Page 55

‘Move!’

The fire had raced in two directions at once, running faster than Noemi could shout.

Up the timber wall in a sheet of bright orange and in a zigzag line across the dry clumps of straw which were scattered haphazardly from one side of the barn to the other.

It spread in seconds as the flames fattened, sending up clouds of acrid black smoke in its wake.

‘We’ve got to leave him. We’ve got to get out of here now.’

‘I can’t reach him, but I can’t leave him to die like this. Whatever he’s done, he’s still my father.’

Their words collided as the flames flew up and crackled into the hay bales stored in the roof space, turning the beams that supported the loft into torches. Viktor was lying behind the fire’s barrier, his head bleeding, his eyes closed.

As Pascal lunged towards him, a breeze blew through the open doorway and caught hold of the burning straw.

The strands whipped up from the floor and cascaded down from above.

There was a strange beauty in the sight of the straw dancing through the singed air like tiny falling stars.

For a brief moment, Pascal and Noemi were hypnotised.

Until the first cinder bit into bare skin and the first beam began to crack.

‘There’s nothing you can do, Pascal. There’s no way to reach him without being killed yourself.’

He didn’t want to listen. The good son who couldn’t betray his father was still lodged somewhere inside him.

It took all of Noemi’s strength to pull his shaking body out of the burning barn.

Her hair was singed by the time she forced him through the door; her hands were pocked with blisters.

Pascal was coughing so hard it was as if he was entirely made out of smoke.

They ran doubled over and fell into the rough safety of a stubble-filled field as the barn collapsed in on itself and the sparks and the flames flew away into the sky.

Pascal’s head sank into his hands; tears tracked through the dirt on his cheeks.

Noemi wrapped her arms round him as he sobbed out his shock.

She didn’t know what to feel. Viktor, the man who had destroyed her family, was finally gone, but there was no satisfaction in that, no sense of relief or justice served.

Instead, there was another burning building and another dead body and – in whatever form it took for Pascal, whether it was based purely on hatred or on some last vestiges of love, or more for his mother than for his father – there was another loss to mourn.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Viktor will never pay for anything now. His crimes will be forgotten. There’ll be a day when memories fade and somebody talks about him as a good man.

Noemi had watched the flames shrink as the barn disappeared inside a column of black smoke that smudged dirty fingers across the night sky.

Viktor would be rewritten in time; so would the doctor and all the rest who’d judged and condemned and murdered by inaction if not by their own hands and would never be caught.

The town would heal and move on, with all its secrets buried.

And I can’t stay here and bear witness to that. I have to find a place where I’m wanted.

‘Noemi, are you all right?’

She jumped as Pascal spoke, unable for a moment to tell if he was speaking to her from the past or the present.

Three weeks had gone by since the fire, but the memory was still vivid and it wouldn’t let go of her, any more than she knew it would let go of him.

She couldn’t stop herself drifting back to it no matter where she was.

‘Herr Niehbur was saying that there’s no more documents after this to sign. This is the last one.’

She gave herself a mental shake and forced herself to focus on the sheet of paper waiting for her signature, while the notary forced a smile and passed her a pen. She glanced at Pascal. His eyes were pouched, the shadows under them as grey as if the smoke from the barn had permanently marked him.

He needs a new life too. He needs to be somewhere he can remake himself.

She dropped her gaze to the document and quickly added her name.

What Pascal did or didn’t need – and how important that was to her – was a minefield she hadn’t worked out how to navigate, especially now Viktor was dead.

Everything he had stolen from the Drachmanns – the shop and the bar, the bakery and the bottling and distilling workshops – had reverted to Pascal with his death.

And Pascal had refused to accept them. He’d had the papers drawn up for their transfer to Noemi before his father was buried; he’d insisted their return would set her free.

She hadn’t been able to ask him, From what ?

She’d barely seen him outside the notary’s office since Viktor’s funeral and the truth of his mother’s death had shut him away from the world.

‘Well there we are, that’s everything, Fr?ulein Drachmann. I hope this goes some way to help resolve your… situation.’

Niehbur whisked them out of the door before Noemi could find him an answer.

It was hardly everything . She had the businesses back, but not the people who’d spent their lives building them.

The café and her home, which had been the centre of her lost life, remained out of her reach, as the notary well knew.

Getting those returned would involve a fight nobody would thank her for starting.

And as for staying and stepping into her parents’ shoes?

‘Can you do it? Can you stay in Unterwald? Do you even want to?’

Noemi stumbled as Pascal read her mind and tried to blame a loose cobblestone. She didn’t know how to answer as he took her arm and helped her to steady herself; she wasn’t ready for him to start seeing her thoughts again.

‘Sit down with me, Noemi. We can do that much, can’t we? We don’t have to be strangers.’

The weather was mild, a gentle September day.

There was a table tucked into the corner outside one of the town’s inns where the late season’s hikers wouldn’t take any notice of them.

She let him guide her there and order them both a glass of wine.

The last thing she’d ever wanted to be was strangers.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you that, especially given that I’ve tied you here now.

But this has hardly been a happy homecoming for you, and leaving’s been on my mind a lot lately.

’ He paused and looked at his wine glass.

‘Do you remember all those years ago when you asked me to go away with you? When you asked me to leave Germany and go somewhere where nobody cared what our beliefs were?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

She could have said a lot more. She could have reminded him that the second part of what she’d said was somewhere we can be together and be in love without fear.

She could have told him the truth – that she’d never forgotten asking him to choose her, or how much his refusal to do so had hurt.

She didn’t know if that was a line she wanted to cross.

They’d discussed what they’d done in the war since she returned but only within closely held boundaries.

They’d discussed Viktor’s death and the heartbreak that was Carina’s, but only in the broadest terms. They’d discussed the restitution of Noemi’s property and its practicalities.

But they’d avoided discussing their shared past. They’d never once reached back for the people they’d been, or not in a way that said, We were far more to each other than this .

Now she didn’t know how to start, but it was all Pascal seemed to want to do.

‘I wish to God I’d been braver. I wish I’d said yes. Our lives could have been?—’

‘Someone else’s.’

Noemi finished his sentence without thinking. She wasn’t sure as she said them whether her words were filled with regret or intended to stop him raking over old memories. But they filled her eyes – and his – with tears either way.

‘I’d like to have met them, the Noemi and Pascal who left Unterwald that day. I think they would have been happy.’

Pascal’s hand was suddenly over hers as he spoke.

His touch should have felt wrong, but it felt like safety.

It made her look up and properly at him.

His face was so familiar, despite the changes that war had written across it.

She couldn’t stay in the town; she knew that, but she couldn’t imagine never seeing him again either.

His hand tightened round hers as if he sensed the shift.

‘Do you think they would forgive us for what we threw away? Do you think they’d forgive me for what I became?’

‘I don’t know.’

She answered again without thinking, but she told him the truth. She saw his eyes cloud. She knew what he was really asking, but it wasn’t a simple answer.

‘The words might come if they wanted to make each other happy, but it would take time and care and a lot of patience before that forgiveness felt real. For her anyway.’

She stopped. It was too big a conversation for they and her and pretend. She had to have her whole self in it or nothing of herself at all.

‘None of this is easy; there’s no clear answer.

I won’t pretend I’ve no love for you anymore, Pascal, even if that might be simpler.

I haven’t wanted that or looked for it. I’ve tried to lose it often enough, but nothing works.

Loving you was what I did for so long, it’s buried deep in my bones.

And I doubt I could ever love anyone else in the same way I loved you. ’

She paused for a moment, wondering if she should say more, knowing this wasn’t the right time to tell him that she’d tried.

‘But forgiveness?’ She drew a long breath in.

Nodded as she looked back at him. ‘That’s a different thing.

I hope it’s there too; I want it to be. I hope it can wipe away the boy who talked about “good” and “bad”, who let his heart so horribly rule his head.

Who sided with people who wanted my people wiped away from the world.

I’ll try to find it, truly I will, because the alternative is too bleak if I don’t, whatever happens or doesn’t happen with us.

But – despite all you’ve done to balance the scales – I can’t promise that I’ll always be able to hold on to it.

I can’t promise my memories of that boy, and that man, won’t reappear and make me question you all over again. ’

‘I know that.’

Pascal slipped his hand out of hers as if he was giving her the chance to get up and leave him. He didn’t drop his gaze from her face. He breathed a little steadier when she stayed.

‘You’re right – nothing is easy or clear.

I live with your version of me, and I struggle with him every day.

That’s how it should be, but it brings a darkness with it too that I don’t want you burdened with.

I hope there won’t always be days when I don’t feel fit for the world, but – like you – I can’t make promises I don’t know I can keep.

But maybe that’s the best we can do: be honest with each other, no matter how hard that might be.

’ He took a deep breath of his own and finally found the smile Noemi recognised.

‘That there’s love on both sides feels like a miracle – you have my heart like you’ve always done, and I think, I pray, I have yours.

The younger me, who only saw what he wanted to see, would have said that was enough.

The older me knows better. But he’s young enough to have hope. ’

Hope.

Noemi let the word settle into her heart and find a safe place there.

Maybe in the end that was all forgiveness was: the hope something new could arise from the ashes of the old.

The willingness to listen to the love the flames hadn’t destroyed and try to keep choosing it. The decision not to be trapped.

‘I still have this.’ Pascal reached into his pocket and pulled out a small velvet box. ‘I gave it to you when I was a boy with no real understanding of what love is. I’d like it to be yours again, if you want it.’

The box lay open on the table between them, waiting for Noemi to open it.

When she did, the locket shone up at her from the silk lining, its blue a mirror of the sky, its enamelled flowers as fresh as if they’d just been plucked from a spring meadow.

Noemi picked it up and let the stone catch the light; felt Carina and all her hopes for the two of them flickering inside its shining heart. And found the right words for Pascal.

‘She would be happy with this, with us, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t care how many cracks our hearts carried as long as we could find room in them for each other.’

Pascal’s eyes were as bright as the jewel, his smile as sweet as the flowers. Noemi reached for him then – words would no longer do.

Their kiss was a tentative one. An exchange between two people who were both sure and unsure of each other.

Who carried scars that might never fully heal and the weight of loss and guilt heavy around them.

Who knew the possibility of hurt ran as deeply as the possibility of love.

It was a tentative kiss, but it was heartfelt and wanted. It held the possibility of home.