The Quality of Mercy Page 26

  ‘Darling V! Tell me again that you’ll marry me. I somehow can’t quite believe it. Say you haven’t changed your mind.’

  Verity closed her eyes and then opened them again as if she had been praying although as a paid-up member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an avowed atheist this was unlikely. She put her hands into his across the table and said simply, ‘I will marry you, Edward, if you still want me.’

  A week later, Edward found himself in a gloomy north London synagogue listening to a rabbi recite Kaddish. He prayed for the soul of Georg Dreiser and for his parents, probably in some hideous concentration camp by now. Then he prayed for Verity, who had left for Prague, and for their marriage.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ she had ordered when he kissed her goodbye. ‘I won’t be in Prague for very long. The Germans will march into Czechoslovakia and I will be thrown out. I am trying to be thrown out of every country in Europe.’ She joked but her voice cracked. ‘I am the albatross – the bird of ill-omen. I move to the sound of marching boots and I dance to the goose-step.’

  ‘V!’ he chided her. ‘Don’t go all gnomic on me. It’s not like you to be so gloomy.’

  ‘Georg’s death has shocked me more than all the deaths I saw in Spain.’

  ‘Why? Because you think it was our fault?’

  ‘No. I know it wasn’t our fault but I feel it as very close to me. Georg was the first person I thought I had a chance of saving and I failed. And now I won’t be at the synagogue to pray for him.’

  ‘You don’t believe in prayer.’

  ‘No, but I’m not always logical as you well know. Pray for him for me, will you, Edward?’

  Before setting out on her long journey across Europe, Verity had spent the night in the arms of her lover. They had eaten a last supper of bread and cheese and drunk a last bottle of wine in the bed which smelled of their entwined bodies. The flat in Cranmer Court – still largely unfurnished – was an adequate refuge, so anonymous it seemed to concentrate all their longings inwards, one upon the other.

  After they had eaten, they lay in the darkness and tried to sleep but there were too many thoughts to pursue in each of their minds to make it possible. Edward stroked her, feeling her flutter under his hand like a bird. She clung to him with all the passion of a child at her mother’s breast, wanting to tell him what he already knew – that she was frightened of her appointment with destiny. She had been in danger so many times and escaped death when others close to her had not. Perhaps her luck was finally running out. Perhaps she would end up in some squalid Nazi prison camp. She tried to still her rising panic. She knew that in the morning light she would see things more clearly. She would not be afraid. She would be dry-eyed as she kissed Edward goodbye but, in the darkness, she could give way to night terrors and be comforted.

  ‘V, darling, you’re shivering. Are you cold?’

  ‘I am a little cold, yes.’

  ‘Shall I warm you again – the way you like?’

  ‘But it’s the middle of the night . . . Don’t you want to sleep?’

  Edward did not answer but cradled her to his chest. She was so small! How could such a sparrow fly so far from him? He felt her breath warm against his mouth. He kissed her and felt, rather than saw, her tears.

  ‘Hey, don’t cry, my darling,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll part in the morning but only for a little while. I shall come after you in a month or two and bring you home.’

  ‘But, Edward,’ she protested, suddenly happy, ‘I’m a hard-bitten, bloody-minded reporter – not a child to be carried off to safety as soon as the going gets a little rough.’

  ‘Of course you are, my darling, but you are also going to be my wife and that gives me the right to protect you. It’s a right I have desired for so long and now you cannot deny me.’

  ‘I won’t deny you anything,’ she promised him.

  ‘Oh, V!’ he cried, entering her as though into a new life. ‘Come to me, my darling girl! I love you very much. You will never be alone again, however far away you are from me.’

  And when it was all over and they were satisfied, they slept and were comforted.

  The rabbi had told Edward that the Kaddish was in essence a reminder of the greatness of God rather than what a Christian might think of as a mourning prayer.

  ‘You see,’ the old man said, ‘the great Rabbi Meir consoled her husband for the death of their two sons with a prayer which likened their dead children to precious objects God had lent them for a while and now demanded they return. So, when a loved one dies, we say, “The Lord gave and the Lord took back. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”’

  It seemed cold comfort to Edward and he felt uneasy praying standing up and with a hat on his head. He studied the English translation of the ancient Jewish prayer and, as the words echoed in his mind, they brought him a kind of understanding.

  ‘He who creates peace in heaven, may he bring peace for us and for Israel,’ the rabbi intoned.

  Georg had not found peace in his beloved Austria, nor in England. Perhaps he was at peace now. Edward hoped it was so. He solemnly swore to the spirit of Georg that he would do his utmost to bring life and hope to the children in the trains shuffling their way over dangerous borders to a kind of safety. They, at least, must feel the quality of mercy.

  He closed his eyes and offered up a moment of quietness – what his friend the Reverend Tommie Fox had told him was called a hesychasm – as he silently repeated words from the twenty-third psalm. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.’

  He sighed. Sursum corda. Lift up your hearts! He offered up a prayer for Verity’s safety in Czechoslovakia and for Frank, who might soon be fighting Nazism on another battlefront. He hoped there was a God to hear it.

  As he left the synagogue, words from Measure for Measure – perhaps Shakespeare’s bleakest play – came to mind. They seemed in some mysterious way to fit the time and the place.

  Mortality and mercy in Vienna

  Live in thy tongue and heart.

  Historical Note

  The first Kindertransport refugee train left Berlin for England in early December 1938, some months later than I have it in the book, for which I hope I will be forgiven.

  After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) on 9 and 10 November 1938 when 367 synagogues were destroyed and the windows of all the Jewish shops left in the Reich were shattered, the British Jewish Refugee Committee appealed to the British Government to admit any Jewish children up to the age of seventeen from Germany and what had until the Anschluss been Austria. After a debate in the House of Commons this was agreed and, as a result 10,000 children were saved from the concentration camps. The last train departed from Berlin just two days before war broke out on 3 September 1939.

  For more information go to www.kindertransport.org