Kate felt the rough sleeve of the uniform against her cheek, opened her eyes, and found herself slumped in the arms of the railway man lowering her gently to the ground. People came running, cries of
She faced Matteous, who noticed how pale she was.
“Shall I get you a glass of water?”
Kate shook her head, she did not need anything, all she wanted was to sit and wait for the reflux of the tide that had been washing over her for days: the hours with Roy and their great life together, which she had buried and banished, and which had started anew in the dark shape of Matteous.
Marina Piccola in May, which you could reach on foot over the newly constructed Via Krupp, a miraculous road with tier upon tier of hairpin bends seeming to spill from the cliffs. The Faraglioni rose high from the sea, three great spurs of black rock with seagulls wheeling above. Roy and she had seen them at close quarters from a dinghy. “Kate-ate-ate!” Roy shouted upwards, outshouting the gulls. The sound came back again and again, louder each time.
Capri in early spring, almost empty of tourists. Roy supervised excavations, and she wandered around the island, or took a boat tour to the blue grotto. Roy needed only to thrust a stick in the soil to be transported to Antiquity. They had stayed for several weeks at a stretch. Kate knew the island like the back of her hand, from the Emperor Tiberius’s Villa Jovis up to Monte Barbarossa.
She told Matteous of her fears for the impending invasion. She hid nothing, relating all Oscar’s objections and describing his concerns over Emma’s safety. She explained her own reservations, and that she had overcome them, and that she had decided to go to the authorities before it was too late.
Matteous shook his head. “Don’t do it, Miss Kate, don’t do it.”
She had been so confident of his approval. He knew the meaning of war, he would tell her she should go, would accompany her even. But what he said was: “You must think of your daughter, Miss.”
Perhaps she had spoken too quickly for him to understand, she would explain all over again, and would continue explaining until he finally said yes. But again he said no. No, no, she was not to go there, she was not to betray her daughter. They would find out, and there was nothing she or anybody else could do about the war, which was a massive force taking possession of the world, of limitless momentum and impossible to stop. Matteous expressed it otherwise, but that was what she understood him to say. He had seen the war and been unable to escape. There was no escape.
Of the funeral she had no memory, none at all but for one thing. Among the scores of mourners at the Cimitero degli Inglesi in Rome, she had seen her father holding hands with a little girl in a black hat. Who she was she did not know – a niece? the daughter of a friend? – yet it seemed to her that the child was leading him by the hand rather than the other way round. She saw herself standing at the graveside while the coffin was lowered, her eyes fixed on her mute father and the little girl in the hat. That was the only image that had stayed with her.
“Matteous, all those people will get shot and burned and blown to smithereens, they’ll crush everything in their path with their tanks. They have done it before and they will do it again. We must give all those innocent folk some warning.”
Matteous looked away, his hand on his heart. He was no longer listening. She was afraid he would leave without a further word. But he moved his hand from his heart to her arm, touched her wrist, and slipped her a folded scrap of paper.
Darkness fell slowly, the street lamps of Barkston Gardens remaining unlit. Time for blackout, time to stand up and shut the windows and the doors to the balcony. It was as though she had fallen ill. Her head was ablaze, she could feel the fever rising, her feet were as cold as ice. Time for blackout.
The train to Fribourg departed on the dot. Oscar was often irritated by the never-ending quest for precision. The Swiss were maniacs, watchmakers, disciplinarians of strict regularity. Today he did not care one way or another, all he wished was for time to be abolished altogether, no clocks, no calendars, no appointments. It was Thursday, 19 June, and the train departing from Berne at 9.32 a.m. would arrive in Fribourg at 10.17. By 10.28 a.m. he would be with Lara.
