The Road Between Us (3 page)

But what he seems to be going through back home in London is not so much a resurrection as a regression. His reflexes are those of a baby, especially his hand-grasping, sucking and asymmetrical neck reflexes.

‘Northy. It’s me, Niall. Niall Campbell. Do you remember me?’ He holds his hand. ‘We worked together at the Foreign Office. I was best man at your wedding. You were best man at mine. Can you speak?’

Niall has drawn the short straw. It was decided that, because of his involvement with the Friends of Edward Northcote campaign, the bad news Edward would have to hear at some point would be best coming from him, someone he knew rather than an anonymous civil servant. But the doctors have advised that the patient may be too fragile. Niall should wait until Edward has built up his strength. The shock could kill him.

‘Northy? Can you tell us anything about what happened?’

Edward raises his chin and opens his eyes. They are dilated with panic. He makes a heavy-tongued noise.

‘
Frejya?
’

III

WHEN EDWARD
’
S FIRST REASONABLY CLEAR SENTENCE COMES, TWO
and a half weeks after returning to London, it is directed at Niall. ‘Where am I?’ he says in a slurring voice.

‘You’re at the Cromwell Hospital in London. It’s good to have you back, Northy.’

‘I know you.’

‘Yes, it’s me, Niall. Niall Campbell.’

Edward’s beard has gone now and his hair has been cropped close to his skull. He looks around the room and raises his hand towards the mirror.

‘You want to see a mirror?’

Edward shakes his head stiffly.

‘You think
I
should look in a mirror, is that it?’ Niall is speaking in the kind of loud, laughter-edged voice adults use with children. ‘You think I’ve changed?’ He pats his stomach. ‘I have changed, Northy, and so have you. It’s been a long time.’ He pulls up a chair and takes his friend’s hand. ‘Can you talk about what happened?’

Edward blinks but says nothing. Niall knows better than to try to fill the silence. There is emptiness in Edward’s eyes. They are red-rimmed and unfocused, like a sleepwalker’s. Is this, he wonders, what is meant by the thousand-yard stare?

A minute passes before Edward finally speaks. ‘The Cromwell? Not St Thomas’s?’

Niall gives a snort of laughter, his friend’s memory for Foreign Office protocol taking him by surprise.

‘We’ve made special arrangements for you … Can you remember anything? Do you know who was holding you hostage?’

‘There was a boy with a cricket bat.’

‘He was the one who found you.’

‘My hands were tied.’

‘Who tied them?’

‘I never …’ Edward’s mouth dries up mid sentence.

Niall is struck by the absence of emotion in his friend’s voice. It is a whispery monotone devoid of strength and expression, like a guitar without tension in its strings.

The tall doctor who has been hovering by the door now enters, pulls down the bed cover and jabs a pin in the patient’s foot.

Edward jumps.

‘You can feel that?’ the doctor asks. ‘That’s great. Can you clench your fists?’

Edward manages a half-clench.

Next the doctor sits on the bed, holds up a pencil and moves it from left to right and up and down to see if Edward’s eyes can track it. They can. A small torch is now being shone in his eyes.

‘Don’t do that, please.’

‘Sorry.’

‘They shone torches in my face.’

‘They?’ Niall leans forward.

Edward does not elaborate.

‘How is your vision?’ the doctor asks. ‘Is it OK?’

Edward thinks for a moment. Blinks. ‘Everything is black and white … Why is everything black and white?’

‘You can’t see any colours?’

‘Only grey … Like Niall’s hair.’

Niall grins.

Edward blinks again. ‘Where’s Frejya? Where did she go?’

Niall looks down. ‘That wasn’t Frejya you saw.’

‘But she was in here a minute ago.’

Niall exhales slowly. ‘That was a couple of weeks ago. You’re going to have a problem with time gaps for a while, until your brain recalibrates itself … And it wasn’t Frejya you saw. It was Hannah.’ He sighs again, more heavily this time. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Northy. This is all going to seem really fucked up, for a while at least. You’re just …’

Edward has fallen asleep.

The doctor flips over a sheet on a clipboard and gives Niall a sidelong glance. ‘You family? I recognize you.’

‘A friend. I’ve been interviewed on the news a bit lately, talking about Edward’s release.’

‘That’s it; you’re the guy from the Foreign Office. Sir Niall …’

‘Campbell. And it’s pronounced Neil. It’s Scottish.’

‘You don’t sound Scottish.’

‘It’s not compulsory. Can I have a word with you outside?’ The two men walk out into the corridor and speak in lowered voices. ‘So what’s the situation here?’

The doctor looks over his shoulder before making eye contact. ‘He should make a reasonable recovery but we are going to have to monitor his food intake carefully. One of the mistakes they made after the liberation of Belsen was to feed the prisoners too quickly. Thousands died because their bodies couldn’t cope. Cardiac failure mostly. We’ll keep him in intensive care for a few weeks, on a controlled diet and a glucose drip, then we’ll start giving him some physio to try and rebuild his muscles.’

‘But no lasting medical problems?’

‘I didn’t say that. It’s too early to tell whether some of the conditions he is suffering from will be permanent, but so far we have detected … Well, do you want the whole list?’ He begins counting them off with his fingers. ‘Early evidence of renal failure, cirrhosis, possible diabetes, anaemia, dehydration, calcium deficiency and impaired vision which we think will leave him with a permanent sensitivity to light.’ The doctor shakes his head. ‘He also has fungi growing under his oesophagus, which makes swallowing painful for him. And our tests are showing he may have scurvy and rickets,
which we haven’t really seen in this country for decades. But we think all these things will prove temporary. His long-term problems are going to be psychological.’

‘We’ve got a good therapist lined up for when he’s ready … Poor old Northy.’

‘Yes, poor old Northy,’ the doctor echoes.

When they step back into the ward, Edward’s eyes are open but they are unfocused. They seem to be looking through Niall – the thousand-yard stare again. ‘It
was
Frejya,’ Edward says through closed teeth. ‘She was here.’

‘Well, I’ll leave you two to it,’ the doctor says.

‘You’ve been away for just over eleven years,’ Niall says, once the doctor has closed the door. ‘That was Hannah you saw. She’s twenty now.’

Niall can see the blood pulsing in Edward’s face. Sense his dizziness and feeling of time dislocation. He now knows that his friend has been unable to take in any of the information fed into his brain on an aural drip as he drifted in and out of consciousness these past couple of weeks. This is not the first time Niall has explained to Edward that his daughter is now an adult.

For a full minute, Edward is silent. Then he says softly: ‘Hannah is nine … She was nine.’

‘This is going to take some time to … to get used to.’

‘Can I see my wife? Where is she?’

Niall hesitates. ‘One thing at a time, Northy …’

Edward eyes him, as if recognizing him for the first time. ‘Did you say you were still at the Foreign Office?’

‘Yep. And you can come back to work for us whenever you feel ready, in whatever capacity.’

‘Says who?’

Niall looks embarrassed. ‘Says me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ll explain later.’

‘Tell me now. What grade are you?’

Niall looks away. ‘I’m the Permanent Undersecretary.’

Edward tries to sit up. ‘You?’

‘For the moment. There’s a general election expected soon and the new lot will probably want their own man in.’

‘Sir?’

Niall studies the floor and nods. ‘But I don’t use it. Tell me about the people who kidnapped you.’

Something happens to Edward’s eyes, as though a shadow is passing over them. ‘They …’

‘Do you remember anything about when you were captured?’

‘Everything went black.’

‘You were in a convoy. There was an ambush. Your Land Cruiser was hit by an RPG.’

Edward frowns. ‘Who were they?’

‘We figured it would be local opportunists who didn’t know they’d got a high-value target. We had a press blackout and notified the Met’s Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit. But nothing. No demands. No video posted on the web. We had no idea where you were.’

‘I was underground. In a cave. It was dark.’ Edward grimaces, as if a bubble of pain has entered his blood. ‘Do we have to do this now?’

‘No. Whenever you are ready. I understand.’

‘Can I see Frejya?’

‘You’ve lost a lot of weight.’

‘I want to see my wife.’

‘I’ve brought a mirror.’

Niall hands over a mirror, but Edward does not look in it. Instead he places it face down on the bed. His eyes look distant and cloudy again; the eyes of a dead man.

‘How old am I?’

‘Forty-seven.’

A beat.

‘Forty-seven?’

‘Yeah.’

Another beat.

‘I’m forty-seven?’

‘Yeah, you’re forty-seven, Northy. Same age as me.’

‘How old was I when I was taken?’

‘Thirty-six.’

Niall feels for his friend’s hand. ‘It’s going to take time.’

‘Why won’t you talk about Frejya?’

‘Northy … There’s no easy way to say this …’

Fear suddenly registers on Edward’s face. His hands try to cover his ears but the muscles in his arms are too atrophied. He shakes his head. Closes his eyes. Mouths the word ‘no’.

Niall’s eyes are wet now. He puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. She died.’

‘Can I speak to her?’

‘Listen to me. You’ve got to listen.’ There is a crack in Niall’s voice now. ‘Frejya is dead.’

IV

Berlin. Early autumn, 1939

ANSELM HAS NEVER SEEN THE PEOPLE
’
S COURT BEFORE, BUT HE
has heard of it. Everyone in Germany has heard of it. The Volksgerichtshof. A place of fear. A place without memories. Today its nineteenth-century façade is draped with three red, white and black swastika banners. They are thirty feet long and make the building look as if it is bleeding.

He is brought in via a side entrance off Potsdamer Platz and taken down stone stairs to a holding cell. There is no window. No bed. No chair. Noticing that it smells of urine, Anselm realizes that there is no lavatory either. His belt and shoelaces are taken from him. The policeman from the
Ordnungspolizei
with kind eyes and a brass gorget around his neck looks him up and down thoughtfully, then takes his tie as well.

Once the iron door has clanged shut and heavy keys have been turned in the lock, Anselm leans his shoulder against the wall, closes his eyes and tries, for reassurance, to summon Charles’s smiling face. He wonders what has happened to him. Is he in prison, too? When he opens his eyes again he notices some words scratched at eye height. They are messages from the damned.

‘My name is Josef Mann. I have a wife and two children in Hamburg. Please let them know where I am.’

And in another hand: ‘Please God, why?’

But the one at which he stares the most is the simplest: ‘Help me.’ This one chills Anselm’s blood.
Help me
. A man can be forgotten in this place, he thinks.
Help me
. All traces of his life can be erased.
Help me
. He can be reduced to a single pitiful plea.

While under
Hausarrest
in Berlin, Anselm had written to Charles in London. He had also written to his parents in Aachen, giving them his temporary address, but he had not told them about his deportation from England, or the reason for it. As the weeks went by, he had allowed himself to think that he had fallen through the Reich’s bureaucratic net. Then, as August drew to a close, a
Blockleiter
arrived to apply crosses of tape to his windows to prevent shattering. In the gaps between them, Anselm had been able to watch trenches being dug near the bandstand in the Tiergarten. The Berliners who walked with urgent steps over the cobbles below had started carrying gas masks. But he could still hear a barrel organ being played somewhere nearby and, occasionally, the heavy flapping of wings as a swan took flight. One day, on the cusp of autumn, war was declared through the loudspeakers. Soon afterwards an air-raid siren was tested. Then they came for him.

Now, as he hears the rattle of the heavy keys again, he looks towards the cell door. The lock turns with a solid clunk as before and the door yawns open with a squeak of unoiled hinges. While the man with the kind eyes remains outside the cell, another policeman stoops to enter, even though he is not especially tall, certainly not as tall as Anselm.

‘Arms out,’ he barks.

Anselm raises his arms, bent at the elbows. The policeman’s touch is icy, his skin forged from the same steel as the handcuffs. Once outside the cell, Anselm stands between the two guards. He is half a foot taller than both of them and, with the prisoner wearing a white shirt buttoned to the throat as if he is a priest, the three of them look like a scene from a stained glass window, an unholy triptych. As Anselm follows the first policeman up a spiralling metal
staircase, he has to grip the waistband of his trousers to stop them falling down.

The iron-barred gate at the top of the stairs opens into a narrow white corridor that smells of fresh paint. At the end of this another prisoner, about Anselm’s age, is sitting head down, leaning forward, on a bench. His handcuffed wrists are resting on his knees. He has his own escorts. Anselm is about to walk towards them when he feels a restraining hand on his shoulder.

The prisoner is breathing quickly and, as Anselm tunes in to the sounds coming from the other side of the black wooden door he is facing, he appreciates why. Shouting can be heard. He cannot make out the exact words, but it is clear that someone is being cursed in there. Anselm feels a chill in his stomach. His scrotum tightens.