A stranger to herself, p.39
A Stranger to Herself, page 39
‘What will another court case do to the child?’ Frederick asked, in despair at this further complication.
‘Boarding school,’ said Henry Sturgess. ‘On that you can insist, Mr Levine.’
‘Good idea, Henry,’ Allie told him.
Frederick thought. ‘It’d break that unhealthy atmosphere. Friends of her own age, a breath of fresh air.’ And this much he was able to achieve, for now the divorce had taken place he was at least able to use money as a threat. She still had the twenty thousand pounds but he could cut Violet’s allowance if she did not agree.
Allie argued that he should go to court for the return of Joanna. ‘I’ll come back to Cavendish Square, if you want me to,’ she offered.
‘No good if Joanna won’t stay. If her mother continues to entice her back to Cheyne Walk and she continues to go, what can we possibly do? She’s almost a young woman. I can’t lock her up.’
Joanna had submitted to boarding school, but in the holidays, although she was supposed to stay with her father, she constantly ended up at Cheyne Walk, where Violet arranged a pretty, film star’s bedroom for her. She stayed up for parties, wore grown-up dresses and was petted by the guests. Allie said, ‘She’s singing in German, while a fat Nazi plays the piano in the drawing-room. I don’t know how you can stand it, Frederick. What’s to become of her? She’s completely changed from the girl I used to know. She’s rude to me. Her eyes are insolent. She’s being corrupted. For God’s sake, Frederick, if you won’t sue, send her to Louis in France.’
Frederick had not seen so much of Joanna’s spiteful looks, which alternated with a dreamy, distanced air, where she seemed to be thinking unguessable thoughts. For her father she maintained a meek and obliging personality. Anything she had not unconsciously learned as a child watching Violet deal with her father she was now being taught, deliberately, by her mother. She enjoyed their conspiracy and made no efforts with Allie because Allie had no power over her. ‘What you’ve done, Frederick,’ Allie said grimly, ‘is prove to your daughter that selfish and irresponsible behaviour pays. She’s at a self-absorbed age now. She sees her mother wearing lovely clothes, dancing with a handsome man to all the latest dance tunes, going out to all the best places, thoroughly enjoying herself. She envies and admires Violet. She sees your life as thoroughly dreary; she draws her own conclusions – crime pays.’
In spite of Allie’s pleas, Frederick took no further action, except to do his best, usually unsuccessfully, to prevent Joanna’s constant visits to her mother.
Robert had been humiliated. Details of the Levines’ lives, hitherto so private, had been exposed, their wealth brought to public attention, calling up latent anti-Semitism. At the time of the divorce, a cartoon showing a hook-nosed Jew in a top hat creeping up between two women saying, ‘I don’t mind vich sister I have,’ was published in Action, the British Union of Fascists’ paper.
For Frederick, a private tragedy had turned into a public one. At forty-four he looked ten years older. So, content that most of the time Joanna was away at school, at least some of the time at Cavendish Square during her holidays, he took the optimistic view that as she grew older Joanna’s fascination with life at Cheyne Walk would lessen, she would become increasingly involved with friends of her own age and, not too long from now, fall in love and marry.
Domestic problems were not the only matters troubling him. Six months later, in Vienna, Hanno Waldstein had said to him what he dared not say, ‘You and I both lost brothers, on different sides, in one war. Pray God we don’t have to send our sons to the second.’ Hanno Waldstein had been christened a Catholic, like his sisters. The Waldsteins were therefore, as he said, as Christian as the Pope, but, he told Frederick, cannibals are supposed, when eating a human being, to declare the roasted victim is a pig. Perhaps they really believe, at the time, they’re eating pork. ‘So, dear Frederick,’ said Hanno, ‘if it’s convenient, we Catholic Waldsteins can be declared Jews. It’s easier to eat us. This may be the start of the Terror.’
‘Uncle Leopold warned us,’ replied Frederick, ‘twenty years ago.’
Hanno, who had not lost some of his old instincts, answered, ‘To whom we drink, before going off to gamble.’
They walked down the same streets they had walked as young men. ‘Remember, Frederick – Mitzi and Trudi and Johanna, all the girls. Nice to turn the clock back, eh?’ As he spoke, he regretted speaking. In those days Frederick had not been married. Only a month ago he had been scandalously divorced. Now his wife was living openly with a Fascist leader, a man in a black shirt with a gang of bullies at his back. His cousin had sustained the worst kind of shock. ‘But – into the glorious future,’ he said, swearing to himself that tonight Frederick would win at baccarat, tomorrow he would find him a bride.
But Frederick proved unmarriable, and lived quietly with his mother and son at Cavendish Square, large and empty though it was, for the next two years. When he did remarry, in 1936, it was as much to provide a mother for Joanna, who had been returned from a clinic where she had had her appendix out and then, according to Allie, not recovered properly, because she would not eat. It was in October 1936 that Frederick, helping his tall daughter, almost sixteen by then, up the steps of Cavendish Square and feeling her bones through the thick coat she wore, resolved to court and marry his beautiful Italian.
He’d made a dreadful mistake, he knew, in letting his daughter stay with her mother. Fortunately for him he never found out exactly how dreadful a mistake that had been.
Only three people – Violet, Allie, whom Violet had called on in panic, and Joanna herself – knew exactly how dreadful it was. And Joanna forgot. But Allie could never forget that terrible summer evening, as she dug a hole in a garden and buried the evidence of what had taken place in a cottage by the sea. The gulls were wailing and screaming over her head as they swirled towards their nesting places, and the noise they made almost, but not quite, covered the horrible screams from the bedroom of the cottage.
Kate Higgins, June 18th, 1991
I got up quietly, leaving Andy sleeping, and went back to Henry Thackery House to get ready for my journey to meet Aurelia Jenks-Davidson. She’d been in two of the batch of photographs given to me in the council house in Kent by Ben Crutchley’s granddaughter, both taken in war-time. One showed Violet and Miss Jenks-Davidson standing in a park, looking at some ducks. Violet was in a little hat and a cotton frock, wearing the increasingly heavy make-up she plastered on as she got older. Her companion was a tall, brown-haired young woman in ATS uniform with several pips on her shoulder. The other shot showed a lunch table – nine people, including Violet and Aurelia Jenks-Davidson – on a lawn with a big house in the background. In Who’s Who, I’d seen that after her war service Aurelia had joined the Foreign Office where she’d had a solid career, including postings to Prague and Washington. I’d written to her, and been invited to visit her at Bleesdale House, Filton, in Yorkshire. On the map it looked like a village fairly high up in the Yorkshire Dales. I took the train to Leeds and hired a car, and got to Filton, a narrow village in a valley with a pub and a post office and small houses on either side of a street and behind them sharply rising grass and trees where a few sheep grazed. Bleesdale House was just outside the village, a small, old house with a big stone wall round it, a garden full of flowers and trees and bushes in full leaf. A duck was swimming on the stone-edged pond set in the grass, under a huge yew tree.
I rang the brass doorbell on the side of the front door. I knew that Aurelia Jenks-Davidson, as Violet’s boss in Special Operations, would know about Violet’s war service in the Second World War, but had no great confidence that she would tell me everything. My second letter to the Ministry of Defence hadn’t been answered either. I assumed they were working on the sensible theory that sheer inattention is the best way to stop trouble: if nothing happens, nothing will. So as far as I knew, Aurelia Jenks-Davidson would tell me nothing, or might even have been set up to mislead me. I was learning. Some might say it took me a long time. My excuse is that I had a happy childhood and that’s no preparation for life. No one answered the door, so I pushed the bell again.
Aurelia Jenks-Davidson came round the side of the house with a trowel in her hand. ‘Miss Higgins?’ she asked. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. I thought I heard the bell from the vegetable bed.’ She was a fat, sensible-looking woman in a plain blouse and a big denim skirt, espadrilles on her bulgy feet. She must have been in her mid-seventies, but didn’t look it. We went through the back door, passing a woman in an apron who was preparing a casserole in the kitchen.
‘Tea, Yvonne, can you? You’d like some tea, I suppose?’ she asked me.
Inside the living-room, small, with a fireplace and a bow window overlooking the garden, I realised why she had asked me about tea in such a dismissive tone, for she promptly opened a cupboard, took out a glass and poured herself a gin from the array of the bottles on a lower shelf. ‘Perhaps you’d like a drink?’
I declined, and she waved me into a flowered armchair by the fireplace and settled in the one opposite.
I told her more about the book than I’d included in my letter, adding that so far the family, with the exception of Jack Christian-Smith, whom I was expecting to see later, was unwilling to see me.
‘Families can be difficult about things like this,’ she said. Then she got up, went out and came back with the tea tray. On it was a fine old cup and saucer, a plate, a brown teapot and a milk-bottle, a large plate with a cake on it.
I drank my tea. ‘I was rather wondering if you could tell me anything about Violet’s war service. I’ve asked the Ministry of Defence, twice, but they haven’t answered and I suspect that if I get a reply it will only tell me that it’s still secret.’
‘I believe you were in Belfast with your husband,’ said Aurelia Jenks-Davidson.
I wasn’t surprised. I smiled at her and said, ‘Yes. I was.’
‘Well then?’
‘If you mean, I must know something about how intelligence works,’ I told her, ‘then of course I do. Not much, naturally, but I’d have to have been very stupid not to notice some things. But this must have been very different. And it was a long time ago.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Miss Jenks-Davidson. ‘But, even now, I obviously can’t tell you everything.’
‘Were you in charge?’ I asked.
‘I was responsible for a number of agents who were working in Holland and northern France,’ she told me. ‘Violet wasn’t official, she was a volunteer over military age – by that time she was forty-five or forty-six – and I got her chiefly, I think, because I was another woman. I was quite unhappy about it, initially. As I saw it she was too old. We’re talking about small boats crossing the Channel at night, often in darkness, often in bad weather, with enemy patrols about. She faced capture, torture – it was a serious business. Imagine my feelings. I was twenty-five. She seemed as old as the hills to me. And I knew she’d been sneaked in through the back door. Through Duncan Mackinnon, I found out later. Of course, we didn’t know then what he was, except that at the time he was a golden boy. He’d pulled strings to get Violet in on it all, but as the officer in charge that didn’t impress me. We were in the middle of a war, inventing as we went along. It was crucial to have the right people on the spot. If they were wrong, they could get others captured and drive off all the people over there who might help us. It’s pretty odd to look back on it.’ She topped up her gin and looked at me questioningly. This time I nodded, and she took another glass and made me a gin and tonic.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Violet, when you looked at it, had her advantages. I must say I didn’t like it. It wasn’t just her age. I actually mistrusted her. But she had obvious advantages – spoke excellent French, and reasonable German – her years with the Levines hadn’t been wasted. Women were less suspected in those days, I think, and one of the least suspicious, or indeed remarked-on kind of individual, as you have yet to find out, my dear, is of course a middle-aged woman. Violet claimed that, in black stockings and a black dress, with a basket on her arm, she could have walked past twenty German soldiers in Rouen while transmitting to Britain at the top of her voice, and not one would have seen anybody but the concierge, the farmer’s wife with eggs to sell, the lady who ran the cafe on the corner. After our first interview, when she turned up in full rig – high heels, hat with a little veil, Elizabeth Arden all over her face – I was horrified that somehow I was expected to make use of her. But the fact is, she was a good actress …’
‘Always had to be,’ I said.
‘I expect so,’ said Aurelia. ‘She had quite a career, Violet Mackinnon.’ She was the first person I’d heard using the name Mackinnon. I suppose to a former intelligence officer the fact that she had married Duncan Mackinnon was the most outstanding fact about her. ‘Quite a career,’ Aurelia repeated. ‘You do well to think about a biography, but it must be like writing the life story of an iceberg: nine-tenths of it you can’t see.’
I agreed. ‘I’d like as much detail as you can give me about where she went, and what she did.’
‘I expect so,’ said the old lady. ‘Well, from what I know and understand it only went on for a year. Violet went to France first in 1942. We landed her and a young agent named Bob Kerr on the coast, their task being to find out where the enemy was, what they had in the ways of troops and so on, where the air force was, and how many. We needed information about what was happening inland. Violet and Bob had no transmitter. They had to make contact with various local groups, get the information then rendezvous, a fortnight later, same time, same place, with the boat which was to bring them home. They did wonders, I must say, always pretending to be a mother and son. Who’d suspect a mother and her grown-up son on the bus with a basket of chickens, swapping family gossip, perhaps she nags him a bit, tells him his girlfriend’s no good, where was he last night anyway? Violet and I concocted all that between us. What an intelligent woman she was.’ Aurelia sighed and shook her head, sadly.
That was enough for me. ‘What went wrong?’ I asked.
She smiled slyly. She was enjoying me, I could tell. It was a bit like the old days, guessing what someone was up to, what made them tick. In that battle, I knew she would always win. I said I wondered if I could have another slice of cake. It was delicious but, beside that, I knew, I needed to blot up the gin or she’d run even more rings round me.
‘What went wrong?’ she repeated. She refilled both our glasses. I ate my cake. She said, ‘It can’t do any harm to tell you. Your publisher will have to check it all before publication anyway. Well – Violet came back with the young man, Bob Kerr, and it was congratulations all round. Then it was Paris, which was a good idea, because Violet knew the city well, then Paris again, and the fourth time – something went wrong. There was a bread lorry which she and Bob were supposed to take just outside Paris, pretending again to be our famous mother and son combination. This time Violet was a baker and Bob was pretending to be a bit backward – Violet was keeping the family business running while the father was away doing forced labour. They were supposed to hand the bread van over at the rendezvous and get a lift to the coast. But just before they arrived they got stopped at a German checkpoint, papers were examined, and, finally, the back of the van searched. But …’ and she paused. ‘But, there were two people in there, who shouldn’t have been. The guards arrested everybody except Bob, who just took to his heels and ran. Violet and the other two were captured, taken to local headquarters, from which only Violet emerged, free as a bird, several hours later. In time to make her way to the coast, anyway, as did Bob, and get picked up by the boat and brought back.’
‘She escaped from the Gestapo,’ I said in amazement.
‘She didn’t escape and it wasn’t the Gestapo,’ Aurelia told me drily. ‘She was lucky. It was an ordinary post manned by an ordinary German officer. It could have been worse.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘That’s what we were never sure about.’
I stared at her. ‘So that put paid to her career in espionage,’ I said numbly. I felt as if I had to put my brain on automatic pilot. If I tried to analyse this amazing story as we went along, I’d lose the controls. I’m not a born reporter. A real reporter can hear anything and stay calm. ‘So – that was it?’
‘In a nutshell, yes,’ Aurelia said, still enjoying it all. And I felt she had a lot in reserve. She’d shock me into a collapse before I left, or she’d want to know the reason why. Aurelia, I reflected, was a bit like Deep Throat. Was she Deep Throat, I wondered? I didn’t think so. Her voice was wrong.
‘What did she tell you,’ I asked, ‘afterwards?’
‘Said she’d talked her way out of it,’ said Aurelia.
‘Just that? And did you believe her?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, to start with, Bob had run for it – very suspicious. She said she’d told them he was half-witted and frightened, hence his flight. So far so good but her chief problem was, obviously, the others hiding in the van.’
‘What about them? Who were they?’
‘We’d never put them there,’ Aurelia said. ‘Didn’t know them from Adam.’
I could hardly believe any of it. I asked finally, ‘How did they get there?’
‘Violet said they must have had no papers, knew the van was leaving Paris, picked the lock and sneaked in.’ She paused. ‘Bob said Violet must have put them there. She had the keys all the time. He also said there was something odd about her reaction when they were found. He couldn’t define it. In a way, we had to believe Violet, officially.’
‘Did anyone ever find out who they were?’ I asked.
‘Not officially,’ said Aurelia.
‘And unofficially?’
‘I don’t know,’ she told me. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. ‘But it was Violet’s last mission.’
