by Rosie Thomas
She was fond of the reading room, too, with its views of the trees in St James’s Square and the row of leather armchairs containing old men noisily asleep. It was satisfying to spread out her apparatus of file index and lined pad beside the stack of books on one of the tables, with an uninterrupted day of calm literary pursuit ahead of her. It was much better than trying to work at the kitchen table at home, where the children or the telephone interrupted her every ten minutes.
Today, however, she was heading for the Library’s basement where the newspaper archives were stored. She was pursuing Grace’s Parliamentary speeches through the coverage they had received in the contemporary press. It was laborious work, but there was the occasional reward of some editorial comment or gossip feature set alongside the political report that made it more worthwhile than a straight reading of Hansard.
Elizabeth had a biographer’s enthusiasm for her research. It was absorbing to pursue the confetti details of another life and then to piece the scraps together, fragment by fragment, to make a picture. Her problem was that the research sometimes became more than a means to an end. In the past it had become an end in itself as she burrowed more deeply, piling up more and more of the little snippets and neglecting the broad outline of the picture.
It would not happen this time, with her biography of Grace Brock. Elizabeth had firmly resolved that it would not happen. She needed the money, the portion of her publisher’s advance that would become due on delivery of the completed manuscript. The roof of the house needed expensive attention, and the central heating boiler would not last another winter. She must finish the book, and do it quickly.
But for today, just today, the yellow newspapers with their breath of a different time were so beguiling …
The bound volumes of The Times from 1931 to 1940 were shelved together at the far end of the room. Elizabeth took off her knitted jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, then set out her pad and pencils ready for work. She ran her forefinger along the row of tall red spines with their gilt lettering and took out the volume marked January–June 1933.
Elizabeth turned the brittle pages with great care. The library was transferring its newspaper collection to microfiche, but for the time being she could derive an almost sensual pleasure from handling the real thing. It was like holding a taut thread that stretched directly between Grace and herself.
She settled in her place, propped her chin on her hand, and began to read.
The dry, sober language of The Times’s reports and leaders unrolled in her head. She read the accounts of the Reichstag fire and then of the Enabling Bill that allowed Chancellor Adolf Hitler rather than President Hindenburg to rule Germany by decree. There were magisterially disapproving descriptions of the violence and intimidation practised by the Nazis during the March 1933 election campaign, and of the persecution of Jews and boycotting of Jewish businesses throughout Germany.
Elizabeth turned forwards, and backwards again. Grace’s name suddenly leapt out at her from the columns of newsprint. There was a report of a speech that she had made to the House in defence of freedom of opinion. She had been referring to a violent confrontation in Piccadilly Circus in which a handful of Mosley’s Blackshirts, peddling anti-Semitic pamphlets, had been mobbed and threatened by an angry crowd.
Grace had been careful to disassociate herself from any taint of anti-Semitism on her part. But the newspaper had quoted her words. ‘I would defend to the death the right of British men, and women, to hold their own opinions, if those opinions are neither treasonable nor directly threatening to the common good.’
Elizabeth’s mouth curved in a smile. She picked up one of her sharp pencils and copied the report word for word on a file-index card. Her methods were slow, but they suited her well enough. She added the newspaper reference and date, and slotted the card into her box. There was another bonus, too. On the very next page she discovered a society reporter’s description of a Mayfair luncheon party. Amongst the guests was ‘Lady Grace Brock, MP, chic as always in a taupe double-breasted jacket, finished with white piqué collar and cuffs, and a black velvet hat trimmed with a fine mesh veil.’
The contrast between the two manifestations of Grace was deeply pleasing. Elizabeth hummed under her breath as she copied out the second and filed it alongside the first.
She didn’t know what impulse made her turn back to the page carrying the report of Grace’s speech. There was a photograph of the Piccadilly Circus incident next to the column and she bent over it now, idly examining the faces. The Blackshirts looked very young, and surprisingly vulnerable as the wave of the crowd pressed in on them. Elizabeth was about to move on when something else caught her attention.
One of the faces belonged to a girl. She was standing a little to one side of the group, but there was no doubt of her identification with it. She was wearing a black shirt and a dark, close-fitting beret. There was even a glint of white at her throat, the photographer’s flash reflecting off her party badge. Elizabeth stared at the uneasy, defiant expression. It was the expression, rather than the features themselves, that was familiar. She had seen it in the family albums that Cressida had carefully preserved. The Blackshirt girl was Alice Hirsh.
Had no one made the connection, Elizabeth wondered, between Lady Grace Brock and her cousin? There was nothing in the caption to suggest it.
She touched the girl’s face with one fingertip, as if the mere contact might provide an answer. She stared at the photograph so hard that it began to dissolve into its component dots, the code becoming more impenetrable instead of offering up its secret.
There was a swimming sensation in her head. It was a familiar feeling: it came when one of the parts of her painstaking picture was dissolving, and it meant that she would have to switch the fragments around and refocus them.
Elizabeth knew the bones of Alice Hirsh’s story, but that was all. But she had never heard Clio mention her. Nor, it came to her now, could she remember Cressida ever having talked much about Alice as an adult. Like the photographs in the albums, all the stories, except for the last one, had been connected with Oxford, or Stretton, when they were children.
She was suddenly certain that there was something here, some significant relationship between Grace and Alice, that she would have to pursue.
Not for the first time, Elizabeth reflected that Clio certainly knew much more than she was prepared to tell. She wondered with a touch of weariness whether it was worth making another trip to Little Venice to try to talk to the old lady again. Sometimes it was worth the effort, and then at other times Clio retreated behind a veil of almost wilful senility.
‘She’s a very old lady,’ the nurses would whisper. ‘You can’t expect too much.’
Yet still Elizabeth felt suspicion stir like a twitching nerve behind her eyes. Clio seemed able to draw down the veil at will, so that the ghost of her sharp intelligence taunted Elizabeth from within its gauzy protection.
She looked for a minute longer at the newspaper picture. Alice’s unhappy eyes seemed to stare directly up into her own instead of into the photographer’s lens. Then she shook her head. She began to turn the pages again, once more following the thin trail of Grace’s political career.
Elizabeth made another discovery on that same day.
She had been out to buy herself a sandwich and a cup of tea at the coffee bar in the next street, and had settled back into the drowsy afternoon hum of the library. She had worked her patient way through several of the other big red volumes of The Times, but something – perhaps Alice’s mute stare – had drawn her back to January–June 1933.
This time she came across an item she had missed before. It was headed ‘An Eye-Witness’s Account’. The by-line was Clio Hirsh’s.
Elizabeth knew all about Clio’s reports from Berlin. She knew that she had written several articles from the viewpoint of an ‘ordinary British observer’, brief descriptions of aspects of life in the city as the Nazi grip on it tightened, all of which had
been published in The Times over a period of a few months in 1933.
Clio had told her, in the course of one of their more lucid conversations, how it had all come about. The newspaper’s editor, Geoffrey Dawson, was an old friend of Nathaniel’s. He had been a frequent visitor to the Woodstock Road in the old days and he remembered Clio as a child, and then as a schoolgirl with an interest in journalism. After she had begun to work for Fathom she had even met him, once or twice, within the turning circles of Fitzrovia. After some hesitation Clio had sent her Berlin stories to Mr Dawson, and he had printed them.
Elizabeth had read the articles. They had been collected, once Clio began to make a name for herself as a writer, and published in a small volume with some others of her nonfiction pieces. There was even a copy of the book in the London Library collection and Elizabeth had taken it down from its place on the shelf upstairs, noting that she was the first borrower in more than two years. She had read it carefully, making notes of whatever material related directly or indirectly to Grace.
But she had never seen the very first article in its original form. She read it again now, reluctantly admiring the elegance of Clio’s writing. There was scope for elegance in the newspapers of those days, Elizabeth thought wryly. She had served her own more recent writing apprenticeship as a tabloid journalist.
Then she closed the big volume, and sat for a moment with her wrists resting against the edge of it. The afternoon was almost over and the other readers were beginning to drift out of the doors of the library and away across the square. It was the time of day Elizabeth liked best, when the light was fading and windows were beginning to show as cosy yellow squares.
Her discoveries were not particularly surprising; they added up to much less than a coincidence. She was unravelling the threads of Grace’s career in the House, and she had known that Clio’s article was there somewhere, even though she would not have bothered to search it out. It was only the sudden juxtaposition of Alice alongside the two of them that was interesting.
Elizabeth pressed the palms of her hands flat on the smooth binding. It seemed to vibrate beneath her fingers.
It was Julius who had told Clio that she must send her article to Geoffrey Dawson.
She gave it to Julius to read because he had asked her what it had been like, watching the Reichstag burn. There was no wireless in Pilgrim’s studio and Julius had spent the evening of February 27 alone, lying on the musty divan and reading The Small House at Allington.
‘It was like this,’ Clio said. She took out the exercise book and handed it to him. ‘I couldn’t sleep afterwards. I kept seeing the flames against the sky and hearing the people whispering. Not shouting, or even talking, but whispering. I wanted to write it down not to remember it, but to … exorcise it.’
Julius read, and then read it again. Then he had looked up at his twin with an odd expression on his face. ‘Now I feel as though I did see it,’ he said softly.
Clio blushed.
‘What are you going to do with this?’ Julius asked her.
‘Nothing. I wrote it because I felt I needed to, that’s all. Why?’
‘It deserves to be published.’
Clio had demurred, but in the end Julius had persuaded her.
She borrowed a typewriter from a friend of Rafael’s and copied her piece out of the exercise book. Editing and retyping a manuscript brought back memories of Fathom, but the other world seemed very distant from Berlin. She wondered what Miles was doing, and made the discovery that although she knew he had hurt her she could no longer recall exactly what the pain had been like, as if a severe headache had melted away to leave only a raw, peeled sensation behind her eyes.
Clio had written a diffident letter to her father’s old friend, and sent it off with her manuscript. The response reached her with surprising speed. Her eye-witness account would appear in the newspaper, and a cheque for five guineas was enclosed. Mr Dawson sent her his kind regards, and indicated that if Miss Hirsh were to write any other first-hand accounts of life and events in Nazi Berlin, The Times would be glad to consider them.
‘What did I tell you?’ Julius proudly demanded.
‘This is wonderful,’ Rafael beamed. ‘Now you have a proper reason to stay in Berlin. You had better take the typewriter on a more permanent loan.’
‘I don’t need any other reason to stay in Berlin,’ she had protested, meaning other than you, but he had put his fingers to her lips.
Rafael would not make any promises, or even talk about the future beyond tomorrow or perhaps the day after that. Clio understood that it was not because he would not commit himself, but simply that he could not. He did not know, any more than the other prominent Jews and political dissidents knew, whether tomorrow might be the day when the men in brown shirts would knock at his door. There were many unexplained disappearances in those days. They lived with the threat, as they lived with the beer restaurants and the Balalaika and the burnt-out shell of the Reichstag, as a fact of life in Berlin.
Clio bought a ream of paper and squared it on her table beside the borrowed typewriter.
She wrote an account of election day, of the Hitler flags hanging from the windows of all the houses and the polling stations occupied by Nazis in uniform who greeted every voter wearing a swastika emblem with Heil Hitler. She also wrote about the April 1 boycott of Jewish businesses and shops, when Jewish professors were prevented from entering their lecture rooms and the windows of Jewish shops were smashed or plastered with posters reading, ‘Germans, defend yourselves against Jewish atrocity propaganda. Buy only at German shops!’
Mr Dawson printed both stories, and asked for more.
Clio learnt to discuss nothing but trivialities with anyone except Julius and Rafael and Grete. She fell into the habit of keeping her door locked, and of slipping out to call on Rafael only when the streets were temporarily empty of the roaming bands of Nazi auxiliary police. She learnt to keep quiet, even in the company of the seemingly friendly Klebers, but to watch and listen as closely as she could to everything that went on around her.
Berlin’s late spring crept up and then slowly became established. The trees in the Tiergarten came into leaf, and tables were put outside the cafés in the Kurfürstendamm and Leipziger Strasse. Julius no longer performed in public, but he continued to teach his pupils and to play in private for Clio and the Wolfs and Pilgrim. Grete introduced Clio to a Jewish laundress, laughing with such genuine amusement at the necessity to distinguish between Aryan and non-Aryan washing that Clio could only admire her generous spirit. She showed Clio the best street markets, and the dozens of little shops where Jewish retailers struggled to make a living through the Nazi boycotts, and the two women slowly became friends.
Rafael spent what time he could spare with Clio, but she knew that he had other work to do. He defended his clients within the law where it was possible, and where it was not he provided advice, whatever money he had, and sometimes a sanctuary under his own roof. Often Clio met haunted-looking men or terrified mothers with bewildered children hiding in the book-lined room. She learnt to be ready to see Rafael whenever he appeared, not before, and tried not to wish for anything more.
Sometimes she saw Pilgrim and Isolde, but she was often alone. When she was not writing she listened to the wireless, or to the talk of ordinary Berliners in the streets or on the U-bahn. Her German improved by great leaps. Under Rafael’s direction she began to read Goethe and Schiller and Rilke.
The summer came.
For all the daily diet of fear and anxiety, even through the news of shootings and street violence and the rumours emanating from the Oranienburg camp not far from the city, Clio was happy. She was almost ashamed of the resonant depth of her happiness, in everyday contrast as it was with so much misery and loss. But she was deeply in love for the first time in her life, and the miracle of that overcame anything that Hitler and his people could do.
And even as life around them became increasingly extraordinary, Clio and Raf
ael still managed to enjoy ordinary pleasures.
They went back to the Balalaika, and soon Clio was able to understand the innuendoes and allusions in the lyrics of the cabaret songs. Rafael introduced her to his friends, beyond the shadowy clique who frequented the Café Josef, and with this group of teachers and doctors and artists they went to other nightclubs, to beer halls and to noisy little restaurants, and to one another’s rooms to listen to music and to talk, endless talk that covered every topic except politics.
Nobody discussed politics. The omission shivered between them all like ice filming the surface of still water. Some but by no means all of Rafael’s friends were Jews. Some of the others, Clio silently noted, had swastika flags hanging from their windows. On some evenings forbidden topics seemed to loom at the end of every avenue of talk, and on such evenings there was no choice but to make neutral conversation and to go home early to Wilmersdorf. But then, on other evenings when the beer or the schnapps flowed and Rafael smiled as he talked, with one long arm hooked over her shoulder, it seemed to Clio that there could be no better or more sympathetic company in the world than this riven group of Berliners.
They were not always surrounded by other people. There were evenings when Rafael played Mozart and Beethoven on his gramophone, and held Clio in his arms under Grete’s mountain pictures. They made love tenderly, and violently, and with every nuance of expression in between. Clio learnt to listen to her body as well as to her mind’s dictates, and she could almost feel herself growing sleeker and more luminous with the warmth of sexual satisfaction.