Going Gently

by David Nobbs

  ‘I hope I can be very considerate too, but this is not a small matter, Kate. To have a secret, on a matter of such importance, is not, I think . . . how would you say? My English is so bad . . . a propitious start.’

  So, as the train snaked into the suburbs of Cardiff, Kate told the tale that she had never before told anybody.

  ‘She crept out of the house at midnight one Saturday night, for a night of love with a boy. She was sixteen. My father found out. He called her wicked and banished her from the house. She was sent to a fierce aunt in mid-Wales. She ran away to London. She might have met anyone. She met a nice plumber called John, and married him. They live in Vancouver.’

  ‘We’ll go to Canada, to see them.’

  ‘I hope so, one day.’

  ‘I shall insist. I shall take you there.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She squeezed his hand, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

  ‘This is the posh end,’ she said, as the taxi purred up the long hill of Walter Road. ‘People have grapes in the house here when nobody’s ill.’

  Her attempt at idle chatter didn’t fool Heinz. He knew how nervous she was. He wasn’t sure which was the greater of her anxieties, that her family wouldn’t like him, or that he wouldn’t like them. She need have no anxiety on the latter score. She had talked about her family with such affection that he liked them before he had met them. She’d told him that Bernard would make challenging statements and tack ‘I beg your pardon?’ on to the end. She’d told him that Enid would remind them about someone who married a German and fell into a vat of moselle wine and drowned. She’d told him that little orphan Annie, who so resented the existence of that other, more famous little orphan Annie, would tell him how fortunate she was to be a part of such a family. She’d told him that John Thomas Thomas would weigh him up gravely, and address him as Heinz Wasserhof if he liked him. She’d told him that Bronwen would adore him if Kate looked happy. She’d told him that Oliver would be very, very charming.

  And that was what Heinz would be too. As the taxi turned left into Eaton Crescent, he prepared himself for being very, very charming indeed.

  Kate couldn’t help feeling a little awkward, bringing home a third fiancé, when Enid, Annie and Bernard hadn’t managed one between them, and Oliver had been so unlucky in love. It didn’t occur to her that it hadn’t exactly been a bed of roses for her – one hanging and one divorce for adultery – but she knew that maturity and laugh lines had only added to the beauty of her warm, liquid, sensual face, and she felt extremely fortunate in life and love that night.

  To her relief, they didn’t take Heinz into the front room, with its smell of disuse, but straight into the cheery dining-cum-sitting-room with the French windows. A large reproduction of one of Cézanne’s many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire now hung over the dining table. There were herrings wrapped in laverbread for tea, and as much bread and butter as you could want, and Welsh cakes and bara brith.

  It was much as Kate had promised, and she could have cried for joy.

  Bernard said, ‘There isn’t going to be a war, Heinz, Hitler isn’t such a fool, I beg your pardon?’ Kate avoided Heinz’s eye for fear that she would giggle.

  Enid was worried about Heinz going to work for Walter. ‘You be careful with those machines,’ she told him. ‘A cousin twice removed from Llandovery worked as a compositor on the South Wales Echo and fell into the presses and was printed to death.’ Kate had to make absolutely certain not to look into Heinz’s eyes then, and she also had to resist the temptation to add, ‘Thereby becoming, at a stroke, a cousin three times removed.’

  Annie went even redder than her normal coarse colour before saying, bravely, ‘A friend of mine who has visited Germany tells me it’s very heavily wooded.’

  ‘Well, yes, some parts are,’ said Heinz. ‘You haven’t been?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Annie seemed shocked at the suggestion of anything so exotic. ‘I’ve never been abroad. Oh, not that I’m complaining. I’ve nothing to complain about. I’m so fortunate to be a part of this kind, loving family. I never forget it.’

  No, nor do we, thought Kate, but of course she didn’t say it, nor did she meet Heinz’s eyes.

  ‘Do people ever suggest that in leaving Germany you’re running away?’ asked Oliver, to Kate’s astonishment, because it was so unlike him to put anyone on the spot like that, it was more typical of Bernard. She wondered if Oliver had been soured by his tragedy.

  Heinz paused, partly to measure his words, in that way he had, and partly to empty his mouth of bara brith.

  ‘I would have stayed to help stop Hitler, had I believed him stoppable,’ he said.

  ‘What you have done is the right thing, Heinz Wasserhof,’ said John Thomas Thomas. ‘You don’t fight a volcano by standing in the crater.’

  A lump came to Kate’s throat, and she almost burst into tears. Her father liked him. She looked across at her mother, who gave her a very quick smile and looked away hurriedly, so she knew that her mother was on the point of tears as well.

  Later that evening, they sat round the fire, with John Thomas Thomas buried in a book of Welsh essays, and Enid doing her marking, and Annie knitting with her legs akimbo and a ladder on the inside of her left stocking, revealing a stretch of pink thigh for all the world to see, should any of the world want to see it, which none of the world did, and Kate could see that Oliver was wondering whether to warn Annie about the ladder, and Bernard was quizzing Heinz about Hitler.

  ‘So, what is he, Heinz, this Hitler? Is he a Fascist? It seems to me that he draws his ideas from the Left as much as from the Right, I beg your pardon?’

  ‘No, I agree,’ said Heinz. ‘He needs supporters from the Left as well as the Right, so he needs ideas from the Left and Right. He is an opportunist as well as a fanatic, and all the more dangerous because he genuinely believes in at least half of what he preaches. If he succeeds, the hands of the Left as well as the Right will be stained with blood.’

  Bernard started on another question, but Bronwen said, ‘Leave the poor man alone, Bernard. He’s had a long journey.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Thomas, I’m not tired,’ Heinz said, but, to Kate’s regret, the discussion of political ideas was over almost before it had begun, as was so often the case in Britain, where to care about political issues seemed to be a social embarrassment.

  ‘Please call me Bronwen, Heinz,’ said Bronwen.

  ‘Mother!’ said Enid. ‘I nearly forgot. I saw Mrs Humpries in the Uplands this afternoon. Her mother has a lump in her left . . . bron.’

  ‘You don’t need to say it in Welsh,’ said Kate. ‘They have breasts in Germany too, and Heinz is thirty-seven.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Enid, ‘but there are words I don’t like using in front of strangers.’

  ‘Heinz isn’t a stranger,’ said Bronwen. ‘He’s part of the family already.’

  John Thomas Thomas looked up from his book and began to smile, then remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be listening, it was assumed that he was far away in his essays, so he gave a little, half-guilty, rather boyish smile and went back to his book. But the conversation became a little more circumspect after that, because everyone knew that he was listening.

  As the long hospital night dragged on, Kate drifted between sleep and memory, between present and past, between bed and levitation, between Mrs Critchley’s snoring and her third wedding day. Months passed in minutes. Recollection had strange gaps. Of that wedding she remembered little except for her father’s support, for he was certain that Heinz was a good man, and the sadness in Oliver’s face, for, deep down, he had never truly recovered his old joy in living.

  She found that her memories of her lovemaking with Heinz had faded also. As one may remember that one enjoyed a book, even when one has completely forgotten the plot, or remark that the food in a restaurant was excellent long after one has forgotten what one ate, so Kate had precious few memories of the many precious private moments she h
ad spent with this precious man. It had all been very straightforward. A hot flush of shame brought her whole body out in another sweat as she recalled a remark she had made to Nigel many years later. She had been provoked into being indiscreet by her irritation with him over the complete secrecy in which he cloaked his personal life, and she had been led astray, not for the first time, not for the last time either, by her desire to live up to her reputation for being amusing. ‘It’s odd,’ she’d said, ‘that the fifty-seven varieties were with Walter, and not with Heinz.’ Nigel had, rightly, been embarrassed. It had been so wrong of her to breech the code of confidentiality in which the civilised world hides these matters. It had been unfair to Heinz and to Walter and indeed to Nigel, who had always been such a thoughtful and attentive son – oh Lord, let it not be Nigel who murdered Graham. She uttered a low moan as she remembered the great task that lay ahead, the task that it was at last safe to undertake, and it so happened that Hilda also moaned at that moment, and Glenda, disturbed deep in her disturbed sleep, turned and farted, and Mrs Critchley, far away in her dreams, cried, ‘Rodney! Not in the foyer!’ and the night nurse came in to see if everything was all right, and Kate thought, She’ll see that I’m levitating, that’ll give the show away, and she tried hard to slip back into the bed below, but she couldn’t.

  Luckily the night nurse didn’t notice her, and it occurred to her that perhaps her body was still in the bed and only her consciousness was floating. Perhaps she was already dead! Perhaps there was a God, after all, and this was heaven, not as high as she’d expected, or perhaps it was hell, not as low as she’d expected. Perhaps there was an afterlife but no God. She couldn’t see any reason why the soul shouldn’t live on even if there was no God.

  She slept for a while, and when she awoke the sweat had gone cold on her body and she was shivering, and it seemed to her that the levitation had been an illusion. She knew straight away that she wasn’t dead, which was such a relief that she didn’t even mind about the cold sweat.

  She returned to her life with Heinz. They bought a pleasant Edwardian house called the Gables in a quiet, shady road called Dollery Road in the pleasant Warwickshire village of East Munton. When they first saw it, in the spring of 1937, the pink snow of blossom was falling. Heinz only had a fifteen-minute drive to work at the head office in Coventry.

  Nigel and Timothy settled well in their new school, where Nigel shone at physics and chemistry and Timothy at English and Latin. Nigel did quite well at games and Timothy very badly. Maurice started school and liked it from the start. All her children liked Heinz and Walter. Kate thought that she was very fortunate in her boys. She was surprised when Heinz and Walter both told her how much it was all down to her, for being such a good mother. It seemed to her that she struggled as a mother.

  How could any of them have murdered Graham?

  Nigel came home from school one day in a very serious mood, leading a tearful Timothy.

  ‘He got beaten up because you’re married to a German,’ he said. ‘Morris Major says he’s probably a fifth-columnist.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Kate. ‘I am sorry.’

  Normally beans on toast would be sufficient to dry Timothy’s tears, but that day he refused to eat them. ‘They’re Heinz,’ he said, his eleven-year-old face twisted with suspicion. ‘They’re probably poisoned.’

  ‘That Heinz has nothing to do with our Heinz,’ said Kate. ‘They aren’t German beans.’ But she gave him boiled eggs instead, and made soldiers out of the bread, and he said he didn’t want to eat soldiers unless they were German soldiers. ‘They are,’ said Nigel, so Timothy ate them, chopping off their heads quite fiercely, and Nigel, being very grown up at thirteen, winked at Kate, and she felt very uneasy about letting Timothy get away with such hostility to the bread soldiers.

  Later, Nigel asked Kate if he could have a word in private.

  ‘Mother?’ he said. ‘I know I’m only thirteen, but I think I’m pretty worldly. Do you think Heinz could be a fifth-columnist?’

  ‘Do you know what a fifth-columnist is?’

  ‘Not exactly. Morris Major says they’re infiltrators, whatever that is. Spies, I suppose.’

  When Heinz got home, Kate told him what had happened. They sat the boys down and Heinz told them all about what was happening in Germany and why he had come to Britain. He said that in the holidays they could tour the works and have a look at all his blueprints and how they were getting ready to convert all Walter’s production to weaponry, to use against the Germans.

  ‘You will get ridiculed at school,’ Kate said. ‘You’re just going to have to be strong. Show it doesn’t upset you, or pretend it doesn’t upset you. If they don’t see you suffering, the boys’ll get bored. You mentioned Morris Major. Is there a boy called Morris Minor?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Timothy. ‘He gets beaten up even more than I do.’

  When the boys went to see Walter’s works, Kate didn’t go with them. ‘I just can’t face the thought of guns and tanks,’ she said. ‘I know we need them. I know Hitler has to be stopped. I can’t bear to look at them.’

  She knew that if she went she would think of Gwyn, but she didn’t tell Heinz that.

  Kate only saw Heinz get really angry once. It was on the day Elizabeth was born. It was also the day on which Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich and waved a piece of paper.

  ‘How can anyone be so naive?’ he said. ‘Especially a politician. It’s a contradiction in terms. Look at her, Kate, so helpless in your arms. Do the silly bastards think they’ve made the world any safer for her?’

  He looked at his three-hour-old baby and made a face at her, as if to say, ‘Sorry, my little darling, you’re in this world of ours now, whether you like it or not.’

  Then he looked at the tired, strained face of his wife and said, ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. It isn’t the time to say it. I shouldn’t be worrying you with these things now.’

  He kissed her forehead and sat stroking her hand very gently. Elizabeth fell asleep. It was very peaceful in the maternity ward, less peaceful in Heinz’s brain.

  ‘Half of the people in Walter’s world think he’s overreacting,’ he said. ‘Don’t they realise, evil never goes away of its own accord?’

  The weather was perfect on that June day in 1940. A modest sun shone out of a pale blue, misty sky. The dew still glistened on the lawn, where a blackbird listened happily for worms. A song thrush was singing joyously from the topmost branch of the hazel tree. The police officer was in a good mood too.

  ‘Am I being interned?’ Heinz asked.

  ‘No, sir. We’re just asking you to come to the station and answer a few questions.’

  Kate thought that she wasn’t going to be able to continue breathing. Fear grabbed her throat.

  ‘I’ll get you some overnight things, just in case,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary, madam,’ said the officer confidently, soothingly.

  ‘May I say cheery-bye to my daughter?’ asked Heinz.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  The policeman was a family man, and he gave a kindly smile and a wink to Elizabeth, who was almost two.

  Heinz kissed Elizabeth and hugged Kate and turned and waved and said, ‘See you soon. Bye-bye, Kate. Bye-bye, princess.’

  ‘Bye-bye, Daddy,’ said his princess.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ said the nice policeman, and he grinned and waved.

  ‘It’s absolutely bloody ridiculous,’ said Walter. ‘I need him, for God’s sake. He’s doing essential war work, for God’s sake. We’re making guns, not Dinky Toys.’

  ‘I’ll get him back,’ said Kate.

  Walter smiled. ‘If anyone can, it’ll be you.’

  ‘I bloody will. It’s so stupid. Oh, how I loathe stupidity.’

  They were standing in the front garden of the Wasserhof house. Elizabeth was asleep in her pram. The boys were at school. A lawnmower was droning across the road, for all the world as if there was no war.

 
‘I told him he should have taken British citizenship,’ said Walter.

  ‘He doesn’t want to. He wants to be in there, after the victory, building a better Germany.’

  ‘He thinks they’ll win, then?’

  ‘After our victory.’

  ‘It’s hard just now to believe we’ll win. Oh, Kate, why didn’t he apply for a permit from the Aliens War Service Department? Anyone engaged in work of national importance can get one.’

  ‘He believes in Britain. He didn’t think we’d ever do anything so stupid.’

  ‘Doesn’t he realise that war is chaotic, that the fear of invasion is in every street, that fear drives out reason?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t either, Walter. You should have made him go for a permit.’

  ‘Get him out, Kate. I need him.’

  ‘Well, I do miss him too.’

  ‘Yes, yes, for sure, and I’m sorry, but I’m sure he’s safe, and your conjugal rights aren’t exactly of top importance just now, but providing weapons for our boys is and every day counts.’

  A bullfinch, overdressed for war in his black hat and pink-red waistcoat, scolded them from a pear tree.

  ‘I could almost wish I was that bullfinch,’ said Kate. ‘Life would be simpler.’

  ‘I can’t see you as a bullfinch,’ said Walter. ‘You wouldn’t be able to stand the monotonous diet or the brevity of the sex.’

  Their eyes met for just a moment.

  ‘Right,’ said Kate. ‘I think I’d better go and find my husband.’

  But this proved easier said than done. He had been taken from the police station to a camp somewhere. Nobody knew where. Time passed, as it does. Hitler continued to rampage through Europe, and Kate looked after Elizabeth. She knew that Heinz was safer than if he was fighting, safer than if he’d been bobbing across the English Channel in a small boat, but where was he? Day after day, and no news. She knew that the horror of war had engulfed the greater part of the Continent, she felt ashamed of herself for being so weak, but where was he? Not to know, not to be able to imagine what he was going through, in this land that he loved. How could they intern this fierce hater of Nazism?