Spitfire Girls Page 20

‘Joined up – what?’ She fought the tears that were sure to come.

  ‘For some reason,’ Burt explained, suddenly gentle, ‘he thought you were gone for ever, so he tried to join up. They’ll give him a civvy job and send him to a fleapit outfit down south, I bet. Imagine the rednecks listening to Blake.’

  Edith was already halfway up the stairs, the horror of her task growing with each minute. The smell of her mother’s excellent cooking made the thought of ATA and an American wing and the Australians seem unbearable. Her stomach fluttered as if she had stolen something valuable and was now about to confess to a judge. Here on Florence Avenue, in the house smelling of prohes and lock-shen, she could have been awakening from a dream, like the wizard’s Dorothy – except that Edith still had to journey to Oz, and in a remote world caught up in war she knew the mission she had to fulfil might lead not to an emerald city but to atrocities no Coke-swigging young American could imagine.

  But tonight she herself would take Hartmut for an icecream soda, while her homeland still drifted in cosy isolationist peace.

  34

  Travelling the roads of Norfolk and Suffolk like a tramp, Friedrich Kranz had become fascinated by the geographical schizophrenia of this island kingdom, and by the variety of plant and animal life growing wild in perpetual damp. Nothing had changed since Elizabethan times in certain villages, whose people wore modern clothing but whose slowness of uptake was mediaeval. Was it possible Germans were sharper, not necessarily intellectually, but in their grasp of reality? Might this strange island race someday grab hold of a Schicklgruber culled from their foggy fens and make him – or her – their human clamp on reality?

  It had occurred to Kranz that most of the hysteria in the land of the Third Reich had been engendered by a reluctance on the part of the masses to take control of their individual destinies. No wonder America did not wish to enter such a war: every racial group had congregated within its shores, trying to assert one thousand different visions of reality, none of which was perfect, but each of which cried out ‘I am!’ like kittens in a multicoloured litter. A land nurturing the spirit of the individual might endure and flourish, Kranz thought, more triumphantly than one overrun with eccentricity, or one commandeered by a failed artist.

  Spending what seemed like his hundredth day on the road, Kranz was becoming aware of his appalling lack of cleanliness. Stealing into the abandoned bread van that had become his home, he could feel the comforting warmth of late summer being sabotaged by the onslaught of his first English autumn.

  Today, moreover, he had been beset, since awakening, with a feeling of disquiet. Thoughts of Valerie had been exceptionally vivid but he had tried to distract himself with the section of comic he had re-read so often since embarking on tramphood. In it the hero, Sir Sagramore, battled with First World War German soldiers and at the end of the comic the publisher had inserted a choice morsel of propaganda:

  ‘Don’t trust that nice German family next door – they could be here to destroy our green and pleasant land!’ There was no date on the cartoon sheet but Kranz imagined it had been sitting in the bread van for many years. Or was it recent? How he longed to read a newspaper.

  Debating whether or not to spend another day incarcerated in his makeshift abode, he was jolted by another wave of thoughts: Valerie was doing something extraordinary today, and he would have to find out. If there were such things as brain waves, he was receiving them now from the woman he craved. Counting the money remaining in his wallet, and stroking his long thick beard, it dawned on Kranz that he could by now pass for a poor Hasidic Jew.

  Had they ever seen such things in twentieth-century East Anglia?

  Eight hundred years before, Jews were thriving in Norwich and were the proud possessions of the King, who had ordered his people to emulate this industrious sect. They had redeemed themselves, the King proclaimed, through centuries of virtuous work and should therefore be known no longer as Christ-killers.

  Then the first Blood Libel had taken place.

  Kranz chuckled at the thought of being the first Jew to walk the road to Norwich since those prosperous men, women and children, supposedly protected by the King, had been massacred, and their culture wiped out, by a raging mob in the capital of Norfolk. He remembered reading in a religious-history book that anywhere in Britain, a road named King Street would have been inhabited by that town’s Jews because of the protection provided by the monarch. In this autumn of 1939 he would walk to Norwich and find a doctor to treat his rash, his sores and his painful throat, and he would also read a newspaper. After so many weeks he doubted whether anyone would think him alive. War was about to explode, and the uniformed services would have more important things on their minds than unwelcome aliens with false papers who quoted an unsuspecting MP as his sponsor and who stole aeroplanes from RAF installations.

  Kranz began his walk, wrapping a thinning body in the long, torn coat he had taken from a lorry two dawns ago while its driver had stopped to relieve himself.

  Thrusting his hands into the deep, frayed openings on each side of the garment that fateful morning, he had been dismayed to discover holes for pockets. Wrapping his hands around his torso, he felt a lump in the upper portion of the coat. Stopping, he had reached inside and found an elegant wallet, filled with an array of illustrious calling cards, neatly sorted papers, and a wad of cash that had made even Kranz draw breath. Retreating into the bushes, a habit to which he had become accustomed in the past weeks, he had rifled through the papers and in the deepest recess of the fragrant leather he had found the name Truman inscribed. Tucking his treasure back into the breast pocket, Kranz thought he might go back to his abode and bury the find. Hazy sunshine was poking through, its hopeful appearance such a rarity in this dreary county that Kranz had decided to carry on, marching his way back to the road to Norwich. Every time he stopped on subsequent days, he had occupied himself with the thick collection of calling cards, trying to construct a mental picture of this man Truman who would carry on his person enough money to buy a twin-engined aircraft. On this particular day he had walked for three hours when the pain that had begun to wrack his body gradually overtook the wandering Austrian. In the distance he could see a stately home situated at the end of a vast clearing and surrounded by hundreds of ancient trees. Had they been saplings when the Blood Libels were born? he pondered. Kranz had never before been really interested in the history of his faith – why was it that his new existence had made him feel such a reverent Jew?

  Weston Longville had never come across a bearded character like this before. Kranz had reached the entrance to the baronial estate, and he marched along the drive with great dignity.

  ‘You there. Stop!’

  Charles, gardener to His Lordship, was frightened.

  ‘My name is Truman,’ Kranz explained, holding up the wallet as if it were a set of identity papers assembled to satisfy the Reich.

  ‘Like hell it is. There be only one Truman and that’s what lives here,’ the gardener shouted.

  Kranz felt his heart skip a beat as the reality of his folly dawned.

  The gardener kept his distance from the smelly, bearded tramp.

  ‘Indeed,’ continued Kranz in a polished English drawl. ‘I am recently returned from safari in Tanganyika. You remember me, don’t you, from the Hunt Ball?’

  Charles eyed him, leaning on his rake. ‘Can’t say as I do,’ he murmured, the spaces his mouth once offered for teeth making his face resemble a jack-o’-lantern.

  ‘Alexander Truman, distantly connected to the Greek royal family.’

  ‘Why you so shabby, then?’

  ‘Dreadful story. Set upon by thieves who stole my motor and all my belongings. Took three thousand photographs of animals in the wild, and the wretched men went off with them. Have had to walk all the way from Bungay.’

  ‘Bungay, then? How’d you get from Africa to Bungay?’

  ‘Flew my own aeroplane.’ Kranz stopped. Had he opened up too much? ‘In any case, kind
ly take me to my cousin.’

  Charles leaned for an instant more then dropped his rake, his gnarled hands a legacy of the care with which he had tended his master’s garden for nearly half a century.

  They stood at the massive, russet-coloured front door and, as quickly as the butler appeared, Charles disappeared.

  Kranz heaved a momentary sigh of relief. ‘Could his lordship spare some food and a bed for the night for a once-rich man?’

  ‘I should say not! How dare you!’ Butler moved to shut the door, but Kranz stopped him, more with his eyes than with his still powerful arms.

  ‘He and I used to know each other, in better days,’ drawled Kranz, mesmerizing the butler. ‘Please forgive my appearance – in fact … might the lowliest servants’ quarters afford a poor fellow a bath?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Actually ashamed to give my name. Fear of disgracing the family.’ Kranz held his hand close to his heart, praying the butler would not frisk him. Obviously Truman had been robbed, his wallet and small fortune believed to be in the grasp of a thief for whom the whole county would now be searching.

  Without another word, the butler led his tramp along a narrow corridor lined with miniatures Kranz knew were priceless. Truman had good taste, so far. Down a flight of stairs, he found himself in an empty scullery.

  ‘Cook and the maids are out for the day. Wash quickly.’

  Kranz had to be satisfied with filling a large steel tub with water from a noisy Ascot. Butler stood and watched, and his guest was gleeful when the drawing-room bell tinkled in the scullery, and Butler was forced to leave.

  Kranz laughed as Truman’s servant stumbled and missed a step, nearly falling down as he headed towards the Lord of the Manor.

  Entering the drawing room, the butler was surprised to see Truman pacing about, agitated.

  ‘Gardener says there is some sort of eccentric on the premises,’ he snapped.

  ‘Indeed, your lordship, a man claiming to be a failed entrepreneur.’

  ‘Bring him in.’

  ‘I am afraid that this moment, sir, he is naked.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We have offered him a bath.’

  ‘Have we? I haven’t. He might have lice.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, it is not like you to be uncharitable.’

  Truman went to the window and looked out at Charles, the trusted family retainer he would soon have to lose. His family had never recovered from the Great War and the Slump, and to him it seemed there loomed ahead the end of Empire as well. Now, Smithfield was his last remaining enterprise and a new war could mean an end to everything. He had been known for his philanthropic deeds and loathed the prospect of having to lose his standing in the charitable sector. Crippling tremors had begun to limit his mobility, and in recent months he had laughed at the concept, engendered by his wife, of a charity being set up to benefit Truman himself. Now he had a visitor: perhaps this eccentric was his Guardian Angel.

  Truman faced his butler, as if they had reversed roles and he was the servile fixture. ‘Perhaps you are right – it is out of character for me to carp. When he’s had his bath and whatever, bring him up.’

  Butler grimaced ritual obsequiousness and headed for the scullery. He dreaded having to go down to that ghastly place: it was bad enough when cook was chattering away and chopping onions, but now there would be a filthy tramp stinking up the room. Cook would have his head if he did not fumigate her domain before teatime.

  Scrubbing himself down in the now-blackened water, Kranz knew he would have to be quick about his ablutions. Butler might take fright over the physical attribute that set him apart from the male natives of Weston Longville. He wanted to leave this dirty bath and be clean again for Valerie; dared he don the crumpled suit he had worn the day he had begun his wanderings, and which he had carried in a bag ever since? Would anyone recognize him if he kept his beard? With Truman’s cache of money he could walk into any flying club and buy a small craft to take him back to Austria, and he could arrange for a Polish pilot to transport the rest of his family out of the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Did flying clubs still exist?

  Perhaps England was already at war?

  Oh, how he yearned for a newspaper.

  ‘His Lordship will see you presently.’ Butler had slipped into the scullery and was gazing disdainfully at the murky bathwater.

  Kranz never ceased to be amused by the mechanical inhumanity of this breed of servant. He decided to rise from the tub with majestic confidence. Butler could only stare with disdain, handing him a large, fresh-smelling towel which he tucked around his bony waist.

  When Kranz had dressed, his suit hanging grotesquely over his emaciated torso, they made their way up the stairs, Kranz carrying his frayed coat and praying the stolen wallet would not tumble on to the superbly polished floors to falsify his story.

  In the drawing room, sunlight bathed the lid of a magnificent grand piano tucked into a corner. Kranz thought he could discern a photograph of Truman with Furtwängler.

  ‘Tibbs says you lay claim to being an entrepreneur,’ Truman said, his silver suit stripes gleaming in the sun.

  ‘I am indeed an entrepreneur,’ Kranz asserted, acutely aware of Butler’s stare.

  ‘Tibbs, you may leave,’ Truman murmured, never looking at his servant. ‘What sort of business do you do, my man?’

  Kranz yearned for Valerie, and in his racing mind he grappled with the terror of betraying his true identity, and then his freedom, in exchange for a pathway back to his passion. Surely Truman knew Cobb – landed gentry knew everyone, in Weston Longville just as in Austria.

  ‘Aircraft manufacturing is my business. May I sit down?’

  Truman motioned for him to sit. ‘Then how did you get to look like something out of the Old Testament?’

  ‘As I mentioned to your gardener, I have just returned from Africa.’

  ‘According to my gardener, you were also laying claim to being a family member, which is a load of old rot because I have never seen you before in my life. Besides, we are all fair-haired in this family – both sides.’ Truman was calm, his voice soft and comforting. His weatherbeaten face twitched slightly, as did his right hand, which he tried to conceal by repeatedly tucking it under his thigh.

  ‘In actual fact,’ Kranz said, bracing himself, ‘I am on a confidential mission for the Polish government and have been travelling non-stop for three months.’

  ‘What sort of mission?’ Truman smiled, fascinated by his heavily bearded intruder, who was gradually becoming a guest.

  ‘Unfortunately, it is highly confidential. You should know I was attacked last week and had all my papers stolen.’

  ‘Good Lord! So was I – attacked, I mean! What did the chaps look like?’

  ‘I … did not get a good look at them. My impression was they were short. Anyway they hit me on the head, and when I came to I found myself in the forest.’

  Truman looked Kranz up and down. ‘You are in want of money, then?’

  ‘No!’ Kranz exclaimed.

  ‘Those robbers took a huge sum from me – I ‘d had it earmarked for something crucial.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Kranz trembled.

  ‘Perhaps I should not be telling you all this, but my daughter disappeared about the same time as Cobb’s.’

  ‘Cobb’s?!’ Friedrich fought to maintain his composure.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Hardly at all.’

  ‘His daughter Annabel and our girl Sarah – it has devastated my wife. Thank God she has work which keeps her distracted. Anyway, the money was for a chap who thought he had a lead. The police have been useless. I miss her terribly.’

  ‘Was this chap a friend of yours?’

  ‘It’s too complicated. Please forget I mentioned it, will you?’ Truman looked pleadingly at Kranz, his power spent and the loss of a child overshadowing all else in his life.

  Friedrich spoke:

  ‘Thank you for lettin
g me bathe – that was all I wanted.’

  ‘Do you never eat?’

  Kranz caught his breath.

  ‘That suit is falling off you. What the devil’s your name, anyway?’

  ‘Wojtek – Pavel Wojtek.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of a Wojtek aeroplane, that’s for sure. Do you want something to eat?’

  It must have been the earnest look that Kranz could not hide that communicated itself to Truman, who smiled warmly and rose from his chair. Kranz stood, leaving the coat on the rosewood piano stool. They retired to the dining room and as Charles peered in through the window, Friedrich Kranz was determined that, in the absence of a newspaper, he would extract as much information from this man as possible. He already possessed Truman’s wallet and had learned so much from those cards. Now he could complete the picture of this person and perhaps find refuge in his midst.

  Butler had arrived in the room and his lordship gestured. With Cook away, this manservant would have to find them a meal.

  Meanwhile:

  ‘What sort of aircraft business does Poland have these days?’

  ‘None of its own,’ Kranz replied. ‘Our factories build Fokkers.’

  ‘Then what is your connection?’

  Kranz had to think fast. ‘I am the only competition to Fokker – we have one small plant but we are growing rapidly.’

  ‘So you are the only native Polish aeroplane manufacturer – I like that,’ Truman smiled broadly at the Austrian.

  ‘Do you know of Valerie Cobb’s achievements?’ Kranz could feel his heart beginning an uncontrollable gallop.

  ‘Henry’s daughter? We’ve known her since she was a tiny thing. Beautiful child, she was. Something about young girls, don’t you think?’

  Truman had begun to drink the wine Tibbs had brought, and Kranz was fascinated that once again his host had made reference to ‘we’.

  ‘Your wife lives here?’ asked the bearded guest.

  ‘She is what is known as a working woman – goes up to town each day and back – madness.’

  ‘What does she do – in town?’

  ‘Works for Haydon. She loves the hustle and bustle of Whitehall. Not that Whitehall has been able to locate our daughter.’