Tamar (42 page)

He took his cigarettes out again, hesitated, then decided against lighting one. “Once or twice my job took me to Holland, and I spent my free time trawling libraries, chatting up government contacts, and so on. People were a bit more helpful than they were here, but I’d always find myself at a dead end sooner or later. There are still things that went on over there during the war that people don’t want dug up.”

Yoyo made a little grunting sound of agreement.

“I learned a lot about the period, but it was bloody laborious. I don’t speak much Dutch or German, and I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, let alone where to look. Basically all I had, you see, was the year 1944 and the name Tamar. I was forever hoping that the word would leap out at me from some dusty old file. And it didn’t happen. It was like chasing shadows in fog.”

He changed his mind and lit the cigarette. “Anyway, in 1988 my job changed. And as a result I found myself spending a bit of time with people from the secret services.”

That made me blink. “What?” I said. “Are you telling me you were a spy or something?”

“No, no. Not really. But the department started sending me to places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, the old Iron Curtain countries. We were looking for business opportunities, future markets, that sort of thing. So I’d go over there, and when I got back I’d have to go to some anonymous office in Euston or somewhere to be interviewed by blokes in grey suits. Debriefing, they called it. They were interested in anything I’d found out about industry and technology, stuff like that.”

I remembered Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“I got quite matey with one of them. Roger. I don’t suppose it was his real name. He was all right, though. Arsenal supporter, like me. So eventually I asked him if he could get his hands on SOE files. It was like I’d suggested he donate me his kidneys. But I kept on at him, and in the end he said he’d see what he could do. It was months before he got back to me. We met in a pub. He said he’d had one hell of a job finding the files, never mind getting a peep at them. But he’d done it. And what he’d found out was that everything, absolutely everything, to do with that group of agents, the Rivers group that William had been part of, had disappeared. It was as if those guys had never existed. He said he’d checked through all the Dutch section files, and although they were a bit patchy, there was at least something on all the other groups. He said it was as if someone had systematically removed the bits I was interested in. He gave me a funny look, I can tell you. He was a very suspicious man. I suppose it was a qualification for the job. He obviously thought that I might know how come those files had vanished. I didn’t, then. I think I do now, though. He did tell me that the man in charge of the SOE section that would have controlled the Rivers group was a Colonel Arthur Nicholson. Later I found out that Nicholson had been killed in a car accident in Australia in 1956. There was someone else called Hendriks, who might have been English or Dutch. And it probably wasn’t his real name; I never found out. So that was another dead end.”

I can tell you what it was like, listening to my dad talking in that neat little garden of his. It was like listening to someone who’d been kept in a dark cellar for years. Someone who’d shaped and rehearsed the story of himself in order to stay real. I know Yoyo felt that too. So we kept quiet.

“The next time I was in Holland I put an advert in a few newspapers. The personal columns. I can’t remember exactly what I said; something like
Tamar: resistance organizer 1944–45. Information sought.
Then a PO box number in Amsterdam and my London office number. Nothing. A few months later I did it again, and I got a phone call: a woman speaking perfect English with an unusual accent. Her name was Rosa Galloway. She said she might have information for me, but she was definitely suspicious. She wanted to know what my interest was. I told her that Tamar had been my father’s resistance code name during the war, and I was trying to trace his old comrades, which was sort of true. Then she surprised me by asking what my mother’s name was. I told her, then there was a silence. I got the impression she’d covered the mouthpiece and was speaking to someone at her end. Then she said that yes, perhaps she could help me, and asked if I could come to Holland, to The Hague. Of course I said yes. We fixed a date, and a place, the bar of a hotel.

“I wangled myself a long weekend and got to The Hague early on a Friday evening. Rosa Galloway turned out to be a woman about the same age as me, very good-looking, very smartly dressed. Big brown eyes. When I commented on her excellent English, she told me that she was married to a Canadian who worked at the embassy. She’d lived in Ontario for several years. Then she told me that it was her mother who’d spotted my advert. Her name was Trixie Greydanus, and she lived in a
hofje
— that’s like an almshouse, an old people’s home — in Delft, just south of The Hague. When she’d seen the advert she’d phoned Rosa, very agitated, because she knew who Tamar was. She’d been his courier in the resistance.

“That was an incredible moment for me. I begged Rosa to take me to Delft that evening, but she wouldn’t. She said her mother was in poor health and would be too tired. In the end we agreed she would drive me there the following morning.

“The
hofje
in Delft was a beautiful old building. I was surprised to find that most of the staff were nurses. It turned out that it was, in fact, a hospice. Trixie Greydanus had cancer, although you wouldn’t have known it, not at first glance. Her room had a tall narrow window, and she was sitting in a chair with her back to the light; so it took me a second or two to see what she looked like. She had the same bright chestnut-coloured eyes as Rosa. She was wearing a lot of careful makeup, and her hair was strange. Cut in a very old-fashioned style and dyed a dark blond colour. I was a bit slow to realize that it was a wig, and that her eyebrows were painted on, not real. She was holding on tight to her chair, but I could see that her arms were trembling. I was shaky too.

“Rosa introduced us and asked me to forgive her mother for not standing to greet me because her legs were very weak. Trixie said nothing at all during this, just stared at me with those big eyes. I felt awkward. Rosa started saying something in Dutch to her mother, but Trixie interrupted her.

“Rosa said, ‘My mother asks when you were born, and where.’

“‘October the fifth, 1945,’ I said. ‘In London.’ Trixie nodded and said something else.

“‘She asks if you’ve brought a photograph of your mother.’

“Which I had, of course. I’d brought three. The one that showed Marijke best was a picture I’d taken of her and William standing on the balcony of the flat the day they moved in. I gave it to her, and that’s when things started getting emotional. Trixie looked at it a long time and then nodded again, and then it was like she couldn’t stop nodding, and she was crying at the same time. She kept touching Marijke’s face in the photo and saying the same thing over and over. I didn’t need it translated.

“‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s not dead. She’s not dead.’

“Rosa had her arms around her mother, trying to calm her. ‘I was afraid this would happen,’ she said. ‘It’s not good for her to get upset. The drugs she has to take sometimes make her very emotional anyway, and confused. Maybe it would be best if you left us alone for a short while.’

“So I went for a walk. It was a freezing cold day. The streets were full of people shopping and doing ordinary things. When I went back, Trixie had calmed down. She’d put fresh makeup on to cover the mess her tears had made of her face. She was trying to smile, and she started talking straightaway. Rosa had to make her pause so she could fit the translations in.

“ ‘She says she recognized your mother at once. She has hardly changed. Always such a beautiful girl. My mother had many terrible days during the war, but the day Marijke disappeared was the worst. She has never stopped thinking and, er, wondering about her. Marijke was her best friend, more like a sister. That is why she cried just now. She says she is sorry. She says you do not look like her. More like your father, perhaps, except for your hair. You have the same shape of face.’

“Sitting there, I couldn’t decide whether my best bet was to wait and let Trixie Greydanus ramble on or to try to get her to answer the questions that I was desperate to ask. But before I could say anything, Trixie studied the photo again and spoke to Rosa.

“Rosa said, ‘My mother asks who the man in the photograph is. Is it Marijke’s husband?’

“I was taken by surprise. I laughed, I think, and said, ‘That’s Dad. My father. I expect he’s changed a great deal since you knew him.’

“Trixie obviously understood ‘father’;
vader
in Dutch is pretty much the same. She looked at me and at the photo again and said something to Rosa. Rosa glanced at me and the two of them had this fast muttered conversation, then both looked at me. Rosa opened her mouth and shut it again, and I sat there smiling at them like the idiot I was.”

Dart awoke on Sunday 18th March with a brain as busy as a pit of snakes. His mind must have been swarming in his sleep, because he could not tell the difference between dreaming and thinking.

It would all work, the mechanics of it, as long as he got the timing right. Tamar would be in the barn at two in the afternoon, making the scheduled transmission. He’d have the headphones on, so he probably wouldn’t hear the ambulance anyway, but it would be best to cut the engine and coast into the yard, just to make sure . . . No, it was
things,
and the unpredictability of those things, that squirmed in his head. A burnt-out wire or sheared bolt in the engine of the ambulance, a cartridge jammed in a gun, an unforeseen incident on the road.

Dart pulled his legs up in the bed and locked his arms around his knees, folding into himself. A lesser man would pray for luck, but he didn’t have to do that. He didn’t need luck, because he had inevitability. He would succeed in the same way that a river always reaches the sea no matter what tries to dam or divert it. And he’d been given Koop, his own malevolent little puppet, his instrument to use and then dispose of. There was nothing to fear.

He went to the mirror above the washstand. The bruising was now nothing more than a shadow, a trick of the light. The split in his lip had crusted over; he would have to shave very carefully tomorrow morning. He held his hands out flat. He willed the trembling to stop, and it did.

When Dart went into the kitchen, Albert Veening was sitting at the long table tapping ash from his cigarette into an empty cup. He wore a cardigan with unravelling cuffs and looked derelict. Dart went to the stove and found something that might have been coffee in a slightly warm saucepan.

“How are things?”

“Better, I suppose,” Albert said. “There are still four patients we daren’t leave unattended. Sidona is the worst. She’s convinced yesterday’s events prove that the angels have turned against her. She believes the Nazi bastard in charge of the raid was the dark angel Trago in one of his disguises. She has it all worked out, which means that her ordinary schizophrenia has become paranoid schizophrenia. Difficult stuff to deal with, religious mania. Especially when it’s so systematic. Thank God I’m an atheist.”

“Have you visited our uninvited guest?”

Albert carefully stubbed out his cigarette and put the dog end in his cardigan pocket. “Yes. I was up there half an hour ago. Can’t say I enjoy treating patients who greet you by pointing a Luger at your head. Mind you, I suppose he’s someone who does have reason to be paranoid.”

“How is he?”

“Bloody nasty. Apart from that, he’s doing surprisingly well. He’s a lot stronger than he looks. Yesterday opened up his wounds, of course, but they’re clean. He was on his feet when I went in this morning. He’d managed to walk around the room a few times. His temperature is normal again, which is a good sign.”

Dart sat down. “Sister Agatha is right, you know. We can’t keep him here.”

Albert leaned back and sighed. “Actually, this is exactly where he should be. He’s as crazy as a burning rat.”

“Albert.”

“Yes, I know.”

“For one thing,” Dart said, “I can’t keep him in the radio room until the damn war is over.”

“True. He smells, apart from anything else. I suppose we should give him a bath. Although I wouldn’t want to be the one who tries it. Got any more cigarettes?”

“I’ll share one.”

“Thank you. Does Mr. de Vries have somewhere else he can go?”

“He says he does, yes.”

Albert looked up. “Not the Maartens place, is it? You mentioned that the other day, and I wasn’t happy about it. I wouldn’t want what’s-her-name, Marijke, to have to —”

“No, no. Absolutely not. That was just, you know, the first thing I thought of. No, he says he knows a safe house.” Dart passed the cigarette.

Albert said, “Where?”

“He won’t tell me. He says he’ll direct me there.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wants to go tomorrow. He wants me to take him in the ambulance.”