The Dower House (30 page)

‘Well, speaking as a man who once lived on nothing but beans, you're up against an expert here.' He undressed to wash behind the screen.

‘I accept your word for it,' she said. ‘Proof will not be required.'

She was lying on her side, facing away from him, when he at last came out again. ‘Goodnight, my dear,' she said without turning round.

But for that he would have switched out the light and gone directly to his bed. Instead, on an impulse, he went to sit precariously on the edge of her bed. She spun round and stared up at him with great, searching eyes.

‘A little goodnight ritual,' he explained. ‘Something Willard taught Marianne.' He stretched his hand toward her face. ‘Sand in the right eye –' he pretended to strew a pinch of it into her eye – ‘sand in the left eye . . .' She relaxed and grinned up at him, becoming a child. ‘Shed a little tear –' he drew a finger lightly down her cheek and then, chucking her gently under the nose – ‘here's mud in your eye.' He bent low and kissed her lightly on the brow. The remnant of the fart was aphrodisiac. Hastily he skipped the six feet back to his bed, turning out the wall light on the way.

Now at last he knew she was, beyond all shadow of a doubt, the most precious, the most wonderful person in the entire universe. She made the very air in this room special. She made everything special. She seemed to carry an aura of . . . something indescribable . . . some kind of exceptional light that bore a hint of gold. It transformed everything around her, making it radiant and extra-real. He could also dare to acknowledge, at last, that his real purpose in making this visit was to be with her – away from England . . . away from the Dower House . . . away from . . . Manutius . . . just to be with her, blessed with a new sense of life and hope in that magical nearness of her.

Hope? Could two people who had suffered as they had suffered hope to make a normal life together? He
felt
normal enough. He had not shut out the horrors of the past but nor did he dwell on them – though, to be honest, everyday life was filled with sly reminders. Faith doling out the porridge could recall the sound of a stodgy heap of beans being thwacked onto a tin plate . . . the ‘barbecue' thing that Willard had used in the summer evoked the crematorium . . . young Sam getting a bramble thorn in the palm of his hand revived an image of the capo pinning a thief's hand to the table with a dagger . . . but it
was
porridge, not beans . . . a succulent T-bone steak, not a cadaver . . . an accidental thorn not a deliberate barbarity.

And so he sank into a pleasant fantasy in which he lay at ease in the back of a light, clinker-built rowing boat while she rowed them, once again, at the gentlest, most leisurely pace round the Wannsee. She had the most powerful and yet the most feminine arms he had ever admired.

And at the precise moment when she rested on her oars and the boat glided under the shade of a mighty weeping willow overhanging the water's edge, she – the real Angela in her bed a few hundred miles away – gave that sort of double-intake of breath that people make after tears.

Jolted back from his fantasy, he listened acutely for more. But no – he must have been mistaken. It was just the sort of double-inhalation people make in their sleep when their bodies have forgotten to breathe a while.

He would not – could not – speak tomorrow. He would write something for them instead.

Tuesday, 30 September 1947

Angela spoke in German. ‘The reason I am here at all,' she said, ‘is that I am on my way to Hamburg to meet an old comrade in the German underground to whom I gave the transcript of a conference held at Interpol Headquarters in January, nineteen forty-two – for which act of “treason” I was sent to Ravensbrück until the Liberation. You may not have heard of that meeting but the whole world knows now what was decided there – the
Vernichtung
of Jews, homosexuals, and Romanies. I had intended to describe it to you in some detail but – having read what my friend Felix Breit has submitted for you to consider – I will focus on just one aspect.

‘Remember – that conference was called for one sole purpose: to allow the Schutzstaffel to inform the wider Nazi party that it, the
SS
, had perfected the means to massacre up to ten thousand people per day, seven days a week.'

There were gasps all around the room.

‘Yes – the true scale of what happened still hasn't sunk in. I wonder how long it will take, in fact. But the one thing I want to tell you about is that, despite all the boasting on the part of the
SS
, even the most hardened of them had to concede the awfulness of it all. One of them told the meeting that Himmler himself, head of the
SS
, was physically sick when he was present at one of the gassing experiments on children that went wrong. Another, after describing early experiments in forcing Slavic Jews to dig mass graves and then stand beside them to be shot, said that “good decent Germans” could only bear it for about two months before they became “burnt out”. They could not forget that they belonged to the race that produced Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven. Their Slav collaborators, he said, made much more efficient killers because they were of a lower order of humanity.

‘There were several other instances of their recognition that what they were doing was bestial and unworthy of the highest standards of the German soul, but I think those two are enough to make my point – which is this: Even there, in the highest echelon of the vilest part of the nightmare that was Naziism, they felt compelled to acknowledge the regrettable – to them – necessity of the
Vernichtung
.

‘But was it
German
culture that pricked their consciences? No! The culture was European – the values bequeathed to Europe by the son of a carpenter in Galilee two thousand years ago – values now shared even by those who (like me, I'm afraid) admire his message but do not think him divine. European values – which now hold the key to the European disease. And so it is to
Europe
that we must turn for a cure. We must all think European first before we add German, French, Italian . . . English . . . Spanish . . . and so on. And you – Germans and French – can make a start today. Imagine the new Europe – a Europe at peace after how many thousand years of war? It may yet trace its very beginnings to
this
room on
this
very day, the thirtieth of September, nineteen forty-seven!'

After an awestricken pause the German delegates banged the table with open hands, palms down; the French, who had started with conventional applause, joined in somewhat sheepishly.

Felix passed her a piece of paper on which he had written: ‘
Hervorragend! Magnifique!
Not bad!'

‘I'll bet we have separate rooms by the time we get back there tonight,' Angela said when they were on the bus to Paris.

‘Damn! We missed our chance!' he joked.

She did not join his laughter. After a long, awkward silence she said, ‘Perhaps you really mean that, Felix?' And when he did not respond: ‘Do you?' And then there was a further, almost intolerable silence before she added, ‘Because I wouldn't mind. You know?' She swallowed so heavily that he heard it over the boneshaking rattle of the bus.

‘Oh God!' He grasped her hands – which let him feel that she was shivering as much as he – and said, ‘I lay awake a long time last night because . . . when I kissed you on the forehead like that, I suddenly knew that you were the most . . . the most
precious
thing in my life. God! The most precious in all the universe. What are we going to do?'

The question jolted her. ‘What d'you mean – what are we going to do?'

‘I mean I actually had that feeling about you from the first moment I saw you – in Schmidt's, when I was sitting there with Fogel, before Fritz told me anything about you. But I thought I couldn't trust it.'

‘Why?' She was more aggrieved than curious.

He shrugged. ‘I suppose I believed nothing so wonderful could be real . . . or be really happening to
me
.'

Two words popped into her mind: ‘Jewish fatalism'. She had seen plenty of it in Ravensbrück. But could someone brought up in complete ignorance of his Jewishness still ‘catch' it?

‘Even so,' he continued, ‘I knew it was no passing fantasy that day when we walked in Regent's Park . . .'

‘When you picked that rose?' Now there was relief in her laughter, but she still wondered about that question:
What are we going to do
? ‘Why did you . . . No – it's all right.' She had actually started asking him why he had picked that rose and held it beside her and declared her the winner; but he misunderstood. ‘You mean why did I take up with Faith?'

‘Oh . . . I . . .'

‘No – you have every right to ask. It's truer to say that Faith took up with me . . . but I found it convenient not to resist. She's very good company. She's a good shield against the office politics at Manutius. A good guide to the subtleties of English life.'

Angela could not help asking, ‘Good in bed?'

‘
Y-e-s
. Or yes and no. I mean she's not passionate. It's just jolly good fun to her. She enjoys horse-riding more, I think. And dancing. We both know we're not in love – and we've never even pretended. We're good for each other's careers.'

‘Does she know how you feel about me? Did you ever tell her . . . what you've just told me?'

‘As I said – I hardly dared tell myself until last night, when it became so overpowering. I don't
think
she knows – and I've certainly never told her.'

‘But? I can hear a
but
in your voice.'

He sighed. ‘But she's very . . . I mean she's almost a mind-reader. She can know lots of things about people without ever asking or being told. So I expect she does know. In her bones.'

‘In which case,' Angela spoke carefully, ‘don't you find it odd that she
encouraged
you to make this trip with me?'

What Felix ought to have replied was: ‘Did I tell you she encouraged me?' for, indeed, he had never told Angela any such thing and, until now, she had been just as careful not to ask. Instead he said, ‘I suppose – if she
does
know how I feel about you – she's baffled as to why I've not done anything about it.'

‘Well, Felix, my darling,' Angela exploded in frustration, ‘she's not the
only
one! Why
have
you been doing nothing about it? You've had lots of chances – and never a better one than last night!'

‘I know! I know!' he said wretchedly.

‘While you were lying there, two metres and a million kilometres away from me, I was lying there with tears running down my face.'

‘Oh . . . oh . . .' He rolled his head in savage anguish on her shoulder until she put up a hand to cushion his weight.

‘Why?' she whispered. ‘Why?'

‘Trocadéro!' the conductor called out.

‘Oh! Let's get off here!' Suddenly animated, she grabbed his hand and dragged him along to the exit.

The conductor reminded them that they had bought tickets to the Place de la Concorde but Felix just shrugged and, tilting his head toward Angela, said, ‘
C'est la femme eternelle!
'

No argument there.

‘Here!' Still tugging him by the arm she dragged him across the open space to the balustrade from which you get the most famous view of the Eiffel Tower. ‘Does this remind you of anything?' She went right up to the balustrade, threw back her head, squared her shoulders, and clasped her hands in front of her, arms straight down in a V.

Seeing her from behind, a commanding silhouette against the Eiffel Tower, he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. ‘Hitler!' he whispered. ‘Here. Right here!'

She turned round, grinning joyfully. ‘The only time he ever visited Paris. He stood exactly here and did a little jig of pleasure.'

Felix gazed down at the flagstones beneath their feet, trying to comprehend that the jackboots which had figuratively crushed the life out of so many millions and plunged the world into a crisis that might yet precipitate a further war –
those
jackboots had literally danced a little jig of childish joy right here, on these very stones.
That
stone, perhaps . . . or
that
one. He felt nauseous.