L'Aimant – Chapter 52
Summary:
A group outing to the flickers proves to be a revelation—in more than one sense.
Set after "Broken Souls". November 1944 onwards.
Chapter 52: Anselm and Sara.
Disclaimer:
The creative rights to the characters and plotlines in "Foyle's War" belong to Anthony Horowitz. This story is a not-for-profit homage to the television series, to the talented actors who bring its characters to life, and to a fascinating era.
Author's Notes:
The only way that I can write a story is to ride with the characters. If I ever feel I'm pushing them, it comes out wrong. And so I let myself be pulled.
…
dances! dances! She's our man! If she cain't fix it, no one can!
Previously, in "L'Aimant"
Waiting in the hallway with the paper bag that Sam had pressed into his hands, Anselm set his own hat on his head and assessed his young companion's millinery.
"Isn't that... confection... a bit old for you?"
Sara forged on past him, all business. "Please. I like the hat. And I shall grow older."
Reaching over her head, for he could easily do so, Anselm pulled the front door open. "After you, then, Miss." Sam fancied she could see him stifling a smile.
"See you back here in a couple of hours for tea," called Samantha.
Foyle came up behind her on the doorstep and gently ran his hands down her upper arms.
"What are you up to?" He brushed her ear with his lips. "Is it wise?"
"Don't know," replied Sam pensively. "It's just... I have a teensy feeling that they each need something that the other might be able to provide." She turned and gave her man a searching look. "Know she's young, but… were you 'wise' with Rosalind, d'you think?"
Chapter 52
Sunday, 11th March, 1945
"Thing about Hastings…" Anselm paused to fill his lungs with spring air before striding off downhill, Sara trotting gamely at his side to keep apace, "it's made it this far; though for most of the war, The Enemy's been within spitting-distance. Makes you think."
"My foster-brother taught me how to spit, Mr Anselm, and even champion spitters cannot manage eighty kilometres."
Anselm frowned down at the hat which was approximately level with his shoulder. "You're a very literal girl, aren't you?"
Receiving no reaction, he tilted his chin and squinted at her. Not a twitch was visible in her features. Was she teasing him? Well how about that?
"Have it your way. But on this side of the Channel, champion spitters spit in miles, not kilometres."
He might have expected a polite laugh at the quip, but had to content himself with a small shrug of the girl's shoulders.
"We are lucky to be counting our distance from the enemy in either one," observed his companion. "In Dortmund, we were not so lucky. We could only count in centimetres. Inches, if you so prefer. And then my family was swallowed up and scattered."
If Anselm felt chastened, there was no outward sign, save perhaps a slackening of his stride. Some might even have noticed a momentary tenderness in the gaze that burned into the girl's back as he stood to squire her on ahead of him.
"Right, Missy. Nipping down this alley. It's a shortcut to the seafront."
Sara moved around and past him, ignorant of her effect.
"Sharp left here," he added in a matter-of-fact tone, "then it's turn right at the bottom, and another left."
Walking more slowly now along the narrow passage betwixt cottages and creeper-covered railings, he matched his pace to Sara Immerglück's as she strolled in clear enjoyment alongside him.
"Like it?" he inquired, with customary brevity, noting her open relish of the old-town atmosphere.
A bright smile was his reward. "Yes, this is charming! Different from London—and from Lyminster, too. Hastings is a pretty town!"
"It was, and it will be again—soon as they rebuild a bit, and shift the barbed wire from along the seafront. Ever been on a funicular?"
"A foo...?" Sara looked up at him. "Is that the cliff railway you spoke of?"
"Funicular. Cliff railway. Yes."
"I have not." She pondered what excitement a cliff railway might offer, then came up with: "Is it steep?"
"Almost the steepest in the country."
"This, I shall enjoy. Almost the steepest?"
"Well there's a steeper one at Broadstairs, but it's all inside the cliff, so there's no view. And there's another one at Margate; but it's hardly worth the bother."
"Why?"
He let out a grunt. "'Cos it's so short, by the time you've turned around, you're at the top. The one here's better."
Sara nodded sagely in agreement. "Yes, it's better here, I'm sure."
"In Hastings, there are two funiculars," supplied her guide. The arch stretch of his eyes tried to cloak in mockery what was actually a genuine interest.
Sara glowed approval. "Shall we ride on both?"
"Not this time. Save the other one up."
"For the next time?"
"Yeah. The next time." Anselm stopped to light a cigarette, and Sara marked time, shifting restlessly from foot to foot. 'Next time' was yet another phrase she'd heard a lot since coming to England. Usually 'the next time' never happened.
"When will be the next time?" There was a sudden shift in tone to quiet melancholy in her question. He would fob her off—she felt it with a certainty that twisted her insides.
"Oh... soon as Hitler packs it in, I'll take you up the other one, and round the castle."
"Hitler will never 'pack it in'." She spoke the words with vehemence.
"Ohhhh yes, he will. We've chased him out of France. Got him surrounded. Won't be long now."
"You believe this?" Hope crept into her expression and her voice.
"Yeah. Yeah, I do."
"Good. For I should like to ride the other railway with you to the castle."
Anselm scrutinised her through a plume of smoke. "'You always like this?"
"Always like what?" Sara's look was sharp with puzzlement tinged with suspicion.
"Wanting the next thing before the first thing's over."
It was a mild enough tease, but the girl pondered her answer as though he'd made a serious enquiry.
"I am not... greedy, Mr Anselm. I just... wish for something to look forward to."
Anselm stared at her a moment, then felt a tell-tale smarting in his left eye, and delved hastily into the corner with his middle finger. Gauloises Bleues – the kick was good, but Christ! he told himself with gruff conviction, could swear they gave off tear-gas 'stead of smoke.
"May I have a cigarette?" Sara asked speculatively.
"Nah. Not these. The smoke'll make your eyes water."
"We are in the fresh air. There is ventilation. The smoke will not bother me."
"Sara. NO."
The sudden irritation was as much with himself as with the girl. The very moment that he'd spoken sharply, Anselm regretted his abruptness; but the tone of his remark was neither here nor there to Sara Immerglück. A small smile tickled at her lips, then slowly spread until it lit her face. This was a 'no' that pleased her more than several dozen 'yeses'. Because at last—at last—this man had shown her the respect of calling her by name.
As they walked on, Sara tried to imagine the end of the war, and found the hypothetical scenario almost unfathomable.
"I should like to see my parents and my brother again," she ventured haltingly. "I wonder whether they will recognise me after all this time? What do you think?"
Anselm appraised her. "Best take the hat off, to improve everybody's chances," he said gently.
...
The ride on the funicular was more sedate than Sara had expected. In her own imagination, she had nursed the hope of something on a grander scale; but somehow, as she looked across the car at Mr Anselm, the jolt of the gondola leaving the lower station sent a similar jolt of excitement to her stomach. This was the closest she had ever been to a pleasant adventure. Her journey to Great Britain, during most of which she had spent weeping into her teddy bear, did not count in any form.
Anselm observed that she submitted to the fascination of their ascent with the eagerness of a much younger child, and answered all her questions patiently, explaining the counterbalance principle of the pair of gondolas, and the function of the twin water towers at the top of the ramp, which drove the lift via hydraulic pressure.
"Perhaps I missed a trick, leaving school so early after all," he remarked. "The way they engineer this stuff is riveting."
Arriving at the top of East Cliff, they sought a vantage point where they could settle to admire the view and tuck into the small, impromptu picnic Sam had pressed into their hands.
Their perch was on a flat, projecting rock, and at their feet, a mass of vegetation masked the drop between them and the sea. Sara sat with her legs pulled sideways, Anselm with his knees up, elbows planted on his kneecaps as he smoked.
When they had been sitting for a while, Sara broke from her appreciation of the panorama and addressed her guide.
"You have been a soldier?"
"Still am."
"Not in uniform." She sized him up. "You are a spy?"
He tapped the ash from the tip of his cigarette, his mouth set in a grim line.
"Let's change the subject. What d'you want to be when you grow up?"
"I am sixteen now," answered Sara, her tone prickly with affront. But then it crossed her mind that her prospects were as distant, still, as if she were a child. The realisation lent his question some degree of fairness, and so she sighed, and graced it with an answer.
"As a little girl, when people asked me this, I used to say I wanted to keep chickens. But it was a silly fancy. Now, I think that I should like to sing. My foster-father taught me music. But," she shrugged, "this is a fancy, too. There is no money. And I must find my brother and my family. Until then…" she reflected sadly, "I shall settle only badly into anything I do. I am afraid to think what I will find in Germany again."
He glanced across at her. Then he drew again upon his cigarette and stared across the bay.
"It's a reasonable fear. Europe's in a mess. No place for a girl like you. You'd do far better staying here, when all the fighting's over."
"You have seen firsthand the 'mess' in Europe?"
"Oh yes."
"I shall not ask."
They sat in silence, watching as a flock of seabirds circled round a single fishing vessel some way out to sea.
Anselm was the first to speak. "Well, you could earn a temporary living baking, maybe. This stuff looks—and smells—delicious." Anselm offered her the greaseproof bag of shortcake, then took a piece himself. He wolfed it down approvingly in two bites while Sara nibbled round the edges of hers, sunk in thought.
"Where in Europe did you see?" she asked quietly.
He coughed up some crumbs. "Didn't I just hear you say you weren't going to ask?"
Sara huffed a sharp laugh down her nose. "I cannot force you to reply."
Anselm contemplated how much he should tell her. Eventually he reasoned it his duty to dissuade her from all thought of searching for her family in person on the other side of the Channel.
"France," he said. "The Nazis might have pulled out, but they've laid waste to everywhere they've been. People are starving. Hitler couldn't keep it, so he's made sure nobody else can live there comfortably either. France is in a shameful state."
"And you have seen this... on a visit?"
"Yeah."
"You have... a relative in France?" she asked.
He turned a sly, appraising glance her way. "What makes you think that?"
"The photograph you keep inside the window of your wallet..."
"What the...?" Indignantly, he tucked one leg under the other and angled himself so that he could inspect her better.
Sara tossed her head and countered with some indignation of her own. "When you opened your wallet and bought our tickets. I saw plainly. A photograph of a small girl."
Anselm shoved an upside-down thumb in between his teeth and told himself that, since she had him, he might as well try to discover how.
"So you saw a photograph. Explain the French connection in your wily mind."
Sara turned and knelt up to address the challenge, folding her hands in her lap. "The little girl, she wears a cross. I think she is a Catholic."
"A lot of little English girls wear crosses, Sara."
"No. This was a crucifix." Sara's tone was determined, and her gaze eagle-like in its fixation; nor was she fobbed off by the slight softening of his voice when he used her name this time.
Anselm's eyes rolled in capitulation. He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket to pull out the leather notecase, and flipped the wallet open. Sure enough, though tiny in the photograph, the cross was clearly embellished with Christ's figure.
"You've got eyes like a hawk," he told her, half-accusingly.
Sara walked across the smooth rock on her knees, and bent to examine the photograph with him.
"I am right then? She is French?"
Anselm squinted out towards the fishing boat. "Her mother was."
"But she is yours? Your child? Why would you carry her photograph, if not?"
"Could be a million reasons."
"Name one."
"She might be my little sister." He quailed inwardly at having to resort to flippancy under interrogation from a sixteen-year-old girl.
And a remorseless one.
"If you are a spy, you must learn to lie better. Your parents are too old to have a child so young." Confident that Anselm had no inkling of Mrs Iain Stewart's condition, and feeling sure of her ground, Sara had no qualms about using this argument, even though the contrary was happening under her nose in two generations of the same family.
"I never said I was a spy."
"Na, so'n Quatsch!" she sank back on her haunches and watched him with a pout of disappointment.
"Swearing at me in German won't get you any further."
"This is not swearing. It is disbelief."
Anselm finished his cigarette, rose, and ground the stub beneath his heel.
"Getting chilly up here. We should go."
Sara snorted up at him in disdain as he towered over her. "If ever you fall into enemy hands, that argument will not work."
"No, but THIS ONE MIGHT!"
In the next instant, with a speed that left her breathless, Sara felt herself swept up from the ground, and swung around so that her feet were dangling over the precipice. He had her underneath the arms and hanging like an empty cape over the abyss. She could feel the cold air blowing up her skirt, her feet swinging loosely underneath her.
Her instinct might have been to struggle, had she not instantly sought his eyes and found that sky blue humour had replaced the normal steel.
Sara regarded him coolly, though her heart was racing.
"You are being a bully. If my hat falls off, and I lose it, I shall not forgive you. Put me back."
It was a short and interesting battle of wills, fought eye-to-eye. And to his chagrin, as he frowned his minatory best at her, Anselm felt his victory elude him.
"Ahhh, you're no fun," he complained, swinging her back again with little effort, and depositing her lightly down beside him on the rock.
Below them, along Rock-a-Nore, a whistle sounded shrilly. Exchanging a brief glance, they peered together over the edge to see a figure in a warden's helmet gesticulating up at them. Sara sent Anselm a private glare, then, threading her arm through his, turned and waved down at the warden with manufactured cheer, adding a little bounce or two to signal her supposed excitement. With an exasperated flap of his hand, the warden let the whistle fall from his mouth and continued on his rounds.
Still smiling with exaggerated cheer over the precipice, Sara aimed a deft sideways kick to the back of Anselm's knee that sent him sprawling forwards within inches of the edge.
"If we are to be friends, John Anselm," she informed him, through a pitiless expression, "you must not use your size against me."
"Where the f*ck did you learn that?!" he let out, winded from the shock.
"I am sorry? Was that German?"
Creakily, for he had fallen rather hard, Anselm manoeuvred himself into a sitting position and rubbed his kneecap.
"Who taught you that move?" he asked, more politely this time.
"I have lived in East London. I had foster-brothers."
He scowled out at the sparkling water of the bay.
"All right. All right. She is my daughter. And she's with her grandma down in Montargis. When I can, I'm going to try and bring her back from France."
Sara lowered herself beside him. "And when I can, I am going to find my brother Ezra. May I have a cigarette now?"
Without a word, he handed her the packet and the lighter, then watched as she fumbled to illuminate the tip of a Gauloise.
"Here, let me do it." His large hand closed round hers and flicked up the lighter lid. "Warning you, if you inhale too hard, you're going to be sick."
"I shall be careful. Thank you." Sara took a novice puff and managed to suppress a cough. "Where is... Montargis?"
"'Bout sixty miles south of Paris. Yanks liberated it last August."
"If your daughter comes, how will you care for her without a wife?"
"You don't half ask some questions." He turned the cigarette packet in his fingers, watching her take a longer drag.
"If your daughter makes you difficulties, it will not be allowed for you to dangle her over a cliff."
Anselm grimaced. "Yeah. Sorry about that."
She exhaled a curling cloud of blue-tinged smoke, and smiled across at him.
"It makes me feel light-headed, but is not unpleasant."
"The Gauloise?"
"No. The dangling."
He grinned behind his hand. This girl was something.
Sara caught the warming of his eyes, and flicked her ash away. "You finish this." She handed him the cigarette. "I find I do not like the taste, though it was interesting. But a singer needs to keep her lungs clear. And her head."
Anselm plucked the firestick from her fingers and inhaled a greedy lungful. Thank Christ singing wasn't on the list of his ambitions. Some days—often, these days, he reflected—he began to wonder what exactly was.
"I try, you know," said Sara, clasping her knees against her, "to fit in with people. But a part of me is always... separate."
The young man snorted. "You've got my disease, then."
"I will help you with your daughter, John..."
One eyebrow rose. First-name terms, was it now? How did she do that?
"...if you will help me find my brother."
"And your parents?"
"I pretend to think that they are still alive. But I must throw away such dreams. What is your daughter's name?"
"They've called her Arabelle."
"It is a lovely name."
"Her mother, Claudie, was a beauty."
That fortnight back in '41, he'd seen a woman risk her life to smuggle out a British airman, and that was Claudie Simoneau. And he'd discovered depths beyond mere looks in Claudie. But then—no point in dwelling on the sentiment—his orders took him north, and back across the Channel. And, come to think of it, he hadn't let himself appreciate the beauty of another human being since. Until that morning on the beach, when he'd seen Foyle's face crumple as he cradled the limp form of his wife—well, that had brought him up sharp, in a way he'd not imagined possible.
Anselm studied the girl's profile. Long-lashed, verging on patrician in her features, her 'presence' struck him, though she was a little awkward in her dress—that bloody hat, too old for her, for starters. And Sara Immerglück had sized him up effectively; that much was a certainty.
"I'll help you find your brother, Sara. And regardless of what happens over Arabelle." Even if I have to make the trip and root him out myself.
"In that case, this," said Sara, softly, "is a birthday I can celebrate." She felt a gesture was appropriate, but couldn't quite decide what that should be. In the end she turned to John, offering him her hand, a little shyly, underneath a smile.
It made her, suddenly, a beauty in the mould of Claudie Simoneau.
Though aware that he was meant to shake the proffered hand, Anselm could no longer perceive this as just a business contract. Instead he turned her hand and took her fingers in his own, and squeezed them once... then let them go.
They lapsed into a comfortable quietude, and each, in their own separate ways, perceived the "otherness" they felt in life recede in the face of new-found and extraordinary kinship.
****** TBC ******
More Author's Notes:
The Hastings East Cliff Railway is now the steepest in the country. Broadstairs closed in '91, and Margate in the late Seventies.
…
"Na, so'n Quatsch!" – What rubbish!
...
More soon.
GiuC