Innocence To Die For

by Eidinow, John

  A shadow fell across the page. ‘Hello, Mr Peter. Have you been waiting long?’

  He managed to break his stunned silence. ‘I wish you would call me just Peter.’

  The middle-aged woman sharing his table, well-brushed hair and sharp brown eyes, finished her tea abruptly, took her bill and got up with a broad smile. ‘Do sit down, my dear.’ She must have felt some explanation was required. ‘I’ve my bus to catch.’

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘Sergeant Blake – the commissionaire – told me. He saw you in the shop this morning and then coming in here.’

  ‘But how did he know I was looking for you?’

  ‘It’s his job.’

  ‘To put one and one together?’

  ‘Particularly if one is reading Peace News.’

  Peter paused to try to puzzle that out. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I had to work late. Mr Selfridge says an unfinished window costs £10,000 in lost sales.’

  She shook her head at his offer of tea or coffee. ‘Thank you, but I must get home.’ She got up.

  Peter left money on the table and followed her into the street. ‘I do hope I haven’t embarrassed you: I don’t know your surname, so I couldn’t ask for you.’

  ‘Why do you need to – to ask for me?’

  He was conscious of taking the plunge. ‘So that I can say I would be truly delighted if you will have dinner with me.’

  ‘Dinner?’

  ‘Or come to a concert. The proms are still on.’

  ‘Proms?’

  ‘Promenade concerts—’

  ‘Promenade concerts?’ She stressed the first word. ‘Does the audience walk about? You must understand I am only a refugee.’

  He began to apologise. She shook her head and laughed. Her dark eyes glinted; they had a hint of hazel, he noticed. ‘Will you walk with me to my bus stop?’ She slipped her arm through his. ‘Though we have not been introduced, I will tell you my name is Altschuler. If there is Mahler, I would like to go to a Prom, as you call it. If not, I feel I would enjoy sitting down to dinner with you. But, if you will permit me, it would have to be quite early. I live with my grandfather. He is old and does not like it when I am out late.’

  ‘Are you free this week? Wednesday? Thursday?’

  They had reached her stop. A car went by with a sticker in the back: “Half a mo Hitler!! Let’s have our holiday first!!!”. The bus arrived and she joined the queue, pushing on.

  ‘Wednesday. Before war starts.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you in the teashop.’ He watched as Dinah, Dinah Altschuler from Czernowitz, was swept on to the bus, and stayed watching until it disappeared.

  ****

  Ella was brandishing a note from Madame Duverger. She would be coming to the flat next morning: she had keys. ‘Deliberately coming when Mrs B is here, so she can cross-examine her about us.’

  ‘How disappointing for her that we live such morally uninteresting lives. No brilliantined gigolo asleep in your bed, no co-respondent shoes under the wardrobe, no cocaine in the bathroom, no oilcloth-wrapped gun in the fridge.’

  ‘No little shop girl drunk on the couch, no silk stockings draped on your bedpost, no empty champagne bottle with a green carnation in the neck. Why can’t my brother bring une petite vendeuse home with him?’

  ‘Une petite poule. Anything to amuse you. I’ll see what I can do.’

  His sister threw him a sharp glance. ‘You’re looking preoccupied. Anything I should know? You haven’t signed up?’

  ‘Only for la vie de bohéme, the dream-life of mystery and gin. Which reminds me that I bumped into your friend Boris Collett and he suggested we go to Paris and watch the war break out there. He says it will be much more stylish than here – the French know how to create national drama; the English are too embarrassed at being thought patriotic.’

  ‘Acquaintance, not friend, and that’s not what I hear. The talk is all how low the French are feeling, how they think war must be avoided. Anyway, I can’t leave the country. I’ve been taken on to drive an ambulance, and I have to go to courses – driving, first-aid and bomb damage control – and then be on call.’

  ‘A chip off the old block – driving like Mother through a storm of shot and shell.’

  ‘That’s what I told them. They said bring your own boots and overalls.’

  ****

  Wednesday came at last. Tuesday had been all formality. In the morning, representing his father in a massively sandbagged St Paul’s at a packed memorial service for a major-general, his father’s former colleague and friend. Onward Christian Soldiers pealing out. He smiled inwardly: ‘Not at my funeral or I’ll return to haunt you all with fire and brimstone,’ his father had sworn. In the evening, dinner in Clarges Street. He was a regular on his host’s shooting and stalking parties and went shopping with his hostess for novels, French and English.

  Though dinners were being routinely cancelled as the hostesses closed their London houses and took themselves off to their country retreats, the trappings of this had shown no hint of war approaching, the columned reception rooms all open and illuminated, footmen in full fig, wine flowing in cascades, jewels on display.

  Peter had been seated between a Frenchman and an American reporter. The Frenchman told him that General Gamelin, the French Commander-in-Chief, was in the pay of Germany, but was too old, too fat and too incompetent for it to matter – the French army wouldn’t fight whoever led it. ‘Ils sont en pleine pagaille,’ he said with relish.

  ‘Their army’s in complete chaos’, Peter translated for the American reporter, who’d been travelling in Germany. She drew a striking contrast between the energy and discipline of the Reich, the sense of renewal and national purpose, the unity behind Hitler she’d encountered everywhere, between all that and the limp disarray of France and Britain. Across the table, a Conservative backbencher was arguing ferociously that Chamberlain and Halifax ‘and the rest of the Munich peace-at-any-price gang’ were preparing to ditch Poland. He had it on good authority from within the Secret Service that German generals were ready to move against Hitler, led by Goering, if Chamberlain and Daladier gave them a lead. A weekly columnist cut in that Halifax was a man of honour and would only do what he believed right. Their tiara-ed hostess dictated a change of subject. ‘Peter, tell us what we should be reading. In English, of course.’

  Over cigars, his host invited him for a weekend’s shooting. A fellow guest who was something in the BBC came over. He’d overheard him describing Fitzrovia – bohemian artists, drunken poets, pubs vibrant with literary talk – to the American reporter and suggested he might like to join the reserve list for Home Talks, on call should war come. He would put his name down.

  Later, the daughter of the house, swathed in gold lamé shot with green, opals glowing on her broad décolletage, told him that if war came she would sign on with the new Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Her father knew the director … She left a space for him to declare his military intentions, a gleam in her eye.

  Peter knew her brother better – a stalwart of the walking group. They’d walked together in the Pyrenees, Iceland and Norway. No walking with the brother this summer, though: a keen Territorial, he’d been at a training camp in Shropshire. ‘I suppose I’ll sign on along with the others when the time comes.’

  ‘“Suppose”?’ She was gripping his arm.

  He had a vision of her ransacking the attics for the trunk with left-over white feathers. ‘I heard from Aubrey that scriptwriters will be needed for propaganda films. So I might try that. An office in Soho and creative lunches at Kettners. After all, the war could be over by Christmas if Hitler’s generals chuck him out.’

  She gave him a puzzled look. ‘Is that a German restaurant?’

  ‘French, actually. Our allies.’

  She pulled him towards her and whispered into his ear. ‘You can fuck me if you go to the Brigade.’

  ‘But then we would have to get engaged.’

 
‘No fear. You’re not on the list.’

  On the lists for dinners and shooting, not marriage. No tiaras in his family, of course. As for the recruiting office, enthusiasm wasn’t his style. Besides, life suddenly had too much to offer.

  ****

  Then at last, past the store’s entrances shielded with stacked sandbags and notices with arrows pointing to the nearest trenches, through shoppers carrying evening papers that proclaimed “Germany Ready to Negotiate”, he was making his way to the tea-shop. To distract himself he opened his paper: a correspondent suggested changing “dachshund” to “brocket”, an old Anglo-Saxon word for badger-dog. He made a note to look up “brocket” – and she was there, just after the store closed, looking round for him, greeting him with the slightest of smiles as she caught his eye and he rose to acknowledge her. She was neat, even severe, in a high-necked blue dress with short sleeves and a pleated skirt under a thin summer coat, lightly made up and a cloche hat pulled down over her rich, dark hair.

  ‘I saw you in the window, rearranging the racquet and club.’ To his surprise, his mouth was dry.

  ‘Oh yes? Mr Selfridge thought they were too serious. “More sporty,” he said. In these worrying days, we needed to make people feel happier. So it was a carefree feel I tried to give. Do you think I succeeded?’

  ‘I thought the golfer looked quite rakish.’

  ‘Rakish?’

  ‘A rake. Someone who expends his money and his spirit on the ardent pursuit of wine, women and song. Gambling too, probably.’

  ‘A cad? I don’t think Mr Selfridge will like that.’

  ‘No, not necessarily. I could be a rake without being a cad. As long as some capacity for noble sentiment remained.’

  ‘Noble?’ She looked at him severely. ‘Governed by the rules of a decadent aristocracy? Never. All hearts must beat in union with those of the masses.’ She smiled and glanced at his paper. ‘Are they on the move?’

  ‘Not yet. Hitler has appealed to Paris, to Daladier, “as one old front soldier to another”, for understanding on Germany’s position over Danzig. He says: “It must be solved one way or another.”’

  ‘My father was a front soldier – but on the eastern front.’

  ‘Mine too – on the western. We’re both children of the war.’

  She thought she would like to go to the evening’s Promenade Concert. Bach followed by Vaughan Williams.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s not Mahler for your first prom.’

  He was overconfident about getting seats. Cinemas were half-empty, and returns were plentiful for even the most popular shows. At Queen’s Hall they only squeezed in. Music was a comfort, he thought. Much more so than drama.

  ****

  Later, in bed, he went over every detail of the evening. He had this image of skating across a limitless lake: exhilarating, but always unplumbed depths below the ice.

  Dinah had enjoyed the prom, he would say – the whole occasion, the prom-goers, Bach’s uplifting harmonies. Anxious about her wishing not to be out late, he’d suggested they leave before the Vaughan Williams and have dinner. They strolled to Charlotte Street, she slipping her hand under his arm again – had he imagined she was holding him a little more tightly? – and ate roast beef and treacle tart. He’d given the restaurant some thought. The Scala—lively, informal.

  As she ate, she had questions. About the promenaders, were these “people’s concerts”? She’d passed Wigmore Hall; who went there? About this jolly place, The Scala; did he come very often? And about him; how serious he seemed. At this point Dinah had looked up from her plate and full into his eyes, which had been dwelling on her, fascinated, almost without a break.

  Her eyes – dark brown, a hint of hazel, flecks of green. Green? He couldn’t hang on to the effect. His and Ella’s were greeny-blue, sometimes bright green, going with their wiry, red-brown hair and pale skins. ‘“Serious”? Is that how you see me?’

  ‘Isn’t that how everyone sees you?’

  He didn’t know about everyone, but perhaps. He tried to explain that at Cambridge there was a secret society of intellectuals called Apostles. His name had come up, he knew, and he had acquaintances that were Apostles. But no. He hadn’t been thought quite the thing, perhaps too uncommitted, not passionate enough for friendship, too solitary. ‘And are you serious, Dinah?’

  She shrugged. ‘Of course. A shop-girl has no choice: it is the role capital assigns to her.’

  ‘You have no free will?’

  ‘You speak of a bourgeois illusion promoted by the ruling élite. I see it every working day. Shoppers believe they are making choices freely but in fact the goods placed there by the unseen hand of monopoly capital have chosen them.’

  ‘And if you were still in Czernowitz, what role would monopoly capital have insisted on for Dinah Altschuler?’

  ‘But we have not finished with Peter Hill.’ Her smile lit the whole of her face. ‘You must permit your guest to learn more of her host before she talks of herself – is that not the correct way?’

  ‘I’m at your disposal. Your wish is my command, of course.’

  But then she’d thanked him for a perfect evening and said she must go to her grandfather. He would be getting worried.

  Sitting upright in the cab, she’d taken his arm in her familiar way. When he’d asked when they might meet again, she thought for a moment and replied quietly that, if he would like, they could go for a walk on Sunday. Her grandfather had a visitor from abroad. He’d suggested Hampstead Heath – making a mental note to disengage from the weekend’s shooting he’d just accepted at the Clarges Street dinner.

  Two or three streets from her house she’d stopped the cab and insisted on continuing alone. It was better not to arrive in a taxi with a stranger. She would be all right; nearby there was a pie-and-mash shop open late. ‘When we first arrived and went in, we heard people ordering “baby’s head and smash”, and we had no idea what this could be – so gruesome, like something out of a fairy tale. Thank you, Peter, for a lovely evening.’ She’d squeezed his hand and was gone.

  ‘Is she German, your girlfriend?’ asked the taxi-driver.

  ‘No, Roumanian.’

  ‘Just as well. I wouldn’t want no German in my cab.’

  ‘Not a refugee from Hitler?’

  ‘How would I know who he really is? And them Germans, they let Hitler in, didn’t they. No, not a German in my cab. Never.’

  ****

  Next day brought good news and bad. A footman in a bottle-green coat delivered an “Urgent” letter to say the weekend’s shooting was off: in the current situation, his host felt he should be in London. The bad news was in a note left for him in chambers with the “further particulars” of the anti-war meeting. “Appearance listed” early that evening in a hall off Holborn. Suggested pre-meeting conference in the adjacent four-ale bar.

  Peter debated: judging by what had been said at that chambers tea, there was precious little chance of his agreeing with anything he heard; on the other hand, it wasn’t a question of agreeing or not. It could be intriguing – and why turn down an opportunity to broaden his experience of life? Interesting to see who went and hear what they had to say. Sitting there observing, the flâneur of political debate—window-shopping, Ella would say. And Creevey-Adams meant well and was being really very decent in chambers, where their paths crossed daily.

  ****

  The man was waiting for him over a double scotch, anxious he should understand that discretion was the order of the day, and that, all things being equal, he might be invited to take part in their work and so, emptying his glass, have his chance to do something for the real England. Peter was offering a refill when a middle-aged woman in salt-and-pepper tweeds came up and gave him a look of rebuke. The meeting was about to begin, she said firmly.

  In the small, bare parish hall next door, a silver-haired man, a neatly trimmed silver beard framing a florid complexion, sat like a ramrod behind a bare wooden table facing an audience of about 30
men and women. They were, Peter thought, much the kind he would expect to find running the England of well-to-do suburb and county town: parish councils, town halls, golf clubs, hunts, Conservative associations, provincial businesses. A blonde young woman in a cardigan and pearls – perhaps her niece – had joined salt-and-pepper tweeds. He caught the niece’s eye; she gave him an encouraging smile.

  Silver hair started to speak, a hint of Devon in the gravelly tones. ‘I think you all know my part in defence of our country, in war and peace. I have striven for nothing else than the greatness of our land, secure at home, wisely supreme abroad, and always supremely wise. During my long period of service, from when I first donned the old Queen’s uniform, my opening thought in the morning and my closing thought at night have been of “this fortress built by nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, this precious stone set in a silver sea”. So it is with the utmost seriousness and profound regret that I tell you this: I fear we have never been in greater danger than at this moment.’

  The audience were still and intent. Peter’s host squinted at him and nodded “you see”. Peter nodded back, with modulated enthusiasm, he hoped.

  ‘And that danger is all the worse because it does not come from abroad. Herr Hitler, who has done so much to rescue Germany from a state of anarchy and depression in which only the cosmopolitan red revolutionaries exulted, Herr Hitler, who has shown the meaning of leadership in troubled times, Herr Hitler, I say, poses no threat to our precious land or our great empire. His emissary in London has made that clear: the German Führer wants only to live in peace with a country and people he admires. He has also made clear that the position on his eastern frontier could be settled peacefully and without delay: he has made proposals that Poland can and should accept with honour. But in her blindness, Poland is egged on to stand firm. This madness, this insane policy comes not from France. The French do not want war, are not ready for war, will not fight. In their weakness and division they are only following their ally Britain, are tragically misled by the short-sightedness of a Britain whose foreign policy is now shamefully dictated by foreign capital, footloose and cosmopolitan.’