Ella Morris

by John David Morley

Genres: World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Spanning the decades from WWII to the Yugoslav conflict, Ella Morris is the story of a continent, and of a woman torn between two men. Born in Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, Ella Andrzejewski escapes Soviet-occupied europe and finds a safe haven in England. Here, she marries George Morris but falls passionately in love with a French student ten years her junior. The ramifications of this love triangle and of Ella's traumatic past will reverberate through the generations, as her children try to find their own troubled peace in a continent still scarred by war.

Release date: September 25, 2014

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Print pages: 896

Sample

CHAPTER ONE



The Will

1

Why was this?

Twisting a finger through long chestnut-coloured hair, the girl smiled as she listened to her friend talk. The listening girl was fair-complexioned. The girl doing most of the talking had black hair, black eyebrows he had seen when she turned to get the waiter’s attention.

Alex could follow the gist of their conversation, audible to him three tables away. Mostly it was taking place in Serbo-Croat, with the occasional word in Albanian thrown in, dialect words he didn’t understand.

It was the chestnut-haired girl who sometimes used Albanian. She listened intently to the dark girl telling her in Serbo-Croat about the restoration of a house on the Dalmatian coast. The dark girl was showing the chestnut-haired girl photos, presumably of the house. The house belonged to her parents. It had been destroyed in the war eight years ago, when her brother was killed. Now the house was rebuilt, but her parents preferred not to live there any more. In summer they let the house to tourists. When it grew too hot in Zagreb and they wanted to get out of the city they stayed at a pension, the same place every year, not far from the restored house, where the family used to spend their holidays before the war. During the winter the house was uninhabited.

The conversation interested Alex. Watching them from behind his newspaper, he could see that the girl with the chestnut hair always smiled. Odd, under the circumstances.

It wasn’t a smile in the ordinary sense, something that came on and went off. Nor would he have described it as the dreamy smile of a person preoccupied with her own thoughts or the polite smile of someone not really interested in what the other person was saying. It seemed to be something in the grain of her nature rather than an expression of the girl’s momentary feelings. She wouldn’t have been smiling, not in the ordinary sense, while listening to the story of the destruction of a house, even a house that happily had been rebuilt – a house with a happy end, so to speak, meriting a smile from the listener. The dark girl passed the fair-complexioned girl photos of the restored house as she talked, which the fair girl held carefully as if they were a trust, the house itself, something fragile that might easily get broken again.

From the way she talked, the dark girl didn’t seem to be too cheerful about her parents’ house having been rebuilt. Now and again Alex heard her sniff as if she might have been crying, but perhaps she just had a cold, or an allergy, or something. He couldn’t tell what sort of sniffing it was because the dark girl was sitting with her back to him.

Whether or not the dark girl was crying, and whatever she said, it made no difference to the reaction of the chestnut-haired girl, who was listening to her with a smile – smiling her way through the disasters the dark girl recounted. This was what puzzled Alex. It reminded him of the smile he’d seen on the face of a Japanese woman in front of the ruins of her house destroyed by the earthquake in Kobe, smiling as she talked to the TV reporter about the ruined house behind her.

Unexpectedly the dark girl turned and looked at Alex. She sniffed again, several times, but there was definitely no trace of tears in her eyes now. It must have been a cold or an allergy after all. The dark girl was also smiling, quite differently from the other girl. The dark girl wore the polite switch-on smile of a person who wanted something.

She held out her camera and said in English, ‘Would you please take picture me my friend?’

Alex smiled as he took the camera. The two girls smiled as they looked towards the camera and Alex took their picture. All three of them were smiling when Alex took the picture, and each was a different smile, for a different reason.

‘Thank you,’ said the dark girl.

The other girl signalled to the waiter and asked for the bill. As she raised her arm to attract the waiter’s attention he noticed the swing of her breasts inside her sweater, how the material there tightened, revealing the outline stirring underneath, coming alive. There was a Viennese lilt to the way she spoke German. He guessed she was local, but did she live here? Alex wondered if it was right of him to listen in on the girls’ conversation and not let them know that he understood what they were saying. He tried to think of some way of telling them without it seeming sneaky, really rather underhand of him to have sat beside them in the cafe for an hour and a half, eavesdropping on their conversation, but he couldn’t think of one. It was too late now. He should have told them earlier.

The girls paid, got up and left. Alex watched them wander slowly out of sight up some steps along a gravel path that led between the trees. The chestnut-haired girl was apparently showing the dark one the local sights, and this was one of them, the former Palm House, the beautiful old wrought-iron and glass conservatory in the park, now a cafe, where he usually spent his Saturday mornings reading the newspapers over a late breakfast.

For the last three months, on those Saturday mornings when he wasn’t away on some assignment but back home in Vienna and came here to read the papers, the girl with the chestnut hair had shown up too. The first couple of times she came later than him and sat down about as far away from his table as she possibly could have. The next time Alex arranged to arrive later than she did so that he could choose a table that was closer and get a better look at her. For an hour or two they both sat at their tables, drinking coffee and reading their newspapers. As she read her paper, the girl often twisted a finger through her hair, but until now Alex had never seen her smile. Occasionally he glanced over at the girl. Once, she looked up and caught his glance, held it for a moment, then looked away.

Today was the second time she’d looked at him, or at the camera he was holding, to have her picture taken. If she remembered him from previous occasions, and by now they had both sat in this cafe on quite a lot of Saturday mornings, she gave no sign of recognising him.

The smile was new. It must have been something about being in the company of the dark girl that made her smile. Not smile exactly. The company of the dark girl brought out in her friend’s face something that resembled a smile but wasn’t a smile in the usual sense but in the sense of the smile of the Japanese woman whose house in Kobe had just been destroyed by an earthquake. The smile had allowed a not otherwise expressible resignation to show on the woman’s face. In Japan, or so a fellow IPA correspondent had once explained to Alex, people struck by some disaster and interviewed about it on television smiled in order to lessen the discomfort that might be felt by viewers. The smiling woman in Kobe didn’t want to impose on the viewers. Whatever she privately felt about the disaster that was being shown in public, the woman kept it to herself behind the smile.

Seeing her smile in this way for the first time, and now taking her picture, Alex experienced a moment of déjà vu. He had done all this before: the dark girl and the girl with chestnut hair, both of them had been in a déjà vu picture taken at some other place and time and perhaps by someone other than Alex. While he couldn’t remember ever having seen the dark girl, he now felt quite sure that he had seen the other girl somewhere else. The difference was the smile. She had not been smiling then.

He unlocked his bicycle and took the short cut through the park, following the direction the two girls had taken.

‘But who’s to say it wasn’t here I saw her? After all, I’ve seen her here every other week for the last three months. Naturally she seems familiar. I mean, obviously so – it’s here I must’ve seen her before.’

Living for the most part alone, Alex had got into the habit of talking to himself. He talked out loud quite a lot of the time at home, sometimes in public too. Perhaps it wasn’t a good habit, but it didn’t necessarily seem to him to be a bad one either. It was a natural thing to do when you were on your own. He had lived in cities where talking to oneself in public was not at all uncommon, Washington for one, where it was ignored, perhaps because the people who talked to themselves were usually black vagrants on the streets, Vienna for another, where it was no kind of stigma; on the contrary, it might be understood as an invitation to other people to join in the conversation, often a grumble about something you liked to share, because everyone in Vienna enjoyed grumbling, had their grumbling rituals – almost a form of politeness. They even had their own local word for it.

He had got to know one of his best Viennese friends in this way. Alex and Roman, the grumbling man who was to become his friend, had both been standing in front of the sold-out opera house talking to themselves one night – neither of them with a ticket, both wishing they had one and complaining they hadn’t because tourists had bought them all – until each had taken over the other’s grumble, finishing the other’s grumble for him, and they both laughed. Musicians playing duets could probably do something similar, thought Alex, reaching up and down the keyboard to take over each other’s parts.

Vienna – a garrulous, frivolous, morbid, grand, cosy, ostentatious, backbiting and fraudulent capital that had remained provincial because it had never really moved out of the nineteenth century, a permanent state of theatre where strangers could pass the time of day on the street without suspecting one another of ulterior motives. The city, its people, their affable manners, even their affable buildings, celebrated a self-ironic sense of the theatrical, paying lip service to Vienna’s claim to former greatness while in reality taking a much keener interest in the most recent gossip and scandal, the human comedy, or perhaps it was the burlesque, behind the scenes that was the true stuff of the city’s life.

Doing his weekend shopping on a roundabout way to Spittelberg in the 7th District, where he lived, calling in at a favourite patisserie, an umbrella maker and a second-hand bookshop, Alex collected en route to the Kursalon Stadtpark, a yellow and white building resembling a cream cake, the neo-Greek buildings of parliament, a neo-Renaissance museum of natural history, neo-Gothic churches, the neo-baroque palaces of a long-defunct aristocracy – all this neo-frontage constituted the theatre sets of Vienna’s often questionable not to say shady imperial past.

Ten years ago, when he first came here, many of these buildings had been on the verge of collapse, rotting on their foundations like the palaces in the once splendid and now sad old quarter of Palermo – in quite a few other towns he had collected on his travels too – their downward slide into beggary and eventual demolition apparently unstoppable. But then communism had collapsed instead, all of a sudden, and this city in what had become a stagnant backwater, the last outpost of the West before you reached the Warsaw Pact countries, regained its hinterland, its old but still loyal clientele in eastern Europe. Along with its former Habsburg allies, Bratislava, Prague and Budapest, Vienna began to be revitalised by investors who had withheld their capital for the last fifty years.

The building in which he lived up on the hill in the eighteenth-century Spittelberg quarter had so far escaped revitalisation. It had once been a palace, a rather modest one, then a hotel, with enormous if shabby suites, which were now let out as apartments. The neo-frontage of the former palace was provided by a facade painted in a colour known as castle yellow and an imposing marble staircase at the entrance, but the moment you turned the corner at the top everything further up became narrow, dingy, malodorous, badly lit. It was the domain of Ciska, who spent all of his days and most of his nights in the glass-fronted concierge’s office commanding a view of everything that passed in and out of his demesne.

Ciska fastened on Alex the moment he came in.

‘Herr Doktor! I have a package for you, Herr Doktor …’

The concierge stepped out of the gloom of his office and handed Alex the package.

‘Thank you, Ciska.’

It went against the grain every time he said Ciska rather than Mr Ciska, but he had learned that local etiquette required this of him, just as it required Ciska to defer to the titles of his clientele, however hard his clientele tried or pretended to try to keep them hidden.

‘How are you, Ciska?’

‘One can’t complain, one can’t complain.’

‘And how is your wife?’

‘Ah!’

Ciska seized on this question, or rather it seized forcefully on him, propelling him out of his den into the corridor, where he stood rocking on his heels for a moment as if needing to adjust his balance to the thick carpet pile, which he didn’t have on the floorboards of the concierge’s office.

‘Very poorly, I’m afraid to have to say, very poorly!’

Ciska reminded Alex of the antique receptionist who used to officiate out of a cupboard under the stairs of a dentist’s practice the Morris family had visited once a year in Wimpole Street. Even then, in the London of the 1960s, that deferential Dickensian figure in an old frock coat had outlived the world around him by half a century. Ciska was dressed in a frock coat too, shiny from wear and no less threadbare, and also featured a high shirt collar, some sort of cravat and trousers hoisted halfway up his shins, drawing attention to a pair of old boots with bits of unsuccessfully blackened string improvising as laces. The larger part of what appeared to be a duster rather than a handkerchief was hanging out of his trouser pocket.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘She’s back on the crutches, Herr Doktor.’

‘I thought Mrs Ciska had a … had a …’

Alex felt a momentary twinge, a phantom pain that flashed through his body, for some reason reminding him of his mother.

‘Unfortunately the new leg hasn’t taken. The fit doesn’t seem to be right. By the end of the day the stump is all sore and inflamed – a shocking sight.’

‘Oh dear. Isn’t there anything one can do?’

Momentarily Ciska seemed to brighten.

‘Very good of you to enquire, Herr Doktor. I’m afraid not. But I don’t want to detain you. How was the war?’

‘War? Oh, well, not exactly war.’

‘On the radio this morning I heard that hostilities still haven’t entirely ceased.’

‘Well, no, I mean sporadic fighting, here and there, but the war as such is over. Were there any messages?’

‘The young lady came in this morning while the Herr Doktor was out. She left something in the Herr Doktor’s postbox. Would that be all?’

‘Thank you, Ciska.’

Ciska retired into his office while Alex continued down the corridor, opened the postbox marked MORRIS and took out an envelope. Inside it he could feel a key. With a sinking heart he climbed the stairs to his apartment on the floor above, took the key out of the envelope and opened the door. A piece of paper fell out of the envelope onto the floor. He picked it up.

‘Sorry to have missed you. I can’t manage dinner this evening after all, so I’m returning the key now. B.’

For six months it had seemed to be working, but then she started drifting away. The fair girls and the dark – for once, making a conscious effort, he had resisted the instinct that attracted him to fair girls and had become involved with the black-haired, moody-tempered, dark-complexioned Belinda, whose mother was from Granada, perhaps with Arab ancestors. But when for half of those six months he had been working away from home, what else could one expect, even if the dark Belinda had been as fair as she was lovely?

How was the war?

Ciska’s question – he had been right to ask it. A war didn’t end until the peace had begun.

Almost five years to the day since the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began, yet another outbreak of violence in Kosovo only the previous week had shown up the fragility of the country’s so-called peace, or rather its intermittent lack of war. A boy in a Serbian village near Prishtinë/Priština, depending on who was talking, had been shot from a passing car. Enraged Serbs had thereupon erected barricades on the main roads to Priština and Skopje and attacked an Irish KFOR contingent that arrived to dismantle the barriers. The following day thousands of Kosovo Albanians had demonstrated in towns around the country, and Alex flew in from Vienna to cover the story for IPA.

With the discovery of the bodies of two Albanian children found drowned in a river, hounded to their deaths by dogs set upon them by Serb youths, according to local Albanian TV and radio stations, a violent situation escalated into one of open warfare in the streets of Mitrovicë, with attacks taking place against Serb minorities by as many as fifty thousand Kosovo Albanians throughout the country. Alex had been unable to confirm the involvement of any Serbs in the drowning of the two children. He filed a report that did little more than present a tally of the dead and injured, the burned and looted houses after two days of what war correspondents writing at this late stage in the Balkan upheaval understated as ‘an excess of violence’, and flew back to Vienna three days later in time for the main fixture of his week, Saturday morning breakfast in the Palm House with all the furtive pleasures that entailed.

Feeling very tired when he let himself into the apartment, Alex sat down for a moment and at once fell asleep.

He was woken by the telephone ringing in the dark. He came to slowly, up and up, emerging from the anaesthetic of an almost sensual tiredness. Most of the day must have passed. The answering machine interrupted the ringing and he heard his own voice giving instructions in three languages, followed by the booming voice of his sister Felicity in London. She wanted to talk to him about his visit and the meeting planned at her house. Philip would definitely be there; Max thought he almost certainly would be too. For what that was worth. Felicity gave a dry little chuckle unlike her, who preferred a good hearty laugh. She said they should have a discussion among themselves. Probate had now come through, by the way. She didn’t see the necessity of a lawyer being present. They could always go and see one if there turned out to be a problem. Which she didn’t expect. They had Philip, after all. They would sort things out between themselves.

There was something else he had to do. Beyond this business Felicity was rambling on about but not unrelated to it. His head gradually cleared of the remains of sleep. He sat up. There was something he had to see to. What was it?

He stumbled over a rumple in the carpet in the dark and switched on the light. Standing, he started to take a pee in the lavatory at the end of the corridor, thought better of it, let down his trousers and sat down. Belinda had called it primitivism, the inconsiderateness and uncouthness of men. She wasn’t joking. She got quite angry. There was no contradicting her. She had shown him the telltale splash marks of urine on the seat and the wall.

‘Get into the habit of sitting to pee.’

The splash marks of urine and blood on the seat and walls, corpses with heads lolling and arms flung forward, still crouching on the toilet as they had been when shot, their bodies since bloated by the heat, covered with flies swarming over ripped-open intestines. Urinals as places of standing execution, preferably out of sight, with no witnesses, the victims lined up along the wall inside and shot in the back of the head. In any case death, whether sitting or standing. The inconsiderateness and uncouthness of men. Images of lavatories he had seen across the Balkans during the last ten years flashed through his mind. Belinda’s objection was not trivialised by such a comparison; on the contrary, it seemed to Alex to be validated.

‘Of course!’

He remembered.

It was the package handed to him by the concierge outside his office. Alex had only glanced at it then, seeing something he didn’t want to see, which was why he’d put it out of his mind.

He walked back down the corridor to the table at the entrance where he’d left the package when he came in. Yellow wrapping, foreign stamps, three of them. He turned it over with a deepening sense of misgiving. The address of the police presidium in Madrid was printed on the back.

He opened the package. Inside it there was something wrapped in tissue paper, accompanied by a letter in a separate envelope. He slit open the envelope and took out the letter. For the second time that evening something fell out of a letter onto the floor. He picked it up and looked at in his hand. It was a piece of faded white cloth the size of a postage stamp, attached to a safety pin.

‘What on earth is this?’

He read the letter.

He carried everything back into the living room, sat down at his desk and read the letter again. In the regurgitative polysyllabic style of Spanish officialese it informed him that the investigation by the responsible authorities in Santa Cruz de Tenerife into the deaths of his parents there in March the previous year had now been completed, and the tape recorder and the tape inside it, withheld by them as evidence bearing upon that investigation, were herewith returned to him as their rightful owner.

This restitution of his property had taken twelve months.

‘His property’ included the safety pin attached to the piece of cloth he was holding in his other hand. A postscript at the bottom of the letter explained that the police had found it in the dead woman’s clenched hand, adding that forensic examination had failed to come up with any connection between it and the circumstances of her death. Well, what sort of connection had those forensic idiots expected to find between a safety pin and the cause of death? Alex sat looking at it, trying in vain to fathom its secret.

Then he unwrapped the tissue paper enclosing the Sony microcassette tape recorder that had accompanied him for ten years of his journalistic life. Evidence that he was its rightful owner was given by an aluminium plaque which, with an eye to thieving colleagues, his mother had paid to have engraved with his name and address and glued to one side of it. The recorder had been built to last. During the previous twelve months he had often wondered where it was and had since bought two replacements, both of them plastic and of inferior quality, and both already defunct.

‘Well.’

He looked at it lying on his desk and wished it wasn’t there.

Reconstructing the long-missing tape recorder’s recent history, trying to remember where he had left it and on what occasion, the initial qualm he had felt on receipt of the package from Ciska, just a slight misgiving at first, now took shape as a foreboding.

He had left the tape recorder at his parents’ house in Tenerife on his last visit there in February. Why hadn’t Ella, so conscientious in all things, sent it back to him or at least let him know that it was there?

Because she hadn’t found it.

Briefly he escaped into a sense of relief afforded by this explanation.

But unfortunately she had found it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be here on his desk. During the six weeks between early February and the middle of March Ella had found the tape recorder and earmarked it for the particular use she already had in mind for it.

Were there any messages? he had asked Ciska in the passage downstairs, and now he knew that he had already been holding it in his hand, in the package Ciska had just given him: the taped message from his mother and father, the mysterious safety pin. They too were returning a key they had been lent.

The package from Madrid explained why no farewell letter had been found at the scene. Its absence had puzzled and grieved Alex.

Presumably the police from Santa Cruz, investigating within an hour the scene of what they had to assume might be a crime, having been informed by Paco, the gardener and general handyman who had found the bodies, chose to withhold the information about the existence of the tape until they had listened to it themselves. The evidence of the tape recording might be valuable, if only as a means of corroborating the evidence of other witnesses. But no other witnesses existed, or none would ever be forthcoming. For about thirty-six hours between some time on the Saturday afternoon and some time on the Monday morning the two old people had been lying there alone on the terrace overlooking the distant sea.

Somewhere within the police bureaucracy the cassette recorder had been lying around, probably mislaid, at any rate put on one side for twelve months and effectively forgotten, its existence never mentioned to interested parties such as the owner of the recorder or the children of the deceased.

Alex ejected the cassette. It had been played to the end and not rewound. The speed was set at the slower of the two speeds, giving a recording time of one hour on each side. The quality wasn’t so good, but it doubled the recording length. Quite good enough for voice recordings close to the microphone without any background noise. It was the setting he automatically chose for interviews. For all its reliability, the ancient Sony had one fault, and that was the lack of a clearly audible signal that the tape had reached its end and needed to be taken out and turned round if you wanted to continue recording.

From the fact that the tape had not been rewound he guessed that there had been nothing more to listen to. Side B would be empty. Whatever the tape contained, the person who had set the tape speed must have calculated that half an hour might not be quite enough for what they had to say. They would have figured out that after half an hour, overdosed and already halfway to death, they might no longer be in a position to raise so much as a hand, let alone eject a tape, turn it round and press a button. They had given themselves sixty minutes for their final summation.

It would have been Ella who worked this out. Claude was useless with anything of a technical nature. But Ella was adept and curious and she had watched him using the tape recorder often enough. Maybe, being Ella, she had asked him about such details as playing speed and playing times, having already earmarked it for later use and wanting to be prepared for all eventualities. Ella always wanted to be ready. Alex wondered if her lifelong refrain about the necessity to be prepared for all eventualities was prompted by a fear of being caught unprepared.

What might Ella have been afraid of? Unprepared for what?

Ella had been a refugee.

Clear enough. The shock of those experiences remained in her bones.

He wound Side A back to the start of the tape. The fact that the investigators had not bothered to do this themselves was somehow as shocking a reminder of the callousness of the treatment surrounding the dead as the gruesome details of any death he had reported from the Balkans.

Now all he had to do was press PLAY and be taken into the last sixty minutes of his parents’ lives. It was perfectly easy.

It was not by chance that the police had returned the tape recorder with the message on the tape to him rather than to one of his brothers or to his sister. Placing the recorder where she had, probably on the little white wrought-iron table between the two reclining chairs on the terrace, Ella knew the police could not fail to overlook it, would confiscate it as evidence and in the fullness of time would return it to its owner. It had been part of the arrangements. She was counting on this. It was a last message in a bottle his mother was sending personally, one that he might choose to share with the others or to keep to himself.

Prepared for all eventualities, Alex sat and looked with acute discomfort at the little machine on his desk. He waited a while, hoping something else would turn up, a phone call, an immediate assignment, so that he could defer doing this.

‘So press the button and get on with it.’

The rustle of static first, or maybe it was the effect of wind blowing into the microphone and upsetting the balance. A tinkle was audible, then Ella’s voice very close, a whisper.

‘Will you ever hear this, my dearest Alex?’

He could hear it, her blood in his heart.

2

‘My last surprise for you. Will it reach you? Will you be pleased to get it? I wonder. Will you want to share it with the others? I leave that for you to judge. That’s the wind chime above the terrace door. It was the first thing I bought for the house. A cascade of glass beads. A cooling sound when it gets very hot. It’s always reminded me of winter. Bells on the farmers’ sleighs in Schlawe. What a beautiful morning! So peaceful. Saturday, March the sixth. A haze hangs over the sea. La Gomera unrecognisable as an island. A blue haze, floating out there offshore. I can hear children playing in the village. Someone mending fences by the sound of it. Hear it? Thock thock thock-ck! The echo adds a syllable. Can you hear the sound? Someone must be putting posts in lower down the mountain. Probably on the Ferguson property. Your father tells me the new owners are rebuilding the terraces. Now and then I catch a scent of blossom on the breeze that comes up around the middle of the day. The plum and apple trees along the coast began to blossom in mid-February. Pink and white. It’ll be another week or so before the colour arrive