House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  The officer stared at him with dubious hostility. ‘I know nothing of French prisoners.’

  Henri shook his head, and regretted it. His vision was blurred, and bloody rain drifted in the corner of his left eye. ‘No, German officers.’ He wished he could recall which division.

  The Oberleutnant studied Henri with more interest.

  He had doubtless been told where his cousins were serving – Baron Jacques sent the German family messages via Clement in Switzerland. Henri tried to remember something about them, anything. Edgar was moral and clever. He was a chess player to rival Clement, lacking only his cousin’s fanaticism. Such a mind must be useful to the German staff.

  ‘Edgar Goldbaum is a staff officer. At Spa,’ he added, feeling that it was likely to be true.

  The Oberleutnant summoned a soldier. ‘Gefreiter, send a message up to division headquarters that we have a French prisoner. Henri Goldbaum. Possibly a spy.’

  Henri closed his eyes. He wondered if they would shoot him.

  The Oberleutnant, apparently sensing his thoughts, cleared his throat and said, ‘We don’t shoot spies. We hang them.’

  He offered Henri a cigarette. Although he rarely smoked, Henri accepted it and, as the Oberleutnant struck a match, wondered whether his driver had reached Paris. The cook at the Esther Château would be preparing a light luncheon of venison and endive salad for Henri and the Finance Minister. He had ordered a chocolate-and-clementine mousse for dessert – the minister’s favourite – to soften unhappy tidings regarding the latest offering of government bonds, along with a twenty-year-old bottle of Muscat, a glorious honeyed amber. He wondered when the minister would realise that his host was not coming, and whether he would still open the Muscat.

  For the first few days they watched him with hostile suspicion, but Henri was polite and solicitous and had a seemingly endless supply of increasingly filthy jokes. And after all, he pointed out, where could he run? The only question, if he attempted an escape across no-man’s-land, was who would shoot him first: the Germans or the British. Deciding that he posed little risk, the company relaxed, mostly ignoring him.

  The Gunners liked to play cards or gamble – on anything and everything: flea-bites on a right leg; the number of corpses they could count from a vantage point; who would be next to join them, and by what injury. Henri helped to calculate the odds, and kept the pool. ‘We can trust him,’ said Helmut, the leader of the Gunners. ‘After all, if he cheats, we shoot him.’ Henri agreed that this indeed was a worthy incentive.

  It was the incessant noise that he couldn’t bear. His ears rang even during the brief times the bombardment stopped. He heard it in his dreams and suspected that, should he ever be freed, he would hear it always, as though his very thoughts had been bombed.

  Every day, at least twice, he asked Stefan, the Oberleutnant, or Frank, another junior officer, ‘When am I to be sent to the prisoner-of-war camp?’ But there was never an answer, only a shrug. Henri realised that by this stage of the war a lone Frenchman lost in a German trench was of very little interest to anyone.

  On the eighth day of his capture, Stefan and Helmut yelled at Henri to get moving. They were taking him to battalion headquarters in the valley. Henri scrambled upright and helplessly combed his fingers through his hair. He caught a glimpse of himself on the mirrored base of a mess-tin and, wincing, realised that he looked like exactly what he was: a dishevelled, hungry prisoner-of-war, red-eyed and unshaven. Although Helmut and Stefan had donned their helmets with some care, no one thought to lend him one. But then, Henri supposed, a stray sniper bullet through his skull would save the Germans some inconvenience.

  They walked quickly and low, aware that the British front line was less than a hundred metres from their own. Helmut swore that sometimes at night, during a lull, he could hear the snores of the British Tommies. The reserve section was six hundred metres behind the front through the skeleton of a wood, the pine trees white and blasted, while here and there bodies of the fallen lay amongst the shell holes. Revolted, Henri did his best not to look. He tried not to think of Claire. Bodies are alike in death, they slouch back into the dirt and earth, wet and squalid. He blinked and for a moment saw her lying in her pale nightdress propped against a tree, her belly swollen.

  The wood was in a valley, and beyond the ruins of the trees, where the heaviest of the fighting had been, soldiers had constructed a garden. They had dragged the tops of blasted pines and replaced them in the soil. Primroses had been dug up and replanted in clusters of buttered yellow, the smooth glow against the grey startling in its beauty. There were drifts of snowdrops and here and there a hawthorn, the first hints of blossom starting to unfurl like tiny hands. A small stream wound its way through the middle and someone had built a series of wooden dams and toy watermills, so that it appeared as if a child’s miniature pleasure garden had been conjured amid the chaos a hundred metres beyond. Even in war, it seemed, men needed a garden.

  They continued for a kilometre to battalion headquarters in the ruins of a château. Stefan gave their names to the sentry on duty. The sentry returned with another officer, this time with the scarlet pips of general staff, who led them into the principal salon of the manor, where half a dozen officers sat around tables in their coats and scarfs, drinking coffee and conducting earnest discussions in low tones. A fire burned feebly in the grate. Henri saw that the glass in the windows had all been blown out and had been boarded up to keep out the draught. He wondered if he was here to be tried and shot and, if so, how his father would discover the news.

  ‘Henri?’

  He turned and, with a maelstrom of relief, saw Edgar Goldbaum. His cousin looked greyer and drawn. If he still wore his yarmulke, it was hidden beneath his Leutnant’s hat. Henri stepped forward to embrace him, but, observing Edgar give a tiny shake of his head, faltered and stopped short.

  ‘Edgar! You truly are a sight for sore eyes,’ he said in French.

  ‘You have been treated well?’ said Edgar, loudly and in German.

  ‘With great kindness,’ said Henri, changing to German, with a glance at Stefan, who relaxed a little.

  ‘Come,’ said Edgar, ‘sit. Have coffee. They told me you had been captured.’

  ‘Yes. It was unfortunate. Next time I’m offered a ride in a plane, I shall refuse and take the car. Even a bicycle.’

  ‘A bicycle to Paris would take some time.’

  ‘Yes, but at least I’d get there. Well, whatever happens one way or another, I suppose the Goldbaums will be on the winning side,’ he said.

  ‘And the losing one,’ replied Edgar, his voice sharp.

  They perched opposite one another on a pair of dilapidated sofas, matching in stripes and rosettes of vivid mould. Henri accepted the weak and bitter coffee with a gratitude he would not have recognised little more than a week ago. They stirred their coffee and sipped, grateful for something to do with their hands, awkward and uncertain what to say, aware that everyone in the room was listening avidly while pretending not to. The two men studied one another surreptitiously, conscious of the absurdity of their position.

  Henri couldn’t help thinking of the last time they had met, at the Esther Château, for what had turned out to be the last gathering of the family. He hardly remembered speaking with Edgar. He found him tedious and mercurial and he did not drink – a grave black mark with Henri in those days. And then Claire had died and he remembered little else about the gathering. He realised Edgar was surveying him with concern.

  ‘I am sorry that there is so little I can do for you,’ said Edgar. ‘I am not sure that we will even be permitted to meet again. It took some pulling of strings to arrange even this. I’m only a Leutnant, after all.’

  Henri leaned forward and said quietly, ‘You are the partner of one of the largest banks in Berlin. Why are you only a Leutnant? Surely you ought to be a Captain or an Oberleutnant at the least?’

  Edgar gave a rueful smile. ‘I’m a Jew. I’m considered lucky to be an officer a
t all.’

  He gave an anxious glance around the room, checking that he had not been overheard.

  Henri gave a sad laugh. ‘Every Tuesday, as a boy, I would take tea with my grandmother, who gave me macaroons and taught me the conversational niceties of every social occasion I might encounter. Alas, this once I find myself unprepared.’

  Edgar nodded but said nothing. Henri smiled inwardly; his cousin was notoriously parsimonious and did not like even to waste words.

  ‘Will you tell my father I am alive? And let him know if anything happens?’

  ‘It is still so cold. Almost as cold as Switzerland,’ said Edgar.

  Henri understood. Edgar would send a message to Clement, and Clement would pass it to Jacques. Let it simply be that he had been captured, and nothing worse.

  They said goodbye with an affection and regret that previously neither would have thought possible.

  HAMPSHIRE, FEBRUARY

  Greta had longed for Albert for months, imagining ghastly deaths and worrying that he’d never meet his son. He insisted on flying himself home in his wretched plane – he claimed for convenience, but Greta suspected it was to even up the odds of dying. Albert didn’t like to feel he was shirking risk, however pointless. Yet from the moment he returned home again this time for a fortnight’s leave and she had the joy of him in her arms, he irritated her. Since the start of the war he had been away so long and so often that they had rebuilt the family without him, like a house losing a wall in a storm and repaired in a different shape.

  But Albert expected everything to alter with his arrival, to revert to how it used to be. He wanted Greta to take coffee with him in the snug, as had been their habit, and he did not wish to discover her amongst the women in the servants’ hall, her grimy gardening apron still fastened about her waist, Benjamin asleep on her lap with a confetti of biscuit crumbs in his hair, while the room rang with unruly laughter. To make the outrage worse, all the women turned round to stare at him when he entered, as though it was he who was the intruder. He wished the world to have paused, waited for his return like statues in a children’s game of grandmother’s footsteps. But they had crept forward when he wasn’t looking. He found himself irrationally put out that Celia had grown; he longed to take her into his arms and chide her for not staying as she was, for having lost the marshmallow pudge around her wrists and cheeks. War had torn from him lumps of her childhood and he resented it.

  Albert was pleased with his son, spending whole half-hours with Benjamin on his knee in his study, reading him aloud columns from the Times with the news from France, but found himself perfectly content to hand him back to Greta, confessing that until Benjamin could bring him ladybirds and Red Admirals from the garden like his clever Celia, he didn’t have much use for him.

  ‘But he’s so beautiful,’ objected Greta.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Albert, not looking up from his paper. ‘A finer fellow never existed. But he’s not interesting. Not yet.’

  Greta, while knowing intellectually that Albert was correct, nonetheless took offence on Benjamin’s behalf.

  ‘I don’t want to go to London,’ said Greta, stubbornly.

  ‘It will do you good,’ said Albert.

  She had repeatedly remonstrated against travelling, but Albert insisted. The London house had been given over to a hospital for the wounded, so they were to take a suite at the Savoy, while Benjamin and Celia remained at home in the nursery. Greta fretted over leaving Benjamin, but Nanny assured her that he would be perfectly well. A wet-nurse would walk up from the village – Albert refused to believe that the new artificial milk formula was an improvement on nature. Greta, however, refused to believe that a hired nipple belonging to a village drudge would be as nourishing as a mother’s own milk, but here again Albert objected. He remembered a time in the county when red-headed wet-nurses could not find work, their milk being feared as pap of the devil. He was impatient with such superstition and would not tolerate it in his wife. Greta tried to explain that her reluctance was not superstition (she objected to fair, dark and red-headed wet-nurses equally), but simply due to her desire to nurse her baby herself. The thought of Benjamin attached to another woman’s breast filled her with a kind of revulsion, and a surge of jealousy so sharp that she felt it inside her as a physical pain.

  For his part, as he watched his wife slice open an invitation card with a silver knife using considerably more force than the task required, Albert was glad he had returned home on leave. It was clear to him that his parents were quite unable to govern his wife. He adored Greta, and mostly her continental eccentricities amused and endeared her to him, but in such times as these, limits must be set. He was gratified that Greta took such an interest in the children, but the interest had to be moderated by her obligations to her other duties. A few nights in town would remind her of her role as a wife. Her protests bewildered him. She could not remain tied to the infant for six months or a year – she was a Goldbaum, not a milking cow. She would nurse Benjamin when she was at home and when it was convenient to her. He did not acknowledge that it was rather when it was convenient to him.

  The suite at the Savoy was the one Greta had stayed in for the days before her wedding, and she half-wondered whether her old resentment had seeped into the fabric of the room and now released itself into the air like ether, because she prickled with cold fury towards her husband. She wanted to be in her own home with her children, the hospital and the Hathaway gardening women – those were her true concerns, not the interests that Albert demanded of her. Anna had laid out her evening dress, and when Greta saw the butterfly choker gleaming in its box on the dresser, she shoved it under a pillow. She would not wear it. She took a hot lavender bath, expressing milk into the water, wondering if Cleopatra’s biographers had it all wrong, and it was not asses’ milk in which she bathed, but her own.

  After she had dressed, Albert came to collect her from her room, watching her from the doorway. She continued the theatre of her toilet, spraying perfume and adjusting the rubies in her ears, each as small and round as a drop of blood. She saw him behind her in the mirror, in his splendid dress uniform sporting the red tabs of the general staff. It might have been tailored to the perfect fit, but to Greta it seemed that he was playing dress-up. Albert was not a soldier, despite appearances to the contrary.

  ‘You have roses in your cheeks. Shall I fasten your necklace?’ he asked.

  Greta gestured to a box on the dresser. Albert opened it.

  ‘Where is the butterfly?’

  ‘It’s too much for a Tuesday night,’ she said roughly, meaning to wound him. ‘I wouldn’t want to seem vulgar.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said with a note of regret, as though something he’d longed for had not come to pass, and instantly she felt guilty. It was not Albert’s fault that he had disrupted things, and she was glad to see him. For an awful moment she thought she might cry, a muddled rush of tears and gloom that pounced on her most days. She turned to him, her eyes wide with love and unfallen tears, and smiled.

  ‘I really am glad you’re home.’

  He leaned forward and, brushing a strand of hair from her neck, kissed a line from her ear to her throat, tickling her. He fastened the necklace, the diamonds as clear and smooth as raindrops.

  ‘Come on, darling, it will be pleasant to be in town and to have nothing to do for a few days but amuse ourselves,’ said Albert. ‘Benjamin will be just as content with Nanny. He won’t even know the difference.’

  Her anger returned in an instant like the lighting of a lamp.

  ‘We mustn’t be late,’ she said, and stood abruptly.

  ‘Very well,’ said Albert, a little surprised. Greta rarely cared about punctuality. He offered her his arm, but she did not take it.

  The palm-filled dining room of the Savoy Grill was brimming with officers on leave, desperate to listen to the band play ragtime and drink gin cocktails till they were drunk. Sailing alongside them, like dreadnoughts amongst fishin
g boats, were the regular patrons of the Savoy, generals and brigadiers with the red pips of the general staff, denoting both seniority and safety. These, Albert whispered to Greta, were the old chaps who retired after the Boer War and who couldn’t quite believe their luck in enjoying one last jolly war, even if they were missing out on all the fun at the front and the chance to bag a few Boches.

  Greta and Albert sat at their table sipping champagne, while every few minutes – or so it seemed to Greta – Albert rose to his feet to salute one man or another.

  ‘Goodness, it’s rather ridiculous, isn’t it? Can’t we go somewhere else tomorrow, where you’ll be less of a Jack-in-the-box?’ she complained.

  Albert shrugged. ‘It’s all right. It’s the poor buggers back from the front that I feel sorry for. Every time one of them salutes me, I feel more of a fraud than ever.’

  Struck by his confidence, Greta put out her hand to take Albert’s and then, deciding she was still too cross, started to withdraw without touching him.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he said, seizing her hand and holding it fast and stroking her knuckles through her glove.

  ‘You despise public affection, Albert.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard there’s a war on?’

  Greta relented and gave a small smile. The chandeliers were reflected into infinity in the silvered mirrors, and cigarette smoke hung like a veil of evening mist. Waiters in long white aprons hurried between tables bedecked with towering vases of bird-of-paradise, squeezing between the palm fronds. The noise of the dining room was like a parrot’s cage, and the whirling women in their feathers and finery were reminiscent of the preening birds. Greta saw many faces that she recognised, but no one came to speak to them.

  ‘Isn’t that Lady Dorchester?’ asked Albert.

  Greta looked. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘She’s been to stay with us more than half a dozen times, but she doesn’t come over?’