The Other Side of Love (68 page)

“That’s you all over.”

“I could hardly try for a medal, Kathe. I’m meant to be in London and, besides, I’ve been given direct orders to stay clear of the American Zone.”

“What if you’re caught?”

“Why should I be? Touring Germany with forged papers is child’s play nowadays.”

“They’ll miss you in London.”

“In my branch, one can always concoct an excuse to have rushed off.”

She managed a smile.

“Aubrey, I feel so awful, not letting you know the verdict right away.”

“No need to keep apologizing, darling,”

he said. Til trot upstairs and see if that nice old nurse with the glasses has heard anything about Wyatt.”

He returned almost immediately. There was no news.

IV

At a little before six, when Erich began shifting and making wordless sounds, Lieutenant Harrison, the bespectacled kindly nurse, came to tell them that the captain was out of surgery.

The operation had been complicated by the second bullet, which had grazed close to his heart, the nurse said. He had lost a worrying amount of blood. He remained in an acutely critical condition.

As the door closed behind Lieutenant Harrison, Kathe slumped down twisting her handkerchief. It waŤKubrey who noticed that Erich was awake. The child had a strorrg boyish face with Wyatt’s high cheekbones. The eyes were Kathe’s blue-green, but far less dreamy than hers at the same age - or so Aubrey remembered. Intelligent wary eyes watching them both.

The boy didn’t respond to Kathe’s introduction, but at Aubrey’s offer to show the way to the lavatory he nodded. Aubrey, recalling that at Erich’s age he would have been mortified had a strange woman been in the room while he dressed, picked up trousers, pullover and underwear.

After the door had closed on them, Kathe looked up at the ceiling.

When I see Wyatt will he be alive or dead?

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“Frowline Kingsmith?”

The two words spoken in a questioning tone wavered through the sinister ruins where decomposing German corpses sat up to aim rifles, machineguns and howitzers at him. But the voice was a woman’s, American, and therefore had no place in this devastation.

He opened his eyes. Ochre colours wavered and tarnished. Blinking, he concentrated. The brownish shades coalesced into walls and a screen at the foot of his painted metal bed. His mind sullenly refused to make connections. He sensed he was drugged, but the pain encompassing his chest and abdominal cavity was real, and so was the sweaty smell of the sheets and pillowcase, the cut of coarse cotton under one armpit, the foul taste in his mouth. The rack with the bottle was mistily out of focus, but he knew an IV when he saw one. And the woman standing over him wore a nurse’s uniform.

He was in a hospital.

“Captain Kingsmith, are you up to a bit of cdmpany?”

He tried to say

“Sure”

but, to his befuddled surprise, his larynx and tongue refused to co-operate. In his nightmares he couldn’t move or function and now, with proof of further physical dereliction, he was no longer quite so positive that he had re-entered the real substantial world.

“Hello, Wyatt.”

Kathe’s soft disembodied voice.

His memory returned in random segments. Racing from Groener’s house. Odd punching sensations in his back. Throwing the boy into

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the car. The brilliantly lit surgery with green-masked figures. Pain. A hypodermic needle. Nurses and orderlies prodding him. Pain. Thirst. The delicious refreshment of cracked ice. Thrashing pain. Another hypodermic needle.

“How are you feeling?”

she asked.

“Groggy …

“

This time his voice worked, but in a strange croak.

“How long … ?”

“Three days.”

He’d been out of it that long?

He peered towards the foot of the bed. A beclouded image of pale blue and the silvery shine of loose hair - the style he liked best on her.

“You’ve had us all worried,”

she said.

“But you’re on the mend.”

She moved a step closer.

“Wyatt, you were marvellous.”

“The boy?”

“Erich’s fine. At first he wouldn’t talk, but now he’s chattering away. He beats us regularly at Snakes and Ladders.”

“Us?”

“Aubrey’s here. He’s cabled your parents and the rest of the family. They all send good wishes.”

“Sit down,”

he said. His voice was stronger.

The chair scraped as she sat at the head of the bed. Near him. Her face looked weary.

“Erich’s very quick for his age,”

she said.

“He’s got quite a sense of humour.”

He didn’t want her talking about the boy. He didn’t want her talking about Aubrey.

“The bottom sheet’s twisted,”

he said.

Til get the nurse.”

“Stay.”

He shifted a bit on his elbow. life rubberized tube twisted the long needle in his flesh. He winced. 9

“Does it hurt?”

“Me, I’m here for the waters.”

“What?”

“Just a line from a movie.”

She bent over and kissed his hand. Her lips were cool and soft, and he felt the moisture of her tears. He closed his eyes, sighing with an emotion that felt suspiciously like relief. It’s not snafu any more, he thought. We’re fine.

On this tough hospital mattress, glucose seeping through his veins, her lips on his hand, he dimly perceived that he had ratified an armistice. It was ended, his personal war, a war that had lasted almost a decade and been fought on terrain that he had never fully understood: love, hate, rejection and fear of rejection. At the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympics he had fallen for a girl who embodied the Third Reich’s physical ideal, and this image of the Nazi propaganda machine’s flawless blonde madchen had been

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superimposed on his every thought of Rathe. Now at long last that obscuring double image was gone. He saw only a vulnerably beautiful woman with skin blotched and eyes red-veined from weeping. Why his vision should have cleared at this particular moment was a vagary that scarcely brushed his mind.

His fingers rubbed weakly at her chin.

“Hi,”

he said. She raised her head and gave him a misty smile.

“Hi.”

The pain-killing pills they were giving him seemed to be working better.

Aubrey had bartered cigarettes for two new dresses, a cardigan and skirt, a trim blue coat and smart cocked hat. Aubrey had procured books, a football, crayons and colouring paper for Erich. Aubrey had arranged with Lieutenant Griswold to get Kathe and Erich identification papers and ration-cards. Aubrey insisted she never leave either the Krankenhaus Frankfurt or the Excelsior Hotel without him.

“It’s Groener, isn’t it?”

she asked a few evenings after his arrival, while they were finishing their after-dinner coffee. She spoke quietly in English. The door was open to the single room where Erich slept.

“You’re worried about Groener.”

“You should have the wind up a bit, too. After all, he warned you that you’re not safe in Germany. And, even if it weren’t for Erich, you know entirely too much about his past.”

“So does Wyatt,”

she said.

Aubrey took off his glasses, rubbing the heavy lenses with his handkerchief.

“The hospital’s well guarded.”

“There’s no reason to worry about Erich and me. Groener’ll stay well clear of Frankfurt.”

Aubrey glanced significantly towards the bedroom.

“He’s most attached.”

“Yes, but he’s too shrewd to come back”

There was a whimpering sob. Erich must be having another nightmare. Kathe ran to waken the little boy, then sat comfortingly close on the bed.

Erich was not an easy child. Extremely bright and volatile, as she imagined Wyatt must have been, subjected to the ceaseless bombings and then uprooted, he swung on an altogether logical pendulum between a childishly resentful silence and rowdy obstreperousness. He often spoke admiringly of Uncle Kurt, quoting him as the ultimate authority. He seldom alluded to his adopted parents; Kathe and Aubrey conjectured that the Dettens”

abrupt departure had cut the psychological ground from under the little boy’s feet.

Within a few minutes his eyes closed and his jaw relaxed. Kathe tiptoed back into the other room.

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I

Aubrey pulled his chair closer to hers, saying quietly:

“I can t staY in this sector much longer.”

She had known he couldn’t, but had put off thinking of his departure.

“It’ll be terrible without you,”

she murmured.

“I don’t know how I’ll manage.”

Til miss you, too, darling.”

He paused.

“I’ve reserved these two rooms for you.”

“Aubrey, how can I keep on taking from you?”

“There’s no reason I should handle the bill. You’re not in the least short. In fact you’re very nicely off indeed. There’s your six years of back pay from His Majesty - that’ll be transferred secretly, of course. Through me. But the big balance is from Kingsmith’s. As Uncle Alfred’s heir, you own a ten-per-cent share. Even with wartime taxes Father’s branch has done handsomely. And, thanks to Aunt Rossie, the Fifth Avenue branch has boomed.”

“I had no idea.”

Tm arranging a visit to London for Erich and you.”

“Aubrey, you know how restricted travel is, especially for Germans. With the trial and my not being properly cleared, they’ll hardly let me into England, even for a holiday.”

“You still show remarkably little confidence in my abilities,”

Aubrey said with a rueful smile.

“I don’t much care to be married to a man in prison for life.”

The newly cleaned lenses magnified his eyes.

“So you’re still planning to marry me?”

“Any woman who passed you up woul be an idiot.”

“Are you saying that because you gav rne your promise?”

Of course it was true that promise bound her. But it was equally true that the emotional savaging of the war had torn her apart. In her exhaustion, she perceived Aubrey’s quiet unassuming love and steadfast faith as the only sanctuary in a ruined world. She had always cared deeply for Aubrey. Although she had never ceased to love Wyatt, and he evidently was involved again, too, she could not believe that he would ever give her his complete trust. And she could not bear any more suspicion. Any mistrust about Erich would topple her.

“Oh, Aubrey, Aubrey,”

she said, sighing.

“Don’t you see that you’re getting the rotten end of the bargain?”

“Me? Darling, you’re unique,”

he said.

She lowered her gaze.

“I can’t think about a wedding yet, though,”

she said.

“What will you do?”

Aubrey, I’ve been searching my head for ways to turn the

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GarmischPartenkirchen chalet into a home for some of the orphans.”

“German children?”

“DPs, Jewish, German. You know how many hundreds of thousands there are, scavenging, stealing, living like animals. I’d like to help as many as I can. The attic’s huge, the bedrooms will make dormitories. Do I have enough to buy food, clothes, medicine, maybe pay an assistant?”

“Several assistants. This is hard English currency.”

“And you? After you’re demobbed, will you go back to Kingsmith’s?”

Aubrey gave a little shudder.

“Thank God I don’t need to. No recurrences of Father’s heart trouble he’s doing brilliantly without me. I’m going back to writing.”

“Could you at GarmischPartenkirchen, with the children’s hurlyburly?”

“Wherever you are is heaven for me.”

He put his arms around her.

“You’re the finest, most decent man I’ve ever known,”

she murmured. Unhooking his glasses, she kissed him. She did not, however, respond in kind to his whispered averrals of love, and pulled away gently when he suggested they move to the bed.

IV

Aubrey had taken the room across the corridor. Leaving the door ajar, he sat at the desk. From here he could see Kathe and Erich’s rooms. Setting the Webley in front of him, he opened his valise to remove six sharpened pencils and a spiral-bound notebook marked:

TROSPER’S PEOPLE

Section Three

At first his pencil moved across the page slowly, but after a few minutes the lead point raced. He had re-entered the world of his spy novel. Though he could reveal nothing about CI4, he inserted enough inter-bureau politics, murky loyalties, forgeries, agents, counter-agents, incompetence, cold dread, valour, blind luck and physical details to make his world real. He walked among the throng of characters who were more vivid to him than anyone he knew with the exception of Kathe. He breathed this world’s atmosphere, he responded to the world’s specific gravity. Yet he dropped the pencil, his hand immediately on the weapon in front of him as footsteps came down the corridor.

It was the floor porter with his cart gathering shoes.

Aubrey returned to his fictive reality.

Trosper had long ago accepted that Analiese would

I

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