The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘Well!’ Felix said as he set down his suitcase and hers. His heart was now racing from more than the climb to this attic.

  ‘Nicole!’ Angela said. She looked at her watch. ‘Bloody Nicole! I’ll bet she is bathing little Andrew Mercier exactly now and giggling over this trick she has played.’

  Felix turned back toward the door. ‘I’ll go and explain.’

  ‘She’ll feel so embarrassed,’ Angela said, adding, ‘We’re not going to be able to wash in this handbasin without bumping our heads.’

  ‘You think we can . . . ?’ Felix hesitated.

  ‘We are completely grown up, Felix. Not kids who see the teacher’s back is turned.’

  But later, at the ‘very simple dinner’, Roger took a phone call in the hall and then called Amy out there, saying, ‘Nicole,’ in a slightly sepulchral tone.

  The conversation was brief and, at the Paris end, rather heated. The moment Amy returned, Angela got in first, ‘We guessed it was her! We weren’t going to make a fuss about it because of tomorrow’s conference.’

  ‘And – as Nicole may have told you, madame,’ Felix said, ‘we have both lived in circumstances where personal privacy was not, so to speak, uppermost in our minds. We can manage very well.’

  ‘Circumstances?’

  Nicole had obviously not told her.

  ‘Mauthausen.’ Felix pointed at himself. ‘And . . .’

  ‘Ravensbrück,’ Angela said.

  ‘Oooh!’ She sat heavily in a chair just inside the door. ‘Oh!’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Oh!’

  Roger was watching her closely, wiping his lips on his napkin – mechanically.

  The thought suddenly struck Felix. ‘Perhaps we should not take part in your conference tomorrow, madame? It might embarrass your German delegates? Though I should tell you that neither of us bears any individual Germans ill will.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Angela put in.

  ‘It must be faced,’ Roger told his wife.

  ‘Of course.’ She combined a shrug and a sigh – in which Felix clearly saw Nicole’s dramatic sort of mime. ‘Perhaps le bon Dieu always intended this for our first conference for peace and understanding.’

  ‘Then you must know all the truth about me,’ Angela said.

  ‘No!’ Felix cried.

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘Until January the twentieth, in nineteen forty-two, I was a technical officer in the Schutzstaffel. In my work as a sound-recording engineer I answered directly to Reinhard Heydrich.’

  ‘The twentieth of January?’ Amy looked at her husband, then at Felix. ‘I was in Paris that day. I can never forget it. It was when they . . .’ She turned to Felix. ‘But they let you go.’

  He nodded. ‘And rearrested me in Vichy, with no publicity, two years later.’

  She turned again to Angela. ‘So did you know each other even then?’

  She shook her head and went on to explain why the conference was held (to implicate the entire party in the Vernichtung) and her own role in recording it, which ended in her defecting to the Resistance and her imprisonment. And how she came to know of Felix’s arrest in Paris on that same day. ‘They said there would certainly be a big protest from the artistic cliques in Paris and it was already decided to release Felix again to make good headlines in the papers. The idea was from Goebbels, of course.’

  Amy glanced sorrowfully at her husband. ‘Oh, Roger – do you hear? It’s true! The Parisians would not mind too much the rounding-up of the Jews . . . but an artist! Tiens! That’s something different. Ooooooh –’ her sigh was like a swiftly deflating tyre – ‘where do we even begin?’

  And now she was so wrapped up in the alterations she felt obliged to make to the following day’s agenda that she completely forgot the other change she ought to make.

  And the last thing Felix and Angela wanted was to make a fuss.

  ‘You go first,’ Felix said. ‘I want to have a good look at these pictures.’

  ‘You won’t see much in this light,’ she warned him. ‘You know what the richest man in France does? I’m sure he manufactures fifteen-watt lamps.’

  She closed the door, leaving him in the pasage. He wondered whether he would, in fact, be able to speak to this conference tomorrow.

  The picture at the stairhead was a crude but probably valuable woodcut of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants. Dress the perpetrators in SS uniforms and it would be a gruesomely familiar scene. It struck him then that the Trocquemés must both be Protestants – no papal portraits, Sacred Hearts, ecstatic images of the Virgin . . . how quickly life at the Dower House had stripped him of his old European habits.

  Could he talk about ‘The New Europe’ without invoking his particular experience of the old, which seemed too petty to connect with such vast ideas?

  Next was a sepia photograph of Alfred de Musset himself, sitting beneath a parasol on the lawn behind the house; the woodland beyond him had since been thinned to a few specimen trees – prudent gardening or wartime necessity?

  And talk to committed Christians? Tell them God must now take lessons from the Humanists?

  Click!

  Darkness.

  He cleared his throat to alert whoever had turned the light off . . . and then remembered it was one of those pneumatic switches that slowly refill with air after you push them in. He thought he remembered where it was and so felt his way gingerly down the flight to where it . . . wasn’t. He tried a fingertip search for it along the passage but soon gave up. Not even the dimmest light penetrated the windows overlooking the street. He had forgotten that all French villages seemed to have a terror of light – outdoor light – after sunset. Even before the war, playing surrealist games with André Breton in country villages near Fontainebleau, they had walked through one pitch-black and seemingly deserted village after another.

  Give them the existentialist answer – tell them they’re on a journey to nowhere? The road is a cul-de-sac. There is nothing beyond that door – open it and see for yourselves. The men with the darkness have arrived, disguised as God.Why was he standing here in the dark?

  Oh yes!

  Forgetting he had descended one flight, he began working his way along the wall, feeling for their door, looking under them for a sliver of light and whispering Angela’s name urgently. There was a sudden flood of light overhead and she startled him by almost shouting his name.

  ‘Er . . . ah . . . yes,’ he replied. ‘Don’t shut the door. I’ve got to find the light whadyoumaycallit.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said impatiently. ‘Surely this is light enough.’

  Stairs. These of wood. Thirteen steps. Lucky for him?

  Halfway up he was transfixed at the sight of her, standing in the doorway with the light behind her – and it certainly was more than fifteen watts. It was only her silhouette, her shadow, against the translucent silk of her nightdress, but . . .

  ‘Pity you haven’t got your sketchbook!’ she taunted, doing a coquettish little twirl before skipping out of sight. Her bed played a spring symphony.

  As he shut their door behind him she let out a small, quiet fart. ‘Oh dear!’ she said. ‘I didn’t quite mean that . . . but it does at least answer one unspoken question between us – in this situation.’

  ‘Well, speaking as a man who once lived on nothing but beans, you’re up against an expert here.’ He undressed to wash behind the screen.

  ‘I accept your word for it,’ she said. ‘Proof will not be required.’

  She was lying on her side, facing away from him, when he at last came out again. ‘Goodnight, my dear,’ she said without turning round.

  But for that he would have switched out the light and gone directly to his bed. Instead, on an impulse, he went to sit precariously on the edge of her bed. She spun round and stared up at him with great, searching eyes.

  ‘A little goodnight ritual,’ he explained. ‘Something Willard taught Marianne.’ He stretched his hand toward her face. ‘Sand in the right e
ye –’ he pretended to strew a pinch of it into her eye – ‘sand in the left eye . . .’ She relaxed and grinned up at him, becoming a child. ‘Shed a little tear –’ he drew a finger lightly down her cheek and then, chucking her gently under the nose – ‘here’s mud in your eye.’ He bent low and kissed her lightly on the brow. The remnant of the fart was aphrodisiac. Hastily he skipped the six feet back to his bed, turning out the wall light on the way.

  Now at last he knew she was, beyond all shadow of a doubt, the most precious, the most wonderful person in the entire universe. She made the very air in this room special. She made everything special. She seemed to carry an aura of . . . something indescribable . . . some kind of exceptional light that bore a hint of gold. It transformed everything around her, making it radiant and extra-real. He could also dare to acknowledge, at last, that his real purpose in making this visit was to be with her – away from England . . . away from the Dower House . . . away from . . . Manutius . . . just to be with her, blessed with a new sense of life and hope in that magical nearness of her.

  Hope? Could two people who had suffered as they had suffered hope to make a normal life together? He felt normal enough. He had not shut out the horrors of the past but nor did he dwell on them – though, to be honest, everyday life was filled with sly reminders. Faith doling out the porridge could recall the sound of a stodgy heap of beans being thwacked onto a tin plate . . . the ‘barbecue’ thing that Willard had used in the summer evoked the crematorium . . . young Sam getting a bramble thorn in the palm of his hand revived an image of the capo pinning a thief’s hand to the table with a dagger . . . but it was porridge, not beans . . . a succulent T-bone steak, not a cadaver . . . an accidental thorn not a deliberate barbarity.

  And so he sank into a pleasant fantasy in which he lay at ease in the back of a light, clinker-built rowing boat while she rowed them, once again, at the gentlest, most leisurely pace round the Wannsee. She had the most powerful and yet the most feminine arms he had ever admired.

  And at the precise moment when she rested on her oars and the boat glided under the shade of a mighty weeping willow overhanging the water’s edge, she – the real Angela in her bed a few hundred miles away – gave that sort of double-intake of breath that people make after tears.

  Jolted back from his fantasy, he listened acutely for more. But no – he must have been mistaken. It was just the sort of double-inhalation people make in their sleep when their bodies have forgotten to breathe a while.

  He would not – could not – speak tomorrow. He would write something for them instead.

  Tuesday, 30 September 1947

  I have lived two lives. [Felix wrote] One was in a Koncentrationslager called Mauthausen. It lasted less than a year and a half but if I live to a hundred, it will still be the longer. On every one of those days we woke up knowing it would be our last. Every new day was also a new lifetime. Why? Because we were in the clutches of people who felt physically sick at the very thought of a Jew, a homosexual, a Romany. Of course, they had elaborate intellectual and metaphysical arguments that lent apparent respectability to this visceral emotion, but my greatest fear is that you good people – all good people – all who want to build a Europe where it can never happen again – will try to disprove those arguments when the real target lurks far below the level of words.

  So I urge you to go for the guts of it. As Christians, you could start by wondering what made Catholics and Protestants burn with such ardour that they gleefully slaughtered one another only a few centuries ago. What in the teaching and practice of Rome filled Protestant souls with such gut-hatred as that – and vice versa, of course? What allowed the Inquisition to throw sacred human life back in God’s face and yet feel certain of His approval? Why is it no longer so? What changed people’s perceptions on both sides? Reason? The law? Or something that lies deeper in each one of us?

  If you can answer that and apply it in post-war Europe, you will have made a good start.

  Angela spoke in German. ‘The reason I am here at all,’ she said, ‘is that I am on my way to Hamburg to meet an old comrade in the German underground to whom I gave the transcript of a conference held at Interpol Headquarters in January, nineteen forty-two – for which act of “treason” I was sent to Ravensbrück until the Liberation. You may not have heard of that meeting but the whole world knows now what was decided there – the Vernichtung of Jews, homosexuals, and Romanies. I had intended to describe it to you in some detail but – having read what my friend Felix Breit has submitted for you to consider – I will focus on just one aspect.

  ‘Remember – that conference was called for one sole purpose: to allow the Schutzstaffel to inform the wider Nazi party that it, the SS, had perfected the means to massacre up to ten thousand people per day, seven days a week.’

  There were gasps all around the room.

  ‘Yes – the true scale of what happened still hasn’t sunk in. I wonder how long it will take, in fact. But the one thing I want to tell you about is that, despite all the boasting on the part of the SS, even the most hardened of them had to concede the awfulness of it all. One of them told the meeting that Himmler himself, head of the SS, was physically sick when he was present at one of the gassing experiments on children that went wrong. Another, after describing early experiments in forcing Slavic Jews to dig mass graves and then stand beside them to be shot, said that “good decent Germans” could only bear it for about two months before they became “burnt out”. They could not forget that they belonged to the race that produced Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven. Their Slav collaborators, he said, made much more efficient killers because they were of a lower order of humanity.

  ‘There were several other instances of their recognition that what they were doing was bestial and unworthy of the highest standards of the German soul, but I think those two are enough to make my point – which is this: Even there, in the highest echelon of the vilest part of the nightmare that was Naziism, they felt compelled to acknowledge the regrettable – to them – necessity of the Vernichtung.

  ‘But was it German culture that pricked their consciences? No! The culture was European – the values bequeathed to Europe by the son of a carpenter in Galilee two thousand years ago – values now shared even by those who (like me, I’m afraid) admire his message but do not think him divine. European values – which now hold the key to the European disease. And so it is to Europe that we must turn for a cure. We must all think European first before we add German, French, Italian . . . English . . . Spanish . . . and so on. And you – Germans and French – can make a start today. Imagine the new Europe – a Europe at peace after how many thousand years of war? It may yet trace its very beginnings to this room on this very day, the thirtieth of September, nineteen forty-seven!’

  After an awestricken pause the German delegates banged the table with open hands, palms down; the French, who had started with conventional applause, joined in somewhat sheepishly.

  Felix passed her a piece of paper on which he had written: ‘Hervorragend! Magnifique! Not bad!’

  ‘I’ll bet we have separate rooms by the time we get back there tonight,’ Angela said when they were on the bus to Paris.

  ‘Damn! We missed our chance!’ he joked.

  She did not join his laughter. After a long, awkward silence she said, ‘Perhaps you really mean that, Felix?’ And when he did not respond: ‘Do you?’ And then there was a further, almost intolerable silence before she added, ‘Because I wouldn’t mind. You know?’ She swallowed so heavily that he heard it over the boneshaking rattle of the bus.

  ‘Oh God!’ He grasped her hands – which let him feel that she was shivering as much as he – and said, ‘I lay awake a long time last night because . . . when I kissed you on the forehead like that, I suddenly knew that you were the most . . . the most precious thing in my life. God! The most precious in all the universe. What are we going to do?’

  The question jolted her. ‘What d’you mean – what are we going t
o do?’

  ‘I mean I actually had that feeling about you from the first moment I saw you – in Schmidt’s, when I was sitting there with Fogel, before Fritz told me anything about you. But I thought I couldn’t trust it.’

  ‘Why?’ She was more aggrieved than curious.

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose I believed nothing so wonderful could be real . . . or be really happening to me.’

  Two words popped into her mind: ‘Jewish fatalism’. She had seen plenty of it in Ravensbrück. But could someone brought up in complete ignorance of his Jewishness still ‘catch’ it?

  ‘Even so,’ he continued, ‘I knew it was no passing fantasy that day when we walked in Regent’s Park . . .’

  ‘When you picked that rose?’ Now there was relief in her laughter, but she still wondered about that question: What are we going to do? ‘Why did you . . . No – it’s all right.’ She had actually started asking him why he had picked that rose and held it beside her and declared her the winner; but he misunderstood. ‘You mean why did I take up with Faith?’

  ‘Oh . . . I . . .’

  ‘No – you have every right to ask. It’s truer to say that Faith took up with me . . . but I found it convenient not to resist. She’s very good company. She’s a good shield against the office politics at Manutius. A good guide to the subtleties of English life.’

  Angela could not help asking, ‘Good in bed?’

  ‘Y-e-s. Or yes and no. I mean she’s not passionate. It’s just jolly good fun to her. She enjoys horse-riding more, I think. And dancing. We both know we’re not in love – and we’ve never even pretended. We’re good for each other’s careers.’

  ‘Does she know how you feel about me? Did you ever tell her . . . what you’ve just told me?’

  ‘As I said – I hardly dared tell myself until last night, when it became so overpowering. I don’t think she knows – and I’ve certainly never told her.’

  ‘But? I can hear a but in your voice.’