dan, of course, was last, but Wendy was suppressing all sorts of ambitious schemes and this made her much more approachable. The room was not particularly cosy but there was a welcoming smell. Since spouses had been invited there were seven in all and they drank Martinis and gin and tonics in a friendly enough fashion, apart of course from Dan, who continued expressing himself in grunts and mutterings with everyone except Kit, to whom he did not speak at all. Drink made Wendy vocal, and from one or two of her remarks Kit got the impression that Dan’s ambitions to be the next Wayne Rooney-style football superstar were not going well. Wendy also made it obvious that, if this was the case, she was up for grabs.

After minestrone and before stufato genovese, Kit looked around the table and banged on a glass with a spoon. He then spoke in his normal voice, friendly, inviting, but perhaps less than warm.

‘I’ve asked them to hold back the main course for ten minutes. There are a few things I wanted to say to you all. As you know, I’ve assured you that I am not interested in the family money—’

‘Oh yes, you’ve said it,’ said Dan. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’

‘You can only see the money after Isla’s death,’ said Kit, ‘and I’m sure we all hope that’s a long way off. But I’ve asked myself, since it was not money I was after, what I did want. Why did I not only track down my birth mother’s identity, but also come down to identify myself to her, and meet you all? And I’m sure that the obvious answer is the right one: I wanted to have a family again – including people of my own age, something I’d never had in the past.’

‘I think everyone understands that,’ said Micky. ‘And I think we’ve welcomed you.’

‘You have, most of you. But there’s been the shadow of a barrier between us. Dan here exemplifies it most obviously. That barrier means there are some doubts: if I’m really who I claim to be; if I’m on the make, whoever I am; if the family actually wants a new member.’

‘I certainly do,’ said Maria.