The Dower House (23 page)

‘And I just wanted to get out of Germany and come to the
BBC
as fast as possible.'

They were now strolling through the back yard, in front of Felix's cottage. The old car chassis, liberated from the pheasant run, had been pushed onto the grass beneath the weeping ash and people were sitting on it, pushing it gently back and forth as they drank beer and chattered. Everything was silvered by the rising moon.

‘It is extraordinary,' Angela murmured. ‘You and I, we share an experience that we could never begin to describe to any of these English – even the ones who fought the war from Normandy to Berlin. It was like a tourist war for them.'

‘All English wars for the last nine hundred years have been “tourist wars”. Always they have fought on other people's lands. That's why they will never understand Europe. They will never
be
European. I have discussed this with Felix.'

‘Me, too. And I agree. But I feel safe here, too – which I never felt in Germany, not once in all my life. London is my
Heimat
! Not
Vaterland
but
Heimat
. You have the same difference in Sweden?'

‘In Sweden we say
hembygden
. Not our motherland but our native –' she pointed at the ground beneath their feet – ‘earth? Soil? It's true. I feel more safer here, also, than anywhere and any time before. Poor old Europe is a million miles away.'

They meandered up the side drive to the front gate and then turned back toward the house along the main drive. ‘Those transcripts you left with me,' Marianne said. ‘I think they're safe. In fact, I'm rather sure they're safe. The embassy didn't want them hanging around – obviously – so they entrusted them to the embassy's German chauffeur, Hermann Treite, a communist who works in the docks. He lives in Reiherstieg now. I can give you his phone number.'

‘Is he still in the party?'

Marianne shrugged. ‘Like me – still a believer, but disillusioned with the Russians. It's a difficult time for us – head going one way, heart the other.' After a pause she added, ‘And you?'

‘The same, I suppose.' She shook her head impatiently. ‘Enough of all that! Tell me about Faith.'

Coming up to midnight Marianne lit a bonfire she had assembled in the basin of the dried-up fountain. In Sweden, the midsummer bonfires reached fingers up among the stars; this was the feeblest imitation – but still bright enough for one wag to parody the wartime cry of ‘Put that light out!' Marianne and others of the community linked hands and danced around it – sedately because of her condition. After a couple of circuits she dropped out and sang the old Swedish Midsummer songs for them to dance by. Soon, however, they switched to ‘The Lambeth Walk', ‘Knees Up Mother Brown', and ‘The Hokey Cokey'. And as the flames died they formed a conger line and retreated toward the house to the strains of ‘I kissed her on the lips, 'ow ashamed I was . . .'

‘Have you ever heard the songs they sang in the war?' Marianne asked as Angela left the line and the others dispersed.

‘All about marching against Germany?' Angela guessed, fanning the opening of her blouse.

‘No! Exactly the opposite. “The Quartermaster's Stores” and “You'd be Far Better Off in a Hole”. They're all about mocking the army, the officers . . . the government. And the
BBC
used to broadcast them, too!'

‘Germany isn't even a hundred years old yet,' Angela mused. ‘Maybe you need to be an old country to be relaxed and mock yourself like that.'

Come one o'clock, there were people lying on the lawn like silvered logs, staring up at the sky, remembering how many more stars they had been able to see during the blackout.

‘If you could shrink the entire solar system, right out to Pluto, down to the size of your wedding ring,' Eric said to Betty Ferguson, ‘the next nearest star to us would be somewhere in Ware – about four miles away. And the centre of our galaxy would be up there on the moon.'

She considered this a moment in silence and then said, ‘Funny – I didn't want to move here when Todd come home that night and told me he thought we should up sticks. But tonight I see what it's all about. True, we do get all Sally Palmer's cooking smells up through our bathroom – especially the fried onions – and I know if Isabella comes down to your studio and you two start on at each other, we get the benefit of your opinions, too . . . but still and all, this
is
better than everyone living in their own little boxes.'

‘It's a form of love, you know – the way Isabella goes on at me.'

Betty laughed quietly. ‘It's gotta be, hasn't it – otherwise you'd never still be together. Also she admires your painting.'

‘How d'you know that?'

‘'Cos she never says a dickey bird about them – which she surely would if she
didn't
like them.'

‘Hmmm. The truth is she knows I'm not a
real
artist – like Felix Breit.'

She turned over and propped herself up on her elbows, to see if he were serious. ‘You reckon he's an artist? I think your paintings are . . . well, they're
real
. Anyone could carve a bleedin' egg out of a block of marble if they was careful enough about it. What's the art in that?'

‘You've put your finger on it there, Betty. We must all try our best to pity today's artists. They're in a terrible fix. Everything that can possibly be done with line, colour, shape, and what have you – either on a flat surface or in three dimensions
has already been done
. The sort of painting I do was done more than a century ago by a man called Samuel Palmer. He'd have absolutely revelled in this moonlight, by the way. And the sort of sculpture Felix is doing was done before the war by sculptors like Arp and Brancusi. It's just not possible now to imagine anything new. From now on, all art is like copying – call it pastiche for a few quid more.'

‘You could stand with your back to the canvas and just chuck the paint over your shoulder,' she suggested with a giggle.

‘
Sshhh!
Someone'll hear you – and then they'll go and do it. And they'll give it some fancy name like random-structured painting and Corvo and his crowd will wet their knickers in ecstasy and American millionaires will fall over each other to buy it up. I'll make you a prediction, Betty – and you can hold me to this – are you listening?'

‘Yeah. I'm also wondering what your wife is saying to Felix Breit over there.'

‘Probably about fashion in Paris before the war. She's doing a feature on Schiaparelli for
Marie Claire
. Anyway – my prediction is this: Sometime in the next ten years someone calling himself a painter is going to exhibit a gallery full of blank canvases and call it art.' A refinement occurred to him. ‘And he'll refuse to sign them because it would spoil the purity of the canvas. And – this is the point now –
the exhibition will be a sell-out
.'

Betty laughed – a melodious, silvery laugh that carried across the lawn.

Isabella broke off her conversation with Felix. ‘What nonsense is he talking now?' she called out.

‘Just the usual, my pet,' Eric assured her before continuing in a lower key to Betty, ‘The interesting question is – will it happen in Paris or London or New York? Because that will determine which city will become the new art-capital of the world.'

‘So you knew Schiaparelli
before
she moved to the place Vendôme?' Isabella asked excitedly.

‘Not really,' Felix assured her. ‘But I used to pass her place in the rue de la Paix. I met Dali on the street outside once.'

‘When he was designing that outrageous costume, all covered with lobsters, for the Duchess of Windsor – actually before she became the duchess? That must have been a
wonderful
time to be in Paris.'

Felix drew breath to reply but, in the end, said nothing.

‘No?' she prompted.

‘Superficially, yes. They used to tell me it was even gayer in the twenties, before the Depression, before all the rich Americans became poor and had to leave. But it was still pretty dazzling when I arrived in the thirties.'

‘Only superficially?'

Felix wondered if it was worth the effort – trying to explain to yet another uncomprehending English person what had happened between the wars, a million miles away over the Channel. ‘There were . . . undercurrents,' he said. ‘The Great War didn't end in peace – just exhaustion. And you could see it clearly in Paris at that time.'

‘Paris?' Nicole turned aside from the gravel path at the word and glided across the lawn to join them. ‘What about Paris?'

‘You must be exhausted,' Felix told her. ‘Shouldn't you be in bed?'

She laid her hand on her stomach. ‘This beast wakes when I sleep and sleeps when I wake. This is good. I relax now. You spoke about Paris?'

‘I was talking about her in the thirties, when I moved there from Berlin after a quarrel with my father. I missed the big riots of nineteen thirty-four but you could feel the aftermath. The right wing and the royalists just smouldering with hatred and waiting their chance for revenge – which they got soon enough.' He turned to Isabella. ‘Didn't the English ever wonder why France fell so swiftly in nineteen-forty?'

‘I was a bit young . . .' she began. ‘But wasn't there something about the Germans simply walking around the top of the Maginot Line?'

‘But why did it collapse so quickly
after
that? I'll tell you – because the right wing and the royalists
wanted
the Nazis to win. They thought they could all be fascists together, standing shoulder to shoulder, cleaning out the liberal-socialist-communist-decadent-homosexual-Jewish filth. And by the time they learned what the Germans meant by
Übermensch
, it was too late. Then they had to collaborate or be cleaned out themselves.' He looked at Nicole. ‘Right?'

‘Completely,' she agreed and drew breath to add some analysis of her own.

But Isabella wanted to bring him back to more important topics. ‘So! When you met Dali that time,' she said, ‘did he take you inside Schiaparelli's salon? Did you
ever
go inside?'

Willard, who had been looking for Nicole, wandered across the lawn to join them.

‘How's Marianne?' Felix called out as he drew near.

‘She's gone to bed. It's been quite a day.'

‘Well, you both did a wonderful job,' Isabella said.

‘And Nicole and Tony,' Felix added.

‘I was coming to that,' Willard said. ‘Nicole – I think you and Marianne deserve to sleep late tomorrow. Tony says you got some off-points sausages – or what the English fondly
believe
are sausages – I got four or five pounds of bacon rashers and a few dozen eggs from some old pals who owed me one. So he and I will take care of breakfast for the masses. OK?' When she started to protest he added, ‘Have it out with your husband, honey – I'm only passing on the orders here.'

He sat down next to her and – in the brilliance of that full moon – turned into one of Henry Moore's reclining figures. ‘What's the scuttlebutt?' he asked.

‘Paris in the Thirties.'

‘And,' Nicole added, ‘the traitory? Treechery?
Trahison
of the royalists and the right, who capitulated France to the
Boches
.'

Willard understood she was trying to provoke him. ‘Heap big moon!' he said, now rearranging himself in the pose of a Plains Indian.

‘Fortunately,' Nicole continued, ‘the right is being obliterated all across Europe. Soon it will be socialism from Liverpool to Vladivostock. And then – let America look east or west, she will see socialists on either side.' She turned to Felix, picking up on his earlier comment. ‘And now the Great War really
is
finished. You agree?'

Felix shrugged.

‘You do!' she insisted.

He spoke as if musing aloud, not specifically answering her. ‘I had so many socialist friends who went to fight in Spain and some were very critical of Stalin – we all remarked on it at the time – it was odd how the socialists who criticized him were the ones who got “killed in action” in Spain. Stalin's admirers somehow survived. And then again I remember the Paris Writers' Conference of 1935, when Maxim Gorky was supposed to be the star of the Soviet delegation, but he didn't appear. And from that moment on, by the way, not a single Soviet newspaper – not a single
communist
newspaper
anywhere
– mentioned his name again until Stalin had him murdered in 'thirty-six. In his place they sent some minor novelist called Pasternak, who gave a speech of such embarrassing banality that everyone could
see
he was scared of saying anything –
anything
– that might upset dear old Uncle Joe. “Poetry will always exist down there in the grass,” he said. It was all empty platitudes like that.' He smiled at Nicole and, as if it were a concession to her, added, ‘Of course, none of that mattered down on the factory floor and out in the fields of the collective farm.'

‘Yes!' Nicole agreed. ‘That's where the future is being made now.'

‘Heap big bull . . . er . . . bullshine,' Willard said. ‘But it's too fine a night to argue. Tell us, Nicole – what do you call that group of stars in French . . . The Big Dipper . . . and those . . . The Seven Sisters?'

He went on pointing them out until that other fierce pride of her life – her native tongue – got the better of her politics.

‘Willard calls it the Eagle's Nest,' Marianne told Angela. ‘He honestly wasn't aware that's what Hitler called his place in the mountains. The Americans and the British didn't fight
our
war.'

They were standing on the balcony that topped the semicircular bow on the south front, overlooking the lawn; the moon was now halfway down the sky to their right, silvering their faces and staining their lips deep purple.