After the Cabaret (30 page)

‘Nonsense, Maman,' Betty said briskly. ‘We're only too glad to do all we can for you.' She turned to Sally and said, ‘Look here, Sally. About Gisela. I don't know what
you're saying, but I think it's time you told us who her father is.'

Sally glanced at Gisela, who was looking out of the window at the birds on the ragged lawn. ‘I think I ought to tell her first.'

‘Never mind that. She's only four years old.'

‘Nevertheless—' Sally began.

‘I wonder if someone would have the goodness to tell me what you're discussing,' Geneviève said. Gisela was suddenly at her side. Geneviève sighed. ‘I see whatever it is will happen with the minimum of decorum.'

And so Sally explained who Gisela was, concluding, ‘You see, Gisela, your mummy and daddy will come back if they can, and if they can't – we don't know yet – you will stay here with us. You do understand, don't you?'

‘Will Nanny come back, too?' the child enquired.

‘I don't know,' Sally said.

It was a bleak moment for the adults. ‘Oh dear,' said Geneviève. ‘This war.'

Betty rallied, saying briskly, ‘Well, I suppose some organisation could take responsibility for Gisela.'

Sally laughed.

Betty was stung. ‘I suppose you think that now you've got the money it'll be easy to keep her.' The business of Aunt Clothilde's will still rankled. She added, ‘Just as well you've got the money, since your husband's left.'

Geneviève observed, ‘I confess, I always thought I might have a vulgar daughter but I suspected her to be Sally. Can I have been mistaken? Or perhaps it's
both of you, in which case I've been very unfortunate.'

Betty got up. ‘Well, at least I can ring Daddy.'

‘Why?' Sally asked.

‘To tell him the good news about Gisela. Gideon will be mightily relieved, too, I can tell you.'

As she left the room Gisela ran towards Sally, stumbled over an invisible obstacle, fell down and began to cry.

‘Oh, Christ,' said Sally, picking her up. She sat down with the child on her knee and lit a cigarette. ‘I'm sorry, maman. I think we need to get some chickens – for the eggs.'

‘I don't really think so,' Geneviève said faintly.

Gisela had brightened up, ‘Can we have chickens? Can I have a kitten as well?'

‘We'll see,' Sally said. She was saying to her mother, ‘Perhaps chickens aren't a good idea,' when Betty came back into the room.

‘How did Daddy take the news?' Sally asked.

‘He said he wasn't altogether surprised,' Betty reported. ‘Gideon's thrilled to bits.'

‘Why on earth?' Sally asked.

‘Because he's very likely to stand for Parliament as a Conservative at the next election and, well, you know what I mean – no one wants a blot on the escutcheon.'

‘He'll be a blot on mine!' Sally cried.

‘Really!' Geneviève said, and then added, weakly, ‘I must go and rest now.'

Sally jumped up. ‘Let me just put a hot-water bottle in your bed. It's still frightfully cold up there.'

After she had helped Geneviève to bed, Sally made a phone call, then went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. She told Gisela to lay the table and ruthlessly fended off questions about her parents and kittens.

When Harry Jackson-Bowles returned from Birmingham Betty and her husband had left and Sally was making soup. Gisela, who had put a blanket in a cardboard box, as a bed for the hoped-for kitten, had crawled into it herself and fallen asleep.

Harry peered into the box and said, in a low voice, ‘Poor little thing. I wonder if she'll ever see her parents again.'

‘There's one bit of good news,' Sally said. ‘I've phoned up Nanny Trotter and told her about maman. She says she'll come back. I've offered her a big pay increase. I'd better have some of Aunt Clothilde's money, Daddy. I know it's privilege but it's what Aunt Clothilde would have wanted. The trouble with Maman is that she's not good at releasing the purse strings. Have a gin. I brought some down with me.'

‘Thank you, darling,' he said. His face was strained, for he knew how very ill his wife was.

Sally had returned – Gisela had parents. War threw up some strange situations, he thought. Indeed, War had made his own marriage. He remembered himself as a young soldier being greeted by the stuffy French family who had offered him hospitality, remembered the sudden intoxication of his first sight of Geneviève
Février de Roche, the steady charming gaze of her brown eyes.

And God alone knew what Sally was cooking up now on that stove.

Each summer evening at nine Sally, her father and Miss Trotter would gather in Geneviève's bedroom to listen to the BBC news. Already Rome had fallen; the Russian army was routing the last of the Germans. Britain had become an armed camp in preparation for the coming invasion of France.

Geneviève slept early and after the news the others normally went downstairs for cocoa or a drink.

It was Miss Trotter who said, one evening, ‘I think Mrs Jackson-Bowles is staying with us by will-power. I believe she's waiting for the liberation of France.'

In the country, despite the absence of the men and the presence of the called-up land-girls in their brown breeches, much was still the same. Fields, hedgerows, the small roads, the swelling hills were as they always had been. In London, though, the rocket attacks continued. At Glebe House they waited.

Sally, whose grip on her purse in contrast to her mother's was excessively loose, threw ration books and principles to the winds and soon became part of a rural network of illicit food-providers. After dark parcels were delivered to the back door. Sally pedalled the lanes on her bicycle with eggs and bacon in the basket under her mac.

There was game, too, in more than one way, for Sally
had begun a flirtation with George Pomfret, the gamekeeper of the local estate. Everybody in the neighbourhood, including his employer and the local policeman, knew that George had deserted the Army after Dunkirk but no one was prepared to turn in Jenny Pomfret's only boy.

The plan to rear hens was abandoned but a kitten came back from a farm in Sally's bicycle basket. Gisela was overjoyed. Better still, from Sally's point of view, was the return of Miss Trotter, who, with money available for local bribery and corruption, soon managed to secure more help about the house.

And Genevieve's strength ebbed.

One May morning she said to Sally, ‘I should like to see France free again.'

‘Have you regretted your life in England, Maman?' Sally asked her.

‘Of course not,' she replied. ‘Your father is English. It is enough to have led my life with him. I'm sorry, Sally, you have never found that kind of happiness.'

‘There's still time,' Sally said. Though Geneviève did not reply, her expression indicated that eternity would not be long enough to see her awkward daughter happily settled.

One evening in June, late, the still-light sky was darkened by thousands of planes, drumming overhead, thick as clouds. ‘It's happening at last,' said Geneviève. She lived just long enough to see Paris liberated in late August.

It might have been true that, during those final months, Geneviève softened towards her difficult elder daughter
but this sentiment was not reflected in her will. She had evened the score between Sally and her sister by dividing the bulk of a fairly large fortune between her husband and Betty. To Sally she left nothing but a picture of her own mother and her love.

Harry Jackson-Bowles was inconsolable, yet allowed no one to see his feelings.

It was after Geneviève's funeral that he told Sally, ‘I've been putting some money aside for Gisela and now I can do a little more for her.'

Sally was touched. ‘That's good of you, Daddy, especially now that you know she's not your granddaughter.'

‘She'll need it more, perhaps. Jewish, isn't she?'

‘Half Jewish.'

‘Well, she doesn't look it so far,' he said. ‘That's lucky. And, after all, there are many cultivated Jews.' These were the code-words for wealthy European Jewry, used by people such as Harry Jackson-Bowles, whose own culture went little further than Gilbert and Sullivan and one or two plays by Shakespeare.

Once the mourners had gone Harry, Sally, Betty and Gideon Cunningham and Miss Trotter were left alone in a house which, lacking Geneviéve's presence, seemed lifeless.

Christmas 1944 came and went, and with the spring it had become obvious that the end of the war was now only weeks away. A general election loomed in the summer and Betty and Gideon had begun a campaign to move permanently into Glebe House with Harry. The
house was bigger and more impressive than their own and would be useful for the launch of Gideon's political career. Betty had already mentioned this possibility to her father. But Harry was unready, so soon after his wife's funeral, to consider such an upheaval. Moreover, Gisela's name had not been mentioned and it seemed the new menage Betty was planning did not include the little girl.

One evening, as the family sat together, Miss Trotter quietly knitting, while Gisela, on the floor, looked through a book, Betty reopened the subject.

Miss Trotter burst out, ‘What about Gisela?'

Harry, profoundly tired, opened his mouth to speak. Betty got in ahead of him and was saying, ‘That's Sally's responsibility, surely,' when the telephone rang in the hall.

Harry got up to answer it, returning shortly after to tell Sally, ‘It's Adrian Pym for you.'

‘Oh, Lord,' Sally said, and went to the phone. Less than five minutes later she was back in the room, chalk white. She said, ‘I'm terribly sorry – I have to go back to London very quickly. I'm so sorry, Daddy.'

‘I hope it's not bad news,' he said.

‘I'm not sure,' she told him. She ran upstairs to pack.

‘Rather a funny moment to leave,' Betty said into the silence.

‘Perhaps there's an emergency at the Post Office,' Gideon suggested.

Not long after, Sally had made her farewells and was bumping towards London in George Pomfret's van,
illegally fuelled with blackmarket petrol. Before she left she'd whispered to Miss Trotter, ‘It's about Gisela's mother. Don't tell the others.'

‘Is she alive?' the other woman murmured.

‘I don't know,' Sally replied.

Into the silence of the early hours of Christmas Day Bruno Lowenthal said, ‘So that was why Sally went to Dachau to find Gisela's mother, Claudia Stein.

‘This was not easy. Dachau was still full of what came to be called displaced persons. Even though the camp had been liberated in April 1945, they had not opened the gates to allow the sick and starving to flood out. Typhoid fever had broken out. The US Army was guarding the camp.

‘What Pym had told Sally as she stood, almost fainting, in the hall at Glebe House, was that Frenchmen on a mission to the camp had found in its prohibited area, where the hopeless cases, the dying, were penned, a skeletal figure who had spoken to one of them by name. They had barely recognised the figure of Claudia Stein. They had wrapped her in a sheet, as people wrap a dead body, and smuggled her from this area of the dying to the survivors' part of the camp, where they had covertly laid her down
by a hut to give her some minimal chance of life. They could do no more, had only been able to do this, they said, because there were no guards around. The soldiers were all in the guardhouse, hiding, afraid of typhus.

‘In London Pym told Sally, “I've got you a plane and I've made some telephone calls. If you want to get her back you have to go there. You'll have to get past the guards somehow.”

‘Sally got in touch with Benoît and Charles du Tour in Paris and they called on a contact who had been in the Resistance. Through him they obtained French Army officers' uniforms and false papers. Sally was provided in London with a British nursing officer's uniform and had papers to match.

‘They drove all day from Paris and by the next morning were at the gates, beyond which lay the acres of mud, the huts, the chimneys of Dachau.

‘As they walked up to the guard-house, they saw an officer in the uniform of a US captain put down the telephone he had been speaking into, then quickly put on his gas mask.

‘Benoît and Charles presented their papers and a sergeant, in helmet and gas mask, ordered the gates to be swung back. ‘See Hamilton – he's over there in that block,' he told them, pointing.

‘Sally, shocked by the mention of Eugene's name, dared say nothing.

‘They marched forward over the mud, passing hundreds of ragged figures, hollow-eyed, skeletal and silent. The air was rank.

‘In a small hut Eugene Hamilton sat at a desk, a man and a woman beside him, both evidently former prisoners. Others sat on chairs in front of the desk, waiting. He looked at Benoît, Charles and Sally as they came in and something like a smile crossed his weary face. Sally stepped up to him. “Eugene, I've come to take a prisoner out. Please let me – it's Gisela's mother.”

‘He said something to one of his helpers, who stood up. “We'll take you,” Eugene said. “Sally?”

‘“Cora told me about the letter. Will you come and see me – afterwards?”

‘He nodded. Then she and Eugene, with Benoît and Charles, followed the tall, thin man, conducting them back into the smell of death.

‘“What are you doing here?” she asked.

‘“My regiment's been put to guard the camp,” he said. “The captain won't come in and a lot of the other guys can't take it.”

‘A truck meandered towards them over the mud, followed by a crowd of prisoners, some barely able to walk.

‘A gas-masked soldier looked out of the truck's window. “Hey, buddy, where do you want the load dumped?”

‘“Over there,” said Eugene, pointing to a heavily guarded shed.