by Simon Mawer
*
The first Ravensbrück trial – later, there were others – lasted into the New Year. On the 3rd February 1947 fifteen of the original sixteen defendants were found guilty, one of them having died during the course of the proceedings. There was a Reuters report on the sentencing on page four of The Times, next to news about the fourth test match in Australia and below Winnipeg isolated by snowfalls. ‘Eleven Death Sentences,’ it announced, including five of the women, including Dorothea Binz. The hangings took place a month later, on the 2nd March, by that cheery cove Albert Pierrepoint who had been specially flown over from Britain for the purpose.
Marian’s father sent her the newspaper cuttings, in case she’d missed them. Reading them she felt an overwhelming sense of horror, horror crawling like parasites all over her body, burrowing into her hair follicles, creeping into her sweat pores, tunnelling through her epidermis – this woman, Dorothea Binz, swinging over the pit, her vertebra snapped like a chicken’s neck. Alan couldn’t really understand her feeling. Good riddance, he thought. But he didn’t say so. Instead he comforted her in that understanding manner of his that she found so aggravating because it was based on a complete failure to understand the substance of her emotion: horror was the last refuge of her guilt – guilt merely by having survived when Véronique and so many others had died, a guilt that was compounded by the guilt of feeling absolutely no guilt at all about Tony Bright.
I’m trying to fit pieces together, build up a picture of her, like that jigsaw that we did at Furze Cottage but never finished. Ophelia drowning; Marian swimming to keep afloat. She could keep secrets but secrets weighed on her. Like the secret of what happened that night in Sussex, the secret that she shared, unbeknown to her, with me. Like the secret of Tony Bright. Like the secret Ned tells her one evening when he has had more than enough to drink.
Keep it secret, Squirrel, won’t you?
I don’t know what it is, yet.
Well, if you promise to keep it to yourself, I’ll tell you. What we’re working on now – it’s worse, ten times worse, a hundred times worse, impossible to calculate. There’s no critical mass, not like the atom bomb where you have to have so much of uranium or plutonium before the damn thing will detonate. But with this new thing there is no lower limit and no upper limit. You just feed it hydrogen – lithium hydride, that’s what we reckon. A pretty simple compound, really. Almost nothing to it. Of course, you have to raise the temperature and pressure sufficiently to trigger the reaction …
How do you do that?
With an atomic explosion.
An atom bomb to start a—?
Hydrogen bomb. Hotter than the centre of the sun. Literally. Fusion, not fission. Infinitely more energy released. Truly the energy of the sun. Not a metaphor this time. The literal truth.
Will it never end? she wonders. All around her the world freezes as surely as the snow and ice of Hamburg; it is freezing into the Cold War.
Cold
The cold had something to do with it, that’s what she claimed afterwards, although the psychiatrist insisted that the visit to Hamburg and the reawakening of old memories was to blame. But she felt it was the cold. It was cold and so she walked. It had been cold in Germany when she’d escaped from the camp, when she and two others had made a run for it. Then they’d walked to keep warm and to find someone who could help them and that was what she did now, she walked and walked to keep warm. And when it came to nightfall she knew that she must find somewhere to hole up for the night or else she would die, there on the pavement somewhere in suburban London. In Germany the three of them had discovered an abandoned hut in the forest and they’d managed to survive, clinging to one another for warmth. But now there were no woods and no hut, just the road with buses and cars driving cautiously over the icy slush, and rows of semi-detached houses, and there at the crossroads a hotel with three stars to its name and an indifferent girl behind the reception desk who admitted that, yes, they did have a room but if she didn’t have luggage she’d have to pay in advance. One pound five shillings for a single room, three and six extra for a private bathroom. Would she be wanting a bathroom?
‘A bathroom? Yes, please.’ She searched in her handbag for the money.
‘You’ll have to sign the register.’
‘Of course.’ The register was a large, official book with dark brown binding, the book of life inscribed with lives various and disparate to which she added, while the receptionist watched, Geneviève Marchal, and the address: 31 rue des Envierges, Paris.
‘What’s that?’ the receptionist asked. ‘You French or something?’
‘Yes, I’m French.’
‘You don’t sound French.’
‘I do when I speak it.’ And she gave a little demonstration.
The girl sucked her teeth, understanding nothing. ‘If you’re foreign, you’ll have to give us your passport.’
There was a moment’s desperate search in her bag. ‘I’ve lost it.’
‘Then you can’t have a room.’
‘But I’ve nowhere else to go.’ She felt panic, as though she was standing on the edge of something, perhaps tears or perhaps madness. ‘Please. Just this once.’ Pleading and at the same time knowing that she was making a spectacle of herself that the girl would remember, that when the police interviewed her she would be able to give them an exact description and Geneviève Marchal would be forever compromised – brûlé, burned, blown. ‘I beg you.’
The girl considered her appeal. ‘I’ll have to call the manager. I can’t just go breaking the rules.’
The idea of the manager sounded frightening, but when he came he was big and jovial and a friend to all. ‘French, are you?’ he said, looking her up and down. ‘I was in France in the war. Catering Corps. Voulez-vous promené avec moi, mademoiselle?’
She tried a smile and suggested that maybe it was a bit cold for a walk. And besides, she’d already been walking for hours.
‘Walking for hours, have you? Where from, may I ask?’
But she had no idea where from, and no idea where she was going. Just walking, that’s what she was doing. Just walking.
‘Question is,’ the receptionist interrupted, ‘can we give her a room if she hasn’t got her passport? She’s paid in advance, you see? But she’s foreign, isn’t she?’
The manager decided – ‘Of course we can, my dear. Anything for our brave French allies’ – and a key with a large, brass tag was produced. With that and the warning that the kitchens closed at nine o’clock, Geneviève was allowed upstairs into the dingy, ill-lit upper corridor of the hotel, to room number 15 with its battered wardrobe, narrow iron bed, cracked basin in the corner and picture on the wall showing horses galloping along a sandy beach.
She felt very tired. Outside, in the light of street lamps, she could see snow falling. The radiator was lukewarm and a cold draught leaked round the edges of the window frame but the room was warmer, much warmer than anything she might have hoped for. Still wearing her coat, she lay down on the bed and slept.
She dreamed the falling dream, the plunging, floating dream, the dream where she wandered without knowing where to go and awoke to no idea of where she was. It was dark outside, the view pooled by street lights. There was the throb of a nearby main road and the grime of dirty, urban snow. Where was this? A hot lava of panic bubbled up inside her. What the hell was she doing here? On the pavement below her window pedestrians breathed fog into the air. A double-decker bus passed by but she couldn’t see the route number or the destination.
She sat on the bed for a moment and tried to gather her scattered thoughts. She knew who she was but not where she was, nor what she was doing here in this dull hotel room with the hard, narrow bed and the ghastly picture of galloping horses on the wall, and an unknown world outside.
London, of course. Presumably. Presumably London. But where and why? Questions crowded in on her, threatened to overturn her, like waves overturning a fragile rowing boat. Where was she?
<
br /> A glance at her watch told her it was ten-thirty. The brass tag attached to a room key on the bedside table told her she was in the Old Oak Roadhouse, Edgware.
Dreams and memories chased themselves through her mind. Walking, she remembered walking. And cold. But not much else. After a while she got up, splashed icy water on her face and attempted to use the scarce resources of her handbag as makeup – some lipstick, a dab of powder, a comb though her untidy hair. Following the exit signs she made her way down to reception where a sallow girl looked up from painting her nails. ‘Fraid you’re too late if you’re looking for dinner. Kitchen closed at nine. I did warn you.’
‘Did you?’
The girl shrugged. ‘Maybe you didn’t understand my English. Being French yourself.’
‘What do you mean? Of course I understand your English.’
A couple came in through the main door, stamping their feet free of snow and laughing together. A gust of cold air followed them like a blast of indifferent reality. They knew where they were and where they were going.
‘I need to phone,’ Marian said.
The receptionist sighed and pointed with one half-painted nail to a wooden booth in the corner. ‘You’ll need pennies. You got pennies or have you only got francs?’
‘Francs? Why should I have francs? Of course I’ve got pennies.’
The interior of the booth smelled of stale clothes and damp. There was a notice explaining that this apparatus was for the convenience of guests of the hotel and was restricted to outgoing calls only. Users were asked not to take up too much time as others might be waiting.
She inserted her pennies and dialled, and Alan answered, a distraught, anxious Alan. She could tell that merely by the way he announced the number as he picked up the phone. She pressed button A and heard pennies fall inside the machine. ‘It’s Marian,’ she said.
‘Marian, where in God’s name are you?’
‘I don’t really know, darling. And I don’t know how I got here. In fact I’m not really sure what day it is. But could you be so sweet and come and rescue me? I think I must be somewhere in Edgware. Isn’t that near Stanmore? I remember going to the cinema in Edgware when I was at Bentley Priory.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I don’t really know. Look, I’m a bit confused and a tiny bit frightened and I’d be grateful if you could come and get me. I’m at somewhere called the Old Oak Roadhouse.’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
Then she put the phone down, went to the bar, ordered a gin and tonic, sat in a corner and waited.
Fugue
Doctors, a hospital bed with nurses coming and going, starched figures with starched minds. They tested her blood pressure and her blood sugar and anything else they could find to test. Even her brain waves, with electrodes on her scalp and pens describing lines of activity on a moving strip of graph paper. There was no trace of anything materially wrong.
‘We call it a fugue,’ Dr Morgan said, meeting with them in his office in the hospital rather than his consulting room on the Woodstock Road.
Alan looked sceptical, but Marian liked fugue, with its musical connotations, its interwoven threads, its careful, artful complexity.
‘Fugue involves dissociation and amnesia,’ Morgan explained, ‘both of which appear to be relevant here. The word means flight, of course. It affected you for only a few hours but people sometimes take off for days, assume a different name, live perfectly normally for a while as a different person and then have no coherent memory of what has happened. The Agatha Christie case, have you heard of that? She disappeared for ten days and when she reappeared she found herself somewhere in Yorkshire, living under an assumed name. It’s thought to be a reaction to stress. Soldiers, for example, with shellshock …’ His voice itself was a palliative, the gentle cadences of the Welsh hills somewhere behind his words. Dissociative, he said. Amnesia. Depersonalisation. Words that whispered through the consulting room long after they had been uttered.
‘Does it mean I’m going mad?’
Dr Morgan smiled. ‘Mad’s not a word we use these days. And you’re as sane as I am. We’re talking about a neurosis, not a psychosis, and we can deal with it together. I suggest we meet up a little more frequently than we have been doing recently. Would twice a week be OK for the moment? Otherwise, just carry on as normal as long as you’re not overdoing it. Work? Of course. Keeping yourself busy is usually a great help. Work isn’t the prime cause, is it? Your trip to Hamburg, reliving your experiences, I’m sure that’s the key.’
They took the train back to London, making plans about how they would deal with this problem. Alan was being understanding. He was always understanding. But why, he wanted to know, couldn’t she just give up her work with that damn left wing lot and become a normal married woman?
She laughed, because she really would go mad if she was stuck at home with nothing to do. And the Peace Union were sure to agree to her having two afternoons a week off. She’d be able to stay overnight with her parents when she had her appointments with Dr Morgan. That would be comforting for her, wouldn’t it? Particularly when Alan was away on business. Everything, she assured him, would be all right. She reached out and took his hand, which was not the kind of thing she often did. ‘Believe me, darling. Everything will be all right.’ As though he were the one to be comforted.
Fawley
Marian Sutro, MBE, Croix de Guerre, travelling unknown on the Tube and the bus through the faint spring, trying to take inspiration from the season and think of the future, trying to forget about the past, trying to forget about her fugue, remembering it only as a dream, a wandering dream, a dream of person and impersonation. She is also trying to ignore the men following her, because they are not there. She knows that. The psychiatrist has assured her that these things – the fugue, the followers – are only illusions born of her experience. And, of course, she agrees – they are illusions, fantasies, products of her own, deranged mind; until the day that it is no illusion, the day when she’s leaving work and she cannot dismiss the man watching her from across the road as a creature of her imagination. Perhaps he had been there on other occasions but then she had been able to dismiss him as a mere phantasm; on this occasion there could be no doubt. No dream, no demon, no phantom. As she emerges from the offices of the Franco-British Pacific Union one approximate spring afternoon, there he is on the far side of the street, a man of medium build in a dark overcoat and bowler hat, with, by his side, a tightly furled umbrella. His face is partly concealed by a grey woollen scarf wrapped round his neck against the cold but he is watching her. As she turns to walk along High Holborn, he does precisely the same thing but on the other side of the road, keeping pace with her, walking briskly, his umbrella swinging in that unmistakable fashion that is the birthright of every English gentleman. At a zebra crossing he passes over to her side and walks just behind her. At the next side street there he is at her side.
‘Marian Sutro,’ he says, touching her elbow with a tightly gloved hand.
She felt fear, and that strange coldness that came to her with fear. The demons brought panic; true fear only brought this chilling calm. She stopped and turned.
‘It is you,’ he said, although he knew damn well it was her. ‘Can I offer you a lift somewhere? I was about to get a cab.’ As if by magic – something else that was the birthright of every such Englishman, perhaps – a free taxi materialised at the kerb beside them. He held the door open for her. ‘Please.’
They sat back in the leather-bound interior. She pressed herself into the far corner, leaving as much distance as possible between his immaculately pressed trouser legs and her nylon-clad knees. Despite the uniform of the city businessman there was still that bland, self-effacing quality about him that she had discerned when they had first met – reserved and thoughtful, like an Anglican divine who has all the arguments at his command but is reluctant to deploy them for fear of offending people. Major Fawley, smil
ing faintly and nodding as if in agreement with what he is saying: ‘What a pleasant coincidence, bumping into each other like this.’
‘Is it?’
‘Perhaps not quite a coincidence. But pleasant, I can assure you. Now, where can I take you?’
‘You can drop me in Piccadilly Circus. I can get the Tube from there.’
‘Oh, please. At least let me deliver you to your doorstep.’ He leaned forward to give instructions to the driver and with a little shock of understanding she heard him name the exact street. A tremor of anxiety and anticipation passed through her, a mirror image of what she had felt the first time they had encountered one another in rooms in an Oxford college, with the war going on around them and the prospect of a parachute drop to France lying before her. But when he sat back in the seat he was wearing that bland, clerical face that signified nothing. ‘What a dreadful winter we’ve had, haven’t we? How are things going? How is peace treating you?’
She told him, just the positive things – her marriage, her new job, her circumscribed life in London – feeling all the time that he already knew most of it. Did he also know, she wondered, about her flight from reality, her fugue? ‘Getting back to normal,’ she said. ‘Whatever normal means. I was lucky, I suppose, considering that I have no qualifications for anything. Miss Atkins found the job for me. Do you know Vera Atkins?’
Light from the window glinted on his owlish spectacles. ‘I know of her. A singular woman, is she not?’ There was a pause while she was allowed to wonder about the singularity of Vera Atkins. ‘Incidentally, may I offer my congratulations on your witness at the Hamburg trial?’
‘You know about that?’