‘Hulloooo, dears,’ she waved, chins wobbling and the dog-in-a-bag under her left arm.
She smiled and nodded and began her descent. Her emerald-green skirt, a massive, bone-segmented thing, moved all of a piece. As her foot peeped out to find the stair, I gasped to see it clad in a faded brown, rubber-soled house slipper. By the time she reached us I had understood that Mrs Franklin was dressed as some kind of courtesan, albeit one whose comfort, in her own home, would not be compromised.
‘How lovely, how utterly lovely.’ She kissed me and Dora on both cheeks and took Hans’s hand between her soft little paws. ‘That you could come. I thought of you with all that, that terrible Herr Goldschmidt business. I feel I ought to have done more. Really, so much more.’ Her body was overflowing its corset, blossoming from a dark wrinkle of cleavage up to her heavily powdered face. A large black mole had been enthusiastically pencilled above her lip.
‘But not at all, Eleanora,’ Dora cooed. ‘Your open Sundays are a wonderful thing. Very much appreciated by all of us. As they were by Helmut too.’
I looked at Hans, who was collecting a champagne coupe from a waiter’s tray. Then he turned, smiling down into Mrs Franklin’s eyes. He took her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘And you would be Madame…?’ The sheer beauty of him could be disconcerting at close quarters. Mrs Franklin laughed like a girl.
‘Mme de Staël,’ she said, her teeth yellowing mildly under the carmine lipstick. ‘Though I don’t really suppose anyone will recognise me.’ She laughed again.
In that instant I saw the eccentricity and generosity and ever-so-slight wariness of the English that I’d grown to love, the luxury of Mrs Franklin’s class being an insouciance about how one is perceived. At home in Silesia at such a ball, the flowers would have been arranged in a classical, symmetrical order; the carpets would never be allowed to fray so nobly, and no hostess would greet her guests with messy lipstick and tender insecurity and in slippers. I felt how far we had come since our first encounter in this house, when our lostness had made us trigger-quick to take offence. If Hans recollected being slighted here, he showed no sign. He seemed in his element.
Mrs Franklin sailed off to greet a black-faced, white-lipped minstrel with a banjo under one arm who was coming through the door. Behind him a veiled Mata Hari with a bared navel was taking off her coat. Girls in black uniforms and unmade faces bore trays of champagne and gin; oyster flesh swayed in china spoons.
Hans had been scanning the rooms to each side of the entrance hall for faces he knew. His colour was high and his lips slightly open. When someone started playing the latest Noël Coward hit on a piano we followed the music into the room on the left. Toller was near the fireplace, turned away from us, but his head was unmistakable. He was moving his hands like a conductor, a cigar for a baton. People had gathered in a semicircle around him, enthralled. Christiane, willowy and taller, was dressed in a man’s suit as Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
Dora peeled off in the opposite direction. I took a glass of champagne from a passing tray.
In the back corner of the large room an elderly German in a green loden suit and high collar stood alone under a potted palm, both hands on his cane. It was Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, the pacifist and human-rights activist. In exile, he had become a kind of uncle to us younger refugees. A gently smiling melancholic, he managed to give us the impression that things as they were, although so unprecedented in our lives and, after all, so unlikely, had predictable outcomes nevertheless. Without ever saying so, he gave us to understand that we would, one day, go home. I was always pleased to see him.
Hans and he were quickly deep in conversation about the questions that Cocks and Churchill had raised in parliament. Hans was pressing Otto to see if he knew the source. ‘It’s got to be one of us,’ Hans smiled. ‘Who’s not standing up to take the credit?’
I gulped my drink. Otto shrugged his shoulders. ‘The truth will out,’ the old man said, ‘one way or another.’
‘Aha!’ Hans exclaimed. ‘Here’s someone who might enlighten us.’ Lord Marley was striding our way, no doubt looking for Dora. He was his tall, calm and magnificent self. I couldn’t tell who he was dressed as–he wore a short red jacket and long dark boots. He stood with his feet together in front of us, his eyes bright, waiting.
Hans moved to introduce them. Facing Lord Marley, he opened one arm to encompass the older German, who, leaning forward, offered his good ear. Palm fronds reached and dipped, unnoticed, over his head.
‘May I present,’ Hans addressed the Englishman, ‘Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt. You perhaps know him, at least by reputation?’ Otto made a little bow.
Hans turned, gesturing now to the other, ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is Marley.’
The Englishman gave a slight start, of the kind I would not have noticed before we came here. It was the subtle shock-and-bemusement reaction to a faux pas and it froze for a split second the air between them.
Then Lord Marley smiled and proffered a hand. ‘Dudley will do fine,’ he said.
The elderly German noticed nothing. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Dudley.’
I felt a thrumming of blood in my brain. I excused myself and placed my glass on a small chiffonier. The floor listed. Snippets of conversation, a high tinkle-laugh, floated towards me as I walked. People an obstacle course.
In the room opposite I found a wing chair near a fire. My mind had gone blank. It was a sensation like wind, like a vacuum. I could think of only one place where Hans, in his assiduousness to master the manners of this country, could have learnt that a lord should be referred to by one word alone–the same place where the people wouldn’t have known that this was only the case when writing.
The horror of it crept up on me. The fire leapt and licked. I hoped he would not come over. I had to find Dora. My legs felt flimsy. To my right a flamenco dancer in a backless dress and red shoes danced loosely with a mummy, or a victim of some kind.
Staring at the fire, I recalled the ember on my mother’s carpet. Surely this matter of titles was something Hans could have learnt anywhere, and as easily mislearnt? Perhaps I was as paranoid as Hans had been telling me lately, my brain reduced to a rat’s thing of instinct and survival so I saw only treachery and threat everywhere.
A pair of shined shoes with fine rounded toes dented the silver pile of the rug. Hans placed one hand on the back of my chair and smiled down, the small solicitous smile of an attentive but not overly concerned husband to his wife in front of a ballroom crowd.
‘Ruthie?’ His voice said, Nothing can be wrong. It said, This is innocence and your thoughts are unworthy.
‘Dance?’ Hans asked. ‘Or are you…?’ I realised he thought I was suffering from period pain, or the ache I sometimes got in my hip when it rained.
‘No–yes, yes.’
The trick of dancing is that it allows extreme physical closeness, of touch and breath, at the same time as it is possible to have an entire conversation without eye contact. This is why it is so popular for risky, initial intimacies. For questions.
I affected a lightness that surprised me. ‘You have been mixing in exalted circles,’ I said to his lapel. ‘How on earth did you know to introduce Dudley as Marley, instead of Lord Marley?’
Hans nodded over my shoulder at an acquaintance I did not recognise, a fair-haired man with a small moustache in a jockey’s silks and cap. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Common knowledge, I suppose.’ He turned me, deftly. I glimpsed Dora deep in conversation with Fenner Brockway, his wide forehead half covered by a pirate’s hat made from newspaper. Fenner was leaning back, laughing hard at something Dora was saying and wiping his eyes. ‘It’s an old-boy public-school thing, isn’t it?’ Hans mused. ‘Or perhaps from the army–I know they just use one name, anyhow.’
I nodded. He seemed so calm and sure and I wanted to credit him with an honest mistake.
I said nothing to Dora. But that night, for the first time in my life, I got so drunk that later I could not remember
how I got home. I drank to obliterate the night, to require Hans to be solicitous, to force him to come home with me and put me to bed, even if I did not see him do it.
Dora spent the next two nights at Professor Wolf’s. When Mrs Allworth came on the Tuesday I asked her, as casually as I could, about the use of surnames and titles in schools and the army, and she said she knew it to be so from her time working in a big house. When I told her that Lord Marley had seemed surprised to be called Marley, she smiled. She explained that, no, a lord would usually be introduced as Lord So-and-So, though his school friends and army buddies and, occasionally, his wife might use his surname or title alone.
By the time I saw Dora again I had decided that the incident was exactly what it had seemed, a small slip-up entirely of Hans’s own making, understandable given the intricacies of the English class system, the different terms of address, verbal and written. Hans left the next week for Bertie and Switzerland, and I packed for Paris.
Dora came to see me off at the station, something I later wondered about. Sentimental scenes of arrival and leavetaking were not her forte. She was businesslike until the last minute, checking she had my Paris address, making sure I had the money she had scraped together for Walter, and handing me a sealed letter for Bertie she wanted posted from Paris. We walked along the platform till we found my carriage and stood in front of its steps. The train steamed impatience; a dyad of red lights flashed alternately at the outgoing end of the platform. Dora put a gloved hand up to my cheek.
‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, as if the idea were just occurring to her. Then, ‘When I see you again it’ll be nearly summer.’
I nodded. We had plans to go walking in the Lake District in June. I took the keys to the Great Ormond Street flat out of my coat pocket. I had had another set cut for Mathilde (so many!–one for each internal door, like a secret, or a cell) so I could take mine with me. I held them up and dangled them.
‘I’m not leaving you,’ I said.
She put the back of her hand to her forehead in mock histrionics, to forestall a scene. ‘Quel drame.’
I hugged her for a long moment, till she pulled away. ‘Better get on then,’ she said. ‘Have a kir for me at La Coupole.’ She shifted her weight from foot to foot, clapping her hands together against the cold: the muffled sound of wool on wool. ‘Righto.’
I pushed my case up the steps. When I turned round she was already gone–halfway back along the carriage, walking briskly, shoulders hunched. Then she turned sideways and disappeared, a red coat swallowed by a grey crowd.
In Paris I took a flat by myself in Neuilly. There were many more of us refugees in Paris than in London, and I felt less conspicuous in France. Perhaps because of my darker colouring, or perhaps because it is possible for us Germans to speak virtually unaccented French, whereas in English we can never lose the trace of our mother tongue altogether. I worked in the office of the party, helping out as best I could. Walter directed my days.
In Dora’s first letter she wrote that Mathilde had made the flat into a home, with ‘massive good cheer and moderate housewifery’. Mathilde and her late husband had had staff to run their grand house in Berlin but she could still, by some personal alchemy, make corners of order herself. Small bunches of jonquils appeared in drinking glasses, and she ingeniously hung kitchen implements from a rack she had the caretaker drill into the bricks behind the stove, so that now even the dresser drawers could be filled with papers. Mrs Allworth was delighted, Dora wrote, and Nepo, after two days curled in mourning on my bed, was slowly coming round. The changes to the flat didn’t bother me; I had no love for those walls and floors. The main thing was that Dora wasn’t there alone. I had not abandoned her.
There’s a man at my door. The light is off here and he is faceless and silhouetted, pausing to look. He sways a little, touches something on his chest. I close my one eye and slyly press my finger-button for him to go away, for more ice inside of me.
He’s still here. It’s Walter. The concierge must have let him in to my Paris building and he is standing in the doorway. I say, ‘Come in,’ but he speaks before he moves. He was always sweet to me. Sweet and tactical. His eyes are small and hooded and grey-blue and his hair is pushed back, thinning. In another age he would have been a loyal Frankish warrior protecting his tribe, routing out traitors. He wears a dark coat, torso sliced into diagonals by his satchel strap. He takes off his gloves. He is not smiling. He is not coming in.
‘They’ve got Bertie,’ he says.
Ice will creep into your veins and stop your heart.
He moves his gloves into one hand, watching my face. ‘I thought you should know.’
No. No—
‘Mrs Becker? Mrs Becker?’
I open my eye. The doctor is about twenty years old. I must seem prehistoric to him. At least a hundred and fifty; a heavy-lidded tortoise, an evolutionary relic long since surpassed, washed up by some freak disaster, coughed out of the earth and into this modern hospital bed.
I crane my neck from the pillow and know it wobbles loosely; it is reptilian, criss-crossed with deep dry crevasses. Around his own smooth neck the boy doctor has a stethoscope with a yellow plastic stem. A toy. Sideburns creep improbably across his babycheeks.
‘You seemed distressed in your sleep,’ he says. ‘You were calling out. I came earlier, but you were asleep then too.’ He unhooks my chart and examines it, not pausing for answers. ‘I’m finishing up now, wanted to check on you before I leave. You sleeping well?’
I wonder if he listens to himself, let alone to anyone else.
‘Any pain?’ He looks at me, pen poised, like a doctor on daytime TV, an underage actor cast to suspend disbelief. Next they’ll require me to believe in my own recovery, walk out of here as the credits roll for the century just passed, ready to combat the return season of terror in a world that never learns.
‘None I can’t account for.’
‘Pardon?’ He hangs the chart back.
‘I’m fine. Vivid dreams, that’s all.’
‘Let me see.’ The hairy infant picks up the chart again. ‘Sometimes with more … senior patients, we recommend a mild antipsychotic along with the pain relief.’
‘I am not hallucinating.’
‘No. No, well. It’s entirely up to you.’
But that’s the thing, boyo, it’s not. This vast life–the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence)–this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know. One slub here, a dropped stitch there, a bump encounter in that place, and the whole fabric will be different once it is woven.
I look into his clear, caramel eyes. Who knows what trace I might leave inside of you, boy?
‘They are all so real to me,’ is all I say. I still have a modicum of control.
He looks at me quizzically. There’s an indentation in his left ear where he’s taken an earring out. As he leans over me I allow myself to wonder about tattoos insinuating themselves across the soft inside of his upper arm, perhaps a bull’s head and horns in the sweet hollow of his back where his shirt tucks in. The mind is a curious thing, spooling and unspooling.
‘May I?’ he says as he pulls down my bottom eyelid without waiting for my answer. ‘What about some B12 then? I’ll arrange for it tomorrow.’
I couldn’t really care. What he cannot yet know–oh, why are we taught so little? and it is such a basic, basic thing–is that one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us.
I lift myself onto one elbow, which is the most emphasis my ruined body will allow. ‘I’d like to go home.’
He looks at me as if the idea had never occurred to him as a possible clinical outcome, as if it were an ambition above my station. He folds his lips together.
r /> ‘I’ll discuss it with the team,’ he says. ‘We’ll get back to you on that, Mrs Becker.’ As he tucks his pen into the pocket of his gown he holds my gaze, and then he smiles, lips still closed. It is a sympathetic look: he is wondering whether I know what he knows. And then he pats the bed twice, a brisk parting coda, and walks out the door.
‘Doctor Becker, actually,’ I mutter to his crisp white back.
Eventually, it all came out. The pieces were filled in, reported, documented in a court case and in letters that flew all over Europe. Memory cobbles together what I knew then with what came later. Standing in my Paris doorway, Walter Fabian, the philandering, charismatic, balding, hardworking, ex-underground ex-husband, was trying to read in my face what I knew then.
‘Bertie!’ My mind was racing and my mouth flapping with it. ‘Is he…?’
‘Alive as far as we know. They have him at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.’
My thoughts flew to the football game with Hans at the border, the waiting car. ‘They lured him over the border? They trapped him—?’ I must have been shrieking; my hands like panicked birds in the doorway. Walter grabbed one of them.
‘Just a minute, Ruth. You need to sit down.’
He helped me along the hallway and sat me down on the sofa. I held my stomach. He disappeared into the kitchen. Outside the clouds hung, bruised and inert over slate roofs. Walter came back with whisky in two glasses. Its colour was the only colour in the room.
‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ he said. He hitched his trousers to sit, opening a gap of white shin between sock and cuff.
I realised–not a neural process at all, but one in the body, a creeping freeze–that this was an interrogation.
‘You and Hans had been sending Bert money,’ he said slowly, watching my face for something, perhaps surprise, feigned or real. Or recognition. I felt none of those things. I was walking along the black and charred lip of a crater: if Bertie does not live I will be drawn into it and burned to dust.