‘I think so, too,’ Mrs Thompson concurred. And with this majority decision reached, the unpleasant subject of the German families and their billets was dropped. As the women started to chat among themselves, Mrs Burnham turned to Rachael, lowering her voice in confidence.
‘So. When did you last see your husband?’ Mrs Burham’s flush seemed to glow and Rachael could smell her skin beneath her perfume’s sickly disguise; it had a sweet, almost spicy, odour.
‘VE Day. For three days.’
‘Well, you two have some catching up to do then.’
‘I fear I’ve got a little too used to having the bed to myself these last few years.’ Rachael surprised herself with this admission, but this buxom, vivacious woman seemed to demand such frankness.
In truth, Lewis had become a chimera to Rachael: half man, half idea. Of course, they had been intimate once. But it had never been a question then; it just happened. It was always straightforward and uncomplicated and – she was sure of this – enjoyable and equal in the giving and the taking. Despite this, she could not recall the intimacy – not even picture it – and this made Mrs Burnham’s question all the more troubling. Rachael was heading to a hostile land to start an uncertain, new life but the thing she was most uncertain of was not the enemy but her husband. It had been over a year since they had ‘had a moment’ (as he had liked to call it when they were newly married) or ‘made love’ (as she had ventured, enjoying the discreet depth of that phrase), but the event was now vague and crepuscular, a clinch lost in the disappointment of the war’s end.
‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I intend to make up for the stolen years,’ Mrs Burnham said, and with that she took a deep, suggestive drag on her cigarette, leant forward and dropped an extra sugar lump into her tea. Even though Rachael had not taken sugar in her tea for five years, she took two lumps and dropped them in the cup.
3
Lewis watched the British servicemen gathering on the platform of Hamburg’s Dammtor station. They were nearly all here to meet a wife and, for some, the train from Cuxhaven was about to bring an end to a separation that had lasted months, even years.
For him, it had been seventeen months since those strangely deflating three days of victory celebrations in London; seventeen months since he had looked at Rachael in the flesh, smelt her ferny breath, heard her play the piano. He would no longer have to rely on the snapshot of her – taken on a belting July day on a beach in Pembrokeshire – which he’d kept tucked behind the elastic strap of his cigarette case. She seemed to be at her own height of summer in this shot: the loose-fitting flower-press dress; the breezy tilt of her head – even in black and white her cheeks seemed to bloom. He was not a visual man, but he had surprised himself with the images and memories he had been able to conjure during their time apart. They were less the stylized, posed perfection of romantic cinema, more the intimate, unscripted moments film was unable or not allowed to show. Most frequently he had returned to the first time he had introduced Rachael to his family – his sister, Kate, stunned at the quality of his catch and instantly approving – and their spontaneous and naked midnight swim in Carmarthen Bay, with slimy kelp lapping their limbs.
Her imminent incarnation threatened all this, and, as he stood there, smoking, he began to think about the person who would step from the train. How would real Rachael compare to the easily pocketed and admired photo Rachael who had smiled back at him throughout the war, in all weathers and circumstances?
Lewis tucked her image back behind the elastic and over the smaller photo of Michael and snapped the case shut. He took one last drag of his cigarette and flicked it into the tracks below. Above him, in the glassless frame of the station roof, birds were making homes where they could. A sudden exclamation of delight made Lewis look down at his feet, where, standing in the tracks, an emaciated man, maybe sixty years old, stood pawing Lewis’s still-smoking cigarette end, inspecting it for tobacco and muttering, ‘Danke, danke, danke,’ over and over. In normal times, the man’s enthusiastic thanks for this most minuscule of windfalls would have sounded like sarcasm; in Stunde Null, a tossed fag end was manna from a godforsaken sky. Pity and disgust tugged at Lewis’s guts and, once again, pity pulled the stronger. He took three cigarettes from his silver case, bent down and gave them to the man. For a moment, the man stared at the fresh cigarettes, hardly daring to take them in case they proved to be a mirage.
‘Nimm Sie! Schnell!’ Lewis said, conscious that most of the gathering servicemen would take a dim view of his benevolence. The man took the cigarettes and cupped them in his palm before squirrelling them away inside his coat.
As Lewis straightened he saw two men coming up the platform towards him. One was Captain Wilkins, clearly animated by the anticipation of seeing a wife whom he had constantly and unashamedly referred to as ‘my petal’. Lewis, who found it hard to articulate his affection for Rachael to Rachael, let alone to others, secretly admired this uxorious tendency in his number two. Wilkins was perfectly jejune about it, sharing intimacies like a young lover unable to contain himself, including, once, a poem he had written, ‘To His Petal’, which contained the line ‘I will water you, my flower, and flood you with my love.’
The man with Wilkins had the crown of a major on his epaulette. He was exotic, unEnglish-looking, with silky black hair, pretty-eyed but alert, and Lewis immediately felt the need to up his game in his presence.
‘Sir, this is Major Burnham,’ Wilkins said. ‘Intelligence Branch. Here to sort out the blacks from the whites and greys and what-have-yous.’
Rather than salute, Burnham shook Lewis’s hand. Intelligence had their own hierarchy and were quick not to show any deference to the regulars, whom they regarded as ill-equipped for the task of rebuilding a shattered state. Lewis didn’t care about the lack of a salute, but he immediately detected, in Burnham’s efficient movements and precise declarations, a man on a mission.
As Burnham glared at the emaciated scavenger, Wilkins jumped into the silence. ‘We found the major a house only yesterday. Not far from you, sir. On the Elbchaussee.’ Lewis’s number two was becoming sensitive to his superior’s unorthodoxies, likes and dislikes, his tendency to speak his mind. He was already sensing a clash. ‘You’ll almost be neighbours,’ he added.
Burnham was still distracted by the man, who had now clambered up on to the platform and extended his hand, no doubt hopeful that the colonel’s friends would be as benevolent. The major spoke to him in impeccable German:
‘If you don’t move on, I will have you arrested.’
The man put up his hands and backed away, bowing and scraping, as fast as his weak legs would carry him.
Burnham grimaced. ‘The smell of these people.’
‘It’s what a diet of 900 calories a day does for you,’ Lewis responded.
‘At least they’re less trouble when they’re hungry,’ Burnham said, offering a mirthless smile.
‘Good point,’ Wilkins said, trying to diffuse things. Burnham nodded, while fixing Lewis with a well-practised, interrogative stare. The resonant whistle of the incoming train saved Lewis having to explain to Burnham that he was wrong about that. Quite wrong.
‘Why are all those children running after us?’
Edmund was leaning over the half-open window of the carriage. Outside, hordes of German children ran with outstretched hands alongside the incoming train, which had now slowed sufficiently for them to keep pace with it. The children called out the names of the holy trinity – ‘Choccie, ciggies, sandvich’ – but the passengers on this train were not familiar with the expected and accepted ritual of tossing rations, and no bounty was thrown.
‘Perh
aps they want to see what we look like’ was all Rachael could muster. ‘We’re nearly there.’
‘Are they Germans?’
‘Yes. Now come. Get your coat on.’
‘They don’t look very German.’
Rachael straightened Edmund’s tie, licked her finger, rubbed a mark from his cheek with it and flattened down his hair.
‘Look at the state of you. What will your father think?’
Porters, outnumbering passengers, were on hand to take luggage and free the arrivals to look for husbands and fathers. Having passed her case to an eager, grey-looking old man, Rachael stepped from the train into a bustling river of tweed, hats, powder and lipstick which flowed towards the waiting men. She could already see reunited couples embracing in the steam. As she had promised, the major’s wife was already making up for lost time. Mrs Burnham walked up to her husband, cupped his chin and kissed him with an open mouth. It was brazen, and Rachael shivered with a covetous thrill. She would never kiss Lewis in such a way in public; even in their salad days, this would have been risqué.
Before he saw her, Rachael saw Lewis – holding back from the crowd and standing apart, his expression, in that moment, slightly fearful, vulnerable – and her heart did exactly what the stories in Woman’s Own said: it leapt, intensifying the pulse at her throat and her breathing. For a second she felt intense affection, but it faded as soon as he saw her, offering only a quick expansion of his eyes then a smile for Edmund, who had run ahead to greet his father. Lewis met his son with a ruffle of his just-tidied hair and a nervous acknowledgement of time passed:
‘Look at you. Like a runner bean.’
‘Hello, Father.’
Lewis continued to look at Edmund, speechless at the changes which always seem so surprising to adults and so prosaic to children, until, no longer able to use his son as decoy, he looked at Rachael and gave her a pecked kiss which landed half on her lips, half on her cheek.
‘Good journey?’ he asked.
‘The crossing was a little rough.’
‘Let’s go and have some tea. We might have some strudel if we’re lucky.’
‘Germans can’t make tea,’ Edmund chipped in, trying to please.
Lewis laughed. It was one of the few clichés about the Germans that happened to be true.
‘They’re getting better at it.’
Edmund was all saucer eyes, taking in every detail around him. He suddenly became animated by something happening across the tracks.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Oh my God,’ Rachael whispered.
Two children were dangling a boy upside down over a bridge in front of an oncoming train. The dangling boy was holding a golf club and for a moment it looked as though the engine would strike him, but the train passed under him, with feet to spare, and as it passed he knocked some coal off the top of the tender for the waiting women below to catch in their skirts.
‘Are they allowed to do that?’ Edmund asked, full of admiration.
‘Not officially,’ Lewis answered.
‘Aren’t you going to stop them?’
Lewis winked conspiratorially at his son. ‘I see no ships,’ he said, and with that he steered his family towards the exit gate before more difficult questions surfaced.
Hamburg’s grandest hotel, the Atlantic, had survived the war and was an oasis of extravagance in a desert of thrift. This impression was magnified by the palm court in the main lounge, where musicians played among the potted palms to tea-drinking British who, for a few hours, were able to forget the grey years and imagine this to be the most colourful of postings. Lewis was trusting that the faded grandeur, the serving of tea, the antiphonal sounds of clinking cutlery, and the thick carpeting would create the ambience of comfort and reassurance he required for his difficult announcement. But he was not happy about the music. The musicians here usually performed the jaunty, popular tunes preferred by the English; today’s players – a male pianist and a female singer – were putting their all into a melancholy song in German which was a counterpoint to the tune Lewis had anticipated. Difficult news needed a happy soundtrack; whatever it was they were performing, it had to change.
Rachael recognized the piece immediately as one of Schubert’s Lieder, and she gave herself to its deep current. Her strudel lay untouched in front of her as she fed, instead, on the music, listening with an intense and, in this room, unique concentration. Next to her, Edmund wolfed his strudel and fired question after question at his father. He had a whole war’s worth stored up and they were in need of immediate answering. Lewis smoked and did his best to give answers, while waiting for the right moment to ask for the tune to be changed.
‘Is Germany like a colony now?’
‘Not exactly. In time, we’ll give it back – when we’ve fixed it.’
‘Have we got the best zone?’
‘They say that the Americans got the view, the French got the wine and we got the ruins.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair.’
‘Well, we created the ruins.’
‘What about the Russians?
‘The Russians? Well, they got the farms. But that’s another story. How is your strudel, dear?’
Lewis noticed Rachael quickly wiping a tear from her eye. She forked some strudel to divert attention, but it was too late:
‘Mummy’s crying again.’
It was as if Edmund had lobbed a distress flare on to the table and lit up the last seventeen months for his father to see. The glow showed Lewis more than he wanted to know or was ready to face. This compact summary of Rachael’s recent history was the tip of something he had hoped physicians, time and distance might have healed.
‘Don’t be silly, Ed,’ Rachael said. ‘It’s just the music. You know sad music always makes me cry.’
When the singer finished to the non-applause of the room, Lewis saw his opportunity to lift the gloom. Even as he stood up to go and make his request, Rachael guessed his intentions: ‘Please don’t …’
‘We need something a bit cheerier, don’t you think?’
Rachael acquiesced with a disappointed shrug and, after he had left, turned to Edmund:
‘Please don’t say such things to your father about me. It will only upset him.’
‘Sorry,’ Edmund said.
As Lewis whispered his request to the singer, Rachael noted her pained, gritted smile; perhaps she was a performer of international standing, the remnant of a decimated orchestra forced to bow to the requirements of philistine customers. As Lewis walked back, the pianist struck the opening bars of ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and the singer switched from the depths of German existential yearning to the shallows of English frivolity without missing a beat.
‘That’s better,’ Lewis said. ‘This country needs a new song.’
With the new mood set to a perky melody and with Lewis unable to wait a cigarette longer, he decided to get it over with. He was not a natural salesman, and his attempts usually exposed an over-reliance on the superlatives ‘most marvellous’ and ‘most wonderful’ and their emphasizing adverbs ‘really’ and ‘truly’.
‘I have news about our new house. It’s really a most wonderful place. A lot bigger than Amersham. Even bigger than Auntie Clara’s. It’s got a billiard room. A grand piano.’ A pause here to let Rachael picture it. ‘Wonderful views of the River Elbe. The house is full of interesting paintings – by quite famous artists, I think. What else? Yes. It has a dumb waiter.’
‘We have a waiter?’ Edmund asked.
‘We have staff. Three: a maid, a cook and a gardener.’
‘But they’re dumb?’
It was
a relief to laugh. Even Rachael laughed at this.
‘You’ll soon see …’
‘Do they speak English?’ Rachael asked, engaging with the conversation now.
‘Most Germans know a few words. And you’ll pick it up.’
Lewis paused. He’d rehearsed this moment several times in his head. Should he appeal to the human element, make them feel sorry, as he had, for the Luberts? Make them see that these were people, like them? Or should he stick with the material facts, namely that this was a house big enough to accommodate twenty people and that it was plain greedy to turf the owners out? Either way, he was trying to wrap a bombshell in cotton wool.
‘The owner of this house is a Herr Lubert. He is an architect. Civilized man. His wife died in the war. He has a daughter, not much older than you, Ed. Her name is Frieda, I believe. Anyway, their house is … well, it’s huge. Big enough for twenty to live in. And it has an entirely separate apartment on the top floor …’
Rachael breathed in heavily and shifted her weight.
‘The fact is, the house is big enough for all of us. They will live in the top-floor apartment and we can have the rest of the house to ourselves.’
Rachael wasn’t sure if she had heard him right.
‘We will live with them?’ she asked.
‘We’ll barely notice they’re there. There are just two of them. They can use a different entrance, be completely self-contained. They have everything they need up there.’
‘We will live with Germans?’ Edmund asked.
‘Not completely. But, yes. We will share a house. Think of it as a block of flats with them on the top floor.’
Rachael needed to do something, so she poured herself some tea without wanting it or even looking. She knocked the milk jug over and Lewis, glad to have something practical to do, spread a napkin over it and called a waiter.
The Aftermath Page 4