“What do you mean, lying?”
“Have you been lying all along? You didn’t just stumble across that job advert, did you? You knew what this place was.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kate says, palms out in frustration. “I told you, my parents—”
“Came here for their honeymoon, you said?”
“Yes!” Kate is scrambling to catch up. “They met you then. I have a photo. I was retracing their steps, like I told you, and—”
“Bring me the photo,” Audrey says shakily. “Now.”
Kate backs away, exasperated, and leaves the room, heading upstairs, still utterly perplexed. She seizes the photo from her dresser, then thunders back down to the sitting room.
“Here,” she says, striding toward Audrey with the picture held aloft. “Look.”
Audrey brings one hand to her cheek, staring at the photo. Her eyes are wet.
“Audrey, for the love of God, tell me what’s going on,” Kate pleads. “What does this locket you say is Ilse’s have to do with my dad?”
Audrey exhales fully, and a tear slides down her wrinkled cheek. “Kate, your father was Ilse’s son. Your father was Daniel Abrams.”
Kate freezes. How can that be? Then an eerie sense of understanding trickles down from the crown of her head as she considers what she knows about her dad. He was adopted, but he’d never spoken about where he came from. Not even the one time Kate had asked, when she was ten years old and doing a family tree project at school. Her mother had told her he didn’t know anything about his heritage other than that he was Jewish.
“How can this be true?” she asks, her ears ringing.
Audrey pinches her eyes shut as though she can’t bear to witness the conversation anymore.
“Audrey?” Kate presses.
“Because it is true,” she says, looking at Kate. “That photo wasn’t taken during your parents’ honeymoon. It was taken when your father came to meet me after tracking me down. I took it.”
“But the photos…” Kate trails off, then remembers: the photos from this trip were stuffed between the pages of the honeymoon album. Kate had made an assumption, but they weren’t from the same trip. Her eyes start to prick as the bizarre acceptance sets in. “But you said you were going to bring Daniel to Alnwick. Wasn’t that your plan?”
“Christ.” Audrey shifts in her seat with Sophie firmly entrenched in the valley of her lap. “I did. I brought him here after Berlin. I tried to make a go of it. I really did.” Her eyes are shining. “For Ilse’s sake, because I said I would.”
“Well, what happened?”
Audrey looks to the ceiling as though appealing for help from above. “Sit down, Kate,” she says. “Please.”
Kate obliges, eyes locked on Audrey as her mind trips over itself in an effort to piece this all together.
Audrey takes a long drink of water, sets it back down with a tap on the wooden coaster. “When we left Berlin, we came straight to London so that I could manage my father’s estate. Get everything sorted, sell the Kensington house, et cetera. It had all just been sitting there on ice since his death in ’38. I visited the solicitor in Lombard Street, but he’d been killed during the invasion of Sicily, so I dealt instead with his father. He was one of the most hollowed-out men I’ve ever encountered, just shattered by the loss of his only son. In any event,” Audrey continues in a hard tone, “there was no home to sell. The house on Argyll Road had been destroyed during the Blitz.”
Kate gasped.
“I went to see it with Daniel. Ours and the one to the north of it had been hit. Fortunately, ours had been empty.” She takes a deep breath. “But my father’s neighbours, the Andersons, were home. Both were killed, but their twin boys had already been evacuated to the country. Lucky devils or poor little bastards, I’ve never decided.” She shakes her head.
“So,” Kate ventures, “if you had gone home when your father wanted you to…”
“There’s a good chance I would have been killed in the Blitz, yes. I can’t ever know, but risking my life to stay in Berlin might have actually saved it.” Her lips twist into a wretched grimace. “We stayed in a hotel whilst I sorted out my father’s estate, then Daniel and I left London for the Oakwood. My aunt Minna was a help, and I did my best, but Daniel wasn’t adjusting well. He was heartbroken at the loss of his mother, as was I. I descended into a deep depression that I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of. All I could think about was the dead. Ilse, Wen, the other women who died on that minefield. The children we killed whilst trying to save the lives of countless others. Claus, the Kaplans, Daniel’s family. All the boys who wouldn’t be coming home to their mothers, the unnamed dead who hadn’t even yet been tallied. And my mother, who died trying to give me a life that made no sense to me now. Somehow I was the only one left standing.”
She strokes Sophie and steadies her breathing.
“I felt rather useless to Daniel then. He was a seven-year-old boy, active and inquisitive. And here we were, out in the middle of nowhere, really.” She gestures at the window and the frozen, sweeping property beyond.
Kate imagines her father at seven years old, kicking a ball around the grounds of the Oakwood. How could he have kept all this from her?
“He couldn’t make friends, and I don’t know if there were any Jewish children round here back then. None that I knew of, anyway. And that was a big part of it.”
“A big part of what?” Kate sniffs.
“I couldn’t raise him in his own faith, and I had none of my own left to pass on to him. I didn’t want to be a mother, and to be honest with you…” Her voice is thick with emotion. “After all he had been through, I thought he deserved more than a reluctant mother.” Audrey meets Kate’s eyes, whose tears mirror her own. “Promises are difficult to keep. Even for well-meaning people. But the way I see it, well… the promise I made to Ilse was that I would take care of him. And in the end, finding him a home with his own people, where he could live a good life with parents who wanted and loved him, felt like the best thing I could do to care for him. To honour her, and what she would have wanted for him, had she lived.”
The question forms in Kate’s mind, but Audrey beats her to it. “I tried to find some Abrams or Kaplan relatives in England, or even on the continent. But everything was such a disaster in the aftermath of the war and the genocide. I doubt there would have even been relatives to find, but the search was practically impossible. Europe was a shambles, still piecing itself back into something vaguely resembling its former self. So I took him to a Jewish orphanage in London. Most of the children who came over on the kindertransports in the thirties were now orphaned. There were plenty of them in need of homes. He was placed with your grandparents, the Barbers. And that’s, well…”
A long silence follows. Kate glances at the black voice recorder on the table between them. It’s still running, recording the threads of Audrey’s history that have just intertwined with hers.
Kate doesn’t know where to begin. She’s grappling with the sense of understanding this brings about her dad’s addiction. He was a high-functioning alcoholic, and she always knew he was trying to drown something. But it was too far below the surface for her to see what it was.
“So, that’s why my dad came here,” she says. “He was looking for you.”
Audrey nods. “Yes. He tracked me down through the adoption agency records in London, around the time he was, what, twenty-eight? I’d left my information there, with this address, when I dropped him off. I still had Friedrich’s trust fund to bequeath him, and I reckoned he would have questions. One day. And of course, he did.”
“Did you tell him everything you told me?”
“Most of it. He remembered me, remembered this place. And Ilse, and Friedrich. He asked me why I didn’t keep him, but I think—I hope—in the end, he understood. He had a lovely childhood, he said. Loving parents.”
“He did,” Kate whispers. “My Bubbe and Zayde. They were older. He was their only child, and they doted on him.” She smiles sadly. “And me.”
