‘So, you know, when it was over, and there were so many people dead, and so many empty buildings and so much stuff lying about they went sort of mad. Looting. Benjie talks about men walking down the streets carrying clocks and looking-glasses and lamps. Ridiculous. They couldn’t possibly have got the stuff home. Just seeing something up for grabs and wanting to grab it.’
‘I was there too,’ said Hugo quietly.
‘Of course, I’m sorry. What am I doing telling you about it?’
Lil had never heard Hugo talk about his national service. Even this admission of having been in Germany was a rare opening, through which, being Lil, she immediately thrust a question. ‘Did you see, well, what did you see?’
‘Not much really. I was just a new lieutenant, lowest of the low. But there was a chap. Roger Bates. I’d known him at school. My friend fagged for him. He was a regular officer but he’d got hold of a military police uniform. And the MPs were allowed to go into the locals’ houses. We were absolutely forbidden to, of course. He used to put it on, and go round banging on people’s doors. They’d give him things to make him go away. Or he’d threaten to send his men round, who’d have smashed the place up, and these wretched people would give him a silver candlestick or what-have-you. Extortion. He was recognised by another chap who knew he was in the wrong uniform. His room was crammed with loot. They couldn’t move him at once, so he was being held in this old office we were using as a command post. And I had to sit with him. I had a revolver. If he’d tried to escape I was supposed to shoot him. We just sat and every now and then I’d offer him a cigarette. I just can’t tell you how long that night felt.’
There was a pause. Helen said, ‘Embarrassing for you.’ But she didn’t sound sympathetic. Lil was baffled. How, in the wreckage of a defeated nation, could a contretemps between two Old Etonians have seemed so significant? ‘What happened to him?’ she asked.
‘Odd thing is,’ said Hugo, ‘I’ve no idea. I never heard anything about a court martial. Someone told me later he’d made a run for it next day when they were changing trains. Absolute fiasco.’
The story fizzled out. Hugo seemed disinclined to make any further attempt to describe conditions in post-war Germany. Helen let him off by throwing in another surprise.
‘Benjie used to think that Antony might be another fake. Not looting, or anything like that, but that he might have been passing himself off as military police for his own reasons.’
‘What?’ Lil bridled. She was liking Helen less and less. ‘Are you suggesting …?’
Hugo said, ‘But Antony wouldn’t …’ Antony who was so jolly with Nell, and never registered by even the most nearly imperceptible nuance of manner (Hugo was alive to all of them) the fact that the agent, whether or not he’d been to school with all the other men around the table, was an employee rather than a guest. Hugo liked him almost as much as Lil did.
‘Well I don’t know.’ Helen recovered from her faux pas with a change of tack. ‘But … He’s so amiable. Perfect undercover agent. It wasn’t so hard, back then, to move from one sector to another. His German’s excellent, and he speaks Russian too.’
‘Antony spying for Russia?’ said Lil. ‘Really, for goodness sake.’ This whole conversation was becoming preposterous, and tiresome.
‘He might have been spying on Russia, though,’ said Hugo.
‘You’re right,’ said Lil. ‘We’d never know, would we? Remember when he bought the Titian for Sunny and we spent a whole weekend trying to get him to tell us who his client was?’
‘Poor Ant. You were ruthless. Gosh, you even got him down on the floor and tickled him to make him talk.’
‘I know. Torture! Ant in his lovely herringbone tweed. He hates to have his dignity undermined.’
Hugo and Lil were laughing into each other’s faces. There was something else covert in the rose garden now, but Nell, beneath the bench, didn’t sense it. Shrinking back against clammy green stone, she thought: Antony; spy; ‘Imagine lying to everyone around you’; ‘ought to be shot’.
*
The walkers’ sticks were just for walking with. They were all quite friendly. When Hugo met someone on Wychwood land, someone who didn’t belong, he would say ‘Can I help you?’ in a way that was unmistakably menacing, but Chloe, trapped by a lifetime of good manners, could not but be gracious.
The man carrying the map said, ‘Good afternoon,’ civilly enough.
There was a terrier with them, and a couple of sheepdogs. Dickie stopped crying.
‘Um,’ said Chloe, ‘are you looking for something?’
‘No,’ said the man, who had very curly hair. ‘Just walking.’
He seemed to be waiting for her to pass, but they were going her way. Helplessly, she walked along beside them, Dickie running ahead now with the dogs. What on earth would Hugo say?
‘This is Mr Rossiter’s land,’ she tried. ‘Wychwood. You know it’s private?’
‘It is,’ said the curly man. ‘But there’s a right of way through here.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Chloe.
‘Work here, do you?’
‘Well, my husband does. He’s the agent.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘So are you all on a sort of outing?’ The habit of making polite conversation was unsubduable. For goodness sake, she thought to herself, if a burglar came into our bedroom I’d be asking him if he’d had a tiring journey.
‘I suppose so,’ said the man.
Another woman walking just behind said, ‘Yes we are. We’re having a lovely time. It’s so peaceful here, isn’t it, Bill?’ the latter question addressed to the man beside her.
Chloe smiled at them. Small talk seemed like the only possible refuge from this excruciating situation.
‘Did you all come together?’ she asked vaguely.
‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘Mark here had the idea. He’s local. And he told Bill. And most of the rest of us, we all come from the same estate.’
‘Oh I see,’ said Chloe, to whom the word ‘estate’ was reassuring. ‘Is it near here?’
‘Banbury,’ said the woman. ‘A bit of a step. But we fancied a day out. Our friend gave us a lift in his van.’
‘So, is that Sandford?’ asked Chloe. Sandford belonged to a friend of Christopher’s. Hugo was often invited to shoot there, and sometimes Chloe went for lunch. When the Sandford water meadows froze over there was a great skating party on New Year’s Day, with baked potatoes cooked in the bonfire, and tin trays for the children to slide around on while the huge pink sun went down behind the ruined priory.
‘Banbury,’ said the woman again. To her the word ‘estate’ had different connotations – modern, urban. Chloe left it. Already she was shaping the story as she would tell it to Hugo that evening. He’d say, ‘Honestly, Puss, you’d never make a policeman.’
*
Back in the rose garden, Nell popped her head out between the ladies’ legs.
Hugo, accompanied always by Wully, was apt to treat his daughter with the same nonchalance as that with which he treated his dog. ‘You shouldn’t just whistle her up, you know,’ said his wife. ‘She is human.’ ‘No, I’m not,’ said Nell, ‘I’m Daddy’s other dog.’ ‘Super,’ said Hugo. ‘Spaniel?’ Nell, who was a greyhound, gave him a look of silent disdain, but lolloped after him all the same.
Now he took her reappearance as a matter of course, but the two women were startled. Her head nudging their ankles was alarmingly animal. They’d known she was there, but perhaps they wouldn’t have talked quite as they did had she been in plain sight. She took charge.
‘Have you seen the goldfish?’ She was addressing Helen who, aware that the conversation had become frigid, said, ‘No but I want to,’ and the pair of them set off across the lawn, Helen queenly as ever, Nell her stocky little infanta, or perhaps her petted dwarf, the two of them stepping repeatedly from darkness into light as they crossed the shadows of the yew pillars.
Watching them Hugo said, ‘See t
he stripes. That’s the way I planned it when I planted those yews ten years ago. Not bad at all, is it.’
‘Really not bad in the least. You’re an artist,’ Lil said, meaning it, but with a safety-lock of sarcasm on her voice.
Nell took Helen to the canal, in deep shade now as the sun dipped behind the big cedar. The water, darkened, was strangely more transparent. The fish passed slowly, so vast that only portions of their reticulated flanks showed in the gaps between the lily pads.
‘Have you ever touched one?’
‘I did once. They’re not slimy.’
Their faces floated on the surface of the cedar-green water, rippled into fairground horrors.
‘I’d be afraid. Aren’t you?’
‘I don’t like it when they gollop their food. But I know they won’t hurt me. It’s more frightening to think about the tunnel.’
‘Tunnel?’
‘Like Daddy said. There are all the underground tunnels that the water swishes through in the dark. So if you fell in you might be swept away.’
‘I don’t think they’d be big enough for you to pass through them.’
Exactly. This was so obtuse that Nell despaired of making her understand that that was just what haunted her. To be sucked into the mouth but not swallowed. Imagine being trapped in the black water, skeins of air-bubbles and waterweed escaping past into the subterranean labyrinth. And the great pale fish bumping and shoving to get by.
‘Can you dive?’ she asked, which was meant to be a diversion, because for her diving was a quick splashy business, but Helen responded by talking about Greece, and boys diving for sponges so deep down that it was dark at midday, and there were octopuses bigger and paler than the goldfish, twining their tentacles around the remains of wrecked ships hundreds and hundreds of years old, and the green hands of ancient bronze gods gesticulating to no one but the fishes as they reared up through the shifting sand that glittered in the spangles of light that fell, like coins, from the far-distant surface.
‘You’ve been to Greece?’ asked Nell. She had a book about gods and goddesses. She was very much afraid of the picture of the Minotaur.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve never been abroad.’
‘You will. But where you live would seem to most people as foreign as Greece.’
‘Why?’ The childish question that Nell had sworn to herself she would stop asking.
‘Wychwood is like an island. No one in the outside world lives like this.’
Nell thought about the outside world. She pictured the village, where older girls walked in pairs on summer evenings, their luminous pink and green socks glowing as eerily as those Greek octopuses. And of St Giles’s Fair in Oxford, where the gypsy boys pranced so elegantly in and out between the whirling arms of the Waltzer, and where her first ever purse – blue and white flower-patterned plastic – had disappeared from her pocket. And of London, where her mother went on the train every Tuesday, wearing black, and she sometimes went too, with gloves on because London was so dirty, and where her great-great-aunt used to lie in a four-poster bed hung with pink satin, grinding her teeth because she was so terribly terribly old. It might be that, to Helen, Wychwood was an island, like the one in Peter Pan, full of adventures and oddity, but to Nell – who did her lessons at home with Mrs Hopwood – the outside world seemed stranger and more far away.
‘You mean people in Berlin?’
Helen looked sharply at her, a look that Nell could read easily. This child is quicker than I realised. I must watch what I say. ‘I was thinking just of ordinary people here in England who don’t get invited to houses like this.’
‘I’m not invited. This is Daddy’s work.’
‘My work isn’t like this at all. It’s a little grey room full of filing cabinets.’
Nell was startled. She hadn’t imagined Helen had work. None of her parents’ women friends did. Nonplussed, she changed the subject.
‘Were you in Berlin with Benjie and Antony and Daddy?’
‘No. No. Girls didn’t go. Well, a few did, but not me.’
‘So those things they were talking about – no girl ever saw them.’
‘Hardly any English girls. But all the people who lived there.’
‘So war is like a boarding school, a place men go away to.’
‘Mm. Their island perhaps. And they don’t really like talking about it, mostly. I’m glad Benjie’s different in that way. He’ll talk about anything.’
‘Are you quiet because he’s so noisy?’
Helen laughed. ‘You’re a very wise person, Nell. You understand a lot, don’t you.’
The exchange of personal appraisals broke their complicity. ‘Hugo will be looking for you,’ said Helen, and Nell led the way back, through the curving double yew hedge which brought them round to one of the garden’s surprises. The hedged walk ended at a ten-foot stone wall with a flattened baroque archway through which a fountain was revealed, theatrically low-lit by the ruddy sun. Lil was in the opening, her head thrown back against the smooth dressed stone. Hugo, facing her, had propped a hand on the wall just above her shoulder. Between their rhymed and curving bodies the water glittered, fluorescent. Helen seemed to stumble, then walked on forward calling their names.
*
That Sunday in Fleet Street was mayhem. When the office went quiet shortly before midnight on Saturday, Nicholas walked home along the river. By the time he got to the flat the telephone was ringing. The editor was hauling him back in. He went straight out again without having even put his briefcase down. All his memories of the day had as part of their atmosphere the fact that his teeth felt so gritty, and he hadn’t changed his socks. Doing without sleep, it turns out, is easier than doing without toothpaste.
They’d put three reporters on the first plane to Berlin as soon as the news started coming in over the wires and there wasn’t really much that the rest of them could do, but no one wanted to risk missing out. Nicholas’s beat was Pall Mall. He’d never been to so many clubs in one day (he had the sense to stick to soda water), or got so little substance from so many hours of talk. Everyone had an opinion. No one had much information. It was hellish hot, and people he’d never seen unbuttoned before were turning up to their offices in Whitehall wearing tennis shoes, as though they’d heard the news on the way out into their gardens and hurtled straight into town.
The Travellers’ was seething with handsome craggy types who’d hiked around the Black Forest in the ’30s or shot boar in the Thuringian mountains, or got themselves beaten up in Weimar Berlin – none of which, frankly, was any use to Nicholas. In the Reform people were hurrying up and down the mirror-box of a staircase, or hollering to each other from the liver-spotted marble balconies as though they were rehearsing for Last Year in Marienbad. In the smoking room he tracked down an old mucker who’d given up Fleet Street three years back and gone into the civil service – Trade and Industry. How banal, his fellow-hacks had thought at the time, how bourgeois. The ministry of travelling salesmen. Now he was the man who knew something.
‘The GDR has been buying up every sack of cement going for the past year,’ he said. ‘We’ve been wondering about it. They talk a lot about their construction works – motorways, new housing, homes fit for the heroes of the battle for industrial renewal blah di blah. But as far we can make out, they’re not actually building that much. There’s a chap I could put you on to at the big cement works up in Lincolnshire who can give you chapter and verse.’
Nicholas took the number, but it wasn’t British industrialists he needed to talk to. He wanted a line to Honecker. He met his Foreign Office friend in St James’s Park. They bought orange ice lollies, took their coats off, bagged some deckchairs and lolled side by side under a plane tree. The other man flicked his MCC tie at a passing duck. ‘It may be the end of the world,’ he said, ‘but it’s also Sunday and I’m buggered if I’m going to keep this thing on all day.’
It was like schooldays during exam time, when normal lessons a
re suspended and everyone was buzzing with a mixture of feelings which looked like elation. But when Nicholas was still in lower school one of the senior boys in his house hanged himself in exam week. Obviously there were a lot of people scared witless the day the wall went up, and that probably included some of the ones he talked to, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way they behaved.
His contact told him as much as he knew, but it wasn’t much. Soviet troops encircling the city. This number of tanks. That number of planes scrambled. ‘One thing I’m pretty sure of,’ he said, ‘Khrushchev doesn’t want this to turn into a shooting match. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.’
‘Is Kennedy reliable?’ Nicholas asked.
‘No one knows. He’s not been tested. But when it comes down to it, it’ll be some nineteen-year-old Flash Harry who gets scared and pulls a trigger, and then … The trouble with ultimata is that they create a chain reaction. You do this. We’ll do that. And so on.’
Nicholas saw a girl he knew on the other side of the lake. She was wearing a striking dress – big checks of black, white and electric blue, very low waist like a flapper. Helen used to tell him he was more observant of women’s clothes than any other man she knew. He kept an idle eye on the girl while he talked. She had taken her shoes off and she was walking back and forth under the trees in an aimless kind of way. The person she was waiting for appeared. Nicholas knew him too, and also knew his wife. The girl put her bare arms – very thin, very brown – around his neck. They kissed for a long time. It was that kind of a day.
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