Joyce was shaking her head, but Dorotha was determined to finish her story, the words bleeding out of her.
‘Please listen and try to understand. We saw a British newspaper, in the displaced persons’ camp, about the disbanding of your mobile library. There was a photo of her standing next to you, looking so happy and content, and I decided that it’d be a cruelty to saddle her with me.
‘Better to have her believe I was dead. And to be honest, Joyce, the old me did die.’
Joyce stared hard at her, and Dorotha could see she was working hard to contain her frustration.
‘I’m so sorry for your suffering, Dorotha, truly I am, but I think you underestimate Adela’s resilience. She’s been through a lot herself. She could’ve coped.’
‘I’m not the same woman you once knew, Joyce,’ she repeated, more quietly now.
‘So, what happened next?’ Harry asked, clearly desperate to join up the dots. ‘How did you end up here in the Lake District, of all places?’
‘Whilst in the displaced persons’ camp, Oscar was offered a place on a British rehabilitation scheme. He was assigned to help care for child orphans who’d survived the ghettos, camps and death marches, and were brought to Lake Windermere to help them recover. He wanted to do it to honour his sister’s work. She ran the orphanage in the ghetto, you see.’
‘Miss Weiss, who you met whilst readingThe Secret Gardento the children?’ Joyce gasped.
Dorotha nodded and heard a gunshot ricochet through her mind. She flinched as she remembered Miss Weiss pleading with the Nazis to spare the orphans’ lives.
‘Maybe we should take a break?’ Oscar suggested.
‘No!’ Dorotha said more forcibly than she intended. ‘Sorry, but no. I’ve waited a long time to tell Joyce this story. I must finish.
‘The children were brought to Lake Windemere to help repair the damage and trauma inflicted on them,’ she went on. ‘Gabriele was one of them.
‘Oscar and I married, and I was offered a place on the scheme too, thanks to my work as a librarian, so we were lucky in that respect.’
Gabriele walked back into the room at that moment, carrying a tray of tea and Eccles cakes.
‘Do tuck in, please,’ she said.
‘Gabriele loved it here in the beauty and peace of the Lakes,’ Dorotha said, trying to see her through Joyce and Harry’s eyes. The tall, willowy red-head, who looked like a typical English rose. You’d never guess she’d been raised in the filth of a Nazi ghetto.
Gabriele’s face lit up as she took over from Dorotha and talked about their arrival in the Lakes. ‘I had a bed, a chest of drawers, soft cushions and food on my plate. Things I hadn’t known existed,’ she said, pouring them all tea into rose-patterned cups. ‘We children swam in the lake, hiked in the hills and learnt to speak English. It was the first freedom many of us had ever known, it was heaven after hell, but for Mama...’ She gently placed a cup and saucer into Dorotha’s hand. ‘It wasn’t so easy to adapt.’
Dorotha saw Joyce’s face register Gabriele’s use of the word ‘Mama’. Nothing ever did get past her. Dorotha owed her the whole truth.
‘I... I had a breakdown after we arrived,’ Dorotha confessed. The cup started to tremble in her hand, sloshing tea, and without a word, Gabriele took the cup and gently set it down on the side table.
Dorotha watched as the tea stain spread over her blanket and waited for the emotions to kick in. Yes, there they were. Helplessness and shame, her loyal companions.
‘I’d worked so hard the past six years, to keep alive, to keep Gabriele alive, to recover from my surgery and the loss of my family,’ she said, dabbing at the stain. ‘As soon as I got to a place of safety, my body shut down.’
‘What does a breakdown actually look like?’ Joyce asked. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, Dorotha.’
‘When we arrived, the place we were all billeted at was a former aeroplane factory, and it was harder than I thought it would be to get around in my chair.’ She remembered herfrustration at trying to get about the sprawling wartime housing complex, the dawning horror that her lack of mobility and independence wasfor ever. It had proved the final nail in the coffin.
‘I’d such plans to set up a library there, and instead, everything started to crumble.
‘Every night I had terrible dreams, and then I’d wake and the nightmares would begin. Visions. Hallucinations. An SS officer sitting at the end of my bed. As real as the hand in front of me.
‘Every knock at the door was a gunshot. Every face at the window, the Gestapo. The floor under my chair would break apart and I’d fall into an open grave. I can see it now, a great jagged chasm.’
Her throat was beginning to tighten. ‘And I could never run. Never get away.’
She knew she was shaking again, tremors running down her body.
‘I lost my mind, Joyce. The pills helped. A little. They dulled the roar. In the end, Oscar moved us out here, to this little cottage, for the peace and quiet.’
