A Kiss for the Enemy

by David Fraser

  From the beginning Anna had received inspiration from her mother’s quiet, indomitable personality. She herself, anxious to help, was never allowed to sew. Her mother would say –

  ‘Time enough for that later. Just now you must read! Work, study, read! Now is the time to develop the muscles of your mind!’

  They went together every Sunday to the Evangelical church and Anna would pray with intensity –

  ‘Make me brave, like Mother. Help me to love You, as Mother loves You.’

  Arzfeld cousins were kind, and none more so than her father’s first cousin, the lame, one-armed Kaspar von Arzfeld. Anna and her mother loved Arzfeld almost as much as did its owner. Kaspar, indeed, felt a glow whenever his cousin’s widow appeared. A shy widower himself, he secretly asked himself sometimes the question –

  ‘Perhaps we … might it not be a happy out-turn –?’

  But Klara was scrupulous. Kaspar would say –

  ‘Klara, you’ll stay as long as you can, with little Anna? Certainly until Easter?’

  ‘No, no. The business can’t wait for that. You’re too kind.’

  And Anna heard her murmur once to herself –

  ‘It wouldn’t do, I’m afraid.’

  To Anna, she would say –

  ‘We must never stay long at Arzfeld. They’re dear, kind people, and we love them. And they love us. But we’re independent, you see. We manage our own lives.’

  Once, with no apparent subject in mind, Klara said to Anna,

  ‘In some things, Anna, not many, one must never settle for second best. In some things in life only the best is right.’

  When she said, later that evening,

  ‘How I wish you had known your father, Anna, little love,’ Anna was sure she had been thinking of Cousin Kaspar von Arzfeld.

  Then, at the age of nineteen, Anna had fallen in love.

  She knew it without the smallest doubt. This was, she knew with absolute certainty, not an infatuation, not a surrender to flattery, not a passing, immature passion. This was immensely important. Astonishingly – for Klara was a strict and in many ways conventional parent – she blurted it out to her mother. She finished with the words,

  ‘I’ve had a revelation, Mother. Nothing can be more important than this, than Clemens and me.’

  To her amazement, her mother, who had listened silently, said quietly,

  ‘Yes, I think so too.’

  Then Anna understood, not only that her mother’s love and understanding of her were even greater than she had already known, but that her mother had really loved her father.

  His name was Clemens Starckheim. Anna was at university, Clemens on the first step of a journalistic career. They found every thought, every mood coincided.

  ‘We’re too much alike! Don’t they say love needs opposites?’

  ‘Not always. You see we’re two halves of one soul, separated long ago and always looking for the other.’

  Sometimes they could sit in silence, content simply to gaze at each other.

  ‘How can one find simultaneously enormous excitement and perfect peace in another person?’

  ‘Oh, one can, one can! Clemens, does everybody experience real love at some time?’

  He held her tight.

  ‘No. Not like this. Only a small, select brother and sisterhood, a privileged elect. The rest have something different. Nice, but different.’

  ‘Clemens, how can you know?’

  ‘Sh-sh-sh.’

  Clemens was pale, dark-haired, fervent. She had been just twenty when she ran up the stairs to the Berlin flat one evening in 1933 having returned from the university, planned to go to supper with Clemens. Klara was waiting. Klara’s eyes and expression needed the addition of no words. Anna said abruptly,

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘Anna –’ Her mother, most unusually, was trembling.

  ‘Yes. Of course. It’s Clemens, isn’t it?’

  Tears now rolled down Klara’s cheeks. She came to Anna, her arms outstretched. Anna pushed her away.

  ‘He’s dead!’

  A nod.

  ‘How?’

  There had been quite a street battle that afternoon and Clemens, zealously covering for his paper, had been knocked down. Three young Nazis, it appeared later, had seen protruding from his coat pocket a copy of an illicit Communist news-sheet and had set about him. One kick, in particular, had done more damage than its deliverer intended and as they made off, alarmed, Clemens had writhed, suffered a haemorrhage and died before reaching hospital. There was irony, in that Clemens was as fanatically hostile to the Communists as to the Nazis. An old-fashioned liberal by conviction he had been slipped the news-sheet surreptitiously by a man in the crowd and intended to use it to show how the Communists were provoking the Nazis into excesses.

  Anna immediately left university and found a job. She knew she must drive herself forward with feverish energy or she would sink in a sea of misery. Klara had a business connection with a small textile firm. One day she said quietly,

  ‘Dollmann’s employ a lot of young girls. They want someone sensible, someone educated to handle them. They’re having problems –’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Anna – could you do it?’

  It was absurd. Few of Dollmann’s girls turned out to be younger than her and she had no experience of giving counsel, exercising authority.

  ‘I’ll try it, Mama.’

  She threw herself into it. After three months Klara’s connection in Dollmann’s said,

  ‘That girl of yours, Anna – she ought to be Director of a firm herself one day! She’s incredible! The girls respect her as if she were twice their age – yet they love her too! It’s most unusual –’

  And there was an admiring shake of the head. That girl is strong, people said to each other, that Arzfeld girl is really beautiful, with those eyes, that skin, that figure. But she’s strong.

  Anna applied herself, heart as well as mind, to her work. The von Arzfelds raised their eyebrows. The pain of Clemens began, a little, to pass, or at least to dull.

  She had been busy at this for just eighteen months when she first met Kurt Langenbach.

  ‘Anna!’

  After a minute, with his arms now around her, Anthony said,

  ‘There’s never been much doubt, has there?’

  ‘No. None. None at all.’

  Anna knew, for the first time since the death of Clemens, that she had fallen deeply and genuinely in love. It was incredible, it was absurd, it was wicked, it was true. She had known it, like an electric shock, since driving from Langenbach to Arzfeld, with Anthony in tongue-tied silence. She had felt then, as she felt now, with half-terrified certainty, the enormous force of Anthony’s feeling. And she knew, insanely, that she responded to it. Completely.

  Anthony quoted softly –

  ‘If ever any beauty I did see,

  Which I desired and got,

  T’was but a dream of thee.’

  ‘Who wrote that?’

  ‘John Donne.’

  Anna sighed, her cheek resting against his. Her voice, most unusually, shook, and she tried, absurdly, to lighten the emotion.

  ‘Anthony, darling, is one of us about to say that this is stronger than us, or some such nonsense? Is this all like a bad film?’

  ‘No. A good film. With a star in the star part.’ The tips of his fingers gently caressed the back of her neck.

  One thing led to another with great rapidity. Robert Anderson was on holiday until the end of September and Anthony had the Mount Street rooms to himself: to themselves.

  They were gentle, murmurous weeks. Weeks in Paradise. They learned about each other, absorbed the character, the past, the background of each other, at the same time as their bodies increasingly delighted in each other.

  ‘You’re younger than me, darling.’

  ‘What the hell does that matter?’

  ‘I thought this could happen. Perhaps I was wicked to write that note. People could
say I pursued you. And I did.’

  ‘You had to come to me. You must make – you must live – life with me –’ he fumbled for words.

  Anna smiled, ‘Some of life, perhaps.’

  Now that she had recognized the truth in herself, Anna was extraordinarily in command of the situation. Anthony sometimes felt, with a jealous twinge of inexperience, that his mistress was his superior in will-power, in love and, probably in intellect. Anna seemed to have to worked out so many things, to have calculated so many human situations so shrewdly. To talk to her, whether in bed or out of it, was joy: but was she feminine, yielding, vulnerable? At times Anthony felt inadequate. But when, if away from her, he recalled their love making, all else was blotted out. And with every day that passed Anthony also felt himself stronger, more assured.

  Anna had found within weeks of marriage that she could never love the man she had wed so unwisely.

  ‘Nobody made me do it,’ she said. ‘It was my own fault. He was handsome, clever, confident, rich. We were poor, you know. I wanted security, I was young, I was impressed. I was a wicked fool.’

  Anthony hated to probe, or even contemplate Anna’s marriage. He knew that it was Langenbach’s whole character that repelled her.

  ‘He has – Kurt has – nothing of his father,’ she said. ‘His father is a gentle, scholarly man. Kurt is ruthless, insensitive. I’m an object to him. If we both lived to be a thousand, he would never understand how I feel. That’s the truth. He has no conception of what to love a woman – really love a woman – should be. Of course, I’ve accused myself, told myself it’s my fault. But I think he’d be the same with anybody. He’s – well, he’s brutal. Indifferent.’

  Anthony still found it incomprehensible that a woman of Anna’s character could have married, apparently, against the instincts of her heart, but he preferred to steer conversation away from the subject. He did not think it wise yet to force the pace on that matter. Instead he implored her to return to England soon, ‘To see her grandmother again.’ She half promised –

  ‘My grandmother is old now, and I love her, Kurt understands that. Now I would not like more than six months to go by–’

  ‘Six months!’ Anthony could hardly endure the prospect of six hours without his beloved. He met Mrs Briscoe. He had been surprised, at first, that Anna was prepared for the risk of such open acknowledgement of his existence.

  ‘It’s all right. I have told my grandmother that a friend of the von Arzfelds, who has stayed there, wishes to call on her. I would like you to meet her. She loved her first husband very much, and her only son, my father. She always likes to hear of Arzfeld.’

  And Mrs Briscoe was, indeed, charming. She lived with an agreeable and not noticeably downtrodden companion, introduced as Miss Platt. Her house in Wilton Place was pleasant. Her love for Anna was very plain. Anthony behaved to Anna, in her presence, with great formality. Human antennae, however, are sensitive where affection is involved, and Anthony thought Mrs Briscoe regarded him with a speculative if not unfriendly eye.

  Then one September day Anna was gone, desirable and desirous, collected, wholly his when with him but ready, nonetheless, to return to a different world in which he could play no part.

  ‘Of course it’s a betrayal,’ said John Marvell.

  It was October 1938. John was trembling with anger, less articulate than usual. Stephen Paterson had never seen his brother-in-law so roused. He was astonished. John was always so extraordinarily peaceable, one who invariably saw an opponent’s point of view. Yet here was John, who might have been expected to be heartily relieved that the Prime Minister had reached a sensible arrangement with Hitler about these bloody Czechs and had averted a war – here was old John, white with rage about the whole thing, weeks later. It was remarkable.

  He, Stephen, had on many occasions taken an aggressively hard line about the German menace. John had been pacific, understanding. Then it had come to the crunch and John had become afroth with indignation while Stephen had accepted, as any man with experience of politics must, that although the Nazis might be a ghastly bunch you couldn’t start a world war to stop them incorporating into Germany a lot of Germans unlucky enough to have been born the wrong side of an artificial line. John seemed to have no sense of proportion.

  Furthermore, thought Stephen angrily, John was disloyal. The Government was doing its best. If defence of the realm was the point at issue HMG was taking air defence pretty seriously. What, in Christ’s name, did old John want? An expeditionary force, to march to the support of Czechoslovakia?

  ‘Abject!’ said John Marvell. ‘Abject surrender to a man who, as is clear for all to see, will not now rest until he has enslaved most of Europe!’

  ‘Steady, John,’ said Stephen. ‘The PM’s pretty shrewd, you know. One of the sharpest we’ve had for a long time. He wasn’t taken in. Hitler doesn’t want a war. He’s a nasty little squirt and he’ll get away with anything he can. But he doesn’t want a war. When the PM says he’s done a deal with which all parties can live, I believe him. I reckon he’s done us proud.’

  ‘And I,’ said John Marvell, ‘reckon that he’s shamed us. It may be inevitable to bow to superior force. But to pretend that it’s honourable is an awful thing. We’re all living a lie.’

  ‘Nonsense, John!’

  Stephen was upset. His allegiance to the Prime Minister was strong. He now half-regretted some fiery speeches about the threat of resurgent, Nazi-led Germany which he had permitted himself a year ago. One didn’t want to be tarred with any particular brush. The thing was to have a sense of proportion.

  ‘Living a lie,’ said John. ‘We know that we are weak, that we dare not outface this evil man. So we pretend he is less evil than he is, that we can deal with him on the basis of trust. We rationalize our cowardice.’

  ‘Nonsense, John. And what’s more, even if one looks at it from the simplistic, military point of view, we’ve given ourselves a valuable breathing space. We’re getting stronger all the time. So even if the PM’s got it wrong – and I don’t believe it – we’ll soon be in a better position to teach Hitler a lesson if it ever comes to that. Which it won’t.’

  ‘We will, will we?’

  ‘Yes, we will. I happen to know a certain amount on that side and ministers have given the Party some pretty useful briefings recently. Our armament programme is really getting into top gear. And don’t forget it’s not only us who are getting stronger. It’s the French. And the Czechs have only lost a strip of territory and a part of their population who are entirely German – both by blood and loyalty.’

  ‘It’s not that fact I mind,’ said John Marvell quietly. ‘It’s the sense that we are running away from reality.’

  ‘What reality?’

  ‘The reality that Hitler is determined to take more. And more. He’s on the march.’

  ‘You’re dramatizing.’

  ‘And we are frightened and prefer not to see.’

  They were standing in the inner hall at Bargate, too disturbed to sit, too angry to relax, too intransigent to change the subject, to smile, to agree to differ. Stephen supposed he’d better try to break from the confines of bitter disputation.

  ‘Heard from Marcia lately? I suppose you and Hilda were pretty worried when things looked tricky that week in September.’ For while Mr Chamberlain had travelled to Bad Godesberg, to Munich, Europe had, indeed, appeared close to war.

  ‘Francis Carr is a sensible man. They’ll look after Marcia all right, I have no doubt. From her infrequent letters she sounds happy.’

  ‘How long do you plan to leave her there?’

  John too, was striving to keep his voice steady, to allow his anger to cool.

  ‘She is doing an eighteen-month diploma course. I believe it finishes at the end of 1939. Naturally, she may break it and come home if the situation worsens. So far, we have had no indication of anti-British sentiment making her life difficult, or anything of the sort. She sounds, as I say, perfectly happy. She will, of co
urse, be home for Christmas.

  ‘Did I hear the letter box, Robert?’

  The afternoon post generally arrived in their rooms in Mount Street at four o’clock. The old-fashioned letter box flap in the door, brass and heavy, dropped with a satisfying smack when mail was pushed through it on to the mat inside.

  Robert walked in.

  ‘Two for you. Both from abroad I see. One an English hand. One –’

  Anthony snatched his letters and pocketed them.

  ‘I imagine you want privacy while you read them!’

  ‘You imagine too much. I’m trying to work.’ Anthony looked, unseeing, at a page of Commentary on Justinian for a further five minutes. They went very slowly. Then, after a fine display of note making, of leisurely preparation for the next day’s work, he strolled to his bedroom. The first page of Marcia’s letter showed him that her troubles could wait. He tore the second letter open with trembling fingers.

  Langenbach

  15th October 1938

  ‘My darling Anthony,

  Since those wonderful two weeks in London everything in life looks different. Colours are stronger, shapes more beautiful, music more melodious. Everything has become radiant. And it is all because I have found you …’

  Anthony had written that life without Anna had no savour, was tedious, insupportable. He found himself, he said, bewitched, without appetite, energy or ambition. The only life he could envisage without agony was one shared with her.

  ‘… you were already filling my heart when Kurt came on his leave from Spain in July. I was charming to him, very dutiful. He was, as usual, hard, rough, intelligent, cynical. I know, my own darling, that you do not like to think of my husband, that I have a husband – but we all have frames in which we exist, like pictures. We cannot easily step out of them. Langenbach is my frame. I did not have to choose it. I married a cold, clever, brave man. I do not love him – you know that. But he and his family are my way of life.

  Yet I must also live as Anna. When I came to England to see my grandmother in August I thought you might have almost forgotten me, or prefer to keep me at a distance. I had not answered your sweet letter. I had no claim upon you. But I could not stop myself from making the contact.’