Tamar (41 page)

I knew that this feeling, the feeling of things coming to an end, was affecting Yoyo as well. I knew it because, without saying anything, we’d agreed not to talk about it. Neither of us had spoken a sentence that began with “When we get back to London . . .” They were the taboo words that would shatter the spell. We were sitting with empty ice-cream tubs in this rather boring place because we didn’t want to say them. Sooner or later, though, one of us would have to say “Shall we go?”

It was Yoyo.

“Sure,” I said, as though I’d been waiting for him.

We gathered up our stuff. I’d gone a few paces before I realized that he hadn’t moved. I looked back at him. “What?”

He was staring at the car park next to the boathouse. Parked in the shade of a tree was a dusty blue Land Rover.

“Is that the same one we saw at the bridge?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. No, probably. It’s what farmers drive, I think. There are perhaps hundreds of them around here. It doesn’t mean anything.”

We walked back over the dam, pausing only briefly to look down at the beautiful gunge that polluted the water.

I’m not sure what I’d thought the “spring” that was the source of my river would be. Something like a natural fountain, maybe, a bubbling-up of crystal-clear water cupped in a niche of ancient mossy rocks. Needless to say, it isn’t like that at all. It’s in a bog. Not what you’d normally think of as a bog, though. Not a low, swampy place. Quite the opposite. In the summer, that is. It’s a high stretch of moorland covered in tall, sharp-edged yellow grass and prickly stuff. According to the map, the spring itself is snug up against a country lane, but when we stopped there, we realized there was no chance of getting to it. Between the lane and the moor, there’s a dense hedge of thorny wind-tilted trees and spiky yellow gorse. You’d be ripped to shreds if you tried to get through it. So Yoyo reversed the car until we got to a place where there was a gate and a track.

The sky seemed lower here and was as white as paper. The heat was moist and nasty. We climbed over the gate and walked down the track until we figured we were more or less opposite the place where the spring should be. A small cloud of gnats kept us company, spiralling above our heads. We saw now that the harsh yellow grass and brambles and low spiny bushes concealed a labyrinth of ditches. In winter they’d be little streams, but in that hot dry summer not one of them contained the trickle of water that would guide us to the spring itself. We stood baffled, flapping our hands at the insects zeroing in on us. We looked down at our bare legs and skimpy trainers.

“Shit,” Yoyo said poetically.

I can admit, now, that all the way up the river I’d secretly nursed the foolish idea that when we reached its source we’d be given some kind of answer. I can’t remember how I’d pictured it. A magical document, a scroll of time-stained parchment in a lead casket, jammed under a rock? A letter from beyond the grave, sealed in plastic behind a veil of falling water? Something as childish as that, probably. Something from an adventure novel in which everything is revealed and tidied up in the last chapter. A key to the code. But when I stood there and saw that the end of the journey was as vague and unreachable as the beginning had been, I realized I didn’t care. No, more than that: I was relieved. I didn’t want an ending, didn’t want to get to the full stop of our story.

Yoyo put his arm round my shoulders, and I leaned into him and put my hand on his chest.

After a while I said, “Home, then?”

And it didn’t seem so terrible a thing to say after all.

We walked back to the car. I was leaning on the gate, gazing back, when Yoyo nudged my arm and gestured with his head. The blue Land Rover was parked about twenty metres in front of the Saab. The driver’s door swung open, and a man stepped out. He stood and watched us for a long moment and then walked towards us. He was wearing a faded denim shirt. He had the face of an old man but didn’t move like one.

I heard Yoyo speak my name, but his voice seemed to come from a long distance; I had that thickness inside my ears that you get on aeroplanes. And I couldn’t look at him, because I was watching the other man’s face and he was watching mine. He stopped just beyond the reach of my arms.

He said, “Tamar?”

The edges of my world melted.

I heard myself say, “Dad?”

Time doesn’t heal, not really. I’m no longer that fifteen-year-old girl whose world changed shape on a desolate country road. Even now, remembering her at that moment, it’s as though something physically shifts inside me, pulling at a wound.

My father put his arms around me, and I held him, because it was impossible not to. We may have stood like that for some time. I couldn’t get into the Land Rover with him, though. I just couldn’t. So Yoyo and I followed in the Saab. Poor Yoyo; it was hard for him to drive, because I couldn’t let go of his left hand, even when he had to change gear. He must have been searching through his languages, desperately looking for something to say. I could only breathe in long shaky gulps, and there was nothing I could do to stop my tears. They ran down my face like rain down a windowpane. All the tears I’d never shed, all at once. A bloody river.

We drove for no more than ten minutes before the Land Rover turned off the road through a pair of immense iron gates. A tarmac driveway curved through parkland ahead of us, and I caught a watery glimpse of a large and complicated roof. We didn’t go towards it. Instead, we turned left again and parked beside a gatehouse, a quaint cottage of grey stone and fancy white-painted gables.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that at times of crisis we do the most ordinary things. Dad just walked to the back door of the gatehouse and said, “Come in.” Then we were in a small tidy kitchen with Dad filling a kettle as if we were familiar visitors who’d popped in for a cup of tea.

If there are words for what I felt, I don’t know what they are. I was so full of questions that I thought they would choke me before I could tug them out of my throat. The first one I managed was truly stupid.

“Do you live here?”

“Yes. The big house — did you see it? — it’s a language school for business people. Residential. Lots of Germans, a few Japanese. I take care of the grounds and do maintenance jobs around the house. It’s a beautiful old place. I’ll show you round later, if you like.”

He said all this very quickly, in one breath, knowing, I suppose, that if he paused I’d ask other, harder questions. I realized that I wouldn’t have recognized his voice if I hadn’t been looking at his face. I’d forgotten it.

The kettle built to a roar. Dad was opening cupboard doors blindly as though he didn’t know where his things were kept.

“Dad?
Dad?
”

His shoulders fell. My fists were clenched; my fingernails dug into my palms. I felt Yoyo’s hands on my arms.

“Dad,” I said, or wailed. “Dad, for God’s sake!”

He turned to face us. His eyes were wet, and he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what to do with his hands. In the end he stuck them under his armpits and clamped his arms tightly to his chest. The kettle clicked off, leaving a huge silence.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you . . . I know you must have so many questions. I don’t know where to start.”

Nor did I. I was shivering, and I couldn’t control it.

Dad said, “I think you might be in shock. Wait.”

He took three small glasses and a bottle from a shelf and poured shots of brandy. As soon as I smelled it, my mouth filled with salty saliva.

I managed to say, “Bathroom.”

Dad pointed to the hallway. “Through there. Top of the stairs.”

I got there somehow. A clean, almost sterile room. A bath with a plastic shower curtain. I lifted the toilet lid and threw up, twice.

When I went back down to the kitchen, Yoyo and Dad had gone. I looked around the room. Nothing in the sink, no washing up on the drainer. Tea towels neatly folded and hung on the rail of the electric cooker. A cork notice board with a few bills and business cards pinned to it, but nothing handwritten, no postcards, no photographs. A small square table, and just one chair.

I heard voices and looked out of the open window into the garden. Dad and Yoyo were sitting opposite each other at a heavy-looking picnic table, the kind that pubs have. Yoyo was talking. Dad was leaning on his elbows, his head lowered.

When I went out, they both stood up as if I were the Queen or somebody. Yoyo came to meet me and put the palm of his hand gently to the side of my face. “Tamar? Are you okay?”

I nodded.

He said quietly, “This is some hell of a thing.”

“I don’t know if I can deal with it,” I said.

“To tell the truth, I think we have no choice. This is what it was all about, the whole time. Come on.”

I sat down next to Yoyo so that I could hold his hand if I needed to. Dad looked sick, despite his suntan, but perhaps that was because his face was thinner than I’d remembered.

He said, “Johannes has been telling me how you came to be here. About Mum, your gran. About your . . . William’s death. I’m trying to take it all in.”

“You didn’t even know Grandad was dead?”

“No. When I saw you, I thought he must have sent you here. That he’d told you where I was. Which I suppose he did, in his own twisted way.”

I stared at him. I had the sensation of buckling and bending. It was a feeling that would get stronger — and worse — as the day went on.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you mean he knew? He knew where you were all along?”

“No, no. He found me.”

“What? He came to this house? You saw him?”

“Oh, yes,” Dad said, and there was no missing the sourness in his voice.

“When was this?”

“Last November. November the fifth, to be precise. I’d been up at the school all afternoon. Setting up a firework display. I got back here just after six and found a car outside. A hire car, from Plymouth. I couldn’t see who was in it because the windows were all misted up. I was shocked to the core when it turned out to be him.”

I struggled with this. Last November. Then I remembered. “He told us he’d gone to Brighton,” I said.

Dad nodded, unsurprised, but said nothing.

“And he didn’t tell me. He knew, he knew where you were for months, and he never told me!”

“No. I didn’t think he would. Not after what happened between us.”

I put my head in my hands. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.”

Dad reached across the table and took my wrists in his hands. I couldn’t look at him.

“Tamar,” he said, “listen, please. I suppose I knew that this would happen one day. I wanted it and dreaded it at the same time. I’ve missed you so much, my love. I can’t tell you what it’s been like.”

I looked up then. There were tears in his eyes, and that was nothing like good enough.

“Don’t say that. How can you say that? You left us. You left me. I thought you were bloody dead.”

I pulled my arms from his grip. He clasped his hands on the table in front of him and stared down at them. Yoyo laid his palm on my back, a gentle, useless gesture. I really was all cried out by then, but my eyes felt hot and swollen.

Dad said, “I want to say sorry, but it would be . . .”

“What?”

He looked up. “Pathetically inadequate.”

“No, Dad,” I said, “it would be an insult.”

“Yes.”

Then there was a silence, and I couldn’t bear it. “So tell me, then. Tell me why you left us.” My voice didn’t sound like my own.

He looked away, drawing in a long audible breath that made his shoulders rise then fall. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, very well.”

He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him smoke.

“He, William, once said to me that some of us have things, secrets, that it’s best we take to our graves. That was the expression he used. And I came to believe it. Or accept it, anyway. And it’s cost me more than I can say. Tell me, did he by any chance tell you how you came to be called Tamar?”

The sun had become a hazy yellow ball. Blurred shadows had gathered at the foot of the neatly clipped hedge.

“Anyway,” Dad said, “we had that conversation about your name two months — no, less — before you were born. I didn’t think too much about it for a long time after that. Now and again I’d try to talk to him about Holland and the war and the rest of it, but I never got anywhere. Mum, your gran, would sometimes let a few things slip, but then she’d sort of skitter away from the subject. Especially if he was there. She’d say her memories were all muddled up. Maybe they were. I don’t know.”

He stared down at the table, picking at the grain with a fingernail.

“Dad,” I said, “what does all this have do with you . . . going away?”

“Everything. It has
everything
to do with it.” There was a sudden fierceness in his voice that startled me. “I’m sorry. This . . . all this stuff goes round and round in my head all the time. All the time. I have to tell you about it in the order things happened; I can’t do it any other way.”

There was a look on his face that I recognized. I’d seen it on the faces of poor crazy homeless people on the streets, the ones who are desperate to tell you their tragic life stories. Dad had that same twist to his mouth, that same determination to get things said. I felt almost afraid of him. I slid my hand under the table and found Yoyo’s, and he threaded his fingers tightly through mine.

I said, “Okay, Dad. I’m listening.”

“It was something to do with you starting school, strange to say. It was a big thing for me. Maybe for all parents. You have this baby, and then suddenly — boom — you’re dropping her off at the school gates. Time seemed to have accelerated. I was nearly forty by then; William and Marijke were well into their sixties. It started to seem like a terrible thing to me, that they would die and I would have no idea about who and what they’d been. It felt like I didn’t know who I was. So I started investigating, researching, the war in Holland. For a year or two it was, well, like a sort of hobby. But it was much more difficult than I’d thought. Information was hard to come by. There was the military stuff, of course. Plenty about the battle for Arnhem, for instance. But trying to find out anything about the SOE, what it actually did, was hopeless. And every time I came up against a brick wall, I got more determined to continue. As time went by I suppose I got a bit obsessive.”