The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘He’s a cameraman with the BBC. They’re going to expand television transmissions soon, so it’s a good, secure thing. He worked for Pathé during the last show. Arthur’s more Felix’s age. When were you born, old chap?’

  ‘Nineteen twelve,’ Felix told him.

  ‘Well, he’s probably a couple of years younger. May is more our sort of age – mid-twenties. They’ve got two brats under the age of three. He obviously got home quite often in the war.’

  ‘It would be good to have the patter of tiny feet about the place,’ Adam said. Then – as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb – he added, ‘Actually, we have a bit of a surprise for you two . . .’

  She stiffened. ‘If you mean Fräulein von Ritter – the Nazi . . .’ She turned on her husband. ‘I still can’t believe you let me fraternize with that . . . that . . .’ A new thought struck her. ‘And now you do the same with poor Monsieur Breit!’

  ‘Mais pas du tout, Madame!’ he said. ‘I know all about Mrs Johnson’s past. I also know my own past.’

  She gave an expressive, Gallic shrug. ‘Alors?’

  ‘And I say if the past will not set the present free, then we are still at war. You still seem to be at war with the Nazis. So you cannot yet claim victory. You keep the Nazis alive so you can go on fighting them.’ He tapped his skull. ‘And so you deny yourself this wonderful present – doux present du présent! It is just one handshake away!’

  Nicole tossed her head but felt she could offer no rebuttal to this – especially to the one who made it. ‘Another reason I’m angry is that I liked her. I thought we can have European nights here at the Dower House . . . Swedish cuisine, French cuisine, and . . .’ She gazed uncertainly at Felix. ‘Hungarian, of course. Goulash – c’est au poile!’

  ‘The French never quite got the hang of rationing,’ Tony said apologetically.

  They crossed the hall, which was almost filled with the semi-spiral volute of the main staircase, a light, elegant structure that seemed too delicate to support even itself, much less the schoolboys who must lately have charged up and down it.

  Nicole turned to Felix. ‘Why are you looking at me so . . . so . . .’

  ‘Intensely?’ he offered.

  ‘Par example!’

  He laughed. ‘I was wondering if you would allow your husband to pose for me?’

  ‘Good God!’ Tony snorted.

  ‘The pose you were in beside the lawn just now . .’ Felix mimed his tapping his pipe on his heel. ‘When I saw that I suddenly remembered you coming into Mauthausen. You did exactly the same thing then. I remember thinking at the time that if an Englishman can march into the camp and do that – so easily, so casually – then we really must be liberated. I think such a moment in my life should be immortalized, no?’

  ‘I say, are you serious?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Felix laughed again.

  ‘The memory is true, though,’ Adam said. ‘He reminded me of it the minute he saw you.’ He glanced at Felix as if expecting him to confirm it.

  ‘Well,’ Felix said. ‘It’s as true as anything can be these days.’

  They started up the final stair, which led to the old servants’ quarters, soon to be the Johnsons’ flat.

  Steps. These of pitch pine.

  ‘Devil!’ Marianne exclaimed.

  It sounded like a whole delegation coming up.

  ‘Well, we’ve finished,’ Willard said complacently as he unlocked the door.

  ‘You have. Look at my hair! Go and meet them – distract them!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Mm nnm mnh!’ Her mouth was stopped with two hairpins and a kirby grip.

  ‘What about the dry rot?’ Willard asked, meeting them halfway along the corridor. ‘Hi, Tony . . . Nicole! Great to see you again.’

  ‘Same here, old bean. You don’t look a day older.’

  ‘What dry rot?’ Adam asked.

  Willard led them to the room at the farther corner of the house. ‘Can’t you smell it? That’s dry rot, surely?’

  They fetched a bar and lifted a floorboard. Small frills of dry rot festooned the brick wall at one end.

  ‘No fruiting body yet,’ Willard said. ‘It looks treatable to me.’

  Adam glanced ruefully at Tony. ‘A fine pair of surveyors we’d make!’

  Marianne joined them, not a kirby grip out of place. ‘We just are loving this whole attic,’ she said.

  There was an embarrassed silence, which Felix swiftly quashed. He tapped his chest. ‘Me – Austro-Hungarian German . . .’ Then pointing at the others as he went around: ‘American . . . Swedish . . . French . . . English. It will be good. And we can have gourmet nights – Swedish cuisine, French cuisine, American cuisine, and –’ he turned innocently toward Nicole – ‘Hungarian, of course. Goulash – c’est au poile, n’est ce pas, madame? And just a handshake away!’

  She flounced away to the stairhead, saying – without turning round – ‘I must draw the arrangement of sewage tanks before I forget them.’

  ‘She knows,’ Marianne said.

  ‘’Fraid so, old thing,’ Tony agreed. ‘I let the cat out of the bag. I had no idea she’d react like that.’

  Adam turned to Marianne: ‘How d’you feel?’

  She shrugged and looked at Willard. ‘I’m willing to try.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Talking of rations – what’s the nearest US Army base? I might know somebody there.’

  ‘See!’ Adam said, still to Marianne though his target was Willard. ‘A community has strengths no nuclear family can match.’

  ‘It’s good so,’ she agreed. ‘But is it strong still after we get our first communal electricity bill?’

  He frowned.

  Sally explained, ‘I told her – we have three electricity meters – one for each phase – and eight fuse boards and no one knows which lights and sockets any of them serves.’

  Tuesday, 6 May 1947

  Felix noticed her at once – a tall, svelte, pugnacious young woman who advanced slowly along the gallery, peering suspiciously at each exhibit. Did she doubt their attributions, he wondered? Or did she think she could have arranged the whole gallery far better than this?

  At last she approached the armour he had been admiring before he noticed her. She peered at it with the same distrustful gaze. Then, still without looking at him, she murmured, ‘You’ll know me next time, then.’

  He took a chance. ‘You want to fix that now?’

  Fix! Willard’s word.

  It surprised her into facing him at last. ‘Fix what?’

  ‘“The next time”, of course. I’m Felix Breit, by the way.’ He offered his hand.

  ‘Felix Breit!’ The name surprised her so much that her handshake was quite perfunctory. It flattered him – until she added, ‘Did you have an ancestor who was an artist? William Breit?’

  He cringed as he admitted it. To think that this young woman knew of his appalling grandfather, painter of chocolate-box erotica for the rich Berlin bourgeoisie, but had not – apparently – heard of his much more famous and worthy grandson! ‘You know his work?’ he added.

  ‘Not at all. Just the name – and the fact that he did paintings of some kind. D’you know anyone called Fogel?’

  ‘Is that your name?’

  ‘Me? No. Oh – sorry!’ She held out her hand again. ‘Faith Bullen-ffitch.’

  ‘Will you join me for tea, Miss Bullen-ffitch? I saw a sign saying Tea Room.’

  She accepted without coquetry – no gleam of je-sais-quoi in her eye. He decided she was a collector. Every artist gets to know them as his star rises. For himself he didn’t mind. Collectors were often more willing to come across than cocottes – and they weren’t limpets when it was time to move on.

  The decor of the tea room at the V&A, once criticized by the Victorians for its incongruous modernity, was now a museum exhibit in its own right – a lofty, clattery, echoing hall, lined from skirting to apex in glazed tiles, unique to this particular tea roo
m. Waitress service, suspended in 1939, had not returned; three skinny ladies dispensed almost sugarless tea, completely sugarless biscuits, and one slice of buttered bread per person. But customers could lard it with as much raspberry-flavoured turnip jam as they liked. The glass tabletop was cracked and the corner clips harboured samples of ancient snacks.

  Miss Bullen-ffitch insisted on paying for herself – fourpence. ‘Bread on ration!’ she said disgustedly. ‘Even in the darkest days of the war it was never rationed. Everything else was, but not bread. Mind you – when you think of the winter we’ve just kissed goodbye . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t here,’ he said. ‘I was in Germany. It was bad there, too. Trees hacked to bits in all the parks. People hammering the sides of coal wagons, just to collect the dust.’

  She was unable to compete. Perhaps she thought they deserved it.

  ‘Who is this Fogel?’ he asked.

  ‘Wolf Fogel, my boss. He’s a publisher here in London. Well, he doesn’t actually publish books himself. Not yet. He compiles them for other publishers. D’you know the King Penguins?’

  ‘Birds?’

  ‘Never mind. It’s not important, really. The only reason I mentioned him is that your grandfather did a painting in a villa belonging to my Mister Fogel’s grandfather – Julius. It overlooked a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. If he can find the painting, it might help prove his title.’

  ‘The lake was the Wannsee, probably. I know it.’

  ‘That’s the name. Am Grossen Wannsee. So did your grandfather have a villa there, too?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Ours is not a communicating sort of family. Wannsee is one of Berlin’s “lungs” – as architects like to say.’

  ‘Don’t they just! Anyway, although the communists have seized the villa, Fogel still wants to establish title because, apparently, he’s the only one to survive out of the whole family. He got out just before the war. Wouldn’t it be awful to be in that situation – all your family dead except . . .’ She caught his expression and clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘I agree.’ He smiled. Later he realized that the smile had been uncharacteristic of him – to smile so immediately, anyway. He was so hungry these days for female company – and, be honest, female flesh – that, with any other young woman, he would have withheld it to make her feel a guilty little debt. What instinct assured him, so soon, that this one was different?

  ‘You’d better tell me all about yourself,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’ll put my foot in my mouth every time I open it.’

  ‘If you’ll return the favour and tell me all about your Mister Fogel?’ It occurred to him that a Jew who had escaped just before the war and had become prosperous during it, might have a conscience that could be played upon. And him a publisher, too.

  ‘So you’d rather hear about him than me!’ she teased.

  ‘I think I already know quite a lot about you.’

  Each audited the other for a moment before she said, ‘Well? Go on.’

  He told her as much of his story as he thought she could tolerate.

  ‘You sum up people in the twinkling of an eye,’ she said. ‘Now I understand why. You must be very good at it, else you wouldn’t be here. I wonder what you’ll make of Fogel?’

  ‘If we ever meet.’

  ‘You’ll meet.’

  ‘So tell me about him. He’s from Berlin?’

  ‘Vienna – but he was at home in Berlin, too, I’m sure. Until he was nineteen. When he came here in ’thirty-nine he was Wolfgang Vogel – with a V, but after the English released all German Jewish refugees from detention, he changed it to Wolf Fogel – with an F, and pronouncing “Wolf” just like that – the English way. And he had a pretty good war, too. Can you imagine! The British locked up pro-Nazis and escaped Jews in the same camp together!’

  ‘Naturally.’ Felix shrugged. ‘Why should they understand? How many British can swim twenty-two miles?’

  She took his meaning at once and smiled ruefully. ‘Quite so – we are dreadful.’ But she spoke the word with a hint of pride. And she went on to describe how Fogel was released and went straight into the ministry, working on leaflets to drop over the enemy. That was during the phoney war, when all the RAF ever dropped was leaflets.

  And that led him into publishing – information books . . . keep-your-chin-up books . . . fight-for-our-heritage books – which allowed him to print in colour when others had to make do with black-and-white, and it also gave him entrée to intellectual and cultural circles – all of which he was now parleying into a profitable little peacetime business.

  ‘But,’ she added, ‘the actual process of writing fills him with a sort of fidgety indignation. Words don’t elude him – words on the air, words that can fade before the breath on them is dry, deniable words. But real words on real paper are like a contract with the truth. They can return to haunt him. Written words, for him, reek with the stench of costly litigation.’

  Felix chuckled. ‘But not for you, I think?’

  ‘That’s why we complement each other perfectly,’ she replied. ‘He always gets others to do the writing for him. And as for editing, subbing, and problems of layout . . . in between the occasional flashes of his undoubted genius, they just bore him. In short,’ she laughed, ‘Wolf Fogel is a born publisher – not an editor but a born éditeur – he can see the bigger picture that often eludes those who dot eyes and cross tees.’

  ‘And what is he working on now?’ Felix asked.

  ‘It’s a project he’s lusted after for the whole of the past year – just waiting for the paper situation to ease – an encyclopedia of European modern art.’ She smiled. ‘Actually, d’you mind if I say no more about it, just for the moment? Meeting you has given me a brilliant idea. Where can I get in touch with you if I need to?’

  ‘D’you think you might need to? We all have needs, Miss Bullen-ffitch.’

  She took his meaning but not the bait. ‘No promises, mind,’ she said.

  He had applied for a telephone at the Dower House but they had told him it would be at least a six-month wait. He gave her Wilson’s number at the Greater London Plan offices and they arranged to meet, again at the V&A, the following Saturday.

  What had brought their conversation to its sudden conclusion on her part was a memory of a recent conversation with Fogel about the projected encyclopedia of European modern art. The first dummies promised chapters on Cubism, Fauvism, Der Blaue Reiter, Surrealism, Dada . . . and so on. The obvious thing to do was to take a key work of art from each school or movement and use it full-page, facing the introduction to each chapter. But Fogel occasionally hated the obvious.

  ‘Better,’ he had told her, ‘would be something plastic, changeable . . . an object . . . an art thing that we could adapt in some significant, thought-provoking way for each chapter. Maybe light it differently . . . shoot it from a different angle each time. Something. I don’t know. We need a unity here.’

  ‘You mean get a sculptor to do something like that?’ she asked. ‘A big name?’

  ‘Yes, but not so big he’s also expensive.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll think,’ he said.

  The thinking stopped the moment Miss Bullen-ffitch told him of her meeting with Felix Breit. He could provide just the thing – a sensuous piece of sculpture, sensuously lighted, printed in the most sensuous Swiss photogravure – but at British-gravure prices . . .

  Mentally he added a nought at the end of his projected print run.

  Felix and Miss Bullen-ffitch met the following Saturday in the graphics room of the museum, where he had requisitioned the folders of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists – etchings, lithographs, monotypes, and a few Expressionist woodcuts, all higgledy-piggledy in display portfolios, much as a private collector or even the artists themselves might have kept them.

  ‘You could practically do the whole book from this one collection,’ he said, turning over a Bonnard monotype of two slightly comical do
gs chasing a third along a Montmartre alleyway.

  ‘Learn to say “we” rather than “you”,’ she advised. ‘I mean – Fogel is on tenterhooks to meet you. Could you spare a day a week?’

  ‘One day this week?’

  ‘No, a day every week. He wants you to become design consultant for the whole project. I told you how he works – a big name on every book. Or, in this case, series of books. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize what a big name yours is.’

  ‘But I’m a sculptor. I don’t know the first thing about book design.’

  ‘You do. Everyone does. You just don’t know it. Listen – you can be a sculptor six days a week and a book designer on the seventh.’ She eyed him cautiously. ‘D’you mind if I coach you a little?’

  He laughed. ‘Someone will have to.’

  ‘When we have tea. Meanwhile, you tell me about these artists. I’m obviously going to have to bone up on them a bit. Bonnard – you mentioned him last week, when you described being arrested in Paris. Did you ever meet Manet?’

  ‘Manet died thirty years before I was born, for heaven’s sake! My grandfather was friends with Monet – he’s the only Impressionist I ever saw in the flesh. But I know many Post-Impressionists – Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Vlaminck, Derain, Chagall . . . friends and acquaintances. Rouault. I can get many private informations, if you are interested.’

  They beguiled the next couple of hours with the V&A’s prints and his reminiscences. At one point Faith said, ‘The two I really don’t understand are Picasso and Braque. They did their paintings . . . what? Thirty . . . forty years ago. I really ought to understand them by now. But I don’t!’

  Felix thought awhile; at length he said, ‘Go and look at back-numbers of Vogue from the time of the Great War. Did it exist then? Well, any fashion magazine from that time. In fact – any magazine, any newspaper. And then look at the equivalent today. What’s the difference? I’ll tell you what the difference is – Picasso! Today’s magazines . . . newspapers . . . advertising . . . they would look completely different without the Cubists and the Surrealists. And Picasso was prominent . . . pre-eminent? . . . in both. I never liked the man but I can’t deny him that. He’s the giant.’