A Kiss for the Enemy (10 page)

‘Marcia's in Vienna.'

‘She's lovely. The Austrians will be mad about her.'

It was a hot summer. They made a pretence of playing with food, their eyes seldom leaving the other's face, serious, unsmiling. Anna spoke quietly, matters of no importance. She had explained that her grandmother, Mrs Briscoe, had married an Englishman after grandfather von Arzfeld's premature death. Born English and now again widowed, Mrs Briscoe lived in London. It appeared that she was particularly fond of Anna.

‘My dear grandmother feels only the cold. She does not mind this. Her house is an oven.'

‘London is no place for a heat wave, Anna.'

‘No, but it is where I must be for these days.'

Anthony suggested they visit Kew Gardens.

‘You know a lot about trees and shrubs, I can tell that. You'll love Kew, and there's space and air there.'

Later they walked slowly among the magnificent trees, forcing themselves to observe, exclaim, admire, hearts beating, aware of nothing but each other. At one comparatively deserted place of shade Anthony turned to face Anna and stood very close. She did not move away.

‘Anna –'

Anna put both her hands on his upper arms and without a word rested her head on his shoulder. Quietly she began to sob. This could not end well. It was her doing. And it could not end well.

Anna's life had already been marked by sorrow. An infant in 1914, she remembered one or two visits from her father, a remote figure apparently always wrapped in an enormous greatcoat. She remembered smoke from a cigar, and a spluttering cough between rather overpowering kisses. That, she
learned later, had been on his infrequent periods of leave from the Western Front, from fighting against his mother's relations. She had been five years old when he died in January 1919, in a field hospital still far from home, not from wounds but from influenza. Anna could recall no sense of bereavement. That period was what she came to know as the great hunger. Everybody in Germany was hungry – hungry all the time, hungry, sallow of face and evil-smelling: the hungry smell. Anna heard horrible stories of those days when she was older. The Allied blockade was maintained after the Armistice and it was said food was so scarce that children in the streets of big cities were in danger of kidnap. Anna never knew whether these whispered nightmares had substance. It was a time of humiliation, suffering and darkness.

Anna's mother, strict, loving, brought the girl up in her own image. Beautiful and gallant, Klara von Arzfeld was undaunted by loss, by famine or by penury. She started a dress-making business, specializing in the economical but elegant remodelling of clothes, using old material. Her taste was admirable, her industry tireless. She took on two, then three girl assistants. The business prospered sufficiently. She and Anna had been left poor and they remained poor. But they survived. They lived in Berlin.

From the beginning Anna had received inspiration from her mother's quiet, indomitable personality. She herself, anxious to help, was never allowed to sew. Her mother would say –

‘Time enough for that later. Just now you must read! Work, study, read! Now is the time to develop the muscles of your mind!'

They went together every Sunday to the Evangelical church and Anna would pray with intensity –

‘Make me brave, like Mother. Help me to love You, as Mother loves You.'

Arzfeld cousins were kind, and none more so than her father's first cousin, the lame, one-armed Kaspar von Arzfeld. Anna and her mother loved Arzfeld almost as much as did its owner. Kaspar, indeed, felt a glow whenever his cousin's widow appeared. A shy widower himself, he secretly asked himself sometimes the question –

‘Perhaps we … might it not be a happy out-turn –?'

But Klara was scrupulous. Kaspar would say –

‘Klara, you'll stay as long as you can, with little Anna? Certainly until Easter?'

‘No, no. The business can't wait for that. You're too kind.'

And Anna heard her murmur once to herself –

‘It wouldn't do, I'm afraid.'

To Anna, she would say –

‘We must never stay long at Arzfeld. They're dear, kind people, and we love them. And they love us. But we're independent, you see. We manage our own lives.'

Once, with no apparent subject in mind, Klara said to Anna,

‘In
some
things, Anna, not many, one must never settle for second best. In some things in life only the best is right.'

When she said, later that evening,

‘How I wish you had known your father, Anna, little love,' Anna was sure she had been thinking of Cousin Kaspar von Arzfeld.

Then, at the age of nineteen, Anna had fallen in love.

She knew it without the smallest doubt. This was, she knew with absolute certainty, not an infatuation, not a surrender to flattery, not a passing, immature passion. This was immensely important. Astonishingly – for Klara was a strict and in many ways conventional parent – she blurted it out to her mother. She finished with the words,

‘I've had a revelation, Mother. Nothing can be more important than this, than Clemens and me.'

To her amazement, her mother, who had listened silently, said quietly,

‘Yes, I think so too.'

Then Anna understood, not only that her mother's love and understanding of her were even greater than she had already known, but that her mother had really loved her father.

His name was Clemens Starckheim. Anna was at university, Clemens on the first step of a journalistic career. They found every thought, every mood coincided.

‘We're too much alike! Don't they say love needs opposites?'

‘Not always. You see we're two halves of one soul, separated long ago and always looking for the other.'

Sometimes they could sit in silence, content simply to gaze at each other.

‘How can one find simultaneously enormous excitement and perfect peace in another person?'

‘Oh, one can, one can! Clemens, does everybody experience real love at some time?'

He held her tight.

‘No. Not like this. Only a small, select brother and sisterhood, a privileged elect. The rest have something different. Nice, but different.'

‘Clemens, how
can
you know?'

‘Sh-sh-sh.'

Clemens was pale, dark-haired, fervent. She had been just twenty when she ran up the stairs to the Berlin flat one evening in 1933 having returned from the university, planned to go to supper with Clemens. Klara was waiting. Klara's eyes and expression needed the addition of no words. Anna said abruptly,

‘When? How?'

‘Anna –' Her mother, most unusually, was trembling.

‘Yes. Of course. It's Clemens, isn't it?'

Tears now rolled down Klara's cheeks. She came to Anna, her arms outstretched. Anna pushed her away.

‘He's dead!'

A nod.

‘How?'

There had been quite a street battle that afternoon and Clemens, zealously covering for his paper, had been knocked down. Three young Nazis, it appeared later, had seen protruding from his coat pocket a copy of an illicit Communist news-sheet and had set about him. One kick, in particular, had done more damage than its deliverer intended and as they made off, alarmed, Clemens had writhed, suffered a haemorrhage and died before reaching hospital. There was irony, in that Clemens was as fanatically hostile to the Communists as to the Nazis. An old-fashioned liberal by conviction he had been slipped the news-sheet surreptitiously by a man in the crowd and intended to use it to show how the Communists were provoking the Nazis into excesses.

Anna immediately left university and found a job. She knew
she must drive herself forward with feverish energy or she would sink in a sea of misery. Klara had a business connection with a small textile firm. One day she said quietly,

‘Dollmann's employ a lot of young girls. They want someone sensible, someone educated to handle them. They're having problems –'

‘So?'

‘Anna – could you do it?'

It was absurd. Few of Dollmann's girls turned out to be younger than her and she had no experience of giving counsel, exercising authority.

‘I'll try it, Mama.'

She threw herself into it. After three months Klara's connection in Dollmann's said,

‘That girl of yours, Anna – she ought to be Director of a firm herself one day! She's incredible! The girls respect her as if she were twice their age – yet they love her too! It's most unusual –'

And there was an admiring shake of the head. That girl is strong, people said to each other, that Arzfeld girl is really beautiful, with those eyes, that skin, that figure. But she's strong.

Anna applied herself, heart as well as mind, to her work. The von Arzfelds raised their eyebrows. The pain of Clemens began, a little, to pass, or at least to dull.

She had been busy at this for just eighteen months when she first met Kurt Langenbach.

‘Anna!'

After a minute, with his arms now around her, Anthony said,

‘There's never been much doubt, has there?'

‘No. None. None at all.'

Anna knew, for the first time since the death of Clemens, that she had fallen deeply and genuinely in love. It was incredible, it was absurd, it was wicked, it was true. She had known it, like an electric shock, since driving from Langenbach to Arzfeld, with Anthony in tongue-tied silence. She had felt then, as she felt now, with half-terrified certainty, the enormous force of
Anthony's feeling. And she knew, insanely, that she responded to it. Completely.

Anthony quoted softly –

‘If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired and got,

T'was but a dream of thee.'

‘Who wrote that?'

‘John Donne.'

Anna sighed, her cheek resting against his. Her voice, most unusually, shook, and she tried, absurdly, to lighten the emotion.

‘Anthony, darling, is one of us about to say that this is stronger than us, or some such nonsense? Is this all like a bad film?'

‘No. A good film. With a star in the star part.' The tips of his fingers gently caressed the back of her neck.

One thing led to another with great rapidity. Robert Anderson was on holiday until the end of September and Anthony had the Mount Street rooms to himself: to themselves.

They were gentle, murmurous weeks. Weeks in Paradise. They learned about each other, absorbed the character, the past, the background of each other, at the same time as their bodies increasingly delighted in each other.

‘You're younger than me, darling.'

‘What the hell does that matter?'

‘I thought this could happen. Perhaps I was wicked to write that note. People could say I pursued you. And I did.'

‘You had to come to me. You must make – you must live – life with me –' he fumbled for words.

Anna smiled, ‘Some of life, perhaps.'

Now that she had recognized the truth in herself, Anna was extraordinarily in command of the situation. Anthony sometimes felt, with a jealous twinge of inexperience, that his mistress was his superior in will-power, in love and, probably in intellect. Anna seemed to have to worked out so many things, to have calculated so many human situations so shrewdly. To talk to her, whether in bed or out of it, was joy: but was she feminine, yielding, vulnerable? At times Anthony felt inadequate. But when, if away from her,
he recalled their love making, all else was blotted out. And with every day that passed Anthony also felt himself stronger, more assured.

Anna had found within weeks of marriage that she could never love the man she had wed so unwisely.

‘Nobody made me do it,' she said. ‘It was my own fault. He was handsome, clever, confident, rich. We were poor, you know. I wanted security, I was young, I was impressed. I was a wicked fool.'

Anthony hated to probe, or even contemplate Anna's marriage. He knew that it was Langenbach's whole character that repelled her.

‘He has – Kurt has – nothing of his father,' she said. ‘His father is a gentle, scholarly man. Kurt is ruthless, insensitive. I'm an object to him. If we both lived to be a thousand, he would never understand how I feel. That's the truth. He has no conception of what to love a woman – really love a woman – should be. Of course, I've accused myself, told myself it's my fault. But I think he'd be the same with anybody. He's – well, he's brutal. Indifferent.'

Anthony still found it incomprehensible that a woman of Anna's character could have married, apparently, against the instincts of her heart, but he preferred to steer conversation away from the subject. He did not think it wise yet to force the pace on that matter. Instead he implored her to return to England soon, ‘To see her grandmother again.' She half promised –

‘My grandmother is old now, and I love her, Kurt understands that. Now I would not like more than six months to go by–'

‘Six months!' Anthony could hardly endure the prospect of six hours without his beloved. He met Mrs Briscoe. He had been surprised, at first, that Anna was prepared for the risk of such open acknowledgement of his existence.

‘It's all right. I have told my grandmother that a friend of the von Arzfelds, who has stayed there, wishes to call on her. I would like you to meet her. She loved her first husband very much, and her only son, my father. She always likes to hear of Arzfeld.'

And Mrs Briscoe was, indeed, charming. She lived with
an agreeable and not noticeably downtrodden companion, introduced as Miss Platt. Her house in Wilton Place was pleasant. Her love for Anna was very plain. Anthony behaved to Anna, in her presence, with great formality. Human antennae, however, are sensitive where affection is involved, and Anthony thought Mrs Briscoe regarded him with a speculative if not unfriendly eye.

Then one September day Anna was gone, desirable and desirous, collected, wholly his when with him but ready, nonetheless, to return to a different world in which he could play no part.