Shadows of War

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘A banker and a coward. Got to be Jewish, surely?’

  Alston checked Constance for a hint of humour but found none. She had a point.

  ‘I loathe the Jews, don’t you?’ said Constance. ‘You must come across heaps of them in banking.’

  ‘Some,’ said Alston. ‘They’re not all bad.’

  ‘But some of them are, aren’t they?’

  Alston thought of the partner of Bloomfield Weiss in New York who had sold him stock in a radio company in 1928 that had almost brought his merchant bank down. It had taken all of Alston’s ingenuity to get it off the bank’s books and into his clients’ accounts at cost price.

  ‘Yes. Some of them are,’ he admitted. Usually he was very careful not to broadcast his mistrust of the Jewish race: he had to work with them every day after all. But there was something about Constance, her directness perhaps, that encouraged him to lower his guard.

  ‘My father was bankrupted by a Jewish stockbroker,’ she said. ‘Daddy owned a packaging firm in Manchester. He sold it in the twenties and then invested the money in the stock market through a Jewish firm. That and Argentine railway bonds. Nineteen twenty-nine came along and he lost it all.’ For once the enthusiasm had left her. ‘He killed himself four months later.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Alston. ‘So you moved up to London?’

  ‘Yes. My sister, my mother and I. We stayed with my aunt in Dulwich. It’s when my life started going wrong. I was fourteen.’

  ‘I hope it didn’t keep going wrong?’ Alston asked.

  ‘No,’ said Constance. ‘It’s going better now.’ She hesitated. ‘I, um... took steps.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Alston, curious as to what those ‘steps’ were. ‘Is that the owner of this place?’ He nodded towards a well-dressed man with white whiskers and a pointed beard, sitting over a glass of tea reading a book.

  Constance glanced over her shoulder. ‘Yes, that’s the admiral. He’s quite a gentleman.’

  Alston looked around the tea rooms. ‘What sort of people come here?’

  ‘Right-thinking people,’ Constance said. ‘Captain Maule Ramsay comes here a lot; you know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a fellow Scottish MP,’ Alston said. And a fool, he could have added but didn’t. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good place to meet, after all. Alston was sure that the likes of Ramsay and certainly Mosley would attract the attention of Special Branch. He didn’t want to be added to that list.

  ‘So. What would you like me to do?’ Constance asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. ‘Or do you have some more questions for me?’

  Alston smiled. He didn’t really know Constance; there were probably more questions he could ask. But he had a good feeling about her. He trusted her. Marjorie had said she was all right, and he knew and trusted Marjorie. She was the right person.

  ‘Just one,’ he said, in German. ‘Have you ever been to Germany?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Constance answered, also in German. ‘I spent a year in Berlin in 1937 as a governess and to learn the piano. I loved it. I think it’s a wonderful country. Modern, exciting, not like fuddy-duddy old England. Have you been?’

  Constance’s accent was awful, but she seemed fluent and assured, although she had invented the Germanic word fuddyduddyisch.

  ‘Many times, working for the bank,’ Alston said. Then, switching back to English. ‘Yes. I think you’ll do very well. But I’d rather not discuss what I want you to do here.’

  Constance looked around. ‘Oh, I see. We might be overheard. Where shall we go?’

  Alston hesitated. ‘We could walk up to Hyde Park. It’s not too far.’

  The glow in Constance’s eyes deepened. ‘It’s quite public, though. And it’s much too cold. Marjorie said you lived near here?’

  ‘I do, yes.’ Was Constance suggesting what Alston thought she was suggesting? He glanced at her. She was.

  ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t your place tidy?’

  ‘It’s perfectly tidy,’ said Alston. He had been married four years, and for the first two and a half he had been faithful. But it was eighteen months since he and Dorothy had had conjugal relations; he just hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it since she had had the baby. Alston had always had a healthy sexual appetite, and that hadn’t left him. So there had been a few girls, most of whom he had had to pay. At that moment Alston wanted a woman badly. This woman. ‘Why don’t I make you a cocktail and we can talk in private?’

  Alston grinned as he lay in bed, sweaty, with Constance under his left arm. It was dark outside his flat now. Constance was a tiger in bed; Alston had never come across anyone like her. She had a hunger and a playfulness that had brought out feelings in him that he never knew he had, or that he had always known he had, but were kept deeply buried. It certainly wasn’t love. It was more than lust. It was a kind of joyful exuberance.

  He felt much younger. And he felt handsome, as if the left half of his face had temporarily taken over the right.

  They had gone back to Alston’s flat in Ennismore Gardens, a fifteen-minute walk. Dorothy, Alston’s young wife, was back in Berwickshire. Since the outbreak of war, they had decided she wouldn’t join Alston in London, where he spent most of his time with his parliamentary and banking responsibilities. Besides, it was better for their baby son Robert to be at the castle with all that fresh air.

  Alston had mixed them both martinis, and explained his idea to Constance. As Marjorie had guessed, she was game. She was definitely the right girl for the job. Then, well, then they had ended up in bed.

  What was it that he liked about her so much? Was it her directness? There seemed a lively intelligence about her, even though she didn’t know the difference between ‘veto’ and ‘vet’, and, like Freddie, her hatred of the Jews was of the simplistic type. Alston knew that Britain wasn’t run by Jewish financiers, nor was it the Jews who had forced Chamberlain to go to war. He thought the War Minister Hore-Belisha should be sacked because he was wrongheaded, not because he was Jewish. Alston prided himself on his ability not to be swayed by the wilder claims of some of his pro-Nazi friends.

  And yet, in all his dealings with Jews, Alston had never really trusted them. Constance was right; if there was trouble, there was usually a Jew behind it. Samuel Greenberg had run from the lion in Rhodesia leaving Alston facing up to it. Bloomfield Weiss had damned near fleeced him, and a Jewish stockbroker had driven Constance’s own father to death. Maybe Hitler was on to something after all.

  He stroked the black curls resting on his chest. ‘Why did you ask me about my scars?’

  Constance lifted her head. ‘Why, shouldn’t I have? Was I awfully rude?’

  ‘No. Or at least I didn’t think so. It’s just that usually people avoid the subject. Or, even worse, they avoid looking at me at all.’

  ‘Silly them,’ said Constance. She pushed herself up on to her elbow. And ran her finger down the undamaged side of his face. ‘You know, half of you is terrifically handsome.’ Then she ran her finger over his scars. ‘And the other half is terrifically exciting.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ said Alston.

  ‘I certainly do,’ said Constance, in a tone that suggested she was offended at having her candour questioned.

  Alston smiled. ‘I believe you do.’ He kissed her.

  ‘You know what?’ said Constance, reaching down towards his loins.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I’m going to enjoy working for you.’

  13

  St James’s, London

  After his meeting with Van, Major McCaigue of the Secret Intelligence Service questioned Conrad for an hour in a small room in the depths of the Foreign Office. Conrad told him everything he could remember about his meetings with Payne Best and Stevens and the shoot-out at Venlo. McCaigue took particular interest when Conrad mentioned the list that Stevens had written out of the names of people to be evacuated from Holland in the event of an invasion, which was presumabl
y now in the hands of the Gestapo. Conrad tried to remember the names, but could only recall three or four of them. McCaigue asked for more details about Conrad’s meeting with Theo in Leiden, and Conrad gave them.

  The intelligence officer was a shrewd listener. His questions, delivered in his pleasant, rich voice with its hint of Irish, were deliberate and thorough and Conrad felt much more confidence in him than he had had in either Payne Best or Stevens.

  Conrad dropped into his club for lunch, and to send a telegram to Professor Hogendoorn in Leiden. There he found a note waiting for him from his father inviting him to come to dinner and to stay the night at Kensington Square. Van must have told him about the disaster at Venlo. Conrad took the note into the library and sank into an armchair by the window.

  He was lucky to be in a comfortable club in the heart of London when Payne Best, Stevens and Klop were presumably in a Gestapo interrogation cell somewhere in the heart of Germany. Poor bastards. Conrad had spent time in one of those once; he didn’t want to do it again.

  That is if Klop had made it. He had taken at least two bullets that Conrad had seen.

  And now Conrad was going back to Holland. He knew he had to: Van and McCaigue were right to get him to ask Theo questions, to find out what had gone wrong. But there was a chance he might not come back this time.

  In which case he shouldn’t hide from his father, even though he wanted to avoid a discussion over what he was doing in Holland. So he telephoned Kensington Square and told Williamson he would be staying the night, but he might be a little late for dinner. There was someone else he wanted to see before he went.

  Anneliese.

  He took the tube north to Golders Green, and it was just getting dark as he walked through the peaceful tree-lined streets of Hampstead Garden Suburb. In some ways it seemed so English: neat, ordered, well kept; even the fallen leaves had been pushed by a tidy breeze into straight lines along the pavement. But in other ways it reminded him of Germany, of the bürgerlich suburbs of Berlin like Dahlem. Now Dahlem and Hampstead Garden Suburb were at war.

  Anneliese and her parents lived in an upstairs room of a small white pebbledash cottage halfway up a hill. The house was owned by a widow, Mrs Cherry, who had crammed two refugee Jewish families into it. The building was in poor repair and it was clear Mrs Cherry had very little money. What was unclear was whether her motive for stuffing seven people into such a small house was kindness or greed. Anneliese’s theory was that it was both.

  Anneliese herself wasn’t at home, but her parents were. They were both pleased to see Conrad, especially since he had brought along half a pound of sausages. Dr Rosen was racially Jewish, but also a devout atheist. Frau Rosen was a good rosy-cheeked Lutheran. Both of them believed in pork.

  ‘Are you staying for supper, Conrad?’ Frau Rosen asked in German. ‘I have enough soup for you.’ And indeed there was a pot bubbling on the little gas ring by the sink. The room itself had two beds, three armchairs, a small table and a wireless. Two stacks of books were growing ever higher. Although the Rosen family had left Germany without any the year before, one way or another they were steadily accumulating them.

  ‘I promised my father I would be dining with him tonight,’ Conrad said. ‘I thought I would take Anneliese out for a drink, if that’s all right.’ He had eaten with the Rosens a couple of times, but he hated to take their scant supply of food, and besides, there was only really room for three at the table.

  It was all they could afford. Even with the outbreak of war, Dr Rosen had been unable to find a job as a doctor: the British Medical Association was eager to preserve its profession from the invasion of central European Jewish medics. As far as Conrad could tell, Dr Rosen spent his days at the Golders Green library. Frau Rosen was a cleaner at a variety of houses in Hampstead and Finchley. Only Anneliese had finally been able to pursue her original career as a nurse: she worked at St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner.

  Conrad heard the door open downstairs, and Anneliese’s voice greeting Mrs Cherry. His heart, as always, leaped to hear it.

  ‘Ich bin wieder zu Hause!’ she called as she opened the door. Her smile disappeared for an instant when she saw Conrad, and then returned in a different, more guarded form. She was thinner than when he had first met her. The vitality, the quick smile, the ironic laugh had gone. But she was still beautiful to Conrad. Small, with dark curly hair and large green eyes, she reminded him of the woman he had fallen in love with. The woman he believed she could be again.

  They had met in Berlin at a dinner party given by Theo soon after Conrad had arrived there the previous summer. Conrad had fallen heavily for her: she was intelligent, witty, courageous, with eyes that hinted at mischief, and he had still been smarting from Veronica running off with the racing driver. Dr Rosen had been locked up in a concentration camp for giving his Jewish blood to an Aryan Nazi road-accident victim. Conrad had helped get him out of the camp and out of Germany. Conrad and Anneliese had spent a blissful few weeks together before she had been snatched away from him by the Gestapo and thrown into Sachsenhausen concentration camp herself. Eventually Captain Foley, the British Passport Control Officer in Berlin, had been able to get her out too, and she had joined her parents in London.

  She had been in England for over a year, but things weren’t the same between them. Things were, well, difficult. But Conrad wasn’t one to give up.

  ‘Oh, Conrad. This is a surprise. I didn’t know you were in London,’ she said in German.

  He bent down to kiss her, and she turned her cheek, in a gesture that could have meant she was offering it to him, or withdrawing it from him.

  ‘I’ve been abroad,’ he said. ‘And I’m... um... going again. I thought I would drop in and see you before I went.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Can I take you out for a drink?’

  Anneliese glanced at her parents, Conrad’s allies. She smiled quickly. ‘Yes. That would be nice. Shall we go now?’

  It was about half a mile to the Royal Oak. As they walked through the pitch-dark streets to Finchley Road – or ‘Finchley Strasse’, as the bus conductors had taken to calling it following the recent influx of German-speaking inhabitants – Anneliese seemed to warm. She talked about her job at St George’s; she had only been there three weeks. Despite all the preparations for a flood of air-raid casualties, the hospital was filled with the victims of traffic accidents as a result of the blackout.

  A warm fug of chatter and beer enveloped them as they went through to the saloon bar, and Conrad ordered drinks.

  ‘So where are you going?’ Anneliese said, in English this time. Her English had improved dramatically over the last year; although she had a distinct German accent, it was nowhere near as strong as it had been when she had arrived in London the previous October. It wasn’t a good idea to speak German in public places. ‘Or I suppose it is a secret?’

  Conrad glanced at the stern poster from the Ministry of Information urging patrons ‘not to discuss anything that might be of national importance, the consequence of which might be loss of many lives’. True enough, of course. But he had trusted Anneliese before in a much more dangerous place than North London, with more dangerous secrets. He did, however, glance around to make sure there was no one in earshot. The saloon bar was half full, and it wasn’t possible for the two middle-aged men closest to them to hear their murmured words above the hubbub of the pub.

  ‘It sounds as if Theo’s friends are about to make a move again.’

  Anneliese’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Really! Are you going to see him?’

  ‘I hope so. I don’t know. There’s been some... trouble. I need to find out what he knows about it.’

  A look of concern crossed her face. ‘You’re not going to Germany, are you?’

  ‘No.’ Conrad shook his head. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I am worried,’ said Anneliese. ‘Be careful, Conrad. Please be careful.’ She bit her bottom lip, in a gesture Conrad knew so well.

 
‘I will.’ Conrad smiled. Although he couldn’t admit it, he was pleased to see her sudden concern for him. And she was perfectly right to be concerned. It was only just over twenty-four hours since he had had a German pistol pressed against his temple.

  ‘Good.’ Anneliese smiled quickly. Closed her eyes. Opened them again. ‘Conrad?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There is something I must tell you.’

  ‘What is it?’ Conrad had a feeling this wasn’t going to be good.

  ‘I am planning to go to New York. We are planning to go to New York. The three of us.’

  ‘New York?’ Conrad said. ‘You can’t do that! Can you get the papers?’

  ‘I’m working on it. It’s difficult, but I think I can. Father has a cousin over there, and he is prepared to help.’

  Conrad could feel disappointment welling up inside him – worse than disappointment: desperation. ‘Please stay,’ he said.

  ‘We need to make a new life. I mean really new. Somewhere far away. It’s ridiculous that my father cannot work here.’

  ‘But once the war really gets going, they will need him, whatever the damned BMA says.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Anneliese looked down at her drink. And then straight at him. Her eyes were dull. ‘But I need to go. I need to go somewhere new.’

  Conrad reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I know I’ve asked you before. But please marry me.’

  Anneliese shook her head. ‘I can’t. I told you I can’t.’

  ‘But why not? I love you. You love me.’ Conrad hesitated. ‘I think. I know you used to love me.’

  Anneliese nodded. She squeezed Conrad’s hand. ‘I know I did. But I am a different person now. I have been trying to tell you that for the last year, but you won’t hear it. Sachsenhausen changed me. I’m sorry, I wish I was the same woman I used to be, but I am not. I’m different.’ She let go of his hand. Took a deep breath. ‘I need to start again. Somewhere else. Somewhere away from you.’

  ‘I can’t accept that,’ Conrad said. In Berlin they had made love several times a day. But then Anneliese had spent six weeks in solitary confinement in first Sachsenhausen and then Lichtenburg Castle. It was true: after that she had been different. She hadn’t let Conrad touch her beyond the occasional gentle kiss. She had joined her parents in London and, with a dull determination, had set herself to survive. She had refused all Conrad’s offers of financial help.