by M. M. Kaye
Miranda did not smile. She was silent for a moment, and then she said abruptly: ‘Robert, who do you think did it?’
Robert did not answer her. He was looking past Miranda to someone behind her, and she saw his mouth tighten queerly as Sally Page’s clear voice cut through the babble of talk and the clink of glasses.
‘I’m so sorry we’re late, but Andy had to go down to the office about something.’
Robert’s eyes came back to Miranda. ‘I’m sorry—what did you say?’
Miranda repeated the question.
‘Stuck a knife into the Brigadier, you mean? God knows! Some nasty little ex-Nazi I suppose. I’d stop worrying about it if I were you ’Randa.’
‘But Simon Lang says it could only have been one of the people who went to the Families’ Hostel in Bad Oeynhausen; because of the knife. And that means us—those of us who dined there I mean.’
‘Oh yes, I heard that too. But I don’t believe it means a thing. Look at that bunch of kids for instance. Any one of them might have walked off with the paperknife—you know what a fascination knives have for children—and then got bored with it and dropped it on the platform or in the corridor or the loo. Forget it sweetie!’
He smiled down at her anxious face and covered the hand on his arm with one of his own in a brief and comforting pressure.
Miranda grinned at him affectionately, and looking away, encountered Simon Lang’s coolly observant gaze.
She had not realized he was here and the discovery came as something of a shock. He was standing at the far side of the room near the door that led into the hall, and he did not make any attempt to disguise the fact that he had been watching her. His face was unsmiling and his eyes, across the width of the room, were very bright. He looked, thought Miranda, as though a new and interesting idea had suddenly occurred to him.
She tried to stare calmly back at him, but could not do it; and after a moment her gaze wavered and turned aside. Her hand tightened convulsively on Robert’s sleeve and Robert said: ‘I can’t think why we should be having such a gloomy conversation at a Sunday morning beer party. Let’s talk about something cheerful … Hullo, Norah!’
Miranda released his arm and turned to see Mrs Leslie, wearing a distressingly sensible tweed suit, standing beside her.
‘We saw you in church,’ said Robert. ‘Is your husband here?’
‘Yes. He’s gone into a huddle with your C.O. and one or two others in the dining-room. They appear to be talking shop as usual. Good-morning, Miranda.’
Mrs Leslie smiled at Miranda and sat down on the arm of a chair. ‘Do you think you could get me a glass of sherry, Robert? I do so dislike beer before luncheon.’
Robert departed in the direction of the dining-room, and Mrs Leslie turned to Miranda.
‘Well, what do you think of Berlin? I hear you went on a conducted tour yesterday.’
‘Interesting, but very depressing,’ said Miranda. ‘It looks as if it would take a hundred years to clear up the mess. It must have been a beautiful city once.’
‘It wasn’t. Imposing perhaps—bits of it—but not beautiful. And you’re wrong when you say it will take a hundred years to restore it. You don’t know the Germans! Frankly, they terrify me.’
‘Terrify you? Why? Do you think they’ll go Nazi again?’
‘Oh, I’m not worrying about their politics. It’s their industry that frightens me. Haven’t you noticed it yet? My dear, in our last army house at home we had to have the place painted and a few odd jobs done. It took over a month; and a large proportion of that time was spent making and drinking tea. It took three full days to put a gate up, and a fourth morning to come back and fetch the tools that had been left behind because it was a nuisance carrying tools in a bus during the rush hour!’
‘At least you weren’t paying for it yourself,’ said Miranda with a laugh.
‘My dear girl,’ said Norah Leslie tartly, ‘you miss the point. Someone was paying for it. And it was pretty slipshod work at that, let me tell you! I could have done most of it myself single-handed in half the time and for a quarter of the money. Our country is still too intent upon its tea-breaks and its next pay rise to buckle to. But not the Germans! Have you watched them build a house out here? I have and it scares me. No tea-breaks or “go slow”, or a good workman being forbidden by his union to lay more bricks than a mediocre one. No five-day week either! They are willing and eager to work flat out. I watch a gang of German workmen spitting on their hands, and I get a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. These people are finding their feet again and bursting with confidence. They know where they are going, and just exactly how soon they’ll get there. And that’s going to be too soon for a lot of us! Oh, thank you, Robert!’
‘I seem to have slopped it about a bit,’ apologized Robert.
Mrs Leslie removed her gloves and accepted the glass gingerly.
‘It’s nice to see you again, Norah,’ said Robert leaning on the back of the chair: ‘I thought I’d see something of you in Fayid, but you went home to take a child to school or something, and I never saw you at all; except once in the middle distance. Amazing really how families who live next door to each other for years can lose touch completely as soon as one of them moves away. The war had a lot to do with it I suppose.’
‘Partly that; and of course I was abroad a great deal,’ said Mrs Leslie. ‘I heard news of you from time to time, and I saw the announcement of your marriage in the Telegraph of course.’
‘That’s where women have the advantage of us,’ said Robert with a laugh. ‘Not many men read the Births, Marriages and Deaths columns—or not until they reach the age when it’s only the last of those that interests them! When were you married, Norah?’
‘I married Edward in 1948,’ said Mrs Leslie.
‘Good Lord! You’re a mere bride! I imagined you’d been married for years.’
‘My first husband was killed in the war. You and I, Robert, have both married twice.’
‘Oh!… Oh—er—yes,’ said Robert. He appeared momentarily disconcerted. ‘That reminds me,’ he said after a perceptible pause, ‘where’s Lottie, ’Randa? I hope she’s not creating mayhem somewhere?’
‘She’s in the garden with the Lawrence children. They’re being policed by Mademoiselle,’ said Miranda.
‘Thank God for that!’
Mrs Leslie laughed. ‘The penalties of fatherhood catching up on you, Robert?’
‘You’re telling me!’ said Robert. ‘By the way, how are your parents, Norah? And Sue?’
There was an infinitesimal pause before Mrs Leslie answered. Then: ‘They’re dead,’ she said flatly.
She stood up abruptly and handed him her empty glass, and Robert said: ‘I’m sorry, Norah.’
‘You needn’t be,’ said Mrs Leslie. She nodded at Miranda, retrieved the gloves that had fallen off her lap onto the chair, and walked quickly away across the crowded room.
‘That was obviously an unfortunate question,’ said Robert slowly. ‘But how the hell is one to know? Oh, well____’ He shrugged his shoulders and turned away, and a little later Miranda saw him talking to Sally Page. He was looking young and gay and insufferably handsome, and once again, as in the Soviet Garden of Remembrance, Miranda was conscious of a sudden pang of irritation and anxiety.
She was for the moment alone and could allow her attention to wander, and it was perhaps because of this that she became aware that from different parts of the room three other people were also watching Robert. Stella with a little anxious frown on her white forehead, Andy Page with a sullen scowl, and Norah Leslie with a curiously speculative look. And that from the open doorway that led into the dining-room Colonel Leslie was watching his wife; his expression a mirror-image of her own.
With a confused idea that she should do something about it, Miranda edged her way through the chattering guests towards Stella, but just before she reached her an unknown man claimed her attention and Miranda turned instead to Andy Page.
&nbs
p; Andy Page was a slim young man who looked as though he should have been an artist or a writer, or a newspaper correspondent. Almost anything but a soldier. A stray lock of hair was perpetually falling over his forehead, giving his thin features something of the look of a young stage genius, and even when in uniform there clung about him a vaguely Bohemian air.
But Andy Page was anything but a genius. He was in fact a fairly ordinary and rather likeable young man of no more than average intelligence, and people were apt to wonder why such an outstandingly pretty creature as Sally Barclay had ever married him: forgetting that he was probably the first man she had had a chance to fall in love with; Sally being barely seventeen when she met him, and having married him, in the teeth of parental opposition, three days after her eighteenth birthday.
‘Hullo, Andy’ said Miranda gaily. ‘What did you think of the conducted tour yesterday? Do you think you got any good photographs?’
Andy turned quickly. He would really be quite good-looking if he didn’t look so sulky, thought Miranda—and smiled at him.
Miranda’s long lashes tilted charmingly when she smiled, and the ghost of a dimple accented the lovely curve of a mouth that Rossetti might have painted. Her shining hair curled about an absurd little hat that was no more than a triangle of topaz velvet that matched her deceptively simple woollen frock and brought a glint of sherry-coloured light into her grey eyes. Andy Page was only human. His scowl vanished and he smiled back at her.
‘I hope so. It’s quite a good camera. A bit elderly, of course, but I can’t afford a better one just now. You know, Miranda, if I thought I could get away with it I’d go into the black-market racket in a big way, if only to get my hands on some of those new German cameras. They’re marvels! Do you know what I’d like to do?’
His face was suddenly animated and his eyes bright, and for a moment he looked as young, or younger, than Sally: ‘I’d like to chuck the Army and take up photography. The sort of thing Beaton and Schiavone and Olins do. It fascinates me! I buy up all the fashion magazines I can get my hands on just to gloat over those photographs. I saw some Italian ones the other day—outdoor ones of cottons, taken in Rome, in a wind. All movement and light. Terrific!’
He sighed, and the enthusiasm drained out of his face and his voice went flat again: ‘Oh, what’s the use? I shall never do it.’
He looked Miranda up and down and said abruptly: ‘Your clothes always make everyone else’s look too fussy. Even that bundle of junk you wear on your wrist looks all right on you, though I detest jangling charm bracelets on most women.’
Miranda laughed. ‘Thank you, Andy. I expect it’s because I can afford so few clothes that I have to choose really plain ones that not only look good, but wear well.’
‘I wish you’d tell Sally that,’ said Andy moodily. ‘God knows I can’t afford to give her a decent dress-allowance, but she will buy things that look all right the first time she wears them and pretty dreadful ever after.’
‘When you are as pretty as Sally it doesn’t matter what you wear,’ said Miranda firmly. ‘If she wore a sugar sack she’d look lovely in it, and you know it!’
‘Sugar sacks are about what she’ll be reduced to at the present rate,’ said Andy bitterly. ‘That is if____’ He stopped suddenly in mid-sentence and flushed, and Miranda, in a praiseworthy attempt to change the conversation, asked after the new flat. But the topic was not a success. Andy replied morosely that it was sordid and uncomfortable, but that he supposed that they would just have to pig it there for a year.
Miranda was saved the necessity of commenting upon this gloomy statement by the appearance of Stella. Mademoiselle and Lottie, said Stella, were already in the car, and Robert was waiting to drive them home. Miranda gave Andy what she hoped was an encouraging smile, and departed.
* * *
Rain fell again during the afternoon, but towards evening the sky cleared and sunlight glittered on the wet rooftops.
‘Who’s for a walk?’ asked Robert. ‘We could all do with some fresh air after stuffing indoors the entire day. Lottie and Mademoiselle can come too.’
They set off down the road, choosing the direction at random and taking any turning that seemed promising, and some five minutes later met the Leslies, who turned and walked with them along the clean-washed streets that glistened with rain.
Early cherry blossom and deep pink almond frothed among the wet spring leaves in the late evening sunlight, and at first, in contrast to most of Berlin, the roads down which they went seemed to be singularly untouched by war. But presently between the neat houses with their white-painted gates and green gardens there appeared gaping, weed-grown spaces where other houses had once stood and where only ruined walls and fallen rubble now remained.
‘What’s that?’ inquired Miranda, pointing to a long, low hill just visible above the distant treetops. ‘Were there houses on there once?’
Colonel Leslie, to whom the question had been addressed, shook his head. ‘It is houses.’
‘I mean the hill over there.’
‘So do I. It wasn’t there before the war. It has been made from the rubble of bombed houses. Every day lorry-loads of rubble are brought from the ruins and dumped there. And that is the second hill! The first one already has grass and greenstuff growing on it. In winter the Berliners ski on them, and there will come a time when people will have forgotten how they came to be there and accept them as natural features of the landscape.’
‘How gruesome!’ said Stella.
‘Why? The London that we know is built on the ruins of many earlier Londons.’
‘“Cities and Thrones and Powers stand in Time’s eye almost as long as flowers—”’ quoted Miranda under her breath.
‘“—which daily die”.’ Colonel Leslie finished the quotation for her. ‘Yes, one must not take the close view of these things, but try to look at them with the eye of history.’
‘But that’s so cold-blooded,’ protested Stella.
‘One should be cold-blooded,’ said Colonel Leslie. ‘Hot-blooded people are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s tragedies. An action done in hot blood is merely violent and frequently messy. Those performed in cold blood are at least calculated, and probably, in the long run, necessary.’
‘I’m no good at arguing,’ said Stella, ‘so I’m not going to try. Lottie, darling, don’t walk through all the puddles, there’s an angel-chick. Isn’t that the Marsons, Robert?’
They had turned into a quiet street overshadowed by trees. Along one side ran a high wall with the tops of trees showing above it, while on the other was the gutted ruin of a house standing in what must once have been a large and well-kept garden bounded by a shoulder-high wall and a tangle of laurels. Gazing in at the ruin through a rusty wrought-iron gate were Harry and Elsa Marson.
Harry Marson turned and waved as they approached: ‘Hullo, have you come to see the cross that marks the spot where the accident occurred? Elsa wanted to see it too.’
‘What accident?’ inquired Miranda.
‘The accident, of course. Do you mean to say you didn’t know? This is it. Herr Whatisname’s house. The character who bumped off his domestic staff and decamped with a Rockefeller’s ransom in Dutch diamonds.’
‘Is it really? What a thrill! Let’s go in and have a look.’
They pushed open the rusty gate and walked up a sunken, weed-grown path to where a short flight of steps led up to the gaping space where a front door had once been. The button of the doorbell was still there, a white china circle incongruously bright and unbroken against the blackened stone.
The bomb that had hit the house had caused less damage than the fire that had followed, and the greater part of the building was still standing. ‘No. Don’t go in!’ warned Colonel Leslie sharply, pulling Miranda back. ‘It isn’t safe to go exploring this sort of ruin. Everything might cave in at any moment. That’s why most of these bomb-damaged buildings carry warning notices—like that one…’ He pointed with his walking-s
tick at a weather-worn noticeboard, half-hidden by weeks, near the foot of the steps.
Sun had blistered and faded the once-bright letters, and wind, rain and snow had combined to make them barely legible. But it was still possible to read the red-printed warning ACHTUNG! that headed it, and, further down, another favourite and all-too-familiar word Verboten. Though exactly what was forbidden was by now in doubt.
‘Not that it matters,’ concluded the Colonel, commenting on that fact, ‘because no one who’s been in this country for longer than half an hour could fail to realize what those two words mean. And in this case it’s sound advice—“Keep out!”’
‘Yes, do let’s!’ agreed Stella with a shudder. ‘Besides, it’s getting late. Mademoiselle, will you start back with Lottie? Come on, ’Randa.’
She tugged at Miranda’s arm, and as they went back down the steps to the path, the others following, Harry Marson suggested a visit to the garage.
Weeds had grown up about it and weather and rain had left their mark on the walls that the builders had left unfinished before the fall of France. ‘But you can still see where the lime pit was,’ said Harry Marson, poking about interestedly among the weeds and rubble.
No one else appeared to share his enthusiasm. They stood in silence, looking at the discoloured walls and the tangle of weeds.
The sun had been moving swiftly down the sky and now, as they stood in the deserted garden, it dipped behind the long hill of rubble that rose behind the far trees, and left the weed-grown garden and the shell of the ruined house to the cold spring twilight.
‘I wonder if they’ll ever come back?’ mused Harry Marson. ‘The Ridders, I mean.’