Tamar (11 page)
Authors: Mal Peet
“But you don’t argue with Nicholson,” Dart said.
Tamar nodded as though Dart had hit on the right explanation. “Exactly. No one argues with Nicholson. That’s right.”
An hour later, Tamar stole barefoot into Marijke’s room. The curtains were pulled back, and the room was full of moonlight. She was sitting upright against the blue-white pillows, the blue-white sheet pulled around her; her face was divided in two by the shadow of the window sash. He sat sideways on the bed, then lowered himself so that his head rested on her shoulder. He felt the hardness of her collarbone against his cheek. She put her right hand to his face. They spoke in whispers.
“You haven’t told him about us.”
“No,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
Tamar sighed but didn’t speak.
She said, “It was so difficult tonight. I thought you must have told him, but then I watched his face and saw that he had no idea. I wanted to touch you but your eyes kept telling me not to.”
“My love, I’m sorry.”
“Oma actually told him, did you see that? And Ernst didn’t understand. He thought she was still talking about the puppet shows, and I didn’t translate. She looked so . . . confused.”
“Marijke, I —”
“Is it against the rules, our relationship?”
He let his breath out: a sigh, almost a laugh. “Probably. I don’t know.”
“Don’t you trust him?”
“Of course I trust him. Of course I do. It’s not that.”
She turned and let his head fall gently onto the pillow. She looked down at him, leaning on her elbow. “But this is all about trust, isn’t it? Are you afraid that if Ernst knows about us, he won’t be able to trust you? He’ll start to think you’d put me first, rather than him?”
And he wondered how he could have forgotten how clever she was. Sooner or later she would work out what he was actually afraid of. It wasn’t exactly a matter of trust, or lack of it. It was something more dangerous than that: envy. In English just a little word, but in the sound of it there was something green and grasping and wormy.
He said, “I just don’t want anyone — anything — to touch us. There are things I want to . . . keep out.”
Later, when Marijke was asleep, he kissed her again and eased himself from the bed. Then, reluctantly, he went to the cold spare bedroom.
Dart had fallen into deep sleep so quickly that when the nightmare woke him, he felt panicked and confused, completely ignorant of where he was. The strange gargling noise was coming from his own mouth, he realized. Someone had stabbed him in the throat with a pen and his windpipe was filling with black ink. He was so certain this had happened that his hand flew to his neck to feel for the wound. After a while, he was calm enough to realize that he was cold. He felt on the floor for his sweater and put it on, then spread his coat on top of the thin quilt. The gun slipped from the pocket and clattered onto the bare floorboards. He groped around for it and laid it on the cabinet next to the bed.
Moments later there was a light tap on the door, then a creak as it opened.
“Dart, are you all right?”
“Yes, I . . . I’m fine. Really.”
Tamar was merely a shadow deeper than the others. “I thought I heard something fall,” he said.
“The bloody pistol fell out of my pocket. Stupid of me. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“That’s okay. I’m a light sleeper.”
“I guess that’s a good thing to be. In our line of work, anyway.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night.”
Dart heard a floorboard creak. He did not hear Tamar’s door close. He must sleep with it open, Dart thought. And with his ears cocked, like a gun.
Comforted by the thought, he was asleep again in less than a minute.
From the
West London Post,
12th May 1995
An inquest yesterday recorded an open verdict on a man who died after falling from the balcony of his sixth-floor flat. William Hyde, 74, was found dead in the car park of Maris Towers, Hammersmith, on 19th March. The coroner, Dr. Rose Lambert, said that although there was some evidence that Mr. Hyde may have deliberately taken his own life, that evidence was not conclusive. Mr. Hyde may have been suffering from depression; however, there was no suicide note and a postmortem had revealed that he had been drinking.
Mr. Hyde was Dutch by birth, but at the time of the Nazi invasion of his country in 1940 was a graduate student at Imperial College, London. He was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, a branch of the British secret services, and trained in sabotage and secret warfare techniques. He was parachuted into occupied Holland in October 1944 and became a key figure in the reorganization of the Dutch resistance, surviving the “Hunger Winter” of 1944–45, when thousands of his countrymen died of starvation. In the spring of 1945, his group was betrayed to the Gestapo, and he was forced to flee for his life with a female member of the resistance, who later became his wife. The couple escaped across the Rhine, under German fire, shortly before Holland was liberated.
Mr. Hyde was awarded the DSO in 1946 and became a British citizen in 1947. He worked for the security services for five years and then joined the Post Office, where he enjoyed a distinguished managerial career. He was a leading member of the team that developed the computerized postcode system that has revolutionized mail delivery.
His daughter-in-law, Mrs. Sonia Hyde, told the inquest that Mr. Hyde was a very intelligent and thoughtful man, though emotionally scarred by his wartime experiences. He had enjoyed a “deep and caring” relationship with his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Tamar. However, in the weeks before his death he had become “noticeably withdrawn and depressed.” Mrs. Hyde told the inquest that her mother-in-law, Mrs. Marijke Hyde, currently in a nursing home, had been diagnosed as suffering from a degenerative mental illness and that Mr. Hyde had “coped very badly” with the situation.
That was it, start to finish. I’ve got the clipping here in front of me now, but I could’ve written it out without looking. I know it by heart, word for word. At the time, when I read it, I felt all sorts of things. Proud of him, I suppose. Embarrassed. (At school: “Was that your grandad jumped off the balcony, then?”) A bit ashamed of myself — I didn’t know what DSO stood for. Postcodes: boring. Now when I look at it, all I see is the spaces between the words where the truth might have been. But I’ve kept it anyway, along with some of the things that were in the box he left me. The box I refused to open until long after he died, because I was too angry with him. All those other feelings were wrapped up inside a thick layer of anger that stayed with me long after the grief had gone.
Because he had jumped, definitely. It wasn’t an accident. He wasn’t the kind of person who had accidents. He was the most careful man I’ve ever met. He thought about everything, even the simplest thing. You’d say, “Fancy a cup of tea, Grandad?” and he’d think about it. You could almost see him turning the question in his hands, like a squirrel looking for the best way into a nut. The coroner knew that, I think, when she said there was some evidence he’d committed suicide. I know what that evidence was. He was naked, for a start; and there is no way, no way at all, that he’d walk around the flat, let alone go out onto the balcony, like that. Not if he’d been in his right mind. He’d taken his false teeth out, and his glasses were on the living-room table. He couldn’t see a thing without them, so he must’ve felt his way onto the balcony. But the clincher, for me, was that he’d shaved his moustache off. Such a strange thing to have done. It was the first thing Mum said, poor Mum, when she got back from identifying the body. “He’d shaved his moustache off,” she said. “I hardly knew him.”
I didn’t understand it at the time, but I do now, I think. It was a sort of ritual. The clothes, the teeth, the specs, the moustache — it was as if he was stripping himself down to the bare minimum of what he was, removing all those disguises at last. And there
was
a suicide note; it’s just that no one realized it. How could they? It was this box, and the things in it.
So it wasn’t an accident, open verdict or not. He’d jumped, and he must have bloody known what that would do to me. He’d have known that it would open up the wounds my dad had left me with. And it did.
Dad had disappeared five years earlier, when I was ten and a half. We’d just moved to a bigger house near Ravenscourt Park, ten minutes from Gran and Grandad’s. The upstairs seemed a lot farther away from the downstairs than in the old house. There was a landing and a turn in the stairs and then a long walk along the hall to the kitchen. My bedroom was nice, but the wallpaper had a pattern that sometimes turned into faces, and I’d have to get out of bed to turn the big light on to get rid of them. The new school was okay, but I spent a lot of break times sitting on my own. I wasn’t much good at making new friends. I suppose I thought that if there were friends out there, they’d find me. I’m still a bit like that.
I had a lot on my plate back then. I’d been sent to an orthodontist, who said I needed braces. My new teacher told my mum that I might be a bit dyslexic. Mum was always messing with my hair. It seemed like everyone was always wanting to do something to me, change me in one way or another. So what with all that, and the move, and the new school, I was a bit slow noticing how strange Dad was getting.
My dad worked for the DTI, the Department of Trade and Industry, and he was away quite a lot, abroad. We were used to it; it was okay. But then he was away a lot more, and it seemed to me that Mum was on the phone all the time, getting emotional. I had no idea why. He never came back from one of his trips without a present for me: a cowboy hat from America, a pair of clogs painted with flowers from Holland, a beautiful little wooden horse from Czechoslovakia. When he was home, he read to me at bedtime, nearly always from our favourite book,
The Wind in the Willows
. It’s in my head, that story. I could recite you bits, like when Ratty takes Mole out in his boat for the first time:
“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So — this — is — a — River!”
“
The
River,” corrected the Rat.
“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”
“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”
But then when he’d turned my light off and I was trying to dive into sleep, I’d hear him and Mum rowing downstairs. Their voices came and went in waves: loud, quiet, loud, silent. I never went down, though. Not because I thought I’d get into trouble if I did. I never got any serious grief from my parents. What I was afraid of was that I’d walk into the room during one of their silences.
And then the rhythm of his coming and going just stopped. He simply stopped coming back. He didn’t phone. I waited for a long time, then one day I got in the car to go to school and I asked her.
“Mum? When’s Dad coming back?”
And she said, “Put your seat belt on, love. Have you got your lunch box?”
And I said, “Mum?
Is
Dad coming back? Has he gone?”
We were at the traffic lights on Goldhawk Road. Mum leaned on the steering wheel with her head on the back of her hands. “Christ,” she said, “what have I done to deserve this?” She wasn’t crying, exactly, but her throat was going in and out as if it was hard for her to breathe. Then there was a blast of car horns from behind, and I said, “Mum? Mum, the lights are green.”
William and Marijke — Grandad and Gran — took it very hard, of course. Gran was already getting a bit “ditzy” — Mum’s word — but I’m sure it was Dad’s vanishing that sent her sliding down to the edge of darkness. At the time, though, she was the more practical one.
“Sonia, we must inform the police,” she said.
I don’t think this had occurred to Mum, because she said, “The police? Do you think so?”
“Of course,” Gran said. “Jan is a missing persons case.” She held up three fingers. “There are two things here. Missing persons is a police matter, and we must report it. Next, we can do nothing ourselves. Are we to drive all over the place looking for him?” Gran gazed at her hand, puzzled for a moment that she was still holding up one finger. Then she curled it down into her fist and said, “He is not dead, I believe.”
That was when Grandad moaned softly and cupped his hands around her face. “I am so sorry, my love,” he said.
Marijke said something in Dutch that Mum and I couldn’t understand. I didn’t say anything because I don’t think I was supposed to be in the room.
The police came three times. They talked to me once, but they asked funny kinds of questions and I couldn’t have been much help. The day after the first police visit, Tweedledum and Tweedledee turned up. That’s what Mum called them because they looked so alike: both Dad’s sort of age, round faces, glasses, suits. I answered the door, and they said they were friends of my dad’s from his office, and could they speak to my mum? Mum took them into the living room and shut the door, so although I lurked on the stairs for a while, I couldn’t hear anything. They stayed about half an hour, and when they’d gone, I asked Mum what that was all about, and she said, “Oh, work stuff, money, you know.” But I could tell from the thoughtful look on her face that there was more to it than that.