The Hideaway: A heartbreaking and absolutely gripping page-turner full of secrets, page 1
THE HIDEAWAY
A HEARTBREAKING AND ABSOLUTELY GRIPPING WW2 HISTORICAL FICTION NOVEL
NORMA CURTIS
BOOKS BY NORMA CURTIS
The Hideaway
The Drowned Village
Striking a Balance
The Last Place You Look
Living It Up, Living It Down
AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
The Drowned Village (Available in the UK and the US)
CONTENTS
1. Hedi
2. Hedi
3. Thea
4. Hedi
5. Thea
6. Hedi
7. Thea
8. Hedi
9. Thea
10. Thea
11. Hedi
12. Hedi
13. Harry
14. Thea
15. Thea
16. Hedi
17. Thea
18. Hedi
19. Hedi
20. Harry
21. Hedi
22. Thea
23. Hedi
24. Hedi
25. Thea
26. Hedi
27. Harry
28. Hedi
29. Thea
30. Hedi
31. Hedi
32. Thea
33. Harry
34. Hedi
35. Hedi
36. Hedi
37. Harry
38. Hedi
39. Harry
40. Thea
41. Thea
Epilogue
The Drowned Village
Hear More from Norma
Books by Norma Curtis
A Letter from Norma
Acknowledgements
For Paul and Joe, with love
1
HEDI
PRESENT DAY
Ninety-three-year-old Hedi was sitting in the parlour in a strip of late afternoon sunlight, gripping her husband Harry’s hand, keeping tight hold of him to save him slipping away. The sunshine was lighting up the tapestry sofa, the pale blue carpet, her halo of white hair and Harry’s hand, tanned and speckled and veined, as it lay in hers.
‘You must let me call the doctor,’ she said, emotion tightening her throat.
Harry’s faded green eyes were warm and steady. He smiled faintly and shook his head. Talking was an effort that took breath and energy. He spoke to her with his gaze, now.
She stroked his hair. It still had a few strands of copper amongst the grey, like the memories of the young man he had been. ‘Don’t you leave me, Harry,’ she warned him sternly. Don’t you leef me, Herry. After all these years, her accent still betrayed her.
Hedi felt a lurch of panic deep in her guts. She couldn’t bear it. But she would bear it, all the same. And when he’d gone, she would follow him. That was her one consolation, that their separation would be mercifully brief. ‘Can I get you anything, my darling?’ she asked him.
His gaze moved from hers for a moment, towards the window where the sun shone in. His eyelashes glowed golden as he blinked. When he looked at her again, his expression was wistful.
‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘You want to be nearer to the window, is that it? See the view?’
He took a deep breath. She could see the steady pulse beat in his neck, under that soft skin above his collarbone, and she wanted to kiss it in gratitude for keeping on going.
‘Hedi, my girl,’ he said, his voice suddenly strong. ‘Call Maggie.’
Hedi looked at him in surprise. She would do anything for him, but she hesitated, trying to read him and understand his intentions. ‘You want that I call her now? After all these years?’
‘Yes. Right now.’
He sounded like his old self and for a moment she was reassured enough to argue with him. ‘Okay, but first you must eat.’
He took his hand out of hers and flicked it at her as if he was swatting away a fly. There was no mistaking what that meant.
‘As you wish.’ She pressed her lips tightly together in disapproval and got to her feet to look for the red leather address book. They used to keep it by the phone, but as most of the entries had an X crossed through the names, it had been put away in the bookcase somewhere, squashed in with old books, too many for them to read again at this time in their lives. What was the point of them? She didn’t know why they kept them, and now she was getting irritable about it. ‘All these books!’ It was better to be cross with the books than with him.
The address book wasn’t very big, which made the search difficult. She looked along the spines, hands on hips. Why now, all of a sudden? ‘It’s no use, Harry, I…’ she started to say, and at the same time she saw it. Oh. There.
Hedi flicked through the address book. She hadn’t listed their daughter under Lewis, she was under Maggie. There were many different addresses for her, running to two pages, but just one phone number, written neatly and with careful deliberation, underlined.
Hedi went to sit next to Harry again and showed him the page. ‘Look,’ she said, showing him. ‘I found it.’
‘Good,’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know what you expect me to tell her. I will just tell her that you want to say hello, I guess.’ Seeing Harry wince, she corrected herself and patted his knee. ‘That we want to say hello.’
Hedi never consciously thought about her daughter these days, but it didn’t stop her from worrying about her on a daily basis, with a deep sense of regret.
She and Harry had failed as parents, Hedi knew that. They’d only had one stab at parenthood, and they’d made a mess of it, spoiling this little miracle that had turned up in their lives to delight them after they’d long given up hope.
As a child, Maggie had been a constant source of wonder. They had doted on her, and told her how wonderful she was, and she was wonderful, that was the thing. Everyone said so. Her teachers loved her, she was made a prefect and head girl; you see, they weren’t biased. Harry bought her a green enamelled prefect’s badge with Perfect on it, and she’d enjoyed the joke even though she was perfect, and she knew it.
‘I don’t know,’ Hedi said to Harry now as if she had spoken this thought aloud. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’
They’d just done a fine job of pretending.
The rift had started with an argument over lunch. Maggie had said she wasn’t hungry.
Maggie refusing the food that was in front of her brought out something dark and uneasy in Hedi. But Maggie had stood her ground and defended herself angrily.
‘You don’t know what I’ve been through! You don’t know what it’s like to suffer!’
When Hedi had slapped Maggie on that unforgivable day, in her head she had been slamming the door on her past. But oh, that sound of palm against cheek was like the crack of a whip; she could still hear it now. Maggie had packed her bags and left, taking their granddaughter who had inherited Harry’s copper hair. She’d never been back. Of course, what Hedi had done to her only daughter was unforgivable, she understood that perfectly well. However, to apologise was to explain, and she had kept her secret for so long that she knew she couldn’t reveal it now.
‘I’ll call her, but you must speak to her.’ She picked up the phone and keyed in the number with great deliberation and a certain amount of dread.
And then Maggie answered. That voice! It was as distinctive as her face in Hedi’s memory.
Hedi’s eyes rimmed with tears that flared in the sunlight. The tears were the relief of a mother finding her lost child again. ‘Maggie, it’s Hedi.’ She thought of adding, your mother, for clarity, but how many Hedis were there? ‘Harry wants to talk to you. Here, Harry, you take it.’
‘Hello, my darling,’ Harry said, pressing the phone against his face. ‘Me? I’m fine.’
He closed his eyes and smiled. ‘It’s good to hear you. Tell me, how are you?’
Hedi took a deep breath and stood up, smoothing her dress. She felt anxious. She wanted to talk to Maggie, too, and she hoped she could find the right words, but even now some things came out wrong, or too abruptly, as if her tongue had a malicious life of its own.
She went to the window and looked down at the street. So many cars! All strung together and pulling slowly up the road. And beyond the cars, the Heath, lost from sight under the canopy of trees.
‘He sounds a good man,’ Harry was saying. ‘You hold on to him. And Thea? The little one? Is she with you in New York?’
Hedi sharply turned back into the room to look at him. Harry was nodding, and his eyes met hers, excited and energised by the conversation.
‘Of course not,’ he said quickly to his daughter, and he smiled gently. ‘She’s all grown up now, I realise that. I’m a fool. Time flies. But you’re happy, that’s the main thing.’
Hedi nodded in agreement, feeling relief. Wasn’t that all they’d wanted for her, that she was happy?
She smiled as she watched Harry light up with joy. In her heart she wondered if that was all it was, after all, not a physical illness but just a deep longing to be with family again.
But suddenly his tone changed. ‘Of course, I understand,’ he was saying to his daughter. ‘You must go. I know you’re busy.’ His animated face settled back into solemn folds again. His voice softened. He said, very deliberately, ‘Goodbye, Maggie.’ He dropped the phone as if his strength had suddenly left him, and he rested his head back.
Hedi felt as if her heart was being crushed. The phone call had not been a hello, after all. It had been a goodbye. She stared at him, wide-eyed with fear.
Harry closed his eyes and nodded off to sleep. He started snoring gently. Hedi tiptoed away to the kitchen and stood by the sink, burying her face in her hands. We’ve lived too long already, she thought desperately in the dark of her warm palms. We’ve outstayed our welcome.
She straightened up and pulled herself together. What was she doing here when she could be sitting next to him? For all that the afternoon seemed bleak, she knew that there was a worse time to come when she would look back at this moment and think: Harry was still here then, it wasn’t so bad after all.
She sat on the sofa next to him, moved his limp hand onto her knee and listened fondly to his snoring. Once upon a time it had irritated her. On her honeymoon, sent crazy by lack of sleep, she accused him of keeping it a secret from her just so she’d marry him. The ‘cures’ they’d tried over the years! She had taped a rubber ball into his pyjama jacket so as to make it too uncomfortable for him to lie on his back. He had bought some kind of appliance, like a gumshield, to bring his jaw forward and open up his airways. They had spent a fortune on a mound of pillows, good ones, Hungarian goose down, which cost as much as the bed, to prop Harry up and keep his tongue forward. Nothing worked, and then miraculously, in her old age Hedi had gone deaf and what a blessing that turned out to be! She took her hearing aids out every night and sometimes even in the daytime if he was talking politics. He enjoyed his monologues a great deal, but Hedi had a fear of politics, with good reason.
She chuckled to herself. All these years, his snoring hadn’t changed, it was one of the constants of their marriage, but other things changed, that was the way it was.
While she was thinking these things, the Earth moved on, turning the windows away from the eye of the sun so that she awoke and found herself sitting next to Harry in shadow, slumped comfortably against his shoulder. She wiped the corner of her mouth and straightened up.
She had been asleep, she realised.
Her gaze rested on the little red leather address book. It looked purple in the gloom. Outside in the dusk, she could hear children laughing.
It was the most sorrowful time of day for her, twilight, and it always had been; it was inexplicably sad in a way that the night was not. Night-time was romantic, lights twinkling on water, striped reflections rippling in the tide.
Quietness. The children had gone home.
She looked sharply at Harry. He wasn’t snoring anymore, and he looked very peaceful, his jaw open, his hand resting on her knee, heavy and cool.
Her breath caught in her throat. She felt her stomach tense in a swift jerk of fear, followed by a profound, resigned weight which settled on her. She sighed, reminded herself to breathe. He’d left her, just like that, gone in the quietness of dusk.
She leant against him and rubbed her cheek gently against the cool cotton of his shirt for comfort.
2
HEDI
Next morning, after the undertakers had gone, Hedi put an apron over her black dress and automatically started straightening up the Sunday supplements on the little mahogany table. Harry liked to browse through them during the week.
What was she doing it for? Like all those books, the supplements were never going to be read.
She fetched a recycling bag from the kitchen and put them in it. There.
Hedi knew that she had to tell Maggie about Harry and at the same time say her own goodbyes. She was dreading it, because the important thing was not to make Maggie feel guilty or in any way responsible for cutting off Harry’s call.
She sat on the sofa with the phone on her lap, considering her words carefully.
It would have made no difference, she would assure Maggie, whether she had carried on the conversation for another hour or the rest of the day, because Harry would have left at the end of it either way. It was what he had been hanging on for, to say goodbye to his daughter.
And once it was over, as his old self would have said, job done.
Hedi decided she would lie and tell Maggie the end had been sudden and unexpected.
She wouldn’t tell her she had been waiting for it for ten years at least, in the low-level way of the long-married. Once they turned eighty, and had a cough or a cold, or some memory lapse that involved the keys disappearing and turning up in some odd and unexpected place, they would look silently but speculatively at each other and wonder: Is this the beginning of the end?
At least he’d gone first, and she was glad about that, not for the selfish reasons of being the last one standing but because being left was so much more painful than being the one to leave. And she had saved him from dying alone. That was her consolation.
All things considered, it was far better that she followed after him. She wasn’t afraid. They saw death differently. Harry saw the hell. His experiences as a young soldier had marked him for life, changed his DNA, which was to be expected. But Hedi saw death as a refuge.
She pinched her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger and picked up the address book. At least Maggie had company over there in New York. He sounds a good man, Harry had said. She hadn’t asked him who, but Harry had an instinct for these things, and she was glad Maggie had someone there to look after her. She picked up the phone, her mouth suddenly dry, and called Maggie’s number.
‘Yup?’ Maggie asked abruptly.
‘You’re busy,’ Hedi said. She could hear the television in the background.
‘I’m always busy. But,’ Maggie conceded, ‘I can talk.’
All of a sudden, Hedi found that she couldn’t get the words out. She felt as if they were clogging her throat and suffocating her.
‘What is it? Is it Harry?’ Maggie asked.
‘He’s gone,’ Hedi whispered.
‘Oh.’ Maggie sounded shocked. ‘So that’s what that call was all about. I knew he couldn’t be just ringing for a chat after all these years. Why on earth didn’t he tell me he was ill? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Who knows these things – when a person is going to go?’ Hedi replied defensively. ‘Nobody knows, even the doctors don’t know, don’t let them tell you otherwise.’ This too was a lie; the dying person understands perfectly well that he can leave this life at a time of his own choosing.
She heard the sharpness in her own voice and regretted it. ‘I’m so sorry, my darling,’ she said. ‘I wish things had been different.’
‘Is that an apology?’ Maggie gave a dry laugh. ‘Ha! You never apologise.’
Hedi closed her eyes, hating herself. ‘It’s true. One of my many failings.’
All the way across the ocean, in New York, to the background sound of the television, she listened to her daughter sniffing back tears. She wanted to take her in her arms and comfort her.
‘I’m not crying because I’m upset,’ Maggie said after a moment.
‘Oh,’ Hedi replied. ‘That’s good.’ Thet’s goot, she heard herself say. ‘Harry wouldn’t want you to be. The funeral is next Wednesday, at two. Come and stay. I’ve booked a car to take us to the crematorium. It will be good to have you here. You will come, won’t you?’
Maggie didn’t respond.
Long moments passed, and Hedi held tight on to the phone, waiting, hearing the television in the background, listening, feeling her heart fluttering nervously behind her ribs.
