by Rosie Thomas
She could choose: to do what she could from London for Alice, or to go directly to Berlin. The House was still in recess, although there was enough happening elsewhere in London. Mrs Simpson had just been granted a divorce from her husband and it seemed that the entire Government, and every dinner table in Mayfair and Belgravia, was waiting to see what the King would do.
In the dark of her study, Grace listened to Julius’s voice within her head. Then she picked up the photograph of Anthony that stood in a silver frame on her desk. Cressida had bought her the frame, for a birthday present, and had placed the snapshot under the glass. The light from the hallway glinted on the silver and glass now as Grace turned it from side to side.
The decision was already made. She would go to Berlin.
Grace flew to Tempelhof. Julius watched her plane approaching out of the whitish autumnal sky and followed it as it touched down and skimmed over the runway to a little patter of applause. There was a festive atmosphere at the Berlin airport. Berliners had taken to coming out for an afternoon excursion, paying fifty pfennigs to watch the planes dipping in and out and listening in the meantime to the band playing on the roof terrace of the excellent restaurant.
Julius saw her as soon as she emerged at the head of the plane’s steps. She was wearing a suit in some pale colour that made her waist look tiny. He lifted his arm to wave to her, and dropped it again, feeling foolish in the realization that she couldn’t possibly distinguish him in the press of so many other people.
But when she came through the arrivals gate, coming straight towards him without any hesitation, she turned her face up in greeting and touched her mouth to the corner of his.
‘I saw you as we came in, up there on the terrace,’ she said.
‘Did you?’ The idea that she had been watching so closely for him made his breath catch sharply in his chest. To hide it he stooped down to lift her suitcase, fussing unnecessarily with the straps of it.
They went back to Wilmersdorf, with Julius paying for an unaccustomed taxi instead of returning, as he had come, by tram and bus. Grace was to stay at the Adlon, but she insisted on seeing Nathaniel first of all. He was waiting with Rafael at Julius’s apartment.
Grace and Nathaniel embraced each other. Nathaniel held her and cupped her cheek in his big hand as if she were his own daughter. Grace was touched by his warmth, and it made her feel glad that she had come on this chase after Alice.
‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled at him, with more optimism than she truly felt. ‘With the four of us to contend with, how can the Nazis fail to release her at once?’
She turned to Rafael. They shook hands with a touch of awkwardness and then he kissed her cheek. Grace knew that he looked at her so hard for what he could see of Clio in her, and she felt the old prickle of irritation. She thought that Rafael himself looked less hungry than he once had done, a little softened and rounded, as if domestic life with Clio and a baby suited him well.
They were all waiting for her, she realized.
‘What do we know?’ she asked Nathaniel.
Nathaniel’s anxiety swooped down on him again. ‘Only that she is in custody pending police and SS questioning. The ambassador has made the necessary representations; she is a British citizen of course, but we are advised that we can only wait. We have no idea even if she is being held in Munich, or in Berlin, or somewhere else altogether. We can’t visit her, or discover if she has any legal representation. It is as if there is a wall around her. The diplomats won’t press too hard, for fear of upsetting relations here.’
Nathaniel spoke coherently, but he could not hide his fear.
‘There seems to be no doubt that she did what they say. There were two dozen witnesses in the restaurant.’
Grace said sharply, ‘Whatever Alice did, she didn’t attempt to murder the Führer. To marry him perhaps, but not to kill him.’
There was a small sound of protest. She had shocked them. Here, in this place, they would rather contemplate Alice offering violence than devotion. Grace suddenly realized that she knew and understood Alice far better than they did, and her own understanding was imperfect and clouded with impatience. She must do all she could for her, that was clear. Alice was already half condemned by her own family’s political bias.
‘I will try to see the Führer,’ Grace said. And to Julius and Nathaniel, ‘You must persevere with the Embassy and the police. Every day.’ Julius nodded. He had the strength, she thought.
It was early evening. Julius had bought food and made preparations for a meal, and now he and Nathaniel began to lay it out on the small table. Watching them work in the confined space of Julius’s room, Grace was suddenly reminded of the intensity and close-quarters intimacy of family life in the Woodstock Road. It must have been Nathaniel who was responsible for that almost overheated atmosphere, not Eleanor. There had been nothing of the kind introduced by Blanche in the nurseries at Stretton and Belgrave Square.
Rafael was watching too, with his long legs and arms folded out of the way. In a low voice Grace asked him, ‘Why did you come back?’
He did not turn to look at her. But he did answer. ‘I had to come.’
It had been harder to leave Clio and Romy behind than anything he had ever done, but the awareness of unfinished business had drawn him back to Berlin. And now he was here he realized that he had not been rational. He was pinioned and immobilized by his own inability to do anything significant either for the destroyed and dwindling Jewish community, that had once been so proud and prosperous, or even for Alice Hirsh. But yet, even though his old contacts were almost all gone, he still knew the names of two men at the Alexanderplatz police headquarters who were not Nazi sympathizers. Maybe there would still be something.
Grace understood that Rafael was not in Berlin for Alice’s sake alone. ‘How is Grete?’
‘She is in Waltersroda, with my father. He is an old man now, and he is in poor health.’
He thought, as he always thought, if they would only leave, and come to Paris, or travel to England. But Rafael knew that his father would never leave Thuringia, and that Grete would insist on staying with him. He felt bitterness wash against him like a cold sea. All his memories of the forest, and Berlin, and Germany itself were tainted with images of decay and corruption.
Seeing him, Nathaniel put a hand on his shoulder. The two men had grown close in the brief time they had known one another.
‘Come and eat,’ he ordered.
The summons to table, as a remedy for all ills, Grace remembered.
They tried hard, over the simple food, all four of them. There was much talk about Clio, and about Romy’s achievements, and family news from Oxford and London and Stretton. But none of them could even half dismiss the thoughts of what cell or worse Alice might be confined in, and what her evening meal might be that night, and what her thoughts and fears must be. They ate what they could, and then Grace said that she must go to the Adlon. Nathaniel was staying in a little pension nearby, and Rafael was sleeping on the floor of Julius’s room.
Julius was to accompany Grace to make sure she reached the hotel safely, and Nathaniel came down to the street door to see her off.
‘Thank you for coming out here,’ he said simply. ‘It means a great deal to Eleanor and me.’
‘Whatever little I can do,’ Grace answered. ‘Did you know, Cressida is in Oxford with Aunt Eleanor? I didn’t want her to stay alone in London without … without Alice or me. It was either Oxford or sending her up to Mama at Stretton. Cressida begged for the Woodstock Road.’
‘For as long as she wants. Eleanor will be pleased to have her,’ Nathaniel said, ever hospitable even in his own absence. Julius and Grace smiled at each other.
When they reached the Adlon Grace said, ‘Come in and have one drink with me.’
Julius hesitated, looking at the uniformed flunkeys and then up at the great façade. ‘I shouldn’t. We avoid places like this, nowadays, because it is easier …’
Grace stood
up very straight. ‘I want you to come in,’ she said.
The doorman saluted them as Grace swept past.
Up in her room, she produced a bottle of whisky from amongst the folds of tissue paper and silk in her suitcase. She poured measures into toothglasses and handed one to Julius. They looked at the heavy armchairs bleakly facing one another across the width of the bedroom, and then turned their backs on them to perch on the high white bed. Grace kicked off her shoes and crossed her legs with a sigh of relief. Julius heard the amazing soft rasp of her stockings between her knees.
Grace tilted her glass to him. ‘Health,’ she said.
‘And happiness. If that is a possibility,’ he answered.
To be perched on the bed picnicking from toothmugs was irresistibly reminiscent of being children.
Grace laughed softly. ‘Remember the magic circle?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘We thought we were invincible.’
Julius lifted her hand from where it had rested splay-fingered on the wrinkled stuff of her skirt. Grace still wore Anthony’s rings. He knitted his fingers with hers, looking down at their joined fists.
‘No. It was you who believed you were invincible. I don’t think the rest of us had any such ideas about ourselves. It was your bravado, your pure high confidence and sureness, that Jake and I were both in love with.’
That I still love.
Had he said it? Neither of them could have sworn to it, either way. The words seemed to hang between them, clearly audible whether he had uttered them or not. Grace turned her head, slowly, until she could see his face.
She had always known it, but she had chosen not to know.
Now the bedroom of the Adlon Hotel tilted, throwing heavy wallpaper and ornate furniture out of true until the only thing that was solid and in full focus was Julius’s dark profile. It seemed that she had known his features all her life, known them as intimately as she knew her own, and had never looked at them before.
Grace lifted their linked hands and put her mouth against them.
A second later she was in Julius’s arms. He moved so quickly, because he was afraid to hesitate. At first he held her as if she might break, or vanish altogether, but then when he felt her solidity and the warmth of her skin he sighed and with blind eyes pushed her backwards until they lay against the massive German pillows and bolster.
He kissed her as if he were starving, and as if she were a feast to which he had long ago given up hope of being invited.
Grace was amazed. Her mouth opened to his, as greedy as he was himself, as she felt the hard weight of him on top of her. She had forgotten it all, the sudden heat and the delight of wanting and discovering that she was wanted in turn. It had been a long time since Anthony went. Her breath was trapped inside her, deep inside, together with some sudden, fierce impulse that she did know and recognize. Julius’s hands spanned her body. He undid the buttons at her throat and slid his hands inside. His fingers found her breast and then her nipple, fluttering over it as it hardened.
Julius.
Had it always been so obvious, Grace wondered, drunk with the sensations that assaulted her, so obvious all these years and so carefully ignored?
She opened her eyes to see the dark hair at his temple and a knot of tiny veins that pulsed under the white, vulnerable skin. Julius was close, so close that he was almost part of herself, but his mouth and hands emphasized their differences and set up a need within her that she had believed was all extinct.
Memories stirred in her, unpursued in this instant of urgency but lending their shimmer to it, like fish in a deep tank: Clio and herself, in and out of the wounded soldier’s room with their reflected features and their different intentions, and his bandaged head; Jake in some field, lying on grass that prickled them, scaring her; the rowing boat, the Mabel, and the terrible rush of water over her head, the fear of obliteration.
‘Your bravado, your pure high confidence,’ that was what Julius had said before he took her in his arms.
Sinking, swimming; Grace knew that she was not brave, exactly. Bravery required a due recognition of the risks, and a decision made to disregard them. It occurred to Grace then that perhaps she did not see the world in as much detail as other people – as Clio did, for example. She did not see the dangers, or feel the peaks of satisfaction. She was a little like Alice, in that. Poor Alice.
But all of these thoughts of Grace’s were only submerged flickers like muscle tics under the skin of her immediate consciousness. The rest of her, the bulky and urgent business of her arms and legs and mouth, was all concerned with Julius.
His hands moved again. He found the smooth, silky stretch of her stockings above her knees, and then the ribbed band at the top, and the bare flesh above it that was so soft he thought it might dissolve under his clumsy fingers. Some edge of lace snagged minutely against his fingernail.
Her legs parted a little. It was warm here, and very close and secret, and at the same time immense and primal, drawing him inwards. Julius could not think at all. There was a rush of urgency and anxiety in him that made him want to plunge himself into her, grinding her with himself until he had made her his, pounding their separate beings until they were mashed together as one.
‘Julius,’ she whispered. Her back arched towards him, but she was holding him off.
He stopped at once. If she had remained silent he would have rushed on and into her, but her voice stilled him. Now her hand reached his and held his wrist.
‘I would like to wait a little,’ Grace confessed.
He raised his head, sensing rather than listening to the words, and then he felt a rush of thankfulness. She had said wait, not never.
Julius sat up immediately, releasing her. He smoothed back his hair, and noticed that his hands were shaking.
Grace sat up too. She straightened her creased skirt and did up the tiny buttons of her blouse, making little adjustments to herself that seemed to him extraordinarily feminine and expressive.
Only when they were both tidied and patted into place did they look into one another’s eyes again.
‘Do you mind? Waiting a little?’ Grace asked anxiously. She knew that she needed time for this, a space to think and recollect and store up the impressions that this evening had thrown at her.
‘I don’t mind anything about you, anything you do. Now or in the future.’
Something about this worried her. Quickly she said, ‘Don’t talk like that. I don’t want you to be a slave.’
If it was an odd word to choose, Julius seemed to understand what she meant by it. He half smiled. ‘No more of a slave than I have always been.’
Grace slipped off the bed. The white cover was wrinkled and creased. She felt equally dishevelled herself, but she did not mind it in front of Julius. There did not seem to be enough space between them for shyness or embarrassment to bloom. Julius stood up too. He picked up his discarded whisky glass and drank the contents at a gulp. The evening seemed to have travelled in a circle; they smiled at each other then, remembering what the circle enclosed.
At the door Grace reached up and kissed his mouth. She peered at him at this odd angle, her eyes seeming very bright. Julius thought he could see his own happiness reflected in them.
‘Until tomorrow,’ Grace said.
Julius walked all the way back to Wilmersdorf. He might have sung, or danced down the centre of the shining-wet streets. He saw two SS patrols, and heard their boot-heels striking the paving stones. There was also one gang of boys who came brawling out of the darkness accompanied by the crystalline ring of breaking glass. Two of them carried the Nazi flag. Instead of singing Julius hid in the shadows until they had gone by, and he reached his own door in safety.
Cressida stood on the narrow, precarious balcony and looked down into her aunt’s Oxford garden. In mid-November it was a wispy jungle of colourless stalks and sodden leaves drifting against the old brick walls. The roof-lines and chimneypots of the neighbouring houses were
clearly visible now that the trees offered only bare branches as screens. Eleanor had not been out this autumn to make her busy sweep of the herringbone-brick paths or to cut back the withering summer growth, and there had been no bonfires of woody debris smouldering in the miniature wilderness at the furthermost point from the house. There were no children left to clamour for a Guy Fawkes blaze, and Eleanor was too occupied with her anxiety for Alice to wander out into the garden with her pruning shears, or to set about protecting the roots of her tender shrubs with nests of straw.
Cressida turned away from the desolate garden. The knotted strands of an unpruned clematis wound through the rusting wrought-iron lace of the balcony, with a few brittle leaves and tufts of beard-like seedhead still clinging to the shoots. She twisted off a single leaf and let it drift down to settle on the tussocky grass.
Cressida was too much used to her own company to feel bored or neglected. But she would have admitted that the mournful silence of the house had begun to oppress her. Aunt Eleanor did what she could, but her terrible anxiety for Alice was too close to the surface. Sometimes when she was talking about something else, some trivial business to do with running the house or her Oxford voluntary work, she would stop as if she could no longer will herself to make the words, and her eyes would fill up with tears.
‘Don’t cry, Aunt Eleanor,’ was all Cressida could say. ‘They will come home, you’ll see they will.’
Sometimes Tabby was there. Tabby had an inner strength that seemed to be truly God-given. It shone out of her, in her calmness and mildness, but she was never able to impart even a fraction of it to her mother and cousin.
‘We must pray,’ Tabby told them with her luminous smile.
‘I can’t pray,’ Eleanor would wail at her. ‘Do you think I haven’t tried? But I can’t do it. I don’t know how to.’
Her husband and her children had been her religion for almost forty years. It was too late to find another creed now.
‘I don’t believe in God,’ Cressida said, with one of her challenging stares.
