The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (35 page)

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Authors: Reggie Oliver

BOOK: The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler

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‘For you,’ said the clockmaker, placing it in his hand.

Rider stared at the watch which was the oddest he had ever seen. It was an ordinary white enamelled dial with the hours indicated by Roman numerals in black, but there were only two numerals, eleven and twelve, with the quarters drawn between them. The rest of the face of the watch was blank. And there were only two hands, a second hand, and an hour hand which stood roughly half way between the eleven and the twelve.

‘What sort of a watch is this?’ asked Rider, his heart suddenly beginning to pump rather hard. The clockmaker smiled.

‘It is yours,’ he said. ‘You do not need another watch. This is all the time you have left.’

‘There is time left?’

‘Come with me.’

The clockmaker led the way out of the room of the ticking clocks, snatching as he did so from behind the door a long black cloak with a hood and putting it on.

The next moment they were outside in the snowy street, the clockmaker leading the way without looking back. Though he was shorter than Rider and took tiny bustling steps, he moved so briskly that it was hard to keep up with him. Once, when Rider had begun to lag behind, the clockmaker said without turning round:

‘Hurry up! Can’t you see from your watch? There’s hardly any time left.’ And indeed, when Rider did glance at the watch, he saw that the hour hand had moved on to a quarter to twelve.

By this time, the sky had cleared and a full moon lighted their way. The clockmaker led Rider on through the city until they came to a church on a hill, surrounded by a low wall. Within the wall and surrounding the church was a graveyard full of tombs and gravestones on which the snow glittered in the moonlight.

But the clockmaker did not lead Rider into the graveyard. Increasing his pace, he skirted the low wall until he came to a piece of rough ground, to one side of the church, just outside the boundaries of the wall. This was, apparently their destination, a tract of scrub land, no more than a quarter of an acre in area, uneven, bumpy, punctuated by a number of oblong mounds overgrown with grass and weeds. The clockmaker stopped in front of a hole which had been dug in the ground, beside which was heaped a fresh pile of earth. He beckoned to Rider who reluctantly joined him at the hole.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Rider.

‘This is where they bury those who cannot be interred in consecrated ground.’

‘Suicides, you mean?’

The man remained silent. Rider heard the ticking of his watch. He looked at it and saw that now only the hour of twelve midnight was showing and it wanted only two minutes to that time.

‘Is that my grave?’ he asked.

‘Look into it.’

Rider stared at the grave, which seemed to him less like a hole in the ground than a doorway into another infinity, a sea where black wrestled with deeper black. Movements and sounds stirred in it. There were entities there which had a kind of life, parting, colliding, coming together again, endlessly restless without purpose. As Rider looked into the abyss he began to sway. He heard his watch ticking. At that moment he knew that he did not want to fall into the hole. Barely capable of controlling the rest of his body he tossed his head back from the great gulf. He felt himself caught by the clockmaker’s arms and held up, barely alive, as he almost drowned in a sea of nausea. The pain would have gone had he fallen forward through the hole, but he submitted to the agony of life.

The next moment Rider was in a hospital bed being violently sick.

In the flat above Rider’s lived a man called Henry Bevis, a podgy eternal bachelor with a private income and no job. He was by way of being a collector and occasionally bought things off him. Though Rider did not care for Bevis particularly—he thought, for no very good reason, that Bevis might have paedophile tendencies—the two got on after a fashion. Bevis tolerated Rider’s tendency to lecture and they could occasionally be seen dining together, at Bevis’s expense, in a local Indian restaurant.

Bevis was morbidly curious about Rider in a way that only someone with too little to occupy his mind can be, so that when he returned at about midnight from a session at a gambling club and saw Rider’s flat door ajar, he had to go in. He justified his inquisitiveness by the fact that he heard music playing—Mozart, was it?—and that this was unusual for Rider at any time of the night, let alone at that hour. On entering Rider’s living room he found that his friend had fallen out of an armchair and was lying on the floor. Bevis, who was far from stupid, drew some rapid conclusions from the whisky and the empty pill bottles on the table and at once phoned for an ambulance.

Two days later Rider was sitting up in his hospital bed with Bevis sitting opposite him, stolidly eating his way through the grapes he had brought for his friend. The two were staring at each other in mute astonishment. Bevis was quite as baffled by his new role as saviour as Rider was to be alive and to be quite pleased to be so. Rider didn’t want to thank Bevis because that would place him under an obligation to the man, and heaven knew what that might lead to. All the same, he felt he should commend him.

‘You acted very promptly, I must say,’ said Rider.

Bevis put another grape into his soft little mouth and continued to stare at his friend.

‘It was all a terrible accident really,’ said Rider. ‘I was just . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence, not out of embarrassment, but because he had no idea what he could say to explain.

Bevis said: ‘I’ve arranged for you to go and stay somewhere when you get out of here.’

‘What? That’s impossible. I can’t possibly afford—’

‘Oh, no. You don’t have to pay. It’s with a friend.’

‘What friend?’ Rider was suspicious. He had no friends to speak of, and none that he knew who would be prepared to have him to stay.

‘Anthony Salvin,’ said Bevis.

‘Who?’

Bevis explained that at the hospital the staff had asked Bevis to get in touch with ‘next of kin’ as there had been a distinct probability that Rider would not survive. Bevis had found nothing of use apart from a business card with a telephone number on it. The card had been that of Anthony Salvin.

‘He seemed to know all about you,’ said Bevis. ‘He knew the strain you’d been under, and he’s asked you to stay with him in his little cottage over Christmas. It’s in the Peak District.’

So that seemed to be it. The following Friday, which was, of all good days in the year, Christmas Eve, Rider took a train to Derby, not knowing why, but content, for once, to be ruled by others. Salvin was waiting for him in the station concourse. Rider recognised him at once as the man who had sold him the card. There was nothing at all remarkable about him to look at, though, except a kind of stillness. Salvin took Rider’s bag and led the way to the station car park.

It was raining outside, and the streets glistened under the streetlights. Rider was reminded of an Atkinson Grimshaw painting. A group of Carol singers in what they fondly imagined to be period costume, one of them holding a gaudy approximation to a Victorian lantern on a stick, were singing ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!’ Another of their party, a bald, rubicund old gentleman rattled a tin in aid of charity. Salvin and Rider put money in the tin and hurried to the car.

It was a twenty minute drive out of Derby, and most of it was taken in a perfectly companionable silence. Salvin was obviously not one of those people who thought that speech was necessary, even under the unusual social conditions in which they found themselves. Eventually Rider decided he must say something.

‘This is very generous of you,’ he said. ‘How long do I stay with you?’

‘As long as you like, but I would suggest a couple of days. At least till after Boxing Day.’

‘And you’ll be here?’

‘And I’ll be here.’

‘And I can talk to you?’

‘Yes. Or be silent. Whichever you prefer.’

‘I don’t understand. Who are you? What are you?’

‘Well, I used to deal in antiques, rather like you. I still do the occasional trade fair. Nowadays what I mostly do is pray for suicides.’

Rider should have asked him more there and then, but the reply astonished him so much that he was silent until they got to Salvin’s cottage. Later on, asking him seemed irrelevant.

It was very dark when they arrived, so Rider could tell very little about Salvin’s cottage, or its surroundings, except that it was a compact, whitewashed building and, it would appear, very remote.

The interior was warm and unpretentious, surprisingly uncluttered for an antique dealer’s retreat. They ate supper together without talking much and drank some wine which Rider had brought as a gift. The little conversation they had was on neutral topics, such as their common profession. Salvin appeared to know quite as much about Rider’s specialism as he did himself.

There were no televisions or radios in Salvin’s cottage—somehow Rider had not expected there to be—but there were books, and many of them, crammed into shelves. After supper Salvin invited Rider to borrow one, and take it with his candle up to bed. Rider obeyed, choosing a volume from a set, almost at random.

His little room was small, simple and warm. The bed, made with crisp old fashioned sheets—no duvet—faced the drawn gingham curtains of a small window. There was a chest of drawers, a bedside table, a bentwood chair, a washbasin and no more. Rider undressed, put on a night-shirt and got into bed. He found that his candle provided a perfectly adequate light by which to read.

Rider opened his book at random. It was one he had not read since childhood but he knew it well. He turned to the last chapter—or Stave Five, as it called itself, for some unknown reason. Almost before he had set eyes on the first words, he began to weep, as he remembered that final chapter had always made him weep long ago. In the end he closed the book and dedicated himself to the shedding of tears, but what the tears were for? Nostalgia? Grief? Relief? Gratitude? He could never say. Then, at some point, he fell asleep.

The next morning when he awoke in the little bedroom he noticed that the curtains had been opened and that the room was full of light. He saw from his bed that the sky was a pale, cloudless blue, but from the luminous white glare projected onto the ceiling he suspected something else. He went to the window and saw that his guess had been correct. Across a rolling pattern of fields and copses, with barely another house in view, snow, fallen in the night, robed the landscape, unstained as yet by wheel or footprint. The outcrops of trees and hedges shone gold in the sun.

Standing at the window, Rider began to sense hope of a kind that is not thrilling to describe or feel. It was like the small hope of a diver who, having touched slime at the floor of a dark sea, knows that he must rise; and that inevitable issue is a kind of promise, but a grey kind.

He remembered that in his overnight bag was the card he had bought from Salvin. After Christmas he would send it to Carla.