Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  “I would never forget an encounter like that. It will be remembered, and recorded in the history books, forever.”

  She was right. Of course, she was right.

  “And he had a brother, you said?”

  Careful. “Did I? I can’t remember. I remember we had a boy in our platoon who sang beautifully… he sang an aria from a Handel opera, accompanied by a mouth organ. Did I tell you that? Can you imagine a beautiful, crystal-clear boy’s pure voice, in the cold night air, accompanied by a mouth organ. The Germans had nothing like that boy. I wonder what’s happened to him.”

  That had moved the conversation on.

  No, it hadn’t.

  “Wilhelm and his brother sang in a choir as boys. Dieter still did, when Wilhelm came to England, but he himself had ruined his voice— by smoking. He loved cigars but they played havoc with his voice. He was upset about it, but was hooked—he smoked one big cigar every day. I wonder if he can get them in wartime?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” I said. “The powers that be on our side send around cigarettes, but not cigars. Still, if the only hardship Wilhelm faces is a shortage of cigars, he won’t be doing too badly.”

  I sounded reasonably calm, sane, or I hoped that I did. But as I said this, I was thinking—again—how convenient it would be if Wilhelm were dead.

  A couple of nights later Sam and I went to the theater and Lottie babysat as usual with Will. When we came home, quite late, she was fast asleep in front of the fire, a book open on her lap. I gently picked it up, while Sam went to check that Will was still sleeping.

  The book Lottie was reading was her usual fare—the doings of the “bright young things,” good-looking aristocratic nobodies, so far as I was concerned, with more money than sense. Sam poured me a whisky, as she always did when we got in late, while I flipped through Lottie’s book. And there, in the photographic section, was a picture of the Earl of Afton, Genevieve’s father, taken at the gaming tables at a casino in the south of France.

  “Not your cup of tea,” murmured Lottie stirring. “How was the play?”

  “It was American, Mr. Manhattan. Too unremittingly cheerful for most of the audience, unrealistic in wartime. But the songs were good. As it happens, this man”—I tapped the page with the photograph of the Earl of Afton—“interests me. His daughter works for us.”

  “Does she, poor girl?”

  “Poor girl? She’s an earl’s daughter.”

  “But her father’s a vegetable. Had a stroke four years ago, leaving massive gambling debts—”

  Sam came in just then. Will was sleeping soundly, she said, handing me my whisky. Then the three of us did what we always did on theater nights: we had a bully beef sandwich with whisky nightcaps, before going to bed.

  I woke at four-thirty A.M. This, in itself, was unusual, for I have always slept well, ever since I was a boy (save for that night in the tent, in the garden, with the owls, with Izzy). And I awoke vaguely troubled. Something that Lottie had said didn’t add up. At first I couldn’t work out what it was but after about an hour of twisting and turning, so that Sam once or twice gave me a shove, I finally nailed it.

  Lottie had said that the Earl of Afton was a vegetable, having had a stroke four years before. But Genevieve had told me she had been taken shooting with her father—the earl—in Germany “a couple of years” ago, before the war. By “a couple” did Genevieve mean “a few,” “several,” or, more conventionally, two? If she meant the latter, how did that square with what Lottie had said? If the two accounts didn’t square, what did it mean, what was I getting at? Come to that, why did I have a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach?

  I got up and went for a walk along the Embankment. My bad leg was always stiffer early on in the day but exercise helped. The Thames, at five forty-five A.M. on a September morning, was misty, a perfect indistinct cityscape for a painter like James McNeil Whistler, or this Frenchman, Monet. The waters were sludge-colored, yellowy even. Black barges slid in and out of the mist like great beasts lurking in the jungle.

  I remember that the zeppelin air raids over London had begun about then and the top half of all the streetlamps had been painted black, to curtail the amount of light they cast.

  What exactly was bothering me? The truth is: I was reluctant— frightened—to put it into words. And what could I do?

  My walk along the Embankment didn’t help, but later that day, in Northumberland Avenue, we noted two more cuttings. One told of a local court case in which a soldier was accused of raping a Bautzen woman. The judge, in condemning the man, recorded that it was the fifth such case in recent months and signified a worrying trend. The soldier was given seven years in jail.

  In the second cutting, the local beer was evaluated by a Vizefeldwebel (staff sergeant) named Eckart Müller. He was writing in the Sunday edition and comparing the local beer with the brew where the regiment was normally based, a town near Rostock.

  I took Genevieve to see Pritchard, who considered these latest developments and managed to say, “Look out, Hal. I seem to remember it took you weeks to come up with a breakthrough. Genevieve has done it in days. She’ll have your job yet.”

  Back in the Gym, I excused myself and went to the archive. I spent a few hours there but returned to my slot well before we clocked off at six.

  That evening I did something I had never done before. I lurked in the large lobby of Northumberland Avenue, and when Genevieve left, I followed.

  It wasn’t easy, and maybe not wise, with my limp—though that had improved a lot by then.

  It was madness, of course. I had been unable to warn Sam that I wouldn’t be home at my usual time, and she would worry. Genevieve could have gone to any number of places—the theater, the hairdresser, to a library or a lecture, to confession (she was a Roman Catholic), on a long omnibus ride, or just home—wherever that was—and stayed in all night.

  But she didn’t do any of those things.

  From Northumberland Avenue she walked to Trafalgar Square and turned right, north, up Charing Cross Road. It was on the chilly side, and coming on to rain, which didn’t make my self-appointed task any easier. At Cambridge Circus, where Charing Cross Road met Shaftesbury Avenue, she turned left into Old Compton Street. This was the wartime West End—Soho—and, thanks to my own regular theatergoing, I knew the area well. Past Frith Street and Dean Street, she turned right into Wardour Street, still heading north. About a hundred yards along Wardour Street, she turned off left into a small dead-end street, Tyler’s Court. As I reached the corner, I was just in time to see her shape slipping down a metal staircase to a basement— what looked like a club. At any rate, a small but brightly lit sign above the steps announced: THE MATTERHORN.

  I stopped. What should I do? Follow her in? That would— perhaps—tell me who she was meeting, if she was meeting anyone. It would—perhaps—tell me what sort of club or bar it was, if it was, in fact, a bar. But then she’d know I had been following her. If I turned up in a place like that, it would be too much of a coincidence.

  While I waited, a plan formed in my mind.

  I let a good ten minutes go by before making a move. In that way, my arrival in the club could in no way be associated with Genevieve. Then I airily ran down the steps to the Matterhorn, as if I did it every day.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man at the door was big, had close-cropped hair, wore a white shirt and a tie with a black jacket, and he himself was very black.

  I was disconcerted but said, “Yes,” as confidentially as I could make my voice sound. “I’m a private detective. I’m investigating an unfaithful wife who, we think, frequents this bar—”

  “It’s not a bar, it’s a private club. For Swiss and other people who are neutral in the war. Strictly members only, plus their guests.”

  I did my best to recover. “Oh. I wasn’t expecting this. A foreign lover. The husband will scarcely be pleased.” I winked. “Sorry to have bothered you.” I quickly turned back up the steps
.

  So Genevieve was consorting with the Swiss. Was that all there was to it? (The Swiss were neutral, after all, and their expatriates would want somewhere to meet in London while the war was still on.) Or was there more to this business than immediately met the eye? Based on what I knew so far, I had no idea. I decided to wait.

  At the opening of Tyler’s Court, on the corner of Wardour Street, was a pub, the Eagle. I bought an evening newspaper from a stand and went into the pub. I was able to find a seat by the window from where I could watch the front door to the Matterhorn and read the paper at the same time. My situation reminded me of the surveillance I had carried out on Sam from the Lamb in Middle Hill. This time I didn’t have one of Wilhelm’s cigars with me (I had two left).

  Between six-forty and eight-forty I got through four half-pints of beer and two whiskies. I had read the paper from beginning to end and back again, all eight pages of it. The Eagle, I could see, had its share of characters. A man whose mane of long, lank grayish-silver hair suggested that he had once been a character actor in the West End theater had the voice of a Shakespearean senator, and at one stage he declaimed, in a full baritone boom, not the bard, as you might expect, but what I knew could only be Kipling:

  I’ve a head like a concertina, I’ve a tongue like a buttonstick,

  I’ve a mouth like an old potato, and I’m more than a little sick,

  But I’ve had my fun o’ the Corp’ral’s Guard; I’ve made the cinders fly,

  And I’m here in the Clink for a thundering drink and blacking the Corp’ral’s eye.

  The clientele heard him out, applauding when he had finished (or stopped) and moved on.

  A gypsy woman in a long purple crocheted dress and lace-up shoes sang a song—frail, tender, embarrassing. Everyone let it go. If she had to sing, she had to sing.

  I was seeing elements of Soho I had never seen before. Was the West End always like this, or was it a function of the war? Whatever it was, I liked it.

  I dipped into the paper a second time, looking up every few seconds, keeping an eye out for Genevieve. With the evening paper gone through twice lightly, so to speak, there was nothing else to do but go through it again. I still couldn’t concentrate, however, as I had to keep looking up every so often. Also, I knew that Sam would be beginning to worry, and that worried me. What I would have given for one of those new telephone things, there in the pub and at home.

  Time passed. I had yet another beer, which I strung out till nine-ten—and then I saw Genevieve in the street. She was standing at the top of the stairs to the club, buttoning her coat. There was a man with her, older, darker-haired, thin. They both waved farewell down the steps, to the Negro at the door of the club, then linked arms and moved off.

  I followed, at a distance. They turned south, on Wardour Street, then left—east—along Old Compton Street, back the way Genevieve had come, as far as Cambridge Circus, then on down Earlham Street to Seven Dials. From there they entered the other side of Earlham Street and, halfway along it, stepped into a brightly lit shop. Most shops had been closed for hours by now, but not this one, and I recognized it though I had never seen it before. It was a theatrical shop that Eve Palmer had mentioned, a shop that sold props, makeup, costumes, magicians’ bits and pieces, and rented out dance shoes, clowns outfits, military uniforms, and so on. All the things that theatrical productions might need when things went wrong at the last minute. Presumably, Genevieve knew about it in the same way that I did.

  The shop was far too small for me to enter it while they were there, so I waited near Seven Dials, where there was a convenient alleyway with no shortage of shadows in which I could hide. It was coming on to rain again and Earlham Street was a quiet place—you would never guess you were bang in the middle of the theater district of a major city with a war on. There were shadows everywhere and the hiss of the rain was louder than anything else.

  Genevieve and her companion were in the shop for about ten minutes. I saw them come out, stand for a moment in the pool of illumination thrown by the shop lights as they pulled up their collars and wrapped their scarves around their necks against the rain. All that light spilling out onto the sidewalk almost certainly broke the law, but I was in no position, or mind, to do anything about it. Genevieve and her companion linked arms again and started out, back toward Seven Dials, toward me.

  I eased back into my hiding niche. Apart from the sound of the rain bouncing on the cobbles, the street was empty and quiet, and I could hear the two of them talking as they came level with me. As they broached the corner of the brickwork at the alleyway where I was standing, in deep shadow, their voices suddenly washed over me, loud and clear.

  “Trust me, darling. The right makeup can do wonders for a woman’s self-confidence. You’ve made a good start. No need to be quite so nervous now.”

  Then they were gone.

  I didn’t move. What I had heard were simple words, innocuous, ambiguous, perhaps, an older man offering help to a younger colleague.

  Nothing unusual in that.

  Except that what the man had actually said was: “Vertrau mir, Liebling. Die richtíge Schmínke kann wunders für Selbstvertrauen eíner Frau turn. Du hast gut angefangen. Es gibt keinen Grund zur Nervositaet.”

  The moment Sam heard my key in the lock of the front door to the flat, she came running. She flung her arms around my neck and gripped me hard.

  I was pleased.

  Lottie was down the hall. She was smiling, a smile of relief.

  “Where were you?” cried Sam in a whisper that trembled with feeling. “I was so worried—we all were,” she added, turning back to her sister. “What happened?”

  “Is there any food?” I said. I was suddenly ravenously hungry.

  “There’s cold rice pudding,” said Lottie. “It’s either that or cheese.”

  “Cheese and whisky,” I said. “In front of the fire, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  I shouldn’t have, of course. But I was so gratified by my reception, and so guilty at being late without warning, that I stood in front of the overmantel, warming my legs, and confided everything to them— why I had suddenly decided to follow Genevieve, after my conversation with Lottie about the Earl of Afton’s stroke, where she had gone, the Matterhorn, the theatrical shop, what I had overheard.

  They listened in silence.

  When I had finished and while I was refilling my whisky glass, Sam said, “So Genevieve is a spy?”

  “How exciting!” whispered Lottie.

  “Thankfully, it’s not my decision. I’ll report tomorrow what I saw tonight and it will be out of my hands. Incidentally, you two had better forget what I just told you. When I joined the show in Northumberland Avenue, I signed the Official Secrets Act, and in saying what I’ve just said, I’ve violated it. So forget my little tale and save me from being shot for treason.”

  Later that night, in bed, Sam was as passionate as I’d ever known her. We had devised our own form of lovemaking—given my predicament—and that night was the best yet. We had been awkward at first. But, as she had said when we were taking tea at Snow Hill station that day in Birmingham, she came from a physical family—she liked touching, bodily contact, and during our walks through London, along the streets and canal banks, we held hands, strolled arm in arm, and, as we lay in bed, we curled together like spoons in a tray. Gradually, she allowed me to explore more of her body, slowly she surrendered, little by little she grew more relaxed, and then increasingly abandoned. Since she knew she couldn’t get pregnant, she gave herself, eventually, without restraint. Her body was everything I had hoped for, everything I had imagined that first day when I had seen her on playground duty outside the school in Middle Hill, when I had realized that there was so much more to her than was revealed in Wilhelm’s photograph.

  Afterward, as we lay looking up at the shadows from the Embankment traffic, gliding across the ceiling, she said, “I thought some horrible thoughts tonight, Hal, when I didn’t know where you we
re, and I don’t want to think them again. Promise you won’t do that again.”

  In reply I squeezed her hand.

  “Will was worried too. He kept asking, ‘Where Hal? Where Hal?’ He wouldn’t go to sleep until I assured him you would be there in the morning.” She turned and kissed my shoulder. “Thank God you’re here.”

  The next morning (having had Will arrive and climb into bed with us very early, just as Sam was suggesting we make love again), I went straight to Pritchard’s office. He was already in a meeting, so I left word with his secretary that I had to see him on a matter of the greatest urgency as soon as he was free.

  At my table they were all there—Alan, Eve, and Genevieve. Genevieve, I immediately noticed, looked slightly different today. Her face was less pale, had more color; there was an added dimension to it, so it seemed. Her eyebrows had more form, and there were hollows— shadows—in her cheeks. Under normal circumstances, I may not have noticed that today she was wearing makeup. However, after what I had witnessed and overheard the evening before, the change was obvious. Why? Was she trying to make herself more desirable, to attract men in the department?

  She had a cutting for me. It was again from a Bautzen newspaper. This time it was a story about a naming ceremony for a new locomotive that had taken place in the town’s main railway station. There was no picture or engraving but a bottle of German sparkling wine had been broken over the front of the engine’s boiler, and the mayor had named the locomotive the Mecklenburg, after the field corps that had moved into the area. Further evidence that there was a military buildup under way.

  This at least gave me the excuse to leave my team and go off in the direction of Pritchard’s office. I intended to wait outside until he was free—I couldn’t sit at the same table as Genevieve anymore.

  As it happened, I met Pritchard’s secretary on the stairs; she was just coming down to get me. I walked into the colonel’s office and closed the door. He was in the process of lighting his pipe.