The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘No. That was pure . . . flux? Oh – look only! God, so beautiful!’

  Above them now towered the northern abutment of Hammersmith Bridge, spiky, Gothic, crisp against the bleached sky – a contrast made even starker by the still-unwashed grime of the war years.

  They both stopped, no longer man and wife, no longer lovers, but a pair of architects lost in the magical space defined and caged by its tracery. Willard echoed her, ‘Will you just look at that!’

  She took it as a gentle correction and stored away the phrase, a lover once again.

  ‘Why do we respond like that?’ he asked. ‘Architecturally it’s against all the values we ever learned. D’you suppose we could be in for a Victorian revival?’

  They crossed the empty road, still gazing skyward, revelling in the dimensions now cradled between the swooping catenaries of the suspension chains, before they continued their stroll upriver, along the Lower Mall.

  The sun burnished her fragile skin; every time he looked at her his love was renewed.

  Where the Lower Mall joins the Chiswick Mall proper, they came in sight of the houseboat moorings, between the bank and the long, boat-shaped island of Chiswick Eyot.

  ‘Heavens, so many!’ Marianne exclaimed. ‘It’s a small town of boats.’

  ‘But there’s our man!’ He pointed out a gray, oil-smeared hulk with the unmistakeable lines of a chine-hulled motor torpedo boat. It was moored to a barge, moored to an ex-pleasure boat, moored to . . . well, three or four other nautical mongrels that, finally, were moored to the bank. ‘The only MTB in the pack. Tony always had a taste for the largest and grandest.’

  There were perhaps half a dozen such columns of moored boats in all. Looking at them from this distance, Marianne was filled with a warm envy. In the evening sun, the little floating community looked so snug and secure. They must all lead the most wonderful lives. What more could people need than a few cabins, a galley, a mess room – and a huge, inviting city like London just a mile or two downriver? Threepence by Underground or bus. Tony’s MTB had a new, civilian name painted on her bow in an architect’s hand: LITTLE EXPECTATIONS. They stood on the bank and stared at her across the five intervening decks, wondering what to do next. Apart from the obvious ropes there were lengths of garden hose and some lethal-looking electricity cables, but nothing resembling a bell-push or even a line with a can of pebbles at the end of it. An RAF type with a Flying Officer Kite moustache poked his head out through a hatch on the second craft from shore, a squat tub of a thing with a sort of potting shed added to its deck. ‘Need any help, old chap?’ he asked.

  Marianne wondered if he’d point out their directions with those luxuriant whiskers. Willard fought the impulse to ask if he could pick up the AFN on those things. ‘Tony Palmer?’ he said. ‘I think he’s in the MTB, but how do we get there?’

  ‘Just stroll over all the decks between,’ the man answered in a bewildered tone that implied, What other way is there, for the love of Mike!

  His head remained poking out of the hatchway as he watched them picking an infinitely careful path among the mooring lines, pails, bicycles, boots, meat safes, and other junk that littered the decks. He chuckled at their caution. ‘Beats any old temperance lecture, what!’ he cried. ‘When you get there, just stamp on the deck. I know they’re aboard. TTFN!’

  Marianne looked inquiringly at Willard. ‘Ta Ta For Now,’ he explained. And then he had to explain ‘ta ta’.

  She sighed. ‘I’ll never learn it. You must tell me when I say things wrong.’

  ‘Sure. But don’t worry. You’ll pick it up in no time. English has no rules, really – not like German. There are just . . . well, different ways of saying things.’

  The deck of the MTB was the height of a man above its neighbour. They had to climb a short ladder lashed to its rail. Somewhere in the bowels of the vessel a wind-up gramophone was playing a Debussy prelude. Willard, afraid that stamping on the deck might jerk the needle, took up a mop and tapped its handle on the chine of the hull. The music stopped. There were vibrations as someone ascended a stair. Moments later a young woman opened the deckhouse door. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were my ’usband,’ she said, in accents more French than English.

  Willard and Marianne glanced at each other. Husband?

  ‘Mrs Palmer?’ he asked the woman.

  ‘Naturally.’ She smiled.

  ‘Mrs Tony Palmer? I didn’t know Tony had married.’ He turned to Marianne. ‘Did you?’

  She shook her head and stared at Tony’s wife, a fine-looking woman with a no-nonsense face. Firm, determined jaw. Frank blue eyes, warily observant. And glossy, raven-black hair.

  ‘Nicole?’ Willard said suddenly, sure of his guess yet somehow not trusting it.

  ‘Yes!’ She laughed. ‘And now I know you. Oh, forgive me, but you were much more . . . élégant in uniform. Major Johnson, no?’

  ‘No – definitely not! It’s Mister Johnson now. And this is my Missiz Johnson – Marianne. Honey, this is Nicole . . . er . . . oh, what kind of fool am I! – I was trying to remember your maiden name. Palmer, of course. Mrs Palmer.’

  The two women shook hands. ‘Come below, please,’ Nicole said, though she made no immediate move from the door. ‘Tony will be so ’appy to see you again, Willard. He talks about you often, you know. But he never says you are married?’

  Willard grinned. ‘He doesn’t know. We only tied the knot last week. He’s met Marianne, when we were with AMGOT, but he doesn’t know we’re married. We’re on our honeymoon now, in fact – on our way back to the States. Are you expecting him home tonight – well, obviously, if you thought we were he.’ ‘He’s only in the Dove, his favourite watering hole.’ Nicole nodded toward the bank. Her eyes flashed with sudden merriment. ‘Oh, let’s go and give him a grand surprise!’

  She grabbed a beret from a peg just inside the door and ushered them back down the ladder. A boisterous black Labrador leaped the gap, almost bowling Marianne over.

  ‘Xupé!’ Nicole scolded.

  ‘What’s that name?’ Willard asked.

  ‘It’s really St-Exupéry. And this is Fifi.’ She helped a small hairy terrier down to the lower level, where it skittered off in pursuit of Xupé.

  ‘You must be very happy to live so,’ Marianne said, gesturing toward the Little Expectations.

  Nicole pulled a face. ‘Last winter was the worst anyone could remember. I’m not spending another winter here.’ She did not lock anything.

  Conversation was difficult until they reached the bank.

  ‘Going for a drink?’ the RAF type called after them. ‘Whacko!’

  Nicole waved back at him. ‘Don’t walk near his hatch,’ she warned Marianne. ‘He only wants to peep up your skirt.’

  ‘Your English has improved out of all recognition,’ Willard said.

  ‘Why not? I’ve nothing to do but listen to the wireless all day.’

  He looked back at the boat and nodded. ‘I guess it’s not much of a challenge to you.’ He turned to Marianne. ‘During the war Nicole was a chef in her family restaurant in Trouville.’

  ‘To be chef in the war must have required great art,’ Marianne said.

  ‘Oh, Nicole can make a gourmet feast of spam and rutabagas,’ Willard said. Then, to Nicole: ‘Marianne is an architect, too. But you – you’ll take up your old profession now, surely? The English could sure do with it.’

  ‘That’s true.’ She shook her head. ‘But Tony has other ideas.’

  ‘Such as?’

  She chuckled. ‘Oh, I’m certain he’ll tell you, Willard. You especially. Be warned!’

  These hints of an old, easy intimacy between them left Marianne feeling isolated.

  They had reached the pub. He held open the door for the two women. Nicole put a finger to her lips and peeped inside. Then she looked back at them, nodded, and, imprisoning her two dogs, inclined her head toward the bar.

  Tony was sitting on a stool scraping the ash and dottle from his pipe. He
was dressed in the nondescript attire of an English gentleman at his ease, all sagging wool and leather patches; on his head, as a nautical concession, he wore a stocking cap topped out by an incongruously large woollen pompom that never settled.

  Willard, now standing immediately behind Tony, his mouth just inches from his ear, said softly, ‘I’d know the filthy stink of that secret weapon anywhere in the world.’

  Tony turned round, not slowly, not quickly. ‘Hello, Willard,’ he said. ‘I was just about to order another. What’s yours?’ Then he saw Marianne and – still without a great deal of surprise in his voice – added, ‘Good God!’

  Marianne laughed and threw her arms around his neck, giving him a mighty hug. ‘Tony!’ she scolded. ‘You are so . . . so typical!’

  Tony, in danger of overbalancing, slid round to face them, disentangling her arms in the process. He winked at her and looked Willard coolly up and down. ‘Married?’ he guessed. Willard nodded. ‘Good-oh. Actually, not much point in asking what’s yours. You can have stout or beer.’

  ‘No Scotch?’

  Several customers laughed, making Willard suddenly very conscious of being a bloody Yank.

  They carried four half-pints of thin beer out to the river bank where they sat on the wall and luxuriated in the evening sun. ‘Warm English beer!’ Willard said. ‘And easily three percent alcohol! How I have longed for this moment!’

  Marianne sipped hers and, nodding at Nicole, said, ‘Watering hole!’

  Willard had prepared himself for a flood of wartime reminiscences but none came. Nicole tried. She asked how Tony and Willard had met Marianne. Tony was vague. ‘During our time with AMGOT,’ he said, adding nothing to what Willard had already told her.

  Simple loyalty impelled Willard to do no more than nod his confirmation, though he longed to tell Nicole everything, to make her and Marianne part of the same old-pals history. He tried to draw Tony out on his work with the Greater London Plan, but the man was equally laconic in his replies there.

  The two wives started talking between themselves – again, not about the past but about the day-to-day difficulties of life in London and Hamburg. Mostly it was Nicole telling Marianne about rationing, and ‘points’ for everything, and ‘Utility’ furniture, and queues and permits and waiting lists.

  Tony asked Willard if his civilian clothes meant he was out of the army, or was it some special dispensation the Americans allowed to honeymooning officers?

  Willard told him, no, he was out for good.

  Tony grinned. ‘You old dog! How did you swing that one?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Willard told him. ‘I’m ashamed of it already. You’re still working on this Greater London Plan?’

  ‘Harder than ever, why? Want a desk?’

  Willard laughed. ‘It won’t work, you know.’

  ‘It’s already working. Cheers! They’ve started with the Churchill Gardens Estate – go and have a look.’

  ‘Cheers! Oh, sure, bits of it will get done. But you’ll lose in the end. Impatience, inertia, greed, lack of vision – the same forces that scuppered Wren’s plan after the Great Fire. But what the heck – I’ve said all this before. Abercrombie got you out good and early – and that’s the most important thing.’

  The talk drifted on to architecture in general – new styles, new materials, and the little matter of rebuilding the post-war world.

  Finally, with a nod toward the MTB, Willard said, ‘Somehow I don’t connect that sort of thing with you.’

  Nicole overheard him and broke off her conversation with Marianne at once. She stared at her husband, on tenterhooks for his reply.

  Tony looked shrewdly at Willard, then at Marianne. ‘Got anything on tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘Saturday?’ Willard shrugged. ‘Sightseeing, I guess. Why?’

  ‘I’ll show you a sight – a sight and a half! Care for a picnic?’

  Willard looked at Marianne, then at the dead, turbid waters of the Thames.

  ‘No, not here!’ Tony laughed.

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He was vague again. ‘Near Hertford. Out in the country.’ His eyes ranged from one to the other and for the first time since their reunion he was truly animated. ‘What d’you say, eh? Adam Wilson will be there, too.’

  Saturday, 26 April 1947

  Felix left the train, as instructed, at Welwyn North. He watched as the tunnel swallowed it, watched the smoke obscure the daylight at the farther end. He lingered there on the down platform until it cleared again, from black through sepia to bright spring sunshine. Holes through solids held an increasing fascination for him. Not the moth-eaten mummies of Henry Moore’s drawings but the pregnant-bellied granite and limestone of his own carvings.

  ‘Barwick Green . . . the Dower House?’ The words, spoken in an American accent, floated across the lines to him from the up platform. The man and the woman who had left the train with him and raced over the footbridge, were speaking to the porter. Felix drew breath to call out, to tell them he was headed that way, too, and that Mr Wilson was supposed to be coming to meet him; but a sudden violent shiver prevented him. Half of him warned that if he did not overcome this desire to shrink into cracks in the world, they would have won after all; the other half admitted the truth of it but pleaded that the time was not yet. He could not even make for the footbridge until the opposite platform was deserted.

  While he dithered, Adam Wilson emerged from the ticket hall, saw him, and called out, ‘Mister Breit!’ Then his eyes fell on the man and the woman, too. ‘And Willard and Marianne! Same train! Stroke of luck! Mister Breit! Sorry about this. Come over the bridge – or aren’t you up to it?’

  An express, bound for Kings Cross, came roaring out of the tunnel and severed their contact.

  Steps. These of cast iron, pierced.

  The guard’s van rattled below Felix’s feet as he crossed the bridge, whipping a tang of sulphur onto his tongue. The note changed as it clanged on over the viaduct but he did not linger now.

  ‘Mister Breit! This, by the most extraordinary coincidence, is Willard Johnson. He was one of—’

  ‘Willard A Johnson,’ Marianne corrected him.

  ‘Of course. Willard A Johnson, who was our colleague in AMGOT and our host at Mauthausen on the day you were liberated. And Willard, this is Felix Breit – the Felix Breit.’

  Marianne saw her husband turn pale. ‘Oh, my God! Feelicks Bryeet?’ He pronounced it like a correction of Wilson’s studiously correct German. To Adam he added, ‘Tony didn’t say.’

  ‘He wasn’t sure Breit would be coming.’

  Felix was sure he and Palmer had forgotten the invitation altogether.

  Johnson continued pumping his hand. ‘Man! If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be . . . I don’t know – a Fuller Brush man.’ Seeing Adam’s bewilderment he added, ‘A door-to-door salesman.’

  ‘Why, please?’

  ‘Your sculpture was my introduction to architecture. You . . . Brancusi . . . the Bauhaus . . . architecture as an art form. Eye-opening.’

  Felix realized that Americans, too, inhabited that world where Hungary and Czechoslovakia were vaguely interchangeable. ‘Well!’ he said, and smiled at the man’s wife, who smiled awkwardly back.

  What was this awkwardness? Was she German? Did they imagine he hated all Germans now? It was a German family in Vichy France who sheltered him after his second arrest; he had tried to look them up last month but was told they had died in Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt. How to let these Saxons know that Europe had become a little more complicated since their tribe had last lived there?

  ‘Forgive me,’ Johnson apologized. ‘Herr Bryeet, allow me to . . .’

  He was obviously going to introduce his wife. Swiftly Felix took her hand and kissed the air an inch from her knuckles; it would have offended him if she had been introduced to him instead of the correct way round. ‘Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau. Felix Breit.’

  She gave a single laugh that was sure
ly ironic and replied, ‘Frau-Arkitekt Marianne Johnson.’

  Their eyes dwelled in each other’s and Felix experienced a rapport that was purely European.

  ‘Actually, Marianne is Swedish,’ Wilson said. ‘Or, I suppose, American now.’

  ‘She’s also an architect in her own right,’ Willard added.

  She saw the surprise in Felix’s eyes and realized he thought she looked too young to be qualified. ‘An apprentice,’ she added.

  ‘It’s not a bad profession to join these days, madame,’ Felix said.

  ‘Listen!’ Willard said. ‘I can’t take all this sir, madame, gnädige Frau, stuff. It’s Marianne, Willard . . . Felix – OK, Adam?’

  Smiles all round.

  ‘Well!’ Adam rubbed his hands briskly. ‘I don’t think the pony can haul all four of us to the top of the hill so . . .’

  ‘Pony?’ Willard said.

  ‘Petrol’s rationed in case you didn’t know.’

  ‘Gee! I should’ve thought. I could have fixed you up with some.’

  Adam threw back his head and laughed. ‘Fix! Whenever I hear that word, I think of you, Willard.’ To Felix he added, ‘Whatever you want, Willard can “fix” it.’

  Willard nodded. ‘Be proud to,’ he said as they wandered out to the station forecourt.

  ‘I can walk,’ Felix said. ‘Let Mrs Johnson ride. Marianne.’

  ‘I shall lead the pony,’ she said, walking straight up to him. ‘We can walk all the way and give this ol’ fella a break.’

  Adam could detect Willard’s vowels in her speech.

  ‘Tony told me you married Sally Beaumont?’ Willard said. To Felix he explained, ‘Another goddam architect! But she’s special. She was his boss in AMGOT and the designer of the famous British army “spider” hut. She had the highest-ranking wartime commission in the women’s services – acting-temporary brigadier. None of us made it above colonel.’