The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘Down the far end,’ she told him. ‘Table for two.’

  When they reached it he hoisted their bags up to the luggage rack and they settled in the two window seats, facing each other. Looking about the carriage he said, ‘I like the pictures in our carriages on the LNER out to Welwyn – those coloured linocuts of Fountains Abbey and The Vale of Evesham. A world of permanence.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘It was a good day – the twenty-seventh of May.’

  ‘How’s Faith?’

  He shrugged. ‘She was out riding when I left. Half-past six every day, rain or shine. Willard drove me to the station so she’ll have to go in with Todd this morning.’

  There was a shrill whistle but it must have been for some other train because the Golden Arrow did not move. The waiter took their order – coffee and Kunzle cakes, which Felix called ‘the nearest thing in England to Sachertorte’.

  He continued, ‘It’ll be interesting – Germany. Post-war. Terence – our economics brain who lives down in the gatelodge – says that England’s limping along with out-of-date equipment that wasn’t destroyed in the war while Germany thrusts ahead with brand-new industrial machinery everywhere. It’s the Versailles of nineteen twenty-two stood on its head.’

  She drew breath to speak . . . then thought better of it.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s something I think about often. Sometimes I want Germany to suffer for what they did – we did – in the war. Then, other times, I know that would only be a repeat of the suffering after the nineteen-fourteen war . . . and all the horrors that led to.’

  While she was speaking the waiter put down their coffee and cakes; Felix initialled the chit. There was a new, more distant shrill of a whistle, and this time the train started to move – smoothly, without a jolt. The coffee did not even tilt in their cups.

  ‘Those horrors couldn’t possibly be repeated,’ Felix said.

  ‘We’re an inventive lot,’ she countered. ‘We’d think of something.’

  They emerged into the full light of day, into a south-London townscape so drab and tired that, for a long moment, it deprived them of speech. At last she asked, ‘Did you bring something to read? I saw a magazine in your raincoat pocket.’

  ‘Why? Actually, I have something Eric Brandon asked me to read . . . part of some book he’s writing – about state patronage.’

  ‘I think it’s very relaxing to sit and read on a train. We can talk again when there’s some nice country scenery to look at. This is so . . . schäbig.’

  ‘Drab.’ He picked up a Kunzle cake – a small cake in which the traditional crinkle-paper cup was replaced with one of crinkle-chocolate and filled with a dense, frothy-choclatey-chewy-nougaty cream. ‘Don’t let me eat more than one of these,’ he begged her before taking the smallest, make-it-last bite.

  ‘I suppose I could force myself to eat just one,’ she replied, biting off a regular mouthful and closing her eyes in ecstasy.

  He wondered how many fellow prisoners he would have killed just to be able to get one of these into his hands. Was that on her mind, too? He could just make out the title of her book: The Woman of Rome.

  ‘Good?’ he asked.

  ‘Unpleasant,’ she said, ‘but you have to keep on reading. Fascinatingly unpleasant. I was going to bring The Diary of Anne Frank, but then I thought . . . no.’

  ‘No,’ he murmered, absent-mindedly fingering the second Kunzle cake, and opening Eric’s folder of loose leaves, ‘perhaps not.’

  From time to time she broke her communion with Adriana and her existentially inevitable drift into prostitution to watch Felix as he grappled with Eric’s complex but constipated effort to reconcile artistic freedom with the patronage offered by the modern state. ‘Any good?’ she asked as he laid the final sheet back in its folder. ‘It certainly held your attention.’

  ‘Wyndham Lewis did it better,’ he said. ‘The free-ranging artist who accepts handouts from the state must ever after accept that he is now confined to a paddock. Didn’t some scientists prove recently that the bumblebee cannot possibly fly?’

  She laughed. ‘I read that somewhere.’

  ‘Well, I think Eric’s saying that culture has come to a dead end. Art can no longer fly.’

  ‘And he’s asking for your opinion? What are you going to tell him?’

  ‘I shall say I feel very like a bumblebee.’

  ‘The White Cliffs?’ Angela murmured. ‘More like gray, don’t you think?’

  ‘And the “bluebirds” turn out to be seagulls. Promises are so easy to make in wartime.’

  ‘But you can see why they haven’t been invaded for almost a thousand years – and not for lack of trying. Do you get seasick?’

  He leaned over the rail, staring directly down into the sea, enchanted by the flickering interplay of black and gray-green, offset by white streaks of foam. ‘Only when asked,’ he replied.

  ‘I think I’m going inside.’

  ‘Below,’ he told her. ‘On a ship it’s called going below. Would you like to read my father’s second letter? Or later, perhaps?’

  She held out her hand. ‘I’d be honoured to be allowed to read it.’ She found a seat that would allow her to glance up at the horizon from time to time; someone at work had told her it was the cure for seasickness. She unfolded the letter and smoothed it carefully on the cut moquette of the empty seat next to her. The pattern, self-consciously avant-garde in the Thirties, now seemed merely trite. She read:

  My dearest son,

  My earlier letter to you is still not sent. And now this one will join it and who knows if either of them will ever be read by you? When we heard of your arrest in Paris and the petition to the Gestapo by so many famous artists, we were so thrilled and so proud, Tante Uschi and I. Even more so when it led to your release. But, for that same reason, I knew then that I could not risk sending you anything whatsoever. For one thing I hoped you had gone into hiding somewhere in Vichy France. For another, they would know how to trace the letter back to me, no matter what care I took, and I could not risk putting others in such danger. So many people helped me put my life back together after your mother drowned and I would rather endure a hundred deaths than put them in harm’s way.

  After that, things became so bad that I and others were forced to move here to Kiel, where the mother of one of us has become too feeble to manage on her own – though, fortunately, she still has her wits about her and knows how to keep a secret. I know at least half a dozen Jews living ‘in the shadows’ in Berlin and they tell me they know of dozens more; altogether there must be more than a thousand. But I have not the temperament or the skills needed to survive in that way. Here I simply hide and make no noise.

  But what would even a thousand Jews on the run be against the hundreds of thousands who once lived in that beautiful city! They took them away in comfortable passenger trains but once they were out of the city they pushed them into a siding and packed them like sardines into cattle trucks and continued in that way to the east. To where? We don’t know. All we do know is that no one ever hears from them again. So this is not ‘resettlement’, which is what we once feared above all. Above all? No. It was the limit of our fears because no one could believe they would actually murder every Jew and other ‘undesirable’ they could get their hands on.

  How are they doing it? With typical German efficiency – of course – but how? With bullets? Surely they cannot spare that much ammunition, especially with things going so badly for them on every front? So do they put them inside rings of electrified barbed wire and simply starve them to death? Or let them die of exposure? But they would still have to dig pits to bury the bodies. Perhaps the new arrivals have to do that before they, in turn, are left to die? But how many soldiers would it take to guard thousands of people, armed with picks and shovels, who have just had the most vivid demonstration that they have no hope of surviving? That cannot be it, either. So how are these devils managing an industry whose raw material is hundreds
of thousands of living people and whose product is hundreds of thousands of corpses?

  Such thoughts plague my mind these days because now, in the summer of 1943, I have decided I can no longer expose my friends to the risks of harbouring me here. In other words I have decided to try to make my way to Denmark. The border is only a day or two away on foot. And then I shall try to make my way onward to Sweden before autumn is too far advanced. The Danes are not surrendering their Jews to the Nazis, so I have a better chance there than here. And in Sweden, of course, I shall live in perfect safety.

  If I get there.

  If you receive these letters from any other hand than mine, you will know that I almost certainly failed to make it. If so, I shall, I fear, discover the answer to the question of the killing factories. And, by the same token, you will have escaped them or you will have survived them. I can imagine you doing either.

  And what can I say to you in what may be my last communication with my own dearest son? That I bitterly regret the words on which we parted – certainly. You are an artist whose talent I not only failed to recognize . . . I actually mocked you for thinking you possessed it: ‘hoodwinking yourself into the free life’! I was jealous of you, to be sure. I started out with ambitions to become the Grand Old Man of German Literature, a latter-day Schiller, the sun to Thomas Mann’s moon. I ended up, at my very pinnacle, a penny-a-liner, scribbling in cafés for pin money and hanging on the coat-tails of men and women with real talent. Do not think this is false modesty – a great artist once assured me of its truth!

  Why did it happen so? I think because I never got out from under your grandfather’s shadow. His brand of Protestant hatred made my flesh crawl. And he robbed me of our family’s Jewish heritage, which I did not realize until it was too late to try to recover it. Jews have to grow from the cradle; even a Jewish atheist is more Jewish than the most ardent convert. That man harried me from the pulpit of his own evangelical self-righteousness and I never managed to escape him. ‘Yea, though I scale the highest mountain or hide myself in the deepest deep of ocean, there also willt Thou find me!’ – one of his favourite texts. For him that ‘Thou’ was God. For me it was him.

  It would not have mattered so much if I had not also loved him. You, at least, did not make that same mistake with me. That sounds bitter but I do not mean it so. If this really is the last communication we share this side of the grave, we cannot afford those comforting half-truths that lubricate our ordinary lives. Whatever you may have felt for me – love, at times, I’m sure, and ennui, and distaste, and bewilderment – the entire gamut – you never let it come between you and your art. And nor must you do so now unless you wish to become the third wreckage of a Breit in three generations. Your grandfather – for all his commercial success – went whoring after his Protestant God and failed to understand what was happening all around him in the world of Art. Your father – notwithstanding the comfortable living he made in journalism and on the foothills of belles lettres – wasted himself in futile justification of his ways to God and That Man. And you? Well, if you think of either of us more than fleetingly, once a month, perhaps, it will be to your detriment as an artist, which is what you first and foremost are.

  If you survive this vile bloodbath, please do what you can to see that those who helped me do not fall upon hard times. Love has no comparitive. I cannot say I have come to love one of them more than I loved your mother or less, but love her I do, and with all my heart, for she is one of the noblest women I have ever known.

  I will close with some lines you will remember well. You spoke them to ‘Brutus’ in the person of Kurt Zuckermann in your last year at the Gymnasium: ‘Farewell! Forever and forever farewell! If we meet again, we shall smile indeed. If not, why then this parting were well made.’

  Your loving Vati

  She had not glanced even once at the horizon – and she did not feel the least bit queasy, either. She re-folded the letter and went back to join Felix on deck. ‘Tummy OK?’ he asked.

  ‘For God’s sake! Shut up about it!’

  ‘Sorry. You know the cure, don’t you.’

  ‘I can hardly wait,’ she replied wearily.

  ‘Sit under a tree for ten minutes.’

  She burst into laughter and, helped by a heave from the deck, launched herself at him. ‘Oh, Felix!’ she cried, steadying herself with a firm grip on his arm. ‘You’ve been trying to tell me that since we came on board – haven’t you! And I never gave the right answer. I’m s-o-r-r-y!’

  ‘Forgiven,’ he said crisply. ‘By the way – before you ask – the “great artist” my father mentions was me.’

  ‘Well, funnily enough, I did manage to work that out for myself. Also that his deliberately vague talk of “others” is really just about your Tante Uschi. He obviously feared the Gestapo might get their hands on the letter. Do you think he really tried to reach Sweden through Denmark?’

  Felix was surprised. ‘But surely it was his best hope – his only hope?’

  ‘That’s exactly why I question it. If I had been in his situation and really intended going back to Berlin – the one city I knew inside-out – and if I feared the letter might fall into the hands of the Gestapo, I’d say what he said about living in the shadows in Berlin. And then I’d go into some detail about escaping in exactly the opposite direction. So I think this letter tells you nothing about what really happened to him. But that’s the least important part. The rest of it is very moving.’

  She did not point out – she did not need to point out – that if he had made it to Berlin and had managed to evade the Nazis, then the fact that he had not surfaced after the liberation probably meant that he had been taken to God knows where by the Russians.

  No one was coming back from there, either.

  At Calais the Golden Arrow became the Flêche d’Or, whisking them in faded pre-war luxury across the flat autumnal plains of northern France to the Gare du Nord.

  ‘Does the Orient Express still run?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘One of the things we used to do in the KL was to talk about our dream journeys. One girl swore the first thing she’d do if we ever got free was take a cruise from Narvik in Norway all the way round the top of the world to Archangel and back – in the time of the midnight sun, of course. It was wonderful to think of standing in freedom in endless sunshine.’

  ‘And your dream?’

  ‘Mine was to take the Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople. I didn’t even know if it still ran – I still don’t – but that was my dream journey.’ Impetuously she took his hands across the table. ‘Except now I’ll have this one instead. Truly – I don’t think I could have faced going back to Germany without you.’

  Mildly embarrassed by her outburst, she made to draw her hands away. But he held them in a tight grip. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I . . . I . . . that is . . . I don’t know.’ He released her then and looked away.

  After a longish silence, while they each stared out at the passing landscape, she said, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘About forests,’ he told her – they had just passed through a stretch of dense and decaying woodland. ‘I was wondering why they are places of terror in so many old folk tales and the Brothers Grimm and so on. All dark and gloomy and only half-seen – I was thinking it must have been like a KL to our earliest ancestors – a place in which they felt powerless and full of terrors. And they had no alternative they could dream about.’ He gazed once more at the darkling landscape. ‘Actually, I don’t think I’d have embarked on this journey . . . alone, either. I’ve been wondering how to ask you if you’d consider coming all the way to Kiel with me. I mean – if it was fair to ask you.’

  ‘I’d love that,’ she said. ‘I mean – to meet your Aunt Uschi.’

  The house had once belonged to Alfred de Musset. It stood in its own extensive grounds in Ville d’Avray, about halfway between Paris and Versailles. Now it belonged to Nicole’s cousins �
� their hosts for the next few days – Amy and Roger Trocquemé.

  ‘It’s good you have come just in this moment,’ she said as she led them up to the attic. ‘Tomorrow . . .’ She took them over to a window and showed them that the house was L-shaped, which was not at all apparent from the road. ‘Over there, tomorrow, we have the first French-German conference since before the war. French and German Christians will sit down together and discuss practical ways how we can make sure it’s no more war in Europe – ever. And you are German, no? Both? And living in England. Perhaps you can join us just for a little while? To give your experiments? Experiences! It could be a much valuable addition.’

  They had now climbed three flights of stairs – and, Felix suddenly realized, he had not faced them with his obsessive categorizing of every flight he ever attempted. Mme Trocquemé paused before a door at the head of the last flight. ‘It is possible you can sleep over in the conference wing, but this is nicer.’ She waved toward the paintings and prints that lined the passageway and stairs. ‘Especially for the artists. You are artists, yes? You, Herr Breit, especially. I remember the petition for your release from the Gestapo in nineteen forty-two. Tiens! Only five and a half years ago – but what years they have been! So much killing. But you were free.’

  ‘We must all work to see it can never happen again, madame,’ Felix said.

  ‘And we will be honoured to attend your conference,’ Angela added. ‘It’s very good of you, madame, even to think of putting us up when you must be so busy.’

  ‘Ah! Pfff!’ Amy waved away the thought.

  ‘And, of course,’ Felix added, ‘we require no entertainment. I just want to show Miss Worth to Paris before we leave.’

  ‘The conference, it’s only one day,’ she assured them. ‘So –’ she threw open the door – ‘I leave you to unpack and settle. We have a very simple dinner in half an hour.’

  And she was gone before it dawned on them that she somehow expected them to share the room.

  From the bottom of the first flight down she called back an afterthought, ‘I’m sorry it’s two beds but you are young, hein!’