Angelmaker (49 page)

The war came to an end and—as with the one before it—everyone was too exhausted to cheer. People smiled at one another not like victorious heroes but like punch-drunk prizefighters, eyes swollen shut and lips rippled and split, who do not understand why everyone is clapping. A numb silence settled over Europe from Snowdon to Ararat. Edie Banister—in the person of Commander James—was detailed to accompany Frankie from London to Calais and down to her family’s home in rural France.

“Did you win the war for us?” Edie asked her in the grim little sleeper compartment of the southbound train.

“No,” Frankie said seriously. “I would say I am responsible for no more than a few percentage points of variance in the outcome. The military men are incapable of asking a clear question. If they can only see one way of doing a thing, it follows that there is only that way. I spent six weeks working on an issue with sonar before I established
that the use they proposed for the new technique was utterly …” She waved her hands in a gesture of aggravation and stared moodily out of the window. Then she looked back at Edie, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry. It was frustrating. More honestly … I do not believe this will be a pleasant journey for me. There will be pain of the soul. But … it is pleasant to see you, Commander Banister.” She reached over and grasped Edie’s hand, and smiled a wide, inviting smile. Then she drew a little closer. “More than pleasant, if I am honest.”

“Frankie,” Edie said after a long moment, “my name is Edith and I am a female person.”

Frankie Fossoyeur nodded, puzzled. “Yes,” she said, “I know. The ratio of your hips to your head is inconsistent with maleness. Also, the formation of your voice, while the note is quite deep, is not indicative of the presence of …” She waggled her fingers and then leaned closer, touching Edie’s throat at the midpoint.

“Adam’s apple,” Edie Banister said, after a moment.

“Yes! Exactly. Also the skin, the eyes, the odour of the body, the hands … these are not mathematical observations, by the way. They are qualitative …” She had not removed her fingers. Edie could feel the second one, resting on her neck just to one side of the first. If she stepped forward, she would feel the third, then the little finger and eventually the palm and the thumb, then the forearm, and then all of Frankie at once.

“Just so that we’re clear,” Edie said. She shifted her weight. Frankie’s nails grazed her skin.

“We are,” Frankie said. “Quite clear.”

How long they stood there Edie was never sure. At some point, they began to kiss, and the distance to Marseilles seemed very short. Undressing, Frankie announced sternly that she did not believe in exclusive love, which was a ludicrous construction of the Judeo-Christian Patriarchy. Edie agreed, never having thought about it, and wondered distantly whether the Judeo-Christian Patriarchy was a plot to which she should alert Abel Jasmine, or one he had perhaps created. Certainly, she wasn’t going to argue about it now.

The journey was easy, but arriving was hard. Frankie’s home was burned out. A pair of tweezers and a copper pot lay broken on her old
hearth, beside a single, charred shoe. She asked about her family, her relatives, but once they knew who she was, the remaining local people would not talk to her. The young ones looked ashamed and the old ones turned away and muttered. A soldier said he thought it likely they’d been denounced as traitors to Vichy.

“They did a bit of that,” he said, looking out at the town. “Pointed the finger at those they didn’t like. People who were too rich or too pretty. All over occupied Europe, belike. Here for sure.” He shied a pebble at a man pulling a handcart. “Half the world at war with the other half and good French lads fighting in the shadows to set ’em free, French soldiers in England readying for the day, and these buggers down here were just settling old scores. Bollocks to ’em, is what I say. Still … they had to live somehow, I suppose.” He showed them a pile of belongings, dug up from the town dump, and Frankie moaned, clutched an ugly beaded necklace of her mother’s from the pile.

Edie walked her away from town, followed a narrow track to a tree stump on the shore of a mucky lake.

“They hate us this much …” Frankie whispered, between gulps of horror. “My people. Because we are witches. Hakote. Children of the Sea. Webbed feet and shadow. Because we see the world, my mother said.”

“I don’t understand,” Edie confessed into her lover’s hair, because she knew already that when Frankie needed to talk about human things and life, you had to give her the cues or she became convinced you weren’t listening.

Frankie swallowed. “Numbers,” she said, after a moment. “Always numbers. We are born with numbers as you are born with sight. Do you see? So we are witches.”

“Because you can count?”

“
Non
, not exactly. It is like that, but it is more than counting, and less. It is … 
Alors
 … Suppose I am a crude peasant girl—which I am, but suppose it is Louis XIV’s time. I see a waterwheel. I see the rotation and the angle, and I know that in thirty to forty rotations, it will wear away and collapse. I do not know why I know. How can I express periodicity when I have never learned to write? When I have never needed a word for ‘rotation’? But I run, anyway, to the miller and I say to him to stop the wheel. Now, the miller is a rich man and he did not get that way by listening to foolish girls. He does nothing. The wheel breaks and a man dies. Now I am a prophet! A witch! It is all my fault! Do you see?”

“Hakote.”

“Sorceress. Yes. So they make up stories. Lies, embellishments. And my mother’s house is a ruin and my … everyone I loved is gone. Because people are too stupid to know the simple truth when they hear it, and believe the most outrageous lies.” And then something else which Edie could not quite hear, but which sounded like:
Please let them have escaped
. More family, more vulnerable witches. More targets.

Edie beside her, Frankie made inquiries from anyone who would speak to her. She discovered her mother and uncles had been put into one of the Vichy French camps quite early, and had died. Two more relatives—Edie wasn’t sure who—had perhaps escaped over the hills to the coast, but been in a convoy which was sunk by U-boats.

The following day, they travelled on into Germany. It was not like seeing a fallen knight or the corpse of a monstrous wolf. It wasn’t even the way Edie had imagined it, with burned-out tanks and beaten, thankful people.

It was like the aftermath of bad surgery, or a pit fight in Calcutta.

Lady Germany had taken a knife to her own face. In a strange, bewildered frenzy, she had cut off her proud, Semitic nose, and skewered her brown Romany eyes. And then came her violent rescuers, no more subtle than herself: they beat her, burned her, stabbed her, and then finally could not agree which of them should own the mess, so split her Solomonically (yet more bitter irony to which no one paid attention) and both parties were now having their way with the remains. A truly befitting European tragedy.
Fossoyeur
: it means
gravedigger
.

In the rain amid the mud and twisted metal: Frankie Fossoyeur was crying, water from her eyes as if they were the very Möhne and Eder dams themselves. Slick-cheeked and open-mouthed, she stared as if seeing the whole of Germany spread out below her on a table. The country had undone itself as much as it had been undone.

“More dead of lies. More millions.”

Leaning on Edie Banister, Frankie choked out horrors and sucked in air which was half mud.

Back home at Edie’s flat in Marylebone, Frankie bawled and wailed and stared into space. Germany had been her enemy, but France
had betrayed her. France was dead to her. She would never visit the Louvre again. She would never take Edie to the Orangerie to see Monet’s water lilies. Monet was a bastard, and his style was evidence of a myopic condition, not of genius at all. No genius ever came out of France. None. Not even Frankie. Frankie was not French. She was Hakote, and that was all. She would work.

She would work. The Apprehension Engine, yes. The truth would come out. Everyone would see. The world would become honest, mankind would be better off. No lies, ever again.

Edie took her to bed and kept her there for most of a week, and by the end she wept only occasionally. Edie bought her oil pastels and paper from an art shop in Reading, and Frankie sketched faces Edie did not recognise over and over again, and touched her hand and said “I love you,” which she had never done before. Occasionally, she stopped sketching and wrote numbers on the wall, and other symbols Edie had never seen, symbols which expressed things for which spoken language had no name. Warmed and lit by the single bar of an electric fire, Frankie Fossoyeur drew the faces of the beloved dead, and surrounded them with wild, dangerous comprehensions no one else on Earth could have understood. It was the first time Edie heard her speak of her book, in the ghastly lethargy which took her between bouts of mania.

I shall write it all down, like Marie Curie! Not just numbers. I shall tell the truth. It does not have to be this way, Edie. It does not! We do not have to be small, and stupid, and weak. I shall make a book unlike any you have seen. A book of wonders … A book of the Hakote, and you shall read it and see it and still you shall not believe what I have done!

Frankie’s handwriting was so bad that most of the words were single letters followed by long wiggly lines. Edie brought her tea and wrapped arms around her, and Frankie allowed herself to be held. A month later they were sharing the flat, Edie’s small number of belongings swamped by Frankie’s accumulated books and devices. In the evenings they huddled together under a quilt, and Edie did crosswords while Frankie wrote.

It was winter, and it stayed that way until 1948.

Shem Shem Tsien had not died in Addeh Sikkim.

Edie had known this, peripherally. She had been aware of him
quitting the field, leaving his soldiers to burn where they fought. She had seen him take a moment to kill the crucified bishop, slicing across his gut so that the man would die painfully rather than quickly. She had known, too, that the subsequent explosion regrettably failed to claim the Khan—Abel Jasmine had shown her the reports, so that she would not be surprised into betraying herself if ever she met him again. Edie had assumed that Shem Shem Tsien would be occupied with rebuilding his citadel, licking his wounds and looking for another genius.