On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  Janet Bray was still crying when William handed her a tumbler half full of neat whisky. The girl was right; it was all his fault.

  While Janet was crying into her drink, Genevieve was having the time of her life. With no formal education outside of drama school, Oxford was a revelation. The old spires and courtyards shouted history to Genevieve and she watched the new generation of young men take it all for granted, their birthright passed down for them to enjoy from all the centuries past, the cornerstone of the empire. The cornerstone of British power that stretched round the globe and seemingly to the young men in flowing black robes walking intently between lectures to be theirs forever, a fact of life that would never change.

  Genevieve knew she was a romantic, knew the romance of life was the best part of her acting, why she looked so longingly into the lens of the camera, seeing the world full of love and hope. Her confidence reflected in her eyes, the young men’s in their stride as they took hold of life in all its young glory.

  Left alone by the boys during the day as they attended their own classes, she wondered what her life would have been had she come into the world legitimate, her parents married, a brother certain to inherit a title as old as Oxford itself. A future husband born to the aristocracy, a place at Somerville College instead of drama classes at the Albert Hall, where she was no more than a woman destined to prostitute her looks to find fame and fortune in a world where she had no protection other than her wits.

  Tinus found her by the River Thames, in the shade of a willow tree, white swans on the water, young men rowing long boats in short white sleeves, the oars dipping to the water, pulling the boats over the smooth surface of the river, not a care in their world.

  “How was your first day at university?” she asked, looking up from her shaded patch of grass.

  “Probably like your first day on a film set. I had no idea what I was meant to be doing. Unlike school, you are expected to find out for yourself. Has anyone bothered you? There was something about you in the press along with a photograph.”

  “No. Here each person is as important as the next one. I only made one film.”

  “It won’t always be like this. Do you like people loving you? This is all so far from Africa I have to pinch myself it’s me.”

  “It mostly depends on who is doing the loving. So far so good. It’s the older lechers who put me off sometimes.”

  “I’m definitely in the University Air Squadron. To them, Uncle Harry is God.”

  “Isn’t he your God too?”

  Tinus sat down quietly on the grass next to her, pulling gently at a wand from the weeping willow tree.

  “My father had gone away to find himself. Bitter his own father had been killed by the British, grandfather’s only sin was being born a Boer in the Cape ruled by the British. My father was on his way home having found God when Braithwaite shot him the same way he shot Uncle Harry’s first wife, your Aunt Lucinda… What do you think of Aunt Tina?”

  “Like me, she is out of her depth. Unlike me, she is not an actress able to hide her birth. Class is powerful in England, unlike Africa where if you are white, they tell me, the rest doesn’t really matter. In England, they don’t like people getting above themselves however much money they have to spend. It’s breeding they think more important than self-made wealth, old money. Everyone wants to come from old money.”

  “You are from old money.”

  “Only half. A by-blow, Tinus. Very much frowned upon… Can you find a boat and take me for a row on the river? Tina is a fool, she should take her children to Rhodesia. Where her father, a one-time railway porter, a stationmaster, won’t make any difference to what people think of her. And that’s the St Clair part of me talking. The snob in me I suppose. Where having the one-time Tina Pringle to Christmas lunch at Purbeck Manor was impossible. Mrs Mason nearly threw a fit at the very idea of the Lord of the Manor entertaining someone from the working class. And Tina’s mother was just as opposed to the whole idea. Poor Uncle Harry. If Aunt Lucinda had lived he would not be in his present mess.”

  “Is he in a mess?”

  “Oil and water. They don’t mix. The classes in England don’t mix. They probably don’t mix anywhere for all I know. Just ask my mother. Would you like to meet my mother, Tinus?”

  “Of course, if you want me to.”

  “You’re a liar… You can row a boat?”

  “We do have rivers in Africa, even if they are infested with hippo and crocodiles. A hippo can cut a boat in half with one bite of its colossal jaws.”

  “There are no hippos in the Thames.”

  “Good. Here comes Andre. He’ll know where to find us a boat. I’m going to enjoy Oxford. Are you going to enjoy America?”

  “I’ll leave just a little of me in Oxford just for you.”

  “Genevieve, you do know I am only eighteen?”

  “What’s the difference? I’m only twenty-one.”

  “The papers say you are twenty-three.”

  “I lied about my age to get into drama school… Andre, darling. Can you find us a boat? I want you both to take me out on the river. Tomorrow I have to go. Early. I spoke to Mr Casimir, my boss, on the phone. I’ll never forget my days at Oxford. In many years’ time we’ll all remember this, when we three are old and not having so much fun.”

  The telegram reached Harry from Germany the next day, redirected from Hastings Court.

  ‘What is the size of his suit?’ which made Harry think. There was nothing else on the Post Office form except the name Klaus.

  Harry telephoned William at the office the reporter rented in Fleet Street close to the newspapers that bought his stories. Business was brisk with his fellow newspapermen concerned about one of their own. William called Janet in her rooms.

  “What’s the size of Horatio’s suits?” he asked her over the phone.

  By evening, a cable went back to Bavaria with the measurements obtained from Horatio Wakefield’s tailor. Not buying his suit off the peg was the one luxury in his life, even though the last suit had been bought three years earlier.

  “No,” said Janet to William, “he had not put on weight.”

  None of them had any idea what was going on but something happening, however strange, was better than nothing. Janet, for the first time since William’s hasty return from Berlin, had hope.

  Two days later, a second telegram made its way up from Hastings Court to the Savoy Hotel, the last day of Tina’s shopping that had taken her from one end of Regent Street to the other. This telegram was also signed Klaus: ‘What is the prescription of his eye glasses?’

  By the time the cable reached Hastings Court, Horatio had no idea where he was. They had smashed his glasses the night Hillier gave him up to the Brownshirts, the last thing Horatio had expected from the nice old man he had talked to night after night in front of the fire in the lounge of Mrs Schneider’s hotel, the smashed glasses turning his world into a blur.

  There was commotion all around him as he was manhandled through the dark streets but without his glasses, Horatio had been unable to see what was going on. Five men in trench coats had picked him up at the hotel.

  “Is this the man, Herr Hillier?” they had asked in German, something after a year in Berlin Horatio was able to understand.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Without a word, one man took off Horatio’s glasses and ground them under his boot on Mr Schneider’s carpet, leaving nothing but broken glass and a twisted frame. Horatio, about to open his mouth in protest, was hit hard across the mouth and marched out of the hotel surrounded by the five men. Horatio managed to stare back at Hillier who was still sitting beside the fire, now looking to Horatio like a smudge.

  Then he was out in the cold street without his coat. As always his wallet and his passport were in the pockets of his jacket, a precaution he had taken from the time Fritz Wendel met them at the station where he had taken the first taxi that had then directed him to Mrs Schneider’s hotel. If Fritz Wendel was also w
orking for the Nazis, William was not going to be any help; he had no faith in anyone.

  A gunshot went off down the street in the direction they were walking him. His mouth was swollen and bleeding. The cold had entered the marrow of his bones.

  An hour later he was bundled into a room, the door slammed shut and locked. Horatio could hear the sound of boots going away down the stairs. He knew he was somewhere in Berlin, even though everything was a short-sighted haze. His watch read eleven o’clock, which was how he had reckoned the hour. At ten o’clock he and Hillier had been about to go up to their rooms as usual when the five men marched him out of the lounge. Peering close at everything, Horatio walked round the room. There was a fire burning in the grate, coal in the coalscuttle, and one light burning in the middle of the room.

  Getting warm took him five minutes. The one window looked down onto a blurred dark street but it was too high to jump from, which maybe they hoped he was going to try to do, killing himself by accident. Sitting silently in the chair by the fire, Horatio tried to think what they were going to do to him now they had him locked up in a room.

  In his mind there was no doubt; the men who had marched him out of the hotel were Brownshirts, the storm troopers of Hitler’s Nazi Party.

  For the rest of the night no one came near him. Without pen or paper Horatio had written his betrayed article in his head, every word locked in his memory. Somewhere he had read that all men were evil given the right opportunity. Horatio hoped his Judas choked on the spoils of betrayal; a man could get away with murder but still have to live with himself.

  In the first light of the morning, as Horatio emptied the last of the coal out of the scuttle, the same thought came back to him with little comfort. He had not slept a wink all night. As the day progressed in his blurry world, fear took hold. Poor Janet, he thought. Their children were never going to be born. They were going to kill him. Let him starve to death in the cold of the room. Even if he smashed down the heavy door he would not be able to find his way, half-blind, looking for a friendly stranger; there was no chance of salvation.

  Quietly, on his knees, Horatio had begun to pray.

  At twenty-five minutes past twelve by his wristwatch, they took him out of the room to a waiting car and drove out of Berlin into the countryside. They drove all day and half the night, Horatio too frightened to ask for food. When they reached what seemed in his out-of-focus world to be an isolated farmhouse, they gave him food in silence before locking him in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Exhausted, Horatio fell into bed and slept well into the next day.

  For week after week, the routine was the same with precise German punctuality. They walked him in the surrounding woods, even in the rain. He was taken to the toilet once a day. He was fed three times a day on the hour. No one, even once, said a word to him.

  When a German army staff car drove up to the farmhouse, Horatio thought he had been captive for well over a month, time, like his eyesight, blurring. The three men in the car were in uniform, two of them so far as he could see were armed. As he was put in the car, one of the five men who had taken him from Berlin saw him off.

  Horatio was sure they were taking him into the woods this time to be shot. By then it was late spring, the sun warm on the car. Horatio was sat in the back with the officer who for ten minutes said not a word as the car drove. Then the man handed him a pair of glasses. When Horatio put them on, his eyesight was perfect. On the fold-down seat in front of Horatio, he could now see a leather suitcase, not a blurred shape.

  “In the suitcase is the uniform of a German officer,” said the man next to him in perfect English. “Put it on please.”

  When Horatio struggled into the uniform, it fitted perfectly.

  “That’s better, there’s a village coming up.”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “You are going to France. And Mr Wakefield, please don’t come back to Germany or write one word of what has happened since you were taken from your hotel, or about Hillier. I want your word as a gentleman. Our mutual friend has also given me his word as a gentleman that you will keep quiet, Mr Wakefield. You will say you went to Moscow. Your reason for disappearing was that you had no wish to report your presence in Russia.”

  “Who is our mutual friend?”

  “Harry Brigandshaw. He shot my plane down during the war.”

  Two days later Harry sent a thank-you cable to Bavaria from Hastings Court inviting his friend to pay them a visit. A reply was delivered by the village Post Office the following day.

  “Not anymore, Harry. Not anymore.”

  Reading the telegram in the drawing room of Hastings Court, Mrs Craddock having brought him the brown envelope on a silver tray, Harry had the same fear in his stomach he had had walking out to his aircraft for the dawn patrol; there was going to be another war.

  When Tina came into the drawing room to find out what Mrs Craddock had brought her husband on the tray, Harry was standing stock still in the middle of the room, white as a sheet.

  “What’s the matter, Harry?”

  “You’d better get used to it, Tina. Sooner or later we are all going back to Elephant Walk. One war was enough for me. I want my family as far away from the next one as possible. And that includes Tinus.”

  “Don’t be silly, the government says there won’t be a war.”

  “Oh yes there will be. Appeasement never works.”

  From the distance and comfort of his own flat which he had reached the day Harry Brigandshaw sent his thank-you telegraph, Horatio understood more clearly what had happened; the Nazis wanted the two of them out of the way on the Night of the Long Knives, when, Horatio now knew, Hitler had murdered his opposition. His captives never intended killing him. Even Klaus von Lieberman might have been part of a larger plan to keep Horatio’s mouth shut while Hitler consolidated his power. Germany after the war had seen its currency rendered worthless, and riots in the streets with German communists wanting to make their country take the same path as Russia who had shot their intellectuals, industrialists and landowners. To a man like von Lieberman, who had fought for his country, Hitler was the better of two evils; or so Horatio surmised. Hitler needed the German aristocracy to command the army and stop a proletariat revolution. The aristocrats needed Hitler to protect their property. The fact the money-lending Jews were eliminated from the Germany economy benefited many in the German aristocracy who had borrowed money from the Jewish banks. Dead Jews did not ask for their money back.

  Throughout history, no one had liked the Jews. Time and time again, history had made them the scapegoat. Horatio shuddered at history repeating itself right in front of him.

  Klaus von Lieberman had given Horatio back his civilian clothes at the German border. The man had said little on the journey except to remark that a civilian in the back of the car would have been conspicuous in a German army staff car. When they stopped for lunch at a hotel, it was important for Horatio to be properly dressed; an ill-fitting uniform would never have been worn by an officer, especially an officer driving in a car with a full colonel. Where the driver and staff car came from, Horatio never found out. At lunch, befitting a colonel lunching with a junior officer, not a word was spoken between the pair of them.

  “They are the problem over there,” von Lieberman had said quietly in English at the border post two hours after lunch. “The Versailles agreement was designed by the French to make Germany subservient for centuries. Don’t blame Hitler, Mr Wakefield. Blame the greed of the French. Give my regards to Mr Brigandshaw. Tell him if we ever meet again, it will be in Africa.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, sir.”

  “Probably not.”

  With his passport and money in his pocket, Horatio had left Germany. When he looked back from the French border post, up the road into Germany, the staff car and its occupant were gone. Horatio was then wondering how the man had known the prescription of his glasses or the size of his clothes. At the end, just before getting back into the com
fort of his car, the man dressed as a German army colonel had given Horatio a last enigmatic smile, making Horatio question whether the man was friend or foe. Perhaps, looking back safely from London, he was both.

  4

  William had already found himself a flat of his own. The rent for Horatio’s flat in Notting Hill Gate had been kept up to date from Germany. Isaac, the Jew who had given William his false identity documents, had stopped the monthly payments when William had left Berlin in a hurry. The rest of their earnings from selling their stories was still in the bank.

  In the new office they were both meant to share in Fleet Street, William showed Horatio his bank balance. The sum was enough to buy himself and Janet a house.

  “Was it worth it, Horatio?” asked William.

  “Of course, sitting here. Over there at the end I thought I was dead.”

  “Are you going to write more about Germany?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think it too much of a coincidence the way in which von Lieberman drove you out of Germany? How did he know you had broken your glasses? Do you keep your word to thugs? Don’t you want your own back on that nice old man, Hillier, now you know how he took you for a ride?”

  “Is there any word of Fritz Wendel?”

  “None. They are making camps for Jews. He knew the risk. If you want to keep your mouth shut, what about Fritz? Doesn’t he deserve a memorial?”

  “Harry Brigandshaw gave his word.”

  “Ask him?”

  “I did. He said he would never speak a word to me if I wrote one sentence in the press. He said that once a man breaks his word he might as well be dead. He said a lot more, Will, but I won’t go on. About trust, honour, loyalty and duty. Words most modern people think of as a joke. No, I’m not saying anything. Anyway, are we sure about Fritz being our friend? Everything blurs at a certain point when you don’t know what happened.”