by Rosie Thomas
‘And don’t you mind everyone peering in at you?’
There were crowds of people waiting at the crossings now, patient-looking people in ugly dark clothes, and more people in the brown streets beyond. Grace reached out and twitched down the green waxed blind to cover the window. Clio put on her coat and sat on the lower berth, watching as Grace nested silver brushes and crystal bottles in her dressing case and snapped the locks. Her initials GEACB were embossed on the lid.
‘We’ll be in in a minute,’ Grace said, looking at her wristwatch. And as she spoke the train slowed again, and steam hissed through the cracks in the wood panelling to fill the compartment with the smell of damp bedclothes.
Anxious to see, Clio flicked the blind. She blinked at the smoky yellow light outside. The train slid into the Bahnhof Zoo and stopped under a great glass canopy. She could see over the heads of hurrying crowds to little green-painted iron kiosks stocked with newspapers, flowers and glinting bottles. There were posters everywhere, pasted on top of one another, torn and peeling beneath and patched with later additions, headed in thick black Gothic script that competed for her attention. She read slowly, piecing the demands together: ‘Action for a Pure Germany’, ‘Victory to the National Socialists’, ‘Gleichschaltung’ – what was that, Integration? The words were vaguely puzzling, as if they were not quite German but some dialect that she had never learnt in her Oxford classroom.
‘Plenty of porters, at least,’ Grace said.
They were lined up along the platform in high-crowned peaked caps, waiting with their trolleys. Grace rapped on the window and pointed to one man. A moment later he was at the compartment door, scooping their bags into his thick arms.
Clio stepped down on to the platform. City commuters jostled past her, men in homburgs and women in headscarves, berets, ratty furs, all indistinguishably muffled against the February cold. The air smelt of smoke, and frying onions, and sweat.
The porter rattled ahead of them, shoving a passage with his trolley. At the other end of the platform Clio noticed two loitering men in brown uniforms with thick leather belts. They wore red, white and black swastika armbands. Hitler’s SA.
A moment later Clio and Grace were in a taxi. ‘Adlon Hotel,’ Grace ordered briskly.
Clio was thinking, Grace doesn’t speak a word of German but she has still taken charge. She knows how to command things, while I just follow on behind.
She leant back in the seamed leather seat while the old Opel bumped over the tramlines. There were gaunt trees overhead and a street paved in square setts, black and shiny in the wet morning. She saw great buildings with dark domes and wreaths of classical detailing and black statues, and all the buildings and spires and heavy baroque ornamentation and even the streets themselves seemed to be made from the same cocoa-coloured stone, everywhere darkened with a layer of soot.
Grace asked, ‘Are you tired?’
Clio turned to her. Grace’s eyes were bright and she was sitting forward, her arm looped through the leather strap beside the seat to steady herself against the jolting. She is excited, Clio thought. All ready for whatever’s coming.
‘No, I’m not tired,’ Clio answered. She remembered the posters with their black, staring lettering and the SA men at the station. There was another group of them here, in a little cobbled Platz. They were laughing, and their breath vaporized in a cloud about their capped heads.
‘What is it exactly that you are going to do here, Grace?’
Grace held on to the leather strap and stared ahead, through the driver’s window. ‘Oh, there’s plenty to do,’ she said. ‘People to see.’
They came along a broad avenue that ran between a dense mass of trees. Ahead of them, Clio recognized the silhouetted arches of the Brandenburger Tor, the Brandenburg Gate. The taxi rolled beneath it, dwarfed by the immense pillars, and came to the Pariser Platz beyond, and the Adlon Hotel.
The Adlon was a high building with tall narrow windows in a wide, dignified street of similarly grandiose edifices. Uniformed flunkeys waited at the doors, and Clio and Grace were swept under a canopy on a tide of bowing and saluting into a marble foyer. They stood under the diamond waterfall of a vast chandelier to sign the hotel register. There was no whiff of onions or bodies here, only French perfume and hothouse flowers.
Clio was pleased to see her bedroom. There was a high white bed with a hard bolster, a feather bag in a white cover instead of blankets and sheets, and a large quantity of ornate, shiny and bulbous mahogany furniture. It reminded her faintly of one of the guest bedrooms of Leominster House in Belgrave Square, the difference being that this room led into its own bathroom. Here she found a vast iron bath, a basin as big as a washtub, and a lavatory with a dripping cistern so high up that she had to tilt her head to look at it.
Clio splashed water on her face and retraced her steps across the expanse of black and white tiles to the bedroom. She was hanging up her clothes in the cavernous wardrobe when she heard someone knock at the door.
She called, ‘Come in,’ without looking round, assuming that it must be Grace.
A man’s voice said, ‘Well, I call this the lap of luxury.’
‘Julius.’
Clio ran to him. She was filled with happiness at the sight of him, but there was a darker edge of sadness that cut into her as she hid her face against his shoulder. It was a long time since she had seen her twin and his thinness made him seem taller than she remembered. There was a new streak of grey in the dark hair over his temple. The last time she had seen him she had still been Miles’s wife, with her defined place, and everything had changed since then. There was a darker veil over her world, like the dun-coloured shadow that muffled the city outside the windows of the Adlon Hotel. She clung to Julius, foolishly smiling, aware of the vacuum that disappointment had made inside her.
‘I meant to come to the station,’ he said.
‘We didn’t expect you. I wasn’t expecting you here, not yet. Oh, Julius. I’m so happy to see you. You’ve no idea how happy. I’ve missed you so much in London. In London …’
She had been meaning to say something light, something to convey the sense of changing times, like The old crew has all sailed away, forsaken the Fitzroy and gone for ever, but the words failed her. She knew that the pubs and the restaurants would still be crowded and the gossip would buzz in Charlotte Street and Bloomsbury, but it was not for her. That was Miles’s territory, and she was still running from it. She could feel the empty spaces at her back.
There was a silence before she whispered, ‘There’s nothing in London. I couldn’t stay there any longer.’
Julius took her face between his hands. He looked at her and then he kissed her cheeks.
‘It’s all right. I’m here. You’ll be all right.’ With the same words he had comforted her when they were both little children, when some imaginary terror had threatened her and he had squared up in her defence. They stood still, both of them remembering the whispering huge grassy hollows of the garden in the Woodstock Road, and the immeasurable uncharted territory of Stretton’s park.
They glanced around them, comparing that recollection with this reality of fanciful yellowing plasterwork, these stuffy drapes framing the window and the bulging knobs and rigid carvings protruding from every piece of furniture. The distance between the two seemed so great, and the collapse of time that had protected them from that to this so inexplicable, that they could only laugh again. Laughter took possession of them and they shook with it, rocking in each other’s arms like the children they had recalled.
‘And so welcome to Berlin,’ Julius gasped. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dried her eyes. Clio did not know for sure whether she was shedding tears of mirth or otherwise.
‘I’m glad to be here,’ she told him, truthfully.
He nodded, smiling at her, the old Julius. Then he let go of her and walked slowly across to the window. He stood looking down into Pariser Platz.
‘There is a lot to talk about,�
�� he said.
‘Shall we go and have a drink somewhere?’ Clio asked.
She had written to Julius about Miles, but she had only told him the bare details. She had dreaded the recital of the rest. Yet now that she was here, and after their laughter, she felt her repugnance begin to fade. Her marriage was in the past, it belonged in a place she no longer occupied. There were other things: her brother, the city she had glimpsed from the train window. She felt her curiosity begin to revive, the beginnings of appetite when she had thought that she would never feel hungry for experience again.
Julius was right. There was a lot to talk about. She understood that he meant Germany and what was happening here and now. The weight of her own concerns lifted from her shoulders.
‘A drink, at this time of the morning?’ he smiled at her.
‘I’m thoroughly disorientated. Breakfast, then. I haven’t had any yet.’
‘Not in this place.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll tell you, you’ll understand why, but not now. There’s a little café I go to sometimes, a couple of streets from here.’
‘Let’s go there, then.’
Clio put on her coat, but Julius hesitated. They hadn’t mentioned Grace, and the silent omission was like a false note ringing between them.
He was afraid to betray his eagerness. The thought that she was here, somewhere close at hand, made him shiver as if he had a fever. The sight of Clio after so many months’ separation sharpened all his senses for Grace. Clio did not look as much like her as she once had done, but the resemblance was still striking enough. It was not quite a reflection but an echo, and it intensified his longing for the reality.
‘Julius?’ Clio said softly.
But she was standing at the door, and she heard the whisper of footsteps on the other side before the knock came. There was nothing to do but open it. Grace stood there with her hand still raised. She was smiling, her head on one side, with colour in her cheeks and the light of anticipation in her eyes.
‘Julius, how wonderful.’
He stepped forward to her, his hands on her arms, kissed her warm cheek.
Clio watched. I have lost him, she thought. The words sprang into her head from nowhere.
She was witnessing the affectionate greeting of cousins, there was nothing more to see in the kiss than that. They had already separated, smiling, and Grace was fingering the rows of pearls around her smooth throat as she looked around the hotel room. But Clio’s eyes were fixed on Julius. His longing seemed so intense that there was something craven in it. It was as if he wanted to kneel in front of Grace and lift her foot in its crocodile-skin shoe and press his mouth against the silky instep.
‘We were just going out, for some breakfast,’ Clio said in a flat voice.
‘What a marvellous idea. I’m starving hungry. But why can’t we just go downstairs?’
‘Julius says not.’
We have already conferred, before you came, so there.
Clio could hear the retort in her own voice from years ago, with all the hard-won maturity instantly thinned out of it. It was like when they were children … I was here first, he’s my brother. The glint of her optimism faded and left her dull again. The very pettiness of her response seemed dim compared with the incandescence of Julius’s devotion.
Grace was apparently deaf and blind. ‘Why not, Julius?’ she demanded cheerfully. ‘This is the Adlon, isn’t it? I thought it was the best place in Berlin.’
‘So it is. And frequented by the highest class of hoodlum. SA, SS, informers, top Nazis of all kinds. The Führer himself is seen here when he is in Berlin.’
Grace picked delicately at her ropes of pearls. ‘Hoodlums? But you say the Führer …’
‘Exactly so. I would prefer not to drink my coffee in their midst.’
She gave the smallest shrug. ‘We shall have to submit to your superior local knowledge, Clio, shan’t we? But I should have thought that whatever is good enough for the Chancellor of Germany ought to be good enough for us.’
Julius paused for a moment. Then he repeated very softly, ‘There is a lot to talk about.’
Clio did not think that Grace heard him. She gave no sign of having done so.
They descended to the ground floor in the ornate gold lift cage and crossed the marble foyer. A group of men in uniforms emblazoned with red and black swastika badges were being ushered in, to be greeted by more uniforms, and heels clicking on the shiny floor. They raised their arms in the Nazi salute.
Heil Hitler.
Heil Hitler.
Grace and Julius and Clio were caught up as they tried to pass by. The officers glanced at them, and then stared at Grace. Her red lips and her furs and her cool expression were immediately striking.
Julius slipped aside. He seemed to melt away in the direction of the great doors that led out to the street. Clio followed him, but no one was looking at her.
The officers clicked their heels and bowed to Grace. ‘Heil Hitler.’
She lifted her arm and held it, palm downwards and fingertips outstretched. ‘Heil Hitler,’ she responded courteously.
Clio and Julius were waiting for her in the street. Julius said nothing but Grace squared herself in front of him.
‘You don’t think I should have done that, do you?’
‘No. I don’t think you should give the Nazi salute.’
‘Listen, Julius. I am an elected member of the British Government. This is not an official visit, but I still have a specific part to play. I’m here to observe, and to report where I can. I have to remember that I am a guest, and this is their country.’
It was intensely cold. An icy wind blew the sodden remains of torn pamphlets and handbills around their ankles. Clio could see clearly in Julius’s face the conflict between surprised distaste and the old, unquestioning devotion. She did not have any doubt which would win out.
Julius said fiercely, ‘Grace, you can’t have any idea what fascism really means or you wouldn’t salute it. These people are brutal, and corrupt. They stand for the very opposite of democracy and freedom. Their rule is fear.’
Grace’s eyes were bright, and her cheeks glowed in the cold air. ‘Perhaps their instruments are brutal, I don’t know. It is an unfortunate truth that powerful movements attract violence, at the lowest level. I do know that great political advances are rarely achieved without some social upheaval, even suffering. I also believe that Herr Hitler might be capable of a political and economic progression that will affect us all, not just Germany. I have come to see for myself, at first hand. That’s all.’
Clio saw how the scent of debate fired Grace. She seemed to grow brighter and stronger with the reminder of it. Clio also knew her cousin’s determination and tenacity. She would defend her standpoint to the last, even if the reasoning beneath it was crumbling away.
Julius hesitated. He knew Grace too. Then he rubbed his mouth slowly with the back of his hand. ‘It’s too cold to stand here in the street,’ he said at length.
He took Grace’s arm in his, and held out the other to Clio. They began to walk, their heads ducked against the wind.
Grace shrugged off Julius’s rebuke, and she talked cheerfully about the news from London. They passed a dozen cafés, but Julius ignored them all. Clio tried to read the news placards and political posters as they passed them. There was one poster that faced her everywhere. It read ‘Hitler – Arbeit und Brot.’ Work and Bread. The syllables began to beat a refrain in her head. She counted the different uniforms that thronged the streets, and attempted to look into the faces of the ordinary people. It struck her that no one would look straight at anyone else. The Berliners hurried past with their eyes turned away, a shabby and derelict-looking flood of humanity.
They came into a narrow street lined with tall thin houses. Three steps led down from each dingy front door straight on to the littered road. The Café Josef was at the far end. It was no more than a window obscured by a thick lacework curtain, let into
a flat green-painted façade.
Grace looked curiously at it. ‘Do you live near here?’ she asked Julius.
‘Not far away.’ He pushed open the door for them and an old-fashioned bell at the end of a spring pealed over their heads.
It was warm inside, steamy with warmth. The women saw a line of rickety tables set around with bentwood chairs, smoke-yellowed walls hung with photographs, a floor of bare wooden boards, and a cramped bar at the far end laden with unfamiliar bottles. A handful of customers sat at the tables. These Berliners did look. Every one of them turned to see who the newcomers were.
‘Julius!’ someone called in greeting. Stares gave way to smiles and nods, and then curious but not unfriendly glances at the two women. Clearly, if they were with Julius then they were accepted. He led them to a table and they sat down.
Clio looked around her. A sense of something familiar about the Café Josef tugged at her until she realized that it reminded her of the Eiffel Tower as it had been when she had first visited it, long ago, with Pilgrim and Grace at the time of The Janus Face. There was no decorative resemblance; the Eiffel was luxurious to the point of decadence compared with this bare room. The similarity was in the atmosphere. This was a place frequented by people with a common outlook. There would be no outsiders here. If inimical strangers did happen on the café by chance, they would not be given a warm enough welcome to make them eager to come back again.
A swarthy, grubby-looking man wrapped in a blue apron appeared from behind the bar. He slapped Julius on the back. ‘Good day, my friend,’ he said in heavily accented English.
‘Hello, Josef.’
Clio smiled involuntarily at the man. The café proprietor even looked like an unshaven, dishevelled version of old Stulik.
‘Josef, may I introduce my twin sister? Mrs Lennox. And my cousin, Lady Grace Brock. Clio, Grace, this is my friend Josef Frankel.’
Josef took their hands, in turn, and bowed low over them. ‘Madam, my lady, I am delighted to make your acquaintance.’
