Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  I never said goodbye to him, she silently repeated, with a terrible wash of bitterness.

  Beneath the turbulence of her fear and disgust there was another sensation. It was not quite relief, but it was close to that, like the reverse of a coin. It was as if some mystery had at last been explained to her. Always, for as long as she could remember, she had suspected that there was some detail in her life that was not quite correct. It was a matter of alignment, or shading, perhaps. She could not have expressed it more coherently than that. And if this were the truth, this blurted malice of Pilgrim’s, it was more than an explanation. She felt as if some black and filthy pit had opened up at her feet.

  But Cressida was Grace’s daughter. She had acquired more self-control in her short life than Pilgrim had imagined in all of his. Her white face was the only visible sign of the shock she had suffered. She walked on, and they turned the familiar circuit of the Parks and came back to the house in Woodstock Road.

  Eleanor was in the drawing room, fussing over giving Pilgrim a proper send-off to London. Cressida sat down on the piano stool, and then abruptly jumped up again. She resettled on the sofa with her face turned away from the Janus. Pilgrim slipped past Eleanor and held out the charcoal drawing to his daughter.

  ‘It’s yours,’ he told her.

  Cressida glanced down at it, and then laid it aside. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly.

  For appearance’s sake she went with her aunt to the front door to say goodbye, but she would not look at Pilgrim and she only touched his hand with the cold tips of her fingers when he held it out to her.

  Pilgrim went back in the train to London. He stared out through the sooty windows at the receding water-meadows, and wished that he had held his tongue.

  Twenty

  Rafael discovered from his allies within the Alexanderplatz that Alice was being held in a camp near Berlin. For a little while she had been in police custody, first in Munich and afterwards in Berlin itself, but then she had been handed over to the SS, who had removed her to Sachsenhausen.

  Within two days, the same information came from the British Embassy. Nathaniel was assured that everything possible was being done to bring about her trial and subsequent release, and representations were being made about the conditions of her imprisonment to Himmler and to the Führer himself.

  They could only wait, in their anxiety, working over the crumbs of information that they had been given, until the meagre facts became greasy and nightmarish from over-familiarity. For Nathaniel and Rafael, who were needed elsewhere and who could do little except grimly speculate about Alice’s whereabouts, the time passed with painful slowness. But for Julius and Grace the same anxiety was shot with a kind of feverish joy. The days of waiting and listening brought them closer together; the dance-step that they had begun on Grace’s first night in Berlin swung them faster and faster.

  Nathaniel saw nothing of what was happening. To Nathaniel they were here for Alice alone, and until she was free and safely on her way home with him nothing else could have any importance or significance. Rafael did see, but he said nothing, even in the letters that he wrote to Clio. The quickening pulse of attraction between Grace and Julius seemed only to increase his own sense of foreboding.

  For Julius and Grace themselves the beat of longing was amplified by the unsuitability of the time and the place, and by the steady friction of their guilt. In the cold and inhospitable days after Grace’s arrival the pressure of their need grew until they could barely sit in the same room without touching, without blindly reaching for one another. Grace had never known such sharp physical desire, even at the height of her late-kindled love affair with Anthony.

  But still they waited. In his new confidence Julius was sure that to wait was all that was necessary, and Grace was stayed by a wish to examine and order and savour this happiness, before it devoured her.

  She moved out of the Adlon, insisting to Julius that it was for reasons of economy. Both of them knew, however, that it was because he felt uncomfortable as a Jew in the luxurious hotel that was frequented by SS and SA officers, and even ill-at-ease, in daylight hours, in the surging and prosperous crowds that filled the political centre of Berlin itself. She took a room instead in a small, old-fashioned place closer to Wilmersdorf. It was much less comfortable than the Adlon, but Grace was oddly pleased by the creaking floors and fading décor, and by the three generations of an obliging family who ran it. It was a relief to be away from the uniforms and medals and insignia and the Heil Hitlers of the other hotel.

  Grace felt that everything was changing, even her once sure view of the rights and wrongs of the world. She walked in the streets and saw the bright certainty of the faces of the Berliners, and then she saw how Rafael and Julius and Nathaniel moved in the shadows away from the bands of Nazis and their followers, and she wondered how she could ever have believed that this German path was the right one to follow.

  December came, bitterly cold, with a wind that penetrated the draughty old buildings and sleet that blew into their faces when they ventured outside.

  Julius and Grace became lovers at last in her bedroom in the little hotel.

  There were white curtains at the windows, and a ewer and basin patterned with flowers on a marble-topped washstand. Afterwards Julius remembered the details of the room as if he had lived there for many years, as if he had experienced the very central passage of his life within the four dim, yellow-papered walls. He remembered Grace’s white limbs, winding around his own, and the intent, almost inward expression of her face when she took him into herself. She held his face between her narrow hands and looked into his eyes, and both of them saw the reflections of one another, and themselves, and between them and behind them was yet another set of features – the still, separate pallor of Clio.

  She was like Clio, and yet not Clio. The likenesses multiplied, and fractured between them, and then were overcome and forgotten.

  ‘I love you,’ Julius whispered.

  Grace straddled him, and he reached up to grasp her narrow waist between his hands. Her hair fell forward to hide her face, and then she lifted herself and her head fell back, and he saw her white throat, and the long curve of her flanks above him. He drove upwards into her, deeper and harder until her back arched and he longed to reach further, until he touched her heart, until he made her cry out for him.

  ‘I have always loved you,’ he told her. ‘Ever since I was a little boy. From the moment I understood what love is, and what it does.’

  Grace was happy, the warmth of it ticking inside her like a flame, but she was also afraid of what he said. She put her fingers over his mouth as if to seal in the words but he kissed the hollows of her palms and rolled with her until he lay above her and her skin and her mouth and the warm scent of her were all his, and his alone. The Berlin street outside their window was noisy with the afternoon traffic but the room was silent except for their ragged breathing.

  ‘Grace.’

  To say her name whilst they were so close, with her body wrapped around him, sounded to Julius’s ear like a prayer. He moved again, in a slow rhythm, feeling her heat and sweetness enclosing him. Grace smiled in answer now, a smile that made her mouth curve softly in a way he had never seen before. It seemed that she was ready to give herself up to him at last, after all the years, after he had all but despaired.

  The room with its yellow walls and flowered jug receded and left them, together with the street noises and the faint squeak of the old bed, until there was only their bodies, one body, given up to one another.

  Then Grace’s wide eyes flickered, and he read in them the first shiver of her orgasm. He felt the slow kick of his own, gathering within him, irrefutable, finally, question and answer, made and completed and sealed between them.

  ‘Julius,’ she breathed, her own covenant. Julius.

  Afterwards, when they went back to the Wilmersdorf apartment, Rafael looked up from the chair where he had been sitting reading and saw at once. He ducked
his head back over his book, embarrassed by the nakedness of their faces.

  ‘Nathaniel is out,’ he told them. ‘Just walking.’

  Nathaniel had taken to pacing the suburban streets in the shelter of darkness, going nowhere in particular, trying only to work off the frustration of the anxious days.

  ‘Is there any news?’ Grace asked.

  Rafael shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  He had been thinking of Clio. Something in Grace’s look tonight made Clio seem closer, as if she were here in Berlin instead of far off in Paris. He thought suddenly of the little inn in the Thüringer Wald, and the long country nights, and the feather mattress that had enveloped them.

  Romy had been conceived at the inn, Clio always said that.

  Rafael’s face suddenly softened, and he was able to look up at Julius and Grace. There was some joy in Berlin, then, even if it was at odds with everything else that was happening and all the fear that was concentrated inside him.

  He stood up and lightly touched Julius’s shoulder.

  ‘There is some food,’ he said. ‘I went shopping. Shall I lay it out?’

  Julius smiled. The taut lines had faded from his face, and the hollows seemed to have filled out. He looked almost like a young boy.

  ‘That would be good,’ he said simply.

  They sat down and ate and talked together. Rafael warmed to Grace a little, because he saw the way that Julius looked at her, and her gentleness to him in return.

  When Nathaniel came in he was tired, and could eat nothing. He drank some of the beer that Rafael had bought, and then went off alone to his pension.

  Grace knew that she should go back to London. The House was sitting again, and all the speculation was as to whether the King would insist on a morganatic marriage to Mrs Simpson, or whether he would be forced to abdicate. From the Woodstock Road, she had heard that Cressida was well enough but unusually quiet. According to Eleanor’s diagnosis she was probably missing her mother.

  Just one or two more days, Grace kept resolving. She could do nothing for Alice. She would allow herself just a few more hours of this strange, sweet and passionate limbo that Julius had induced, and then she must go home and back to the real world. Neither of them had discussed what must happen when that time came. Julius held on to her, living each moment like a drowning man, and Grace fell under the spell of his intensity.

  They moved slowly, as if they were bewitched, from the hotel bedroom to Julius’s apartment, out into the cold streets and back into the draughty rooms, entirely lost in one another. Rafael and even Nathaniel were like strangers, on the far periphery of their private world. They talked, almost always about the past, their childhoods and Stretton and Oxford, and the years in between that had brought them here, and they made love, endlessly, with the sharp appetites of the needy.

  On December 11 the King abdicated. The four of them heard the news from England on the wireless in Julius’s apartment, delivered in solemn, portentous tones by the German news broadcaster.

  ‘Poor devil,’ Julius said and Grace looked at him, her eyes suddenly bright with tears.

  ‘It is a very great deal to give up, just for a woman,’ she whispered.

  ‘I would do the same,’ Julius said.

  Nathaniel sat in his corner with his head buried in his hands.

  The next day a messenger came to Wilmersdorf from the British Embassy. Nathaniel was required to see the Ambassador at once. He went in a great hurry, pulling on his raincoat and flattening his ancient hat on his head as he emerged into the icy street. Julius went with him, and Grace and Rafael waited at the apartment.

  The room they were shown into at the Embassy was small and bare, furnished only with a desk and chairs and a portrait of the King. Julius looked up at it while they waited, wondering if his face would be turned to the wall, or how soon it could be taken down and the new King’s image hurried into its place.

  Then the Ambassador and one of the Secretaries came into the room and as soon as he saw them Julius froze with his idle reflections heavy as a stone in his heart. Nathaniel half rose from his place. His bulk seemed awkward and heavy in the confined space, and his knuckles whitened as he struggled to balance by the polished arms of the chair.

  ‘I am afraid I have some very bad news.’

  The slow, grave words filled the space around them.

  There was no air, no light anywhere.

  Nathaniel threw his head back, and Julius thought his father was going to howl aloud like a child. He moved quickly, putting his arm under Nathaniel’s, having to support what had always seemed a source of power and strength.

  Alice was dead.

  She had been shot while trying to escape from the Sachsenhausen camp.

  The younger diplomat was looking at a single half-sheet of paper held in his hand. ‘That is all the information we have at the moment. We are doing everything we can to discover how and why this happened. The authorities are being cooperative.’

  They could not take in what he was saying. Nathaniel had fallen back into the chair. His mouth hung open and he sucked in one painful breath. Julius knelt beside him and fumbled to loosen his collar stud, and behind him he heard the door opening and the sound of whispered instructions and hurrying feet. A woman with a pearl necklace leant over his shoulder and held out a glass of brandy. Julius took it and held it up to Nathaniel’s mouth.

  At last Nathaniel shuddered and leant forward. He rested one elbow on his knee and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Julius had seen him adopt this pose a thousand times before, discussing some fine point of philology with his graduate students or arbitrating in a family disagreement. It brought back the bookish clutter and the academic preoccupation of the Woodstock Road, sharp as this moment, as the last of his fragile hopes disintegrated. There was no mistake, and no hope. Alice was gone.

  He thought of her body, huddled on the ground, and the terrible notion of the bullet hole came unbidden with it. Alice had been a little girl with wiry dark ringlets, running up and down the uneven stairs in the old house. Always behind the rest of them, hurrying to catch up.

  Nathaniel seemed to regain some control of himself. Without looking up he said in a dry voice, ‘She would not have been trying to escape. She would have known that she would be released soon. That we were all here, working for it.’

  But she had not been released. They had scratched away at the hard glitter of Nazi Berlin, in all their narrow futility, and they had achieved nothing. Julius thought of the hours they had spent in Grace’s little hotel, and the yellow walls that had seemed to make a place of safety.

  The Ambassador said, ‘Our information is that she broke away from her group and ran to the perimeter wire, and kept on running when challenged by the guards. She was warned, but she made no response. A guard fired one shot.’

  And that was all. There were disappearances every day. Alice was one out of uncounted hundreds or thousands. She was a British citizen and so there would be questions and official explanations. But it was just one more death, Berlin turning inwards, consuming its own flesh. This was not the Germany that Julius had come to years ago, to play the violin and to hear other men’s music. He tasted the thickness of disgust on his tongue, disgust with himself for living here for so long, as well as for the regime that had murdered his sister.

  The Hirshes could see the diplomats’ sympathy and distress, but they could read other truths in the well-bred faces too. There were English girls who came out here and got involved. They made trouble, had affairs with SS men, needed to be baled out and shipped home. And this was the worst sort of business, the kind they all dreaded. The girl was clearly wide of the mark, and now she was dead. Probably no one would ever know quite how or exactly why. The police and the SS would see to that. It was an incident, a diplomatic embarrassment. It was to be contained, but with the proper degree of dignity and regret. That was what they were thinking.

  Julius put his hand over Nathaniel�
��s. The older man’s felt cold and boneless. He was still sitting with his head bent, as if he were thinking out some problem in his study at home.

  ‘What will happen now?’ Julius asked the blond Englishmen.

  After a moment, the younger one said, ‘We hope that her body will be released to you, for burial here or return to England.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Julius said.

  And so Alice would not be huddled into the ground with the other missing, the husbands and fathers and children consumed by Hitler’s people. Hitler’s people, whom Alice had admired so passionately.

  Julius knew that he would cry; he could feel the pain of the unshed tears. But not here, under the Embassy’s picture of the displaced King. He must get himself and Nathaniel away from here.

  He found a way to stand up, and helped Nathaniel to his feet. They shook hands, listening to the murmurs of sympathy again, and the woman with the pearl necklace opened the door to let them out. They emerged into Wilhelmstrasse. There were cars and buses flooding past them, and people stepping busily and hopefully, and high, shining windows in tiers above their heads.

  Nathaniel’s head shook, wobbling from side to side like an old man’s. Julius guided him to the kerb and helped him into a taxi. As they drove past the fashionable cafés and shops and the balconies draped with swastika flags, Julius could only think of Alice lying huddled where she had fallen, and of how she would never see this again, neither these streets nor home, where she belonged.

  At Wilmersdorf Rafael and Grace knew at once that the worst had happened. Julius moved to put his arms around Grace’s shoulders and laid his cheek against her hair.