All along the border, construction brigades began work. Honecker had planned the operation meticulously. Hundreds of tons of concrete, barbed wire and timber had been amassed – bought in moderate quantities, in the name of civilian contractors, from numerous different suppliers across Europe. Everything necessary, from protective gloves for handling the wire to special clamps for fixing it to concrete posts, had been similarly acquired, and placed in position. This enormous exercise in clandestine shopping had been accomplished so adroitly that only a handful of people had noticed and wondered at it.
Trucks lugged concrete uprights, manufactured out near the Polish border, from the sites around the city’s periphery where they had been stockpiled. By one-thirty a.m. the construction workers were setting them up. Others began to fix barbed wire to hooks. The workers were guarded by regular troops. Once the wire fence was securely fixed, these soldiers set up tripods for their machine guns. Their guns pointed eastwards. They weren’t invaders. They were their own people’s jailors. Soviet tanks formed a ring around the city.
At four a.m., in a hotel in West Berlin, an American reporter was woken by a telephone call from a photographer with whom he sometimes worked. ‘It’s happening,’ said the photographer. ‘You’d better come on over here.’ The reporter began to dress, picked up the phone again and asked for coffee. ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the switchboard operator. ‘There’s no room service.’ ‘Come on,’ said the reporter. ‘Just do me a favour here. I’ve got to go to work. Just get me a cup of coffee.’ ‘No room service,’ said the telephonist again. ‘None of our staff from the East have come to work tonight. No room service.’ The reporter finished tying his shoelaces and ran down the stairs, and out onto the street, and kept on running until he reached Potsdamer Platz and saw the wire.
As the sun rose Ulbricht’s party guests were allowed, at last, to go home.
Sunday
Sunday was the only day of the week on which the Lane family ate breakfast together. Chloe went fasting to Communion, and by the time she got home, the afterglow of holiness and sweet wine as soothing in her as the balm of Gilead, the house would be smelling of the warm bread rolls they had instead of the daily bacon and egg. Heather, slatternly in her dressing gown, brought the children down, then vanished back to the night nursery for her weekly lie-in. Mrs Ferry carried the rolls out from the slate-shelved larder, ceremoniously covered with the special pink and white embroidered cloth. It was Nell’s solemn duty to warm them in the oven, which she was usually forbidden to touch.
They ate them with slices of ham, and then with honey. There was hot milk for the children, tinted purple with Ribena, and real coffee for the grown-ups out of the silver coffee pot that had belonged to the great-aunt who had bequeathed to Chloe a houseful of lacquered knick-knacks and hand-painted porcelain, and who had insisted on giving Nell her name. The morning sun fell quiet on the black and white geometry of the dining-room’s paved floor. The grown-ups were allowed to read the papers, which made them inattentive to table manners. Nell licked honey off her fingers, and closed her eyes and wondered at her eyelids, so thin that the sun shone pinkly through them.
This Sunday, though, her mother and father were arguing about someone called George, who was going to be in prison for a long long time. Nell had read bits of The Count of Monte Cristo. Prison was a place of perpetual darkness where people’s hair and fingernails grew as long as witches’.
Hugo said, ‘You can’t say “poor fellow” about a traitor.’
‘But traitor to what? Blake was being true to his idea of what was right.’
‘Oh for goodness sake.’ Hugo didn’t really enjoy this kind of arguing. Chloe did, but sometimes Nell could see how, though she might seem to be getting all worked up about something in the papers, really it was Daddy she was cross with. Like Dickie getting furious with Nell when she wandered off in the middle of a croquet game because she just didn’t care who won. Chloe wanted to talk about George. She wouldn’t have minded Hugo disagreeing, but ‘for goodness sake’ spoiled the game.
‘But really. He’s actually Dutch, did you know that?’
‘And came here to save himself, and settled down very comfortably thank you, and went to Cambridge and had a lovely time punting, and then decides all the people he’s been chums with can be killed, for all he cares. Honestly, darling, you can’t feel sorry for a chap like that.’
‘But why not?’ Fresh from the altar, Chloe was full of Christian charity.
‘People were killed because of him. People on his own side.’
‘No, it wasn’t his side. I mean I know he was an enemy, but there can be good traitors. Like there can be good Germans. Think of the aunts.’
This was a bit of a swerve, and Chloe, recollecting herself, had executed it deliberately to restore good humour. The aunts were a pair of ladies whose relationship with the family was genealogically vague, but warm. They lived together in North Oxford, along with a gentleman called Foxy (his real name was too long to be easily pronounceable), and wore lace-up shoes and heavy tweed skirts over which chiffon scarves incongruously drifted. They had been self-appointed godmothers to Chloe, and were now to Nell and Dickie. They were Austrian actually. Legends of their youth involved crenellated castles overlooking lakes, disappointing young men in white flannels, a poet or two. Though they had fetched up in Oxford well before the war, they had neither of them really mastered English. For Nell – who had been sent to stay with them while the parents were on holiday – to think of the aunts was to feel the slithery fineness of face powder in a gilded round cardboard box, to smell Foxy, who seldom spoke but reeked pleasantly of something vegetable like dried-up moss, to sense the odd peacefulness of their house, where no one had to be decisive or busy, or do anything other than exchange fragmentary quotations from the works of unfashionable poets, and wonder aloud when it would be time, finally, to throw out the dusty arrangements of dried flowers.
‘Are the aunts traitors?’ asked Nell now. The thought was interesting. Hugo, who was less fond of the elderly threesome than his wife was, perked up too.
‘Well maybe they are,’ he said. ‘Maybe they were secretly working for Hitler, sending secret messages back to Berlin about which cabinet minister cheated at croquet.’
‘Would Hitler want to know?’ Nell was doubtful.
‘Yes, yes. Of course he would. Because then he could blackmail them. Imagine if it got out that a fellow had moved his ball. Just a tiny little nudge when everyone else had turned to see Mrs Ferry coming with the lemonade. He’d be blackballed from his club. He’d be jeered at on the platform at Paddington. He’d be done for. Fate worse than death. So in his despair he’d be a helpless tool of the Nazis, and Aunt Irma would be his handler, and meet him for picnics in Christ Church Meadow, and slip him macaroons with messages written in invisible ink on the rice paper on their underside.’
Nell and Dickie were both giggling now. This was baffling nonsense, but they loved it when their father set out on one of his flights into absurdity.
‘But Hitler died ages ago.’
‘Yes, and anyway in the dark days of the war the aunts saw the error of their ways and longed to cut their ties to their evil master. And one day they noticed that the new gardener, Boris, had a peculiar accent. Of course he’d told them he was from Somerset, and being foreign they couldn’t tell the difference between a proper West Country burr and the terrifying tones of a secret agent from Vladivostok.’
Hugo was acting it all out – the way Boris put his hand to his back (all gardeners had bad backs). The aunts throwing their hands up in dismay. It was as good as charades. Dickie laughed himself into hiccups.
‘So one day, among the gooseberry bushes, Boris told Aunt Lottie the truth. He was a Russian spy, and he knew all about their dastardly behaviour in passing secrets to the German enemy. So …’
A pause as Hugo worked out the next twist. Chloe had unclenched and was smiling vaguely, leaning back, rocking on her chair’s back legs, eve
n though she told the children off so sharply when they did the same.
‘So now he was going to blackmail them, because if he revealed their dreadful secret and if they went into Fullers for walnut cake all the nice ladies having tea would stand up and hiss at them. So of course they were putty in his hands.’
‘What’s putty?’
‘Hush. So they became Russian spies for a bit, but then … They went to a sherry party in Christ Church with an excellent fellow who has parties on Sunday mornings.’
‘Mr White!’ said Nell and Dickie in unison. Their parents went frequently to such sherry parties.
‘And he took pity on the poor aunts, because he could see they were really good Germans.’
‘Good Austrians,’ said Chloe.
‘Good traitors,’ said Nell.
‘And he said they could be triple traitors and spy for England as well, and so their good spying cancelled out both kinds of bad spying and they went back to Park Town in time for lunch and they had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding because now they were jolly old English spies.’
‘So there are good spies?’
Hugo, suddenly snapping out of it. ‘Well I wouldn’t want to be one. Or for you to be one.’ He wasn’t playing any more. ‘Imagine lying to everyone around you. Even if it was for a good cause. You couldn’t like a person who did that. I don’t think I’d like the good Germans who helped us, not really, however useful they were. And I certainly don’t like Blake. He ought to be shot. Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.’
‘That’s enough. Come on. Hats and gloves and meet you by the front door in ten minutes.’ Chloe was pushing the children, arms outstretched around them without touching, like Mr Slatter coaxing a dawdling cow. Heather, dressed now and waiting in the hallway, ushered them on up the stairs.
‘You’ve got them properly confused now,’ Chloe said to Hugo, ‘and I won’t have you telling them you’d shoot people.’ But she said it lightly. The argument was over.
An hour later the family sat, in ascending order of age, in the agent’s pew behind the Rossiters’: sailor suit; yellow linen coat and flowered bonnet; blue dress with a bolero failing to meet over a huge striped bow which matched the hat; dark suit, white shirt and Brigade of Guards tie. After the psalm Hugo walked over to the lectern, and read slowly and impressively from the Old Testament. The story of Samson. His hair was as oiled and gleaming as that of the hero about whom he read, his voice expressionless. He was good at this.
As Nell listened, images swam through her mind. The terrified foxes with flaming tails. The woman weeping and pleading. The warrior who married the daughter of his enemy. The bees swarming around the poor dead lion whose picture was on the Golden Syrup tin. The riddle, its answer treacherously revealed. The hair strewn on the floor (blonde ringlets, she saw in her mind’s eye, like brass corkscrews). The hips and thighs smitten by the serrated bone. The ass, shaggy and greasy-smelling like her own sweet donkey but reduced to a horrid weapon. So many creatures to grieve over. Betrayal.
Christopher was the only occupant of the pew in front. ‘You’ve got a houseful of heathens, then?’ said Hugo, following him out.
‘Wireless-worshippers,’ said Christopher. ‘You’ve not heard the news? They’re all still around the breakfast table, bowing down to that thing as though it was the burning bush.’
‘What’s happened? There was nothing much in the papers.’
‘No. But Nicholas rang early and told us to switch on. The Reds have closed the border in Berlin. In the middle of the night.’
‘How?’
‘With miles and miles of barbed wire. Thousands of concrete posts. Men with machine guns in a human wall all across the city.’
‘My God. All in one night? It’s unbelievable.’
‘It is.’
In Chloe’s mind a ring of fire sprang up around Brunhilde. When your daughter looks like taking an interest in a new world order, wall her in with flame.
Hugo, who wasn’t interested in opera, said, ‘German efficiency for you.’
‘Let’s hope so. If the Russians put them up to it we’re all up shit creek without a paddle.’
Mild, courtly Christopher occasionally came out with risqué colloquialisms. Hugo could read, passing serially behind the surface of Chloe’s inadvertently expressive face, a tremor of shock, an impulse to signal to the children that it was not all right to use such words, an effort at self-control. Mustn’t be rude to the boss; probably the children didn’t understand anyway; to fuss about a bit of ripe language in the face of a potentially terrifying international crisis would look preposterously prissy. She really did hate that sort of talk, though. It was to her, like the scritching of chalk on blackboard, or the way rhubarb turned the inside of one’s mouth from satin to sandpaper.
Perhaps Christopher could read her face too. Smoothly switching tone he said to Hugo, ‘Lil asks if you’ll come up for tennis again after lunch.’ He caught a flickering, silent exchange between husband and wife. Living on the edge of the deer-park, Hugo could slip home for elevenses and odd times throughout the day – a plus – but he was also (and Christopher was more alive to the annoyances attendant on this than Lil was) all too easily available to his employers, something which Chloe found irksome. Christopher added on his own initiative, ‘All four of you. I expect you’ll want to swim again before the pool’s emptied, won’t you, Nell?’
Nell was bewildered. Was something awful happening, or not? If there was going to be a war how could the grown-ups be talking about tennis? It had always puzzled her. When her parents were at school there were bombs dropping out of the sky and people they knew were being killed, and yet all the usual things carried on all the same. Lessons, and eating shepherd’s pie, and going to parties, even. That seemed the strangest thing of all. Now she knew, from the way Nicholas and Mr Rossiter had talked yesterday, that this thing that was going on was frightening, but still her mother was trying to edge into the shade of one of the churchyard yew trees because she hated getting sunburnt – as though having pearly pale skin really mattered even now.
Antony
Earlier that year I had had occasion to visit Sunderland. Being an art-dealer takes one into some intriguing milieux. A ship-owner intended to invest some of his money in old masters, and wanted to get our relationship off on a right footing by showing me the stupendous work he did, before humbling himself by requesting my guidance.
We rode around in a car smelling so strongly of new leather and cigar smoke that all my recollections of the day are queasy. He took me to his office, hung with pictures of the ships his family had built and owned, some of them painted in Hong Kong by Chinese artists with an unfamiliar approach to perspective, some simple drawings done by teenaged mid-Victorian second mates, some moody romantic oils of sails silhouetted against scudding clouds. One of these, he told me, confidently but over-optimistically, was by Turner. He offered coffee, cognac and chocolate biscuits, all of which I declined. I was introduced to a succession of men, his managers, who clearly thought, and made me feel, how footling an occupation I had compared with theirs. Then we drove down towards the waterfront.
A street without pavements, on each side an unbroken brick phalanx of several dozen identical two-up-two-downs. He’d told me to sit in front with the chauffeur. He wanted to astonish me, and he so far succeeded that at first I almost missed the marvel. The street came to a dead end bounded by a metal wall so high I could no more take it in than the mouse could comprehend the elephant. A ship. Dry land and appropriate scale ended simultaneously. This enormous thing subverted all expectation. It was so big and solid and heavy, and yet it floated, as those squatting houses and their heavy-booted occupants would never float. It belonged in vast spaces. It would dwindle to tininess amidst boundless empty seas. It was a marvel. I have spent much of my life appraising images designed to induce awe and wonder, but I had never before seen anything so impressive. Here was the product of skills I could barely imagine, and hard, dangerous labour.
Lying there, alongside the pygmy homes of the puny little humans who had built it, the ship was as astonishing as an annunciating angel.
That Sunday morning at Wychwood my memory of the ship kept recurring. Berliners had woken to find that the next street lay in another country. This they’d known ever since the war’s end, but to know something is a very different thing from seeing it, especially when it is so implausible.
Frontiers are drawn on maps as lines, but in experience they are broad smudges, gradual transitions. The heather and midges begin long before you get to Scotland. By the Italian lakes you are already, or still, in Austria. The people who live along a border – in peacetime anyway – walk over it, plough over it, overlook it. Physically, it doesn’t exist. Yet here was a nation throwing up a palpable wall along an impalpable division. It was eerie. The materialisation of the imaginary. A haunting.
‘And it’s not even a wall,’ said Lil. ‘We keep calling it that, but Nicholas says it’s really just a barbed-wire fence.’
It was lunchtime. The long stone table at which we were eating was shaded by the cedar, gigantic, black and medicinally fragrant. The food at Wychwood was always fabulous. Little round pots of some sort of pink fish mousse, then cold lamb cutlets with new potatoes and a bright-green sauce made of Mr Green’s mint and the yoghurt which Lil, perhaps alone in Oxfordshire, demanded from the harassed village shopkeeper. It was imported from Bulgaria, and we all accepted its sourness as being of the nature of the beast (it was, we understood, animate). It was only several years later, once the local equivalent became available, that I realised it had gone off in transit. But how deliciously cosmopolitan it seemed. Posies of nasturtiums brilliant against white damask. Wine in glasses so fine that Benjie, generally popular now but still cack-handed, broke one simply by grasping it too firmly as he arrived at a punchline. And all around us, rendered even more than usually lovely by the hazy light of a dying summer, that grandiose assemblage of stone – carved by humans, embroidered by lichen – ancient trees, bleached parkland beyond the ha-ha, the admirable garden in which the formality of watercourses and topiary set off the great free sweep of the lawns.
Peculiar Ground Page 13
