Nazi's Daughter

Tim Murgatroyd

Description

The Netherlands, Spring 1943. When her glittering career as a ballerina is cut short by a dancing injury, Elise Van Thooft-Noman, rebellious daughter of a powerful Dutch Nazi, flees to an isolated island off the coast of Holland. Here she meets Pieter Goedhart, reluctant village schoolmaster and Resistance fighter. A dangerous affair is kindled between them. Meanwhile Elise's Nazi family and the terrifying brutality of war are closing in, threatening to destroy all she holds dear... New York, September 2008. Uncomfortably overweight, single and scraping thirty, Jenni Malarkey is summoned to a mysterious party to celebrate her estranged grandmother's glamorous life. Her journey through Elise's secret history will force her to confront a legacy of guilt and shame...Past and present intersect, as unlikely hearts connect to seek love and redemption, in this haunting time-shift novel set in wartime Holland and contemporary New York.

Sujets

• Nueva York
• Países Bajos
• Netherlands
• New York

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788032445
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Nazi’s Daughter




Tim Murgatroyd


Copyright © 2017 Tim Murgatroyd

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1788032 445

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BY TIM MURGATROYD

NOVELS
Taming Poison Dragons
Breaking Bamboo
The Mandate of Heaven
The Nazi’s Daughter
Dust of the Earth

POETRY
The Stars are Apples
Lullaby
Drunk


Contents
The Prodigal Son
Easter Fires
New York, September 2008
Razzia
At the Van Thooft-Noman’s
SNAFU
New York, December 2008
A New World Order Arises
New Neighbours
NewYork, Winter 2008
The Folk Dance
Skating
New York, Spring 2009
St Nicholas’ Eve
Rites of Spring
New York, July 2009
The Second Front
New York, November 2009
Surfacing
Hunger Winter
RIP’S END
New York, Winter 2009
Author’s Note
About the Author


The Prodigal Son
The Netherlands, April 1943.
He carried a full suitcase to his father’s funeral. No time to drop it at the old house beside the dreamer dyke, the dunes running in high, grass-tussock waves to the sea. He arrived breathless, trousers and shoes mud-flecked, his best blue suit crumpled by overnight travel.
Hat pulled down low against spattering rain he opened the chapel door. A hundred faces turned. At first he met their collective stare boldly. But confusion soon bent his neck. Despite his status as chief mourner he slid awkwardly into an empty pew at the rear.
A hundred heads rotated back to face the low pulpit. For a moment the latecomer reprised a half-forgotten medley from childhood: refrains of defiance, hope, resentment. Then sorrow – unappeased and raw – simplified him. He grew calm like the grey, still surface of a frozen pond, as all who grieve from the muddy depths of their soul learn sorrow must freeze, in order to become bearable.
The congregation commenced the final hymn and he stayed mute. Only when the people rose did he realise he’d forgotten to remove his hat. Oh, there’d be whispers about that. Looked just like a gangster. Couldn’t be bothered to bare his head at his own father’s funeral. No respect even as a boy. Broke his father’s heart .

After the coffin was lowered and the first sods of peaty turf laid, the mourners drifted to homes and farmyards, fields and fishing nets. Some paused for a few stiff, curious words with the latecomer. Twelve years since he left the island as a boy of eighteen. Not once had he come back.
Now they saw a tall man with slightly hunched shoulders, eyes blue as a Frisian summer sky, a detached, hawk-like expression. Some pitied the stranger who resembled so closely his father, their village schoolmaster respected by three generations. Of course you heard about the son’s great loss , they whispered. Poor souls. God forgive us all.
He lingered a little way from the grave. At last he noticed that one mourner waited patiently, an old fellow in a threadbare postman’s uniform and cap: Ter Braak, the village mayor.
‘Well then, Pieter Goedhart,’ began the old man by way of greeting.
Pieter turned but said nothing.
‘Your father was a good man,’ declared Ter Braak. ‘A good friend to us all. He left us still needing him.’
‘Not everyone leaves so much,’ said Pieter.
They remained by the open grave, hat in hand. The breeze flapped a lock of white hair over Ter Braak’s mottled, bald forehead. Pieter’s own hair was blonde and thick. Crying gulls from the small harbour absorbed a dull, low boom.
‘They’ve set up a few bits of artillery and barbed wire at the end of the island,’ explained Ter Braak. ‘A barracks of old men and boys.’ He chuckled. ‘Not many but enough to steal our potatoes.’
Pieter looked round. ‘I expected Germans. The war hardly seems to have reached the village.’
The old man’s grin revealed teeth either black or missing. ‘There are more of them at the tip of the island. Besides, not everything is as it seems.’
Pieter picked up his suitcase.
‘I shall visit later,’ Ter Braak called after him. ‘You’ll find the key in the usual place.’
Only when Pieter was half way home did it strike him as odd the postman knew Father’s secret hiding place.

Even in wartime the old, steep-gabled house had stayed spruce and proper. Its garden adjoined a former sea dyke and was dotted with apple trees displaying masses of pink and white blossom. Pieter knew the blossom to be deceptive: the orchard planted by his mother forty years earlier bore sour fruit. She had lain in the spongy soil of the churchyard for twenty of those years. Of all her gifts to this earth just Pieter and a dozen gnarled trees survived.
Suitcase in hand, he stood like a nervous travelling salesman beside the front gate. The wind picked flakes of blossom from the apple trees. How little had changed! There’d been such alteration in his soul over twelve years of travel and reinvention, yet here? Home abashed him.
He retrieved the spare key from a loose brick inside the coalbunker. It turned in the lock with admirable smoothness. Pieter could just imagine Father methodically striding from lock to lock, oilcan in hand. Everything smooth and correct to the last.
The only letter on the mat bore Pieter’s own handwriting and was unopened. He had posted it in Amsterdam after receiving news of Father’s sudden seizure. Death reached the old man before his letter. Perversely, Pieter felt cheated. A great bending of pride had been necessary to compose that letter. And now its words were empty, lacking the heart and mind they were meant for.
Room by silent room he drifted through the ground floor. Again he marvelled at the absence of change. That ornament just where he last remembered it. That print of a sailing clipper tilting against the wind. The house had frozen on the day of Mother’s death when Pieter was eleven, Father insisting they must re-arrange nothing, not a single plate or rug, as though afraid of offending her ghost.
In the small, book-lined study he ran his finger along the spines. Religious works in Dutch and lots of German classics – Goethe, Heine, Storm. All Pieter’s own books were lost. Yet now he had inherited a new library. For the first time he grasped the extent of his inheritance: this house and its contents, Father’s savings accounts, every last sour apple in the orchard.
On impulse he lifted the piano lid and hammered down a minor chord. Another. The piano was out of tune. Its sound scattered, echoed round the still house like a flock of startled black birds.
Without warning, Pieter felt an icy certainty. He froze, fingers still pressed upon the keys as the reverberation faded.
‘Mother?’ he muttered. ‘Father?’ Did their ghosts watch their only son’s return? Had the piano awoken them to a sad, disapproving vigil upon the living?
Something creaked. Instinct drew his glance to the ceiling. Somebody other than himself had listened to those chords. But that must be nonsense. The house was deserted. Before he could disprove his fears there came a knock at the door.

His visitor was Ter Braak. Pieter boiled a kettle on the gas ring – it took twice as long as normal due to cuts in the gas supply – and rooting around he discovered a box of ersatz tea tablets to dissolve. The mayor grumbled about Germans and their Dutch Nazi stooges in the nearest town. It surprised Pieter the old man trusted him so readily.
‘Mr Ter Braak,’ he said, dryly, ‘are you testing my loyalty?’
‘I take your discretion – and loyalty – for granted. Are you not Michael Goedhart‘s son!’
‘It seems all I am allowed to be.’
Both sipped the terrible tea in silence.
‘I will ask my wife to send over a can of milk,’ said the old man. ‘It masks the flavour. They still allow us that much, at least.’
‘Fish, udders, rain, wind,’ said Pieter, with a faint smile. ‘Even the Germans can’t ration those on this island.’
‘Unless they steal the cows,’ pointed out Ter Braak.
Something thawed between them.
‘Now, Pieter, I heard what happened to you in Rotterdam. Your father told us the news. Terrible, terrible.’
The empty, bleak expression returned to the younger man. ‘I wrote to tell him,’ he said, dully. ‘He wrote back of accepting God’s will and judgement.’ Anger touched the cold blue eyes. ‘Between ourselves, Mr Ter Braak, I suspect he considered it God’s punishment for my heathen ways.’
‘Terrible, terrible,’ muttered Ter Braak. ‘This foolish war!’
He cleared his throat. ‘And after Rotterdam your father lost track of you. He worried you, too, had died. Where did y