The Silent Child
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Synopsis
SHE CAN'T HAVE A FUTURE UNTIL SHE HAS A PAST.
1944
LEO STERN arrives at the Nazi camp at Borek with his wife Irena and his two daughters. The Sterns are spared from the gas chamber when they witness a murder. But in a place that humanity has deserted, Leo is forced to make unimaginable choices to try to keep his family alive.
1961
For seventeen years, Hanna has been unable to remember her identity and how she was separated from her family at the end of the war, until the discovery of a letter among her late uncle's possessions reveals her real name - HANNA STERN - and leads her to Berlin in search of her lost past.
Helped by former lover Peter, Hanna begins to piece together the shocking final days of Borek. But Hanna isn't the only one with an interest in the camp, and lurking in the shadows is someone who would prefer Hanna's history to remain silent.
Based on in-depth research and beautifully written, this a novel of memory and identity, and the long shadow of war.
(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Release date: April 14, 2022
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 400
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The Silent Child
J.G. Kelly
Hanna sat alone on the back seat of the polished black car, her battered suitcase on her lap, the world outside only dimly seen through the misted windows. The engine, cooling, made an odd ticking sound, but otherwise there was silence, until she heard crows calling. She cleared a porthole in the condensation with her glove. The landscape was entirely flat, but upside down: the sky grey and sooty, while the snow-covered fields seemed to pulse with a gentle current of inner light. Her breath kept obscuring the scene, so that she had repeatedly to wipe the glass clear, each time noting another visual detail: a lone willow, a string of telegraph poles running to the horizon, a stretch of water-filled ditch, the surface glazed with ice as if by cataracts.
Setting the case carefully down she slid across the leather seat and cleared a circle in the window on the opposite side of the car. Mr Hasard, the driver, was smoking by a mailbox mounted on a metal post. When they’d come to a halt after the journey north from London, he’d wound down his window and sounded the horn, and Hanna had counted out the triple echo. He’d done it again before switching off the engine and getting out, his shoes making a brittle crunch in the snow.
‘They’ll be here soon,’ he’d said, although who ‘they’ were had not been clear. Hanna was inured to these moments, when the adult world seemed to require only that she sat quietly and waited politely for the future to unfold.
She watched Mr Hasard throw the cigarette away with an impatient gesture, stamping his feet, looking towards a house in the distance that stood half a mile away, at the end of a rutted track.
Hanna read the sign that hung from an iron arm on the mailbox:
SWAN HOUSE
MAZUREK
Mr Hasard came back to the car, threw open the door, and pressed down on the horn, the cigarette hanging from his mouth.
‘We’ll have you warm and safe soon,’ he said, checking his watch.
When he’d come to the chateau in Poland to fetch her – the car was black again, but smaller, battered and dusty – he’d taken her hand and said he was ‘Mr Hasard-with-one-S’, and that he was her provisional guardian. His duty was to collect Hanna and take her to Paris where ‘further decisions’ would be made about her future.
They had driven for three days, skirting towns where it was possible, but where they couldn’t, edging through streets full of rubble, past sullen crowds gathered around bonfires against the cold. The fires carried ash up into the sky, and Hanna watched the rising smoke, craning her neck to see the clouds, while everyone else seemed hypnotised by the flames.
When Hanna wasn’t asleep on the back seat she sat next to Mr Hasard, who asked her gentle questions she couldn’t answer. There was something wrong with Hanna’s memory. The last year, which she’d spent in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate, was vivid: from the swans on the frozen lake at Christmas to the rabbits running from the last stook of hay at harvest time. But back beyond these images there was nothing. The first six years of her life were lost, and when she was urged to see into that darkness she had to look away, although she never cried.
They reached Paris, a pale city, where all the buildings had been arranged in squares, and around parks, or along wooded streets, and all the fountains were dry, and full of snow. The apartment was on rue Delambre and had so many mirrors, and tall windows, Hanna felt constantly unsure if she was looking at the real world of rooftops and drifting smoke, or its reflection. The rooms were bare, but the plaster was ornate, and depicted swans, just like the ceilings at the chateau. Mr Hasard came each day and explained that he was waiting for what he always called ‘instructions’. A tutor visited in the afternoons to teach Hanna English and French, but she still thought in German, although some of the few words she said out loud, and unbidden, were Yiddish – words she was urged to forget.
A woman called Suzanne looked after her and cooked her meals, and was always there, beside her bed, when she woke up pooled in sweat, rigid with nightmares she couldn’t remember. In the dusty park by the apartment, Suzanne told her that the doctor, who had examined her twice in the yellow day room, thought she’d had a great shock, which had upset her so much that the past was lost, but that it might be found, if they were patient and kind. Hanna asked for a sketch-book and pencils, and Mr Hasard admired her work, although it revealed nothing of the past.
Finally, after three months, instructions did arrive in Paris, and now here she was, after a journey of trains and boats, somewhere north of a city called Cambridge, in England, on what Mr Hasard called a ‘fen’ – a frozen landscape of fields and poplars, which reminded her of Poland, as if her journey had described a great but pointless circle.
She heard brittle footsteps on ice, and then voices close to the car, and through the porthole that she’d cleared she saw that two elderly people had arrived and were shaking hands with Mr Hasard. The three adults, dimly seen as a single shadow, came to the side of the car. The door opened, and Hanna had to jump down, clutching her case.
Mr Hasard performed a slight bow towards an old man. ‘Hanna, this is Count Mazurek.’
‘Welcome to Swan House, Hanna,’ said the old man, in what Hanna recognised as English, which he spoke very slowly.
‘You can call me Uncle Marcin. This is my wife.’ It wasn’t an old man’s voice, Hanna thought, and she saw that his hair – which was swept back off a broad face, was only streaked with grey. He had a peasant’s great hands – like those of the estate workers back in Poland – and broad shoulders, and a round head that hung forward, as if its weight was too much.
He took her hand gently in what Hanna felt was a sign of welcome.
But his wife, who was bird-like and still, stood back watching them both.
‘She remembers nothing?’ said the count to Mr Hasard.
‘No. As I said in my letter, she can recall nothing before the estate at Łabędzie,’ he said, slipping on a pair of driving gloves. He opened the boot of the car, retrieved a large flat brown paper parcel, and gave it to the woman, who clutched it to her chest.
‘But she can speak?’ asked the count, looking at Hanna, and then Mr Hasard, a smile widening.
‘Oh yes. When spoken to.’
They all looked at Hanna, who looked at them back.
Mr Hasard touched the rim of his hat. ‘I must get the ferry, and the roads are bad. The car has to be back by nightfall.’
A minute later, after a conversation Hanna did not understand involving ‘expenses’ and an ‘invoice’, Mr Hasard shook her hand and then they all stood back and watched the shiny black car drive away, until it seemed to tip over the distant horizon.
Marcin took Hanna’s suitcase, and they set out on the rough, icy track to the house. He told Hanna that they too had once lived in the great chateau at Łabędzie and that his wife was a countess, but Hanna could call her Aunt Lydia. They had fled Poland when the Germans invaded in the first days of the war so that the count could continue the battle in the sky. Their grown-up daughter Natasza had been left behind, trapped in a city called Warsaw, where she had bravely helped hide Jewish children like Hanna away from the Nazis who wanted to kill them. Finally, she’d escaped with Hanna to the family estate, and hidden her safely away again. But Natasza had been killed helping others reach freedom.
All this, the most important words Hanna had ever heard, came from the mouths of these two strangers out on this wide fen, under a tin-lid sky, on a still-born day, already close to dusk. Hanna felt she should mark the moment, so she stopped walking and turned to face the countess. ‘I’m sorry I don’t remember,’ she said.
‘In time,’ said Aunt Lydia, smiling with her lips, but not her eyes, which never seemed to meet Hanna’s.
The house had a brick façade – flat and foursquare, with blank windows – and a central door with two pillars that held up a little roof, which tilted giddily to the left. It looked like the house was falling over very slowly. Smoke dribbled from a chimney in a black lazy line.
The front door swung open to reveal a bare hallway, with worn wallpaper, and floorboards. The house smelt of cabbage and polish. In a kitchen with a stone floor Aunt Lydia gave her a glass of milk and boiled her an egg, which Hanna ate with bread and butter in front of a coal fire. Lydia also gave her a cup of black tea that tasted of herbs, which Hanna sipped, staring into the flames. She felt that if she kept very still, and silent, and remained well-behaved, things she wanted to happen would keep happening; she’d be left alone in a room of her own, and then she could open her suitcase and take out her sketch-book and pencils.
Lydia announced that Hanna was tired and should go to bed.
‘It’s gone bedtime for little girls,’ she said, but Hanna felt this remark wasn’t for her at all, but someone in the past.
They climbed up uneven wooden steps to the second floor, and then to an attic, which comprised several rooms off a wide corridor. Lydia showed her into one, at the front of the house, with a sloping ceiling and a single window. Marcin pulled back a heavy curtain to show Hanna that snowflakes were touching the glass.
The bed was big enough for two grown-ups and was made of iron, and Lydia had to help Hanna turn back a wedge of blankets so that she could slip beneath. Her suitcase was set on a wooden chest while Marcin fetched a glass and a jug of water. Finally, the old man stood at the door, his hand on the light switch, smiling shyly before letting the darkness flood out from the corners of the room to press against Hanna’s eyes.
She heard them say goodnight.
Sleepless an hour later, she burrowed her way from underneath the covers, drew back the curtains, and looked out over the strange flat country, disguised by snow, but now under the light of a familiar moon, by which she opened her sketch-book and drew the first line, describing the pale horizon.
Chapter 1
Long Fen, January 1961
Hanna remembered the shoebox at the last moment, as she climbed the stairs in the gathering dark, ferrying a canvas away from the rising flood. The banks had broken the night before, the great river spewing out across the fields, so that at first light they’d watched the waters spreading over Long Fen; an infinite grey sea flecked with white horses, running to the same horizon over which Mr Hasard’s car had tipped fifteen years earlier.
Any memory of what went before was still lost, a silent history, but the precious shoebox contained all of her memories since: photographs, letters, keepsakes, postcards and diaries. Tonight, of all nights, she needed the shoebox beside her, so that she could set out the past, and decide on the future. A decision had to be made, the biggest decision of her remembered life. But the shoebox was in the old fruit store, surrounded by the flood.
She hauled the painting up the stairs to what Lydia had always called the ‘schoolroom’ – where Hanna had faced her various tutors over the years. She blew out the candle on the table, and went to the window, opening it with difficulty against the gale. A moon appeared briefly between shredded clouds. A tree – an oak from the north – sailed past in the mid-distance, half submerged. The line of poplars along Siberia Belt flexed, and she heard the sound of snapping branches, and waves breaking around the house. If she was quick, and sure-footed, she could get to the fruit store before the water rose too far. She ran back to the stairs and sat down to pull on Marcin’s old waders. The count’s winter coat hung on the newel post, and so she shrugged it on as well, feeling the damp weight of it, and catching a memory of the old man in the hint of pipe smoke in the collar.
She stepped from the stairs into a foot of floodwater, which had been flowing through the house since early afternoon, so that they’d had to drag away the sandbags across the front door to let it drain out to the fen. The flood reeked of greens and leeks, and black earth, and now, tonight, there was the unmistakable tang of the sea. It seemed to boil with eddies and currents, its surface encrusted with silver bubbles.
She took the first step across the hallway and set her hand flat against the far wall.
‘This is madness, Hanna.’
Aunt Lydia stood on the stairs wrapped in a housecoat and carrying a candle in a pewter bowl. She’d gone to the warmth of her room an hour ago to sleep, because the power had failed, and she couldn’t read for long by candlelight.
‘You can’t go out, child. Not now.’ Lydia’s world encompassed the house and little more, a fearful, timid outlook against which Hanna had fought with increasing success over the years. She took another brave step towards the open door that framed the night, pausing to push her hair back from her face, readjusting a clip, and buttoning up the old coat.
‘I have to save the Lambretta,’ she said, lying easily. ‘There’s just time. They’ve opened the sluices to the sea. If saltwater reaches the engine it will never start again. I need to get it up on blocks.’
She edged further along the hallway, her hand flat against the wall, which was marked by the coloured lines she’d drawn as a child with a crayon in her trailing hand, marking the passing years as surely as a doorframe marked with feet and inches. Lydia had been outraged by this outburst of artistic expression, but Marcin had been forgiving, a breaking of ranks that defined their taut, triangular, relationship.
Hanna saw two rats in the flood, sleek and dark like slugs.
‘They won’t bother us,’ shouted Hanna. Lydia had never overcome a lifetime’s fear of vermin.
Halfway out of the front door, Hanna met the wind, a gale that guttered as if trapped in a great sail. Close by, a chimney pot smashed, and then a pane of glass. Once away from the bright pinpoint of the candle flame, her eyes switched to night vision, and she could see that the storm had ripped the clouds away. The black water was studded with torn branches and flotsam, broken fence posts, a flooded dinghy, thorn and bramble, all sweeping past. The illusion that she was being swept north, leaving Long Fen behind, made her dizzy.
The water was two foot deep in front of the house, and her torch beam failed to penetrate to the path beneath. Once clear of the building, the air was full of spray and foam whipped off the surface of the river that ran between its high banks behind the house. Within seconds her hair was wet, water running down her face. She stumbled once but reached a low wall that sheltered the cottage garden. The old store, a shed set on brick foundations, stood among the count’s apple trees. She had to lean her weight on the door to push against the flood inside. The lemon yellow Lambretta, with its CND sticker, a source of perpetual tension with Lydia in Hanna’s teenage years, stood high and dry on the workbench where she’d left it that morning.
Since the count’s death the shed had been neglected, making it the perfect hiding place from Lydia’s tireless regime of order and the random forays of the cleaner who came from the village each Friday. Hanna stood on her toes to reach the shelf and retrieve the shoebox, which she slipped into the poacher’s pocket of the old coat. Back outside, she found herself wading now against the current, and was quickly out of breath. The spray in the air was as dense as rain, the old waxed coat streaming. The floodwater was higher, rising, and she had to stop to rest and still her heartbeat, which is when she heard a single bell in a sudden silence between gusts of wind. She turned north, towards the little chapel at River Bank, and wondered if a hand had pulled a rope, or if the storm had rung its own warning.
The unseen path was slippery and she nearly fell taking her next step, scrambling at the last moment to find a foothold. The mud, the darkness, the thundering current, made her think that it was quite possible her life could end here, if she wanted it to. She could make the decision right now, and simply let herself be swept away. It was a moment rehearsed many times in the last two weeks. The shoebox would be lost too, with all its memories, which seemed fitting.
She stood, swaying in the current. Out in the night she heard the terrified lowing of a cow and, staring into the moonlit distance, saw the beast itself, wall-eyed with terror, struggling to keep its great head above water. It reached a narrow bank that ran over the fen, marking the line of the dyke. Hanna saw it rise up, first on its knees, and then on shaking legs, until it stood facing into the gale, stunned and lost, before it settled, folding itself down into a foetal ball, as if for comfort.
The fatal moment passed, and so Hanna set out back along the path to the house.
When she reached the door, she saw Lydia sitting halfway up the stairs. Her brittle hands were knotted together, and she realised with a shock that her aunt was frightened for Hanna’s safety, not of the storm.
‘Aunt. There was no need.’
‘We should have given up and gone when we had the chance. It’s my fault,’ Lydia said stiffly. Two men from the village had come in a boat to take them away, but Lydia had said the old house had served them well and they’d seen out the floods in ’47 and this was no worse. The people of the Black Fens took inundation in their stride.
‘If they come back in the boat tomorrow, we should go,’ said her aunt.
Hanna went to the phone, which was fixed to the wall, and picked up the receiver, but the line was still dead. The water was running through the house strongly now, pulsing, as if propelled by a great heart, slopping up against the walls and doors.
‘Let’s see what dawn brings,’ said Hanna, taking the last few steps to the stairs, her feet shuffling on the muddy boards. ‘The boatmen said it would peak at midnight. The worst may be past soon.’
Hanna watched Lydia’s pale heels as she climbed the stairs to the attic. Her studio bedroom was on the ground floor, with long south-facing windows, but she’d had to abandon it to the flood. In the old schoolroom the paraffin heater was ticking, the metal warming, but it had hardly taken the chill off the air, so she set a fire in the grate, and then put the shoebox on the camp-bed. Taking off the rest of her clothes, she hung them on chairs, wrapped a towel around her hair, and draped a blanket over her shoulders. Then, with an eye on the door, she opened the shoebox and set out the contents. Some were found objects: beach pebbles from Norfolk, a piece of plaster from a church in Padua with the fragment of fresco attached, and the bowl of a clay pipe she’d dug up in the vegetable garden, helping Marcin plant broad beans. And finally, the diaries that she was so keen to keep from her aunt’s eyes. She’d made daily entries since her twenty-first birthday, confiding difficult emotions, often about Lydia, who had never disguised the fact that as Hanna grew up, she had become a poor substitute for the lost Natasza.
Beneath the diaries was a wad of photographs and she picked out the oldest and pinned it to the corkboard on the wall.
A studio shot, it showed her face, artfully lit. It had been taken in Cambridge the weekend after her arrival. The purpose of that strange outing had been disguised as a shopping trip for much-needed shoes: the sturdy brown leather pair that had once filled the coveted box. The real mission was to get an official picture of Hanna to forward to an organisation in Germany that helped parents track down children lost in the war. She had no name – no surname – and nobody knew anything more about her, not even Mr Hasard-with-one-S. The portrait photograph was striking: the round broad face, the large brown eyes, the curving arched eyebrows, and the peculiar intensity of the blank face, which seemed lost and dignified in the same moment. But no one had recognised her, and so from being ‘hidden’ she was translated to ‘lost’. Other photos followed: her again, standing glumly at the playground gate to the school at Upware; the inevitable Lambretta, with her student flatmate Vanessa hanging on, with the Brighton Pavilion in the background; and then finally a rare sighting of Hanna’s smile, clutching her degree certificate from art college on the steps off Long Acre, the shadowy outline of a London backstreet running into the distance.
She pinned them all up and then picked up the bundle of postcards. Most were from Peter. She slipped off the elastic band and spread them out. The latest was a black-and-white shot of the National Gallery, which marked the last time they’d met. It had been a week before Christmas and they’d gone to the gallery to avoid continuing the row that had begun the night before in Peter’s bedsit in Earl’s Court.
It was early morning and the pigeons in Trafalgar Square were untroubled by tourists.
The gallery was deserted too, except for the sullen attendants who sat on chairs staring at everything but the art. She’d wandered with her sketch-book for an hour and then caught up with him where she knew she would, in front of a wide landscape of the American West, with towering clouds casting a shadow over the Great Plains, a herd of bison in the distance, a broken tree to the foreground, under which a family sat by their chuck-wagon.
The author’s name was on a gold-leaf plaque: Albert Bierstadt 1881: Beyond the Sierra Nevada.
‘Homesick?’ she’d asked, taking his arm.
Peter, six foot one inches tall, looked down at her. ‘Sure. This guy’s a kraut – well he was before his parents set sail for the Land of the Free. I like the light – not fashionable now. They said he was a luminist. They’re never going to say that about me.’
Peter’s work was jet-black and jagged, full of angry architectural shapes in violent motion.
‘The boat sails next week, Han, and my offer still stands. The Empress of Britain, from Southampton. As I said, I have to get back and a loft’s come up. Five days at sea, then New York. Double cabin – you can still come. It ain’t first class – but there’s a porthole. I checked.’
Hanna sighed. ‘It wouldn’t work, Pete. It’s not my home; it’s yours. Besides, you’re famous.’
It was a familiar argument, which they’d circled like birds of prey, even though the carcass was down to the bones.
He shook his head, narrowing his eyes as if he could see something in the dusty distance of Bierstadt’s painting. ‘One show on the East Side and a piece down-page in the New York Times doesn’t make me the next-big-thing.’
Hanna shrugged. ‘Well, you look famous. I look like a twenty-three-year-old art student. Over there I’d be the great man’s girlfriend. And what am I going to paint? It’s your landscape, not mine. Wherever I’m going, I have to start on Long Fen.
‘I need to paint, Pete. I need to paint better.’
Hanna’s abstract canvases were full of intense colour, and geometrical form, and some even sold, but to her they were devoid of emotional content, as if she’d reached out for an idea, and felt nothing at her fingertips.
‘I’ve told you how to paint better, Han. Paint what you feel.’
‘I’ve tried,’ she said, and shook her head, staring into Bierstadt’s endless sky. ‘But sometimes I don’t know who I am.’
Hanna took a step back, as if trying to reassess Bierstadt’s landscape. ‘And as I’ve said, Lydia’s frail. The doctor says another stroke’s possible. I know she’s independent, but I feel a duty, to stay close, at least for now. I do owe her, Pete.’
Peter shook his head. ‘The old girl’ll make a hundred, you’ll see. That type always does. Eats like a bird.’
He’d visited Swan House in the summer but left his paints in his suitcase under the bed, spending his time swimming in the river or sitting in front of the house on a swing-chair drinking whiskey. He thought the house gloomy, and suggested that skylights in the attic was the only solution. Oddly, he’d liked the Fens, explaining to Hanna that the grid-like mathematical landscape reminded him of a great chequerboard. At dusk they’d played draughts on the stoop. Lydia had been a shadowy presence, coldly polite, a figure glimpsed in the corner of his eye.
‘She hates me,’ he said. ‘I’m a drunk. Sorry, an old drunk, who paints his nightmares.’
‘You were in the war. She understands. She has her own nightmares. And you’re not old: you’re thirty-eight.’
Peter had been called up in the last year of the war and spent six weeks in a shell-hole in a snowy forest in Belgium. Then they’d discovered his grandparents were German and he could speak like a native, so they assigned him to special duties. He hardly ever talked about those months, but Hanna had been woken by the muffled screams at night. The war brought them together, because he couldn’t forget what he’d seen, and she couldn’t remember.
They’d sensed the bond the day they met. She’d spent a term at Padua at the art school, staying with Lydia’s sister in Venice. She’d lingered in the city, waiting for Lydia’s annual visit. August had been sweltering and so she’d taken the boat to the Lido, and they’d sat alone, fifty yards apart, looking out to sea, then chosen the same moment to swim. Back on dry land he’d offered her a cigarette with a dripping hand and she’d liked his face; handsome still, but the features settled, buckling slightly under the force of gravity, the blue eyes still holding a thousand-yard stare. The art-school boys had never had a past to share.
They’d ended up back at his studio in a side street in the Arsenale, and in the weeks that followed, they spent every moment together when Hanna could shake off the attentions of her chaperone, Lydia’s sister. At five o’clock they’d take a shower, using the tin can he’d rigged up in the yard, and walk out into the city and find another bar or café beside the jade-green water of a sluggish canal. They’d talk about art, because he understood why she was driven to paint, that it was a way to try and connect with the world she’d lost when she was six years old. And for the first time in someone’s company, she felt that she could just be: she could share his studio, work in the same space, and he would ask no questions, or demand anything of her but her presence. The rest of her life often felt like a summons to be someone else, a series of appointments to meet the expectations of others.
The light seemed to fade from Bierstadt’s landscape. Peter wanted a cigarette, so they’d made for the exit.
Outside, a few people were strolling in the anaemic sunshine, and the great Christmas tree looked out of season. They found an empty bench where the wind blew spray from the fountains in a thin mist, so the wooden seat was damp.
Peter’s face had hardened, the cigarette between thin lips, and she knew there would be one last effort to get her to follow him to New York.
‘I know I shouldn’t have mentioned kids,’ he said, using a Zippo lighter, which left a whiff of fuel on the air. ‘It’s mortality kicking in. It’s not important.’
But it was. He’d come home after the war to small-town America – Artesia, Nebraska – and married a local girl. Working in a real estate office, he painted at night in the garage in an effort to exorcise his demons. Ten years later he went to work one day and didn’t come back home – hitchhiking fifty miles, then getting the Greyhound to New York. He’d left a son behind, five years old, who he hadn’t seen since. He said he often wondered what the boy was doing – not in a general sense, but in the sense of right now.
She took the pack of Lucky Strike out of his overcoat pocket and lit one.
The wind blew a shower of droplets on her face.
‘Maybe I’ll have children one day – maybe, but not now. I’ve got to learn to paint first – that’s what you always say. I’m sorry.’ There was another reason that she left unsaid: how could she think about a new family if she hadn’t found the one she’d lost?
Peter picked a shred of tobacco off his lower lip. ‘I’ve been thinking. I might go back to Artesia and see if they’ll let me see the boy. He’ll be ten – eleven.’
‘If it’s what you want, go. I hope it’s enough,’ said Hanna.
Before he could say anything more, she’d stood up. ‘Ring, when you can. Or write.’
She’d walked away and when she got to the corner of the Strand she looked back, and he was still sitting on the bench, watching her through the drifting spray. Turning away, she wondered if she’d see him again.
His card had arrived two weeks later with a New York postmark. On the back he’d written: You took my Lucky Strike. Happy Christmas.
She now pinned the card on the wall next to the photographs; her past laid out, in time to make a decision about the future.
The fire was radiating heat, and she felt feverish, so she let the blanket fall from her shoulders, and stood naked in front of the long cold mirror she’d once used to check her school uniform. She let her hair fall free, taking out the clip.
If she’d been one of the art-school models, shivering in the studio, she’d have said she was tall and well-made, with long limbs leading to slender hands and narrow feet. Her face was indeed broad: Marcin had
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