Read Return to Fourwinds Online
Authors: Elisabeth Gifford
25
th
July
Ralph, you wouldn't recognise Lily.
As we walk down to the tea rooms again, the faint summer scent of Lime
trees in the evening air, I have to look twice at this slight woman at my side, nothing but fire and determination, her eyes glittering with tiredness, but she won't give in. And I wonder where she's learned this subterfuge, my own timid little Lily.
But then, of course, it's not the first time she has risked all, and been prepared to play a part if she has to. I do know just what Lily can endure for those she cares about.
Our little jaunts don't get any easier, I have to admit, no matter how many times you go through it. Takes strong nerves â and some downright cheek. But it all passes off smoothly. We share a tense hour over tea with our new dearest friends â glad that the string quartet in the corner has a marvellous ability to muffle the conversation around one, Lily chattering on, though I know her heart is hammering in her throat. Sometimes there's a child with them. That really breaks your heart, to think of all the others who haven't escaped â and makes one more determined.
Now that Switzerland is closed, the Madrid underground railway is the only viable route out of the axis for Jewish refugees. So Churchill's told Hillgarth to increase the activity in evacuations as much as is possible, do whatever he needs to. It seems all the best families are in on it now. Quite the thing. And no one breathes a word.
Each time it happens, dear Lily seems a little thinner, a little more worn. Some evenings, by the time I've helped her to bed, raised her feet up onto the mattress, she's already falling asleep.
I said to her, âLily dear, you don't have to do this. Do you really want to take more risks?' But do you know what she replied? âBut what would we tell Ralph, if we knew we hadn't done all we could?'
And she's right, dear boy. One day, I want to tell you what we did to play our part, for a better world. For the world you will live in.
Ralph was filled with longing for the affectionate man who had once been such a vital part of his life, and with all the feelings that he
hadn't let himself admit for years. He missed Max, missed him terribly.
But why hadn't Max let him know all this himself? Ralph was partly to blame, he knew that, the way he had pushed Max away at Mama's funeral and refused to even open any letter from Max.
Then Max had died so suddenly and so swiftly after Mama had passed away. When Ralph had got the news in the barracks there had been a WREN officer there who had meant kindly but misunderstood, telling Ralph how people deeply in love often went swiftly together, couldn't live without the other. At the time he'd shaken his head at that â she'd got it so very wrong â but now he wondered. And he saw that Max must have surely been intending to talk to him and tell him, was waiting for the right time, but his sudden death had robbed him of that chance.
Ralph took a shuddering, almost involuntary sigh and realised that a deep love for Max had never really left him; it had simply been tamped down hard, somewhere deep inside his chest.
16
th
August
Such a long time since I've had a chance to sit down and write in this little book. Long hours trying to broker a new deal with Spain through the embassy bank. Spain's completely bankrupt in effect, so, for the right amount, they've agreed to sell their entire stock of wolfram ore to the allies â if we outbid everyone else. There's no other source of wolfram in Europe, and it's vital for arms manufacture. But there's nothing the Nazis can do now that Spain has agreed to quietly sell the whole caboodle to us. Means it's only a matter of time before the Nazis run out and that will affect their ability to expand into Russia or Africa this winter certainly.
The real headache however has been this deal with March. He's got several of the generals in his pocket all right, but the money to pay their bribes has had to pass through the US banks in Switzerland to help wash away the British connection, and since they can see it all going to a Spanish recipient the US
has blocked the whole ten million â we can't tell them outright what the deal is about, you see.
Hillgarth and Hoare are frantically trying to get the funds unfrozen. In the meantime, March has stumped up half the cash from his own funds, to stop the generals turning on him and throwing him to the dogs. Frantic negotiations to try and get it all sorted. I'm getting very little sleep.
I've told no one about this except this little book. Not even dear Lily, who has enough to think about. Even when we're alone, we rarely speak of what has happened during the day. There will be a time for talking openly, one day soon.
The light was beginning to show through the shiny fibreglass fabric of the curtains, making the bedside lamp unnecessary. Max let the diary rest on his lap.
That was why Max was given an OBE. For the first time it made sense. All the secret deals that Max had brokered so that March could keep the generals from letting Franco think it was a good idea to let the Nazi troops roll down through Spain. And the deals to stop wolfram ore going into arms manufacture so that Hitler had had to scale back his plans to expand. This was what Churchill's government were thanking him for when they made him the award. Quietly, unassumingly, without ever making a song and dance about it, not even a hint, Max must have saved a hell of a lot of lives through his work. And even more than that, there was all that Lily and he had done for the fleeing refugees and escaped prisoners.
Ralph picked up the diary and read on.
23
rd
September
We've had a visit from a Wehrmacht officer today. Came to the flat. Very friendly. Impeccable manners. Walked around looking in all the rooms, admiring the splendidly appointed accommodation. Rather pointedly menacing in his manner to be honest.
Not sure if they are on to something about the bank or there's word about our guests, but I don't like it. If they took me in for questioning, I think I could cope, but Lily is another matter. I know about their methods.
So there's a place come up on a flight out and I'm making sure Lily's on it. God willing, you'll see her in a couple of days. She's torn in half. Longing to see you but she's crying next door, tells me she's not going each time I go in. But she has to. It's not safe.
âBut you'll come too?' she keeps asking.
I told her that I'd love nothing better, but I can't. So much depending on the transactions going through the bank to keep Spain lined up with the allies. I know I have to stay and see it through. We drove out to the airport at Barajas late afternoon. We talked a long time before your mama left. We asked ourselves whether she should tell you now. Decided the right thing is to tell you only when this is over, my own dearest boy. In time. I held her for as long as I could before she had to go, waited, watching her plane lift into the sky and then I stayed and watched it until it disappeared.
I seem to have taken to praying again, for you both to be safe.
19
th
January 1941
It's been a long and hard winter so far. But today, a letter from you got through. How is Oxford? I'm sure you will ace your exams there, dear Ralph, in the years to come.
How the days do drag with no Lily. Consuelo has really stepped up to the mark I must say. She gets the flat ready for the ashen-faced guests I still bring back every so often. Thousands have gone through the Madrid safe houses now. It doesn't stop.
Consuelo works like a trooper, always ready with whatever one needs.
Ah, but it's so empty here in the apartment without you both, my dears. I wish so much I could jump on a plane and come and see you for a few days, but flights to England are now cancelled indefinitely. I know it's so important not to lose hope, to keep looking to a better day, a brighter dawn. But it's hard. One
sees no end to this war. Quite when it will be over no one can say, or how things will end. Perhaps in a few months the situation will have changed enough for me to take leave and see you both at last.
I take my meal in the kitchen these days and sit talking with Consuelo. Warmer there than in the chilly dining room by myself. Share a few glasses of wine.
Dear boy, how you and your mama are so very missed.
After that there were no more entries, but Ralph could fill in the rest of the story, from news that had arrived in letters from Mama's friends in Madrid over those following months.
At the beginning of 1942 Consuelo had appeared in the Embassy Tea Rooms dressed in one of Lily's old coats, a fox fur stole clipped round her neck. Max had looked hunted, embarrassed, but Consuelo hardly seemed to notice or care, her cheeks rouged, triumphant and reckless. No one spoke to Max after that. He was given the cold shoulder, not so much for sleeping with the maid, but for rubbing everyone's noses in his bizarre little scandal.
His post at the bank had been affected; new blood brought in to look at things in a different way, they said. After the scandal he'd caused they wanted him out, but still needed him for the long nights of covert deals and brokering that Max had taken on to keep Spain out of the axis. By the time Ralph had gone up to Oxford, Lily and Max had agreed a divorce.
At the time Ralph had seen nothing but fault in what Max had done. No excuse for it. But now he saw another Max, alone, wanting to come home so very much but having to hang on in Madrid; the long evenings in the lonely flat; the war stretching out till God knew when; and then a bleak moment of weakness, taking a little comfort where he could find it â not seeing how it would unravel everything.
Then a few months later, while Ralph's unit was in Holland, a telegram had come announcing that Lily had died. That was when a cold hate towards Max began to simmer in Ralph's chest. He'd adamantly blocked any attempt of Max's to get in touch with him after that, even at Mama's funeral, vowed to never forgive him. And a few months after the funeral Max was also dead. Ralph had not gone to that funeral.
But now he didn't so much forgive Max as found that he saw all Max's imperfections and weaknesses spread out before him like the autopsy of a damaged heart. The bitterness he felt towards Max and Consuelo drained away. And for the first time he saw the logic and fear and perambulation that had led Max to keep silent.
A feeling of calm came over Ralph; there had been a shift inside, an untying of something wound tight: he had stopped being angry. Ralph closed the small volume. So much to take in, everything about Max and Lily now seen from a different angle, all their secrets and strenuous efforts to help those in a desperate situation revealed.
Heroes, you could say that. They were heroes really.
But most of all Max's diary was a letter from a father to a son. For years, even after he had been told Max's secret by Mama, the memory of walking with Max and Tom through Valencia had been of a child longing to walk with his father, believing he never would. But now he saw his small hand firmly held in the large, rough palm of his father, his childhood years held in the gaze of his father's concern.
And he was bursting to tell Alice. The story wasn't finished, not until he had shared it with Alice.
Ralph blinked twice, slowly. For the first time he let himself see how the years had let a distance grow between them, and he saw for the first time how he had wanted and even engineered that. What had he been thinking? Had he really been so wasteful, so stupid? For what? Those years were gone now. He couldn't go back and change it.
It was as if that small boy from Valencia was now sitting beside him, watching him, wondering why it had mattered so much that he should hide himself away like that. Why? The closeness that Alice and he had shared on the day they'd moved into the damp and tumbledown cottage, he wanted it back. He wanted Alice back â if it wasn't too late.
It was still ridiculously early, but he began to stuff his things haphazardly back into his case. A brief splash of water on his face. The night attendant on the desk was a little grumpy to have to process his bill at such an hour. Out in the deserted street Ralph hailed down a lone taxi and asked to be dropped at Euston.
He counted off the stations as the train neared home. Watching the passing fields and blurred townscapes through the window, those indistinct shapes from the past that he had lived with for so long began to materialise into forms that he could finally see with clarity. Yes, there was the stultifying heaviness of Lily's silence, her shame at his illegitimacy, her fear of being cast out; but with Max he also recognised an altogether darker garment, made from the terrified pulse in the throat, from the close, hot breath of the shadow of death passing over a people as Lily and Max had walked home through the streets of Madrid with a couple of desperate refugees. An old tattered coat made from the stories that Max's mother had told him by the fire one winter, its lining sewn from stories of pogroms and men with clubs. For the first time Ralph clearly understood the heft of fabric that had weighed down his own limbs; a coat of fear and silence, worn by instinct, without question, how it had silenced and isolated him. Well, no more.
Another hour and he'd be with Alice
CHAPTER 31
Fourwinds, 1981
Around ten in the morning the taxi dropped Ralph off at the top of the drive that led to Fourwinds. The morning had opened out into crisp sunshine. He wandered along the drive and over the lawn, exhausted, but home. He came to the wooden bench and sat down, spreading himself out to simply look at the old place.
That was how Alice found him when she came out to peg up washing. He was sitting and thinking, still in his crumpled mac, the suitcase and briefcase abandoned on the lawn. She stopped dead, and then walked slowly towards him. She saw immediately in his face that something had happened.
âWhy didn't you tell me you were coming this early? Ralph, what is it? What on earth's the matter with you?'