The Marx Sisters bak-1

by Barry Maitland

  ‘I gave up, but the next day I phoned a friend who works for Lufthansa and speaks German. I faxed the two sides of the letter through to her, and she worked on it over her lunch hour. In the afternoon she faxed back her reply.’ He looked round. ‘We should have a copy here, actually. Since we started to do so much work through the fax machine, Sophie automatically keeps a copy of all incoming and outgoing faxes in a central file. I’m terrified about site instructions and sketch details and so on flying around unrecorded and going astray. I should be able to lay my hands on the translation if you can just hang on.’

  ‘Mr Jones,’ Brock broke in, sounding somewhat weary, ‘is this all absolutely relevant, this letter? I think you lost me somewhere back there.’

  ‘I’m sorry’-Jones took a deep breath-‘but yes, to be perfectly honest, it is relevant. Shall I fetch us some more coffee while I’m up?’

  When he left the room, Brock muttered, ‘I always worry about people who keep saying “to be perfectly honest” and “to tell the truth”. It sounds like the verbal equivalent of crossing your fingers when you tell a lie.’

  ‘Do you think he’s lying?’ Kathy asked. But Brock only grunted and got to his feet, stretching his back stiffly.

  13

  Hanover, 30 April 1867

  DEAR FRED,

  Your letter arrived this morning and greatly cheered me after another wretched night suffering from a sudden outburst of carbuncles in places that make it intolerable to sit for more than a few minutes at a time. How I shall survive the journey back to London in a week or two with those swine eating into my behind I cannot conceive. I am quite resolved to take Gumpert’s advice and resume taking arsenic, although it makes me stupid. At least the book is off my hands at last and I need not keep a clear head for that any longer. How great a weight lifted from my shoulders! Tonight I shall take your advice and get mercilessly drunk.

  Meissner proves to be a quite excellent fellow, despite his dreadful Saxon accent. Printing has already started, and he talks enthusiastically about Volume 2. I discussed our plans for four volumes, contrary to his preference for three which I mentioned in my last letter. He is now quite converted and proclaims the highest expectations for the final volume, which will, he says, assure our immortality and make all our fortunes! I would be quite content with a more modest reward, at least enough to put off those ‘gentlemen’ who ‘urgently’ await my return to London. If only they would take my carbuncles instead, and leave me in peace to work. I have no more paper to write. Best compliments to Mrs Burns!

  Yours,

  MOHR

  While Brock and Kathy read the fax, Bob Jones was on his knees in front of a cupboard in a corner of the room.

  ‘Er… there’s a bottle of Scotch in here,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day. Do you fancy a snifter with your coffee?’

  Brock stirred. ‘Sergeant Kolla here is on duty, so she’d better not. But I’m more or less an observer, so I’ll join you, Bob.’

  ‘Good,’ Jones said, ‘fine,’ and glanced at Kathy who kept her head down over the letter, but raised her eyebrows just a fraction. He brought over the glasses.

  ‘I was sitting here, that evening, reading the fax again. I thought it was a hoot, but it meant nothing to me. Then I thought of Judith. She was the only historian I knew. We had been students together at university, and I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, but I seemed to remember that her thing was nineteenth-century economic history. I had no idea where she was, but I had the home phone numbers of a couple of other people who were in our group at university, and eventually I managed to track her down to Princeton and get her phone number.

  ‘That had also been a long day, I remember, and by then it was well on into the evening. I’d had nothing to eat, and one or two of these’-he lifted his glass-‘and I suddenly thought how nice it would be to talk to her again after all this time. So I rang the number. It was her departmental office, and they said she’d gone home for the day. They wouldn’t give me her home phone number, but I did get her office fax number, so before I left that night I sent her the translation, with a covering note asking if she could throw any light on it, and some other stuff which is probably best forgotten, to be perfectly frank.’

  Jones noticed Kathy’s smile and he shrugged ruefully.

  ‘After a couple of days, when I didn’t get a reply from her, I reckoned she wasn’t interested, and I forgot all about it. I had plenty of other things to think about, to tell the truth, Jerusalem Lane among them.

  ‘The second design review meeting for the project was held a few days later. I’d pinned up the more developed versions of the drawings of Options One, Two and Three on those walls there, and on this wall here I had some other stuff pinned up, but covered with blank sheets so they couldn’t see what they were. After Herbert had made a few remarks about the vital issues, like his fee and whether Slade would have lunch with him, I talked about the three schemes on the wall. Then I suggested that these were perhaps reasonable enough, but I’d come to believe that maybe there was another alternative which might present greater opportunities. Slade pricked up his ears and asked what I meant, and I came over to this wall and ripped off the blank sheets, revealing Option Four.

  ‘It certainly had an impact. Both Slade and Gilroy looked stunned. They recognized the plan form of Jerusalem Lane immediately of course. I started to explain that this option set out to take advantage of the asset already presented by the existing Jerusalem Lane. Slade cut in immediately, his voice very quiet. “What do you know about Jerusalem Lane, Bob?” he said. It was hard to see exactly how his expression had changed. His mouth, his eyebrows, they had shifted position by no more than a millimetre, but somehow it was the biggest millimetre you’d ever seen. Herbert saw it, though I don’t think he really followed what was happening.

  ‘I told Slade that I’d spotted the synagogue one day, realized it was close to a tube station, and put two and two together, but I don’t think he believed me for a minute. I assured him I hadn’t mentioned the location to anyone else, and tried to steer their attention back to the design. My idea was to keep a fair amount of the existing buildings as a sort of human-scale crust around the new stuff which would fill the rear courtyards with modern atrium-type office space. I suggested that the present diversity of building forms and uses and rental levels in the crust could be seen as an asset, enriching the overall development. I was trying to present the thing in positive development terms, you see, rather than negative conservation ones. I spoke about the historical origins of the Lane, and how these could become a selling-point, and I got quite lyrical about the benefits of having the present occupants and the new tenants coexist within a new, revitalized Jerusalem Lane.’

  Kathy had put down her notebook, captured again by Jones’s enthusiasm as he talked about his ideas.

  ‘When I’d finished, Slade turned to the quantity surveyor who had come to the meeting, and asked him right off what he thought of Option Four. He was in an awkward spot, I suppose. He’d got the commission through us, but it was Slade who was paying his fees. He made a few general noises about imaginative lateral thinking, then pointed out that he’d had the drawings for less than twenty-four hours and hadn’t had time to do much more than measure the floor areas for the various parts of the scheme. He passed copies of a list of typed figures round the table, and Slade said immediately, “Less than half a million square feet?” I could see Herbert go pale. I explained that, yes, it was a less intensive development form, but then construction costs would be lower proportionately, and there would be more rent-yielding uses of other types. And I was sure that the planners would be much more sympathetic to that type of approach.

  ‘Slade then turned to Quentin Gilroy for his opinion. He didn’t need to be so tactful. The construction cost might come down, he said, but the land cost would stay the same, so the rents would have to be higher for what he considered less attractive office space, with irregular shapes and awkward to let. And if my “
crust” was going to wipe its face, there was no way the existing residents or businesses could afford the rents. “My God, have you seen some of those people, Derek?” he said. “Did you know there’s an old chap up on the top floor of number 4 who’s a signwriter for those lunatics who walk around with sandwich-boards saying the end of the world is nigh? That’s all he does. His place is full of these sandwich-boards announcing the end of the world! It’s unbelievable! I think our square foot rates might be a bit beyond his means.” And Slade chuckled tolerantly. “Haven’t seen that, Quentin,” he said. “Must have a look next time I’m down.”

  ‘I felt the way I can remember feeling as a little boy. You know, you’re happily going around pretending to be a rabbit or something, and suddenly some adult slams some great chunk of reality down on you, and you realize how little control you have on any of it. Do you know what I mean?’

  Kathy nodded.

  ‘Slade thanked me for the “interesting diversion”, and we got back to Option Three. Later, after they had all gone, Herbert called me back into the conference room and closed the door. I could see he was absolutely furious. On the way out, he told me, speaking between clenched teeth, Slade had said that he hoped he wasn’t paying us to spend time working on designs that didn’t even meet half the brief. He said it jokingly, but he wasn’t joking. Then he said that a Canadian developer was coming in on the project, and they felt that North American consultants should be involved, in partnership with us. Slade hadn’t been sure at first, but now he was coming round to the view that it would be a healthy liaison. So now, Herbert fumed, they were going to bring in bloody Yank architects to do our job, because I’d been messing around, wasting time on tomfoolery-that was his word, a very Herbert word, actually.

  ‘My performance had been humiliating, apparently, and downright unprofessional. But it wasn’t just this project. He was beginning to feel that I was out of sympathy with the whole basic philosophy that they’d been building up at Basingstoke. He had to tell me that he was beginning to wonder if my presence in the partnership was doing either of us any good. He suggested that I give this some thought over the next few days, while someone else got to work on Option Three.

  ‘The thing that really annoyed me, funnily enough, was that I’d got the idea for Option Four from that framed letter I’d bought at Kowalski’s shop in the Lane-the idea of a grid contained within an elaborate old frame. The idea had come all of a sudden in the middle of the night, and it had seemed so appropriate that I thought it just had to be right. When it fell so flat I felt, well, betrayed somehow.

  ‘I went back to my drawing board, and there were half a dozen telephone messages stuck all over it. One of them was to ring Judith Naismith, on a London number. I made the call, and immediately I heard her voice it was as if we’d left university only the day before, with only the faintest mid-Atlantic trace to mark the years between. She said she’d been glad to get my fax, but had been in a rush to get herself organized for a conference she was going to in Paris. She had a short stop-over in London, and she’d love to see me if I could spare any time that day.

  ‘Judith was the great unscaled peak among the women undergraduates in our group. All the lads had tried to seduce Judith at one time or another, and none had succeeded. Even Charlie, whose powers of persuasion had cut a swathe from the women’s college to the language school and through the nurses’ home, had been very subdued in his account of his final great attempt on the north face of Judith Naismith. She was a beautiful enigma, and her reappearance suddenly made up for the disaster of the morning’s meeting.

  ‘We met for lunch. She looked absolutely stunning, just as I remembered her.’

  Although Kathy was absorbed in the story, Brock gave a little cough of impatience. Bob Jones mollified him by offering another whisky, and then continued.

  ‘We fairly quickly exhausted reminiscences and news of mutual friends and what we’d done since leaving university. I could see she was a bit edgy, and I asked if she was short of time. She said yes, really she couldn’t stay too long, but she’d wanted to find out about the letter I’d faxed her. I explained I’d picked it up by accident in a second-hand bookshop. I kind of rambled on a bit about the anniversary of my divorce, and she stopped me dead and said she’d like to visit the shop, and where was it? Suddenly I had the feeling that all the time she’d been much more interested in the letter than in seeing me again. I asked her what was interesting about it, and for a moment I could see her debating what to tell me, then she shrugged and started to explain.

  ‘“Mohr” means “Moor” in English, as in Moorish-the Arabs, you know? And apparently it was Karl Marx’s nickname. His family teased him that with his thick beard and swarthy complexion he was like a Moor.

  ‘His closest friend was Friedrich Engels-“Fred”. In April 1867 Marx went to Germany to deliver the manuscript of the first volume of Das Kapital to his publisher, Otto Karl Meissner, in Hamburg. He went on to Hanover before returning home to London in May. Gumpert was the name of Engels’ doctor in Manchester, and Mrs Burns was his mistress.

  ‘I think I made some stupid joke about it being a pity the letter was written by someone so unfashionable, and that I might have been lucky and found a letter from someone important, like Elvis. But all the time I was thinking about that blue plaque on the wall outside Kowalski’s shop, saying Karl Marx used to live there.

  ‘I asked if she thought there could be more. She seemed really puzzled about that. Apparently all of the correspondence between Marx and Engels was supposed to have been collected together when they both died. She said that it was now held in Amsterdam, in the International Institute of Social History. It had been published in nine volumes, and Judith said she was going to check the volume for 1867 and see how this letter fitted in. She was puzzled as to how it had come to be separated from the rest.

  ‘Then she asked me again where I’d found it. I kind of fooled around, and said that the price of that information might be high, considering how I’d always felt about her. You know, that sort of stuff. She humoured me, for about three seconds. So I paid the bill and we got a cab.

  ‘You should have seen her face when we got to Kowalski’s shop and I pointed out the plaque. There was the difference of dates, of course-Marx lived there in 1850, not 1867, but all the same, she was stunned. She said that coincidences like that just don’t happen. We walked into the shop half expecting to see the ghost of Marx himself standing behind the counter, waiting for us.

  ‘At first we got our wires crossed with Mr Kowalski. We assumed that the letter must have come from the shop itself, found in the attic or something, and he didn’t understand what we were going on about. Eventually he explained that he had bought it not so very long ago. The lady who had sold it to him had also given him a box of books, but no other letters that he could recall.

  “What kind of books?” Judith demanded. “Old books, on history, or socialism perhaps?” He scratched his head and said no, he didn’t think so. He thought they were children’s books. He didn’t know where they would be now.

  ‘We spent a fruitless hour searching the shelves, Judith starting in Politics and History, and me in Children. Finally we spoke again to Kowalski, asking for the name of the person who’d sold him the letter. He was reluctant to give it to us, saying that the woman was elderly and might not want to be bothered. Was the document valuable, then? he wanted to know, sounding rather worried. He’d probably recognized the signs of an over-anxious buyer and thought there might be some money in this. He said he would speak to the seller himself, and see whether she had anything else that might be of interest to us. He took my business card and agreed to call me if anything turned up.

  ‘But it was Mrs Winterbottom herself who phoned me a couple of days after Judith had gone on to Paris. She didn’t seem to know what I wanted to talk to her about, so I explained that my friend was a historian, and she was interested in the letter I had bought from Mr Kowalski because it related to the per
iod she was studying. Did Mrs Winterbottom have any other documents from that period? She wasn’t sure, but said she’d have a look. Apparently there were lots of old papers and things her mother had left, but whether they’d been thrown out by this time, she didn’t know. I told her that my friend would be back in London again in a couple of weeks, and asked if I could phone her nearer the time to arrange a meeting, and she gave me her address and phone number.

  ‘By the time Judith returned from Paris, Herbert and I had agreed to part company. The Lowell Partnership moved to much larger and more prestigious premises in Docklands, establishing a joint project office with a firm of New York architects for the Jerusalem Lane project, which they were now calling “Citicenter One”, would you believe. I took over the lease of this place, and set up on my own as Concept Design, with just one job, a loft conversion in a friend’s house in Maida Vale.

  ‘I contacted Mrs Winterbottom again, and she agreed to see us at a certain time on this Sunday afternoon-she was quite particular about the time.’

  ‘When was this?’ Kathy said.

  ‘It must have been about a month ago. Yes, four weekends ago, I should think. Judith had timed her flights around the meeting. We arrived at 3, and Mrs Winterbottom invited us in to her flat and gave us a cup of tea. We chatted about the weather, and how Judith had been in Paris. Mrs Winterbottom mentioned she’d never been there, although it was so close, but she had been to Sydney, which was so far away, and she laughed at that. I got the impression she was sizing us up, to tell the truth, trying to find out if she could trust us. She chatted away about her family, and how she had a granddaughter who had been to Paris on a school trip, and I could feel Judith getting impatient, but trying not to show it. Then suddenly the old lady got down to business. She started talking about books. She didn’t have any herself now, she said, she preferred the telly. But her sisters did have some of the old books their mother had left them. She explained they lived in separate flats upstairs, and would we like to take a look?