Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘This is dull for you, miss,’ Leopold said once.

  ‘No. I want to hear everything,’ she answered.

  The old man turned to Rafael. ‘You are lucky,’ he said. He lifted his glass to them both.

  On their last morning in Waltersroda, Clio knew that the muffling silence was descending on the house again. It lay in the corners of the rooms whence their talk had driven it for a few hours.

  Leopold came to the front door with them and opened it cautiously, but he did not step on to the path. He kissed Rafael, and took Clio’s hand between both of his. ‘You will come again,’ he told her, as a simple prediction.

  ‘Won’t you come to Berlin instead?’ she begged. ‘For their sake?’

  He shook his head. ‘I am too old to go anywhere now,’ he answered.

  They were going to catch the bus again from the village square. Rafael picked up their bag and hoisted it on to his shoulder, and his father stood in the doorway, half shielded by the door itself, to watch them go. As he had watched for their arrival, Clio remembered.

  They stopped at the bend to wave, but he had already retreated into the cover of his house. She felt the silence, pressing inwards in her head. They waved in any case, feeling his eyes on them from behind the sun-streaked curtains.

  ‘Couldn’t you come home to him, then?’ she asked Rafael when they passed the house with the Buff Orpingtons, where his friend had once lived.

  ‘I am more use in Berlin,’ Rafael said quietly. ‘There are worse evils for Jews now than the solitude of old age.’

  ‘He is your father.’

  Rafael looked at her, but he didn’t slacken his pace. ‘Do you think I don’t remember that?’

  He was as implacable, she thought, as one of his forest oaks. There would be no dissuading him, once he had fixed his intention.

  It was not until they were in the motorbus and on the winding road that he turned to her. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he said. ‘We still have two days.’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ Clio answered. She let her head rest against his shoulder. She was thinking about the healthy, strong people in Waltersroda and the warning, speak through a flower. ‘There is so much fear. Even in this beautiful place.’

  ‘There will be more, too. More than we can even begin to comprehend, before this is over.’

  Her own happiness and the threat of what was to come seemed to shiver in the balance on an edge between light and dark.

  ‘What can we do?’

  Rafael touched her cheek and her hair. ‘Be happy while we can. What else?’

  He took her to the wooded ridge of mountains called the Thüringer Wald, rising steeply from Thuringia and then falling away in a series of gentle foothills towards Franconia. They stayed in a wooden-floored room in a quiet inn, with a brass bed and a feather mattress to envelop them.

  Their three nights apart seemed a long time, now, when they reached for one another again.

  Clio had never felt so greedy for him, even at the beginning of their time together. They made love over and over again, reaching and stretching to come closer, for the satisfaction of possessing one another more completely. She sat astride him under the whitewashed beams of the little bedroom, leaning down to kiss his mouth until her own felt bruised, like damaged fruit, and then twisting above him until he reached up to grip her waist, and held her, and drove up into her as she gasped and gave a sudden, sharp cry like one of the invisible animals in the wood.

  Afterwards they lay hip to hip, silent except for the rasp of their own breath, looking into each other’s eyes as if they could climb into the depths inside and make them their own.

  ‘I love you,’ Clio said on the last night. ‘I want to stay with you for ever.’

  ‘I love you,’ he told her. ‘Take a day, and a night, and then the next day, and the night after that, if it should come. Don’t look any further than that, because it is impossible to see.’

  She was comfortable in his arms, and already beginning to drift into sleep. She smiled, and he kissed the corner of her mouth.

  ‘I am happy just with tonight,’ she murmured.

  In the morning they ate the last country breakfast at a table in the inn garden. There were eggs and brown bread and smoked sausage and cheese, honey and jam, set out on flat pieces of scoured white wood instead of plates. Afterwards they walked to the bus in the yellow sunlight. They caught the Berlin express from Blankenburg, and by the evening they were in Wilmersdorf again. When they turned into Clio’s street they saw that Hitler flags were hanging from the upper windows of the Klebers’ house.

  Fear squeezed Clio’s heart, twisting it in her chest, and she knew that she was right to be afraid of this violent blush of Nazism that coloured Berlin with its insignia and shone in the bright faces of the villagers of Waltersroda.

  ‘Rafael, can’t we leave Berlin? Leave Germany? You could come to London, or to Oxford, and bring Grete and your father, while there is still time …’

  As she had known he would, Rafael answered, ‘No. I am needed here. But perhaps you should go home, to your mother and father, where you will be safe.’

  ‘I can’t leave you,’ Clio said.

  Rafael was still looking up at the flags, hanging limp against the dusty glass.

  Two nights after their return Clio was sitting alone at the wobbly table in her room writing about Waltersroda when Frau Kleber called up the stairs to her.

  ‘Fräulein Hirsh? You are at home? There is a visitor here to see you.’

  She stopped typing at once. She pushed her chair back and ran to open the door, smiling with the anticipation of seeing Rafael. She had not been expecting him, but his appearances were often unpredictable. The stairs outside her room were dark and descended steeply, but Rafael knew the way. She leant happily on the smooth wooden rail of the banister, looking down for the first sight of his blond head as he climbed up to her. But there was no one there.

  ‘Fräulein Hirsh!’ Frau Kleber was not particularly patient. She must be waiting down by the street door.

  Clio clicked on the landing light. It was harsh and bright under a white glass shade. She ran down the angle of the stairs, from where she would be able to see Frau Kleber in the hallway with her visitor.

  She swung around the corner, still smiling, looking forward to seeing who it could be.

  At the first glimpse, Miles’s upturned face was so familiar that she felt no surprise. It was only a minute afterwards that shock spread up from her stomach, cold and clammy like a sickness.

  He was wearing his greenish tweed coat, as if he had just stepped out to the Fitzroy, but there was a portmanteau beside him that she did not recognize.

  Clio began to shake. As she descended towards him she wondered if her knees would support her. She was aware of Frau Kleber’s eyes, sharp with malicious curiosity.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ Miles said, using his boyishly charming manner that now seemed as false as the female impersonator in the Balalaika. ‘There was some confusion with your landlady here, who insisted that she didn’t know any Mrs Lennox. You don’t look very happy to see me, by the way.’

  ‘Miles.’

  He kissed her, and she had to fight the impulse to break away from him and run away into the street.

  ‘Frau Kleber, this is my husband.’

  ‘I did not know you were a married lady, Frau Hirsh.’ Clio did not like the Frau’s expression.

  ‘No.’ She turned to Miles and said in English, ‘I suppose you had better come up, now you are here.’

  As they climbed the stairs Frau Kleber called after her. ‘This is a house for single ladies, Frau Hirsh. That is how Herr Kleber prefers it. Gentlemen visitors once in a while he perhaps does not notice, but we cannot have husbands taking residence.’

  Clio said in a cold voice, ‘That is quite all right. He is only making a short call.’

  When they reached her room she closed the door and leant against it, as if she could keep the malign effect of her husba
nd contained within four walls. The sight of Miles in his green coat brought back the memory of Gower Street, his chair with the ashtray on the arm, the spread-out manuscript pages, their table and bed and all the accretions of their married life together. The flat had been sold and her own possessions packed and stored – kind and capable Tabby had overseen that for her – but Miles’s presence carried the unhappy images of those years like a penetrating smell.

  He had put down his bag in the middle of her floor, and now he hung his coat over the back of a chair and coolly examined the room. He flicked the sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter, and cocked his head to read the titles of the handful of books on the shelf.

  ‘Quite the artist’s garret.’ He could not resist sneering at her.

  ‘What do you want, Miles?’

  ‘I’ve seen some of your stuff in The Times. It’s quite good.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  Miles was grinning. ‘What did the old bat downstairs say? Gentlemen callers, was it? Is that what’s keeping you here in Berlin?’

  She hadn’t known he understood so much German. Clio found the steel to confront him. ‘So what if it is?’

  He retreated then, lifting one hand in a warding-off gesture. ‘Just a question. I met Partridge in Old Compton Street, and he gave me Pilgrim’s forwarding address.’ Partridge was Pilgrim’s London agent. ‘When I got off the train I called in at that studio of his. Pilgrim was busy daubing at some filthy canvas, and he was happy to send me on here.’

  That sounded like Pilgrim.

  ‘And so what do you want?’ Clio asked again.

  ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

  ‘No. Or yes, there’s some beer.’ She gave it to him and sat down at the table, waiting. Miles perched on the edge of her bed, rolling the glass between his hands, and then he began to talk.

  Clio listened to the words of his story, quicksilver little words that were polished in the telling in Miles’s droll way, but she could also hear the dull and unpleasant weight of reality behind them. He had found a room to live in after he had been obliged to leave Gower Street, but he had managed to borrow money from his landlord and then failed to pay any rent, and the trickle of writing commissions had temporarily dried up. There had been no more money, and then there had been an incident.

  Miles wiggled his fingers in the air, as if the incident had been comical, but Clio knew that it was not. There would have been drink and some violent outburst, and an aftermath that made her scalp tighten across her skull with the effort not to imagine it. Miles would have decided, or perhaps it had been decided for him, that it was a good idea to leave London. He had cast around for a suitable refuge, and had come up with Berlin, and Clio.

  At the end of the story he smiled at her. It was a whimsical smile that she remembered very clearly. It made her sick to realize that she had once found it so charming. In that minute she saw her husband complete and whole, as she had never been able to see him before, and understood that he was helpless.

  ‘How much do you want?’ she asked.

  Miles looked wounded. ‘It isn’t money. Well, actually it is, but I wouldn’t ask you for that. It’s you I need.’

  He let the fey mask slip a little, or tried to give her the impression that it slipped. In either case, she knew it was no less than the truth. He did need her. He needed her as a shield, and a cushion.

  Clio remembered the pendulum swings of his mood between elation and depression, and the blackness that had engulfed him at the lowest points. He had wept and clung to her. After one of those black fits he had first made love to her, and she had held him in her arms and convinced herself that she could take care of him. As she had done, for more than four years. Miles had been much cleverer than she, and was no less clever now.

  ‘You are my wife,’ he said. There was a threatening edge in the wheedling tone that made her pity him less.

  ‘I want to divorce you.’

  ‘Divorce? My darling, I have never believed in divorce. I couldn’t agree to it.’ And now there was triumph, suppressed but still glinting in the corners of his eyes.

  Clio kept her voice steady. She had found him in her bed, lying beside a male whore with black fingernails. There was no cause for the mush of pity or sympathy.

  ‘Then don’t agree to it. But I am not your wife any longer.’

  There was a little silence. ‘That is very harsh.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  Miles hunched his shoulders. His beer glass was empty. ‘I know. I haven’t the right to expect anything. But do you think I’m happy to be the way I am? Pleased, or proud?’

  He was playing a role, of course, as he always was, wheedling for her sympathy now, yet Clio understood that there was a seam of honesty in the sham.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you are. What can I do?’

  He took her intended disclaimer and deftly flipped it. ‘You can let me stay for a little while, now that I’m here.’

  ‘You can’t stay. You heard Frau Kleber.’

  ‘I didn’t mean in this room. I wouldn’t expect that, after what you saw. But I could find somewhere nearby, couldn’t I? Or even a hotel, a cheap one?’

  Clio summoned all the brutality she could muster. ‘It would have to be cheap. Since I’ll be paying for it, I suppose.’

  ‘I can stay, then?’

  Wearily she answered, ‘Do I have a choice?’

  It was hateful to think of Miles in Berlin, weaving himself like a discoloured thread into her life here. But he had come, and he had been her husband for three years, and she couldn’t unpick that. Looking back at the past months she felt that she had been covering over the wound that she had left behind in London, and now it was time to open it up and cauterize it.

  Miles stood up and poured more beer into his glass. He was pleased to have insinuated himself. ‘Some for you?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  He strolled to the window and looked down into the suburban street, as if gauging its potential for him. Then he turned back, and leant against the corner of the table so that he could look down at her.

  ‘Who are the gentlemen callers? Am I allowed to know?’

  Clio took a breath before she answered. ‘There is one caller, as you put it. He is a friend of Julius’s. And my lover, now.’ There, the truth. It was easier than she had imagined.

  Miles’s eyebrows made inquiring peaks. He looked amused, even indulgent. ‘A German?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not a Nazi, I hope.’

  ‘I will introduce you. Then you can judge for yourself.’

  They would have to meet. She couldn’t hope to hide Miles from Rafael, nor would she want to try. Cauterization, she reminded herself.

  ‘I shall look forward to it,’ Miles said.

  ‘I think you should go now,’ Clio told him. The beer was all gone; she wanted her room to herself, so she could think.

  Miles had got his own way, and was prepared to be amenable in everything else. Clio gave him some marks, and directions to a hotel in a nearby street.

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ he promised. He kissed her and she held herself very still until he had removed his hands again. When she opened the downstairs door to let him out into the street, she knew that Frau Kleber was watching from her lair.

  Rafael and Miles met at a pavement-café table. It was not one of the big cafés on the Kurfürstendamm or Friedrichstrasse, because Jews no longer frequented the main thoroughfares in case of attracting the attention of the SA or auxiliary police. The café was a small, ordinary place on a corner in the Altstadt, with a handful of tables placed outside under a faded awning.

  Miles was sitting reading an English newspaper, but he looked up as Clio and Rafael crossed the street. It was the beginning of September, and noticeably cooler. A slight breeze lifted Miles’s fine hair and ruffled it over his forehead.

  ‘Rafael Wolf, Miles Lennox,’ Clio said, and they shook hands.

  Rafael had
listened carefully when Clio told him that Miles was in Berlin.

  ‘I am still his wife,’ she finished. ‘In law, if nothing else. And he is so helpless. It is his helplessness, at the root of everything, that means I have to help him.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked her.

  Clio considered. ‘I … know how clever and how devious Miles can be. He likes to manipulate people, and it might amuse him or suit him to manipulate us. Or me, rather. To make me feel that I should in some way conceal him from you, or pretend about him in some other way, and so create an untruth between us. He is inquisitive about you. I want you to come with me to meet Miles, so that it is you and I who are one, and not Miles and I. So that there are no secrets. Would you mind that very much?’

  Rafael had laughed. ‘Why should I mind? Of course I will meet him, if that is what you want. Only don’t expect me to like him. From what you have told me, I don’t think I shall.’

  It was as simple as that. Clio was still amazed by how clear and simple Rafael could make matters that seemed to her to be shadowed and complicated. He was neither jealous nor possessive, and she loved him for it. It was only the perversity of her own nature that made her long to be possessed, and to be able to look into the future beyond tomorrow, or the day after that.

  And so Clio and Rafael sat down at the little metal-topped table, and Miles signalled to the waiter. He brought them coffee and schnapps and Clio was amused by the thought that they looked like any trio of friends meeting for a drink and an exchange of the wary talk that passed for gossip in Berlin now.

  The sun was bright on the opposite windows, and it was pleasant under the shelter of the awning. A little tongue of happiness licked up inside Clio. Even Miles couldn’t affect her here. She watched him, as he leant back with his foot on the opposite chair. He looked rested and cheerful, just a neat-featured man in a shirt with a worn soft collar.

  There was nothing to be afraid of, because she was with Rafael and Miles couldn’t hurt her any longer.