It is today.
The refrain carried Liese through the short walk across the dew-soaked grass and down to the shingle. The sea spread out before her smooth as French Navy satin, frilled with cream lace where it trickled over the shore.
If this is wrong, if it won’t pay the price, the water won’t want me.
She knew that it would.
Salt danced through the breeze, tingling at her lips. Dawn was breaking. Liese breathed in the morning and stepped onto the beach.
Eighteen
Karen
Berlin, October 1990
No one who looked at Andrew Cartwright could fail to see the soldier he had once been, even at seventy-four. Despite being tired from the early-morning start and, Karen suspected, nervous about the journey to come, his back was straight, his shoulders were square and his walk still carried a snap in it. He had dressed for the occasion – his first time flying – in a tweed suit and overcoat that attracted admiring glances as he walked through Heathrow. Within five minutes, his bearing and impeccable manners had so impressed the British Airways check-in staff, he had bagged the upgrade to First Class that Karen had never once been offered. She was proud to be seen with him and told him so, taking a quiet delight in his awkward blush.
‘Do you want anything for the flight? A newspaper or a magazine?’
‘My book will do me fine, but thank you.’
A formality had crept back between them since May’s revelations, although their meetings nowadays were consciously more regular and their conversations always couched in considerate tones.
Liese’s last letter, and Andrew’s subsequent account of how he had fallen apart on the day of her death, had dredged up old memories and knocked Karen more off balance than she could at first admit.
No, I can’t come; don’t ask me.
His furious response to Karen’s plea on the day of Liese’s death, that he come to her and help her make sense of their loss, had resurfaced. She had forgotten how his shout had echoed round the hotel, or, rather, she had worked hard not to remember it. He had recounted his memories of that day the same night he had given Karen the scrapbook, pouring them out honestly and surrounded by apologies. How he had gone to identify Liese’s body and then found himself alone on the beach, weeping so hard no one would come near him. How he had come back to the hotel, horrified by his behaviour and desperate to make up for it. How he had given in too easily when he was told Karen was sleeping and best left. Karen had gone away feeling sorry for her father but sorrier still for the little girl whose wounds she was afraid she would never completely shake. She had woken almost every morning in the following weeks replaying the shock of his failure to be the father she needed. The father that Liese had asked him to be.
‘Did you tell him that?’
‘No. I gave him the book back and said I was tired and needed to think. I haven’t mentioned it, or anything else, since.’
‘I understand why, Karen.’ Markus had been as direct in his responses as ever. ‘You must have been drained from the reading and the memories. But I thought you were done with old patterns. Won’t more silences just drag you both back to where you were when you started out on this quest?’
The telephone conversation with Markus had been snatched and brief, and Karen had hit him with so much information, she had wondered part of the way through if she sounded a little mad. By the time she was done, the cost of the call had flown to an unsustainable level. She had gabbled it to a close and left Markus with barely enough time to offer her anything more than those few words of advice beyond ‘I’m here’ and ‘I care’. When she eventually let it, his advice had sunk in. Now she was glad she had followed it.
Liese watched her father letting the First-Class Lounge staff fuss round him. Explaining her feelings of anger and abandonment had been harder than she wanted, although easier than it would have been six months earlier. She had planned what she wanted to say so that it wasn’t loaded with blame. So she could lay out carefully the mistrust that had grown up around what she had seen as her father’s lies, and how that had hardened over the years. So she could make him see how the pain that mistrust caused had made her want to hit out; how it still cut deeper than she wanted.
She had managed to deliver her speech calmly; her father had listened with scrupulous care. He had accepted everything and apologised, allowing her to do the same. They had agreed that there was hurt inflicted on both sides, that neither of them had any desire to go forward in the same conflict-fuelled way. They had agreed to make a proper effort to be in each other’s lives. Andrew now called once a week and asked interested questions about her work. Karen visited him at least every other weekend. They were careful with each other, but they were inching forward, discovering that they were more alike than past resentments had let them see. Lately they had brought Liese into their conversations, offering memories of her good days to each other like new friends tentatively exchanging gifts. More recently still, Karen had let him ask the occasional question about Markus.
Markus. In a few hours, she would be back in the same city as him. She had been longing for that for the past five months and now the thought of seeing him made Karen’s hands clammy. Andrew was occupied, caught up in some animated discussion about cricket Karen had no interest in. She helped herself to another cup of coffee and took Markus’s latest letter out of her bag.
It wasn’t easy to speak, with his work shifts and the cost of calls, so letters had remained their main line of communication. Markus hadn’t got much better at writing them. His preference was still for facts, for straightforward exchanges of information that he promised to ‘fill in when I see you’. His reactions on paper were far more muted than in person, and he rarely mentioned the presumably difficult conversations he must have had with his father. Sometimes Karen read through the brief pages wondering what this relationship she hoped was developing between the two of them actually was. If it had been merely a sidebar to her mother’s story. And then a line would appear in the middle of a tightly written message. A sudden tumble of words that suggested what was going through his head might not be so different at all to the dreams that keep flourishing in hers.
I wish I was with you, to hold you. I hope it’s not wrong to think you want that too.
You were brave and you found her. A lot of people would have run from what you uncovered, or never dug in the first place. You are really quite something, Karen Cartwright.
And her favourite, from the letter she was holding, which made her grin every time that she read it.
Promise me you will phone me when you arrive in Berlin, the first minute you can. I’m counting the days like a schoolboy.
‘You’re daydreaming, Karen. They’re calling our flight. It’s a busy one apparently, packed with journalists flying out to cover tomorrow’s reunification ceremony. I’ve been asked twice if I’m some kind of writer. It must be the suit.’
Her father’s eyes were twinkling; he looked ten years younger.
Karen grinned. ‘I should take a photo of you and send it to Mrs Hubbard. Prove to her that my “crazy ideas” haven’t put you into a box like she predicted.’