Page 30 of Last Letter Home
Paul had begun to turn over the earth in the bed. Everything about his posture spoke of unhappiness. She snatched up the basket, but then her eye fell on the box of biscuits.
‘Is your mother in?’ she asked him. ‘Perhaps I could take these to her.’
He paused in his work and forced a smile. ‘She is. That is kind of you, I’m sure she would appreciate it.’
Mrs Hartmann took a long time to come to the front door and she opened it with hesitation, timid dark eyes in a pale oval face peering at Sarah, but when Sarah introduced herself and showed the box, she drew the door wide. ‘How nice of you. Come in for a moment, please.’ She had a low, gentle speaking voice.
‘I’m sorry, the house isn’t tidy. I wasn’t expecting anyone.’ Her glance darted from the shabby hallstand to the threadbare rug, her anxiety obvious. She was a small, slight woman dressed in navy, a colour which Sarah thought aged her. The effort of speaking made her cough and her whole body tensed up with the exertion.
Sarah surveyed her with pity, imagining what she must have gone through with the loss of her husband and her home. The experience had broken her health. ‘I won’t stay,’ she assured Mrs Hartmann. ‘Your son said it would be all right to call. I baked the biscuits this morning, so they’re quite fresh. I hope you like ginger.’
For the first time a sparkle came to Mrs Hartmann’s eyes. ‘I love it. I have happy memories of making gingerbread as a child with my mother,’ she said, taking the box and opening the lid. The sudden spicy smell filled the air. She smiled as she breathed it in and Sarah saw that she’d been pretty once in a frail, dainty way.
‘It’s a favourite of mine, too.’ I’ll bring her flowers next time, she thought, watching Mrs Hartmann place the box on the hallstand. Daffodils, they’ll brighten this house. They hadn’t been able to take many possessions away with them from Germany, she remembered Paul telling her, and again she felt a rush of pity.
Mrs Hartmann’s troubled eyes rested on her now. ‘Your family has been so kind, we are so grateful.’
‘Not at all. We were sorry to hear of all your trouble. We hadn’t known before what things were like in Germany.’
A shadow passed across Mrs Hartmann’s delicate features, causing Sarah to wish that she’d held her tongue. ‘That is the problem. No one here really believes it.’ She stopped for a moment to cough.
‘I think a great many people have their suspicions,’ Sarah ventured, ‘but nobody wants war.’
Mrs Hartmann batted the excuse away. ‘This country is asleep. I have met people here, some our closest neighbours, who say England should stay out of Europe’s business. They think that things can go on here as they always have done, that Germany does not want to go to war with us so why should we? But I tell you, Herr Hitler is not a man to trust on any account. Think of Kristallnacht. Oswald Mosley’s bullying is almost nothing to that. There is great evil moving in Germany. It’ll engulf us all if it is not checked.’
This sounded so dramatic, almost biblical, that Sarah could not think what to say. She knew about last November’s events, the vicious attacks on Jews in German cities. She knew, too, Mr Churchill’s view, that Hitler could not be trusted. Yet, whatever the level of violence in Germany, could it be that a whole nation was infected by evil? Surely this was an exaggeration.
When she left soon afterwards, her mind was troubled. Paul’s sudden coldness to her and his mother’s dire predictions had upset her deeply.
At home in the early evening Sarah heard the letter box rattle and shortly afterwards Ruby brought a letter to her in the drawing room where they’d all settled after dinner. ‘Miss Sarah Bailey’ was written in thick black ink in a hand she did not recognize. But before she could open it, Diane switched on the wireless and her hand stilled on the envelope. She listened with horror to the news, the first they’d heard today. ‘German troops have marched into Czechoslovakia.’ Sarah knew what this meant. Hitler had lied at Munich. He wasn’t interested simply in a Greater Germany, he had grand imperial plans. And if Czechoslovakia wasn’t safe, then Poland wasn’t either. Mrs Hartmann is right, her thoughts ran. The news ended and Mrs Bailey turned off the wireless.
‘Why’s everyone so serious?’ Diane looked wildly from her mother to her sister, worried by their silence. ‘It’s all so far away, what does it have to do with us?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ Mrs Bailey said calmly, extracting a cigarette from the case in her bag, but her hand trembled as she held the lighter.
Sarah opened the letter without interest and smoothed out the single sheet inside. Dear Miss Bailey, it began. Reading seemed an effort, but she sighed and started again.
Dear Miss Bailey,
My mother has asked me to convey once again her thanks for the biscuits. Your kindness to her means a great deal in these difficult times.
I wish also to convey my apologies for I must have appeared rude to you this afternoon. When you asked my opinion about your future career, I was, most selfishly, reflecting upon my own prospects. You ask my advice and I say go, apply for this course. It will not help your family for you to be held back, frustrated, unable to exercise your talents. I wish I could tell myself the same thing, but my mother would be completely alone if I left her now and I must wait.
My regards to you and your family,
Paul Hartmann
How nice of him, she was touched. She thrust the letter into the pocket of her cardigan, determined to reply to him that evening. He had been too courteous, it occurred to her, to mention Major Richards’ interference, though that had clearly annoyed him at the time. His advice was sound. She would apply to the college as he suggested, though perhaps not immediately. She needed to speak to her mother first, and tonight’s bulletin made it more difficult to plan for the future.
Sixteen
Briony finished the little notes from Sarah, imagining Paul reading them here in this house and smiling at her cheerful asides. His mother surely had to be the Barbara whose grave she’d found, and it seemed she’d married a German man, so Paul would have been German, too, or at least half German, if Barbara was English. That wouldn’t have been easy in wartime, and she wondered how he had ended up serving in the British Army.
She picked up the next envelope from the pile and tried to extract the letter inside, but at some point it must have become damp, and she saw she couldn’t pull it out without tearing it. She inspected the next one, to find the same thing had happened. Perhaps if she held it in steam from the kettle . . . It was too dark to do anything about it now, though, so she tied the bundle together, put it back in the tin and went upstairs to read in bed.
After she’d switched off the light she lay in the darkness thinking. It might make sense for her to type fair copies of the letters as she read them. It would mean that reading them would take longer, but they’d be easier to refer back to that way. As she fell into a drowse she was sure she could hear the whisper of a woman’s voice in her mind and fancied it to be Sarah’s.
The museum was in a castle on a mound with a view over Norwich and Briony stood out on the concourse for a while the following day, a sharp wind lifting her hair, looking out across the gleaming glass and metal shapes of shops and offices below, with the stone towers of churches rising here and there among them. In the misty distance, dark canopies of trees girded the city, a sign of where the countryside began.
