The Diplomat's Wife

by Michael Ridpath

  He stood up to try to catch the guy’s eye, but he had turned and was pushing his way through the crush to the street. Phil considered following him, but he had a beer on its way.

  The waitress weaved her way expertly through the crowd towards him with his beer when a small body barrelled into her, knocking the glass to the floor. It shattered and the noise level in the bar momentarily dropped as the crowd turned to look.

  ‘Scheisse!’

  A slight girl with straggly blond hair started to apologize to the waitress in bad French. The waitress was not impressed as she left to get a cloth and a dustpan and brush. The girl turned to Phil and apologized too. When the waitress reappeared the girl helped her clear up.

  ‘Do you want another beer?’ she asked Phil in heavily accented French.

  ‘No, that’s OK,’ Phil replied in German, having identified her expletive.

  ‘You speak German? I owe you another one. I can’t believe how stupid I am. You must take it.’

  The waitress seemed not only to agree with the German girl about her stupidity, but also to think it was the girl’s duty to buy Phil a replacement beer, so he accepted.

  The girl sat on the empty stool at Phil’s small table. She was holding her own glass of wine. She was really very pretty – small, thin, with bright blue eyes and a pointed chin, strands of hair that was so light it was almost white hanging down against her cheeks. She continued apologizing in German. She seemed to Phil to be agitated, and more than just from spilling his drink.

  The waitress returned with another Stella Artois, and Phil raised it to the girl. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ the girl said.

  ‘No. Not at all. Aren’t you with other people?’

  ‘I was,’ said the girl darkly. ‘One other person.’

  ‘Oh. My name is Phil, by the way.’

  ‘Heike,’ said the girl. But she barely looked at him. She seemed preoccupied.

  Phil sipped his beer. The girl, Heike, looked seriously upset and not really in a mood to talk to him. She had taken the chair because it was one of the only spare seats in the bar. Phil thought about giving her her privacy.

  But she was very attractive.

  ‘You look like you are having a bad evening,’ he said in German.

  At first he thought she was going to ignore him. Then she turned to him and smiled. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My moron of a boyfriend. Turns out he slept with my best friend from university.’

  ‘He just told you that?’

  ‘He just admitted it. I made him tell me. And then I told him to piss off.’

  ‘Just now?’

  ‘Just now. That’s why I barged into that waitress and spilled your beer. I was too upset to watch where I was going.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Phil. And he meant it. The girl looked seriously unhappy, the corners of her mouth pointed down and she seemed near to tears.

  She drained her glass, and looked out at the street. She turned to Phil. ‘Do you mind if I stay here a bit? I told my boyfriend to make sure he was out of our hotel room by the time I got back. I need to give him a bit of time.’

  ‘No. Of course not. Can I buy you another drink?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I’ll get it.’

  ‘We’ll split it.’ Phil somehow got the waitress’s attention.

  ‘You’re English?’ Heike said.

  ‘You can tell?’

  ‘You have the accent. But you speak good German.’

  She took out a pack of cigarettes and offered Phil one. He accepted – he barely ever smoked, it seemed ridiculous to him to waste fifty pence on twenty cigarettes, but he grabbed the opportunity to seem that little bit older, that little bit cooler, than he was.

  ‘Are you here alone?’ she asked. ‘Or have you just dumped your own girlfriend?’

  Phil laughed. He was about to claim that he was in his second year at Edinburgh and he was hitch-hiking around Europe by himself, when he thought better of it. She seemed like a nice girl, she’d had a bad evening and she would be a lot easier to talk to if he didn’t lie or try to make out he was someone he wasn’t. No more cigarettes.

  ‘I’m driving my grandmother around Europe,’ he said. ‘She’s back at the hotel, but she let me out for the evening.’

  This went down well. ‘Oh, I’d love to drive my Oma around. What a great idea! She is this tiny little old lady with the sweetest kitten. She bakes the most delicious cakes for me.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound much like mine,’ said Phil. ‘She’s not even really old, and she’s a little scary and a little strange.’

  ‘But you like her,’ said Heike. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘I do like her,’ said Phil. He felt a lump in his throat. ‘She told me yesterday she is going to die. She has a . . .’ He searched for the word and couldn’t find it. ‘A stone in her brain.’

  ‘Hirntumor?’ Heike touched his sleeve. ‘I am sorry. That puts losing my shithead boyfriend into perspective. I should be happy he’s gone. I am happy he’s gone.’ She said the last words defiantly and drank more of her wine. ‘This is good stuff,’ she said. ‘Shall we get a bottle?’

  So they bought a bottle. And drank it. Heike was good company. Phil soon admitted that he had just finished school, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She came from Braunschweig and was at university studying engineering, but she had read Günter Grass, and was happy to talk to Phil about it. She even laughed at his jokes. Phil found the German coming easily once he warmed up, and with the lubrication of a bit of alcohol.

  They bought a second bottle. By this time Heike was becoming quite drunk, and Phil’s German was slurring. There must have been a moment when drink-fuelled good humour became sloppy incoherence, but it took a while for Phil to notice it. Eventually, he did, and he suggested that they leave.

  ‘I am seriously drunk,’ Heike said deliberately. ‘Shitfaced. But at least Jürgen will have cleared out of my hotel room by now. Thank you for entertaining me, Phil.’

  ‘Are you going to be all right getting back to your hotel?’

  Heike stood in front of Phil on the street, swaying. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Here, I’ll take you back.’

  It was a twenty-minute walk to Heike’s one-star hotel; Heike leaned into him the whole way. They found it eventually. Phil considered trying to ask himself in, but decided in a moment of lucidity that one way or other it would screw up what had been a great evening.

  ‘Do you want to meet up again tomorrow night?’ he suggested. ‘Same place? Eight thirty?’

  Heike looked up at him and frowned. Then she smiled. ‘OK,’ she said, and pushed herself through the hotel entrance.

  It took Phil three-quarters of an hour to walk back to the Ritz through the streets of Paris, but he grinned all the way.

  Chapter 15

  Five and a half hours later, Phil’s travelling alarm clock wrested him out of a tumbling sleep. He rolled out of bed, dragged on some clothes and made his way down to breakfast in the Ritz’s grand dining room, with its confusing ceiling of blue sky and clouds.

  Emma was waiting for him, perusing The Times over a pot of tea.

  ‘Philip! You look dreadful.’

  ‘I love you too, Grams. Is there any coffee?’

  Emma smiled. ‘I take it you enjoyed yourself last night?’

  Despite the piston engine in his head, Phil responded with a smile of his own. ‘I did.’

  ‘I trust you didn’t get yourself into that state alone?’

  ‘No. I, um, I met someone.’

  A broad grin from his grandmother. ‘I’m very pleased to hear it. What’s her name?’

  ‘Heike.’

  ‘German?’

  ‘Yeah. From Brunswick.’

  ‘And did you speak to her in German?’

  ‘I did,’ said Phil proudly.

  ‘Good for you.’

  Emma refilled her cup of
tea, and Phil attacked the chocolate croissants. His stomach demanded food urgently.

  ‘Grams, I hope you don’t mind. I said I’d meet her again this evening. At half past eight. Is that OK? Do we have anything planned for tonight?’

  ‘We do, as a matter of fact,’ said Emma. But then, seeing Phil’s disappointment, she continued, ‘But we’ll get you wherever you are going in time.’

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  After breakfast they retraced Phil’s journey of the previous evening, taking the Métro to Saint-Michel. Emma led Phil down towards the river and an old bookshop facing the back of Notre-Dame Cathedral, the words ‘Shakespeare and Company’ painted on a yellow board above its door.

  They entered a warren of little rooms, random steps up and down, musty old sofas, and books, hundreds, maybe thousands of books lining the walls from floor to ceiling. There was a profound smell of dust. The till at the front door was presided over by a middle-aged man with a pointed grey beard reading a novel by Armistead Maupin. Various ‘customers’, mostly young, lounged about reading the stock. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone to actually buy anything.

  ‘Pick something out you’d like,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  Phil and she split up and wandered around the shelves. Phil was reluctant to buy anything, since he still had over a thousand pages of War and Peace to go, but Emma arrived at his elbow clutching Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

  ‘I’ll get you this,’ she said. ‘Just in case you get an idea in your head to join the army. Or the air force.’

  ‘I’ll join the air force if I want, Grams,’ Phil said, partly to wind her up, partly because he didn’t like being bossed about even by his grandmother, and partly because although he knew he would never become a jet fighter pilot, just as he knew he would never play centre forward for England, he didn’t want to rule the possibility out.

  ‘Of course you will, dear,’ said Emma. ‘Just read this book first.’

  With difficulty, she roused the bloke at the till to take her money for Catch-22 and a book about linguistics by a man called Noam Chomsky. Or was Noam a woman’s name?

  They left the shop, with Phil carrying the books.

  ‘I loved Shakespeare and Company when I was here in the thirties,’ Emma said. ‘But that’s not the original shop.’

  ‘It doesn’t exactly look new,’ Phil said.

  ‘It doesn’t, does it? It has its charm, but the original location was on Rue de l’Odéon. I’ll show you.’

  It was about a fifteen-minute walk. Normally Emma’s long legs would have eaten up the distance with no difficulty, but she started veering a little to the right as they walked, and so she threaded her arm through his. A worrying sign of the insidious damage being done to her brain.

  The Rue de l’Odéon was a short, straight street that led gently uphill from the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain towards the classical columns of the Odéon theatre. They stopped outside Number 12, a yellow stone house with a small wrought-iron balcony above the front door.

  ‘This used to be Shakespeare and Company. It was run by an American woman named Sylvia Beach. I spent a lot of time here, and also at the French bookshop that used to be right opposite. Sylvia was famous by the time I got to Paris. She had published James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s, and the likes of Ernest Hemingway used to drop by there. And Gertrude Stein. But by the 1930s the shop was in trouble, and I actually helped bail her out financially. All kinds of writers, French and British as well as American, did readings. I loved it. And I spent a lot of money here.’

  They walked back down the hill to the roaring traffic of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and headed towards the tall church of that name.

  ‘The Deux Magots?’ Phil said spotting a large café opposite. ‘Isn’t that where Jean-Paul Sartre used to go?’

  ‘That’s right. And the café opposite, where we are going for a cup of coffee now.’

  It was the Café de Flore. They took a seat outside on the pavement, watching the cars hurl themselves down the boulevard.

  ‘Back in the thirties, these places were a hotbed of socialism. In those days artists and writers really did wear berets and smoke Gauloises cigarettes and argue about philosophy or dialectic materialism. It was not exactly forbidden, but it was certainly frowned upon, for diplomats to be seen in places like this, but I used to stop here for a petit café after visiting Shakespeare and Co.’

  Phil looked around. There were plenty of tourists like him and Emma. There were a few well-dressed, well-heeled Frenchmen and -women. But Phil was pleased to spot an immensely wrinkled old man reading Libération with a fag end of ash drooping precariously from his cigarette, a little glass of red wine at his elbow.

  ‘I bet that bloke was here back then,’ Phil said.

  ‘Probably.’ Emma grinned. ‘This is where I met Freddie and Dick.’ Her smile disappeared. ‘And where I learned something that destroyed my life in Paris.’

  Chapter 16

  May 1936, Paris

  I WAS A little late to the Café de Flore. Dick had telephoned me and suggested that I join him and Freddie there at nine o’clock. I was beginning to appreciate and abide by Parisians’ tendency to add a petit quart d’heure to any meeting time, and decided to add an extra quarter-hour on top of that to be on the safe side. I had dined alone at home – Roland was on his way back from a day of meetings with ship-owners in Le Havre.

  Freddie was already there, as was Dick, but they had somehow inveigled themselves on to a large table of voluble Frenchmen and a couple of Americans, many of whom I recognized from the readings at Shakespeare and Company. As I arrived, Freddie was haranguing a particularly famous and formidable poet in surprisingly good French about the poet’s misunderstanding of love. I sat down next to Dick and watched in something approaching fear.

  But the poet broke into uproarious laughter, as did his colleagues. They thought the idea of being lectured to by someone whom they assumed was an Englishman on the subject of love a huge joke. An outcome, I realized, Freddie had anticipated.

  Freddie saw me and introduced me to his new friends, who expressed varying degrees of enchantment at my presence. There were two women present of about my own age, an American named Frances Piggott whom I had spoken to briefly at the book-shop, and her friend Ellen. I sat next to Dick, and listened to the conversation.

  The talk switched to Spain, and the recent elections won outright by the Popular Front coalition, and some discussion and then dismissal of rumours that the army was planning a coup. In France, everyone was sure that a general strike was on its way, of which they all seemed to approve, especially Freddie. It was strange seeing Freddie, so dapper in his well-tailored suit, espousing the cause of the workers with such enthusiasm. The French seemed to like it, and I began to see why Hugh had liked it also.

  I was fascinated, although it meant I would be unlikely to get the chance to question Freddie about my brother.

  ‘I’m finding it hard to keep up,’ said Dick to me. ‘My French isn’t quite up to it.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘These are exactly the same topics of conversation the diplomats chat about, but from an entirely different angle.’

  ‘Your friend is quite sure of his opinions,’ said Frances, who was sitting on Dick’s other side. ‘And they are a sight more left-wing than I would expect from an English gentleman.’

  Dick smiled. ‘They certainly are. But he’s Irish. Sort of.’

  Dick, Frances and I carried on our own little side conversation in English. I would rather have stayed listening to the others, but I felt sorry for Dick for his lack of French. It turned out Frances was a student at a New England college and was spending a year at the Sorbonne. She seemed nice. I noticed Dick thought so too.

  ‘Oh, I saw your husband today,’ Dick said. ‘At a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. He was—’

  ‘It can’t have been him,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Oh, it
was. I didn’t speak to him, but it was definitely him. I don’t think they saw me.’

  ‘No. He spent the day in Le Havre.’

  ‘But . . .’ Dick hesitated.

  I noticed. I wondered.

  ‘Was it him?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘You said you were sure it was him?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it was him.’

  ‘With whom was he lunching?’

  ‘Two men,’ Dick said, after a pause. ‘Frenchmen, probably.’

  The tips of Dick’s ears went red. ‘The tips of your ears have gone red, Dick,’ I said.

  ‘Have they? It must be the wine.’

  I fell silent. We listened to the conversation, which had moved on to the German occupation of the Rhineland a couple of months earlier and whether the French government should have kicked up more of a fuss. Except I wasn’t listening.

  Dick was lying.

  Lying about what? About seeing Roland today? No. Why would he lie about that?

  If he had seen Roland, then Roland’s lunch had not been above board. Two possibilities suggested themselves, both of which scared the hell out of me.

  ‘Dick?’

  He tried to ignore me.

  ‘Dick!’ Louder.

  He turned to me reluctantly.

  ‘Was there any chance that the two Frenchmen Roland was having lunch with were, in fact, German?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Dick. ‘Maybe.’ He seemed relieved by my question.

  He was looking for a lead from me. One of the possibilities, prompted by my conversation with Colonel Vivian, had been that Roland had been lunching with German contacts at an out-of-the-way restaurant to give them secret information from the embassy, and that Dick had realized this and that was what he was lying about for some reason. But his uncertain response, and his relief that I was taking that tack, didn’t seem to fit that.