Tamar (24 page)

“Do you want to know what I think?”

“Yes, please. By the way, you look incredibly sexy when you are being serious like this.”

“Shut up. Listen, I think he put the stuff in this box very carefully. He wanted to make sure the first thing I saw was the crossword.”

“Why?”

“Because we couldn’t finish it. It’s like saying we have unfinished business. Know what I mean? It’s like saying that this, all of this, is a puzzle I’m supposed to solve.”

“I had this thought also.”

“Especially because of the
Treasure Island
thing,” I said, hurrying now. “And the maps.”

“You must go slow a little bit,” Yoyo said. “I haven’t read
Treasure Island
.”

I took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. But in the story there’s a map showing where treasure is buried, and —”

“And these maps tell us where the treasure is? But there are lots of little crosses on them, not one. Maybe the money is the treasure.”

“No, I think the money is the ship.”

“I am lost now,” Yoyo said, frowning. “What do you mean, the money is the ship?”

“I mean that the money is to . . . to make it possible to get there.” Then I sank a little bit, because I wasn’t at all sure what I meant.

Yoyo’s fingers drummed a complex little rhythm on the table top. Then he said, “The maps are in a certain order, yes?”

“Yes.”

We both looked down at them.

“They go from south to north, and what joins them together is this river that has the same name as you.”

“Right.”

Yoyo stood up straight and walked up and down the kitchen. “It’s fantastic,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“You think he wants you to go there? To make a journey up this river? Is that what you think he’s telling you?”

“I can’t think of anything else,” I said. “Can you?”

Yoyo chewed a thumbnail for a little while. Then he picked up the identity booklet. “Your grandfather was in the resistance, is that right? And you said he was dropped with a parachute into the Netherlands?”

“That’s what Mum said that Dad told her, yeah.”

“So, if this Christiaan Boogart person was your grandfather, and these were his identity papers, and he came from England in 1944, he must have had this with him when he arrived in Holland. But the date on the papers is 1942. There is a difference of two years.”

“Is that important?” I said, feeling lost.

“Oh yes, I think so. I think that this identity thing is false. I think it was made in England. It is obvious, really. The British would not send your grandfather to Holland with his real name.”

He squinted at the little snapshot again. “So yes, maybe one of these men is William Hyde, okay. But, I’m sorry, his real name was not Christiaan Boogart, I’m sure. That is not the answer to your mystery.”

I knew he was right. I must have looked very dejected because Yoyo sat and took both my hands in his.

He said, “You are right and wrong at the same time. I think that for some reason your grandfather has set you a puzzle to make a mess of your head. But I think he was perhaps a mad old bugger. Old people are weird, you know. Maybe you should take all this stuff down to the bottom of the garden and put fire to it. Not the money, of course.”

He tugged my hands. “Let’s do it. Burn it, and I will buy you dinner. No,
you
can buy me dinner, now that you are so rich.”

“No.”

“Why not? Then you can just remember him the way you knew him.”

“No,” I said again.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Yoyo studied me with great seriousness. “Okay. Good. So what do you want to do?”

“Do you still have your car?”

“The old Saab? Of course. I came here in it.”

“What are you doing in the last week of July?”

He sat back and massaged the blond stubble on his jaw, gazing at me. “Tamar, are you thinking what I think you are thinking?”

“Probably.”

“You want me — us — to go together to . . . where is it? Devon? Cornwall?”

I nodded. He kept his eyes on mine for several seconds, his expression very solemn. Then he slid forward off the chair and fell to his knees. He put his hands together in prayer and lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

“Thank you, Grandad,” he said. “Thank you for making all my wild dreams come true.”

I leaned forward and slapped the back of his ridiculous head.

I made two cups of tea and we took them outside into the hot garden. Yoyo put on his sunglasses, which were small and circular and amber-tinted; they made him look like a back-combed owl. He perched on the garden table next to the barbecue that we hadn’t used since Dad left.

“You must remember two things,” he said. “First, we have no idea what we are looking for. This trip will perhaps be not a treasure hunt, but a what-you-call-it — a wild goose hunt, is it?”

“I know. I’ve thought about that. Maybe there’s nothing to find. Maybe Grandad just wanted me to go and see this river I’m named after, and that’s what the money is for.”

“It’s a lot of money just to go to see a river.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is, isn’t it?”

“And it doesn’t explain the other stuff in the box.”

“No. What’s the second thing?”

He sighed and lifted his shoulders in a sad gesture. “The second thing is that your mother will not let you do it. With me.”

It’s not that I hadn’t thought of that, of course. I’d thought of it about three milliseconds after I’d decided to call Yoyo. I’d thought about that huge bloody obstacle almost as much as I’d thought about what was in the box. A lot more than I’d thought about biology or geography. I’d run a thousand different arguments through my head, rehearsed a thousand reasons why she should let me do it. None of them were good enough to convince me, let alone her. I was going to have to fall back on that old technique, the only technique that we can rely on in the battle with parents: nag and whinge. And when that doesn’t work, nag and whinge some more. Wear them down.

“She’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll sort it.”

Yoyo grinned at me. “She’ll go through the ceiling.”

“The roof,” I said.

“Yes. She’ll go through the ceiling and then the roof.”

That was something else he was right about.

On the morning of 5th January, Tamar sat at the kitchen table of Sanctuary Farm. A map was spread in front of him, and the deciphered signal that had come in from London the previous night was by his right hand. The first part was clear enough, unfortunately. His requested supply drop had been postponed because of bad weather and a shortage of aircraft. There were a number of inconsistencies and contradictions in the remainder of the message; now and again Tamar would mutter to himself and utter small sounds of frustration. It seemed unlikely that London had cocked up the coding, and he had checked his own deciphering twice and found nothing wrong. If Dart were with him, he’d probably see the problem in no time at all.

Dart wasn’t there because Tamar had taken over responsibility for the transceiver for the time being. It had been absurd to expect Dart to struggle back and forth through the white hell of the weather. They’d agreed this on Christmas morning, but the conversation had been strangely spiky and Dart had left abruptly immediately afterwards.

It had been the first morning that Oma had been too ill to leave her bed. Dart and Marijke had spent some time with her, then Dart had come downstairs alone. He’d talked about Julia’s condition in a curiously distant, matter-of-fact way. Then, just as Tamar had been about to raise the subject himself, he’d said, “I can’t keep slogging out here if the weather stays like this, you know.”

His tone of voice had been strange, like familiar music played in the wrong key.

Tamar said, “No, of course you can’t. You could die on the road if you got caught in a snowstorm. I was going to suggest that I take over wireless operations here until the weather improves.”

“Good. You’ve got a copy of the schedule, haven’t you?”

“Yes. It’s bloody ironic, though, isn’t it? While Oma is sick you have the perfect excuse to come here.”

Dart paused in buttoning his coat but didn’t look up. “Ironic,” he said. “Yes, that’s one way to describe it.”

And that had been it. Dart had downed most of a cup of tea and left, shoving the heavy bike up towards the road, leaving an irregular woven track that was later obliterated by afternoon snow.

The memory of that morning, their last meeting, occasionally nagged at Tamar like a torn fingernail. Still, there was probably a simple explanation for Dart’s apparent ill humour: he’d been hungover. They both had.

Tamar concentrated on the map and the coordinates again. He looked up when Marijke entered the room. She put a half-full bowl of broth and a spoon down on the table; then, without touching him, she went to the window and stood there with her arms folded. He watched her back, waiting.

“She wants a priest,” Marijke said.

“Ah.” He stood up to go to her.

When she heard the scrape of his chair, she said, “Don’t touch me. If you touch me, I’ll cry. And I’m not going to cry. I told her not to be so ridiculous. I pointed out that the only Catholic priest this side of Apeldoorn is Father Willem, and that he’s at least as old as she is and wouldn’t last ten minutes out of doors in this weather. I said that since there was no question of him coming here; she has no choice but to get better. I refuse to discuss the matter any further.”

Her voice cracked on the last sentence, so she tried it again. “I absolutely refuse . . .”

She put her hands to her face. Tamar held still. They stood like that for several long moments in the half-light of the kitchen.

Tamar said, “Can I touch you yet?”

“No.”

“I want to.”

She turned then and faced him. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and folded her arms again, hugging herself.

“I’m so angry,” she said. “I was all right until you came back. I’d given up. So many terrible things. Relatives, neighbours disappearing. Opa. The bloody Germans coming to . . . to strip us bare. Oma’s silence.
Bam, bam, bam
. Like being punched over and over again. You get numb. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Unless you start to hope. That’s the trick, you see: you can take any amount of shit unless you start to hope.”

“Marijke, come on —”

“No, listen. If you weren’t here and Oma died, I’d deal with it. Because there’d be nothing more to lose. It’d be just me. But now it’s different; it’s worse. Because you’re yet another person to lose. You do stupid, dangerous things, and every time you go away, I pray in agony that you’ll come back. It’s unfair. Hope is pulling me to pieces. I can’t stand it. I really don’t think I can stand it. Can you imagine a life for me if I lose you as well?”

He said, “I really believe the war is almost over. It’s all right to hope now. Hope is . . . appropriate. I have no intention of dying. Or leaving. We’re going to stay together.”

She stretched her arms towards him, a beggar’s gesture. “Listen to yourself. Don’t you see?”

Two days later, in response to a signal from Amsterdam relayed through London, Tamar left the farm. He’d wrapped himself in so many clothes that when she watched him walk into the white landscape, he looked like a big clumsy animal. A big clumsy circus animal pushing a bicycle.

Later that same day, Marijke, busying herself in the kitchen, heard sounds from above. The coughing was routine, and she had tuned her hearing to pick up variations in it. But this was something else. She went to the foot of the stairs. Incredibly, Oma stood looking down at her, clutching the banister. She was wrecked, red-eyed, and full of purpose.

“Oma! What are you doing out of bed? What do you want?”

The old woman wanted to be downstairs, and there was no arguing with her. She refused to sit by the stove and lowered herself onto a chair at the table. There was a coughing fit and a spell of breathing that sounded like cloth being torn. When it was over, she mimed the need for pen and paper. Marijke brought them to her, along with a mug of tea, which was ignored.

Julia Maartens began to write, hunched over the paper like a schoolchild taking an examination in the presence of cheating classmates. When her sweat fell onto the paper, she blotted it carefully with her sleeve. Once, passing behind her, Marijke glanced down and saw that the letter began with the words
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned
. She fought the desire to seize the paper and tear it apart; instead she lit the lamp because the daylight in the room was failing. When Julia had finished her confession, she folded it into an envelope that she addressed to Father Willem van Dael. With Marijke’s help she got to her feet and went to the dresser. She reached up and tucked the envelope behind the brass and mahogany clock that had not worked for several years. When that was done, she allowed her granddaughter to help her back to bed. It took a long time to climb the stairs. Their progress was twice halted by bouts of coughing that seemed likely to unhinge the old woman’s ribs.

Before he’d left on Christmas Day, Dart had told Marijke there was a possibility that Oma would develop pneumonia. He had described the change in symptoms that would occur if that were to happen. Oma’s breathing would become faster and shallower. The rattle in her chest might well turn into something more like a faint whistling; she would perhaps feel pain high in her back. Her temperature would rise, and she would almost certainly be feverish and confused. Still, Dart had said, Oma was strong and the chances were that none of these things would happen. But his tone had been strangely flat, neutral; and he had not once looked Marijke in the eye. She was not reassured. Within forty-eight hours of Oma writing her confession, the changes that Dart had predicted took hold of her.