Antwerp they thought constantly of what might have been.’
‘Were they close, Ethan and Jacob?’
‘Yes, they were inseparable, even though they were so different. Ethan was two years older, and he was more like me I suppose — steady, patient, persevering — whereas Jacob is headstrong, ruled by his emotions, in love with extreme positions. After Ethan’s death he left our synagogue and became a Hasid, and then two months later he gave that up and said he was a Zionist. I don’t know what he is now. Or where he is…’
‘Has he written to you, telephoned you, made any kind of contact since he left?’ asked Trave.
‘No, nothing. As I said, our relationship deteriorated after Ethan’s funeral.’
‘Do you have a photograph of him? I saw Jacob once when he gave evidence in London, but a picture would help with finding him.’
‘Yes, I thought of that,’ said Aliza. She leaned forward to pick up an old weather-beaten black bag that was lying on the ground by her feet, and the white cat on her lap stretched and jumped softly down, looked quizzically at Trave for a moment, and then stalked away out of sight.
Aliza took a small framed picture out of the bag and handed it to Trave, who got up from his chair to take it from her.
‘It was taken two years ago,’ said the old lady. ‘And Jacob wears glasses now. He was always short-sighted like his father, but it got a lot worse at the beginning of last year. I’ve written my address and phone number on the back.’
A young, good-looking man with thin cheeks and wide eyes stared back at Trave out of the photograph. He was neither smiling nor scowling, but the line of his mouth was resolute and his chin was firm and set. He looked like a man on a mission, Trave thought — a soldier about to go to war.
‘I will look for him,’ said Trave slowly, feeling like he was taking a vow. ‘I can’t promise anything, but I will try, and if I succeed, I’ll tell him your message.’
‘Thank you. That’s all I ask,’ said the old lady, holding out her hand in farewell. ‘I feel you are a good man, William Trave. I think you have suffered too like me and so you understand what I have told you. May God go with you and be your guide.’
CHAPTER 17
Vanessa shivered, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her overcoat. She’d wrapped up warm to come out, but it still wasn’t enough to keep out the stabbing cold. There’d been a forecast for snow in the morning paper, but for now there was only the cold and the clinging mist that hung over the river beside which Vanessa was sitting, rendering the line of black, leafless trees on the far bank into tall, ominous shadows that filled her with unease.
Vanessa hated January — the month when winter seemed like it would never end and it was dark by half past four in the afternoon. It was like an annual endurance test — bedraggled Christmas trees awaiting collection at the end of the road, the ground hard and barren, nothing to look forward to but more of the same. It made Vanessa think, as she often did, that she’d been born in the wrong country, that she was a southerner at heart, forever longing in vain for the warm sun of the Mediterranean or the hot countries beyond.
She knew, of course, that she could go there now on a cheap ticket, lie on a beach for a week, burn the cold from her bones. She had some money saved up, and she was sure Titus would go with her if she asked him. He’d jump at the idea. But something held her back. It felt too much like an escape, an abdication of responsibility. Because it wasn’t just the winter that was making her feel anxious and hemmed in. Her unease had deeper roots. She felt she was at a crossroads in her life and would soon have to choose a road to go down for better or worse. And yet she distrusted the signposts, feeling unready to make a decision.
Titus had been patient with her for months, but she could sense that soon he would press her for an answer to his marriage proposal. Vanessa believed she loved him — certainly she thought of him constantly when he wasn’t there and looked forward with hungry anticipation to their evenings together. But was this a basis for married life? She’d loved her husband with all her heart once, years ago, and yet their union had failed. Vanessa was burdened with her past: however hard she tried, she was unable to free herself of her life experience. She feared commitment and yet could no longer enjoy the independence that she’d worked so hard to achieve in her little flat behind Keble College. She was always restless now, taking long, directionless walks after work, and at night she was oppressed by loneliness, turning on the radio beside her bed to fill the vacant space and then waking up in the small hours to the sound of alien, disembodied voices discussing the parlous state of the world.
But she knew that it wasn’t just indecision over her future with Titus that had upset her peace of mind. It was guilt too — a gnawing guilt that was eating away at her inside. The months had passed since David Swain’s arrest, and now his trial was fast approaching, and yet she still maintained her silence about what Katya had said to her that September night in the drawing room at Blackwater Hall. Vanessa remembered the terrible effort the girl had made to reach her, to get her words out before she lost consciousness. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she’d said. And a few weeks later someone had killed her, and yet Vanessa had stayed quiet. Why? At first because Titus had asked her to, but that was all right because at that early stage she’d only agreed to think about what to do; she’d made no binding commitment. And then when Franz Claes had pressed her on the issue a week later, her immediate instinct had been to rebel against his pressure and tell Titus that she had decided to go to the police. She had always thought of her husband as essentially a fair man, and she’d been unable to credit the idea that Bill would twist Katya’s words to try to implicate Titus in the murder because he was conducting a jealous vendetta against his wife’s lover. But then within hours of her conversation with Claes she’d been forced to revise her opinion. Vanessa shuddered even now, months later, at the memory of her husband lying sprawled on his back in the courtyard of Blackwater Hall like some pathetic, angry schoolboy who’d just lost a playground fight. It was obvious he couldn’t be trusted, and so she’d reluctantly agreed to remain silent when Titus raised the matter with her again later that day. And she’d felt bound to stay quiet even when her husband was taken off the case.
Then, as the weeks passed and Swain’s trial got closer, she tried to tell herself that her silence didn’t matter because the case against the defendant was so overwhelming, but her conscience kept getting the better of her. She couldn’t suppress the memory of Katya’s white, agonized face from her mind, and every day she felt more torn between her need to do what was right and her desire to protect Titus.
What troubled Vanessa most was that she wasn’t just shielding Titus; she was shielding Claes too. Vanessa had no doubts that Titus was entirely innocent of all wrongdoing, but she was far less sure about Claes. She had always disliked Titus’s brother-in-law with an intensity that she didn’t understand, and at their most recent meeting the previous Sunday their unspoken mutual antipathy had almost erupted into open hostility.
They’d been in the dining room at Blackwater — Osman at one end of the polished oak table and Claes at the other, with Vanessa and Claes’s silent, severe-looking sister sitting on either side between the two men. Outside, it had been raining all day and the atmosphere was heavy and oppressive. Vanessa had to force herself to eat the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding that Titus always liked to have served on Sundays in a strange culinary homage to his adopted country, and she was counting the minutes until Titus and she could be alone. With dessert they began a desultory conversation about politics and the state of the world. It was not a subject in which Vanessa had any great interest, but she had enjoyed watching the Kennedy inauguration on the television a few days earlier and had felt infected by the mood of excitement and hope inspired by the new young president.
‘He will have to be ready,’ said Claes in his strangely formal English. ‘The Russians will attack — maybe this year, maybe next. Khrushchev, Stalin — they are all the same.’
‘What do you mean — the same?’ asked Vanessa, irritated by Claes’s doomsday certainty. ‘Khrushchev condemned Stalin and the purges. Didn’t you read about that?’
‘It does not matter,’ said Claes with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘They are Bolsheviks. They want to make everyone else Bolshevik. We had the chance to stop them in the war, and now maybe it is too late.’
‘What chance? What are you talking about? Without the Russians Hitler would have won. Is that what you wanted?’ asked Vanessa, outraged. She threw down her napkin and pushed her chair back from the table, but Osman reached out, covering her hand with his, preventing her from rising.
‘Please don’t be upset, my dear,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘This is all a misunderstanding. Franz did not want Hitler to win. He fought in the Belgian army when the Germans invaded. It’s just that he does not like the
