Our Friends in Berlin

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘I couldn’t speak for her,’ said Tessa, ‘but you were right about him. He was hopeless with women. It was the work he loved.’

  Amy nodded. But in her heart she felt that Tessa, who had known him for years, still hadn’t got him quite right. There had been more love in Jack Hoste than she knew. Perhaps more than even he knew. As he lay dying, and she held his hand, he had muttered something in a curious, musing voice: Exciting times, aren’t they? There was nothing else. Tessa saw her eyes begin to glisten, and gently placed her hand on her shoulder. They stood motionless by the window for some moments.

  Later, preparing to leave, Tessa remembered something else. She took from her document case a flimsy slip of paper and laid it on the table in front of Amy. It was a laundry bill from the St Ermin’s Hotel, dated from 1940.

  ‘That line of code, in pencil. Would you say that is Hoste’s writing?’

  Amy scrutinised it. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

  ‘No, I don’t either. But I found it on his desk.’

  ‘What does the code mean?’

  ‘Oh. According to our cryptanalyst it’s a name and address. Did Hoste ever mention the name Kreshin to you?’

  Amy shook her head. Tessa returned the slip to her case, and shrugged. She would let her know about the funeral.

  On the day The Times reported the first tentative successes of the Allied landings in Normandy, Amy found a short notice in the Deaths column:

  EAVES, Edward. 20 January 1899 – 1 June 1944. Beloved only son of the late John Eaves and his wife Marian. Funeral at St Peter and St John the Baptist Church, Wivelsfield, Haywards Heath.

  She took out a sheet of writing paper and uncapped her fountain pen.

  25 Queen Anne Street, London W.

  Dear Mrs Eaves,

  I didn’t know your son for very long, but in that short time he became a very dear and valued friend. He talked to me about you and your late husband, and I was struck once by a remark of his – that of all the marriages he had known, yours was the happiest.

  I can only imagine how terrible must be your grief at his death. So many have been lost in this dreadful war that after a while one feels numb to the fact of their being somebody’s brother, or father, or son. I hope in time you will be consoled in the knowledge that Edward conducted his life and work in a way that would have made you proud. It is no exaggeration on my part to say that, had it not been for him, I would not be here, writing these few words to you today.

  Please accept my deepest condolences, and God bless you.

  Sincerely yours,

  Amy Strallen

  May 1948

  23

  Leaning against the parapet she squinted over the terracotta rooftops, trying to trace the route they had walked. Bobby had brought the camera and was taking snaps on the other side, overlooking the Tejo estuary, the purity of its blue almost heartbreaking against the horizon.

  They were standing on the terrace of Santa Engracia, with its 360-degree perspective on the city and the river. After stepping off the tram they had made their way up steep, cobbled alleys towards the white marble church. Street life beetled on, the vista patched overhead by drying laundry. In a tiny shop smelling of candlewax and stuffed with devotional knick-knacks Bobby bought a wooden-beaded rosary for her fanatical papist mother – ‘To impress her fellow trippers on the way to Walsingham,’ she explained. ‘Don’t they call them “pilgrims”?’ asked Amy.

  They had set out late from the hotel, where a dusty brindled cat had slunk around their ankles while they ate breakfast. The city traffic honked and fumed under the slab of the noon heat. By the time they spotted the distant dome of Santa Engracia the sun was a savage white glare. A pair of nuns slipped by in silence; otherwise they encountered no one on the winding staircase to the top. They had the entire terrace to themselves. Out on the estuary a little speedboat had carved a white figure of eight on the glistening pane of blue. She felt a drop of sweat trickle down her back.

  Behind her a click went off. She turned to find Bobby’s face obscured by the camera.

  ‘You had such a soulful pose then,’ said Bobby. ‘Silent, upon a peak in Darien. I bet he sailed from here, old stout Cortez.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You must know the poem – Keats? Oh, darling! The conquistador who did for the Aztecs. Of course, when you look at Lisbon on the map it’s perched right on the edge, pointed at the New World.’

  ‘It feels rather sad, don’t you think?’ said Amy, turning back to the view. ‘Like a place that’s always being left behind. I suppose it’s the last of Europe most emigrants ever see.’

  ‘’Strue. It’s where Ingrid Bergman and what’s-his-face are flying to at the end of Casablanca, d’you remember, leaving poor old Bogey on the runway?’

  Amy smiled. ‘Yes, and he put such a brave face on it.’

  They made another languid circuit of the terrace; the heat was by now oppressive, and soon they were retreating down the marble stairwell to the ground floor. Their voices echoed beneath the vaulted ceiling. A few other tourists shuffled about the cool, shadowy expanses of the building. Bobby craned her gaze at one or two of the portraits, but Amy could tell from her cursory inspection that she was impatient to be getting on. The real focus of her interest became apparent once they reached the Campo just along from Santa Engracia, where a flea market was under way. It was quite a primitive affair; tented stalls stood about, but most of the wares were laid out on old rugs. Some traders could not run to even this amenity and simply spread their humble bits and pieces on the cobbles. Bobby made a beeline for the more energetic-looking quarter of the market in search of clothes. Her command of Portuguese was unsophisticated, but her expressive use of sighs and her nose for a bargain made her a formidable haggler. She bought two silk headscarves, a floppy straw hat, and a lacquered wooden fan which she immediately put to use.

  Amy was amused by Bobby’s market savvy, and noticed in one or two of the traders an air of exasperation at her tenacity. ‘They expect you to beat them down, it’s how the whole business keeps turning.’ Amy shook her head, laughing. ‘You make it sound like you’re doing them a favour.’ ‘Well, they’d rather have us here than not, darling.’ They mooched around for a while longer, and were just about to leave when something caught Amy’s eye: it was a citrine ring, square-cut, dressy, not the sort of thing she’d ever imagined wanting. But she did want it, and she knew almost with a certainty as she eased it onto her middle finger that it would fit. Bobby was delighted, and got down to negotiating with the stallholder, a small, shrewd-eyed man whose tanned bald head looked as smooth as teak.

  It was soon apparent that he was not going to be knocked down like the others. He kept saying, quietly, Prata, prata. Whether it was real silver or not, he didn’t seem in a hurry to sell. He listened, with a faint smile, to Bobby’s garbled but vehement Portuguese and shook his head. They play-acted a little dispute until she turned to Amy.

  ‘He wants six for it. I’m trying to get him down –’

  ‘Six what?’ asked Amy.

  ‘Six thousand. Escudos. It’s a lot.’ She turned back to the man. ‘Nao posso pagar mais do que quatro.’

  The stallholder spread his palms in a pleasant gesture of regret. Amy slid the ring off, and with an answering smile handed it back to him. Bobby had one more appeal in her repertoire. ‘Por favor, senhor,’ she said, nodding to Amy, ‘significa tanto para o meu amigo.’

  He shrugged. ‘E significa seis mil para mim.’

  Bobby’s shoulders slumped at last: she had met her match. It was more than either of them could afford. As they walked off Amy called ‘Obrigado’ over her shoulder.

  Wandering back down to the main drag they found a little cafe where they treated themselves to bolas de berlim and tiny cups of coffee as black and bitter as tar. Amy had bought postcards and sat poised with her fountain pen, casting about for something funny to say to her parents. Bobby, meanwhile, a cigarette at the
corner of her mouth, examined her little haul from the market, cooing at the softness of the silk scarves and caressing them against her cheek. When she eventually peered across the table at Amy, mid-sentence, something brightened in her eye.

  ‘Are you writing one to his nibs?’

  ‘Dan? Well, I suppose I should …’

  She had already decided to, picturing the look on his face as he recognised her hand on the postcard – in fact, her handwriting had been one of the first things he’d admired about her. She had been seeing Dan – Daniel Collingwood – since last September. They had met earlier that summer when he came as a client to the bureau. He was tallish, early forties, dark hair severely parted on one side and a smile that made his eyes crinkle. He had taught classics at a school in Surrey before the war. After being demobbed he tried to go back to teaching but found he’d lost the heart – or the nerve – for it. Instead, he joined an old friend from university at a literary magazine in Bloomsbury and did some private tuition on the side.

  ‘I must say comprehensively I’m never going to be rich,’ he told her, rather seriously, at their first interview. ‘Will that count against me?’

  Amy tucked in her chin. ‘Not with anyone who regards a man as more than a meal ticket. Would you object if I matched you with a woman of … similar prospects to your own?’

  ‘It would be pretty awful of me if I did!’

  His chief requirement was companionship – everything else would follow from that, he believed. Amy read through the short unexceptional list he had made in the Requirements box. She paused only at the last entry.

  ‘“I’d like someone who knows Attic Greek.”’ She looked across at him. ‘Erm, why would that be?’

  He wagged his head sideways. ‘Well, it’s always been a dream of mine to have a girl who might read The Odyssey aloud to me. Or The Iliad. Just for twenty minutes or so, of an evening.’

  Amy stifled a sudden laugh, and blushed. ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to – I’ve heard some strange requests in this office, but never that one.’

  ‘Is that unreasonable?’ His earnest expression caused her heart to turn over. She felt somewhat ashamed of her mirth.

  ‘No. Not unreasonable. Just a little unlikely.’

  He nodded, his brow knitted. ‘Yes, I see. Perhaps, then, someone who could recite it in translation?’

  Amy eventually set him up with one of their nicest young clients. That didn’t spark, so she matched him with an equally nice older one. This proved more satisfactory, but it was plainly not, in the bureau shorthand, an MMIH (match made in heaven). Mr Collingwood – or Daniel, as he now asked her to call him – was game at least, and trusted Amy’s judgement: he never refused an introduction she had arranged. They bumped into each other on the street once, and she found herself chatting to him animatedly for ten minutes: the last date she’d sent him on had been a great success, and he was waiting to hear back from her. (She was tempted to ask about the lady’s liking for The Odyssey, but resisted.) There was nothing from him after that until the end of the summer, when he telephoned her at the office. She was expecting a tale of a triumph, but no, it turned out that the lady he’d been waiting on had ‘dropped off the radar’. She had not contacted him after all. Amy was genuinely sorry, and commiserated with him, knowing how disheartened he must feel. Before he rang off he asked her if she would send him a fresh Requirements form; he had decided to rewrite his completely. She promised to put one in the post. A few days later she received a note from him.

  Dear Miss Strallen,

  Would you be good enough to read over the revised Requirements form I have enclosed? I’d be most grateful if you’d let me know your thoughts.

  Sincerely yours,

  Daniel Collingwood

  I am looking for a lady, somewhere in London, who likes to lend a sympathetic ear to the troubles of others. She will be kind, good-humoured, and patient to a fault.

  She will be in her mid-thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair, green eyes with amber flecks at the edges; she will always look well dressed.

  She will have beautiful handwriting and work in an office, e.g. at a marriage bureau.

  She will laugh often, but sometimes will blush if she thinks her amusement has caused pain to her interlocutor.

  She will be the sort of person who has no idea of herself as ‘a catch’ and so spends her life matchmaking others.

  She will read Homer aloud to me whenever her time and inclination permit. (This last requirement is optional. The others are not.)

  After considering this for some hours, Amy wrote back:

  Dear Mr Collingwood,

  Thank you for sending the bureau your revised Requirements form. I am happy to report that I have someone here who may suit you. Please call at the office at your earliest convenience.

  Sincerely, and always yours,

  Amy Strallen

  Bobby must have been studying her face, because she now said, ‘D’you remember that time, a few years ago – I’m sure we were at Quo Vadis – when you said you weren’t capable of “real love”?’

  Amy smiled distantly. ‘I do. I believed it at the time. Although there was someone –’ She broke off, and fell silent.

  ‘Was that him? Jack? I do so wish I’d met him.’

  ‘You might not have been impressed. He wasn’t easy to get to know.’

  ‘If you liked him, I’d have found a way.’ Bobby paused, and Amy sensed what was coming next. ‘Did you ever find out how he …?’

  Slowly she shook her head. ‘They just said “killed in action”. I knew he was brave. He once saved me from flying shrapnel during a raid one night – I must have told you that.’

  Bobby nodded, and looked a little nervous. ‘Have you told Dan about him?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I will. Some day.’

  They walked back to the hotel under the white-hot lid of the sky. Up in their room the ceiling fan revolved stoically, whispering into the net curtains. Amy opened the door onto the balcony, but the sultry stillness of the air didn’t yield an inch. Even the wallpaper looked parched. Bobby made her laugh when a pigeon suddenly landed right in front of them on the railing of the balcony and she enquired, quick as a flash, ‘Any messages?’ It was too hot to do anything but lie on their beds.

  The turn of the ceiling fan lulled them.

  She woke with a start from a dream in which she was trying to leave a party. A few of the guests she knew, but most were strangers; whoever she asked for directions to the exit pointed to this or that door, which led nowhere, and she kept returning to the room to ask someone else. This rigmarole seemed to go on for hours, and left her exhausted. She rose from the bed, her mouth dry and tasting of ashes – that awful coffee.

  Bobby slept on her side, unstirring: ‘sparko’, as she would say. Amy slipped on her sandals, picked up her purse and tiptoed out, having left a note on the bedside table. Gone for a walk. Outside, the streets were waking from their siesta. Shopkeepers pulled open their shutters; the cafes were beginning to fill again. The heat remained thick as molasses, stifling. Nobody appeared to pay her any mind, though amid the locals she felt herself to be conspicuously pale. In one of the big squares she wandered for a while; the wrought-iron benches were occupied, mostly by old men with deeply tanned, weathered faces. Pigeons strutted around, chests out, eyes ablaze.

  She found a bench of her own in the shade. The funiculars and the wooden trams clanked away in the distance. There was something secretive and antique about the city, its face turned away from the rest of Europe. The war had happened elsewhere. What had they made of it here, aware that the continent was madly tearing itself to pieces? Perhaps they didn’t care. It struck her now that Lisbon was the furthest she had ever travelled. She had never been outside of Europe; she had barely been ‘abroad’ at all. And what did it signify? Who would ever know in time to come that a thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman had sat in this square contemplating her life one May afternoon in 1948? She tried to re
member the sad Latin phrase Dan had told her recently, it meant ‘under the gaze of eternity’; we live and we die, and the world goes on, not noticing. But to live at all was the privilege.

  She remained there a long time, watching the afternoon light turn yolky, until some unfathomable impulse forced her to her feet. She turned in the direction of the hotel, but as the familiar landmarks called her on she decided to walk the long way round. It would enable her to time her return with the cocktail hour. Bobby had been scouring the guidebook for this evening’s entertainment. Good old Bobs, still lurching from one love affair to another, unwilling to settle; they would never tame her. And yet she had been a little lost since the war. Many were. She seemed to depend more on Amy, the friend of her youth, and their annual summer holiday had become a kind of ritual that neither dared to break.

  She waited at a junction, where the late-afternoon traffic had shoaled and thickened. A tram had halted crosswise right in front of her, its bell clanging. At the windows faces stared, blank as paving stones. For some reason she lifted her eyes to the nearest standing passenger, and her heart took a drastic lurch as the gaze locked on hers. Marita. Amy blinked, thinking to shake the hallucination from her sight. But no: Marita it was, her hair shorter, and a different colour, lighter. Nobody had seen her since that day in June, four years ago. They stared at one another through the glass; it could only have been a matter of seconds (she realised later) and yet the time seemed to swell and slow. Indeed, with the traffic stalled there, Amy felt helpless to resist a natural impulse: haltingly, almost shyly, she raised her hand. Did she expect some acknowledgement in return? She didn’t know what to expect, there wasn’t time to think about it.

  The tram heaved onwards – and just before it did, Marita, who had been holding one of the overhead passenger straps, answered her. She detached her grip, and straightened her arm, hand flat, at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was the gesture of a moment, unremarked by anyone but her.