The Road Between Us

by Nigel Farndale

  A sinewy and laconic 56-year-old with a German accent, manicured nails, all-year skiing tan and silver hair that hangs down below his collar, Walser looks more like a Milanese art dealer than a master of the universe. As is his custom, when he reaches the car he gets to his knees as if in Muslim prayer. It is to check for explosives under the 4x4. He knows Mike will already have checked with his mirror device, but for Walser the double check has, as he once explained, become a superstition. Mike doesn’t take it personally. He understands. If anything, it makes him admire his boss even more.

  Walser opens the door, acknowledges Mike with a nod, says nothing.

  He is known for his silence. According to a profile Mike has read about him in the Financial Times, he wears it defensively, like a layer of body armour, but he can also use it offensively, crushing his opponents under its weight, or obliging them to fill it with one-way chatter that puts them at a psychological disadvantage. From what Mike can determine, Walser has been married three times but is single now. And he has few friends at work. While his more clubbable colleagues in the banking world will cultivate a certain urbanity and wit as tools of their trade, Walser won’t even start a phone conversation with ‘hello’. And he will always be the first through a door that is being held open for two people.

  Smiling does not come easily to him either – and when people approach his desk he will wave them away. He protects his privacy fiercely and has for the most part managed to avoid giving interviews to the financial press, despite being the most senior executive in the London division of Rheinisch-Westfälische, the provincial German investment bank he has, over the past four years – and almost single-handedly – turned into a bulge-bracket, mainly through a series of mergers and hostile takeovers. Walser weathered the financial crisis of 2008–9 better than most.

  Into the vacuum of Walser’s silence has been sucked a blizzard of rumours, as blinding as it is white. In the 1970s he had been a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, that is one. He has had death threats, hence his obsession with security, that’s another. The most persistent is that his father had been in the SS – the commandant of a concentration camp, no less. Mike has checked the records but hasn’t been able to find any SS members with the surname Walser. Then again, the commandant of a concentration camp would have changed his name after the war, presumably, perhaps when escaping to Argentina with the likes of Mengele and Eichmann.

  When the infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign disappeared from above the gates of Auschwitz in 2009 there was a rumour that it had been stolen to order, for a collection – Walser’s order, Walser’s collection. Mike has no idea whether that was the truth, but he does know that his boss collects Nazi memorabilia. The usual items: SS ceremonial daggers, Iron Crosses, documents signed by Hitler. Mike has seen them. But he also knows that rumours of this sort are not uncommon about German bankers of a certain age, especially in recent years after it emerged that German banks had loaned the money for the building of the concentration camps. Deutsche Bank had funded Auschwitz-Birkenau; Rheinisch-Westfälische, Bergen-Belsen.

  Another rumour doing the rounds at RWB is that Walser’s driver is also a bodyguard, one who is licensed to carry a handgun.

  When he started, Mike was approached by one of Walser’s colleagues and asked about this alleged gun. He had merely said that his working arrangements were private; Walser, not the bank, employed him. The colleague said that Walser had a strange habit, that twice a day he would close and lock his office door for five minutes or so. His blinds were always shut anyway. The man had speculated that Walser was having a ‘power nap’ in there – either that or a ‘power wank’. Mike said nothing but took satisfaction from knowing that the man would never have dared say that to Walser’s face. Besides, Mike knows what his boss is doing when his door is locked, and there is another odd habit only he knows about, something Walser does at the same time every day. Mike isn’t about to share that with anyone either, because he respects Walser. More than that, he feels a keen loyalty to him, something approaching devotion.

  At 6.30, the car begins its glide towards the City, taking, as usual, a slightly different route from the one taken the day before. Mike turns on Radio 4 so that Walser can hear the news headlines. More phone hacking, more crises for the euro, more about the disruption to flights being caused by the eruption of Norway’s Beerenberg volcano. When the sports news comes on, Mike turns the radio off so that his boss can read the Financial Times. He knows his routines. It is one of the reasons Mike likes working for him. Another is the uniform: he is not required to wear one. An open-neck shirt and jacket is fine. The jacket is needed anyway, to cover the shoulder holster in which he keeps his Browning 9mm pistol, the one with the clip filed down and the safety on.

  After dropping Walser off at the main entrance of RWB, Mike drives round the side of the building and parks in the underground car park there. He then sips black coffee as he waits in the bank’s refectory, located in the corner of a second-floor atrium. He likes it in here because he can watch the stressed-looking bankers come and go, trying to imagine what it is they do exactly, apart from worry.

  He also likes to use the time to catch up on some military history. Today he is reading a critically acclaimed new hardback about the atrocities committed by the Red Army in the final months of the Second World War.

  He is so engrossed in the book he forgets the time and when, six hours after sitting down, a text comes through from Walser’s secretary, he feels momentarily disorientated. Can he be ready with the car in five minutes? Walser wants to go to the Imperial War Museum. Mike has driven him there before.

  They cross town in their customary silence and, after he has dropped Walser off at the entrance gate to the museum, Mike goes to the Library Street car park, an eight-minute walk away. There, he removes his jacket, unstraps his holster and locks his handgun away in the glove compartment. He had been searched last time they went to the museum and, even though he had been able to produce his small-arms licence and show his security ID card, the police had been called, the gun had been confiscated and the red tape involved in getting it back had been irritating.

  Mike doesn’t mind the trips to the museum. Quite enjoys them, in fact. He is obsessed with the Second World War himself and will sometimes plan his whole evening’s viewing around the Führer. The Hitler Channel, as he calls the History Channel, usually has back-to-back Nazi porn, even if, as a fig leaf, they will sometimes squeeze in a documentary about Mary Queen of Scots, or the invention of the steam engine.

  Mike takes the stairs rather than waiting for the lift to the Holocaust Exhibition on the third floor. At the top he takes in the sign warning visitors to turn off their mobile phones, as if they are entering a church. In a way they are – a shrine to human suffering.

  As he reaches the dimly lit room showing photographs of living skeletons staring mutely into the camera from behind barbed wire, Mike feels the usual gravity descend upon him, a stealthy saturation. He studies an image of a man in civilian clothes kneeling on the lip of a mass grave, an SS soldier holding a gun to his head. How had they allowed these photographs to be taken? For their records, no doubt – that Germanic craving for bureaucracy always damned them. Another image shows a pyramid of naked female bodies in a mass grave. The caption reveals it is the work of the Einsatzgruppe C, the SS paramilitary death squads in the Ukraine. Mike wonders what it is with the Nazis and nudity. There was something fetishistic about this need to strip people before they killed them. But there was probably a practical reason. Flesh decomposes more quickly than fabric.

  Mike sees Walser across the room contemplating a painting. He is folding his arms and putting his hand to his chin. He then takes a couple of steps back and cocks his head. It is an oil painting about three feet by five which shows an SS officer on a black horse. The officer is wearing a black leather jacket, the tails of which are spread out over the back of his saddle. His boots, jodhpurs, gloves and cap are also black. Were it not for the stil
lness of the painting, its lack of emotion and movement, this SS man might have been one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As it is, he is looking at the gallows to his left, as if contemplating his own fate. The signature and date appear to have been painted over, but a caption on the frame reads: ‘An SS officer believed to be the commandant of a concentration camp, painted during the war by a prisoner.’

  Mike gives Walser a sidelong glance and wonders if this is his father. Probably. It would make sense. But he knows better than to ask. Don’t mention the war. He is sure Walser has loaned this painting. Mike hasn’t seen it in his private collection, but a week earlier he had delivered a painting to the museum that was about this size, handing it over to the curator in a packing crate.

  He doesn’t know whether it is true or not about Walser’s father being in the SS but even if it is, Mike feels that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the son. He reckons he isn’t a bad judge of character. He finds his boss to be a decent and sensitive man. Those who are suspicious of him do not know how his eyes have a wet film on them whenever he listens to Bach.

  As they drive back to the City, Mike puts on a CD of the Brandenburg concertos, without needing to be asked. After dropping Walser at the bank, he goes for some lunch and then reads his book again, this time in the car. He will not be needed now until after the markets close.

  At 5pm he is waiting in the bank’s underground car park. This is the strangest part of his daily routine – the ‘odd habit’ Walser’s colleagues would love to know about. He will drive his boss a couple of miles and then drop him off at Mile End tube. What Walser does then, Mike knows, is none of his business. He will wait there for him, outside the station, and Walser will return in an hour, get in the car and clip on his seat belt without saying a word.

  The Nike bag suggests he is going to the gym, but Mike suspects it is something to do with a charity, his boss doing an hour’s voluntary work in a homeless shelter, perhaps. Because that is something else people don’t know about Walser. He makes substantial charitable donations, always anonymously. Mike usually acts as the go-between.

  Walser’s latest act of unsung generosity has been to offer Edward Northcote and his daughter, either together, separately or with friends, the use of his château in Alsace, for as long as they like, any time they feel in need of a holiday. Mike had driven round to their house in Parsons Green to deliver the letter personally, and as it wasn’t sealed he had taken the liberty of reading it. Walser explained in it that he had heard about their story in the news and had been moved by it. Northcote’s daughter had opened the door. Mike had liked the way she smiled when she read the invitation; the way dimples had appeared in the corners of her mouth. He left her his card.

  VII

  Four and a half months after Edward’s release

  AS HANNAH DRIVES, EDWARD TAKES IN THE COUNTRYSIDE – SUNLIT heaths and open farmland punctuated by round bales and thick hedgerows, each blurring into the other. This is his first visit to see his father at the nursing home, and he hopes that Hannah doesn’t sense his apprehension about it.

  ‘I used to go and see him after school,’ she says, keeping her eyes on the road. ‘Before his memory went. He taught me to use oil paint.’

  ‘Did he? Wish he’d taught me, but then I never had any talent for painting.’

  ‘He had a very unorthodox way of holding his brush, because of his missing thumb. It made his style, like, much more bold. Visible strokes of the palette knife, too. Mixing paint right on the canvas. Thick layers of it … We’re almost there.’ A gear change down into second. ‘Just over this hill. You get a great view from the top.’

  ‘Would you mind if I get out here and walk the rest?’ Edward asks. ‘I could do with some fresh air, before we go in.’

  ‘Course not.’ Hannah brings the car to a halt once they have crested the hill. ‘I’ll go on ahead and park. Just follow the road down. It’s a couple of hundred yards.’

  Edward watches the Volvo disappear around a corner and then walks over to a dry-stone wall. Below him are the bosomy folds of a deep, wooded valley bisected by meadows feral with dandelions and buttercups. Only the bleating of unseen sheep and the song of skylarks disturbs the silence.

  He inhales slowly and, on his out breath, realizes that he is home at last, that this is deep England, the remembered country. But where there should be joy in his heart he feels only resentment and melancholy. Frejya should be here with him. They should be savouring this view together.

  He takes in another sound. A peal has started up, rung on eight bells, summoning Christians to church. It must be Sunday. He turns in their direction and sees a spire rising above a distant sun-dappled coppice. The change-ringing, as old as the Norman invasion, and as evocative in its way as the minarets of Arabia, weaves with memories of church from his childhood: of fits of giggles at moments of solemnity, of the smell of mown grass around the gravestones, of wood polish, of mildew, of tattered regimental flags … of a handkerchief licked by his father to clean his face.

  The bells have re-ordered now, changing their sequence with mathematical precision. As he listens to their descending scale he turns and follows the road around the slope of the hill.

  He sees the lawns first, ripples of heat-mist dancing across their even surface. A few yards farther on he sees a Palladian hall. With its mellow stone-flagged terraces and its strutting peacocks it could be the home of a duke.

  Hannah is striding with unbearable youth towards him. She waves. They enter through the main door and, once inside, the building’s function becomes unambiguous. Though his sense of smell has yet to return fully, Edward recognizes the stagnant air immediately from his stay in hospital: cloyingly warm, stifled by self-closing fire doors, pricked with disinfectant, urine and flowers.

  The linoleum on the floors renders a passing wheelchair silent. Its occupant waves a friendly stick to greet an old man with amputated legs who is descending on a stairlift. Hannah leads the way through a communal room where a dozen elderly residents are watching SpongeBob SquarePants on a wide-screen television. Their faces seem frozen, old men looking gormless without their teeth in, women with hairy chins. Their features seem exaggerated: big noses, big ears, big, arthritically crooked hands. Some have overbite, others yellow eyes, one has glasses too large for his head. They look like aliens.

  Once through this area, Hannah points in the direction of an open door.

  ‘That’s his room.’

  ‘Does he know I’m back?’

  Hannah shakes her head. ‘He’s been told, several times, but … I think I’ll leave you to it. He gets agitated when he has more than one visitor. I should warn you, the only thing he says is “answer”. Don’t know why. There’s an empty pond in the garden with some chairs around it. I’ll wait for you there.’

  Edward hesitates before entering. At first he does not recognize the old man sitting in a wheelchair by the window. Age has shrunk him and the old kimono he is wearing looks the wrong size, as if he is a child trying on his parents’ clothes. His eyebrows are wiry, there are dark pouches under his eyes and his chalky hair looks weightless and soft against his small, birdlike skull. The bones in his shaking hands look too big, the skin on them loose, except for the stump where his thumb was, before it was amputated during the war. There the skin is tight.

  Apart from a few liver spots, the hands are almost transparent. The only patch of skin that still looks young and smooth is on the side of the old man’s face, where he has been burned – another war injury. It is a different colour, yellow and taut. Stray silver bristles make it look like an unripened nectarine. He is recognizable to his son, just about, but his edges are softer, as if someone has placed a veil over him. There is a whistling sound coming from him, as elusive as steam from a boiled kettle. He is taking little sips of air.

  Edward raises the sunglasses he has to wear even indoors. ‘It’s me, Dad. Eddie.’

  When his father fails to look up, Edward puts out hi
s hand to shake. The old man stares at it with watery curiosity.

  ‘I’ve brought you this.’ He hands over a bottle of Irish whiskey.

  His father transfers his stare to the bottle.

  ‘Would you like a glass?’

  The old man looks at his son with pale, cloudy eyes.

  ‘It’s me, Dad.’ He reaches over and touches his father’s mottled hand. ‘I came back … Dad?’

  ‘You OK there?’

  Edward turns towards the female voice. There is a nurse in the doorway holding a tray with two cups and saucers, a jug, sugar bowl and a teapot. ‘Come along now, Charlie,’ she says. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

  Edward chews his cheek. ‘I think he would prefer to be called Mr Northcote.’

  The nurse looks embarrassed. ‘Sorry. We tend not to use titles and surnames here.’

  ‘His generation are quite formal. They like strangers to address them by their surnames.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Edward sighs. ‘No, I’m the one who should say sorry. It’s fine to call him Charles, or Charlie. I’m sure Charlie no longer cares what he’s called. I’m just a little shocked at seeing him like this, that’s all. It’s been a while.’

  ‘You’re his son, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve … been away.’

  ‘I saw that on the news. I’m pleased you’re back safely. Mr Northcote watched you on the news as well, though I don’t think …’ The nurse smooths the old man’s hair. ‘He’s no trouble, you know. He just sits here. Listens to music sometimes. The Beatles are his favourites. And he paints.’ The nurse points at some childish paintings of trees and houses Blu-Tacked to the wall. In one the sky is green, the grass blue. There are pots of poster paint and thick, numb brushes. ‘He’s quite the Picasso, isn’t he?’

  Edward stiffens. ‘He used to be a Royal Academician.’