‘I was in the army for six years,’ said Armstrong to Antony. ‘You meet all sorts. You think things out.’
‘But you came back to gamekeeping for one of those who grind the faces of the poor.’
Armstrong didn’t rise to the irony.
‘Old Mr Rossiter did the right thing. Every man who’d done his bit got his job back. He was a good boss.’
‘Christopher didn’t fight, did he?’
‘He could never see a thing. You should have seen the thickness of the lenses on those gig-lamps he wore, even when he was just a little chap. Mind you, there was a fellow in my platoon whose eyesight was every bit as bad. His people wouldn’t have known how to get a fancy doctor give them a certificate, or they couldn’t afford it. I’m glad he didn’t go, though. I’m glad he stayed safe.’
‘You’d never make a revolutionary,’ said Antony, thinking, Nor would I.
‘Slow and steady,’ said Armstrong. ‘Look at our Jack, worked alongside Mr Lane, and Brian Goodyear doing the agent job now, who started out no better off than I did. There’s no need to string people up. Just keep plugging away.’
‘Our’ Jack, thought Antony. Our Jack. Am I one of the people allowed to say that?
‘You’re very good to old Armstrong,’ said Lil to Antony.
‘He’s first-rate company,’ he replied. ‘As I know you know. I hear you’re a regular visitor too.’
‘We’ve got a lot in common. He’s the only person I can talk to about Fergus.’
They say that the birth of children can cement a relationship. Their deaths can too.
*
‘I really have to go,’ said Antony. He had a habit, when he was nervous, of rearranging things that didn’t require it. For the last five minutes he had been tidying the sugar lumps in the metal dish between them.
‘Off you go then,’ said Nell. ‘We’ll be fine. If he doesn’t show up soon I’ll just go back to the flat.’
‘You’re sure you know the way?’
‘Of course.’
It was a relief when he finally took himself off. Nell settled herself back in her chair. Jemima, in her sling, slept and drooled between her breasts. It was peaceful. Jamie would come eventually, she supposed. When she’d told him she was thinking of coming out to Berlin with Antony he’d sounded anxious. ‘I’m working non-stop,’ he’d said. But then, to her surprise, because he didn’t say things like this, he’d said, ‘I do really really miss you both.’ So she’d come.
One of the things about having a baby was how much one valued quietness. Her table was hard up against the café’s window. Outside the plate-glass people kept passing, and looking in at her, or rather at Jemima. If I was in England, she thought, I’d feel obliged to respond somehow, but when you’re a foreigner, you can act invisible. She shut her eyes.
Time passed. Jemima stirred and snuffled and arched her tiny body. There was a spluttering noise from her lower end and at once Nell could smell it. A woman out on the pavement was rapping at the window and shouting. The glass was thick. Nell couldn’t make out what she was saying, probably wouldn’t have understood anyway: her German was rotten. The woman kept banging on the window. She looked wild. A waiter made a shooing gesture. She waved both arms in the air and jumped up and down and then went on down the street dancing. Nell could see her banging on other windows, still shouting. Other people joined her. Some sort of a demo?
‘Come, little mouse,’ said Nell to Jemima, picked up her big bag (so much luggage for such a tiny person) and went to the Damen. There was a changing table – Germans really are better organised than us, she thought. She stripped Jemima to her vest, and cleaned her bottom and put the used nappy in a scented bag. Why do I buy these bags? she thought. The smell is sickening. I actually prefer the smell of poo. She put the nappy in a bin and got out the new one and she and Jemima played the usual games of where’s-it-gone and bum-up and tickle-tummy and all the time she was singing to her, or rather crooning, just little scraps of nursery rhyme, and because they were in Berlin she began to sing the rhymes that Gerti had taught her, Gerti the au pair girl who came to them after Heather left, when even Dickie was really too old to need a nanny any more but who still sometimes saw them into bed when their parents were out, and sang them the songs of her own childhood.
Hampti Dampti, ein schneeweißes Ei
fiel von der Mauer und brach entzwei.
Der König schickt Ritter mit Pferd und Lanz,
doch wer von den Herren macht ein Ei wieder ganz?
When the new nappy was on she played the All-of-Jemima game. Here are Jemima’s FEET. And here are Jemima’s KNEES and here is Jemima’s BOTTOM and so on, always giving the part in question a gentle little shake which made the baby laugh and wriggle. And then she sang Gerti’s rhyme again, and this time, because she was interested to know whether something she had memorised phonetically, as a sequence of meaningless sounds, would make sense now she understood at least a bit of the language, she translated it for Jemima.
Humpty Dumpty, a snowy-white egg –
Which gives it away. It’s a riddle-rhyme. Spoils it to begin with the answer.
Fell off the … Mauer –
Mauer.
Off what did Humpty Dumpty fall?
Now she knew what the madwoman had been shouting. No wonder she looked deranged. Hampti Dampti sat on a Mauer. What did Humpty fall off? The Mauer. ‘Die Mauer ist gefallen!’ That’s what she’d yelled. ‘Die Mauer ist gefallen!’ No wonder she was shouting and dancing. No wonder Jamie wasn’t there. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. The Wall ist gefallen.
‘All fall down Wall fall down,’ she told Jemima as she poppered her into a clean red suit with a panda face on the chest. ‘Wall fall down,’ she sang as she got her back into her sling. Jemima began to wail. This wasn’t right. She’d been hoping for a bottle. They walked back out into the café just as the kitchen door swung open and a dozen people burst through it shouting. Nell could see they had the television on in there. Three of them ran straight through the café and out into the street. The others were spinning between the tables, and people were rising to their feet and hugging each other and shouting and kissing and they were all saying what that first mad-looking Cassandra had been saying. ‘Die Mauer ist gefallen.’ A huge red-faced man hugged Nell and Jemima together and Jemima went quiet in astonishment and then began to cry louder and louder and Nell fought her way back to their table, and found the bottle of formula and got it into Jemima’s mouth, and struggled into her own coat, and got the sling back on because the world may be changed utterly but if you’re looking after a baby you still have to do these things and then at last she found the dummy that she really hardly ever used and popped it into Jemima’s mouth and by this time they were almost alone in the café, but she still went up to pay, but the cashier was dragging on her own coat and said something Nell couldn’t follow but which was pretty easy to understand and the three of them, cashier, baby and the serious-minded civil servant who was, at one of the great turning points of twentieth-century European history, in the ladies’ loo wiping shit off her daughter’s bum, went out into that stirring night.
Selim
When I was first here, if I switched the light on at night, dusty moths came and circled the bulb, casting enormous shadows onto the inside of the paper shade. Now, nearly two months later, the insects have left. I am grateful for the companionship of the dribbling of the little fountain in the centre of the pool.
‘Have to turn that off soon,’ said young Green. (It is only this week that I have understood that ‘young’ is not his name, but a descriptive adjective.) The pipes, he said, have to be drained before the first frost or they are likely to burst. He explained this carefully, as though to a small child. I didn’t tell him that I lived three winters in Oxford, and that I am a skilled amateur mechanic.
My colleagues on the magazine have apologised for printing the offending extract. I was not consulted: I accept that in fleeing I forfeited my authority
. Not one British newspaper has taken notice either of our original defiance, or of our subsequent grovelling surrender.
Nell has gone to Berlin. The television is full of news from Eastern Europe. There is a kind of hushed rapture in the commentators’ voices. It is as though the Western world is watching the last lap of a steeplechase, and their horse is coming up on the outside and there’s only one more fence before the finish and they are all rigid with hope and hardly daring to breathe for fear of missing the moment when their horse’s nose goes out in front. (When I was small my father used to take me to watch his Pathan friends racing in wooden wheeled chariots down the dirt roads of the Punjab – ‘Attend,’ he said. ‘You are seeing what the Greek Alexander saw.’ Homesick in my first winter at Oxford, I’d spend as many Saturdays as I could manage at the races.)
They’re watching the wrong horse. The wrong race. For people here it looks as though, all of my lifetime, the world has been cut by a slash that ran through Berlin. East/West Communist/Capitalist Soviet/American. Now that cut is closing and everyone is getting ready to celebrate, as though once all’s right with Europe, then all’s right with the world.
Have they forgotten what brought me here? These ideological disputes between two sets of white Westerners can perhaps be resolved. Not so the antipathy between those who are harbouring me, and those who would have me stoned.
My father has written me a long letter. There is a great deal about Ovid in it, but less about Cicero, because he does not want to tell me, any more, that he expects me to be killed.
When I stepped out in the dark before dawn one morning, I found myself heehawing like a donkey, trying to control my breath. I think it is possible to die of fear.
*
Jamie wasn’t going to the press conference. ‘My wife’s coming over with the baby,’ he said at lunchtime in the press-club. ‘I’ve got to stick around.’
‘My wife’. ‘The baby’. The words still embarrassed him. Saying them, he felt like he was acting. Not that he didn’t love the two of them. He did. He really did. When Jemima reached out damp translucent fingers, and poked two of them up his nose, he fell in love absolutely and for ever. I’d die for her, he thought, pleased with himself. But though he might perhaps have died for his daughter, had circumstances required it, he wouldn’t, as it turned out, miss out on a story in order to welcome her to Berlin.
His friend from Associated Press, who had four children, and was no longer either sheepish or wonderstruck about paternity, said, ‘The family can wait. Something’s going to happen. Don’t know what. Don’t know when. But if you take your eye off the ball for a second you can bet your fucking life that’s when it’ll all go up.’ And Jamie thought, He’s right, and found a telephone, and called the flat, and got no answer, but he left a message on the machine anyway and he went through the checkpoint with the AP man and settled next to him in the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the ministry’s press-room. But he’d been up since the small hours walking among the crowds keeping vigil on Potsdamer Platz, searching, as everyone there was doing, for a sign, and while Schabowski was droning on he fell asleep.
Jamie was a snorer. The AP man would elbow him when the whistling and the hog-snorting got too loud, and he’d shift in his chair and nod off again. But about three-quarters of an hour into the East German minister’s statement the elbowing became brutal and he woke up angry. Something was happening. People were scribbling. ‘What?’ he said to the AP man. ‘Travel restrictions lifted,’ muttered the man and leant forward rudely so that Jamie couldn’t keep pestering him for more. The big grey-faced man on the podium was shuffling through papers. Impatient. Seemed not to find what he was searching for. Looked a bit irritated. Said, without emphasis, or much conviction, ‘Sofort.’ Straightaway.
And straightaway Jamie felt the kind of lurch you get in dreams when you realise you’re onstage and you don’t know your lines, don’t even know what play you’re in, and you’re not even sure your trousers are on. The man from the Telegraph was on his feet, asking, ‘Where does that leave the Berlin Wall?’ and the AP man was running, and so were most of the other journos, for the corridor with its bank of phones.
*
Guy seldom got up now. Flora, Benjie and Lil took it in turns to sit with him. His room was in the old part of the house, pre-Woldingham. A four-poster bed, linen-fold panelling. Two mullioned windows just a maddening little bit off-centre for the vista of the great beech avenue. ‘Norris had this room,’ said Benjie. ‘People say he planted the avenue mainly for his own pleasure, but if so I do think he might have got it straight.’
Lil came up every morning from Wood Manor, leaving her car by Antony’s lodge and walking along the Grand Vista, taking her time. When she reached the junction of the two avenues she paused.
After Christopher died, she’d commissioned an artist whose work she’d been eyeing for decades to make an installation for that place as a memorial to him. Everyone had made a fuss at first.
‘You know that’s the highest point, Mrs Rossiter,’ said old Armstrong. ‘They’ll be able to see it from church tower to church tower.’ Of course she knew.
Benjie said, ‘I know a chap who’s been rescuing big things from Eastern-bloc countries and floating them down the Bosphorus. He’s got some socking great obelisks. The Magyar nobility loved them, apparently. You’d only have to pay transport.’
‘Women,’ said Lil, ‘do not erect obelisks.’
Antony trusted her taste. He said, ‘Christopher always talked about putting something there.’ It wasn’t true, but Lil said, ‘Yes, he did, didn’t he,’ and he thought, She’s lying too, but we mean well.
Now the piece was installed, and it was an obelisk’s antithesis. A disc of black metal laid flat on the ground and so highly polished it exactly reflected the sky. A circle of mirrored glass structures of about human height, like standing stones, positioned around it. ‘The Amalienburg,’ said Antony, when he saw the plans. Wet leaves floated on the black circle. The mirrors reflected and matched the negative shapes between wet black tree-trunks, sending flashes of uncanny light across the space. Some things, Lil thought, as she did every time she passed this way, I have done right.
Ensconced in the wing chair in Guy’s room she reminisced inconsequentially, conjuring up her past life for him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Normally reticent in the extreme, she talked to him as openly as though she were talking to herself. As though it was safe to do so; as though he was already gone. In his lucid moments he brought up memories too. ‘The first time I came here,’ he said, ‘I was with Helen and Benj, in that noisy red car. And I saw you walking across the lawn with Hugo, a long way off, and I didn’t know either of you, but I was sure that you were lovers, or that you ought to be. You were both exquisite. In white.’
‘We’d been playing tennis, I suppose,’ Lil said, prosaic.
Guy ignored the interruption. ‘Did you love him?’
Lil looked out of the window, took time answering. ‘I think I thought then that he loved me, and that was intoxicating. But I don’t know now whether he did. He was a very conventional person, really. He liked being married to Chloe. He loved his dog and his children. Beauty is very confusing. You see someone who looks divine and you suppose they must have remarkable interior lives as well. It’s not fair on them.’
‘I know,’ said Guy, ‘God, don’t I know!’ and they both thought of the dozen or so boys he’d brought out to Wychwood over the years – lovely as the day is long, but pretty annoying, some of them.
‘Well I can’t say I was ever dumbstruck with wonder by your choices,’ said Lil and they laughed. But she thought, and perhaps he did too, Where are those men now? Marriage may be an outmoded institution but in-sickness-and-in-health isn’t a bad rule. All those wild years and gaudy nights. All those myriads of men. They’ve all pushed off and left, and he has to come back to his family. Or sort-of family.
Guy’s father had kept his distance for years, disapprovi
ng. Now he wanted to do the right thing, but Guy said, ‘He’s left it too late.’ For all his studied levity, he could be harsh.
In the afternoons Guy slept, then Flora came up with tea and cake and they switched on the telly. They saw Schabowski’s press conference and couldn’t believe it and then saw it repeated over and over again – the exhausted face, the tetchy tone. Benjie rang a Berliner architect he worked with sometimes. ‘No one knows,’ she said. She sounded anxious. ‘The crossings haven’t opened. But everyone’s celebrating. All this dancing in the streets. It’s premature.’
‘Oppression is a con,’ said Guy. ‘Liberation could be too. Act like it’s happened, and happen it does.’
*
The hotel lobby in which Antony sat was all brown. Dark stained-wood floors. Leather chairs designed like sections of a cube. Wall lights with mottled brown glass shades. His companion – her ostensible job was in the trade department at the embassy – was in brown too, a suede coat, smudges of brown eyeshadow. Even brown lipstick. And their drinks – lager for him, rum and Coke for her. Antony was amused. Sepia, he thought. Having a highly trained eye does occasionally yield unexpected pleasures. What a good thing, he thought, I packed my brogues.
‘Oleg wants his house in the Home Counties,’ she was saying, ‘and his golf-club membership. He’s certainly earned it.’
‘But why’s he coming now?’ asked Antony.
‘He expects the transition to be bloody.’
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