Put Out the Fires (38 page)

“Hallo,” she said curtly.

“I’m pleased to see you, too.” There was sarcasm in the deep voice, which held no trace of a foreign accent.

Ruth felt too angry to answer. She missed a note and took her fingers off the keys. Not sure what to do with her hands, she put them on her lap, and stared at the music on the stand in front of her. She rarely used music, knowing everything she usually played by heart, but today was the first time she’d played A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Matt Smith said.

“Go ahead.” She hadn’t much choice but to listen, she supposed, unless she was prepared to get up and walk away.

“Not here. Somewhere more private. Can I meet you afterwards?”

“I’d sooner not,” Ruth said coldly. “I can’t for the life of me imagine finding anything you have to say of interest.”

“You’re very rude!” He actually had the nerve to sound quite hurt.

She glared at him. How dare he? He looked as angry as she felt as he glared back. She noticed two women sitting nearby were nudging each other as they eyed him up and down with obvious approval, and she wondered if they realised he was Adolf Hitler’s notion of a perfect specimen of German manhood. Ruth shrugged carelessly, “So, I’m rude!”

Matt Smith turned to leave. There was a look of disgust on his almost perfect bronzed face. “I thought we two might have something in common,” he said disdainfully.

“That’s why I wanted to meet you before.”

Ruth knew she’d gone too far. She remembered the words of Jack Doyle on New Year’s Eve, “It’s nowt but prejudice to damn the whole German race. Isn’t that what we accuse them of when it comes to the Jews?”

Matt was already halfway across the floor. “What is it we might have in common?” she called.

He stopped and merely turned his head. “We’ve both lost everything,” he said.

Ruth sighed. “All right. I’ll meet you in the cafe downstairs as soon as the dance is over. But I can’t stay long. I have to be home quickly for my little boy.”

He nodded. “I’ll be there.”

Ruth had never used the ground-floor restaurant at Reece’s, though she had to walk through it to reach the stairs to the dancehall. It was big and lofty and painted cream. It had, she always thought, a slightly continental air.

Matthew Schmidt was sitting at a table in the furthest corner which was slightly shielded by a large potted plant.

When Ruth approached, he stood up and courteously held her chair. “Would you like tea or coffee?”

“Tea, please.”

He waved to the waitress, who came over and took the order. The girl quite unconsciously fluttered her eyelashes when he spoke. Ruth hadn’t noticed before, but he was dressed well, in a grey suit and a blue and white striped shirt.

Whilst they waited for the tea to arrive, they chatted about the weather. It seemed quite warm for Easter, but then Easter was late this year. After all, it was almost the middle of April.

It was all terribly civilised, thought Ruth. It didn’t seem possible that she was sitting in Reece’s restaurant taking afternoon tea with a German).

The tea came and Ruth poured. “Do you take sugar?”

“No, thanks, and no milk, either. I prefer lemon, but nobody, in Liverpool, at least, seems to have heard of tea with lemon before.”

He began to stir his tea, though there was nothing in it that needed stirring, and Ruth realised he was actually quite nervous. When he picked up the white cup, it looked ridiculously small and delicate in his large hands.

“I know you’re in a hurry, and I’ll be as quick as I can, but there are a few things I’d like to explain.”

“Go ahead,” Ruth said flippantly.

He put the cup down with a bang, and his blue eyes flashed. “This is not going to be the least bit funny, I can assure you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I want to be truthful, so there’s one thing I must tell you first. I was once a member of the Hitler Youth.”

Ruth recoiled. “What!” She pushed her cup away and would have got up and left, there and then, in utter disgust, if he hadn’t reached across and held her arm to prevent her going.

“It was 1930 and I was only eighteen,” he said quickly. “I wasn’t in for long. The blinkers soon dropped from my eyes, and the minute I realised what was actually going on, I left.”

“What did you join then, the SS?” She relaxed in her seat, but couldn’t resist the barb, though instead of looking hurt, he smiled.

“No,” he said. “I went to university and quietly studied languages, English and French, for four years. Afterwards, I joined the Communist Party, not so much out of ideology, but because they seemed to provide the main opposition to the Nazis, fighting pitched battles with the storm troopers on the streets. My parents were horrified.

They both looked upon Hitler as some sort of god.”

The idea of Hitler being regarded as a god by anyone sane was so ludicrous that Ruth looked at him uncomprehendingly.

He made a funny little movement with his mouth. “I know it sounds crazy, but you don’t know what Germany was like for many years after the First World War.

Unemployment was rife, our currency worthless—there were literally trillions of marks to the dollar and people were pushing their wages home in wheelbarrows. Living conditions were appalling and there was crime everywhere - no-one was safe on the streets. Adolf Hitler put everything right. He appeared to many as a saviour; someone who would make our country great again.”

“But not to you?” Ruth asked suspiciously.

“Not to me, not to a lot of people. But even those who could see what he was doing, they said and did nothing.

They kept their heads down, closed their eyes and let him carry on. It was safer that way. As long as they had a job and a roof over their heads, they didn’t care what horrors were being perpetrated in their name.” He laughed sardonically. “In the 1933 election, ninety-two per cent of the electorate voted for the Nazi list for the Reichstag.

Even in Dachau concentration camp, most of the inmates voted for the party that had put them there.”

“Dachau! You mean there were concentration camps so long ago?”

“There were at least fifty, all run by the Totenkopfverbaende, the Death’s-Head units, sadists and brutal murders one and all. Dachau is where my wife died in 1937,” he said in a thin, expressionless voice. “Maria was whipped to death.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. Jack Doyle had already told her some of this, but she’d closed her ears, just as the people of Germany had closed their eyes. She didn’t want to hear because he was a German, and no excuses could be made on their behalf. “What had she done, your wife?”

“She was a Communist and a teacher, like me. Though, like me, she kept her affiliation secret. It was insanity to do otherwise. We worked underground, arranged for speakers for other like-minded groups, produced a little anti Nazi newspaper which we distributed on the streets, helped smuggle people the Nazis were after out of the country . . . ”

“What sort of people?” Ruth asked.

“People like us, the ones who had been found out: agitators, trade unionists, pastors and priests who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to almighty Hitler. And, of course, Jews.”

But only the sensible Jews, Ruth thought bleakly, the ones who’d seen the bloody writing on the wall and taken notice. The rest, like her and Benjy, and millions of others, refused to believe the evidence of their eyes and escape to safety. What did it matter if you had to start again in another country with nothing? At least you were alive and living in dignity. Though it was easy to take this view with hindsight, Ruth thought ruefully.

“We didn’t realise,” Matt was saying, “that we’d been infiltrated, that we had an agent provocateur in our midst.

One night, our meeting was raided and everyone was dragged away, including Maria. A month later, they were all dead. Before you ask why I wasn’t with them, I was at home. I had die Grippe—what is it called in English?

Influenza.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ruth said again.

“So am I,” he said bitterly. “Sorry I was ill, sorry I didn’t have the courage to give myself up and die with her.

Instead, I went underground. A few months later, it was the turn of another group to spirit me out of the country. I came to England, where I was granted political asylum.”

Suddenly, a burst of raucous laughter came from a table nearby, and Ruth came down to earth with a start. A group of women were sitting there whom she recognised from the dance. She wondered what they’d think, the women, the other people taking afternoon tea and coffee in the restaurant, if they knew the conversation she was having with this man?

“Did you come straight to Liverpool?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I changed my name to Smith by Deed Poll and got a job in Croydon as a language teacher, though the staff knew my nationality. They didn’t seem to mind, not even when the war began. I’d made my feelings about Hitler pretty clear by then.” He cocked his head sideways and said thoughtfully, “I suppose I should have been happy, or at least grateful I’d survived, but instead, I felt dead inside. Without Hitler to fight, I’d lost my reason for living—they wouldn’t let me join the British forces, although I tried. Nothing seemed to matter any more. I’d also lost Maria, and my family had long since preferred to think I didn’t exist.”

Ruth nodded. “I felt the same, though I had my father. If it hadn’t been for him, I doubt if I would have seen a reason for living, either.” Except the chance, the faint chance, that Leah and Simon were still alive.

Matt said with a quiet air of triumph, “I said we two might have something in common.”

“So you did!” His handsome looks did him a disservice, she decided. Men as attractive as he was were often conceited and usually aware of the effect they had on women, yet he seemed entirely oblivious to the appreciative looks he was getting from the women on the next table, the ones who’d just laughed. He must have been very brave to have stood up to Hitler, one of the very few who had. She felt almost sick with shame when she remembered the way she’d spoken to him. He was a hero, and she’d treated him like dirt. She realised an apology was in order, and duly proffered one.

“I lumped all Germans together, I’m sorry. I thought you were all the same.”

“That’s understandable,” he said generously. “Jack Doyle told me about your husband and children, but it was partly my own fault. It was foolish to click my heels and address you in German the first time we met. I thought you might find the heel-clicking amusing, and I was anxious for a conversation. Despite everything, I miss my old language.”

Ruth shuddered. “I never want to speak German again for as long as I live.”

“Is there any more tea?”

She’d forgotten to add the hot water to the pot. “It won’t be very warm.”

“It doesn’t matter. As long as it’s wet, as they say here.”

“What brought you to Liverpool?” she asked as she refilled the cups. Furthermore, what was he doing working on the docks when he was a teacher?

He smiled ruefully. She’d already noticed the smile never reached his eyes. “It’s where the boat docks from the Isle of Man.”

She stared at him, perplexed. “What’s the Isle of Man got to do with it?”

“That’s where I was interned,” he said tightly.

Ruth vaguely remembered that was something else Jack Doyle had mentioned, but she’d felt so angry that night she’d not taken in properly all he’d said.

Matt appeared to be looking at some point above her, his face inscrutable. She sensed an unfathomable rage.

“After all I’d been through,” he muttered, almost to himself, “losing Maria, risking my life and being bundled out of my country like a criminal, the British authorities decided I was an alien, an enemy, and put me in an internment camp with people most of whom were as innocent as myself.”

Neither spoke for a long time. Matt seemed to have forgotten all about her. He remained staring at a spot above her head.

“How long were you there?” Ruth asked eventually.

“Six months. When various people found out where I was they wrote and complained. I was one of those that helped them escape, they said. So, after a great deal of huffing and puffing on the part of those on high, they let me out.” He shrugged, still enraged. “I landed in Liverpool. I had no wish to return to teaching. I had no wish to do anything, but I had to live, so I took the first job that turned up, on the docks.” He looked down at his cup, still full of tea. “Why did I ask for more? I haven’t touched this. Never mind.” He swallowed the drink in one gulp.

“You know, Ruth, it’s ironic, in a way. I’d be far more use to my old country where I am now, reporting on shipping movements, than I ever was as a teacher.”

Why was he was telling her all this? Did he merely feel the need to confide in someone and, for some strange reason, think she was the appropriate person? She’d almost forgotten about Michael. Sheila Reilly would have deposited him with Jacob by now. Ruth pretended to look across the tables out of the window whilst she searched for a clock, though no matter how late it was, she doubted if she could bring herself to make an excuse and leave, not whilst Matt Smith was unburdening his soul.

Perhaps her dilemma showed on her face. He said, “I suppose you’re wondering where this is all leading?”

“Well . . . ”

“I wanted you to know everything about me before . . . ” He paused and smiled, and this time the smile actually reached his eyes and his face was transformed.

“Before what?” asked Ruth.

“Before I ask you to marry me!”

Chapter 17

It was one of those rarest of moments, a moment when everything fell completely quiet. As if a spell had been cast over them, people stopped talking, dishes stopped rattling and the restaurant was silent. Ruth felt convinced Matt’s words had been audible to the entire room, rendering everyone as dumbstruck as she was herself. Then somebody laughed and, all of a sudden, conversation began again and the babble was almost deafening.

“Actually,” Matt said thoughtfully, “I’d sooner put it another way; before I suggest we get married, which is a different thing altogether. It makes it seem more of a mutual decision, rather than a proposal.”