by Francis King
‘Saturday?’
‘Saturday I keep for my friend.’
‘Horst?’
‘Yes, for Horst. He works all week, so on Saturday I go out with him. Always.’
‘Well, Sunday then.’
‘Thank you.’ He nodded. ‘But is it – are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘So – I say goodbye.’ He extended his left hand.
She took it in her right. ‘Goodbye, Thomas.’
‘Goodbye, madam.’
The sudden formality took her aback. ‘ Oh, please – Christine.’
‘Goodbye, Christine.’
He broke away and hurried off, head lowered before the icy bluster of the wind.
Chapter Five
Early in the afternoon on the Sunday when she was expecting Thomas, Ludwig and Klaus for tea, Christine was striding down the Cornmarket. Suddenly she glimpsed Thomas with Horst – whom she had deliberately not invited – on the other side of the street. With no regard for her safety, cars braking, swerving and hooting, she raced across.
In her fur cap and coat, her face glowing from the cold and the exertion of her walk, she looked unusually healthy and attractive, in contrast to the two prisoners, whose features were blue and pinched. Thomas was even shivering slightly, his jaw rigid, so that as he spoke the words emerged, with a curious impression of stoicism, through clenched teeth. All around, scraped into hard, uneven mounds, the snow glittered, merciless to the eyes, in the slanting afternoon sunlight.
‘How do you like this weather?’ Herself so exhilarated, she did not at first notice their despondency. ‘Isn’t it a wonderful day? I was skating all yesterday morning on Port Meadow. You’ve no idea how beautiful it looks. Stunning. A real wonderland. One just glides on and on – forever. You can see the grass through the ice – as though it were covered in the clearest of clear sheets of glass.’
Thomas smiled wanly and shook his head. Suddenly she noticed the two tears that the cold had forced into his eyes. One trembled and trickled down his cheek; the other remained seemingly embedded in the corner of the eye like a tiny, opalescent bead. Then she felt ashamed of her delight in the glaring snow and of her feeling of triumphant well-being.
Towering behind Thomas, Horst was staring at her in a manner wary, even hostile, that sharpened her discomfort. He had returned her greeting with no more than a jerky bow. He held his hands, in their rough khaki gloves, stiffly to his sides.
‘Were you on the way to my place?’
Thomas looked in submissive questioning at Horst. Then, getting no answer, he said: ‘It’s too early, no?’
‘Earlier than we said. But that doesn’t matter. It must be rather miserable wandering the streets in this biting cold. My room should be warm. I keep feeding that blasted meter. Its appetite for shillings is as bad as Ludwig’s for sugar.’
Horst stooped and muttered something in German to Thomas, who then, clumsy in his embarrassment, stammered: ‘Horst and I must do something first. But thank you. I’ll come at three. That’s when you said?’
‘Oh, come any time!’ She forced herself to turn to Horst. ‘Why don’t you come too?’
‘I am sorry. It is very kind of you. But I am busy all this afternoon.’ There was no effort to make the excuse sound convincing.
‘Did Thomas give you the Burkhardt?’ Perversely, she still wanted somehow to win him over.
‘Thank you. I will take much care of it. Maybe next Sunday I will bring it back. Yes?’
‘Oh, don’t hurry. Any time.’ She turned to Thomas. ‘Which way are you walking?’
Horst indicated Ship Street. ‘This way.’
‘Not my way then. I won’t keep you hanging around in this cold.’ She turned back to Thomas, her face relaxing and her voice losing its edge. ‘ I’ll see you later.’ Then she felt impelled to make another, no doubt fruitless overture to Horst. ‘You must come to tea another time – when you can spare an afternoon.’
He merely gave another of his small, jerky bows.
‘Well, I’ll say goodbye then. À bientôt, Thomas.’
Afterwards, she wondered what made her stop in her swift passage down Beaumont Street, to pause and look back over the long, glittering vista just traversed. Had she not done so, she would have been spared the humiliating revelation that, so far from turning up Ship Street, Thomas and Horst were walking no more than a hundred yards behind her. She stopped and waited, determined, in her resentment, to inflict on them the embarrassment of knowing that she had seen them. But they were so deep in conversation that they did not look in her direction. Soon they had turned up an alley and disappeared from view.
That was Horst, she told herself as she walked on. It had nothing to do with Thomas. But in that case why had the trivial incident so much upset her? All at once she felt exhausted by the trudge through the snow. The unrelenting glitter had given her a vague throb behind the eyes.
‘You look done in!’ Margaret’s solicitude filled her, as so often, not with gratitude but with irritation. ‘Come into my room and put your feet up. It’s warmer than yours? Margaret had been baking a cake for Christine’s tea party. ‘I persuaded Mrs Albert to let me use her oven. It’s so much easier to regulate.’ She showed Christine the cake. ‘I don’t know how it’s going to taste. It’s a recipe I found in the Sketch, with peanut butter in it.’
‘Sounds interesting.’ In fact, Christine thought it sounded dreadful. ‘It looks lovely. You are kind!’
That morning Margaret had suggested that the two of them should bicycle up Boar’s Hill to have tea with an elderly woman friend of her parents. Christine had then had to explain that she had already invited the Germans to tea. ‘I won’t ask you to come because I know you wouldn’t want to.’
Margaret flushed and bit her lower hp. Then, after a protracted silence, she crossed over to perch herself on an arm of Christine’s chair. ‘ You know, Chrissie, I’ve been thinking a lot about this … this German business. And yesterday, – she had locked her stubby fingers so tightly together that the nails had gone white – ‘ yesterday I spoke to Father Quinterly about it. I hadn’t realised but apparently he does a lot for them – many of them are RCs, you know. Well, we talked, and I told him what I thought, and he told me what he thought. And suddenly, just like that, I felt that … that I’d been wrong all the time. After all, when all’s said and done, they’re humans – God’s creatures – like the rest of us. Aren’t they? And we’re told to forgive our enemies and do good to those who hurt us – as Father Quinterly reminded me. So …’
‘I’m glad that you’ve come round to my way of thinking. It worried me that you so obviously disapproved.’
‘So I’d like to come to your tea party,’ Margaret got out in a rush. ‘That is, if you don’t mind having me.’
‘Of course I don’t mind. I’m delighted. But as Christine later acknowledged to herself, she did mind; so that it was with the thought that, if Margaret had already butted in, one more guest would make no difference that she rang Michael to ask him to come too.
‘I’d love to come.’ Surprisingly, Michael was enthusiastic. As a rule, he preferred to entertain rather than to be entertained. ‘The only thing is, I’ve got June Bryson – you know, of Ballet Rambert – on my hands this weekend. Would you mind awfully if I brought her along?’
‘Of course not. But I ought to warn you, Thomas is supposed to be playing for us.’
‘Oh, June will adore that. She’s the most accommodating young woman – prepared to find anything fun, provided it doesn’t go on for too long. What time do you want us?’
So now Christine was faced with tea for seven. ‘I’m glad you baked that cake, because I haven’t a notion what else to give them. I suppose I’ll have to set about cutting some sandwiches.’ She began to heave herself out of the battered and scarred armchair, but Margaret at once pushed her back.
‘I’ll do it. I can make some cucumber sandwiches. Michael always loves them.’
‘Well, in that case use my marge. It’s in the fridge.’
‘I have lots and lots.’
‘You’re not going to use your own stuff on my tea party.’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly. We always share and share alike, so what does it matter anyway?’
But Christine insisted. She was touched, as so often, by Margaret’s generosity and now also by her eagerness to make a success of a party not her own, and yet she was also irritated. She wanted to say: ‘It’s my show, mind your own business!’ She was almost tempted to tell Margaret that, after all, it might be better if she did not come.
At three o’clock, not a minute later or sooner, Thomas knocked at Christine’s door.
After they had exchanged greetings, he blurted out: ‘I must tell you something. I forgot to tell you when we just met. Klaus and Ludwig can’t come.’
‘Oh, dear! Why is that?’ She did not mind about Ludwig’s absence, in fact was delighted. But she felt disappointed over Klaus.
‘Klaus has a cold. Ludwig has’ – he raised his eyebrows – ‘ some other business.’
‘Poor Margaret has prepared so much food.’
‘I’m sorry, sorry.’
His hands were too stiff from the cold for him to practise without first warming them, so that for a time he knelt before the fire, his fingers outstretched to the flames and his melancholy gaze fixed on them.
Christine lowered the book that she had just taken up again. ‘What have you been doing since last you were here?’
He continued to gaze at the fire, not turning. ‘On Friday I sang in a concert at the camp. Not solo, in the choir. Otherwise – nothing! There’s not much to do in this weather. Oh, but yes! You remember, when last you saw me, you asked me why I did not try to write some music. Well,’ – he laughed with sudden, momentary joy – ‘all the time that I was walking back to the camp that same evening, music keeps coming to me.’ The palms of his hands were beginning to tingle from the heat of the fire. He rubbed them against each other. ‘ But,’ – he sighed and pulled a face – ‘I am lazy, so lazy. Instead of sitting down and trying to put this music on paper, I played skat until the lights are put out. To do so was so much easier.’
‘What are we to do about your laziness?’
He laughed. ‘We can do nothing.’
She looked at him and gave a slow smile. Then, on an impulse, she added: ‘Perhaps Horst can.’
‘Horst?’ He frowned, shook his head. ‘Why Horst? What can Horst do?’
Clearly she had upset him with the deliberately needling suggestion.
‘Then you must make the effort.’
‘Yes, I must do so.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not good to be idle. If one is idle, one becomes bored. And in the camp boredom is the most terrible thing of all. Truly Every prisoner says so.’
‘Yes, I can well believe that.’
‘I’ll tell you how it is. Yes? One begins to hate those same, same faces of the others, their jokes, their stories, their way of saying things, doing things, their little habits. Everything is so – so known.’ Once again he gazed ruminatively into the fire. ‘But sometimes, sometimes, one meets a comrade like Horst. Not like the rest of us. Always fresh – you understand? – fresh. Always interesting, surprising. That’s why I like him for my friend. I have no other friend – true friend – in the camp.
‘I’d like to get to know him.’ And, yes, she meant that, if only because of the relentless curiosity from which she had suffered all her life. ‘But I have this feeling that he dislikes me. Or at any rate distrusts me for some reason.’
‘Maybe he is bitter. He has had a hard time.’
‘He hates us English – doesn’t he?’
He rose from his squat before the fire and crossed to a chair. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘I think he hates us.’
‘In England you have many people who hate the Germans very much. Yes? I am right? Your own friend for example.’
‘Oh, Margaret?’ Christine laughed. ‘No, she’s changed her mind. In fact she’s going to join us for tea. She asked me to explain to you – and to apologise for her behaviour. The poor dear is too embarrassed to do so herself. She hopes you’ll forgive her.’
‘You English!’ He smiled across at her. ‘You’re wonderful!’ Then, realising from her expression that she had thought that he was being ironic, he added: ‘I mean that. Truly. You are wonderful.’
‘What a pity that Horst doesn’t think so.’
‘Perhaps he is not what you call a good German but he is – truly – a good man.’ There was a brief silence, then he went on: ‘Horst’s wife was killed in an air raid – the hospital where she was expecting a baby was bombed. Horst’s little girl was sent to live with her grandmother in Prussia – far in the east. The war ended but still he has no news of them. If she is alive, the old woman is now eighty, maybe more. I am not saying, of course not, that all this – or any of this – is the fault of the English. But if Horst hates the English, then maybe he has some reason.’
‘Of course.’
He had now jumped up and hurried over to the piano. She noticed with what clumsy movements he had begun to select and then arrange a score on the stand.
No doubt on which sides they now stood. For all their friendship, each smarted under the other’s unspoken accusations: Cologne, Coventry; Berlin, London; the Ruhr, Docklands … They were suddenly far distant from each other.
But for a short time only. Ten minutes later, as they played side by side at the piano, it seemed impossible that they had come so close to an estrangement. Their faltering performance of another stretch of the Eroica had soon erased all memory of the words that had suddenly left them confronting each other across an invisible abyss.
Margaret interrupted them, a plate of thick-cut sandwiches in one hand. ‘Hello.’ She gave Thomas a brief nod and a nervous smile and then at once put the plate down on a table, her gaze averted from him. She turned to Christine. ‘These are the sandwich spread. I’m just going to do the rhubarb jam. I’m afraid I look a sight. My hair doesn’t seem to take a perm.’ She peered into the glass above the elaborate Victorian mantelpiece, fidgeting unhappily with the tortoiseshell slide that held a bunch of her coarse, sandy hair away from her bulging forehead. She sighed. ‘Your hair looks so lovely. Doesn’t it look lovely?’ she appealed to Thomas.
‘Yes. It’s very nice,’ he agreed in an almost inaudible voice.
‘And it never needs a perm or setting. That wave is natural. Some people have all the luck. And you’ve got a wave too,’ she continued to him. ‘I don’t think that’s fair. It’s wasted on a man.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘Ah, well … Back to my labours!’
Thomas and Christine looked at each other as the door closed behind her. Then they burst into laughter.
‘She’s really rather a darling when you get to know her. Michael calls her my lady-in-waiting. But she’s a lot more than that. Do you know what a lady-in-waiting is?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I guess. Maybe Dame bei der Aufwartung?’
They were still struggling with the Eroica when Michael, dressed in a double-breasted suit and a stiff collar, as for some formal university occasion, arrived with June Bryson.
‘Do you know, you’re the first German prisoner I’ve ever spoken to,’ June greeted Thomas, a hand on his arm. She wore extremely high, crocodile-skin court shoes, which paradoxically served only to exaggerate her minuteness, a silver-fox fur coat reaching almost to her ankles, and a pillbox hat of the same fur jauntily tilted to one side of her head. ‘You speak English?’
Thomas nodded.
‘Oh, what fun!’
She pulled off first the coat and then the hat and threw them on to the sofa, before flopping down in the nearest armchair.
‘Michael’s been giving me a truly super time. He really is the world’s best host, there’s no doubt about that. I always knew that, even in these days of austerity, dons wined and dined like nobody’s business but, we
ll, it’s been a revelation to me. One wouldn’t have thought that rationing existed.’
‘I have a lot of friends in America,’ Michael put in. ‘That helps.’
‘Well, I have a lot of friends in America too – or thought I had. But it’s not often they think of sending me a food parcel. And dancing makes one so hungry. Worse than a five-mile walk. In the good old days before the war I used to eat a beefsteak every evening after a performance. Now one has to be satisfied with God knows what! Pigeon, horsemeat, whale meat, rabbit. Rat and cat, I shouldn’t be surprised, in some of the restaurants to which one resorts in desperation. Even the smart ones.’ She wrinkled her small, uptilted nose. ‘Quelle horreur! Oh, you’d laugh if you could see me late at night, sitting up in bed and devouring great hunks of bread with a scrape of marge on them. I’m an awful pig, I’m afraid. I sometimes think I love food more than anything else in life – even sex.’ She turned to Thomas. ‘What’s the food like at your camp?’
‘Not good.’ He shook his head. ‘I think you would often be hungry,’ he added with a smile.
‘You don’t look all that undernourished. In fact, you’re quite well upholstered. What sort of things do they give you?’
When he had finished telling her, she gazed at him in horrified incredulity. ‘But that’s awful! Only bread and potatoes for lunch – and after you’ve done all that back-breaking work.’ She jumped to her feet and snatched one of the plates of sandwiches off the table. ‘Here – quick – eat something!’
Thomas shook his head and all of them, except June, then burst into laughter.
‘What’s the joke? The poor man must be starving. And starving’s no laughing matter.’
At that moment Margaret returned with some more sandwiches and the tea. She was wearing, for the first time, a voluminous dress inspired by one of the gypsy figures in a Russell Flint reproduction hanging in her bedroom. She herself had run it up on Mrs Albert’s treadle sewing machine. Her face was coated in white powder.
‘Yes, we have met before – after a fashion,’ she told June as they shook hands. ‘You wouldn’t know me from Adam – or Eve – but I feel I know you so well. I’ve always been a huge fan of yours. Do you remember when Sadler’s Wells reopened? Of course you do – what a silly question. Anyway – to cut a long story short – I was one of the people who went round to the stage door to tell you how fabulous you were. You were, you know – absolutely fabulous. A dream.’