Nucleus

by Rory Clements

  ‘I’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall, that’s all.’

  ‘You mean you don’t have the Oval Office bugged? Your friends must be slipping.’ He was suddenly impatient to see the back of Eaton. ‘Are we done then?’

  Eaton’s fingers tightened around his glass. ‘There’s something else, a little complication.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Frau Haas’s son, Albert. He’s eight years old. He was coming out of Germany separately, to be met at Liverpool Street railway station by Miss Morris. We know he was put on the train. But it seems he was lifted from his carriage at the border when the train was about to cross from Germany into the Netherlands.’

  ‘Lifted by whom?’

  ‘Border guards . . . Gestapo, perhaps. Not certain.’

  Wilde’s mood changed. ‘Good God, that is not a little complication,’ he said angrily. ‘It’s a hostile act. An outrage! Where is the child now?’

  ‘We don’t know. We assume he has been taken back to Berlin. But so far we’ve had no word. It’s as if he’s vanished from the face of the earth. The embassy over there and the Quakers are looking into the matter with great urgency. Miss Morris and Frau Haas are extremely distraught.’

  ‘This changes things, Eaton.’

  ‘You mean you won’t look after Lindberg?’

  ‘Quite the contrary. It means I will do all in my power to help. If it helps, they can both come here until Lydia gets home. Now,’ – Wilde got to his feet and ushered Eaton to the door – ‘I have things to do.’

  And thinking. Lots of thinking to do. There was still a nagging doubt. No one could have concerns regarding Eaton’s enmity for Nazi Germany. But that didn’t mean he was to be trusted.

  *

  Lydia sat opposite Bertha Bracey on the third floor of Bloomsbury House.

  ‘Nothing,’ Bertha said.

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘The embassy is doing all it can. Miss Forster is in touch with senior members of the regime.’

  ‘They won’t talk to her, will they?’

  ‘You’ll be surprised, my dear. Strange as it may seem, many Nazis have fond feelings towards the Society of Friends. Anyway, we won’t give up. Albert Haas must be somewhere – and so we shall find him and shame them into reuniting him with his mother.’

  ‘We have to do something, Bertha. We can’t just sit here and wait.’

  ‘Patience, my dear. Make use of the patience God teaches us.’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘No. It’s not good enough. I have to do something. Frau Haas can’t go back to Berlin, so I will have to go.’

  Bertha Bracey’s shock registered in her eyes. ‘Is that wise, my dear?’

  ‘Wisdom has nothing to do with it. I accepted responsibility for the boy. Anyway, I know my way around Berlin. If Albert is there, I’ll find him.’

  ‘I need you here, Lydia. And—’ She hesitated, her kind face concerned. ‘Forgive me, my dear, but I ask this as a friend – what of Professor Wilde? He must have returned from America by now. Have you not been in contact with him?’

  Lydia bristled. What had this to do with Bertha Bracey? ‘I was going to call him this evening,’ she said stiffly.

  Bertha picked up the handset from her desk telephone and turned it towards Lydia. ‘I’m just going out to the newsagent. You have the room to yourself for half an hour.’

  *

  Wilde was sitting at his desk when the phone rang. He picked it up.

  ‘Tom Wilde.’

  ‘So you came back.’

  ‘Did you doubt it?’

  ‘Well, it would probably have been safer to stay over there.’

  She still knew how to rile him. But they weren’t going to argue, were they? He softened his tone. ‘Lydia. It’s good to hear your voice.’ Two and a half months was a long time in the history of a relationship, particularly one as difficult as theirs had been in the weeks before he left. ‘When will I see you?’

  She was businesslike. ‘Soon. I gather Eaton will be bringing Herr Dr Lindberg up to stay with you. I’ll be a few more days. Bertha Bracey needs me here.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that—’

  ‘It won’t be long. Tell me about America. Did you have a good journey?’ A pause and then the words he’d hoped to hear: ‘I’ve missed you, Tom.’

  He hoped she meant it. He wasn’t sure. ‘I’ve missed you, too, Lydia. I have a lot to tell you. Mostly, I just want to see you.’

  ‘How was your mother?’

  ‘Strong as an ox in her mind. But I wasn’t convinced. She seemed frail. Look, Lydia, there’s so much to tell – to talk about. I could catch the train down tonight. Lindberg isn’t here yet, and Frau Haas is bedded down at the Bull. There’s nothing to keep me here.’

  No hesitation in her reply. Straight in. ‘No, Tom. To be blunt, I’m working my socks off. I’m really not great company at the moment. Anyway, Eva Haas needs you. You’ve heard about this frightful business with her boy? I’ve been glued to the phone and the wires – that’s why I couldn’t meet you off the boat. You understand, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ He wasn’t at all sure that he did. ‘But wouldn’t it have been better if Frau Haas had stayed in London while inquiries are being made?’

  ‘That was the original plan, but she insisted she had to go up there. I suppose she’s right. There’s nothing she can do in London – and she needs to work or she’ll go mad. Cambridge is the place for her. I won’t be more than a few days. Then we’ll have the long vac to look forward to.’

  She sounded distant, as if London was further away than America. There was something she wasn’t telling him. He didn’t doubt her fidelity, not for a moment, but he was missing something. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘a thousand kisses.’

  ‘And a million back.’

  Just time for those three words, but she didn’t say them, and neither did he.

  ‘The days will fly by, Tom. You’ll have to enjoy May Week for both of us.’

  ‘Lydia, where are you staying?’

  But the line had already gone dead.

  *

  Lydia looked at the phone. Tom had wanted her to go with him to America to meet his mother; she understood that. She understood, too, that with war looming it could be her last opportunity: Mary Wilde was not in the best of health.

  But this was bigger, this work in London. This was about the fate of thousands of children. They had to come first, and if Tom and his mother couldn’t see that, well there was nothing to be done.

  *

  Henty O’Gara wrenched open the rotting window on the ground floor of the boarding house, slipped out into the garden and made his way westwards through the maze of dirty, neglected streets from the railway track in Barnwell. In his pocket was a scrap of paper, part of an ordnance survey map of the town. It was, perhaps, the one thing that could cause him trouble if he was searched, but he could always claim that any tourist would have a bit of map like this to find their way around. It would be a poor piece of evidence to hold him on. The bag of explosives in his room was another matter, of course.

  This was the route he had taken to the Free Library, but now he stopped short, at the edge of the park known as Christ’s Pieces. He waited at the corner of Earl Street, just before the pleasant terraces of Emmanuel Road. They were nice houses, early nineteenth century, he guessed. A little like some parts of Dublin. He suppressed a laugh. The stamp of the British. The stamp of their fucking dominion over a quarter of the globe.

  A group of men were finishing a game of bowls on the green and a policeman in his tall helmet was walking slowly across the centre of the park, hands behind back, looking all around him.

  O’Gara stood and watched for five minutes, smoking a cigarette like any working man loitering between pub and home, until the constable turned away down Drummer Street towards the town centre. The bowls players were packing away their equipment. Dusk lingered this close to midsummer. O’Gara walked to the centre of the
little park, where paths crossed. Through the trees, he caught sight of a church spire, a little way to the north and west. Lowering his gaze, he saw what he was looking for: the wall that separated Christ’s Pieces from Christ’s College. And in the wall, almost in line with the church spire, was a closed wooden door.

  Checking that the policeman hadn’t turned back, O’Gara strode towards the door in the wall. Hold your shoulders back, he told himself, don’t look furtive.

  The door was painted green, but he had no interest in it or what lay behind its peeling paint. It was the brickwork. Five courses up from the pavement, then fifteen bricks to the left. The one with barely any mortar. His hand went to it. It should be loose, but it wasn’t.

  He counted again and was certain he had made no mistake. Behind him he heard a sound. He turned, and flattened his back to the wall. Two undergraduates in billowing gowns were racing each other across the park, laughing as they went. He breathed again.

  Taking a penknife from his pocket, he opened the longer of the two blades and slid it into the mortar to the right of the brick. With the fingernails of his left hand he got a grip on the other side of the brick and that was enough. It came out and fell to the ground, breaking in two with a dull crack.

  O’Gara probed the hole in the wall and pulled out a small edge of cardboard, the cover for a book of matches. He turned it over, and there it was: a telephone number and a time. Picking up the two halves of the brick, he replaced them in the hole.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Deutsche Lufthansa flight took off from Croydon Aerodrome in bright sunshine at 8 a.m. On any other day, Lydia would have baulked at boarding an aircraft bearing a swastika on its tail, but this was the earliest available flight to Berlin, with just one stop, in Amsterdam. She had no option.

  As the plane rose steadily into the cloudless sky, it occurred to her that the pilots could be transferred to the Luftwaffe at a moment’s notice and be sent back to attack Britain along familiar and well-rehearsed routes.

  Her seat was close to the front of the plane, beside the porthole window. She looked out and down through the light scattering of clouds as England turned into a green patchwork of fields and forests, rivers and roads. She had a book, but her eyes were heavy from lack of sleep and she kept it closed in her lap.

  ‘Are you travelling for business or pleasure, young lady?’ the man at her side said in precise English as the plane levelled off at its cruising altitude.

  His voice startled her. He had arrived on board after she had settled herself in the window seat, and plonked himself down beside her. She had nodded to him and said Guten Tag, but then turned away, not wishing to engage in conversation. Now she found herself obliged to reply. She smiled apologetically. ‘A little bit of both.’

  ‘Amsterdam or Berlin?’

  ‘Berlin.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said.

  He was a pink-faced man, clean-shaven with a double chin nestling comfortably on the edge of his collar. She had already decided that he looked German, with his fair hair close-cropped. She guessed he was a businessman of some sort, but you couldn’t tell in these feverish days. There was so much talk of Nazi spies, agents and fifth columnists. He offered her a cigarette and when she declined, took one for himself and lit it, blowing a cloud of smoke in her direction and making her feel queasy.

  ‘I am going home before the war starts,’ he continued. ‘Much as I like England I have no wish to be stranded there, away from my family.’

  ‘Perhaps there won’t be a war.’

  ‘Oh, there will be a war. Fortunately I am too old and fat to fight this time round.’ His belly rumbled and he turned to face her and put out his right hand. ‘Manfred Bloch, young lady. England representative for Seebald Royal Tours.’

  His fingers were limp and podgy and damp. A wave of soapy eau de cologne wafted her way. ‘Should I have heard of your company?’

  He laughed. ‘No, no. It is not the biggest of enterprises. We take holidaymakers on tours of the great houses and palaces of Europe – mostly England, France, Hungary and Germany.’

  ‘And you gain access to these palaces?’

  He laughed again. ‘You have caught me out. No, young lady, we do not have access to Buckingham Palace or Balmoral – but where possible we show the exteriors from a distance. We make these restrictions quite clear to our clients, most of whom are German.’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘I must confess they tend to prefer Windsor Castle to Versailles. I think we have more kinship with England.’

  ‘Then let us hope war can be avoided. Another great war would be a terrible tragedy.’

  ‘Indeed, but we must be realists. I am certain I shall not be returning to your country this year.’

  She felt herself drifting again. Yeats came to mind; slouching towards Bethlehem. She was writing again, more feverishly than she had done for years, but her publishing company was in the doldrums. Nothing had come her way that she loved and so she had published nothing. Her eyes were heavy. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I must rest. I did not sleep well last night.’

  Lydia had not told Eva that she planned to go to Germany herself, for Eva would doubtlessly have tried to dissuade her. She understood the German woman’s need to work, to still her mind. She has been through so much, thought Lydia. Perhaps she no longer had the energy to keep on fighting. But she, Lydia, could not let it go. She had promised to keep Albert safe. If his mother could not go to Berlin then she would go herself. But she would not tell Tom, for he would move the very heavens to prevent her going. And if – when – she found Albert she would accompany him back to London personally. Eaton had been another matter. He had understood instantly why she felt she needed to go, and had offered her advice and the name of a contact.

  The plane droned on. She closed her eyes and turned her head away from Herr Bloch. He left her in peace. Some time later, she felt a hand on her shoulder. ‘Miss,’ her fellow passenger said. ‘We are making our descent.’ She looked out of the window and saw the distinctive crescent of the aerodrome buildings at Tempelhof, close to the heart of Berlin. Everything was grey and cloudy. Smoke rose from a million chimneys, many of them industrial.

  She was puzzled. ‘What happened to Amsterdam?’

  ‘You slept through it. I could see no purpose in waking you as we were not required to disembark.’ He took a card from his pocket. It was embossed with his name and company details. ‘Feel free to call if I can ever be of service, miss.’

  She did not take the card. ‘I do not think I will be going on any royal tours, Herr Bloch.’

  ‘That is not what I meant.’ He pushed the card closer then dropped it in her lap, just as the plane made its landing. ‘Germany is a hard place for a stranger these days.’

  She still felt groggy. The bouncing of the aircraft across the tarmac did not help, but she took the card from her lap. What exactly was he implying?

  ‘I know people,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper, almost drowned out by the propellers as the plane taxied towards the grand terminal building. ‘You never know when you might need assistance.’ He lit another cigarette.

  For some reason, she warmed to him. ‘My name is Lydia Morris,’ she said. She picked up his card and put it in her novel. ‘Thank you. I needed a bookmark.’

  *

  In three years, the great city had undergone profound changes, even out here in the suburbs. From the back of the taxi, Lydia gazed at the swastika banners of red, black and white, that hung from every public building. She spotted a squad of brown-shirted men marching and she saw the smashed and boarded shop windows and knew what they were. Back in August 1936, when she had last been in Berlin for the Olympics, the persecution of the Jews had been hidden away, the Stürmer showcases put into storage so that the so-called newspaper’s foul anti-Semitic message might be concealed for a while. Now there was evidence of persecution and militarism wherever she looked.

  Lydia had wondered if there might be difficulties at the aero
drome, given the strained relations between Germany and Britain. Perhaps she would be detained by border control and customs officials and questioned for hours on end. In the event, the passport inspector had asked her business and she said she was visiting a friend, Miss Ulrike Forster, for a short holiday. He had asked, too, about her religion and race and seemed satisfied by ‘Quaker, British’, although, of course, the religious implication was not strictly true. The customs officer opened her case and sifted her belongings cursorily before closing it again and nodding her through. The official at the pass control, bored or indifferent, stamped her passport, intoned a perfunctory ‘Heil Hitler’, and waved her through, wishing her a pleasant stay in the new Germany. ‘Heil Hitler,’ she said back, knowing that others who failed to respond had been barred entry. At all events, it had been easier to get into the country, she suspected, than it would be to get out for most people.

  *

  Miss Ulrike Forster, one of the Quakers’ organisers in Berlin, lived to the west of the city, in a villa near Schlactensee. She was a serious woman trying to maintain sanity in a world cheapened by brutality and tyranny. She threw the large, heavy door wide. ‘Come in, Miss Morris, please come in.’

  The house was enormous. From the outside it was overblown and intensely ugly, built to impress with baroque pretensions. Indoors, the rooms were high-ceilinged and cold, designed for another age. But they were furnished simply in the Quaker style. No extravagance.

  Lydia hauled in her small suitcase. ‘I’m sorry to land myself on you at such short notice.’

  ‘All are welcome here, Miss Morris.’

  ‘Thank you.’ A question hovered on her lips, then emerged more in hope than expectation. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a word. What must poor Frau Dr Haas be feeling? You know Albert really is the sweetest boy you could meet. I cannot imagine anyone would harm him.’

  Miss Forster spoke in clear, textbook English with every consonant enunciated clearly, but her accent was pure German, having spent most of her fifty years in the country of her mother’s birth. Tall and thin with not an ounce of fat on her, she wore her straight fair hair almost like a medieval helmet. She reminded Lydia of some of her father’s more austere Quaker friends.