The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler

by Oliver, Reggie

  Swiftly and delicately Bloody Bill picked up the Neshmet boat, restored it to its place on the shelf and locked the cabinet. We would have liked to stare at it for longer, but he had decided that the entertainment was over.

  At that moment, as if responding to a secret signal, Mrs Hexham entered the room with three cups of tea on a tray and a plate of uninteresting looking biscuits. She deposited them on a card table and left without a word. With a little grunt of annoyance Bloody Bill moved the tea to another table, set the card table between us three and took out two packs of cards from one of its drawers. As he was shuffling these he asked me how much money I had on me.

  I owned up to seven-and-sixpence. He nodded to Tristram who went to a japanned tin box which stood on the bureau. In it were piles of silver threepenny pieces which had long since ceased to be legal tender. Reluctantly I handed over my seven-and-sixpence and received in return the appropriate number of these makeshift gambling counters. Tristram was made to cash in a ten shilling note with almost as much reluctance.

  I cannot now remember the names of the card games we played—Bezique? Gin Rummy? Canasta? Piquet? Vingt-et-un?—I know we played several, but they are just names to me now. What remains with me is the manner in which Bloody Bill played: greedily, with a skill and speed that utterly defeated me. He played only to win, and he did. By the end of an hour or so my seven-and-six, which I could barely afford to lose, was all gone. Tristram lost too but not as quickly or as comprehensively as I had. Bloody Bill looked at me in triumph, then sidelong at Tristram.

  ‘I am afraid that our friend has been soundly thrashed,’ he said. ‘What say we give him five shillings on account in return for an I.O.U?’

  Tristram looked embarrassed. I was silent.

  ‘Don’t you want your revenge?’ he asked me mockingly, as if the possibility of my obtaining it was too remote to be anything other than laughable. I shook my head and muttered something about being late for Absence, the roll-call that was held at the end of a half-holiday. Tristram rose too, also eager to go, and Bloody Bill grudgingly released us.

  ‘You must come back soon and have your revenge,’ he said. They were the last words he spoke to me. With those devouring blue eyes fixed on me I was conscious of a terrible hunger in the man, a hunger for battle and the chance of crushing an adversary, even if the end result was humiliation.

  Outside in the corridor we met Mrs Hexham and thanked her perfunctorily for the tea. She moved not a muscle, said not a word. Tristram and I bicycled back through the gathering dusk to our respective Houses swiftly and in silence.

  III

  I did see Bloody Bill once more, at least I think I did, but I cannot be absolutely certain. One afternoon a couple of weeks after our visit, I was returning exhausted from a junior inter-house match on Agar’s Plough. Nobody, least of all myself, had wanted me to be in the team but the sickness and injury of better players had necessitated it. There had been some hope expressed, I believe, that I might rise to the occasion and show ‘keenness’, but I had not, and that small part of me which still yearned for conformity and acceptance was dejected.

  I was walking along the path towards Sheep’s Bridge. To my left, behind a belt of trees, the Thames ran softly through the mist and it was there that I thought I saw Tristram with Bloody Bill, standing side by side, he bareheaded, as usual, and in his heavy overcoat, Tristram in school dress, black tail-coat and pin-stripe trousers, like an old fashioned undertaker. They had their backs to me and were watching the river, still and intent. It was absurd, of course, but something in the way they were standing made me think that they were both about to jump in. There was a poised look about them. I thought for a moment of going over to join them, but only for a moment. So I went on my way, and when I got to Sheep’s Bridge, I turned to see if they were still there, but they had gone.

  The following evening R.F.N. came to see me in my room. He was a solemn-looking man who habitually wore an expression of complex disapproval, so that when something serious had happened a considerable effort was required to make this show on his already troubled features. This evening his brow was furrowed to an even greater extent than usual. He fidgeted with one of my books before addressing me via the mirror.

  ‘Er . . . I believe you are friendly with erm . . . Ronaldson from R.D.F.W.?’

  I said I was. He said that Tristram had disappeared from his House the previous day and had not been seen since. A search was being instituted and the police had been informed. If I knew anything of his whereabouts—at this point, R.F.N. turned to me and, as was his habit, thrust his face unpleasantly close to mine—I was to tell him at once. So I told him that I had seen him the previous afternoon near Sheep’s Bridge ‘with Bl—, erm, I mean, with Mr Hexham.’

  R.F.N.’s reaction astonished me. He became both extremely indignant and very nervous at the same time. He picked up the book he had been fiddling with before and might have torn it apart if it had not slipped out of his hand and fallen into the waste-paper bin.

  ‘No. No! Impossible! That’s ridiculous. He can’t have been. You’re lying to me. You’re not telling the truth. You’re mistaken. No. No indeed . . .’

  I tried to ask what made him so certain I was mistaken, but he abruptly left the room. The following day I discovered a possible reason for My Tutor’s disquiet. On the afternoon that I claimed to have seen him by the river Bloody Bill had been on his deathbed in Slough General Hospital.

  This naturally made me very worried for Tristram, but a few days later he turned up at his house, somewhat dishevelled, but otherwise apparently unharmed. I do not know the full details, but I gathered he told the authorities that he had had some kind of blackout and could not remember where he had been. The recent death of his father and other family circumstances having been taken into account, his story was accepted, though I believe he was taken to see a psychiatrist.

  I visited him in his house about a week later, not long before the end of the Michaelmas Term. He was pale, restless and barely seemed to know who I was. I mentioned our project of an Egyptological society, but he showed very little interest. His room was untidy and I noticed that the familiar skull on the top of his burry had been joined by two other objects. There was no mistaking them: somehow he had managed to become the possessor of the bronze figurine of Anubis and the Neshmet boat. When I commented upon them, Tristram became extremely agitated and almost pushed me out of his room. He did not return to Eton after the Christmas holidays.

  IV

  I did not see Tristram for another seven years, and when I did it was quite by accident. It was in the summer of my last year at university and I had decided to take a day off revising for my exams in order to go to the Fourth of June at Eton. This is the great day of Eton festivities when there are picnics and speeches and promenades and cricket matches. In the evening there is a great procession of boats off Fellow’s Eyot, by Luxmoore’s Garden. As each boat passes the spectator stands, the crews, composed of senior boys dressed in antique naval uniforms, stand up in the boats with their oars, doff their boaters and shake the flowers with which they have been bedecked into the water. All this is accompanied by cheering from the watching crowd, applause and the sweet sounds of a silver band playing the Eton Boating Song. It is a charming spectacle for those who are not disposed to be alarmed by its elitist implications.

  I was standing rather dreamily watching all this and thinking that it was really about time I returned to Oxford when I saw Tristram. He was standing a few feet away from me with his arm round a girl in a long floral-print Laura Ashley dress. He wore one of those fur-lined Afghan coats that were fashionable at the time, despite the fact that it was a very warm evening, and his black curly hair rested on his shoulders. His face was very pale, but otherwise he seemed in fairly good shape. The girlfriend looked uncannily like him, with the same round, white face, the same mid-length black curly hair. When I went up and greeted him, he appeared to be pleased to see me.

  We exchanged news
. Tristram was living on a commune in Wiltshire. He told me that he was ‘going to be a writer’ and had already published a volume of verse. He insisted on taking my address so that he could send me a copy. I asked him if this was the first time he had been back to Eton.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve come back many times.’

  The girl gave him a look that was both troubled and protective. He in turn hugged and kissed her reassuringly on the cheek. I had the impression that theirs was a relationship based more on mutual dependence than on passion. Soon after this we bade farewell and allowed ourselves to be separated by the crowd.

  A few days later a signed copy of Tristram’s book of verse arrived for me in the post. It was called, rather pretentiously I thought, Signs and Sigils, and the cover was decorated with ankhs, hieroglyphs, alchemical symbols and the like. The contents were no better and no worse than many another produced by an aspiring young writer barely out of adolescence, though much of it was horribly obscure. The only poem which struck me in any way was the last one, and that was really only because of the title, ‘To W.N.H.’. W.N.H. of course stood for William Neil Hexham, or Bloody Bill.

  To W.N.H.

  The shadow of white on white,

  The shadow of black on black:

  We crossed the river at night;

  You stayed, but I came back.

  I saw what I should not see;

  I heard what I should not hear;

  A life was returned to me,

  But never the loss of fear.

  You stand by the river at night;

  You stay until I come back:

  A shadow of white on white,

  A shadow of black on black.

  I do not know what this means, and I hope I never will. One year later a newspaper paragraph informed me that Jasper Ronaldson’s son, Tristram, had died alone in London from a drug overdose. The jury returned an open verdict. I have never had much time for talk about ‘wasted lives’—after all, a life is a life, and who are we to judge whether it has been wasted or not?—but in my selfish way I do still regret the loss to me of that vital, original mind.

  All this was over forty years ago now. It is November again and the mists have descended into the little Oxfordshire valley where I live, alone since my wife died two years ago. There is a stream running along the bottom of my garden and yesterday evening as I took my walk down to it I thought I could make out through the cold white haze two figures standing in the trees on the opposite bank. A big old man, bare-headed in a heavy overcoat was holding hands with a thin adolescent boy. The boy appeared to be naked and covered in blood, his left leg thrust forward in a stiff marching pose, but my eyesight is very poor these days and I cannot be sure. The boy raised a stick-like arm and seemed to wave or beckon to me.

  I have yet to see their faces.

  A CHRISTMAS CARD

  In the late winter afternoon the sky had faded to a rose-tinted, duck-egg blue. Beneath it a thick mantle of snow covered roofs and the ways through the city. The ancient houses on either side of the narrow street leaned inwards towards each other as if huddling together for warmth, golden light glowing from behind their mullioned windows. In the street a boy in ragged clothes was attempting to sweep the snow from a doorway. Passing by on the other side, his back to the viewer, was a tall, elderly man with a stick, a shovel hat and a long brown overcoat which came down almost to his feet.

  It was in many ways a scene typical of those found on Christmas cards of the late Victorian period, at a guess mid-1870s. The colours, produced by a superior chromolithographic process, were surprisingly fresh and the card had evidently not been used. The white border, deckled and heavily stamped to look like lace, was crisp and intact.

  Hugh Rider found it lying in a transparent plastic pocket on a stall at the Woodstock Antiques Fair. The little round sticker attached to the pocket had £50 written on it in blue biro. That was rather more than Rider wanted to pay, but the card was in superb condition, and he had never seen that particular image before. He screwed himself up to ask the stall holder what was his ‘best price’—a phrase he loathed—but he was anticipated.

  ‘You’re “trade”, aren’t you?’ said the man behind the stall, as if he had been reading Rider’s thoughts. ‘You can have it for £20.’

  Rider looked up and saw the stall holder for the first time, a small, thin, bespectacled man in his late sixties. He was looking straight at him and smiling.

  ‘That’s very generous,’ Rider said, breaking the cardinal rule of the antique dealer, which is never to suggest that anyone is doing you a favour. He took a £20 note out of his wallet and handed it to the man before he could change his mind.

  ‘You obviously admire it,’ said the man, as if this were a reason to lower his price rather than raise it.

  ‘It is unusual,’ said Rider guardedly.

  ‘It is unique,’ said the man, handing him the item. ‘Take my card,’ he said, pointing to a little pile of business cards on the front of the stall. Rider took one and read the name, Anthony Salvin.

  Rider felt he would have liked to have had further conversation with Mr Salvin, but by the time he had put the card in the inside pocket of his overcoat he found to his annoyance that the man was already occupied with another customer, a lady who was interested in some early nineteenth century engravings of Morchester. While he was talking to her Salvin briefly turned back to Rider and gave him a nod, friendly but dismissive. Rider walked away in search of other prizes, but that day—a week before Christmas, as it happens—he found none.

  A difficult man was Rider: clever, sharp, sardonic, with a round self-indulgent looking face which seemed at odds with his occasionally abrasive manner. He was someone who persistently misunderstood the effect he had on other people: when he thought he was being humorous, to the rest of the world he appeared rude; when he imagined himself to be honest and straightforward, he seemed harsh, even cruel to everyone else. Having given others, quite free of charge, the benefit of his unrivalled knowledge of Victorian prints and ephemera, he would be surprised when his generosity did not receive the gratitude it deserved because he had no idea how patronising he sounded.

  As he grew older, a vein of bitterness was added to this gaucherie. It began in his fortieth year when his wife left him and returned to America, taking with her half the value of the antiques business they had built up, along with their daughter, Stephanie. The reason for her departure was no more sinister than that she could no longer bear to live with him. Carla had been a very social person—a ‘social climber’ Rider had sometimes called her to her face—and she found her husband persistently embarrassing in company. Without fail, he would strike the wrong note: either he talked too much, or he remained aloof and silent; in louche company he would be censorious, with the staid he would suddenly launch into a scabrous anecdote from which no amount of disapproving looks or kicks under the table could deflect him. When Carla reproached him afterwards Rider would at first be penitent if a little baffled; then, when she pursued her theme a little too vigorously, his pride would suddenly assert itself. Why, he asked, did she do nothing but criticise him the whole time? When the parting of the ways came both felt that they were the injured party, but Rider felt the more injured because he was losing the one being for whom he felt and expressed unqualified love, their daughter, Stephanie, then nine years old.

  That parting had occurred five years ago. Every year since then at Christmas a letter had arrived containing a photograph of Stephanie looking a little older, a little more beautiful, a little more interesting, a little more achingly remote. This year even that bittersweet experience would be denied him. Stephanie had died in October as the result of a road accident, a stupid ‘American’ road accident, Rider had called it.

  He went to the funeral in Los Angeles and hated everything about it. It had seemed to him utterly artificial, from the impossibly green lawns of the vast ‘Garden of Rest’ in which his daughter had been interred to the mawkish little po
em that one of Stephanie’s school friends had read out at the grave side. Carla and he had barely spoken a word to each other. Their mutual sorrow had not met, so Rider took a plane back to England the day after the funeral with nothing but anger in him.

  As he drove back from Woodstock, Rider wondered vaguely what he would do with his find. He knew several collectors of Victorian Christmas cards who would pay a hundred or so for it; in addition, he could probably interest a company who made fine reproductions of early Christmas cards and to whom he acted as consultant. Under other circumstances these prospects would have interested, even excited him, but just at the moment his life was a heap of ashes. A fortnight before he had decided that there was no point in continuing to live.

  It was a wet night: rain drops sparkled on his windscreen, lit by the headlights of oncoming traffic. They shone for a moment before being rudely shoved aside by the arm of the windscreen wiper. More than once Rider felt the urge to drive into the lights that surged towards him out of the darkness, but the impulse was only momentary. Rider was going to commit suicide with the least amount of trouble to anyone else. The idea of taking others with him offended his sense of pride. He did not want to be thought utterly heartless in his grief. On the other hand, had someone driven into him, or stabbed him in some act of road rage, he would have blessed them—assuming that he could—from beyond the grave.

  Rider had always called himself an atheist, because he despised the milksop term ‘agnostic’. He was convinced that nothing stirred after death, but his refusal to entertain any notion of spirit was actuated as much by revenge against the way he thought life had treated him as by hard rationality. Given these convictions, however, he found it difficult to understand why he hesitated so long in the face of suicide, but he did. The idea of ceasing to be filled him with a horror which reason could never quite extinguish, and the irrationality of this fear annoyed him.