The Museum of Broken Promises Read online

  Also by Elizabeth Buchan

  The New Mrs Clifton

  I Can’t Begin to Tell You

  Daughters

  Separate Beds

  The Second Wife

  That Certain Age

  The Good Wife

  Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

  Secrets of the Heart

  Perfect Love

  Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit

  Against Her Nature

  Consider the Lily

  Light of the Moon

  Daughters of the Storm

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 2019

  The moral right of Elizabeth Buchan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 528 0

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 530 3

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 529 7

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For Annie and Duncan

  ‘I gradually came to realize that

  there were two kinds of freedom,

  internal and external’

  Ivan Klíma, My Crazy Century

  Austria, 1986

  A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD GIRL WITH A BANDAGED HAND waits on an Austrian station platform with a suitcase at her feet inside which is stuffed a rucksack but nothing else because it is only there for pretence.

  The platform is grey and so badly maintained that plants scramble through the cracked asphalt. It is the same story on the track where the weeds sprout lustily between the sleepers.

  Her eyes slot right and left, searching for a watcher. One of the grubby but sometimes desperate people who keep afloat by reporting on others. She is becoming an expert on those.

  She strains to see into the distance. Small and isolated, the station is surrounded by woods. Ash and pine, and beautiful silver birches. Through a break in the trees, she sees a cluster of red roofs from the centre of which rises an onion-domed baroque church. So typical of Middle Europe, she thinks, the breath catching in her chest. Of free Europe.

  A couple walks onto the platform. The woman is carrying an overnight bag and he a larger suitcase which he sets down. The woman is thin and dressed in a camel-coloured coat. He is stockier and wears an Alpine hat with a feather in the hatband. They are prosperous and smug, and she hates them on sight. They can park their bottoms on the train seats and sit in perfect tranquillity all the way to Vienna.

  The girl swings around in the direction from where the train will arrive. To the north and east is the border between Communist Czechoslovakia and the Austria where she now waits. Even though the rail route was established in the Hapsburgs’ heyday and is well mapped, it is not going to be, and never would have been, a simple journey.

  If the schedules run true to form (not something on which one counts in Czechoslovakia) the tank-like, grimy Soviet Bloc engine with its red star on the smokebox should be pulling into Gmünd, which is the exchange station for the engines and on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria. Having made the same journey from Prague to Vienna a week earlier, she knows there is a special platform fenced off by a wall and barbed wire where the passport and custom control officials wait.

  She is not Czech. Her ability to travel was not in question. Yet, on that train journey she realized she had been infected by the pathogen of repression. Sweaty palms. A constant urge to urinate. Checking, checking on her fellow passengers. Paranoia is promiscuous. It doesn’t mind which philosophy it feeds on.

  At Gmünd, the Czechoslovakian frontier bullies worked their way through the carriages as they will be doing at this moment. She and the other passengers sat in dead silence. On the platform, dogs and police checked the length of the train’s chassis for ‘deadheads’ clinging to the underside.

  When the all-clear signal sounded, the Czech engine decoupled. There was a bump as a shiny western one replaced it.

  She remembers clutching her UK passport in her injured hand and trying not to think of the ‘deadheads’. Instead she made herself concentrate on him – of when they first met and how it became what it is.

  Then, as she is doing now, she thinks about love and what an extraordinary, incendiary thing it is and of how it consumes her. Of how her life has been transformed.

  If she closes her eyes, she can summon him. His touch, his smell, his body.

  The single bench on the platform by the waiting room is free and she sits down. Its wood is gnarled and splintering and guaranteed to ladder tights.

  She lights up a cigarette.

  Milos will have gone over and over the plan with Tomas. It’s the details that count. She remembers Milos telling her about the escape plans. Learn them. The right seat, the right station, the right clothes… You have to convince them that your journey is normal and you have been given permission to make it.

  A crate of champagne will have been sent to the watchtower.

  It seldom fails, said Milos. Get them drunk.

  Step by step. The architecture of an escape is painfully hazardous to construct because it involves trust.

  Her heart beats faster. Don’t think about failure.

  It’s madness to try and do a runner from the cross-over point at Gmünd. Suicidal. Everyone knows that. That’s why this unremarkable station on the other side of the border is the one to go for and why she is here.

  On arrive, he promised in his execrable French. ‘I will.’

  The autumn wind whips the tops of the trees. Her cigarette flares up and then dies. She grinds the butt with her boot and shivers.

  The watchers. Who are they? Answer: everyone, including your grandmother. Once it is understood that an elderly woman with a string bag bulging with vegetables is as dangerous as the bully boy in the leather jacket, it becomes obvious that anyone can manipulate anyone. She also knows that, in more cases than she supposed, the watchers are as frightened as the subjects on whom they spy.

  Waiting.

  Waiting is an art form. Those who live in eastern Europe know its intimacies. The dry lips. The rapid heartbeat.

  She shoves her cold hands into her pockets. In the left one she clutches the railway ticket she used to make her own getaway. Prague, Brno, Gmünd… She refuses to throw it away.

  The elderly Volkswagen she has bought from a garage is parked up outside the station. God knows what condition the car is in but if it gets them to England it doesn’t matter a toss. On the back seat is a loaf of bread, sausages, apples and beer.

  ‘You’ll have to marry me if you want to stay in England.’

  ‘Do I now?’

  Her stomach clenches with pain and she begins to shake.

  She knows what she has done.

  She knows.

  She checks her watch. In th
e world she has just fled, there are many jokes about timetables being made of jelly. She’s not laughing now.

  Again, she checks her watch.

  If all is well, the newly attached engine is easing its way to the border where the frontier police are poised to open the concrete barriers, leaving it free to gather speed towards Vienna.

  If all is well.

  She knew that the instructions would be precise. He must chop his hair short and wear a business suit – not his style at all. He must always keep his forged passport to hand.

  ‘I hope your name won’t be Wilhem,’ she told him as they said goodbye. ‘I refuse to love a Wilhelm. It should be Viktor for Victory.’

  On the station bench, she prays that he is occupying the aisle seat – aisle seats are better positioned to make a break for it. In his briefcase should be a made-up schedule of business commitments for his four-day visit to Vienna and a forged docket for the hotel.

  She squints into the distance. Smoke is billowing over the trees and, in the far distance, a train moves against a green backdrop. Gradually, it enlarges and bears down towards the station, wheels screeching on the rails as it reins in its momentum. A stink of anthracite and low-grade coal floats over the platforms.

  What is love? What is her love? Profound, infinite, burning, tender… all those words.

  Guilty?

  Her hands clench.

  The train has precipitous steps up to the carriages and the passengers are descending. A toddler is coaxed down. An elderly man clings to the rail and summons his courage.

  The smug, prosperous couple further along the platform wait to board.

  The wind shifts and the engine’s steam throws a dense, white veil over the scene. A man in a pinstriped suit and black brogues steps down from the third carriage. His hat obscures his face but he has short hair and a red handkerchief tucked into his lapel pocket.

  Gritty smoke blows into her eyes which are watering copiously.

  Her heart beats a tattoo of relief.

  Then…

  The figure halts in front of her. ‘Laure.’

  The smoke clears. Oh my God.

  Her insides are dissolving, her knees weakening. In a second or two, she is going to collapse onto the grey platform.

  Petr holds out his hand.

  Hers remain at her side. ‘Where is Tomas? Tell me where he is.’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  He looks at her with a mix of pity and contempt. In a moment of clarity, she understands that Petr’s feelings for her do not extend to ensuring her happiness. He has his life. He has his family. He has his politics.

  She steps back, one foot feeling unsteadily behind the other. ‘My God … you’ve betrayed him.’

  He grabs her by her injured arm and she bites back a scream. ‘I betrayed him?’ he says.

  CHAPTER 1

  Paris, today

  HER LIFE WAS NOT QUITE IN ORDER. WOULD POSSIBLY never be – but it wasn’t bad. Accommodations had been made. She had the museum.

  At 9 a.m., Laure folded back the shutters in Room 2 and looked out at a Paris revealed by the morning light. A bunch of pigeons strutted over the roof next-door uttering their pigeon racket.

  In summer, the sun lightened the colours of the roof tiles. In autumn, they were slicked with rain and, in winter, frost sometimes ran a rim around their edges so that they resembled a Fabergé fantasy.

  Little else changed over a year, which was precisely what Laure craved. She wanted to look out at the same vista, open the same shutters and turn to inspect the glass cabinets in which were enshrined the disquiet of those who sought resolution.

  Those objects could be disturbing. Or poignant. Or funny. Almost always marked in their effect. It was not uncommon for a visitor to say they had experienced a sense of déjà vu when studying the display cabinets. Some confessed they had a feeling that there was someone else in the room other than the visitors. Some said that the objects appeared to exude a soul, with all its imprecision and mystery. Stopping to polish a small smudge on the glass of the cabinet nearest to the door, she walked into the next room. The day had begun.

  Just before the lunch hour, a muffled cry sounded in the building.

  Upstairs in the office, Laure, and her assistant, Nic Arnold, looked up from their desks. One of those. A touchstone moment when a dam broke in a visitor, releasing… well… many things.

  She gestured to the door. ‘You or me?’ The cry was repeated and Laure made a decision. ‘Both, I think.’

  It was early autumn and the visitor numbers were dropping as they always did after the summer. Technically, it was a normal day. Yet, normal days could be deceptive. From them could erupt disquiet, even a violence of sorts. Certainly, violent emotions. The contents of Laure’s unassuming, unshowy museum possessed a power to trigger them, particularly in those close to breaking point.

  She picked up the first-aid pack. Nic picked up the clipboard. Together, they ran downstairs. If procedure was being observed, Chantal at the kiosk would be hastening upstairs ready to herd visitors away from the room in which the incident was taking place.

  In Room 3, a man and a woman were fighting. Or rather, he was fending off an attack as she beat him on the face with the museum catalogue. Laure and Nic exchanged a glance. Nic put down his clipboard, stepped forwards and, as politely as possible in the circumstances, pulled the woman off the man.

  Panting, the man stood back – disappointment and rage written all over his face. He touched his cheek where the edge of the catalogue had left a red mark. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Odile?’

  ‘I wish I could kill you.’ She was matter-of-fact which made what she said the more chilling. One hand clung to the belt threaded through her jeans which, Laure noted, had a large metal buckle. ‘Perhaps I will one of these days.’

  They were French. Not so surprising as this was Paris – but you could never predict in this museum (any museum?) what a visitor’s nationality might be.

  The woman’s knees buckled, forcing Nic to tighten his grip. Laure whipped the chair, stationed by the wall for precisely these emergencies, under the woman and together they eased her down.

  The first-aid pack had been designed to snap open easily and Laure produced a cup and a bottle of water. ‘Would this help?’ She was calm and measured. ‘I’m forbidden to hand out medication but I can contact a doctor or the emergency services if you think you require them.’

  Nic picked up the clipboard and wrote the time and date down in the boxes on the form headed ‘Incidents’.

  She held the plastic cup to the woman’s lips who took a mouthful and pushed away Laure’s arm. ‘Thank you.’

  Laure eased herself upright and addressed the man. ‘Are you the person who we would deal with in an emergency?’

  Tall. Wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket. Probably in his forties… ‘If you’re asking if I’m her husband, I am,’ he answered. ‘Yves Brun.’

  Sour, too.

  Nic noted it down. ‘Is your wife unwell or was it something in the museum which has upset her?’

  A shade crossed the man’s features. ‘I suspect it was something here.’

  Even to an uninformed observer, and Laure and Nic were habituated to seven degrees of deception practised by the public, it was obvious Yves was skirting the truth.

  Odile shivered. ‘He knows what’s wrong.’

  Nic wrote that down too. Current regulations insisted on a precise record and he asked Yves for their telephone numbers.

  Yves bent over his wife. ‘Odile, you can’t do this in public. It’s becoming a problem.’

  She gazed up at him and, without warning, spat at his feet. ‘That sort of problem?’

  ‘Putain.’ He stepped back.

  Again, Nic and Laure exchanged glances. The situation was likely to be more complicated than met the eye.

  ‘The shoes…’ Odile wiped her mouth.
‘They belong to my daughter.’

  Nic wrote: ‘Room 3. Marital incident.’

  Laure knew to what Odile was referring. At the front of the display cabinet was a rectangular box into which was meticulously folded a baby’s layette. It included a cashmere shawl, two tiny vests, a pair of socks and distinctive green-and-white booties. The label read in French, English and Italian: ‘My baby never made it into this world because of negligence’.

  Laure placed herself so that she blocked the cabinet and its objects from Odile’s sight. ‘Do you wish me to summon help?’

  The husband winced. ‘No.’

  ‘We all need help. The whole world needs help,’ said Odile. ‘And he’s taken my daughter’s things and put them here without my permission.’

  ‘It’s the medication,’ said Yves. The anger had been superseded by a sadness, which Laure – who understood sadness – knew was unfeigned. ‘She doesn’t know any more.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Odile. ‘Who wants to know about being alive? Do you?’ She swivelled around to look up at Laure. ‘You don’t look brimming with excitement.’

  ‘Odile… may I call you Odile?’ asked Laure. ‘Those baby clothes were sent in by someone who lives in Italy. I have the records.’ She waited for the information to sink in and added gently, ‘The objects in here can affect one and it’s possible to become muddled.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me.’ Ignoring her husband, she opened her bag and drew out a blister pack of pills and squeezed a couple out into her hand. Yves exclaimed and turned away. ‘Shut up,’ she told him.

  ‘When you left hospital you promised.’ Yves stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  ‘Oh yes, I promised.’ She gagged over the pills but got them down. ‘My baby… our baby… did make it into the world but only for a few hours. I had bought her the clothes,’ she pointed to the cabinet. ‘Exactly those. I never saw her in them.’

  Deal with. Record. Facilitate. She and Nic knew the procedures well.

  In the adjacent Room 4, Chantal had kettled off the visitors, who no doubt were riveted by her purple hair and many piercings, and asked them to remain there for five minutes. Shortly afterwards, Laure and Nic helped a shaky Odile down the stairs. Yves followed and reluctantly took his wife’s other arm and he and Laure ushered her outside.