From that moment on, he sensed a certain shift in their relationship, in her estimation of him. Every now and then he caught her looking at him as if to say, ‘I need to know you a lot better than I do.’ Behind it, perhaps, was the thought that he could be very useful to her. He relaxed even more in her company then; ‘You could be useful to me’ was the motto of his homeland.
And it cuts both ways, of course.
After fifteen minutes or so the Curator of Prints himself asked if he might join them and he, too, listened to Felix’s tales in fascination. Before they left he asked if he would return some other day and repeat the stories to a shorthand note taker.
‘You should charge them for it,’ Faith told him as they made their way down to the tea room.
‘Don’t tell me what to charge for.’ He gave her arm a friendly squeeze. ‘I’ll suggest an intimate dinner to which he might also invite the Curator of the Tate and the head of the sculpture school at the Slade. Or the Royal College.’
She laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Mister Breit. I shouldn’t have . . .’
‘We’re from the same mould, Miss Bullen-ffitch. You needn’t worry.’
‘But I do. You have such an unworldly air. You seem so vulnerable.’
‘I’m vulnerable when it comes to book design – I make no secret of that!’
They brought their tea and biscuits to one of the tables and she began: ‘You are only vulnerable, if you try to get too technical. Don’t! Fogel has first-rate book designers in the house – people who know all about typefaces and ems and points and serifs and stuff like that. He doesn’t expect anything like that from you. From you he wants an artistic –’ her hands began to shape huge, airy spheres – ‘overall view.’
‘From the depths of my ignorance!’
‘From the profound depths of your artistic sensibility! Listen! You know the difference between an artist and a designer? A designer always has logical reasons for whatever he does. He can always say, “I chose these four tints because we can get them with only one colour separation and black.” Even if he really chose them because they’re pretty. See? The blighters always have a logical reason. But that’s what keeps them down at the level of mere tactics. They’re just lieutenants and captains – fortunately for you, General Breit! Because you can step in with the grand, overall strategy.’
The tutorial continued for another half-hour, until Felix’s head was so stuffed with typographical arcana that it almost made a coherent whole.
‘I’m just putting together snippets I’ve picked up since going to work at Manutius,’ she warned him
‘Which is how long?’
‘Two months – a lifetime. Two months is a lifetime with Wolf Fogel, believe me. It won’t be a sinecure, Mister Breit. It’ll be one frantic day each week.’
‘You mean I should ask a lot of money?’
‘Of course.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘What d’you call a lot of money?’
He shrugged. ‘Four hundred?’
She slumped in her chair and asked the cracked glass tabletop, ‘Am I wasting my time with this man?’
‘More?’ he asked.
‘Much more! Ask for two thousand and stic firmly at sixteen hundred – and that’s per volume, mind.’
‘My God!’ His hands began to tremble. ‘That’s four times what I’m getting in—’
‘Listen – when Fogel meets other publishers he boasts about two things: how little he pays his slaves and how much he pays his consultants. You ask for four hundred and he’ll want you to come in every day. For sixteen hundred he’ll be so grateful you can spare us one day a week. This is not the real world, you know – it’s the world of publishing.’
He liked that ‘us’! ‘Whose side are you on?’ he asked.
‘Need you ask? D’you know the secret of success, Mister Breit? Never acquire any skill that might detain you at the bottom. I actually learned shorthand-typing before I realized my mistake – and I’ll kill you if you ever tell Fogel I can do it.’
Wednesday, 14 May 1947
The Manutius Press occupied the entire first floor of a nondescript, three-storey, 1930s glass-and-concrete box in Rathbone Mews, not quite two hundred yards from the Saint Giles’s Circus end of Oxford Street. The ground floor was a cross between a warehouse and a shop, where all kinds of war surplus was for sale. The commissionaire, a one-armed ex-soldier, showed Felix to the lift. ‘If it doesn’t work, sir,’ he said, ‘the stairway’s down the end there.’
It worked; no steps today.
Faith Bullen-ffitch was waiting for him in the vestibule; the man must have buzzed her. ‘Fogel has booked us for lunch at Schmidt’s,’ she said as she led him along the corridor. ‘Sorry about the lino. We can’t get a requisition to replace it.’
The walls were all of light steel framing filled in up to waist height with asbestos board, painted and repainted many times, the latest coat being cream; above it, frosted wired glass rose to the ceiling – all paper-thin. As they progressed she said, over her shoulder: ‘Editorial, editorial, typing pool, design, Ozalid room, copy, editorial . . .’
Almost all the doors were open, allowing Felix (when he wasn’t admiring the way Faith walked) a composite of Utility office desks, none tidy, young men in shirt sleeves, ties loosened, jackets draped over chair-backs, sucking pencils as they read, drumming fingers as they read, typing two-fingered, closing their eyes as they waited for telephone connections. Where she indicated design, men and some women stood hunched over machines that looked like some kind of camera obscura, with lights below and a hooded canopy above.
‘Production’s in the other corridor,’ she concluded. ‘And here’s the nerve-centre. Me, Mister Wiggs of accounts – Hans Dreyer, who . . . does all sort of useful things – and—’
‘What’s on the top floor?’ he asked.
‘Nothing but ghosts.’ She opened a door with a flourish. ‘Fogel!’
Fogel leaped out of his chair and pirouetted round his desk with extraordinary grace for so large a man. ‘Breit!’ He advanced on Felix, right hand fully extended. His left, holding a large cigar, hovered nearby. He had large, slightly watery eyes of a penetrating blue; their lower lids hung a little slackly, forming cisterns which maintained that watery sheen. His hair was so minutely wavy that it would have been impossible to caricature it, especially with so much brilliantine. His lips were never still – nor were his eyes. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this meeting ever since Bullen-ffitch told me about crossing you at the V&A,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Ve go for lunch soon. A sherry? Anything? You smoke a cigar?’
Felix declined all offers. ‘Bei mir ist es ganz überaschend . . .’ he began.
‘English!’ Fogel looked both pained and apologetic. ‘It’s politic in these times. You speak English, no? America? You were a boy in America?’
‘Sure. But I get so little chance to speak German.’
‘Oh you get used to that.’ He grinned. ‘Where you live now? They speak German there? Sit, please.’ He waved a hand toward a sofa, facing his desk.
‘There’s a Swedish girl . . . woman . . . married to an American. She speaks perfect German.’
On the sofa he was a good thirty centimetres beneath Fogel, now back at his desk – which was certainly not from the Utility range.
‘You live in their house?’ Fogel asked.
He explained about the Dower House.
‘A kibbutz.’ Fogel chuckled. ‘A kibbutz of capitalists! That should be interesting.’
The conversation skated briefly over a number of topics – Fogel’s grandfather, Felix’s grandfather, the villa on the Wannsee, artists Fogel had known in Vienna, artists Felix had known in Paris and Berlin . . . shame . . . blame . . . survival.
When the cigar was ready for mashing to shreds, Fogel stood abruptly. ‘Vee lunch,’ he said. ‘You can speak German to the vaiters. Fritz is very good. He knows all from Schiller. Can you believe – all in the war a German restaurant stays open in London, very popular with BBC
people, and nobody breaks the vindow glass even! Come – ve go!’
It was barely a quarter of a mile but they took a taxi up Rathbone place and into Charlotte Street, where Schmidt’s was to be found. Fogel enlivened the journey with a joke about a diner who tells the waiter that his sauerkraut is not very sour. And the waiter tells him that’s because it’s actually spaghetti! And the customer laughs and says, ‘Ach so! No, no! You can leave the plate because – for spaghetti – it’s already quite zauer enough!’
When they were seated at his table in Schmidt’s, he returned to the joke and said, ‘This is precisely our problem vith modern art, Breit – our series. Ve cannot simply look at a piece of modern art and say it’s good, it’s bad, it’s zo-zo. First ve must ask what it’s set out to be – is it Surrealist-Sauerkraut or Symbolist-Spaghetti? Every act of criticism begins with the question: Papiere bitte, Herr Künstler! And this, dear Breit, is where you and your artworks will be zo absolutely crucial. They are that framevork. You can do it, yes?’
Felix, who hadn’t the first notion of what was really wanted of him, even now, played for time. He said he would prefer to look at whatever work had already gone into planning and outlining the series.
But Fogel would have none of it. ‘In that case all you make is an illustration of our vork. All you do then is follow us. But you are not our follower – you are our Führer! Ve flounder with labels – Dada . . . Fauves . . . Abstract Expressionist. Ve shuffle cards. But you – you come crashing in with just one zupreme flash of genius and you pull it all togezzer. You make the grand synthesis in one sculpture! Ve light it in many different ways. Ve put it in different backgrounds. Ve combine it vith uzzer material. No?’
Throughout this and several other inspiring monologues Fogel’s hands gestured dynamic but unhelpful shapes, neither grace notes toward any kind of sculpture nor rhetorical flourishes to guide Felix through the vehemently sincere opacity of the man’s thoughts. The entire meal was shrouded in that same rich fog of allusion and cajolery. Fogel’s restless gaze quartered the room as often as it settled on Felix, who now realized that he was going to see nothing of the restaurant and its other clientele – whom both Fogel and Faith Bullen-ffitch seemed to find every bit as interesting as they found him. So, after the Bratwürst and Sauerkraut (both of which he could eat without surrendering any ration coupons), he made an excuse and went to the gents. Most of the other customers, he now saw, were men in city suits but there was a more bohemian group at a cluster of tables at the farther end of the restaurant. BBC types, he guessed. Among them was a young woman in a long-sleeved floral-print dress who looked rather interesting. On his return he hung back in the dark of the passage and studied her as long as he dared.
She was statuesque and blonde, with short, tight curls that clung around her head. The one word that occurred to him, watching her every move, was ‘dignified’. She held her head high and spoke without animation to her two companions, both men and both clearly somewhat in awe of her. Her face had a sculptural quality, like a de Lempicka. All her gestures were precise and unhurried. When she spoke, they listened; when they spoke she had no hesitation in cutting in once or twice. As he re-entered the restaurant she broke off what she was saying and stared at him. Their eyes met and, for some reason, Felix found himself responding with the faintest of smiles and the smallest nod of his head before threading his path back to Fogel.
‘Someone you know?’ Faith asked.
‘Who?’
‘Never mind.’ She gazed pointedly over his shoulder.
He turned and followed her gaze. The de Lempicka woman was talking to Fritz, their waiter.
At the coffee-and-brandy stage Fogel began to bargain over the fee for his work on the series. Remembering what Faith had told him at the V&A, he parleyed his way up to a sum that seemed dizzyingly unreal. Curiously, the harder he pushed, the more delighted Fogel appeared.
Fritz came with the bill. ‘Hat es Ihnen gut geschmäkt?’ he asked, addressing Felix in particular.
He replied, in German, that he had enjoyed the meal immensely. Fogel told the waiter that Herr Breit was a distinguished artist and that he, Fritz, would probably be seeing quite a bit of him because he was going to direct an important project at Manutius. Faith tried to interrupt this exchange, squeezing Fogel’s arm rather hard and reminding him of an afternoon appointment.
‘Ja-ja-jaaa,’ he said, shaking her off. He simply signed the bill and handed it back.
As they left, Felix paused in the doorway and took one last look at the BBC blonde. Once again she was talking earnestly to Fritz.
Back at the Manutius office, after his farewells with his new employer, Faith showed him back to the lift. This time she took his arm and held it tight all the way. ‘You’d never have dared push him that high without my coaching,’ she told him.
‘Could I have gone higher?’
‘Not a penny. Aren’t you glad we met, though? When are you going to show me this capitalist kibbutz?’
Felix gently pushed open the door to the Palmers’ part of the house and tiptoed along the corridor to the stairs that led up to Willard and Marianne’s flat. Nicole heard him nonetheless. ‘I think they went out,’ she said, appearing at the half-landing as if by magic.
‘I saw their lights as I crossed the yard,’ he assured her.
When he drew level she hissed, ‘How can you?’
He shrugged.
‘She didn’t just work in Germany, you know. We all worked for the Germans in one way or another. We had no choice. But she had a choice – and she choiced to join the Nazi Party. She worked for Speer!’
‘I wish I’d been so lucky.’
‘How can you say such things? You of all people? I don’t understand you.’
‘I’ll tell you then. Speer called all his officers and sergeants together one day and asked them what they’d do to a machine operator who didn’t oil his machine so that it broke. And they said they’d beat him into the middle of next week. So then he told them that his slave labourers were the finest machines they were ever likely to come across. He wanted the maximum output from each and every one of them, and he wasn’t likely to get it if they were starved and beaten black and blue – was that understood? In Mauthausen, the harder you worked, the quicker you died. So, Nicole, you wish to ask me once more why I would have been lucky to work for Speer – me of all people?’
‘Alors!’ She turned on her heel in disgust. ‘You people can make black white and white black. Well, I will never fraternize with that one. Jamais, jamais, jamais!’
‘The loss is yours,’ he called after her as he started on the last flight.
Steps . . . pitch pine.
Her remark – you people – had not slipped by him. An unconscious anti-Semitism from an all-too-conscious anti-Nazi. Not at all uncommon in France.
Nicole turned again and followed him. ‘You know that new electric cooker they have – the monster he got from the US base?’
‘That’s one of the things I want to see now.’
‘She heats their apartment with it – it’s true. She turns it on full and leaves the oven door open. We’re going to have a horrid electricity bill all because of her.’
‘You’ve seen her doing it?’
‘Not me. I won’t set foot in the place. But just go and look at the meter if you don’t believe me. The wheel spins faster than you can watch. It must be her. Who else?’
He opened the Johnsons’ door and called out, ‘Anyone home?’
‘Felix!’ Willard called back.
‘We’re in the south room,’ Marianne added.
‘See – lights on everywhere!’ Nicole shouted as she went back downstairs.
‘Nicole!’ he called after her. ‘Don’t you know what sort of scars you get if you keep up picking at the wounds?’
She slammed a door.
Willard and Marianne had turned their largest room into a temporary workshop, full of American power tools running off a 110-volt transformer
. The other families had each lashed up some kind of kitchen in their portions of the house but for most of them it was still a matter of carrying large enamel bowls of used washing-up water to the nearest lavatory for emptying. The Johnsons, however, were making the kitchen to end all kitchens – a combination of American gadgetry and Scandinavian design. In fact, the way they planned it, the entire apartment was to become a lived-in advertisement for their architecture-and-design partnership. When they had finished, this temporary workshop would become their studio, where clients could see for themselves the sort of quality they could expect.
Willard was lighting a log fire and cursing the short chimney for not drawing very well. ‘What can we do for you, Felix?’ he asked between puffs.
Marianne was laying out tongue-and-groove matchboarding, all cut to size and sanded to a fine satin finish; she was swapping boards around, trying to get an even scattering of the cinnamon-red knots, each of which she had carefully blinded with French polish.
‘Or should I try to make random groupings of them?’ she asked Felix when she had got them perfectly distributed.
‘Are you a designer or an artist?’ he asked in reply.
‘What’s the difference?’
He told her.
Nonplussed, she said, ‘I guess I’m an artist pretending to be a designer, then.’
‘Just like me. I’m a sculptor who’s going to have to pretend to be a typographer.’
‘Eh?’
‘Say again?’ Willard added.
‘I got hired today by a publisher in London to make the specifications for a series of books – a five-volume encyclopedia of modern Western art.’
‘Hey man . . . wizard . . . well done!’ The congratulations rained upon him.
Willard gave up on the fire and said, ‘This calls for a celebration. Did you eat yet, Felix? Let’s see if anywhere’s open for dinner.’
‘No, honey,’ Marianne insisted. ‘We’ve got to stick to our quota. Sorry, Felix. I’ll cook us a dinner here. Say you’ll stay for that.’
The Dower House Page 7