Last Telegram Read online

  Stefan needed no such prompting. His manners were already sophisticated, and what he didn’t already know of English etiquette, he quickly picked up by watching. Now that he had abandoned the old leather jacket and black trousers for the cords, jumpers, and jacket John had bought him, he looked almost like an English boy, apart from the hairstyle he insisted on keeping unfashionably long. But he was unlike any other boy I knew.

  What I had mistaken for shyness, I slowly began to realize, was actually a confident stillness. While the others always needed to be active, Stefan seemed content to observe the world around him quietly, with an expression of mild curiosity and, I sensed, amusement simmering just below the surface. Little escapes those dark eyes, I thought, with a slight shiver.

  That Sunday, Stefan handed back my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles with one of his rare smiles.

  “I enjoy very much, Miss Lily,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “I would like to be a perfect English gentleman like your Sherlock Holmes.” He raised an imaginary bowler hat, pretended to twirl an umbrella, and bowed deeply, making me laugh out loud. Stefan the clown was a side of his character he hadn’t revealed till now.

  In just two months, his English improved so much I’d abandoned my intention to speak German. I was astonished by how quickly he learned; he could already read in another language. This was the second Conan Doyle book I’d lent him, and every time he visited he devoured Father’s copy of The Times, urgently looking for news from Europe.

  Over lunch, we encouraged them to talk about home. Of course, we got only the edited versions. Stefan told us about his parents, both schoolteachers in Hamburg, and his younger twin sisters. He hoped they would come to England once they’d saved or borrowed the money for permissions and transport. Kurt and Walter spoke longingly of the Bavarian hills and the family farm. The English countryside is so flat, they complained. As conversation flowed, I reflected with satisfaction that the boys were starting to feel more secure.

  It was our usual custom to follow lunch with a walk on the water meadows, but that day it was pouring. “Not a good day for a walk,” Father said, looking out of the drawing room window. “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

  “Cats and dogs?” Walter said, frowning. “Why do you say cats and dogs?” he asked, after we’d told him what it meant. We had no idea. Some English phrases were so hard to explain.

  After coffee, Father suggested a game of cards. But I had a better idea.

  “What about a song, Mother?” I said, pointing to the baby grand. It was rarely played these days and generally served as a shelf for photographs and ornaments.

  “I couldn’t,” she said, blushing and nervously smoothing her skirt. “I haven’t played for years.” She’d had a classical training, and though never a professional performer, she’d given piano lessons and played in local amateur concerts before marriage and children got in the way. When times at the mill had been hard and there was no extra cash for servants, her music had been sacrificed to housework and cooking.

  “Come on, you can do it,” I said, going over to the piano stool and rifling through the piles of sheet music stored under its padded lid. I found what I was looking for, a score now dog-eared and falling apart at the seams: Music Hall Favorites.

  “Here we are,” I said. I moved the knickknacks from the piano, propped it open, lifted out the music shelf, took her elbow, and led her to the piano stool. “Now all you have to do is play.”

  “It’s been so long.” She shook her head. “My fingers won’t know what to do.”

  It was Stefan who finally persuaded her. He was sitting on the arm of the sofa, leaning forward, watching intently. “Please, Mrs. Verner. Please play for us,” he said. “We like very much to hear the piano.”

  As she started, everyone began to listen. Watching her fingers move over the keys with growing confidence, I remembered how she used to sit me on her knee as she played. With a child’s selfishness, it seemed then that her music was just for me. Now, hearing her again after so long, I realized what a sacrifice she had made, giving up her music to meet the demands of the family.

  She stopped to look through the battered old score. “Here’s a good one. ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van.’” As she started into the familiar tune, John and I got up and stood beside her, reading the words over her shoulder. After a couple of verses, the boys came to join us, starting to hum along and sing the chorus with us.

  When we sang the words dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied, they started to giggle.

  “What is dilly dally, please?” Walter asked.

  I struggled to find a polite explanation. “It means they spent a lot of time hanging around drinking, or talking, or…”

  John interrupted, saying something in German, and they guffawed like schoolboys. Next time we repeated the chorus, they made cheeky kissing noises and Father frowned in gentle reproach.

  After three more numbers, Mother declared she’d reached the end of her repertoire and went to make tea. As the others drifted back to the warmth of the fire, Stefan stayed by the piano, apparently lost in his own thoughts. Then he seemed to settle something in his mind and looked at me briefly with a slight smile before pulling out the stool and sitting down, tentatively spreading his hands over the keys. Something tugged in my heart as I noticed for the first time the perfect pink ovals of his nails at the end of each long, elegant finger.

  He played a few scales and then, haltingly, started to pick out a tune I recognized as the opening bars of the Moonlight Sonata. Muttering at his mistakes and pausing to remember each following phrase, Stefan stumbled on, but his arpeggios sounded more like a doleful trudge than the calm moonlit landscape Beethoven had intended.

  After a few minutes, he took his hands from the piano and sighed, lowering his head. The untrimmed wisps of dark hair curled down his neck and over his collar, and I felt a surge of sadness for this strange boy, so far from home.

  “Play us the jazz,” Kurt said.

  Stefan looked up at me.

  “This is okay for you?” he asked. “You like the jazz?”

  “Very much,” I said, smiling encouragement.

  Stefan turned back to the keyboard, took a deep breath, and launched into an exuberant ragtime piece. The solemn struggle with Beethoven was transformed into the joyful freedom of jazz. The fingers on Stefan’s right hand moved so fast they became a blur, as the left hand stretched into successions of complex chord sequences.

  Everyone in the room started to move, heads nodding, feet tapping; even Father’s knee was jiggling. The rhythm was irresistible.

  “Remember those swing steps, Lily?” John leaped up and took my hand as we clumsily tried to approximate the dance we’d learned on New Year’s Eve. Kurt and Walter watched for a moment and then came to join us, doing their own wild version, waving arms and legs around without any regard for the rhythm.

  From the piano, Stefan shouted, “Swingjugend, swing. Swing heil!” Kurt and Walter raised their arms in mock-Nazi salutes and repeated, “Swing heil! Swing heil!”

  Mother’s eyebrows raised in alarm.

  “What’s that all about?” I shouted to Kurt.

  “American jazz. Banned by the Nazis,” Kurt shouted back.

  “Why is it banned?”

  He shrugged. “Stefan plays it for—what do you say?”

  Stefan stopped playing and swiveled around. In the sudden stillness, his voice was firm and clear, “We play it because it is not allowed.”

  “Who’s we, Stefan?” John asked.

  “Swingjugend.”

  “Until they were arrested,” Kurt said, almost under his breath.

  “Arrested?” I repeated, failing for a moment to understand the full import of the word.

  Stefan glowered at him. “They just gave us a beating. As a warning.”

  It was such a shocking image, none of us knew what to say next. My mind whirled, trying to understand. How could the police—or was it soldiers?—be so violent against youn
g boys, just for playing music? The sense of menace seemed to seep into the room like a poison.

  Mother spoke carefully. “Are you saying that the police beat you and put you in prison, Stefan?”

  Stefan nodded. “The SS,” he said. “But we were not in prison for long. It was just a warning.” He paused and then went on, “That is why I had to leave Germany.”

  “You poor boy,” she murmured. “No wonder…”

  “Were you all members…of this group?” I stuttered.

  “Only Stefan,” Kurt said. “We do not know about it till he tell us.”

  “There is no Jugend where we live,” Walter added.

  “Perhaps we make our own group, here in Westbury?” Kurt smiled, and the tension in the room started to settle. “Can he play some more?”

  Stefan looked at Father, who nodded.

  This time we listened quietly. It didn’t seem right to dance. Trying to make sense of what the boys had told us, I began to understand why this music was so important for Stefan. The baby grand had never known such spirited, emphatic playing. It was an act of protest and defiance, seeming to drive the menace out of the room.

  After a few minutes, he stopped, and we all applauded and cheered. As Stefan straightened up from a mock-formal bow, I saw for the first time his face fully illuminated with happiness.

  6

  Finishing is the final procedure in the long and complex process of transforming the silkworm’s gossamer into a perfect piece of woven silk. Dependent on the type of fabric required, finishing can include dyeing, boiling, tentering, drying, and pressing in a variety of ways to achieve an extraordinary range of characteristics: firmness, fullness, dullness, luster, softness, or draping quality. For certain technical applications, such as parachute silk, finishing is critical in determining the final porosity of the fabric.

  —The History of Silk by Harold Verner

  I was sitting in a deck chair in the garden on that warm May evening, refreshing my tired feet in a bucket of cool water, a gin and tonic in my hand and reading the latest edition of True Romance while horned stag beetles bumbled around me in dusk. I should have been content, but I wasn’t. I was desperate for some romance of my own. Though fabled for having one pub for every thousand residents, Westbury offered few opportunities for meeting people, and John seemed to spend more and more time in London.

  Robbie’s intimately whispered promise to “see you very soon” rang hollowly in my ears. He hadn’t been in touch for three long months, not since the meeting at the mill. I’d stopped trying to be first to the telephone each time it rang, and had given up rushing to meet the postman. I was lonely, and my social life was at a standstill.

  So when I heard the raunchy toot-ti-toot of a car horn, I didn’t waste any time putting my shoes on and sprinted around to the front of the house barefoot. John was already waiting on the front step.

  “Nice motor,” I said, as a low-slung dark blue sports car drew up.

  “It’s a Morgan, spelled M-O-N-E-Y,” he whispered back.

  The car scrunched to a halt on the gravel. Robbie looked just like a Hollywood leading man in his fur-lined flying jacket and a white scarf of what appeared to be parachute silk. His long absence was instantly forgiven. He pulled off his leather pilot’s helmet, pushed himself up, and swung his legs over the door.

  “My new baby. What do you think?” He seemed extremely pleased with himself.

  “Beautiful,” we chorused.

  He pumped John’s hand. “How are you, old man? Long time no see.”

  He lifted my fingers and kissed them with mock formality, eyes flirting, then looked down at my bare feet. My toes felt suddenly vulnerable.

  “Hello, Lily. Love the red nail polish, terribly erotic—I mean exotic.” He grinned with easy familiarity. “How’s tricks, one and all?”

  “Not bad, not bad,” said John. “Like the Morgan.”

  “Little beauty, isn’t she? Fancy a spin? There’s room for both of you, if Lily doesn’t mind sitting sideways in the back.”

  The smell of Castrol on the warm evening air promised adventure. As Robbie shimmied the car through the twisty lanes, each bend brought a new aroma: a greenstick bonfire, hay drying in the field, pungent piggeries, water mint, wild garlic, and the sweeter notes of bluebells and cow parsley.

  We pulled up at the pub, and while Robbie went inside to get the drinks, John and I sat on a bench by the river, watching an anxious mother duck shepherding her ducklings and listening to the calls of coots settling in the reed beds.

  “I wonder why he’s popped up just now?” John said. “We’re still waiting for him to sign that parachute silk contract, you know? It’s been a while.”

  “Are you going to ask him?”

  “Watch and learn, Sis,” he said, tapping the side of his nose.

  Robbie arrived with the drinks, and for a while we made small talk. “Been doing much flying lately?” John asked.

  “She is no more,” Robbie said, pulling a sorrowful face. “Had a bit of a prang.”

  “Golly. You crashed it?”

  “I’d been out for a spin—lovely evening, bit like this. I was just coming into land when out of nowhere comes this ruddy great removal van toddling along the edge of the field,” he said smoothly. “Managed to avoid it but the wheels clipped a hedge, and next thing I knew, we were doing a somersault. Fine in the air, that kind of thing, but not so clever at ground level. Ended up with her nose half-buried in a ploughed field and me hanging upside down in the straps.”

  He demonstrated leaning out of his seat, chest parallel to the ground, arms gripping an imaginary joystick, mock terror on his face, making us laugh. It seemed like a bit of a lark. We expected a jokey punch line.

  “What did you do?” John asked.

  “I felt this wet in my hair. It was petrol, dripping out of the tank onto the engine block. So my mind got made up sharpish. I jumped for it and ran away across the field. There was a ruddy great whoomph and the whole thing went up. Guy Fawkes would have been proud. That was the end of the plane, though. Miss her terribly.” He jerked his thumb toward the Morgan glistening in the twilight, engine ticking as it cooled. “But the insurance paid for that little beauty.”

  The story shocked me, much more than I’d expected. What if Robbie really had gone up in flames? I could imagine what John was thinking: we could have lost the contract too.

  Robbie took a swig of his pint. “C’est la vie. Anyway, what’s been happening in Westbury? How’s business?”

  “Not bad, not bad, considering,” John said.

  “Tough times for us all,” Robbie said. “The harder old Chamberlain bargains for peace, the harder we seem to be working for war, don’t you find?”

  He offered us cigarettes from a slim monogrammed case and then, as he lit them for us with his gold Dunhill, added quite casually, “By the way, how’s the finishing going? The parachute contract’s yours, you know, just as soon as you’re ready to meet the specifications.”

  John didn’t miss a beat. “The finishing plant’s in and we’re confident it’ll be up and running in a week or so.” I sipped my shandy and smiled to myself at his bullishness. The truth, I knew, was less impressive.

  For weeks now, John and Father had been preoccupied with installing the new equipment. By moving machinery around, they had managed to clear a section of the winding mill to create a self-contained room next to the boiler house with its own double doors leading directly into the yard, convenient for the plumbing, drainage, and hot water needed for the new plant. The equipment arrived from Switzerland on a lorry so long it had difficulty in negotiating the driveway. Each heavy section had to be lifted and rollered into the new finishing room before the machinery could be assembled. A team of engineers worked several days to construct it and link up the plumbing and wiring.

  “You’re very quiet, Lily,” Robbie said, turning to me. “I gather you’re in charge of weaving the stuff? How’s that going?”

  “It’s g
oing fine.” I caught John’s eye. Just watch me play the game too. “It’s a plain taffeta in twelve momme habotai, and to be honest, it’s a doddle compared with some of the other things we have to weave. We should be able to get you some samples any day now, just as soon as the plant’s up and running.”

  Robbie nodded as if he knew what I was talking about and John suppressed a smile. I surprised myself too; it was a heady feeling, being an expert. Not what men usually expected of women, I thought smugly.

  What I said wasn’t far from the truth. Weaving parachute silk was straightforward: thread of equal weight for both warp and weft, with no patterns or color changes. Twist and tensions were clearly defined. The yarn we used was still “in the gum”—the sticky sericin the caterpillar exudes to make its cocoon—which made it easier to handle. It would be “degummed” by boiling the woven cloth as part of the finishing process.

  Gwen had put me in charge of two looms weaving test runs with Stefan, so that he could take over two of his own once the contracts came in. As she predicted, he was already a good weaver, and I found myself looking forward to working beside him each day. At first, it was exciting to be developing a new material, but it was vital to be vigilant against broken threads, and these were tricky to detect against the blinding whiteness of the material. After hours of watching yards of plain white cloth emerging from the shuttle beam, our eyes burned and we begged Gwen to let us weave stripes or Jacquard designs to relieve the boredom. But she was immovable. “It’s important work, has to be right. And you two are our experts now.”

  After Robbie dropped us home, John said, “Very impressive, schwester, the way you talked that up. You’re turning into a right little businesswoman.”

  “Thanks for the compliment,” I said, feeling quietly proud of myself, flattered that he’d noticed.

  “Of course, it helps that he’s pretty sweet on you. Better keep it that way—we’re going to depend on him in the next little while.”

  “He’s not sweet on me. You’re just imagining it,” I snapped. “Besides, just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I have to simper at any chap with a checkbook.”