Perfectly Ordinary People(96)

What things, dear?

Spotting that Guillaume was Jewish. Or taking him away from you, for that matter.

Oh, my fears weren’t rational at all. But they were very real to me all the same.

So what did you do?

Well, we just left. We left as fast as we could. And we never went back there.

That must have been so disappointing.

It would have been. Only, just as we rounded the corner at the bottom of the road, the maid from the house caught up with us. She’d been eavesdropping on the conversation, I think, and had felt sorry for us.

She didn’t know Hannah’s address, and said she’d only started recently and so had never met Ethel either. But then she asked us something important, something amazing: she asked if we knew Ethel’s American friend.

Her American friend?

Yes. She said a handsome GI had come looking for Ethel and Hannah’s father had given him an address. She didn’t know if that was Hannah’s address or if he perhaps knew where Ethel was living, but Hannah’s father had definitely given him a piece of paper with something written on it.

Am I right in thinking this is Sam?

Yes! We couldn’t be sure of that, but I assumed it was him as well. I was so happy then that I burst into tears. Because I’d given Sam a letter for Ethel, and it seemed he’d tried to deliver it by hand. And presumably because he was a man, and American, and no doubt in part because he was Jewish as well, they’d not turned him away as they had us.

OK. But I suspect I’m missing something here. I get that you’d given him a letter, but I don’t see how that helps you find her. Because even if Ethel got it, there’s still no way for you to find each other, is there? Not with you staying in a hotel in Victoria.

Ah, well! That would be because I haven’t told you yet what I wrote in my letter. Because luckily – thanks to Sam – I’d written something really, really clever.

Sam helped you write the letter?

Not as such. But he helped me think about what to put. I hadn’t told him Ethel was my girlfriend, though I suspect that despite Christophe and the baby being around, he had his suspicions . . . Instead I’d told him she was my best childhood friend and that I planned to join her in London after the war. I’d told him that Hannah didn’t like me much, and I was worried she’d not been forwarding my letters.

The first draft had said merely that Ethel should write to my parents with her address and I’d come and find her, but when I’d explained this to Sam, he’d pointed out that it was likely she’d return home to find her own parents, and even if she didn’t, everyone was moving around all the time because of the war, so any address she gave me might not turn out to be permanent. He asked – with terrifying clairvoyance – how I could even be sure my own parents would still be at the same address by the time the war finally ended – or that my own address even still existed. I suppose he must have known how heavily Mulhouse had been bombed.

So even though it was impossible for me to imagine they might be anywhere else – let alone imagine the horror of what had happened to them – I’d redrafted the letter, saying that I’d look for her first in Mulhouse, and that if she wasn’t going to be there she should write to me care of my parents and send me her address anytime she moved, so that I could join her in London wherever she was. I added that if for any reason I didn’t find her in Mulhouse, and the address she’d given me didn’t work – because my letters weren’t getting through or she suddenly had to move – then I’d meet her at a landmark on the first Sunday of the month after the war had ended.

I added that if I hadn’t tracked her down by the first Christmas after the end of the war, then I’d meet her back in Mulhouse, outside the boathouse, or if that no longer existed, down by the canal where we’d first kissed.

Gosh, you really covered all the bases, didn’t you?

Yes, thank God! And that was largely thanks to Sam, who kept pointing out all the things that might go wrong with what I suppose you might call military precision.

You mentioned a landmark. Which one did you choose?

Speakers’ Corner. That was Sam’s idea. At first he’d said to put Big Ben, but he was worried that it might get bombed, and that it represented too big an area in which to meet someone, so I changed it to Speakers’ Corner instead. The final version said that if I didn’t find her in Mulhouse, and I hadn’t received an address, I’d go there – to Speakers’ Corner – at twelve o’clock exactly, on the first Sunday of the first month I could get there.

But how would she know which month that was?

Well, she couldn’t know, could she? We didn’t know that it would take so long to get there. So I just hoped she’d be motivated enough to go there repeatedly, once a month.

But you’re right. It was a lot to ask. I’d never expected getting passports to take so long. And there were so many other things that could go wrong: had Sam even found her? Was she still there or had she been travelling home at the same time we’d been travelling to London – had our paths crossed, so to speak? And even if she was there, was she even able to get to Speakers’ Corner? What if she had a job waitressing or something, and had to work on Sundays? So I was more than aware how unlikely it was. But I couldn’t help hoping all the same.

But the fact that Sam had been to Hannah’s father’s house . . .