‘No, of course not,’ he took another sip of his whiskey, then abruptly turned that jagged senatorial face on her. ‘You should know that I am not pleased that my son sent you the Journal. It is a family matter and like most family matters intensely private.’
Helena flushed at the implication, ‘You don’t believe that I would publish the story?’
‘I would hope not,’ he scrutinized her, ‘but I don’t know you very well and journalists sometimes think they have a duty…’
‘You mean a duty to expose Max Bergmann as a Nazi. A fraud, a fake, a deceiver?’
‘There you are wrong.’ He was definitive, almost, she thought, angry. ‘Max Bergmann was not a fraud, except for the small matter of a change of name. I have read his books over the years and they are a direct progression of what he believed in as a youth. In fact I would characterize him as a Peter Pan. All those attempts to recreate those boyhood summer camps, those idylls of boys alone together, pure in the wild, and turn them into a way of life in America, a country so different. Bah, it’s a farce. He hadn’t read his Marx, or he would have realized that. You remember Marx’s insight about historical repetition? The first time the great events may appear as tragedy. The second time they can only be farce.’
He seemed to be carrying on an argument with himself.
Helena looked at him open-mouthed. ‘When I asked you in California whether you knew of Max Bergmann…?’
‘Permit me my little deceptions. I thought it simpler at the time not to engage in philosophical discussion,’ he gave her a charming smile. ‘No, I have known of Max Bergmann for many years.’
‘Known that he was…
‘My cousin? Yes. My brother? No. That is a recent revelation and not one I wish to think about at the moment.’ He cleared his throat and gave Helena a dark look. ‘My mother was the one to spot Max Bergmann. She saw his photograph in the paper. Sometime in the sixties I think it was. She went to hear him lecture, came back and announced in great excitement that she was certain she had discovered Leo. Asked me what I wanted to do about it? I wanted to do nothing. As I want to do nothing now.’
Helena began to pace, her hands locked tightly behind her back, so that she would resist the sudden unnerving temptation to bite her nails.
‘I don’t understand. He tried to kill you.’
‘Bah. Adolescent pranks. Of a particular nastiness, I grant you. It was a violent time. But Leo wasn’t evil, just deluded, resentful, his head in the clouds, more a victim of the propaganda of his times than one of its inane heros. The proof is that I am here. He was not altogether up to the violence he worshipped,’ he spread his arms in a grand gesture. ‘Nor would the Nuremberg Trials have had anything to accuse him of.’
‘Did you ever check him out?’ Helena murmured.
He nodded. ‘My mother insisted. She thought I was erring on the side of generosity. Or perhaps simply trying to repress buried hatreds. God knows, we all had enough of them. So I eventually managed to ascertain that Leo had arrived in Sweden in 1936. It wasn’t that difficult. We tried a permutation of names. He used Leinsdorf,’ Max Peters chuckled. ‘He had always had a predilection for the aristocratic side of the family.
‘And you never went to see him?’
He smiled ruefully, ‘I was never quite generous or brave enough for that. Though I did accompany my mother to a lecture once. The usual high-sounding patter, the rhetoric of prophecy. Can I get you another drink?’
Helena nodded.
It had grown darker as they talked and he switched on the table lamps before handing her her glass.
‘I still don’t see how you can be so moderate about it all.’
‘A frenzied man of seventy would be a distinctly comic figure, my dear. Passion is for the young.’
‘By that logic, I should expose your… cousin.’
‘Touché, Ms. Latimer. But I hope you too will in this be moderate. All it would result in is the glare of publicity for my family. We would all suffer for it, personally, I mean.’
‘And you think Max Bergmann did nothing wrong?’
‘In law, under the name Bergmann? Nothing. Or no more than any other self-styled guru.’ He gazed at her astutely, then shrugged, ‘I am a great believer in the rule of law, Ms. Latimer and in freedom of expression. Though not in vengeance or the sliding logic of morality. I have also come to believe that that particular chapter in European history is best buried, at least on an individual level. Otherwise, we shall all be at each other’s throats again avenging historic wrongs, engaging in blood feuds. Which is why I would be prepared to attack Max Bergmann’s ideas and yet not expose Leo Adler as a Nazi youth. You are quite free to disagree with me, of course,’ he smiled. ‘My son seems to now. My mother certainly did, though only for a short while.’
‘What did she disagree with you about?’ Adam had just come into the room, a freshly scrubbed and pyjamaed Janey in his arms. He frowned at his father.
‘Oh, nothing important. Is it time for dinner?’
Adam looked at Helena, then as if he had made a sudden decision, he strode over to her and put a hand firmly on her shoulder. ‘If Helena is ready, if she’ll join us.
She met his eyes. There was a hunger in them which made her ache.
‘Of course. Can I take a moment to change?’
‘I’ll show you to your room.’
‘Can I come too, Daddy?’ Janey put her hand into Helena’s without waiting for a response.
Later, while Adam was tucking Janey up for the night, Helena sat in the library and started to reread Anna’s Book. Adam’s family, she thought, with a cast of characters who had walked into her life and taken her over, even when she had been least aware of it.
She was so absorbed in her reading that she didn’t hear him come in, steal upon her, until his hand was on her shoulder.
‘This is how I first found you here,’ he murmured. ‘Except that you were asleep.’ He stretched out his hand to her, drew her into his arms. ‘And I’ve wanted to hold you like this ever since.’
‘I’m not asleep now.’
‘No. I prefer it that way.’
He kissed her, slowly, luxuriantly, wiping the figures of Anna and Bettina and Johannes and their tangled passions from her mind so that she was only aware of him.
But she drew away from him after a moment, before the sensation of him engulfed her completely. There was still so much to be said. The dinner, the family closeness there, Janey so central to his emotions, had made her uncertain. She laughed a little nervously, deflected him. ‘They were rather wonderful, your Bettina, Anna. So brave.’
His eyes played over her. ‘You remind me a little of both of them. You have Bettina’s high-mindedness and Anna’s impetuosity, though I can’t work out which is uppermost. Your Max must have sensed it too.’
‘Which makes me suitable bait for Johannes, I suspect.’ Helena said the first thing that came into her mind.
‘Of whom you don’t approve.’ He sank down into the sofa, looked at her seriously.
‘But to whom I most probably would have succumbed,’ she laughed, certain of at least that, as she said it.
‘Lucky his grandson got there first.’
She hesitated. ‘Have I succumbed, Adam?’
‘Haven’t you?’ His tone was light, cajoling, but his eyes had grown wary.
She avoided his scrutiny, gestured at his newly immaculate desk. ‘And what are you going to do now that the book is finished?
‘I’m due back in Princeton in September.’ He rose abruptly, started to pace. ‘I could wangle another term off. Get something at the LSE. But Janey… It’s too long.’ He seemed to be talking to himself and then suddenly he turned to her, gripped her arm, ‘Helena, why did it matter to you when you thought I was married?’
She looked at him in incomprehension. ‘I told you. I just don’t get involved in things like that.’ The floor seemed to sway beneath her feet.
‘What I mean is, do you have designs on my f
uture?’
‘Designs?’
He groaned, ‘I’m not putting this very well. Look, it’s simple.’ He kissed her fiercely with a hard passion that took her breath away. ‘I’d wish us like this Helena, together. Always. But I don’t know how to arrange it. There’s 2000 miles of ocean. There’s my child. You even seem reluctant to stay an extra few days, take time off work.’
‘Have you asked me?’
‘To stay? I thought I had…’
She shook her head, ‘No, how to arrange it.’ A smile played over her lips. She touched his cheek, traced the line of it, the dimple, tasted the wave of happiness that swept over her. ‘Well, ask me?’
‘How, my darling?’ he whispered.
‘I’ve been offered this job in New York. I was thinking…’
He twirled her round the room, didn’t let her finish, kissed her, kissed her, whispered, ‘Wait.’
He was back in a moment. He bowed to her formally, took her arm as if they were to engage in some arcane waltz. He led her up the stairs to his room and at the threshold lifted her off her feet. ‘It’s a good thing you’re wearing white,’ he said softly.
‘Obviously part of an intricate design,’ Helena smiled.
The room was exactly as she remembered it, except that on the low table in front of the fireplace, there was a bowl of flowers, a bucket of champagne and two tall fluted glasses. She walked round while he popped the cork, the memory of what she had lived there racing through her. She paused in front of the row of pictures, examined them.
He was by her side following the line of her gaze. He hesitated and then with a visible effort took down the picture which included his former wife.
‘You have to understand, Helena. I keep it there for Janey. That delicate matter of paternity, remember? What would she think of a father who completely denied her mother? I never look at it. But it’s a fact. A fact of my history. Just like that manuscript you were reading downstairs.’ He shrugged, made to put the picture in a drawer.
She stopped him, placed the photograph back on the shelf, smiled a little impishly, sought out his lips.
‘If I’m going to forgive you behaving like a father, you’ll have to forgive me dreaming Max was mine. He brought us together after all, brought me to this place.’
‘At the moment I’d forgive you anything. Except walking out of this room.’ He raised his glass to her.
‘Yes,’ she glanced out the window, thought she saw the glint of moonlight on Anna and Johannes’s grave. ‘Max brought me to this house. Where the children, it seems, are only conceived when another man is present.’
‘I don’t want any other man here, Helena, not even a ghost,’ he growled playfully.
‘I came in search of a father.’
‘And you’ve found a lover with a history too full of them. And what some might call their sins. Won’t that do?’
‘Very well,’ she smiled at him dreamily.
‘Though I must say I do find it difficult to combine the two in one. Father, lover, what’s a mere man to do?’
‘A mere man might call on a mere woman,’ she laughed up at him.
‘Now why hadn’t that occurred to me?
He pulled her towards him, down onto the bed, gazed into her eyes. ‘Would you like a child, Helena? To equalize things a little?’ There was that old irony in his eyes. And something else.
‘I think so. With you. Sometime.’
‘Janey would be jealous,’ he chuckled.
‘She might not be the only one,’ Helena smiled down at him. ‘These new-fangled doting fathers. It’s just not natural,’ she shook her head with mock ferocity so that her hair tumbled over him.
‘Nothing’s natural, Helena, except what we make of it.’
‘I’ll buy that, Professor Peters,’ she murmured as she felt him moving beneath her, ‘for tonight at least.’
About the Author
Lisa Appignanesi is a prize-winning novelist, writer and broadcaster. She has been the President of English PEN, Deputy Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and is a Visting Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London.
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