Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  §162

  She ran her fingers over his belly. Found the scar, a softer, clearer skin.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bullet wound.”

  “I thought you missed the war. I thought you got called up after.”

  “I did. And it’s a long story. And I’d hate to be here when Billy gets back.”

  It was pitch dark on the doorstep. The shimmering gas lamp on the other side of the street did nothing to light them up. She looked both ways then kissed him a real smackeroo.

  “You take good care of yourself John Holderness. No more bullets!”

  Sometimes he did get lucky.

  He rang Burne-Jones at home.

  “What chance you could rustle up a chit for a billet?”

  “Sorry, Joe. Don’t quite follow you there.”

  “You know, some sort of order that’ll get me a bunk in barracks somewhere in London. Just for a couple of nights. I find myself suddenly homeless.”

  There was a whispering on the other end. A soft discussion with Mrs. Burne-Jones no doubt.

  “Where are you?”

  “In a phone box on Stepney Green.”

  “Look, why don’t you come here. Campden Hill Square. We’re marginally nearer Holland Park than Notting Hill Gate. Just hop on the tube at Mile End, you’ll be here in half an hour.”

  And so it began—a shift in Wilderness’s geography from East to West. Holland Park was not “up West,” it was beyond the up and was just West.

  §163

  Mrs. Burne-Jones turned out to be Lady Margaret Burne-Jones, daughter of some toff or other. She stuck him in another attic. The bedroom of her eldest daughter, Judith. Judith was away at Cambridge, Newnham College, her first year studying for a degree in English Literature. The other three daughters, ranging from seven to fourteen, were in residence.

  Burne-Jones led him up a seemingly endless, tortuous staircase to the top of the house.

  “We’re very proud of Judy,” he said. “Of course Madge went to Newnham too, but one can never take anything for granted.”

  “I went to Cambridge,” Wilderness said. “Are you proud of me?”

  “You know Joe, you can always sleep in the dog kennel if you’d rather.”

  A plain, British ration-book dinner after which Wilderness pleaded the travails of the day and excused himself for an early night.

  He lay back on Judy Burne-Jones’s bed and inhaled . . . Judy Burne-Jones . . . breathed in the trail of scent she had left behind. He knew what it was. He just couldn’t name it. Vanilla, more than a hint of vanilla. It hung in the air as though she’d been in the room minutes not days before. It was a girl’s room—not in the sense of frills and fluffs, pinks and pincushions, it was if anything a simple room—but you’d no more mistake it for a man’s room than a woman daft enough to walk into the gents’ lavatory in a London bus station by mistake would ever think that that was other than what it was.

  The scents entwined.

  The new perfume of Judy wrapped itself around the . . . ah, two Judys in one day . . . the new perfume of Judy Burne-Jones wrapped itself around the sweat of Judy Jacks, mingled with the sharpness of his own semen, and the memory of Merle.

  He might sleep well so ensconced in scents, as soon as the unresolved woman invoked by this olfactory assault let him go. With two Judys in his senses, Merle in his memory, he thought of . . . Nell Burkhardt.

  He told her to go. She wouldn’t.

  He breathed in Judys. Still Nell persisted, her lips on his, her hair tumbling over his face . . . enveloping him in scent. That was it . . . the trail Judy Burne-Jones had left was the same scent Nell wore . . . L’Aimant—the magnet—by Coty. Orchids and vanilla. A cheap one, as scents go. Frank had knocked them off, and he and Eddie had shifted bottles by the hundred in 1947.

  Taxonomy was a good game, but an obsessive one that tended to induce insomnia. But it was Coty, and now he knew it was Coty he would probably sleep. If he could name the word, he could dismiss the woman. Idea would always beat feeling as surely as scissors cut paper and paper wrapped stone . . . and stone blunted scissors.

  §164

  At breakfast he met the other three daughters—Eliza, Olivia, and Dorothea.

  “This is Sergeant Holderness,” Burne-Jones said.

  “Call me Joe,” Wilderness said to the girls.

  And to Burne-Jones, “Official then, is it? I’m a sergeant now.”

  “Yes. And as I keep telling you . . .”

  “Rank doesn’t matter.”

  And the youngest girl said, “People are always finishing Daddy’s sentences. He’s so slow.”

  After porridge and a cup of coffee that reminded him there were many things he’d miss about Germany—and that while morphine had its moments he’d rather start the day with a good cup of Java—he said, “I’ll look for a room today. I was thinking of Notting Hill. Cheap enough, after all.”

  “I think you mean shabby. And I wouldn’t bother just yet. I need you in Vienna at the end of the week.”

  §165

  Vienna led to Paris, Paris led to Lisbon.

  It was 1952 before he felt need of a home of his own.

  He and Burne-Jones arrived in Campden Hill Square late one warm Monday evening in May. Madge had left beer and sandwiches on the kitchen table.

  Wilderness said, as he had said before, “I’ll look for a room in the morning.”

  And for once Burne-Jones did not contradict him by mentioning a posting he had previously forgotten to mention.

  “Why not?” he said. “Meanwhile I gather Judy made up her bed for you personally, before she went back to Cambridge this morning. Nice to know she’s learnt something as a result of a very expensive education. I seem to see bugger all else by way of benefit.”

  Burne-Jones was picking up chutney jars and peering through his half-moon reading glasses at the labels, looking for something that might go with beef. A letter propped between a proprietary Bengal Spicy and a homemade 1950 plum and bramley fell over.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Eh?”

  “Forwarded from your cousins in Stepney. Postmarked last Tuesday.”

  Wilderness opened it. Rarely, if ever, did he get letters, and almost never on headed notepaper.

  “It’s from a firm of solicitors in Chancery Lane. Etherington, Graham, and Yooll. Would I be so kind as to contact them at their office, ‘where you may hear something to your advantage.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It means something very dear to your heart, Joe. Money.”

  Money, even more than taxonomy, could cost him dear sleep. But as he rearranged the pillows a second letter addressed to him fell to the floor.

  Joe Holderness! Did you ever see Sunset Boulevard? Gorgeous, yummy William Holden plays a scriptwriter, and the script he never gets to finish before Gloria Swanson shoots him depicts two people who share a room—I think they even share a bed—and they never get to meet as one works days and the other nights. Isn’t that us? Don’t you think that’s us? Three years now, and we’ve never met.

  I graduate next month. I’ll be around a lot more. That’s a hint. You know how to take a hint, don’t you Joe? You know how to whistle, don’t you Joe? You just put your lips together and . . .

  Judy

  §166

  He found Etherington, Graham, and Yooll in Chancery Lane. Mr. Etherington (junior) saw him. An impossibly tall man of seventy or so, which begged silent questions as to the age of Mr. Etherington Sr., with a shining brown pate and a halo of stiff white hair.

  “Concerning the will of the late Mrs. Alistair Carnegie-Little . . .”

  “Who?”

  “I believe her maiden name was Mary-Ann Evans.”

  Ah! Merle! So she was dead.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie-Little died as a result of an incident involving Mr. Carnegie-Little’s Bentley and a Scots pine on the banks of Loch Lomond in the small hours of New Year’s Day.”

  “Drunk, eh
?”

  “That would . . . er . . . appear to be the case. Mr. Carnegie-Little died instantly. Mrs. Carnegie-Little lingered a week or so . . . long enough to have a new will drawn up. As Mr. Carnegie-Little predeceased her, she was, of course, the beneficiary of his not insubstantial estate, and while Mrs. Carnegie-Little saw fit to pass on the bulk of that estate to her stepson, she made a provision for you, Sergeant Holderness. The not inconsiderable sum of five thousand pounds.”

  Wilderness wondered at the man’s pointlessly complicated use of double negatives, but said simply, “Five grand?”

  “I believe that is the vernacular, yes.”

  Wilderness’s thoughts rapidly cycled through “fuck me,” “so she’s spent all she nicked and bungs me few grand from her toff husband,” “fuck me” (again), and “five grand? That’s a fortune!”

  “If you’ll just sign here, I can make out the cheque forthwith.”

  It was a presumption. RAF NCOs didn’t have bank accounts. Working blokes didn’t have bank accounts. Wilderness did. Burne-Jones had made him open one years ago. He banked with the armed forces’ bank, Glyn Mills. Their main branch was in Lombard Street. He could walk there in a matter of minutes and deposit the cheque. Five grand. A sum so big he did not think cockney slang even had a euphemistic term for it. He’d have to invent one. Five grand—a load of sand? Five grand. Fuck me. And fuck Rotting Notting Hill. He’d buy in . . . Hampstead. Hampstead, lovely Hampstead, where he had begun his career as a thief.

  §167

  It was more than he wanted to spend. It was all he had inherited and more. It swallowed the last of the Berlin stash, although spending the stash was a way of burying it for good, of legitimising the last of his ill-gotten gains—sardines and soap, coffee and morphine . . . turned into bricks and mortar.

  Perrin’s Walk was an unpaved track, a hundred yards downhill from the Everyman Theatre. The house looked as though it might have been mews for one of the far larger houses in Church Row at some point in its life. Three floors of narrow, neglected rooms stacked over a garage. He didn’t need the garage. He’d find another use for it. If it had been mews then the chauffeur had never come back from the war. On first scent the house smelt of mice and emptiness—emptiness at a time when London was desperately short of housing, at a time when the new were not getting built and the old and bombed were scarcely patched up.

  His no chain, cash offer was accepted at once.

  He spent six weeks in a boardinghouse in Camden Town and moved in the day the paperwork was completed. He retrieved his boxes from Judy Jacks, emptied them out and they, with the one item abandoned in the mews—a striped deck chair— became his first items of furniture.

  He’d never had this much space in his life. He’d never felt particularly exposed. For all that he had been, and nominally still was, a serving member of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, the only time he’d ever spent in barracks was his abortive basic training out in Essex. He’d had his own room in Cambridge, and in Hamburg . . . he’d shared with Swift Eddie for a while in Berlin . . . and after that it had been beyond question, no one had ever suggested he share a room again—sergeants did not share, spies did not share—but no room had ever been his in any sense that mattered. He was always passing through. He might be in one city, in one room for a year or more, but he was always passing through. That was part of the devil’s pact he had signed with Burne-Jones.

  This was his.

  Every square inch.

  About noon the same day there was a banging on the door, down on the ground floor.

  Burne-Jones stood in the lane, clutching a magnum of Veuve Clicquot.

  “Got to launch the ship in style, you will agree?”

  Next to him, a small, beautiful blonde, hair in a ponytail, no makeup, slacks and a sloppy sweater, flat heels—what he thought of as woman’s mufti.

  “I don’t have any glasses,” Wilderness said.

  The girl held up a brown paper bag, shook it gently so that he could hear the chink of glass on glass.

  “House-warming present,” she said.

  Burne-Jones didn’t wait to be invited in and set off up the stairs with “You know Judy of course” tossed over his shoulder, and Wilderness found himself face-to-face with Judy Burne-Jones for the first time.

  “Known her for years,” he said to Burne-Jones’s ascending rump—and to her, “I’ve read all your books. Almost the same as knowing you.”

  “Really? Which was your favourite?”

  “Vanity Fair. I found I could really identify with the heroine.”

  “Ah . . . but it’s a novel without a hero. You may not have noticed, but I have better manners than my father. Do invite me in, Sergeant Holderness.”

  “Do come inside, Miss Burne-Jones.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and ran up the stairs after her father.

  §168

  Burne-Jones gave him a year in London. Wilderness did not think of it as a favour. He had enough work to do to prove that was not the case, and much of it was mundane observation work.

  As rationing fizzled away to nothing and Britain began to recognise that it wasn’t really broke after all, Wilderness acquired furniture—including a double bed all to himself. It was another symbolic freedom—to stretch out his long legs and feel the bed go on for ever.

  Burne-Jones had made him get a phone, indeed had expedited his getting a phone by pulling strings to get around the GPO waiting list. Nor did he have to a endure a party line—“Can’t have every bugger in London listening in, now can we? National security has to mean something.”

  About once every six weeks an invitation to eat at Campden Hill Square would arrive. The phone would ring, at home or in the office—occasionally Burne-Jones would appear in person, with the habitual phrase, “Feel like taking pot luck with me and Madge tonight?” He never got more notice than that. And he never said no. Odds on Judy would be there, and on the nights when Judy cooked, good food replaced Madge’s rather perfunctory pots of luck.

  Judy was a devotee of the work of Elizabeth David, and smiled like arrayed artillery when her father greeted a navarin printanier with “Mutton stew again,” or beignets de sardines avec pommes anna as “Fish and chips.”

  Wilderness ate everything she put in front of him.

  He learnt to like olives.

  He learnt to like garlic—that it was not something you rubbed around the inside of a salad bowl to impart the ghost of flavour—it was something you mashed with the flat side of the knife and threw in by the handful.

  He learnt to like Judy.

  He was aware of the line. However much Burne-Jones rubbed at it and blurred it, and he had been doing that since 1945, it was still there.

  It seemed to him that he could blow everything if he made a play for Judy Jones. So he didn’t.

  He was preparing for a posting to Helsinki . . . (“Finland? Why are we spying on the Finns? What did the fucking Finns ever do to us?” “Think of their next-door neighbours, Joe, think of one of the most heavily defended boundaries in the world.”) when Judy rang him in Hampstead, about a week after the coronation of the new queen.

  “Joe, I finish my BBC traineeship next month.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “No, I mean . . . I’ll have a proper job and a proper salary.”

  “I say again congratulations.”

  “Do try and get the point, Joe! I mean . . . I don’t have to go on living with Ma and Pa.”

  “Great, but I don’t want your old room back.”

  “No, but I want yours.”

  “What?”

  “Pa tells me you’re being posted abroad by the not-so-secret service. Joe, rent me your house. I’ll be Madge and Alec’s little girl for ever if I stay with them.”

  “But that’s what they want you to do. Stay.”

  “I can’t.”

  “And I can’t rent you the house. If your father has told you anything about what we do, then the uncertainty of it all must
be apparent. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I never know.”

  “Then just rent me one room. The box room if you like. The big bedroom can stay as it is, and you can turn up whenever you like.”

  He did not return to London for over eight months. One night in the spring of 1954, he paid off a cab at midnight, let himself in to find the house empty, fell into bed, fell asleep and woke around seven to find Judy Jones sleeping next to him—her clothes scattered across his all over the floor, as though they had embraced instead of the flesh within.

  He made coffee. Brought the tray back to bed and nudged her into waking.

  “Have you been sleeping in my bed all the time I’ve been gone?”

  “Yep. Tit for tat. You slept in mine for however many years.”

  “Are you going to make a habit of this?”

  “’Fraid so. Been a long time coming hasn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Talk about hard to get. You were almost impossible to get. I left books for you, I left billets-doux, I cooked for you, I got you playing blindman’s buff at the old ’uns Christmas party just so I could get you to feel me up . . . short of just taking off all my clothes and making a complete fool of myself I did everything I could to get your attention, Joe.”

  Wilderness looked over the top of his coffee cup at the bra that had landed on top of his shirt, at the stockings trailing across the carpet, the suspender belt clinging like cobweb to the doorknob.

  “But . . . you did take all your clothes off.”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “Then call me Wilderness. Every woman in my life has.”

  §169

  The next night, still without her clothes, wrapped around him in post-coital sloth, Judy said, “What exactly is it you do for my dad?”

  “I’m sure if he wanted you to know he’d tell you.”

  “But, sweetest, it’s you I’m asking. You’re no more an RAF sergeant than my dad’s still a Guards officer . . .”

  “’Cept when it comes to pay. Your father’s motto is ‘rank doesn’t matter’ and mine is ‘pay does matter.’ But . . . since you ask. I’m MI6’s resident cat burglar.”

  She hit him, laughed and hit him with a pillow.