Ursula was agitated by her exchange with Kutov, and that agitation was now trained on Lewis. ‘You’ve listened to everyone else. It’s only fair that you share something.’
‘Right,’ Ziegel agreed, slapping the table. ‘You gotta bring something to the table, Colonel. We’ve all bared our souls. Fair play and cricket and all that.’
Ursula reached for the bottle and put it in front of Lewis. He looked at it, but he wouldn’t take it. Ursula impatiently snatched it back and held it in front of her.
‘Very well. As your interpreter, I will interpret for you. I think I know what the colonel is saying.’
Ursula looked at Lewis and he suddenly wanted to take the bottle from her hands.
‘But for the war, Colonel Morgan would not have been here to offer me a job. I would not be going to London. So thank you for this. But for the war, Colonel Morgan might be living a nice life somewhere in England or Wales. I don’t know. But for the war, Colonel Morgan might have spent more time with his family. But for the war, he would not have lost a son and then tried to stay so busy and work so hard that he didn’t have to face thinking about it. Even though it is there. In his heart.’
And, with that, Ursula moved the bottle from in front of Lewis to the centre of the table.
Kutov clapped. Ziegel nodded his approval.
Lewis could feel something swelling inside him, at his sinuses and in his chest. He had worked hard to keep this ghost at bay, but now it was pressing in, coming to claim its dues. The tears were coming, and he had to swallow to hold them. He stood up. The syrupy numbing of the vodka seemed to have concentrated at the backs of his thighs, and he steadied himself. He put his hand over Ursula’s – very lightly – and tapped it. ‘Good translation.’ He bowed to the men. ‘I’m going to turn in. Gentlemen. Frau Paulus. Goodnight. Spokoynoy nochi. Bonne nuit. Gute Nacht.’
11
Richard slowed to drop Rachael off outside the gates of the Burnhams’. As he did so, he stalled the Austin, its judder forcing her to place a hand on the dashboard.
‘Dieses englische Auto ist Scheiße!’ he muttered, then became acutely embarrassed at his outburst. ‘Entschuldigung.’
Even without her daily lessons, she’d have understood these words well enough.
‘Don’t worry, Richard. It’s just the cold. I agree, it isn’t the best car in the world. Thank you for driving me. It was actually much nearer than I thought.’ She said all this accompanied by compensatory hand gestures: walking fingers, hand indicating small distance, and then a light, reassuring touch of his arm.
‘You are good lady,’ he said, in English.
As she walked up the Burnhams’ drive, Rachael felt both flattered and uneasy at Richard’s compliment. She didn’t feel like a ‘good lady’. The illicit events of the last few weeks had surely disqualified her from receiving that accolade.
If anyone could see through such a claim, it would be Susan Burnham. This invitation to tea now felt like a potential ambush. Rachael’s raw feelings, her situation, were exactly the kind of meat on which Susan loved to feed. As they took tea in Susan Burnham’s impressive front parlour, Rachael decided to offer a diversion.
‘I presume you’ve heard about Herr Koenig? Edmund’s tutor?’
‘Yes. Keith said. Secret Police. I expect he’ll be shot.’
Rachael nodded.
‘Didn’t you check his story?’
‘Yes. But it was obviously not the one he told us,’ Rachael said. ‘He filled out his form like everyone else. He just avoided the incriminating categories. He said he had been a headmaster in Kiel. Lewis thought him sound.’
‘How did they get him?’
‘Someone who knew him reported him.’
‘Well. Your husband’s screening process leaves much to be desired.’
Instead of defending Lewis, Rachael lifted her teacup to her lips and burnt herself. She blew on the surface of the tea, causing little ripples across the surface, and studied the cup. Rachael had a soft spot for crockery. She knew her china, and this was a stunning set decorated in the exquisite Blue Onion pattern. She lifted the cup and looked underneath for the maker’s mark, and there was the blue crossed-swords emblem signifying the town on the Elbe near Dresden which made the best china in the world. How curious that this cup had been made in a town that stood by the same river that flowed just a few hundred yards away. It was her and Lewis’s twentieth-wedding anniversary in April, and she had always given him a gift in the appropriate material. Twenty years was china.
‘Meissen,’ she said.
‘Comes with the house. The place is heaving with the stuff.’
The Burnhams’ house was grander than Susan had let on. She had so overplayed the magnificence of the Villa Lubert that Rachael had imagined her living in far less salubrious circumstances than these. While lacking the dimensions of Lubert’s house, this was perfectly grand in its own way, and perhaps also a little too refined, a little too cultured for the likes of Susan Burnham. Not that Rachael would say this. They were both uncultured cuckoos in the fancy nests of other birds.
‘I would have invited you for Christmas, but we don’t celebrate it with much gusto – Keith can’t bear it. ’
‘It’s kind of you to say that. We’ve had a perfectly fine one.’
‘Your hubby is quite the absentee. I think I’ve only met him once in our time here.’
‘I think a part of him is glad to get away.’
This was not what Rachael had intended to say, and Susan Burnham scented blood. ‘Did he take his translator with him?’
‘He didn’t say. I imagine so.’
‘Keith said he saw her the other day, at the lunch. Said that Lewis has “an absolute goddess of an interpreter”. My hubby is usually quite blind to such things, so she must be. You didn’t check, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t it make you … just a teensy-weensy bit suspicious? You’ve heard about Captain Jackson?’
Rachael hadn’t heard – nor did she want to hear – about Captain Jackson, but Susan was going tell her.
‘He eloped to Sweden with his translator. Left three children. Didn’t even leave a note.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Susan?’
‘Because I look at the two of you and wonder how you manage. I worry about you.’
Rachael wasn’t sure she believed this. Was it concern or prurience that drove her friend?
‘What about you? How is Keith? I have not seen him since … that evening.’
‘God. I don’t think he’d even remember it.’ She laughed. But the mention of it caused her to pause. ‘He’s beastly when he’s drunk. I worry that it’s got worse since we’ve got here.’
‘He seemed very angry.’
‘It’s his work. Keith’s on a mission. He doesn’t want them to get away with it.’
‘Them?’
‘The Nazis.’
‘No. None of us do.’
‘Well. He was deeply affected by the pictures of the camps. He asked to be transferred to the de-Nazification programme the week the pictures were released. He felt called to root out that evil.’
Rachael’s gaze focused on a row of tea chests by the wall. She assumed that they had just arrived from England.
‘You’re still unpacking?’
‘We’re sending stuff back.’
‘But you have room enough …’
‘We’re … you know … shipping some bits and pieces.’
‘Bits and pieces?’
‘Oh, come on, Rachael. Spoils of war. It’s all stolen goods anyway. Those paintings in your house – you think Herr
Lubert has no blood on his hands?’
How stupid I’ve been, Rachael thought.
‘I wouldn’t … dream of it.’
‘It’s all right for you.’
‘Why?’
‘You come from good homes. You have heirlooms and fine antiques. We’ve come from nothing.’
‘That’s not true. Neither Lewis nor I come from privilege.’
A maid entered with a plate of mince pies.
‘Nein! Goodness me!’ Susan Burnham said as she redirected her to the sideboard. She was suddenly quite unhinged.
Rachael started to dab her mouth with her napkin. She wanted to get out of this house.
‘He’s won you over, hasn’t he?’ Susan said.
‘Who?
‘Your handsome architect.’
Rachael couldn’t stop the mechanism that connected her conscience and the flow of blood to her cheeks. ‘What do you … mean?’
‘I saw how you leapt to his defence when the vase broke.’
‘It was his house, Susan. We were breaking his things – his things!’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘No. I don’t know what you mean.’
‘When you went towards him – to stop him hitting Keith – the way you looked at each other –’
‘Susan! Please.’
‘Well, be careful. They’re not like us. They’re different. Quite different. Not that I’d blame him.’
‘For what?
‘For wanting to take advantage.’
‘Please, Susan.’
‘You’re an attractive lady. And virtually unattended. I’m only saying this because I envy you.’
‘Me?’
‘It’s all more complicated,’ she said. Her skin was suddenly blotching now, around her eyes and nose, stalk marks of emotion flaring. ‘I hate being here.’
‘I thought you liked it.’
‘I put on a brave show. You get good at it when you’re married to a drunk.’ She gave a frivolous, nervous laugh to try to play this down, but the word was out.
The military was full of secret inebriates, but Rachael had not numbered Major Burnham as one of them. ‘I didn’t realize it was that bad.’
Susan Burnham suddenly put a hand over Rachael’s. ‘You won’t tell anyone? Please don’t tell anyone.’
‘No.’
‘And about the other.’
‘What other?’
Susan Burnham looked to the crammed tea chests awaiting shipping.
‘About the china and things.’
Edmund spread a deck of cards face down across the expanse of his bedroom while Frieda lay on her side, her body stretched out across the carpet, her skirt hitched up to her thighs. She was examining the stitches on Cuthbert’s neck. Since the Christmas screening, Frieda had started being friendlier towards him, and Edmund had tried to dissociate himself from his cloth soldier and any other form of play she might consider juvenile. No more running Dinky cars along the landing or hunting imaginary beasts in the garden. It was all films and cards now.
‘The English soldier is better,’ Frieda said, in an English far better than Edmund had thought she possessed. ‘He is a king’s soldier?’
‘He’s a Grenadier Guard.’
Edmund wanted to get on with the game of Pelmanism, but Frieda ran a finger along Cuthbert’s stitches, up and over his bearskin, smiling to herself. Perhaps she was going to give him a full confession.
‘Your mother make him better. From the stummer Diener.’
Edmund shrugged nonchalantly to show that he had moved on from soldiers and dumb waiters. He was looking at her bare legs now, and had positioned himself to see them more easily. He was drawn to Frieda in a way that defied sense or his full understanding. At night, when he found it hard to sleep, his mind kept returning to her athletic display, to her white knickers deep in the recess of her thighs, and to the ammonia citrus tang of her piss in the chamber pot. From these moments, he was able to grow a whole sequence of new fantasies.
Pretending to spread the cards more evenly on the carpet, he brushed his hand against her flesh and left it lying there. He had already touched her in his delicious mind-adventures. But to do it in real life … These were the games he wanted to play. He wanted to stroke her skin there, in a circuit above the knee, to rub it as if cleaning steam from a window. This thought seemed connected to his loins, where he felt a surging sensation. He wanted his hand to continue moving up towards the impossible whiteness of those knickers until it reached the material. And what then? Would she clamp her thighs together, trapping his hand between her legs?
Frieda gave no sign that she’d noticed his touch. She lay Cuthbert down and switched her attention to the doll’s house, pulling herself up on to her knees and taking in the configuration of the dolls. She pointed to the small boy doll in the bedroom.
‘This you. This’ – pointing to the doll at the piano – ‘Frau Morgan. This’ – indicating the dolls on the roof – ‘my father and me.’
Edmund nodded. He wanted to go back to the other game, but Frieda seemed quite taken with his re-creation. She swapped the Frieda doll with the doll that represented Rachael, placing Frieda with Edmund on the first floor and Edmund’s mother with Herr Lubert on the roof. Then she placed the adults together in the master bedroom. She seemed amused by this rearrangement. Edmund laughed, too, although, in truth, he wasn’t sure if it was funny. The sight of the Lubert doll and the mother doll together in the bedroom gave him a strange feeling.
‘Where is Edmund’s father?’ Frieda asked.
Edmund pointed to the car sitting on an island of clothes by the rocking horse. ‘Heligoland.’
She got up and went over to the horse, stroking its shiny back, and put her foot over the car. She rolled it back and forth on the carpet.
‘You can send him back,’ said Edmund.
‘Now?’
‘Now.’
With her foot, Frieda propelled the car back across the carpet with enough force to jolt the side of the doll’s house and flip the car over on its side.
Rachael could see something moving in the woods: figures tracking them in parallel, moving from the cover of one tree to the next. As she looked, she slowed and tugged Lubert’s arm, forcing him to look, too. ‘I think we’re being followed.’
Lubert looked to the trees. ‘Trümmerkinder.’
The figures stopped and peered from behind a tree. One of them looked to be carrying a large stick resembling a spear. He could have been the same age as Edmund.
‘Don’t worry about them. They’ll just think we’re refugees, or lovers going for a walk in the park.’
The term ‘lover’ seemed too breezy to Rachael. Being a lover, she had discovered, required more stealth and guile, more plotting and planning than writers of romantic fiction liked to let on. They had spent many an evening in front of the fire, talking deeply, but the house was all ears and eyes, and with the cold months keeping everyone indoors it was no place for easy intimacy. Even this brief escape had required her to leave the house first and him to follow after: she ‘to get some air’; he ‘to look for wood’. Lewis had been gone nearly two months, and yet this was the first time they’d managed to find time to be fully alone since that Christmas night.
As they walked through the grounds of the Jenischpark, she thought that winter was the right season for an affair. Much easier for furtive bodies to find anonymity when everything was under wraps. From a distance, everyone looked the same and, today, both she and Lubert were so well swathed – she in her galoshes and black wool coat; Lubert in a ski hat and carrying a rucksack filled with f
uel for the gamekeeper’s hut – they could easily have passed for two displaced persons heading for the nearby camp.
The park was only fifteen minutes’ walk from the house, but it felt like another country. The snow was virgin except for deer prints. Icicles hung from the architraves of the great house at the park’s centre. As they walked, Lubert explained the park’s history. ‘It was landscaped by a man called Casper Beck. A talented man. Although something of a tragic figure. He tried to find a universal language in his work and failed. He fell into despair and took his own life.’ As they approached the gamekeeper’s hut, he explained how Claudia’s family connections had given them a licence to shoot game in the park and private access to it. The hut was a folly of sorts, a mock log cabin in the American style, overlooking a pond that in summer was a private pool. In snow and surrounded by pines, it perfectly resembled a shack on a lonesome frontier. Lubert produced a key, brushed the snow and ice from the lock, and unlocked it.
Inside, the cabin was furnished with thick wooden chairs and rugs; a gun rack and a stag’s head adorned the wall above the fireplace where a stove had been set. From his sack, Lubert produced kindling – a broken-up tea chest, a copy of Die Welt – and set about lighting it. The floor was covered in dried dead bugs that scrunched and popped beneath their feet. Rachael swept them under the door with the limb of a fir tree and cleaned a space in front of the fireplace, where she laid all the rugs to make a bed. She then sat and watched Lubert get the fire going. He waited for the flare of the kindling to die down then added some coals, carefully setting them one by one among the burning twigs. He then joined her on the bed of rugs and together they watched the fire do its work, sitting like scouts at a camp. Despite the significance of what she – what they – were doing, Rachael couldn’t help but think that the affair still had the feel of a children’s game.
The snow from their clothes began to steam around them. Lubert took off his hat and scarf, and Rachael did the same. He then kissed her and, cradling her head with one hand, lowered her on to her back. They kissed for a long time and then began to make love, this time keeping most of their clothes on. It was not the same as that first night. The temperature required haste and awkward fumblings. Despite the clothes, though, Rachael felt more exposed than when she’d first lain naked with him. She was too aware of herself this time, and too conscious of time and life pressing in. Afterwards, they lay back, looking at the cobwebs in the beams above. She wondered how long they could keep the realities of the world at bay.
The Aftermath Page 25