The Linden Tree Read online

  I hated being unable to tell them more. I liked them, they had been wonderfully good to me, and I longed to be able to repay them by telling them the truth.

  But the truth would hardly make them happy. To admit the true extent of my predicament would be to make them accessories to my offences against the East German State. They would, quite rightly, be frantic with worry and vicarious guilt, and I should have no alternative but to leave them immediately. So I did my best to swallow the generous supper they gave me, and tried to smile, and prayed that Nicolas would by now have heard where I was and that he would be on his way to rescue me.

  I insisted on doing the lion’s share of the washing-up, and no one objected, though of course Scott helped. By the time we had finished, it was growing dark. Most of the group had decided to walk up to the town and sample the local brew in a tourist inn, but although Scott eagerly offered to escort and treat me, I declined.

  We sat outside the tent for a while, watching the last of the light fade from the walls of the castle high above us. Scott asked what work I did, and his interest and excitement when he heard that I was an actress was so great that I hadn’t the heart to disillusion him about the profession. But I was too weary to indulge him for long.

  ‘I think I’ll turn in. But look, Scott, are you going to be all right in the open?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be fine in my sleeping bag.’ He demonstrated, kicking off his sneakers, scrunching himself down into the bag fully dressed, and embarking on a recital of long, whistling snores.

  I laughed. ‘All right,’ I conceded, ‘I’ll believe you. Just don’t keep me awake by snoring, that’s all. Good night – and thank you for everything.’

  Tired though I was, I was far too worried to sleep. I turned and wriggled restlessly on the unyielding ground, while my mind clamoured with problems. It wasn’t until I heard Scott clear his throat, astonishingly close, that I remembered that only a wall of canvas separated us.

  ‘Alison?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Mmm?’ I feigned sleepiness, not wanting to bother with idle chat.

  ‘This friend of yours – Nicolas. Are you going to marry him?’

  I stiffened, feeling the colour rise in my cheeks and aware of the rough caress of the blanket against them. ‘Good heavens, I don’t know,’ I mumbled. ‘The question hasn’t arisen.’

  ‘Ah!’ The relief in his voice was unmistakable.

  ‘You wouldn’t approve, I take it?’ I said, trying to keep my voice light.

  ‘We-ell,’ he answered judiciously, ‘something is bothering me. You say Nicolas brought you here to East Germany on vacation, and then you were separated? And he has your purse and your passport and your visa and your luggage and everything?’

  I made an uncomfortable murmur of assent. It did sound a very thin story.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then he burst out defiantly: ‘Well, if I had a girl like you, I know one thing – I sure as hell wouldn’t lose her! I mean … to let himself be separated from you, and to leave you stranded in a country like this, where they’ll lock you up for stepping out of line … how could he be so dumb?’

  I swallowed hard. ‘I don’t really think –’ I began, but he cut in quickly.

  ‘Oh, I know it’s none of my business, and I don’t mean to be rude or hurtful. But – well, even if you were just an ordinary friend, you’d think he’d take more care of you. But you’re in love with him, aren’t you? I could tell that whenever you mentioned him. I’m sorry, Alison, but I just don’t think he’s the right man for you. If he were, he’d look after you a whole lot better than this!’

  I hadn’t allowed myself to consider it, let alone admit it. But as I pulled the blanket over my head and pressed my fist hard against my mouth in an effort to keep my desolation from the boy, I had to acknowledge that what he said was true.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was a long time before I could sleep. Scott’s criticism of Nicolas had been too painfully accurate. And he didn’t know the half of it!

  It was true. Nicolas was irresponsible, inconsiderate – and worse. He must have known full well the risks that were involved when he talked me into switching places with Elisabeth. To put me, deliberately, in such danger was not the act of a friend, let alone that of a man worth loving.

  I had to face up to it. Quite probably Nicolas wouldn’t come to rescue me. Even if he wasn’t as irresponsible as I feared, it was possible that Kurt’s message hadn’t reached him. And perhaps poor Kurt himself was already under arrest for conniving at my escape from East Berlin.

  Perhaps there was no one to come to my rescue at all.

  And yet I couldn’t rely on Paul and Nancy and their friends either. They had already done more than enough to help me. And Kurt had made it clear that I must not involve Willy Hendricks if I could avoid it. Willy was to be approached only as a last resort, so in fairness to him I must wait at least until tomorrow evening before begging for his help.

  In the meantime, the important thing was not to worry my companions. I must act confidently and naturally, as though the story I had told them was true. More acting …

  When I emerged from the tent next morning, stiff from sleeping on the ground, Scott had disappeared. But in a few moments he was back, running, with fresh warm rolls that he had fetched from the town. He was ebullient, proud of his night spent in the open on my behalf, and eager to inform the others that I had made a stage appearance in London. I guessed that his rescue of an actress from a tight situation was going to make a good story to tell his friends when he got back home.

  I watched him affectionately as we breakfasted, thinking how urgently I needed the services of a resourceful Knight Errant. He caught my eye, and gulped the last of his coffee. ‘The town’s really fantastic,’ he announced. ‘I’m going back there right away – there’s so much I want to photograph. You’ll come with me, won’t you, Alison?’

  I was glad to. Anything, to take my mind off my own problems.

  The main gate of the camp site led out to a road that wound up the hill towards one of the bastioned gateways of the town. This was the route that most people from the camp were taking, but after Scott had burrowed into his tent and emerged backwards clutching his camera, he led me to a smaller gate at the far end of the site.

  ‘I found this path when I came down from the town this morning,’ he explained. ‘It cuts up through the trees to a sort of back door in the town walls. It’s a lot quicker and prettier than the road, but it is a bit steep. Sure you’ll be able to manage?’

  I assured him gravely that I thought I could. As he said, it was pleasant under the trees; the hot sun came filtering through the leaves, and although there was one path that went almost straight up the hill, another one nearby zig-zagged sufficiently to make it a walk rather than a scramble. Even so, I was glad when, towards the top, the ground levelled a little and the trees thinned sufficiently to allow grass to grow. I moved away from the path and sat down, my back against a convenient tree trunk, and looked out across the tops of the hillside trees to the rolling miles of sunlit countryside, shade-swept by fat white wind-chased clouds.

  Scott had been chatting, tirelessly. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect a trainee Knight Errant to be perfect. Now he broke off and sniffed the air.

  ‘What’s that scent?’

  I had recognized it immediately, as soon as we had climbed up through the oaks and chestnuts to this natural grassy platform. The pale yellow flowers were hanging above us in thick clusters against the tender green leaves, and their scent – honey-sweet, elusive, unforgettable – came drifting down to us.

  ‘We’re sitting under a linden tree,’ I said. ‘If we’re quiet, we shall be able to hear the bees.’

  He stopped talking for a full three minutes. I leaned my head against the trunk of the tree, and closed my eyes. The air was warm and blessedly quiet; the traffic in the valley was a distant murmur. Nearer, there was the ripple and splash of a fast-falling stream, and nearer
still the absorbed humming of a thousand drunken bees among the lime flowers.

  Linden, I corrected myself wretchedly. Not lime, linden.

  The scent pervaded the air. ‘Nicolas,’ I thought in despair, ‘Nicolas, my love, where are you? You can’t abandon me like this, surely you can’t –?’

  There was a sudden sharp click. I opened my eyes with a start. Scott, his camera to his eye, was taking some quick close-ups of me. I tossed a handful of grass at him to make him stop.

  ‘All right, then,’ he agreed, holding out a large paw and pulling me to my feet. ‘Let’s get up to the town before it’s too crowded.’

  The path wound upwards through the trees and emerged at the foot of the massive encircling town wall. A narrow dirt road, rising from another part of the valley, led on up an open slope to an archway in the wall surmounted by a red-roofed watch tower. We walked up the slope, through the archway under the tower, and then up a lane between high garden walls overhung by apple trees. And then, climbing some stone steps, we reached one of the main streets of Marberg.

  As Scott had said, the town was fantastic. Truly fantastic – for once, the much misused adjective provided an exact description. Marberg looked unbelievably unreal, a town transported in its entirety from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. I felt that I was in a fantasy-town, a story-book setting come to life.

  We joined the other tourists and wandered, I gaping, Scott clicking his camera with the speed of a fashion photographer. Marberg was a town of cobbled streets lined by tall gabled houses, some of stone, but most of them half-timbered, with brown beams and plaster-work shading from cream to ochre. Dormer windows peered down at us from steeply-pitched roofs. On street corners, charmingly extravagant half-timbered circular windows, topped by individual turrets, projected from upper storeys.

  Stone towers sprouted everywhere: church towers, bell towers, watch towers, castle towers; some round, some square, some topped with conical roofs, some with spires, some with onion domes. On top of one of the highest was perched a watchman’s house, half-timbered, its tiled roof ridged and gabled in a shape reminiscent of the helmets of sixteenth-century German knights in engravings by Dürer.

  But although I was enchanted by the appearance of the town, I found it impossible to forget that I was in East Germany, and no tourist. At the end of every street we caught sight of the encircling wall. Not an open-topped wall, like the ones I had walked round in York and Chester, but one with a red-tiled roof that covered the walkway. It was a delightful wall, curving and turning, its stones cushiony with lichens. In some places it had been used as the fourth side of an old house, or of a barn or poultry shed. Grass and wild flowers grew at its base, logs were stacked against it, children bounced balls off it. It had been tamed, domesticated.

  But it was still a wall, and for me it was an ever-present reminder of the Wall in Berlin, and of the fact that I was on the wrong side of the East-West frontier.

  ‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ cried Scott. ‘Just look at the detail – those elaborate old wrought-iron signs over the shops and the carved corner-posts and the stone fountains with knights and heraldic creatures on the top …’

  ‘And I love those geraniums cascading out of window-boxes,’ I agreed, trying to shake off my worries, ‘and – oh, can you hear the music?’

  The insistent sound of fife and drum began to draw the crowds through the narrow streets and into an open place in front of the castle. Its massive doors were firmly closed, but the sight-seers were expectant. Apparently the festival pageant was being rehearsed, and the castle doors would soon be opened.

  The musicians and, it seemed, half the townspeople, were already dressed for the festival. Some were wearing the old regional costume, the men in wide-brimmed hats, black velvet waistcoats and knee-breeches, the women in full-length gathered skirts with ornately-embroidered bodices, and pleated white bonnets. Others had made a cheerful stab at dressing for the period of the pageant, give or take a century.

  ‘Will you look at him,’ hooted Scott, pointing to a portly burgher dressed in a plumed hat, seventeenth-century jerkin and thigh boots. ‘He’s a hundred years too late for the Peasants’ Revolt!’

  ‘Oh, but see how he’s enjoying himself! Dressing-up’s such fun. Besides, I imagine they’re wearing whatever they can unearth from their lumber rooms. Look, some of the men are just wearing hats and cloaks over their ordinary clothes, but does it matter? They’re all entering into the spirit of the thing.’

  A group of costumed men approached the castle doors, leading a waggon drawn by a pair of heavy-shouldered, cream-coloured oxen. Two armed members of the Volkspolizei who had been standing guard drew aside. The great doors were dragged open from the inside, and a muffled cheer went up from the crowd as the waggon lumbered under the stone gateway and into the castle courtyard.

  From the comments of the crowd, I gathered that it was rare for anyone from the town to enter the castle. I craned my neck in an attempt to see inside, but glimpsed only the bare courtyard and a solid wall, relieved by rows of small windows; a bleak place to be used as a home for the old and sick. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I could see pale faces staring down into the courtyard from some of the windows.

  And then the oxen came out again, and a greater cheer went up as the waggon rolled into view with an enormous cask aboard. According to the story Willy had told us, a tyrannical sixteenth-century Duke had agreed to spare the lives of the rebellious peasantry only if ten of the citizens could, between sunrise and sunset on one summer day, drink every drop of wine in the biggest cask in his castle cellars. If this was the original cask, I thought, then the ten citizens would have been paralytic before they’d drunk a fraction of it, and been hanged into the bargain.

  ‘Bet the cask’s empty,’ muttered Scott cynically, but the thought didn’t take the smile of enjoyment from his face; or rather from what I could see of his face since his camera had become a permanent feature in front of his eye, endlessly clicking.

  A procession formed, directed by a perspiring man in lederhosen that were dark and shiny with years of wear. The fife and drum band took its place in front of the patient-eyed, indifferent oxen, and began banging and shrilling its way towards the market place. As the waggon rumbled over the cobblestones, anyone with any pretensions to costume – and a good many local children and dogs without – fell in behind. And then, since there was nothing more to watch, the spectators followed too.

  Scott moved to another viewpoint. I stayed to watch as the oxen and waggon approached the place where I was standing, interested and amused despite my worries.

  And then I saw Nicolas.

  It was impossible, of course. If Nicolas were here, in Marberg, he wouldn’t be walking in procession at a rehearsal for a pageant, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and a short jaunty cloak slung over one shoulder.

  Impossible.

  And yet …

  The man was past before I had begun to gather my wits. I tried to push my way through the crowds, but found myself caught up in the tail end of the procession. I struggled free, elbowing my way rudely through the onlookers until I reached the open space behind them, and then running full pelt until I was level with the head of the procession again.

  ‘Alison!’

  It was Scott, grabbing my arm as I flew past. ‘Alison, what’s going on?’

  ‘It’s Nicolas,’ I gasped. ‘I’m sure I’ve just seen Nicolas!’

  The boy looked half-pleased, half-sorry. ‘Hasn’t he seen you yet?’

  ‘No. You carry on with your photographs, Scott, while I find him. I’ll see you back at the camp.’

  He let go of my arm reluctantly. ‘Don’t get lost, now.’

  I flashed a smile at the boy and dodged away until I was level with the oxen again, then pushed my way through to the front row of spectators. The waggon rolled past. Behind it were girls and men in regional costume, a jester in particoloured hose, the fat man in the buff jerkin, a girl in a dirndl dress and
print headscarf. I stood on my toes, bobbing frantically in an effort to see if he had moved to the other side of the group.

  And then I saw him. He was wearing an ordinary shirt and trousers under his short cloak, narrow trousers which I was sure were part of Nicolas’s suit. I recognized his walk. His face was partly shadowed by the hat he wore, but I recognized the turn of his head. Even if you have known him only a short time, the simplest movements of the man you love are unmistakable.

  He was within a few yards of me, and all my questions, my doubts, my worries about his good faith, my unhappiness, were blotted out by the fact of his presence.

  ‘Nicolas!’ I called, hearing my voice break with joy and relief. ‘Nicolas, here I am!’

  He walked on, looking straight ahead, hardly a muscle of his face moving.

  My heart seemed to stop. I stood still, buffeted by the people pushing past me, staring after him. Was it a mistake? Was this man Nicolas’s double, as I was Elisabeth’s?

  But that would be far too great a coincidence. And anyway, as I knew, even people who look alike don’t walk in the same way. This was Nicolas, I was positive. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me above the noise of the band.

  I shoved and scrambled after him, and caught at his arm. For a second he paused. I looked up at him and saw the familiar long-lashed green-brown eyes; saw too the small unmistakably identifying scar on his cheek.

  ‘Nicolas,’ I said simply.

  My hand instinctively moved up and on to his shoulder. I raised my face, I waited for his kiss.

  He looked straight at me without any sign of recognition. He shook off my hand. He side-stepped. He brushed past me and walked on.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was lost. Caught up in the crowds like a stick tossed into a flowing stream and swept and jostled along without volition or purpose. I couldn’t distinguish Nicolas, somewhere ahead of me among the costumed townspeople, because my vision was blurred.