And, with that, Mrs Burnham performed a sexy parade-ground salute and Rachael heard the rare sound of her own laughter, the witchy-cackle that didn’t sound as though it should come from her and that Lewis had always said was one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her.
Rachael laughed a great deal more during the twenty-minute car journey to the NAAFI in the centre of Hamburg. They were in the back of Mrs Burnham’s bug-eyed, beetle-shaped car, one of the new ‘Volkswagens’ that everyone seemed to be driving and which were now known as The Wheels of the Occupation. It was as uncomfortable as a chapel pew and as noisy as a biplane, and they had to shout to hear themselves above the engine in the boot, but it made them smile.
The outing was more like an expedition than a shopping trip. Susan Burnham joked about everything, from the car (‘A strange little back-to-front thing, looks like a ladybird, but I rather like it’) to intimate conjugal details (‘We’ve been like rabbits since I got here’), falling just short of describing the sex act itself. ‘I don’t know what it is, but there’s something in the air here. Don’t you feel it? It just feels different; as though we have permission to let our hair down. It’s all quite liberating.’ Despite Mrs Burnham’s obvious vulgarity, Rachael was happy to give her the benefit of the doubt. If she was brazen, she was big-hearted; if she was lewd, she was honest and said only what others were already thinking; and, while she might be intent on climbing the social ladder, she seemed just as ready to kick the ladder away. And she never missed a trick.
‘And you two? Have been making up for lost time?’
Rachael glanced at the driver – a young man not much older than Michael, and with the same downy, tapered duck-tail hairline as her late son. His ears must have been burning below the rim of his tram driver’s peaked cap.
‘Don’t worry about Erich. He understands nothing. Isn’t that right, Erich?’
‘Bitte, Frau Burnham?’
‘Nothing. Carry on.’
Mrs Burnham started to do her lips in the driver’s rear-view, leaning into the middle, across Rachael, her ample bosom squishing as she contorted to see herself. In the same mirror, Erich looked then looked away, his hands twitching on the steering wheel.
‘Well? How has it been?’
‘I have nothing to report.’
‘Come come, Rachael Morgan. This will not do. Auntie Susan needs to know.’
‘Really …’
‘Nothing?’
‘Not really, no. How are you finding the whole staff business?’
‘Oh no, no, no, no. You can’t duck me that easily. This is not good, Rachael. Have you lost your desire?’
Rachael simply had no precedent for talking about her sex life; not even Dr Mayfield, with his new-fangled ideas about neuroses and manias and libidos, had pursued it; she had always assumed that sex, like religion, should not be discussed with anyone, not even the person with whom one was having it.
‘What is the matter exactly?’
Rachael shook her head, trying to visualize what the matter was. All she could picture was the ceiling of their bedroom with its subtle cornicing and the swan-wing lampshades and Lewis biting the strip of the prophylactic wrapper.
‘To be honest, we haven’t seen that much of each other. He’s working –’
‘– Hard. Yes, yes. But aren’t they all? You have to take control. You cannot simply rely on there being a right time.’
Rachael felt a disturbance at her throat. ‘Susan … I’d rather not discuss it.’
‘Well, of course. It’s embarrassing when what should be natural and good becomes so difficult and awkward. But it’s important. As important as any work our hubbies might be doing. And, if anything, it helps them do a better job.’
‘It should be a private matter.’
‘I disagree. We should talk about it more than we do. A healthy sex life in a marriage affects people more than you’d think. Whole wars might have been averted had people committed as much time and effort to their sex life as they did to trying to take over the world. I’m convinced of it. That grotty little man Hitler should have got himself a proper wife instead of that strumpet secretary. Stalin whored. Mussolini had mistresses galore – but who knows? In the end, the war was won by married men enjoying a regular sex life – I am sure!’
Mrs Burnham’s theory made Rachael smile but provoked a sequence of peculiar and unwanted images: Hitler in pyjamas, Stalin in the arms of a fleshy Caucasian wench and Mussolini and maid strung up, bloated and beaten and hanging from a ramp …
‘You will be blaming me for starting a war next!’
‘As long as we are friends, I will continue to ask. And probe and nose around. It is my duty. Keith tells me that they’re meeting that ragged socialist next week. Shaw? I assume Lewis is going to be there?’
‘He mentioned he had a big few days ahead. But he tells me very little about his work. He prefers to leave it at the gates.’
‘Have you vetted his interpreter yet?’
‘Should I?’
‘I insisted that Keith choose the ugliest he could find, and, by God, she is an utter fright. Make sure you invite Lewis’s in for tea soon and have a good look. If she is remotely attractive, have her fired.’
The idea that another woman might pursue Lewis was curiously comforting, for, if Rachael was certain of anything, it was that he would never fall in that way.
‘You need to get a firmer grip on things. I’d never let Keith fob me off with some phrase like “I’ve got a big few days.” What’s so big about them that you can’t tell me? Insist on information. Don’t be satisfied until you have some. Oh, yes, I make sure I know what’s going on and I get it in the end. Keith learned most of his interrogation techniques from me, you know.’
‘Does he like his work?’
‘I’m told he’s very good at it. He has patience. I think that’s important. I’d make a terrible interrogator.’
‘Do you tell him everything?’
‘Everything he needs to know.’ Mrs Burnham winked and closed her lipstick, pursing her lips with a smack and leaning back to her side of the car. ‘Don’t worry. Your secrets are safe. He is useless when it comes to getting things out of me.’
This was no reassurance. Rachael had shared nothing of consequence and yet she felt she’d given too much of herself – too much of Lewis – and left things wide open to all manner of conjecture.
‘We have no secrets. We’re fine. We’ll be fine.’
And, with that, Susan Burnham looked at Rachael in the way an adult looks at a child who has just announced that they’re going to fly to the moon and back.
The British Families Shop – or NAAFI – was housed in a neat, intact two-storey building near the Alster. To get there, the car passed by the opera house, with its bombed auditorium, and the Astra cinema, which was showing Laurence Olivier in Henry V in English in the afternoon and Laurence Olivier in Heinrich V in German in the evening. There were even two posters side by side to prove it.
‘One hour, Erich,’ Mrs Burnham said, as they drew up outside the store. ‘Zurück in einer Stunde.’
In the street, a number of German women stood wearing placards around their necks. At first, Rachael thought they were protesters but, as she got closer, she saw that each placard had a photograph of a man – either husband, son or brother – a short biography, an address to contact and a plea for any information concerning the missing person. Rachael was drawn to the face of the man on the first woman’s placard. His name was Robert Schloss and he’d been a paymaster. He wore the unthreatening cloth cap of an orderly and had rimmed glasses. Something in the curvature of his chin a
nd his open expression recalled Michael. Rachael suddenly wanted to know all about Herr Schloss. The address to contact was …
‘Bitte?’ the woman said, hopeful. ‘Haben Sie ihn gesehen?’
Rachael looked up from the placard into the face of the woman. Her elegant hat was secured to her head with a neck scarf tied under her chin, its brim bent up to form the shape of a bonnet; it made her look like a shepherdess. There was a desperate and ludicrous expectancy about her, as though Rachael could actually have information about her missing husband and had come here especially to tell her the good news.
‘Haben Sie ihn gesehen?’ the woman repeated.
Rachael felt Mrs Burnham’s hand at her elbow.
‘Of course she hasn’t! Lassen Sie sie in Ruhe!’ Mrs Burnham waved the bereft lady on and muttered to Rachael, ‘Remember that they’re after our men,’ as she steered her past what would normally have been the building’s main entrance to an innocuous side-street door. Unless you knew what it was, you’d never think to enter it. The glass front of the shop had been blacked out so that nothing of what was on sale could be seen.
‘They don’t want the Germans to see what’s inside in case it makes them feel more deprived than they already do,’ Mrs Burnham explained. ‘I actually think it makes matters worse.’
Rachael agreed. If anything, the obfuscation teased the passer-by. The hiding of what was inside became less a sensitive veil than an admission that the goods within were beyond the reach of most people walking past and that there was – despite the efforts of the Control Commission to say otherwise – a dual economy in operation in the zone: one for the natives; one for the occupiers. ‘You know what I really think,’ Mrs Burnham went on. ‘I think CCG want the Germans to think we’re richer than we really are. It’s a matter of honour that the occupying country is still perceived to be rich and powerful.’
Once inside the store, this cynical view seemed more like a truth. It wasn’t British embarrassment at their riches that had led to the blacking out of the windows, it was shame at the lack of them. Had the Germans been able to view the full display of goods on offer, they’d have been surprised to see just how paltry it was, and probably alarmed that the country running theirs could barely rustle up a square meal for itself.
‘The only thing that makes shopping here bearable is knowing I’ve more choice than my sister in East Sheen. They’re rationing bread in England now. Would you credit it? Bread! They didn’t even do that during the war.’
There was gin, of course. Walls of it: Gordon’s, London Dry, Booth’s. The familiar brands were reassuringly present and correct, their production seemingly unaffected by the problems besetting the manufacturers of other goods. Essential commodities may have been scarce, but the tried and tested stimulants and suppressants of Empire continued to flow like oil from a deep reservoir. This was no glitch. Gin, as every commissioner, general and governor knew, could bring sophistication to the bleakest of outposts and lift the spirits of Britain’s most downhearted servants. Its manufacture and distribution was a national priority.
It was to the gin wall that Mrs Burnham marched them first.
‘Keith complains that without tonic it tastes like paraffin, but beggars can’t be choosers. God knows when we’ll ever see tonic again. But, as long as we have vermouth, we’ll have gin and it. As long as we have Angostura Bitters, we’ll have pink gin and, of course, if we have orange squash we have gin and orange: gin, squash and a dash of water! No one ever complains. With these mixers, we’ll survive until those lovely tonic chaps resurface. Until that happy day we will be inventive. Look how cheap it is! Four shillings a bottle! They clearly want us all to get drunk and socialize as much as possible. Well, we will oblige them. Besides, I think it’s high time the governor’s wife held her first social function.’ And, with that, Mrs Burnham grabbed four bottles by the neck and dropped them into her bag.
The people who ran the NAAFI made no attempt to display the goods in a better light. All the food and drink was simply plonked in rows and left in boxes, arranged in bulk without any effort to dress it up. Rachael found the lack of pretence oddly calming. She’d never really enjoyed shopping, and she found this a less fraught way of going about it. Having whole aisles selling one product made things simpler. There was something almost futuristic about it. Having to pay for each item with the BAFS vouchers or the fake octagonal ‘coins’ pressed out of cardboard added to the feeling that it was all make-believe.
Around her, British women – it was almost all women – shopped with a barely disguised hysteria. A number of them were dressed up as though they were going to the theatre. Rachael had herself made an effort for the outing, selecting a slightly smarter woollen twin-set than was necessary, and, to any outside observer, she blended in seamlessly with the press of wool and nylon and the fug of perfume and talcum powder, but she still felt out of place, and it wasn’t just the dislocation, or even ‘the fragmentation of self’ that Dr Mayfield had diagnosed. Shopping always felt so unsatisfactory.
‘Ready for the second floor?’
Mrs Burnham pointed Rachael towards the lift that ferried people between Food and Drink on the first floor and Clothes and Toys on the second. It was an open-caged paternoster, allowing people to step on and off. Rachael, who had not seen such a thing before, hesitated as she approached it, afraid she’d get caught in the no-man’s-land between the lift going up and the lift going down. She took her place next to a young boy who was beaming with the thrill of shopping with Mother and running the wheels of a Dinky car on the palm of his hand.
‘That’s a nice car,’ she said. ‘Where did you get that from?’
‘I got it from upstairs. It’s a Lagonda Tourer,’ the boy said, proudly holding the miniature up for Rachael to see. ‘And today I am going to get the Auto Union Grand Prix car. They have all the new ones here.’
Rachael hadn’t thought about Edmund once this morning, but she thought of him now, back at the house having lessons with the skeletal and slightly intimidating Herr Koenig, and she scolded herself inwardly. She’d grown negligent and inattentive and, while some self-justifying mechanism tried to convince her that the space and freedom she granted Edmund offset any deficit of affection and attention he might be suffering, she’d let him roam too far, and if she wasn’t careful she’d lose him. With sudden urgency, she went to the second floor, bought a Lagonda then almost ran back to the waiting car.
‘Mind the ice!’ Mrs Burnham warned, before redirecting her from the back of the car to the front. ‘Other end! Engine’s in the boot.’
Rachael handed Erich the heavy paper bag full of gin and whisky and cigarettes but retained the gift she’d bought for Edmund.
‘Do you want to stop off at the Carlisle Club? Have a coffee? Pick up a copy of Woman’s Own?’
‘Actually, Susan, I’d like to get back – home,’ Rachael said, surprising herself with her choice of the word.
‘Right. Let’s see this palace of yours then.’
As they passed Dammtor train station they saw the placarded women again, gathered like a funnel. Hundreds of heavily clad men, arriving from various corners of the country, poured into it. The heads of the women bobbed and craned and peered as they tried to see if their missing man was floating in the river of refugees flowing from the trains. Rachael saw a man run and embrace one of the women. He fell to his knees and kissed the photo of himself hanging around her neck then stood and lifted her into the air by her thighs and hips, twirling her around and around.
‘Eyes front!’
But if Mrs Burnham thought she’d caught Rachael being drawn back into unpatriotic sympathy, she was mistaken. This
wasn’t a trap of compassion; it was envy. Envy for the completed, carouselling couple. If Lewis had gone missing, would she have made a placard and stood outside train stations in the freezing cold waiting for him to show up? She really wasn’t sure.
‘Ich heisse Edmund. Ich bin englisch.’
‘Engländer,’ the Skeleton corrected him, gently.
‘Engländer. Ich heisse Edmund. Ich bin Engländer.’
‘Your accent is excellent.’
The Skeleton shivered and tried to disguise the tremors by rubbing and clasping his hands tightly together in a priestly manner. Edmund wasn’t fooled but, out of sympathy and respect, he pretended not to notice, just as he pretended not to notice Herr Koenig’s waxy, shellac smell. Despite the room being as warm as any in the house – in Hamburg, in probably the whole of the British zone – Koenig kept his coat on throughout the lesson, as though he were trying to store the heat for later or thaw some deep, glacial ice within himself. He threw a covetous glance at the slice of cake and glass of milk that Heike had brought for him. The maid usually brought it after the lesson but today she’d brought it before and left it there on the pedestal table, and it had been calling to Koenig all morning.
‘Would you like your cake now?’ Edmund asked. ‘Kuchen?’
Under his breath, Herr Koenig muttered, ‘Dear God, yes,’ in German. Then, audibly, in English: ‘Thank you.’
Edmund got up from the desk and fetched the plate of cake and glass of milk and put them in front of his tutor. Herr Koenig grasped the glass and drained it, fast but carefully. He set it down and licked his milky moustache, his tongue darting discreetly. He then ate the cake, using two hands, like a finicky mouse, then pushed his forefinger into the glass to wet the tip before pressing it into a remnant on the plate, gathering all the crumbs, like iron filings to a magnet, into a last morsel. Afterwards, Koenig’s plate looked shiny and clean, as though licked by a dog.
The Aftermath Page 12