No response.
I took out my ring of keys. I didn’t have much hope that the old one would work but I tried anyway. It didn’t even fit in the opening. I knocked again. Put my ear to the door. Nothing.
Then Nepo crying.
I went downstairs and sat on my case. I probably sat there for an hour. I wasn’t thinking. I was hoping that the situation itself would take over from me, that Dora or Mathilde would walk in before I had to make a decision. Nepo was there; they couldn’t be far. Then I thought to look in the letterbox. There was three days’ uncollected mail.
A key turned in the front door and opened out my heart. But it was the retired insurance executive, Mr Donovan, coming home. I told him I was back from France but had no key. He said he thought the ladies had gone away. They had had a great many visitors the past week, he said, but he hadn’t seen them at all since the weekend. It was Thursday.
Mr Donovan let me use his telephone. There was only one person I could think to call. Christiane picked up, and I introduced myself. ‘I know who you are,’ she said, not unkindly, and passed me to Toller. He suggested that Dora and Mathilde may have gone to Lord Marley’s house in Sussex. Toller said he didn’t have the new key, or any key for that matter.
When Mr Donovan came back into the room he was wearing a dressing gown over his clothes. He offered me tea and went into the kitchen. I sat still, on his sofa.
Dora knew I was coming today, this morning. She would never have met me at the station but I could not imagine she would not be here when I was due.
I called Toller again. ‘She knew I was coming,’ I said.
He was at our building within the hour, his movements fast and fidgety, dark circles the whole way around his eyes. We walked to the police station on Gray’s Inn Road, Toller talking all the while. We just needed to check inside the flat, he said, we could have any damage to the door repaired before they got home. He thought the local police would probably have nothing to do with Scotland Yard, and it shouldn’t be too hard to keep them away from the cupboard. We just needed to check. I didn’t speak–there was a pit of anxiety in my stomach.
Police Constable Hall came back to Great Ormond Street with us. The three of us stood on the doorstep under the angel’s head and the boarded-up fanlight. The policeman rang the doorbell for the top flat. We waited out the silence of its wake. Then I let us into the building with my key.
Upstairs, PC Hall knocked on the door of the flat and opened his case. Fear crawled cold over my skull–for what we would find, for the violence of finding it. He barely waited for an answer before jemmying the door.
The wood barked and flew open. Both locks stuck whole in the jamb as the door splintered away from it.
Nepo sprang out of the kitchen, so alive, so grateful, circling through my legs. I picked him up. The flat was silent, neat and clean. There was milk and food in his bowls in the kitchen. It was fresh: they couldn’t be far. Toller and the policeman moved through the other rooms. Nepo roared like an engine in my arms.
PC Hall came back and stood in the kitchen. ‘That one is locked.’ He pointed across the entryway.
Toller was very quiet. He seemed to be deferring to me. I suppose it was my home.
‘That’s Dora’s room.’ I put Nepo down.
The moments of greatest intensity in my life have taken on automatic qualities, as if soundless, underwater. One thing leads to another and you break down a door, sit on a chair, drink tea, scald your mouth, freeze your heart. Then a powder to sleep–desperate for oblivion, but sad too, at each night that takes her further from you–you going into an unshared future. The soul who has gone leaves your own lonelier and small, shrunken inside a body that is now a shell for loss. PC Hall picked up his jemmy again.
They lay in the bed facing one another, the covers drawn up to their chins. Toller leapt to her, fingers on her throat, then Mathilde’s. He backed off like he’d been burned, slid down the wall. PC Hall stayed away.
Her forehead was cold on my lips. Her mouth was greyish blue, parted. Eyes closed, deep in their sockets.
Mathilde looked weary. A crust ran from her nose and mouth to the pillow.
I threw back the sheet. Dora was in the old cream pyjamas I’d given her, coffee stains down the front. Mathilde was fully dressed–a black silk dress, stockings, but shoeless. Their hands were clasped together, heads bent close.
Did one go first, the other watching, waiting for her time all alone?
There was nothing to do. She was gone. She was here still. A small, cold bird. PC Hall didn’t stop me. I put one arm under her body and the other around her. I pressed my cheek to her forehead and I rocked and held my brave girl, my wild dead love. The policeman looked away. It was the loss of the world.
What had I thought I would grow into? I was grown. Why had I thought I might, still, become something else? It was over.
PART III
You, a writer, were missing as we buried them in a hideous Jewish cemetery in East Ham. A pitiful bunch of mourners, Toller giving interviews all the while. You would have seen what it is, emigration … the glorious middle section of a grim novel that no one will write.
One friend of Dora’s writing
to another, 24 May 1935
TOLLER
I sat for two days in the chair by the bay window, where I had waited for her the night she went out to the heath. I have seen a lot of death. I willed myself to acknowledge hers. But the heart will not be told. I was desperate for sleep to take me but if I closed my eyes my mind would leap to imagining she might be here at any minute, come stomping cold and cross through that door.
‘It must have been hard for Christiane,’ Clara says. ‘To see your heart broken by someone else.’ She is closing the first of my cases, with a firm snap. She is right to think of Christiane.
Christiane ministered to me quietly those days, I tell Clara. She brought me toast, coffee. I barely saw her, though, until the afternoon of the second day when I noticed her watching me, crying, in the doorway. She wasn’t crying for Dora. She was crying for me.
It is possible for grief to transmute itself to anger, and for that anger to keep you alive. The inquest came the next week, and my fury about it has kept me going these past four years. While there was an injustice to be resolved, I would hang on to fight for it.
‘It’s still unresolved.’ Clara is sitting near me now. Her eyes are huge, the furrow has reappeared between her brows.
‘That’s true.’ I nod as if to say it’s all right, it really is. But the other thing I left for myself to do was to write her into existence. And that part is done.
Outside the coroner’s court some people had brought folding stools, as for the races. I held the fury inside me. They probably had sandwiches and thermoses in their satchels as well. The day was clear and bright, an outrage. It was ten to eleven.
But when I got closer I saw that there was nothing festive about most of those filing in to fill the seats. They were refugees, grey-gulleted and swivel-eyed and hoping for protection. In the six days since Dora and Mathilde were discovered the newspapers had been full of ‘The Bloomsbury Deaths’. Two single foreign women poisoned in a bed together in the heart of London: it sold copies. Tabloid headlines screamed ‘Hitler Henchmen Among Us!’ More sober papers in the first days simply declared the deaths to be ‘in mysterious circumstances’. They quoted ‘friends who preferred to remain anonymous’ on the break-ins at the flat where nothing had been stolen, on the death threats in letters. The best reports made the link between Dora’s activities in helping uncover Wesemann’s Nazi connections in London and the dangers faced by outspoken refugees like Berthold Jacob and herself, outside the Reich.
Theories flew around. Like most theories, they were as much about the prejudices of those who held them as about the situation they described. There were ridiculous intimations that Dora and Mathilde had been ‘intimate friends’ (as if lesbians, by nature, court simultaneous assassination). According to others
, Dora had been deceived by an Englishman who had promised to marry her and so was driven to suicide, taking her friend with her. (Why is it that with women, some kink, some vulnerability of the sex, is always presumed to lie at the heart of things–as if they have no other life, no relevance as important as that which they have for us men? How she would have hated that theory.)
On the fourth day, rumours of a suicide note surfaced. I’d certainly not seen one in the flat, nor had Ruth. I didn’t take the talk seriously. But from then on the tabloids ran openly with a new theory of romantic suicide. The ‘unnamed friends’ started to waver, conceding that even if political intrigue could not be proved, the cause of death should still be attributed to the Hitlerites. Without their bloody regime the women would not be in exile, said the unnamed; they would not be in financial insecurity, frightened of having their visas cancelled and being sent back to Germany; they would not have been driven to this. To my relief most of the better papers remained steadfast, intimating foul play by ‘the Wesemann-Göring Gang’.
On the way in to the court on the tube I’d overheard two women discussing the ‘Bloomsbury murder-suicide pact’, along with the ‘high-strung nature’ of our race. They felt entitled to their salacious tut-tutting, as if someone else’s tragedy confirmed the deep pleasure of their unwagered lives. The truth had dislodged itself from any connection to Dora and become a matter for open debate, in which any idiot could express an opinion. And today, the meaning of her life would be toted up by a committee of jurors, on the basis of ‘reasonable probability’. Which standard, in my view, had long ceased to apply to us.
Members of the Wesemann-Göring Gang were no doubt here at the coroner’s court, mingling among the crowd, dressed as embassy officials, reporters, refugees. Come to gloat, to see the terrorising effect of their murder on the community of exiles. I saw Dora’s prominent friends–Lord Marley with his wife, Fenner Brockway pale as a plate, Sylvia Pankhurst, Churchill, and some other parliamentarians I recognised but couldn’t name. There were a lot of press–men in Homburgs juggling cameras with saucer-flashes.
I spotted Ruth on a bench at the front. She was holding her bag on her lap with both hands and staring rigidly ahead of her, flanked by strangers. I had a sudden need to sit with her. But there was no room, so I found a place four rows behind. I watched her straight back, the curls escaping beneath her green hat. Over the past few days she had come into focus for me in a way that made me ashamed not to have ever, really, seen her before.
After the ambulance had come to take them to the morgue, Constable Hall had escorted us both to the station, to be interviewed by his superiors. Pain is as selfish as love. It takes over the body and the mind and supplants them with itself: you become the element incarnate–there is no ‘you’ left to think of anyone else. But when I looked at Ruth walking beside me, my own suffering was dislodged. She was a picture of ruin, ashen and collapsed. I don’t think she noticed how she got from the flat to the police station; I don’t think she could imagine herself into any action at all, any future.
They took us into separate rooms. My interrogation room was small and bare, a fire-drill map on the back of the door. They–there were two of them–began by asking me what might have been making the women unhappy. I told them categorically that they were not unhappy. I said I knew for a fact that Dora had been in high spirits on Friday, though of course well aware that they might kill her. They asked me who ‘they’ were and I said the same people–agents of Hitler–who killed Lessing and Formis, who kidnapped Bertie.
The men went quiet for a moment, concentrated on taking notes. I saw that this story, so familiar to us as the basis for our current lives, sounded cloak-and-dagger outlandish to these ordinary, sensible policemen. I should have gone slower, back to the beginning to account for it. I should have gone back to the war, the revolution, the tender spirit of pacifism and freedom in Germany and the nationalist force that had now risen to kill it. When I looked at their young, blank faces I felt hopeless.
They asked, politely, whether my same theory applied to Mrs Wurm.
I didn’t like ‘theory’: I was giving them the solution to the crime on a plate. But I kept my cool. I told them Mathilde was a former Social Democrat MP, and that while I considered Dora to have been the main target, Mathilde was supporting the work her flatmate was doing, and would have had to be assassinated too, like so many wives or assistants of other targets who got in the bullet’s way. I told them that as late as Friday, Mathilde had been unflappable.
But it didn’t seem to matter what I said; their questions came to revolve more and more around the easy, feminine solution of suicide.
‘How do you account, sir,’ they asked, ‘for the room being locked from the inside? The key left on the shelf?’
At that point I could think of no other way to answer: I admitted to them my own area of shameful expertise. ‘Sirs,’ I said, ‘I am familiar with the black pull to death.’ My voice was rising but I got it under control. ‘And I can tell you that Dr Dora Fabian did not have it.’
They looked at me. Everything I had ever accomplished fell away. I was what they saw: a dark-looking foreigner, a Jew, a hysteric from a former enemy nation. They took neat notes and thanked me politely.
I waited over an hour for Ruth on a bench in the entrance of the police station. The rotating door spat out people going about their business as on an ordinary day. When she emerged from the other end of the hall her eyes seemed smaller, her lips grey. She lowered herself onto the bench by my side.
Ruth was taller than Dora, long-bodied, with legs ungainly as a foal’s. Her fingers were fine and tapered, no wedding band. Ruth was never the first person you would notice in a room, probably not even the second or third. But as she sat there trying to gather herself I felt her humility, her gentle watchfulness. She was a woman with no pretensions of any kind–to beauty or talent–no claim on public attention. This freed her, I believe, to have a true sense of another person. Which is a rare thing.
She started to rock forward and back, holding her arms across her body. ‘I told them Dora would never have left me to find her like that,’ she said. ‘She would never have done it without a note to me.’
‘No,’ I said. Nor to me, I thought. Ruth fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief.
‘They kept saying that the room was locked from the inside, that it seemed a pretty clear case. I told them she’d been investigating Hans’s activities in London for the Gestapo—’
Ruth broke off to put her hand to her face. ‘There is so much I didn’t see.’ She hunched over. When she spoke again her voice was a tight howl. ‘I could have warned her.’
I put my arm around her. ‘Dora didn’t see Hans turning. Neither did Bertie. You’re too hard on yourself.’
Her voice, when it came, was terrible. ‘I was closer.’
‘Sometimes,’ I stilled her flighty hands in mine, ‘that makes it more difficult.’
She started to weep. Her words came in a flurry. Something about seeing her husband at the embassy, about him engineering a practice run at kidnapping Bert at the French border. Then after the counter-trial he’d suddenly become happier, behaved like a man saved.
‘You can say it all at the inquest.’ I stood and held out my hand. ‘We should leave now.’
It was as if she didn’t hear me. Then she said something I didn’t catch. I bent to her, cupped my hand under her elbow. She turned her eyes to me, blurred with pain, and repeated, ‘It should have been me. With her.’
I didn’t think she would be able to get up. ‘You should stay with me and Christiane tonight.’
She shook her head. She would go back to the flat. They were not even treating it as a crime scene.
‘But the door is smashed open,’ I protested. ‘You’ll be scared.’
Her response came from some far place. ‘They won’t be back,’ she said. ‘I need to empty the cupboard. They will have photographed what they wanted, and left it now for Scotland Yard to
find and use against people.’ When she looked at me I saw something solidify behind her eyes, some decision quietly made. ‘Besides, we’ve done it before. A chair against the door.’
At the coroner’s court a jury had been empanelled in rows on the right-hand side of the room. When the coroner came in we all stood. S. Ingleby Oddie was a silver-haired man in his sixties with a narrow, lined face and dark circumflex eyebrows: a face set in permanent surprise, so as never to reveal any. He took his papers from a briefcase and laid them on the desk. In front of him was a table for counsel: Mathilde’s family had hired a barrister. No one represented Dora. Her mother, Else, I heard later, had been taken off to a camp, as they often did with relatives of their victims.
I watched the back of Ruth’s head. It occurred to me that perhaps the benches up the front had been reserved for witnesses. But surely I would be called, because I had been there to discover them, because I knew Dora so well, and because, well, I had so much to say.
Constable Hall was the first witness in the box. He had his helmet off; his pale-brown hair had been trimmed since Thursday and his ears were newly prominent, pinkish. I felt I’d had some intimate experience with the man as in a war, though I knew him not at all. PC Hall described forcing the door of the flat, and then the locked door of the bedroom. He said the women were lying on the bed, facing one another and holding hands. The covers were drawn up over them and they were ‘no longer alive’. He had taken a cup with a dark liquid in it from the bedside table as evidence, and called an ambulance. There was no disorder in the room, the constable said, though two cases lay half packed next to the wardrobe. The key to the room, he said, was placed ‘neatly’ on a shelf beside the inside of the door. I hated that he allowed himself the flourish of an adverb.