It was in this more philosophical mood that he entered the house and ran upstairs to change into his suit. As he did so he thought that they were supposed now to open their presents. Well, if no one else mentioned it, he certainly wasn’t going to.
Their hosts, the Hope-Rudstons, lived in a long Jacobean house, set in an old garden. Behind it were water meadows and a lake. Greg suppressed impatience as they entered the house and met their hostess, a smiling, needle-thin woman in pale cashmere. He was becoming tired of these nice houses in nice settings in the country, tired of feeling like a stranger in what was beginning to feel like a strange land, tired of watching Simon’s back as he whizzed off into the centre of a crowd of friends.
Katherine hailed him from the middle of the room, and when he joined her she introduced him to a beautiful girl with long blonde hair, Amelia. ‘Thank goodness,’ she told Amelia. ‘I don’t know a soul here.’
‘Here’s Rupert – Rupert Hennessy,’ Amelia said. A tall young man in black joined them. ‘Jon Hope-Rudston,’ said Amelia. As Greg turned his head to say hello his glance struck a large mirror hanging over the fireplace. Reflected in it was a group of five men near the opposite wall talking. One of them, full face to the room, was Sir Peveril Jones and he thought he saw Sir Peveril’s eyes flick towards him, then away.
Interrupting Jon Hope-Rudston, who was saying something about a party, Greg said, directly to Katherine, ‘Why, there’s Sir Peveril Jones over there by the wall. Who’d have thought it?’ A promising chess player at high school until he’d got tired of being called a nerd and started concentrating on football, Greg decided that the situation merited a random opening gambit and, turning abruptly, marched straight over to Sir Peveril. They said that if you went up to a hundred people and hissed in the ear of each, ‘I know everything,’ ninety-eight would go pale.
Apologising, as he pushed past the men with Sir Peveril, he went up close to him and said, in a low voice, ‘I know everything.’ Then he turned and walked out.
And that, he thought, starts and finishes the game.
He would not go back to the party. He would not have what he believed was an arranged interview – set up by Simon and Katherine – with Sir Peveril Jones. On the other hand, he couldn’t bring himself to drive off, leaving Katherine and her crippled uncle stranded.
He went to where the cars were parked, opened the door of his own, got in and sat down to wait until the party ended.
Half an hour later a face appeared at the car window, that of the lean black-clad young man to whom Greg had been introduced.
‘Jon Hope-Rudston – we met,’ he said, apologetically. ‘They sent me off to find out where you were.’
‘Well, I guess you know now,’ Greg said.
‘Had enough of the party? I don’t blame you,’ he said. ‘Mind if I join you?’ He opened the door on the other side of the car and climbed in. Then he produced a packet of cigarettes and took one out. ‘Do you object?’ he asked.
‘No.’
Jon lit up, and from the smell Greg deduced that this was no ordinary cigarette. Jon took a drag then offered it to Greg. ‘Do you inhale at all?’ he asked.
‘Thanks,’ Greg said, taking the joint and breathing in deeply. He handed it back.
‘Sorry about the intrusion,’ Jon said. ‘Any particular reason why you’re sitting in the car?’
‘I found out I don’t like my host, Mr Ledbetter, he doesn’t like me and neither does my girlfriend. It’s Christmas Day, I’m six thousand miles from home and I think I’m being conned,’ Greg replied.
‘I see,’ Jon said. He smoked the joint pensively for a few moments, then passed it back to Greg. ‘I hope you don’t mind me sitting here,’ he said. ‘You know what Christmas is like, a bit of a strain.’
‘Do you live here all the time?’
‘No, in London. I’m a solicitor, very junior.’
He lit another joint, took a drag and handed it over. ‘I don’t want to use up all your supply,’ said Greg.
‘It’s all right. I’ve got loads. Anyway, if I run out I can get some more from the gardener.’
‘He grows it?’
‘No, he buys it in Dorchester.’ He stretched. ‘I’d better go in and say I found you, I suppose.’
‘Tell them I’m asleep.’
‘OK. Nice meeting you.’
‘Thanks for the smoke.’
‘A pleasure,’ said Jon, and went off. Greg shut his eyes, relaxed.
Not long afterwards, Katherine came to the car. Greg got out. ‘Jon said you were asleep,’ Katherine said.
‘I did drop off,’ Greg told her. ‘Sorry.’
‘We’re about to leave. Do come back inside and say goodbye.’
‘Sure,’ said Greg amiably. He realised there was no way out of the interview with Sir Peveril, but the difference was that now he didn’t care much.
‘Sir Peveril was a bit put out by something you said to him before you went out,’ Katherine said lightly, as they walked towards the front steps. ‘Apparently you went up to him and said, “I know everything.”’
‘It was a joke,’ Greg told her. ‘I never called him an asshole – or a traitor – and I guess he’s both.’
She stood still in front of the house. ‘Greg, you’re being very peculiar.’
‘Jon Hope-Rudston offered me a strange-tasting cigarette,’ Greg said.
‘He didn’t – Oh, God, you haven’t?’ Katherine said disgustedly. ‘Can you drive?’
‘I can drive. I just can’t connive,’ said Greg, and smiling widely, he bounded into the house.
Sir Peveril dropped any pretence that this was a casual meeting. He was waiting in the hall when Greg walked in and came up to him immediately. Grasping Greg’s arm he said, ‘I wonder if we could have a word in private.’
‘Sure,’ Greg agreed, moving to regain possession of his arm.
‘This way, then,’ Sir Peveril said, and led the way to a study off the hall. They sat down in an atmosphere of furniture polish and unread books.
Greg leaned back in his chair, still a little irritated that the determination of the Ledbetters and Sir Peveril had forced him into a conversation he did not want. He said, ‘I don’t really want to be here. Is this about Adrian Pym?’
Sir Peveril, evidently deciding it would not serve him well to take offence, replied, ‘It concerns Pym indirectly, more particularly perhaps it concerns your book. You’ve been talking to Bruno Lowenthal, of course, about Sally Bowles.’
Greg said the first thing that came to him: ‘Is she dead?’
Annoyed at being deflected, Sir Peveril replied brusquely, ‘Dead? No, she’s not.’
Greg was very startled by this answer, which he had not really expected. ‘She’s not? So where is she?’ he demanded eagerly.
‘You’d better ask your friend Mr Lowenthal. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you,’ Sir Peveril replied. ‘Now, concerning Pym, obviously he has the capacity to do immense damage to this country’s reputation …’
But Greg was hardly listening. He knew more or less what Sir Peveril was about to say. What shook him was that Sir Peveril had no doubt Sally was alive or that Bruno – Bruno! – knew where she was. The old bastard. The evil old bastard. Sir Peveril leaned forward and tapped Greg’s knee as if to attract his attention. Greg hated that tap. He was caught by another mention of Bruno’s name.
‘No doubt Lowenthal’s inaccurate anecdotes involve Pym during the war. If you publish these damaging statements, Pym may be tempted to retaliate. The developments could be dangerous.’
‘It was a long time ago, sir,’ Greg told him. ‘Fifty years. Most of the people in the world weren’t born then.’
‘That’s not relevant to what I’m saying. The times we’re talking about are on the borderline between present time and history, close enough to have a bearing on the future. In particular, on our relationships with other countries, including your own.’
‘Once upon a time,’ said Greg, still thinki
ng about the extant Sally Bowles, ‘there was heavy Communist infiltration of the British secret service. The traitors worked undetected for many years, were exposed and fled in the nineteen fifties. The damage they did is accounted for. From what I understand there’s nothing dangerous in what I have to say.’
‘Let’s say I might know a little more about that than you,’ Sir Peveril told him.
The room was suddenly too hot and too small. Greg wanted to get out. He forced himself to reply. ‘I’d be grateful for any comments you might like to make when my book is complete.’
‘There is a likelihood that publication of the book will be stopped,’ Sir Peveril said.
Greg had half expected this. ‘I’ll be sorry if that happens in the UK.’
He knew Sir Peveril must understand that an embargo in Britain would make little difference to him. His contract was with an American publisher. News of British censorship might even help sales.
‘I think the State Department might easily come to the same view as the British Government,’ Sir Peveril replied.
Greg, half stoned, child of freedom marchers, stood up and said, ‘I don’t, I have to tell you. Any British cover-up would be more to protect the reputations of a small group here than to serve any public interest. I think my government would feel the same. There’s nothing you can say that will stop me from writing the book, Sir Peveril.’
Sir Peveril sighed and looked at him coldly. ‘If that’s the case, I have to tell you your presence is no longer welcome in this country. Mr Phillips, you are under a deportation order, effective as of eight o’clock tomorrow morning, the twenty-sixth. A BA flight to New York is leaving at ten a.m. tomorrow and your name has been placed on the passenger list. If you do not avail yourself of your seat, you render your status that of an illegal immigrant. You may be arrested by the police and imprisoned until deportation.’
Greg laughed. ‘If you want to attract the attention of the world to Pym’s return, you’re certainly going the right way about it.’ He left the room.
Katherine was in the hall, waiting for him.
‘It looks like I have to leave the country,’ he said to her.
‘My God,’ said Katherine. ‘Why?’
As if on cue, Simon came up in his wheelchair. ‘We must go,’ Katherine told him. They all said goodbye to their hostess and silently got into the car, Simon in front as usual, Katherine in the back. Driving along, Greg said, ‘I’m getting deported, but I guess you knew, so it’d be nice if nobody started saying, “What a shock, Greg. I’m so sorry.” I’ll leave right away.’
‘Oh,’ said Katherine. ‘You must stay to lunch.’
‘Yeah – we can pull crackers and put on paper hats,’ he said. ‘Tell me this, Katherine, if I hadn’t got in touch with you, once you heard what I was doing, would you have got in touch with me?’
‘It was just a coincidence,’ she said.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
The rest of the journey passed in silence.
Back at Chapel Manor Farm he parked. They all got out of the car and Greg went upstairs to fetch his bag. As he closed the front door he heard the phone ring. Katherine and Simon, together in the drawing room, did not come out to say goodbye.
Chapter 57
After Greg’s call from Dorset Bruno sat down again and continued to speak into his tape-recorder.
‘Claudia began to live in Sally’s house. Antonia and Ricardo spent a lot of time there, helping. I would go when I could, for it was only by chance that I had avoided the fate of Claudia and Simon Stein. Of Simon there was still no news.
‘It was terrible,’ Bruno said. ‘It was quite terrible. Claudia’s state of mind was not good. When you think what had happened to her, what she had seen, what she had endured, that was not surprising. She was like a zombie, clear about only one or two things, one being that her daughter must not see her until she looked more like a mother – anyone – should. The other, that her husband was dead.
‘So I would go there and help, cleaning, that sort of thing. Sally was hopeless at it. In any case, the house was unmanageable. Sometimes I’d cook some German food and Claudia and I would talk. It was easier for her to use German, though difficult for her to speak at all sometimes. Sometimes she would pause, look ahead of her into space and tears would begin to run down her face. This was difficult for me,’ Bruno said. ‘I’m not good at such things. She was so broken, so weak. There would be these long silences, where you could almost feel the nightmares building in her head. And at other times she would speak fluently, but of times and people I did not know – of her childhood, of films she had seen before the war, but never about Dachau. It chilled me. It frightened me. Many times I did not want to be there. Sometimes I would arrange to go and visit her then cancel at the last moment. I am ashamed of this, but I am a selfish man. I can only take so much.
‘But you must have the whole story. Well, then,’ said Bruno. At this point he got up and poured himself a brandy. He sipped a little and went on speaking. ‘The Steins met at the Berlin Institute of Technology before the war. They were both top of their classes, sometimes Simon in position one and Claudia second, sometimes the other way about. But, of course, Simon was a Jew. Claudia was not. They married in nineteen thirty-six, the year Hitler made it illegal for Jews to marry Gentiles, but Claudia and Simon did it anyway. They had to keep the marriage a secret.
‘By this time Simon could not get the work he was qualified to do, because of his race. But Claudia was taken on by Walter Dornburger at the experimental rocket station at Kummersdorf-West, not too far from Berlin. I don’t know if you appreciate fully what this is all about, Greg. I think you will know the name of Claudia’s superior, though. He was Werner von Braun. So there was Claudia in the Army Weapons Department, involved in developing rocket technology, while Simon worked as a hospital orderly, which was all he could get. The country was becoming a hell for Jews. And they were living apart, at two different addresses, pretending not to be married.
‘Of course, they should have left but they couldn’t see into the future, could they? Clever as they were, they couldn’t know …
‘Later, around nineteen thirty-eight, Sally returned to Germany and tried to take up again with Christian von Torgau, to discover that this once enlightened and civilised man, free-thinking and cultured, had become a fanatic. How such a thing can happen I don’t know. It’s possible to understand the poor and deprived adopting a philosophy that promises them power and wealth and tells them they have a natural superiority over another group of people, so they can treat others as they themselves have been treated – but a von Torgau? A man with almost everything? What did he want? A faith? More power when Hitler had conquered the world? I don’t know – some things you can never know.
‘His wife Julia was not with him in this. Julia’s family was even older than von Torgau’s. She was more aristocratic, even, than he. She was a cold woman, haughty, and I don’t know what their marriage was like. It was suitable, though, and two sons were born, which, I suppose, was the point of it. Julia disliked Sally, but not because she was von Torgau’s mistress – I expect the marriage was by that time beyond love, jealousy, all the rest. No, I think she disliked Sally because Sally was Sally, disorderly and English, and she didn’t know the rules. I suppose a woman like Julia would expect to be respected by her husband’s mistress, as she might have been respected by anyone who was, in some way, in the family service. Which Sally didn’t understand and didn’t care about. However, when it came to the point, Julia couldn’t believe in Hitler. She believed in her country, but not in Hitler. So there it was.
‘Now the von Torgaus and the Steins were friends, which you might think strange, but no, Simon Stein’s father had been the von Torgaus’ banker. The Steins were greatly cultured, something, perhaps, of more importance in Germany than in Britain. And Christian and Julia had a passion for music, as had Simon and Claudia. Julia was a good pianist. She had a natural talent. Simon was a fair violini
st and Claudia played the cello. They would meet often, sometimes just for a meal or to talk, sometimes to play music, purely for the fun, because they loved it, a feeling which transcends class and race and politics. Musicians are musicians. You will remember I told you I was there one evening, before the Nazis put an end to everything good, including their music. Von Torgau’s conversion ended their friendship also, but Julia maintained her loyalty to her friends and continued to see them.
‘By now Claudia was working on rocket fuels. This was crucial work, of course, for without light fuel the necessary impetus could not be achieved for successful launching. The scientists weren’t keen on the weapons side of the affair. It was the rockets themselves they were interested in. There was a lot of politics – for the first three years of the war Hitler, for example, was not convinced about the use of rockets in warfare. Just as well – if he’d become keen earlier he might have won the war. Never mind, it didn’t happen.
‘Claudia got pregnant about the time Britain declared war, and went back to her parents to have a child few knew about. Fewer still knew the paternity of the child, not even Claudia’s parents, who had to accept that their daughter had come home to bear an illegitimate child in secret.
‘The child was born. Claudia returned to Berlin with her and gave her to a woman in the house where she lived to bring up. She went back to her work.
‘Remember, the child was half Jewish, the marriage had been illegal. All three, Claudia, Simon and the baby, were in grave danger. Each year the punishment of the Jews grew worse. In the week of Claudia’s return Simon was arrested. He had been picked up at the hospital where he worked and accused of theft. This was probably the action of a malicious fellow worker. It’s certain he was innocent. But he was a Jew. He was condemned, he disappeared. It was Julia who made the enquiries – Claudia could not afford to be so involved. But even Julia got nowhere. As for finding Simon, he had disappeared, no one knew where. Claudia’s position was impossible – her husband was missing, perhaps dead, her child, in Nazi Germany, half Jewish, and then there was her work – poor woman, poor woman.
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