The Novel in the Viola (42 page)

There was a grace and an unreality to the fight. I’d spent hours and days on the top of this hillside, watching birds of prey. I’d seen a hawk attacked by a flurry of black crows, which swarmed the larger bird in a dark storm of wings as it made desperate attempts to escape. I’d seen a peregrine swoop and snatch songbirds out of the sky, catching a lark into silence. This aerial game was no more real than the bloodied battles of birds, and I felt oddly distanced as I watched them weave among the clouds. It was hard to imagine that inside each cockpit lurked a young man, filled with sweat and terror and fighting to the death with the tenacity of any buzzard or falcon. The hill echoed with gunfire, and tracer rounds strafed the blue sky. Vaguely, I wondered that they didn’t pierce the clouds and cause a storm of pellets and rain.

‘He must be low on fuel,’ observed Poppy, shading her eyes as she studied the Messerschmitt with her steady green gaze.

I stared at the yellow-nosed plane hurtling towards the bay, only to be fired upon by the Spitfire and forced to loop back inland, and tried to feel pity at the pilot’s choice: fire and death, escape and drown. I felt none. Like any cornered animal, the Messerschmitt was desperate. It would break its wing to get away, even if that meant death in any case. Escape. Nothing else mattered. The Spitfire was in no hurry; it had enough fuel and was on home ground, and seemed almost leisurely as it soared and rattled its guns, dodging the bullets of the other plane with casual ease, staying behind a cloud here, dancing through the sky with balletic grace. Then it came. High above us, but close enough that we saw the burst of fire, like flames from the mouth of a dragon, the Spitfire lined up in perfect position behind the enemy, and spat a stream of tracer rounds. The Messerschmitt fell from the sky, a flaming phoenix, engine stuttering into silence. The Spitfire lingered to watch for a moment and then vanished into the evening glow. Poppy and I climbed onto our half-finished fence to watch the descent of the wounded plane. Out of the wreckage floated a white parachute, as smooth and unhurried as a seed case from a dandelion; it dawdled on the breeze, wafting towards the ridge of Tyneford Barrow. Poppy jumped off the fence and grabbed my hand.

‘Run,’ she said.

Hauling me beside her, she took off along the hillside. My lungs burnt and my eyes streamed in the wind, but I didn’t slow or stop. We had to find him. I blinked and envisioned the pilot freed from his parachute, wielding his handgun and shrieking as he fired upon us. I picked up the pace, so that for once Poppy trailed behind me. I bounced from stride to stride, remembering how Kit used to run across the hills and realising how effortless it was. The sun was getting lower now, a glowing disk sinking beneath the horizon and I squinted as I scoured the bare hilltop for a sign of the parachute. Smoke. A flash of white.

‘There,’ I said, pointing to a wind-rushed field.

We sprinted across the barrows, up and down the waving ridges, slowing with caution as we reached the gate leading into the field. Wreckage from the plane blazed and the air stank of burning fuel. Smoke billowed in thick plumes like a thousand chimneys and a slick of grey began to coat my skin. Poppy and I held hands by silent accord. We spoke in whispers.

‘Do you see him?’ she asked.

‘No. Let’s get closer.’

I crept towards the gate, keeping her fingers firmly clasped in mine, and wished we had thought to bring either the mallet or hammer to use as a weapon. I hoped the airman was unconscious or dead.

‘They wear British uniforms in case they crash. And they speak perfect English,’ hissed Poppy. ‘You have to stamp on their feet really hard to see which language they swear in.’

‘Well, we know he’s a Nazi, don’t we? So there’s no need to go stamping on his foot, unless we want to.’

A cry cut through the air. It was a note of fury and hate. Feral rage and fear pooled in my stomach. We dropped over the gate and slid through the grass, grateful for the mask of smoke as we edged across the field. A figure loomed in the murk, towering over the fallen silk of the parachute and clutching a pitchfork. With the flames from the plane licking the sky behind him, he looked like the devil himself. I felt a scream build in my throat and willed myself not to turn and run. The figure turned to look at me.

‘’Ullo. Caught myself a Nazi,’ said Burt. ‘Makes a nice change from cod.’

The prisoner sat in the dining room at Tyneford House. He dabbed at a gash on his forehead and vomited into a bucket Mrs Ellsworth had placed beside his boots. His face was smoke-blackened and his eyes bloodshot and furious. He looked incongruous in the sunlit dining room, clad in his tan sheepskin jacket with the small Nazi insignia on the sleeve. The Wedgewood shepherds and shepherdesses watched him with staunch disapproval from the mantelpiece, and I wondered that the falcon and adder grappling on the dusty coat-of-arms didn’t cease their fight to leap off and savage him. Burt lingered in the doorway, still clutching the pitchfork. Poppy stood flat against the wall, her hands folded behind her back. Mr Rivers was perfectly relaxed, no more concerned than he would be with a tedious dinner guest. He sat across from the pilot on one of the upright dining room chairs, removing the cartridges from the German’s service revolver with practised ease.

‘Safer like this, don’t you think?’ he said pleasantly.

The pilot looked at him with steady hate, and then leant over and retched into the bucket. Mr Rivers pulled Kit’s cigarette case from his pocket, offering it to the pilot. He took one and allowed Mr Rivers to light it, without a word of thanks.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay here for an hour or two, till they can send an army chap to fetch you,’ said Mr Rivers. ‘You’ll be quite comfortable. No one will hurt you. When you’re feeling better, you may have some food.’

The man said nothing, just drew on his cigarette.

‘Alice?’ said Mr Rivers, without turning to look at me. ‘Will you translate? In case he’s ignorant rather than ill-mannered.’

I stepped forward, resting my hand on the back of Mr Rivers’ chair.

‘
Herr Pilot, someone from the army will come. Until then, you must stay here. You will be kindly treated.
’

The German sat up and stared at me, his mouth slightly agape.

‘
You are Austrian.
’

‘
Yes. I was born there.
’

He continued to stare, as though disbelieving his own ears. He touched the wound on his forehead, as though unsure if I was a mirage caused by the blow. Swallowing, he licked dry lips and his eyes flicked around the room, meeting for a moment Mr Rivers’ cool gaze. Apparently satisfied that he was not dreaming, he focused upon me once again.

‘
Where in Austria, Fraulein? I am from the Tyrol.
’

I smiled despite myself. In all my imaginary meetings with captured Nazis, I had not considered making small talk. I hesitated, deciding whether to answer.
I gave a small sigh.

‘
Vienna. I was born in Vienna.
’

He gazed, unseeing, out of the window.
‘
The most beautiful city in all of the world.
Pretty enough for heaven.
’

‘
Yes
,’
I agreed, staring at him. He was a Nazi but this man who had fallen out of the sky was speaking in my mother tongue. He understood Vienna. I hated him and yet we shared something. For a moment I was crippled with homesickness. I wanted the army to take their time in coming to collect him, so I could spend the afternoon talking with him about the Café Sperl and listening to the band in the park of the Belvedere Palace, or which cake was better, the chocolate at the Sacher
or the
linzertorte
at Hotel Bristol.
In a way, he was more my countryman than Mr Rivers or Mrs Ellsworth or Poppy or Burt could ever be. But he would also burn my father’s books in the street and force me to wash faeces off the pavement and make Anna and Julian leave the beautiful apartment in Dorotheegasse and sell the grand piano and – I blinked.

Mr Rivers glanced at me and then at the pilot, but said nothing. His German was passable, but I knew we spoke too fast for him to fully understand.

‘
Ah, the mountains of the Tyrol.
Snow in winter. Edelweiss in summer,
’ said the pilot, letting
the ash fall from his cigarette onto the dining room rug. ‘
I don’t suppose I shall see them for a while.
’

‘No.’

I replied in English, uncertain if he was asking for my pity, but his face was blank and I realised that he merely thought aloud. He had sandy hair, a snub nose, and his eyes were a greenish blue. Blood congealed on his forehead from the cut and in the sunlight I thought I saw a glimpse of white bone. I felt sick and swallowed. He dabbed feebly at his gash with the compress, the cotton pad congealing brown and red. Unaware of what I did, I found myself stepping forward and reaching for the cloth. Then I stopped dead and shoved my hands into my pocket. I would not touch him. I backed away, feeling my lip curl in horror at the thought of his proximity, and retreated behind Mr Rivers’ chair.

The pilot eyed me curiously, intrigued as to my obvious revulsion. I could sense him wondering and, as the fog of pain and shock cleared from his mind, considering why an Austrian girl would be living in an English country house. Any moment and he would know. He was a logical man and first he eliminated other possibilities. He scrutinised my left hand for a wedding ring.

‘
Fraulein?
’

I did not reply; I would not help him.

‘
He is your husband?
’
he asked, nodding towards Mr Rivers.

I flushed and shook my head.

He gave a tiny, satisfied nod. Then there was only one reason for my presence. I heard him say the word in his mind.
Jew.
I heard it as loud as if he had shouted, ‘
She lives here in exile because she is a Jew.
’
It would have been better if he had spoken it. His silent condemnation enraged me. How dare he? He was the traitor. He was the one who had chased me through the fields like a run-rabbit as he fired upon me with his machine-gun and made the woodland floor leap with bullets and the sheep on the meadow explode with a belly full of blood. He silenced my mother’s singing and her letters, kept my sister far away across the sea, and he trapped my father inside the viola. He chased me all the way from Austria across the ridge of green English hills and now sat here in the sunlit room taunting me. I read hatred in his silence. He said nothing, so I heard everything. I crossed the room again, but this time I did not flinch from touching him. I drew my arm back and hit him across the face. I felt his jaw crack, all the way up my arm. My palm stung and I was glad. His hand went to his cheek, a streak of red on his fingertips where my thumbnail had caught his skin. No one spoke. Not Mr Rivers. Not Poppy or Burt. The pilot looked at me in surprise.

‘
You shot at me,
’ I shouted.
‘
You.
’

He shook his head. ‘
No, Fraulein. I did not shoot you
.’

‘
It was you. I know it was you.
’

I trembled, whether from anger or remembered fear I neither knew nor cared. Mr Rivers grabbed my wrist to steady me, but I shook him away. I was entitled to a moment of crazed fury. There was a fleck of blood under my nail. Nazi blood, the same colour as any other. In my dreams I’d imagined them to bleed black like witches. I felt the violence beneath my skin, and the hair on my arms prickled. I thought of the night fox with his hackles raised in the dark, and knew that a savage part of me wanted to kill this man. Wanted to bite and tear and claw and bleed him more than a petty thumbnail scratch. I walked out of the room and slammed the door shut, leaning for a second against it, and listened to the hammer and thud of my own heart and the hushed voices on the other side.

I lay in the semi-darkness of my attic room, cradling the battered viola case and did not move until I heard the rumble of tyres on the gravel driveway below. I listened for the sound of boots on stone and, a few minutes later, the snarl of the engine as the army truck drove away, and I knew he was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘We thank you kindly for not smoking in the bedrooms.’

The WAAFs arrived in March with the thaw. They came as the daffodils erupted on the banks in golden clouds and the tart spring wind carried the scent of green things. I watched from my bedroom window as they clattered across the drive in a hurry of suitcases, woollen stockings and mouths painted Woolworths red. They chattered and smoked and filled the hall with unrepressed laughter and whispered confidences. I came down to greet them, noticed the fragrance of ‘ashes of roses’ mingling with too much cheap violet perfume and smiled. We’d been stupid with grief for too long, numbed by winter cold and unhappiness. The house needed these girls with their romances, pencilled eyebrows and cheerful noise. The girls hushed as they saw me. I shook hands with each in turn. ‘Hullo. I’m Alice Land. If you need anything at all, you’ve only to ask me or Mrs Ellsworth.’

The housekeeper had retreated in annoyance into her kitchen, irritated by the war forcing upon us more guests than we had bedrooms for, but I knew she would relent in the face of all the happy chatter. There were fifteen girls and I’d had to squeeze four into each of the guest rooms and, for the first time since I’d been at Tyneford, all the maids’ rooms were full. All except my little attic. As I’d gone up to put fresh sheets on the bed and air the room, I’d realised that I couldn’t bear anyone else to sleep there. The WAAF girls could manage perfectly well and I decided they would probably prefer to share rooms in the cold house. Spring always arrived late to Tyneford, and despite the blossom dusting the hedgerows like duckling down, the wind hissed through the gaps in the brickwork and, without coal to keep them going, the log fires stuttered into ash after dark. A layer of ice coated the inside of the windows most mornings. I shepherded the girls upstairs, enjoying the bustle of noise and footsteps. As I ushered the last few into Kit’s old room, I heard whispers behind me and a giggle. A girl called Maureen had seized the photograph resting on the dresser.