He stopped then and said, “You know the problem with us?”
She looked at him with a frown, searching for a meaning in the question. She was beginning to enjoy herself and feared that he was about to bring the evening to an end.
“No.”
“You Brits forget how young we are and we Yanks forget how old you are.”
She smiled, relieved, and raised a glass. “To the New World and the Old.”
He was curious about which books she read and raised his eyebrows when she said she preferred films.
“Which ones?”
“I love Garbo. She has that quality of mystery about her in every film she’s made.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, you know – Queen Christina, Grand Hotel, Mata Hari. The camera loves her – that’s what makes her a star.”
“You’re right,” he said. “She never shows so much as an ankle in any film, and yet there’s an eroticism there, wouldn’t you say?”
“I think that’s a man’s view, isn’t it?” she said.
“Not at all. Women find other women sexually attractive, don’t they?”
“Maybe,” she said. It was all she could think of.
Then he bent over the table and kissed her gently without a word, their lips touching only briefly. Before she could react, he had stood up and offered his arm. “Shall we dance?” he asked.
They walked to the deserted dance floor He wound the gramophone handle vigorously before lowering the needle onto a crackly version of a fast-tempo Viennese waltz.
“How did you find this place?” she said as they began to dance.
“I passed it one day on a walk, looked in and was amazed at what those two woman have managed to do here. That took guts. I’ve told you, it’s women who are going to rebuild this city.”
He held her at a respectable distance, turning them both through the steps with confidence. Over his shoulder, she could see admiring glances from the other diners. He changed the record and the tempo slowed to a slow operatic aria. He held her close, his hand linked with hers, their bodies moving almost as one. She remembered Charlotte’s story about the advice given by her dancing teacher.
“It’s hot. Shall we have another glass of wine?” she said.
It felt quite natural that he should slip his arm into hers on the walk back to the hotel. When they got there he asked her if she would like a nightcap.
“I’d love one, but where?”
They looked across the lobby at the iron grill drawn down to the counter of the bar.
“How about my room?” he asked.
She said yes without hesitation. She had met him only a few hours earlier, but he was an interesting, attractive and unusual man. She was going to sleep with him the moment they got into his room. No, that was not right, she thought. They were not going to sleep with each other or make love. The euphemisms were decorative but meaningless.
This man was a stranger. That was the beauty of it. She was going to fuck her stranger. All night long. She repeated the word to herself. Fuck. She had always hated it – until now. It was a clenched fist of a word, brutal in its brevity and exquisite in its capture of an act, not of love or lust, but survival. She was going to survive. There would be no clemency to be found in the night ahead, only the sweet taste of what – revenge? Why not?
In his room he offered her a whisky, raising a bottle and two glasses enquiringly. She shook her head, slipped off her coat and lay back on the bed, feeling lightheaded and dizzy.
He loosened his tie, took off his shoes and walked to the bed. He leant over and kissed her. She slid a hand between his legs and squeezed gently, listening to a long slow sigh in response.
“Get undressed,” she said.
He took his clothes off without embarrassment and faced her naked, erect and with a glass of whisky in his hand. Kay suddenly wanted to giggle. She wished Charlotte could see her now – her friend would have warmly approved. Kay swung off the bed and undressed.
She faced him as she bent forward to slip off her dress and then turned her back to remove her underwear. She looked over her shoulder at him as she had done in front of the cheval mirror all those years ago. He was watching every movement, his eyes moving over her body. He drained his whisky and put the glass down. She turned and slipped quickly between cold damp sheets.
“Come here and fuck me,” she said.
They had coffee and hard brown bread with American marmalade for breakfast in the dining room the next morning. The shared intimacy of the night left little need for conversation. Both were comfortable with small talk about the weather and the knowledge that they would never see each other again.
That was the whole point, Kay realised. Charlotte had been right.
“Thank you,” she had said as he rose to go.
He kissed her again. “There’s one small confession I have to make.”
Her heart sank.
“The women of Rome didn’t rebuild the city after its destruction. I made that up. But they could have done, and they will do here.”
With that he gave her one more quick kiss, a light touch on her lips. Then he was gone.
She returned to the breakfast table and finished her coffee. It was over. She knew she must leave her job and put Berlin behind her.
When Kay put in for a transfer to the US in early 1946, General Clay forwarded the request to the Pentagon with relief. He was glad to get rid of her.
22
February 1946
On his first day as chief of staff of the American army, Eisenhower lunched in the Pentagon commissary. He ate alone by choice, having explained to his staff that he wanted time to read the morning papers and reflect on a series of depressing meetings. Afterwards he got disorientated in the honeycomb of corridors and failed to find his way back to his office.
When bemused officials realised that their new boss was not walking around on a lightning inspection tour but was actually lost, they guided him back to his office. The story was leaked by a helpful underling and made headlines in the next day’s papers.
Constant Washington gossip about his supposed presidential ambitions interested Eisenhower only in that it exposed what he had always thought was the real business of that hothouse world inside the beltway – endless chatter about who was in or out, up or down. He wanted no part of it and told everyone he was a soldier, not a politician.
The sharp-eyed Washington press corps noted, however, that in negotiation with President Truman the new chief of staff had carefully limited his term to two years. This would mean his release from the army in 1947. The next presidential election was scheduled for 1948. The timing did not look like a coincidence. “Ike for President” campaign committees began to appear across the country.
In response, Eisenhower insisted that all he was thinking about was the tough job he now faced. Millions of men had to be demobilised and brought home. Defence spending cuts voted by a Congress looking for a peace dividend meant battles with other service chiefs over reduced budget funds.
A lifetime in the military had left Eisenhower with a mind that could swiftly assess the risks and rewards of any given action. The methodology had been hammered home since his cadet days at West Point: a commanding officer drew up a balance sheet weighing the risk of sending men into battle by listing the pluses and minuses.
There were always more minuses than pluses, as there had been at D-Day, when the weather, Rommel’s ability to move the panzer divisions to the beachheads on day one, and the strength of coastal defences in Normandy had posed real dangers.
The plus side of the D-Day balance sheet lay in command of the air, superior numbers and the element of surprise. The logic had pointed clearly to delay. But that itself posed an unacceptable risk, which swung the balance to action. Eisenhower had taken a gamble that had triumphantly paid off.
Across the Potomac River from Washington DC, in the traditional home of the renowned 3rd US Infantry regiment, he and Mamie were surrounded by staff and servants. From their new home she travelled with him to meetings across almost every state in the Union, greeted everywhere by crowds that told their own story. His marriage, cruelly tested by three years’ absence and scurrilous gossip about Kay Summersby, had been restored.
There was, however, one item on the balance sheet that did not lend itself easily to risk analysis.
Kay Summersby was due to return to Washington. Her request for a transfer had been successful. Since administration of the visitor centre in Berlin was about to be transferred from the army to the state department there was no way of avoiding her return to the US.
Eisenhower knew she would wish to see him, and he knew he would agree. It would be difficult not to. She would bring Telek into his office and place that faithful dog on his desk as she had done in the old days. She would stand there in his office looking at him, smiling the way she always had done, and that would be enough to make him go red in the face, partly with embarrassment and partly with irritation.
There was nothing he’d feel able to say to her beyond the usual civilities and good wishes. They would talk about Telek, of course. He loved that Scottish terrier, although giving the dog that name had been a mistake. But dog talk would not be enough. Kay Summersby was not going to go quietly.
He knew his letter had been cold. He knew it would have been a hurtful shock her. But it was better for both of them, he had argued to himself, to end the relationship that way than let it linger on.
He had found a new life, a new world away from Europe. Three years of war, three years of fighting the Germans, three years of dealing with the endless clashes of big personalities under his command and the titanic egos of de Gaulle and Churchill, had isolated him from reality. He looked back on his time in the European theater as one remembers a dream. It seemed like a past life on a distant planet.
The anguished wait for the first reports from the D-Day beaches, the headquarters in the Normandy apple orchard, the shock of hearing that captured Canadian paratroopers had been bound then strangled with their own harnesses by a Hitler youth unit, the anguish of the Ardennes breakthrough, the dinners with Churchill, the unimaginable horrors of the death camps – they were all experiences far removed from his new life at Fort Myer. They had become folk stories, to be remembered with affection or with anger, but stripped of meaning in the now of a new life.
The heart of the problem was that Summersby belonged to that old world, the world of Europe and war. He didn’t deny he had had feelings for her. They had been deep. She had given unstinting service and more. She had been someone to come home to when he wanted to shut the door on the world outside.
In a moment of euphoria after the German surrender, when the liberation of Europe seemed to herald a new beginning, he had thought that he too might find a new beginning – with her.
He could not deny that he had written that letter to George Marshall and that he had, briefly, thought of divorce. His excuse was that he had been exhausted. He had let naturally affectionate feelings for that woman assume an unwarranted importance in his life.
Perhaps, in truth, he had become a little obsessed with her because she was ... well, she was Kay Summersby. She had drawn him into a moment, not of madness, but of weakness. In those frantic days of after the German collapse, anything had seemed possible.
Of course he had desired her. When she sat across from him on the sofa with drink in hand on those evenings they enjoyed so much her skirt would be drawn up high over those long legs and she would unbutton the jacket of her uniform, allowing him to see the shape of her; he knew that shape because he had held those breasts in his hands and kissed them with his lips; yes, he had desired her. Any man would have.
The truth, he told himself, was that he had needed her because just having her around had kept him sane, given him moments of private joy. That was what Kay Summersby had been for him. A partner in the great adventure that was World War Two.
And now he had a new life and Kay could not be part of it. It was as simple as that. He would never close the door on D-Day, or the grinding battles after the Wehrmacht’s surprise Ardennes offensive, or the final surrender – those were rooms in his mind he would enter with pride for the rest of his life. But there was no room for Kay Summersby.
Kay entered Ike’s office in the Pentagon with Telek on a lead. The sight of the dog in the corridors of the Pentagon had surprised the staff. Ike looked no less surprised as he rose to meet her. He hadn’t been looking forward to the meeting, but now he was strangely pleased to see her. She was looking well. She had somehow managed to make the drab green uniform of the Women’s Army Corps look stylish.
She bent down, unleashed the dog, straightened up and saluted. The salute was returned. They shook hands formally as Telek ran to his old master, stretched his paws up on Ike’s uniformed leg and growled a soft greeting. He bent down to pat the dog. Telek obligingly rolled over and allowed his tummy to be tickled.
A secretary who had been taking dictation slipped out of the room. The meeting had been requested, agreed and put in the diary. Even so, Kay’s first impression was that her old boss was surprised to see her. He looked well, but older, she thought. As usual, when he was embarrassed or irritated, he had gone red in the face.
It was two weeks before Christmas 1946, well over a year since she had last seen him during the hurried departure from Frankfurt. She remembered those moments as one remembers a famous scene in a film. He had held her in his arms briefly. He had said he would be back. But he had not come back. He had sent for everyone on his staff except her. Instead he had consigned her to a job taking political hopefuls and has-beens to the Brandenburg Gate to deliver a brief talk on the fall of the city to the Russians and the four-power occupation that followed.
Thus passed a long and wasted year. In that time she had not received a single word from him, not even by way of a greeting passed on by a visiting army colleague.
She smiled and said, “You’re looking well.”
Eisenhower nodded. “You look fine too. How have you been?”
“Berlin was a bore, but it was a job.”
“Have they given you something here yet?”
“I’m in the pool, waiting for deployment.”
“I’ll see if I can help out there.”
“That would be nice.”
She knew he wanted a cigarette. So did she. She wasn’t going to ask unless he offered her one.
There was a silence, broken by a whimper from Telek demanding attention.
“He’s well, isn’t he?” said Eisenhower.
“He’s in great shape. He kept me sane, if you must know.”
“Ah. Yes. Those long Berlin winters.”
“It wasn’t the weather, Ike ...”
She had always called him Ike, or “the boss”, when they were alone, except during moments of intimacy when she had occasionally whispered “darling”, but he had always flinched when she’d said that. She doubted even Mamie was allowed to call him that.
“I know. I realise it must have been difficult.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Realise how hard it has been?”
They looked at each other.
“I had no option, Kay. I don’t control my life here. You did a great job for me in theater and I hope I thanked you.”
“You did. You sent me that letter.”
Ike frowned and grimaced at the same time.
“I know. Maybe it
could have been worded better, but I was under a lot of pressure.”
“You said you would be back, remember. You said that you would send for me ...”
Her voice rose and the words tumbled out. For a moment they became almost a waterfall of regret, anger and accusation. She felt tears brim in her eyes. She had promised herself she would not do this, not lose control, not become emotional. She would stay calm, just have the conversation and leave.
But it was hard standing here in front a man who had taken over three years of her life, violent years of war in which history had been made and unmade, years that magnified emotion so that fear, joy, sorrow and horror had become feelings of exquisite intensity.
Above all they had been years of promise – the promise of victory, the promise of a new Europe, the promise of prosecution for the Nazi criminals and the promise of love. Now those years, like the war, were over. Victory had been achieved. Justice was being delivered at Nuremberg, a new Europe would arise from the ashes. But one promise had been broken.
She went quiet.
“Kay?”
“Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
Eisenhower had fished a handkerchief out of his pocket. She sniffed, shook her head and opened her handbag. She took out her own handkerchief and blew her nose.
“Yes. I would like a cigarette please.”
He walked to his desk, opened a drawer and flipped a cigarette out of a pack. He lit it for her. She inhaled deeply, feeling calmer.
“Aren’t you having one?”
“I’m trying to give up.”
“It’s difficult, isn’t it – giving up?”
Ike bent down to pat the dog
“I really appreciate you looking after Telek.”
She wanted to scream at him. Damn the dog, Ike, what about me? I’m the one you loved, I’m the one you kissed, the one you made love to in front of the fire at Versailles, not the bloody dog.
But she didn’t. Instead she said, “You remember his name.”
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