by Francis King
‘Shall we go now?’
‘Already?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Not yet three o’clock.’
‘That seems late enough to me. Unless you were planning to stay for breakfast. A number of people have gone already.’
‘Only the oldsters.’
‘Well, I’m beginning to feel like an oldster myself. It’s almost an hour’s drive, remember.’
‘Oh, all right then! Come on! Let’s get going!’
As they moved through the draughty hall, Christine saw Bill talking animatedly to one of the footmen. She paused, caught his eye and called: ‘Do look me up!’
He hurried over, fumbling in a pocket of the shiny, over-large dinner jacket. ‘Then you must give me your telephone number.’ He pulled out the crushed packet of Woodbines and a fountain pen and began to scrawl at her dictation on the back of it.
‘First time that poor chap’s looked at ease all evening – talking to that footman,’ Peter said when they were scarcely out of earshot.
The drive began in silence. Then he demanded: ‘What went wrong this evening?’
‘Did anything go wrong?’
‘Of course it did. You know it did. Have I upset you in some way?’
‘Don’t be silly! I’m tired, that’s all. I felt – enough is enough. Sorry?
‘I don’t mean just leaving early. You’ve been, well, odd all evening?
‘I certainly haven’t. What on earth are you talking about?’ But she knew that he was right. She had at once, seemingly for no reason, become disenchanted with him from the first moment of his stepping into her bedroom.
‘Oh, well. Let’s forget it. If I’ve done anything wrong, then I’m sorry. I’m sorry, darling?
His right hand on the wheel, he placed his left one, at once exploratory and proprietary, high up on her thigh.
At once she jerked away.
‘What did I tell you? There is something wrong.’
‘Nothing is wrong. Nothing at all is wrong. I tell you, I’m tired. Tired. That’s all. Can’t you get it? Tired.’
‘I’m damned if I know what I’ve done.’
Chapter Three
At ten o’clock the next morning Margaret, flushed from her bath, entered Christine’s bedroom with a tray piled with breakfast things. She jerked back the curtains, marched over to the bed, and began to shake Christine’s shoulder. ‘Wakey, wakey! Rise and shine! It’s gone ten.’
‘Oh, God!’ Christine sat up, rubbed her eyes and collapsed back on to the pillow. ‘I thought it was much later.’
‘You asked me to wake you at ten, because of your work for your tutorial. Remember?’
‘My tutorial!’ Christine jerked up again, the back of her right hand pressed to her forehead.
Margaret knelt to light the gas fire. ‘You’ll feel much better when you’ve had a cup of tea. I’ve fixed you that last rasher of bacon and some fried potato.’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I don’t feel all that hungry this morning. I’ll just have my usual All Bran and some toast and a smidgen of butter. I always feel liverish if I eat bacon in the morning, I don’t know why.’
Apart from the lateness, this morning had begun like all their mornings. Margaret had spent at least half-an-hour in a bath continually renewed, to the fury of their landlady, with more and more scalding water, had prepared the breakfast in their shared kitchenette and then, humming to herself, had come in to wake Christine. Christine, somnolent and unamiable, had begun to gulp tea.
‘Better?’ Teapot in hand, Margaret leaned forward, preparatory to pouring out a second cup.
Christine nodded.
‘How was the ball?’
‘All right.’
‘Tell me all about it. Who was there? Were the eats good? And did you drink bubbly?’
‘Yes, the food was good. And, yes, we drank champagne. Gallons and gallons of the Widow? she added to heighten Margaret’s vicarious delight.
‘You arrived home earlier than I expected. Usually it’s dawn – or later. I couldn’t sleep, so I heard the door and called out. But you can’t have heard me.’ Christine had heard and had then hurried past Margaret’s door. ‘I thought Peter was looking terribly distinguished. It must have been that look that got him into the Foreign Office. He’s not really all that bright, is he?’
Christine raised her cup with both hands and gulped from it.
‘Oh, come on, Christine! You seem to be still asleep.’ Then another thought came to her. ‘There was a POW wandering around yesterday evening – just before you and Peter left. He passed me on the stairs – coming up as I was going down. What on earth do you think he was doing? Not at all the sort of person Mrs Albert would want around her house.’
‘Oh, he came to see me.’
‘You!’ Margaret was aghast.
‘His name is Thomas. Thomas Bartsch. I met him through Michael the other day – Michael’s been kind to him, in fact he’s been kind to a number of them. He used to be a music student and he needs a piano on which to practise. So I said that he was welcome to use mine – provided, of course, that he didn’t interfere with my work. In fact, he’s coming over this afternoon.’
‘Chrissie! No, Chrissie! What’s got into you? Are you completely mad?’
‘What’s all the fuss?’
‘Well, you’ve so often said …’ Margaret jumped off the bed, her doughy face suddenly blotched with pink. ‘When they first allowed our men to fraternise in Germany, I can remember so well your saying it was all a ghastly mistake. And I agreed with you – a hundred per cent! So how can you now yourself start to fraternise …?’
‘Because I see I was wrong. That’s all.’
‘That’s all, that’s all! I’d have thought you owed it to Ben, if not to all the other men … Do you really mean to say you’re going to allow that, that Jerry to come in here and, and bang away on your piano, when for all any of us know he may well have killed friends – or, or relatives – of ours? I can’t, I just cannot, believe it!’
‘Oh, do stop all this nonsense! I must get dressed.’ Christine clambered out of the bed. ‘ I wish you’d learn to mind your own business.’
‘But don’t you get it? We simply can’t behave as though all those horrendous things never took place – the concentration camps and mass-killings and doodlebugs and, oh, everything. Our dear little house was bombed – you know that – utterly destroyed, thank God that none of us was in it. And Daddy’s business has never been the same since, and my older brother was away for almost three years. When I think of all that all of us went through and then of those German frauleins palling up with our men just to get things out of them, and of these Germans over here being asked to English homes, well, it makes me sick, physically sick!’
‘Oh, for Gods sake! Why on earth are you working yourself into such a state? It’s not your room, it’s not your piano. And I’m not asking you to meet him, let alone be nice to him.’
‘You know I’ve always stuck up for you through thick and thin. No one can say I haven’t been a good friend to you.’
‘Well, what has that got to do with it?’
‘I’d give my right hand for you. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. But this is – quite simply – a matter of principle. I’d be false to all my beliefs if I didn’t tell you what I felt. We can’t let those wretches think that they can once again get away with it. Otherwise the whole awful thing will repeat itself in another twenty or thirty years. Can’t you see that?’
‘All I can see is that you’re going to make me late.’
‘Oh, very well!’
Margaret rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
‘Must you slam the door?’ Christine shouted after her. Then she heard Margaret’s feet thumping down the stairs.
Chapter Four
As Christine struggled to complete her latest assignment for her tutor Mrs Dunne, she found herself returning over and over again to Ma
rgaret’s protest, until she came to see it not as the transient outburst of an emotionally unstable nature but as, yes, a warning. A warning? She looked again at the half-finished verses, then flicked over the pages of her Gradus ad Parnassum in search of a word. A warning. But of what.’
Once again she made an effort to concentrate, but the disquiet nonetheless remained, no longer acute but still there, a thorn lodged somewhere in the recesses of her being, so that every thought, every sensation was attended by a vague throb. Again she flicked over the pages, tattered and soiled from the use of many years; and as she did so she suddenly felt that she was being snatched at by an invisible current, with the panic-stricken certainty that she no longer had the strength or, worse, even the will to struggle back to land. She put a hand over her eyes. She was tired, she decided, after that late night. She had drunk too much.
After lunch, eaten in solitude at the British Restaurant in the High – ‘cheap and nasty’ had been Michael’s verdict when she had persuaded him to go there with her – the verses went no better. Eight lines had now been completed, but she was self-critical enough to know that they were bad. For minutes on end she doodled on her notepad, gazed out of the window as she sucked on her pen, or wearily searched the Gradus for a word that she all too often forgot as soon as she had found it. She glanced at the small travelling clock on the mantelpiece – its blatant tick-tock had been maddening her, as never before – and wondered when Thomas would arrive. Obviously his practising would be too much of a distraction for her. She would have to move over to the Ashmolean Library, as she had often done in the course of this unrelenting winter in search of more warmth than her niggardly gas fire could provide.
Eventually she heard the deliberate tread of his boots on the stairs. She waited, head cocked and tongue against upper lip, with a mixture of apprehension and excitement.
‘Come in!’
‘Oh! You’re working. I’m sorry. I disturb you.’
‘It’s quite all right. I was expecting you. I’m just going out to the library. I often work there – with all the books I need to hand.’ With flustered movements, she began to gather up her books and papers and to stuff them into a battered briefcase, a survival of her schooldays.
‘You’re not going because of me? It’s easy for me to come another afternoon.’
‘And have that long walk for nothing?’
He smiled: ‘ I can spare the time.’ He hesitated, unsure whether to make the confidence or not, and then went on: ‘Before I became a prisoner, I used to think the most wonderful thing in the world would be to have time, endless time for myself – to think, to read, to play music, to listen to music. And now – I have all that time and what do I do with it? As I told you before – I sleep!’ He laughed.
‘You also come to use my piano.’
‘Yes. That’s good.’
‘You’ll find all sorts of music here. There’s some Poulenc – rather fun, I’ve only just discovered him – and some of the eighteenth-century people. They’re my favourites.’ She picked up one of the scores from the top of the baby grand. ‘Ravel. Too difficult for me but perhaps for you …’ She tossed the score back.
‘What’s this?’ He picked up a score and stared at it.
‘Oh, that!’ She laughed. ‘Carl Müller. An arrangement of the Eroica for piano duet. Margaret – my friend – and I have been having a lot of fun trying to play it.’ On an impulse, she picked up the score and turned to him. ‘Why don’t we give it a try? How good is your sight-reading?’
‘Us?’
‘Why not?’
‘The Eroica is very long. You must go to your work.’
‘Don’t be silly! I don’t mean the whole thing. We can just start on it.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Anyway I don’t really feel in the right mood for Latin verses. To hell with them!’ She opened the score. ‘Come on. Let’s give it a try!’
After a brief hesitation, he nodded, crossed the room to fetch an upright chair for himself and sat down beside her. She adjusted the height of her stool. They began to play, peering at the score as they did so, repeatedly stopping, getting their hands entangled, and going back when one or other had made a mistake. He was so close to her that she could smell the odour of toil, communal living, unwashed clothes and sweaty bodies that emanated from all but a few privileged prisoners like Ludwig. But so far from it repelling her as at their first meeting, it merely intensified her excitement.
Suddenly the door was flung open. It was Margaret. ‘ I’ll thank you for my score!’ She raced over, snatched it off the stand, her elbow jabbing Christine’s head, and then ran out, slamming the door behind her. Thomas stared at Christine, aghast.
She did not know how to explain. She jumped up and strode to the door, with the intention of going after Margaret. Then she thought better of that. She shrugged and forced a smile. It was something to be laughed at, she tried to indicate. But neither her shrug nor the smile that followed it rid his face of its expression of shock and humiliation. It means nothing. She’s like that. Does she really think I should get her permission each time before I pick up something of hers? She constantly uses even my toothpaste and my vanishing cream with not a word … Oh, well, never mind, never mind.’
‘I think I must go. She’s your friend. Maybe best friend? I’ve made you quarrel.’ He got up from the chair and edged away from the piano. ‘That’s not good.’
‘She’ll get over it. She always does. You’d better get on with your practising.’
He shook his head. ‘I have no – no more feeling for it.’ Again he shook his head. ‘No. Sorry.’
‘Well, sit down then and I’ll make us a cup of tea or coffee.’
Instead of sitting down, he moved over to the built-in bookcase that covered the farthest wall. ‘There are more books here than in the whole of the camp.’
‘Books are my great extravagance.’
He pulled out a volume and turned over the pages.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Burkhardt’s Renaissance Italy.’
‘You can borrow it, if you like. As you see, it’s not in the original German but in English. Good practice for you. I’m sure Ludwig would agree.’
‘It is not for myself. It is for my friend – Horst. You met him at Michael’s. He has wanted to read this book for a long, long time.’
‘Well, take it to him.’
He was about to obey, but then had second thoughts and thrust it back on to the shelf. ‘Maybe better not. It’s so new, so clean.’
‘That’s only because I’ve never got round to reading it. But don’t tell Michael that. He gave it to me as a birthday present.’
‘In the camp it is impossible to keep a book clean.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter a bit. A lot of my books have coffee or cocoa stains on them. Go on! Take it!’
Reluctantly he did so. Then he frowned, head lowered: ‘ Perhaps I really should go?’
‘No, no, stay a little! I’ll make that tea. Or do you prefer coffee?’
He hesitated, ‘Maybe coffee? Is that possible?’
‘Why not? And I won’t make it as the English like it. I’ll make it strong!’
The coffee made, they sat opposite each other, she on the sofa and he, as though deliberately as far away from her as possible, on the stool, his arm in its plaster resting along the lid of the piano.
‘Michael told me you write music.’
‘No longer.’
‘Why not?’
He stared down into his coffee cup. ‘ When I was first captured and taken to a hospital, I tried. No good. When one is seventeen, eighteen, one writes poetry, one writes music. It means nothing.’
‘It could mean something. I think you should make another try.’
He shook his head, tapping gently with his teaspoon against the side of his cup. ‘I have no – what do you call it? – Werdenenergie. Power of will. I surrender, like I surrendered as a soldier. Not good. Horst is not like that. He makes h
imself do things, reads, studies. For him nothing is impossible. For me – most things!’
‘Tell me about Horst.’
He frowned, clearly reluctant to do so. Then: ‘He is … a good comrade. Good.’
‘He looks intelligent.’
‘Yes. Very intelligent. Much more intelligent than I am!’
‘How old is he?’
‘Forty-seven. Maybe forty-eight. I forget.’
Suddenly he sounded impatient and she felt that she had probed enough. They began to talk about other, less personal things – music, books, the life of the university and the life of the camp – with flagging animation.
Eventually he looked at his watch and jumped to his feet. ‘I must go. I mustn’t be late.’
‘But it’s been so short.’
Again he looked at his watch. ‘Almost two hours. And I’ve kept you from your work.’
‘Oh, to hell with my work.’
He went to the chair over which he had draped his cumbrous greatcoat and began to struggle into it. ‘Your work is important, I am sure.’
‘I’m not sure myself. I sometimes think it is a total waste of time.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘I’ll walk a little way with you. I need some fresh air – to clear my mind.’
‘No, no! Not necessary! It’s too cold now.’
‘I’d like to come. I mean that. I’d really like to come.’
He shrugged his acquiescence.
They walked side by side through slushy streets almost entirely devoid of people. The icy wind made Christine’s teeth ache and her eyes water. He quickened his pace, so that she had to hurry to keep up with him.
Suddenly he swung round, gripping her forearm with his good hand. ‘Go home now! Please! You must! It’s too cold.’
Such was his urgency that reluctantly she nodded. ‘ Okay’ She turned her face up to his, almost as though she were inviting a kiss. ‘When shall I see you again?’
‘Tomorrow I’m going to Michael.’