by Francis King
‘Why on earth should you wish that?’
‘Well …’ He seemed reluctant to continue. ‘I’ve come to feel responsible for them. As I used to feel responsible for my crew. I find myself worrying about them – what’s to become of them, what sort of future can they eventually have in the ruins of Germany? Ludwig’s all right, of course, he’ll always be all right, he’s that sort of chap. But all the others …’
‘You mean in addition to Thomas and Klaus?’
He nodded. ‘Oh, yes. A least a dozen more of them.’
‘They must appreciate your kindness.’
‘Some of them. But to the majority – to Ludwig, for example – to them I think I’m just a sentimental ass, good for a meal, the loan of civilian clothes, a bar of chocolate, a packet of fags, a ten-shilling note.’
‘Isn’t that rather cynical?’
‘Perhaps. Well, at all events, I like to think that at least Thomas and Klaus have some kind of affection – and maybe even respect – for me.’
‘Of course they do. One can see it at a glance. Of course they do,’ she repeated, since he seemed reluctant to believe her. ‘But the others. If you think they just use you, why do you bother with them?’
He thought for a while. Then, tossing his half-smoked cigarette into the fire, he said: ‘I can’t help having a certain admiration for a man like Ludwig. He’s never for a moment given in, despaired, relaxed his grip on life. He’s got courage – and I’ve always admired courage. After all, what was he? A chemist’s assistant, who was forced to become a private in an infantry regiment. Yet alone of all those privates he had the willpower and energy to teach himself English and so qualify for a privileged job in the camp. He’s got grit and guts and all those bold, male qualities that I myself lack.’
‘What on earth do you mean? Without grit and guts you couldn’t have taken that bomber up for months and months on end.’
‘That’s easy to explain. I’ve no imagination. You know that, of course you do. I just couldn’t imagine myself being shot down. That was something that only happened to other unlucky bastards. Guts had nothing to do with it.’
‘Anyway – what about Klaus and those clothes? That needed guts.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, that! That was hardly heroic.’
‘I wish you hadn’t. Suppose he’s caught and they find out that the clothes came from you. I bet your name and address are in the inner breast pocket of that suit. Yes? If the police found it … I don’t think they or the college would take a very good view.’
‘Oh, to hell with them!’
‘But it’s such a big risk for such a small thing. What does it matter if Klaus can’t see a wrestling match?’
He leaned forward. ‘ Christine – don’t you understand? – I wanted to take that risk. I made myself take it. The whole trouble with me is that I’ve always been so soft. Not like you, not at all. All my life I’ve been desperately careful not to offend people, tread on their corns, challenge the more idiotic of their prejudices, do anything that might seem the least odd or immoral. That’s really why I never became a conscientious objector, as I’d often thought of doing. Life has been smooth for me, always smooth. I just glide through things, on and on, with no effort at all. I’m ‘‘ easy to get on with” – you must often have heard people say that.’
The revelation of so much self-disgust and self-hatred shocked her. She tried to argue with him. But he kept shaking his head, between deep drags on the cigarette that he had lit off a previous one smoked almost to its filter.
Then, even as she was talking, he abruptly jumped up and went over to the Boulle cabinet in one corner of the room. ‘You haven’t seen this.’ From the bric-a-brac crowding the cabinet he extracted a scale model of a red double-decker London bus. He handed it to her.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘From Klaus.’
‘You bought it from him?’
‘No, he made it as a present for me. He was very hurt when I offered to pay him for it. I was terribly touched. Just think – he could get three or four pounds for a thing like that. Look at the workmanship. I’m not at all sentimental, as you know by now, but I think I’d really rather have it than the Cotman, if I had to make the choice.’
Christine turned the model over and over, examining every detail. She was thinking of Klaus’s huge hands and his apparent clumsiness. How had he managed to create something so small and so perfect? ‘Where did he get the materials?’
‘Where indeed! I thought it more tactful not to ask. I suppose he scrounged and pinched them.’ He took the bus from her, replaced it in the cabinet and turned the key. As he did so, he asked, without looking round: ‘When they’ve taken Thomas’s arm out of its plaster – tomorrow, I think – would you perhaps allow him to practise on your piano?’
She hesitated. ‘ Well … yes. Why not?’ But she could think of many reasons why not.
‘I want to get him interested in his music again. Just at present he’s so apathetic – as you must have noticed. He doesn’t really care about anything at all. When he said he spent the whole day sleeping, it was probably nearer the truth than you can have realised. If he could use the piano, if you could lend him some music …’
‘I’d be delighted.’
‘You don’t sound all that delighted. I hope you mean that. I hope you’re not just trying to please me.’
Christine slowly got to her feet and, with a sigh, picked up her things. ‘Now I must go, I’m afraid.’
‘Unfortunately I can’t press you to stay – much though I’d like to do so. I have a wine committee meeting in’ – he looked at his watch – ‘seven minutes.’
Having run down the stairs so fast that she all but collided with a portly youth puffing up them, Christine emerged into the white vastness of the quad. Opposite, the roof of the Victorian Gothic chapel glimmered iridescent through the clammy mist. Icicles hung from the gaping mouth of the bronze Triton that usually spouted water before the Hall. She set off briskly for her rooms in Wellington Square, her feet sinking deeper and deeper into the freshly fallen snow. When she had first left Michael, racing down the stairs, she had been full of elation, but now that mood had ebbed. Inexplicably it had come and no less inexplicably it had gone, its place taken by a vague unease for which she could not trace the cause. She thought of the work that awaited her – the ochre cone of lamplight, the books open under it on what had once been her landlady’s kitchen table, the dipping of her pen into the inkwell and its scratching on a coarse sheet of ruled paper – but these images, usually so satisfying, were now empty of all pleasure. They even intensified the sombreness of her mood.
‘Is that you, Chrissie?’ Only one person called Christine that.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
Hoping that Margaret would not hear her footsteps on the stairs, Christine had crept up as silently as possible; but when she had reached the last step but one, the door before her own had opened and the plain, peering face was above her on the landing.
Margaret rubbed fingers, blue with cold, against each other. ‘Isn’t it bitter?’ She shuddered involuntarily as she said the words. ‘What a winter! It must be the worst for yonks.’ She was barring Christine’s way, so that there was no way of not stopping and speaking to her, even though on this evening her usually welcome presence produced only irritation.
‘What have you been doing?’
‘Oh, working – as per usual in this stinking weather.’ Margaret pulled off her glasses and wiped them on the edge of her jumper. She was not attractive, but her face was from time to time transfigured by her love and sympathy for someone like Christine. It was so transfigured now.
Christine edged towards her door.
‘Nice party?’ To her chagrin, Michael had never invited her with Christine to his rooms.
‘Oh, all right. Not really a party.’
Christine gave an indeterminate shrug of her shoulders and disappeared into her room, closing the door decisively behind her. It was impossible
to tell Margaret about the Germans because, if she did so, she would only provoke her indignation. ‘ Oh, Chrissie, how could you?’ Christine could hear Margaret’s shocked voice, could see her blinking eyes. Margaret was fanatical in both her loves and her hates. She hated the Germans so much that, although she had a vast collection of classical records, she had refused to accompany Christine to a concert in the Sheldonian because the Siegfried Idyll was to be played. She would always refer to that work as The Siegfried Nightmare.
Having taken off her coat and hat, changed her shoes and stockings and then turned up the grudging flames of the gas fire, Christine tried to settle to her work. When she had gone out that afternoon, she had been reluctant to leave the task of putting Tennyson’s ‘Break, break, break …’ into elegiacs before her next tutorial; but now she found that she was incapable of concentrating on it. She leaned across the table and tweaked back one of the shabby beige rep curtains so that she could look out on to the premature dark. Nothing could be seen but a rectangle of falling snowflakes, transformed into a dazzle by the beam of her lamp. All at once, without her volition, her mind was following a train of thought of its own, as she began to imagine the Germans trudging out through the muffled city, past the bars, the shops, the cinemas and the station, and so on up Harcourt Hill, malignantly slippery in that weather, and past the guards into the chilly, noisy camp.
Her reverie was shattered by a knock at the door. Bending once more over the copy of Tennyson’s poem, she called, ‘Come in!’
‘Sorry to disturb you, Chrissie.’ The first name constantly seemed to emerge from Margaret as an endearment ‘But we never talked about supper.’
‘Oh, I really can’t think about supper now. I’m working. As you can see.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know whether you wanted to go out or eat in.’
‘Getting a meal is such a waste of time and bother …’
‘Oh, I don’t mind doing it by myself. You can leave it all to me. I’ve got a tin of baked beans – oh, but you don’t like baked beans, they give you the collywobbles. Well, never mind. I could boil you that one egg.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to go to the Kemp?’
‘But you’re tired. I can see you’re tired. You don’t want to trek out again in this snow.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! I don’t mind where we eat. But just don’t bother me for the next half-hour.’
‘Chrissie – you are tired! Just leave it to me. I’ll get a really nice supper together. There are all sorts of odds and ends in the meat safe. And you can eat at whatever time you want. Just give me a shout when you’re ready.’
After Margaret had left the room, Christine stared for a while at the closed door. Then, having carefully placed her dipper pen on to the blotting pad, she got up with a sigh. She crossed the landing and knocked at Margaret’s door.
Margaret looked up from her crochet. The whole room was jangling with the sound of Wanda Landowska playing a Bach prelude on the harpsichord.
‘I’m sorry I spoke to you like that.’ Christine was obliged almost to shout to be heard above the din from the vast horn of the EMI gramophone.
Margaret threw down her crochet and gazed up, mouth open and eyes radiant. ‘Well, of course I didn’t take offence. No hard feelings, I knew you didn’t mean it. You never do.’
Chapter Two
As Peter Kemball-Smith took the stairs two or three at a time, Margaret, ever vigilant, appeared at her sitting-room door. ‘Oh, it’s you! Hello, Peter.’
‘Hello,’ he returned with considerably less warmth. He could not understand Christine’s friendship with Margaret, whom he would often describe as ‘dim’, ‘dreary’ or ‘pathetic’.
‘Chrissie isn’t quite ready yet. She’s upstairs in her bedroom – dressing. She asked me to ask you to wait in her sitting room. I’ve lit the gas fire. It’s ghastly how they gobble up one’s money. When is this weather going to change?’
Peter said nothing, merely pulling open the door to Christine’s sitting room and going in. Margaret hesitated, wondering whether to follow him or not; but something in his behaviour to her – no more definite than the weary tone of his voice and his refusal to look at her for longer than was absolutely unavoidable – made her turn and retreat back into her own sitting room instead. Kneeling before the gas fire, she gazed at the radiants, her eyes itching from the glare and heat and her mind busy with the question that his presence so often prompted: What could she have done to make him dislike her? Then her mind wandered off on the dream that had so often consoled her during the war years and continued to do so during this interminable winter. She was bicycling alone down a Cornish lane, during one of the family holidays in a rented bungalow in Port Isaac before the war, and the sun was shining, as it had seemed to shine all that summer, day after day, and its warmth was on her forehead and bare arms. A sports car raced towards her and the driver, a young man with scarf streaming behind him, jammed on his brakes with a screech of tyres. As he swerved up on to the verge he smiled at her and then, left hand on wheel, blew her a kiss with his right. A few seconds later the car had roared round a bend. He had all but killed her, but he had also suddenly made her feel alive, as never before. For the rest of that holiday she had yearned to see him again. But she never did. The rocket-like blaze of his passing was only the first of many others, thrilling but cruelly transient, in the years that followed.
Across the corridor from her, Peter gazed in distaste at the mess that Christine always managed to create around her. Yet it was that disorderliness that, paradoxically, exerted such an attraction on his finicky and fussy nature. He stooped for a book that lay, face downwards, on one of the chairs, smoothed its rumpled pages and then replaced it on the desk. Touching it, he briefly had the erotic sensation that he was touching her. Then, staring at his reflection on the glass of a John Piper watercolour of Windsor Castle under a lowering sky – hadn’t that rich, pansy cousin of hers given it to her? – he fingered his already perfectly symmetrical black tie and ran the back of his hand down the left cheek that he had so recently shaved with a cutthroat razor.
When, at that moment a knock sounded, his expectation of Margaret – no doubt with the offer to make some tea or coffee or to pour out a drink – made him call out testily: ‘Yes! Oh, come in, come in!’
The door opened. A male, foreign voice said: ‘I am sorry. I have come to the wrong room,’ and the door closed again.
Peter strode over to it, opened it and shouted after the retreating figure: ‘Who were you looking for? You, there! Who were you looking for?’
Thomas halted and turned his head. ‘Excuse me, sir. The lady downstairs told me that Miss Holliday lives in that room. Maybe …’
‘Well, yes she does. What do you want her for?’
‘It’s not important. I’ll come back another time.’
‘What’s your name? If you wait here’ – he indicated the landing – ‘I’ll go up and tell her.’
‘No, please! If she’s busy now –’
‘No harm in telling her. Then she can see you or not see you, as she wishes. What’s your name?’
He hesitated, clearly reluctant to give it. Then he muttered: ‘Thomas. Thomas Bartsch.’
‘Bartsch.’ Peter repeated it in a tone of incredulity, as though he could not believe that it was this creatures real name. ‘Wait here.’
The sight of Christine seated at her dressing table put Thomas momentarily out of Peter’s mind. ‘ You look terrific, darling.’
‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. Somebody must have had a very full bath and I had to wait an age for the water to heat up again. I couldn’t face a tepid bath in this weather. Mrs Albert really ought to get a new boiler.’
‘There’s someone waiting to see you. Downstairs. A POW.’
‘A POW? Oh, I expect it’s the one who wants to use my piano. I won’t keep him a moment I must just fix a day and time with him.’
Thomas had eventually seated himself
on the bottom step of the flight up to Christine’s bedroom. At her appearance, he at once scrambled to his feet. Blocking her way, he stared at her. Christine was forced to halt and Peter halted behind her, until, at long last coming to his senses, he stepped down. Outside the sitting-room door he waited for them to enter first, then followed.
‘I came …’ He gave an abrupt little cough, and then repeated: ‘I came …’
‘About the piano?’ She smiled, touched by his obvious nervousness. ‘Oh, do sit down. Please.’ She pointed to a chair and reluctantly Thomas placed himself on its edge, his soiled cap clasped between his hands. ‘Michael told me you were a music student. Is that right?’ He nodded, twisting the cap in his hands. She took the chair opposite to him, with Peter glowering behind her. ‘Would you like a drink of some kind?’
‘No, no. No, thank you. You’re busy. And I must hurry back to the camp. I only came to ask when it is convenient. That’s to say – if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I don’t mind. I told Michael that. The only thing is – we must pick a time when I’m not working here. Otherwise it would be too distracting for me. And probably also for you. What sort of time would suit you?’
‘Any afternoon this week is fine for me. Next week I begin to work again, I think. Tomorrow the doctor takes off my plaster.’
‘Well, then – why don’t you come tomorrow afternoon? If I’m not here for some reason, I’ll ask Mrs Albert – my landlady – to let you in.’
‘You’re very kind.’
Christine jumped up from her chair and turned to Peter. ‘We ought to get cracking. We’re going to be awfully late.’
Stricken, Thomas cried out: ‘Forgive me! I’ve delayed you, I’ve delayed you!’
‘Of course you haven’t. I took far too long getting ready’
In a cross voice Peter asked: ‘Have you got everything?’
‘Yes, I think so … No, my rose.’ She hurried over to the vase on the mantelpiece. I bought it for my hair. You’ve no idea what it cost.’ She held out the single rose. ‘Be a dear and pin it for me. Here’s a clip.’