Orders from Berlin

by Unknown

  ‘My father’s funeral – making the arrangements, organizing the stupid flowers, transporting his body round town, getting to the church on time. You know what I mean, Bertie. Don’t pretend you don’t.’

  ‘Of course I’m not enjoying it,’ he said angrily. ‘But someone has to do it, and you didn’t show any signs of wanting to get involved.’

  ‘What’s the point? He made you his executor, didn’t he?’

  ‘I think he just thought it would be easier that way,’ he said defensively. ‘I know how these things work.’

  ‘What? Because of your job, you mean? The job that you don’t do.’ Ava’s bitterness was obvious.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know damn well what I mean. You know how you sit at home all day, neglecting your patients, listening to news bulletins on the radio, poring over old copies of The Times, moving your stupid pins around on that map over there like the war’s some stupid game made up for your amusement, like you think you’re contributing to it in some way.’ Ava’s voice rose as she jabbed her finger at a large map of Europe taped to the kitchen wall. And then silent suddenly, she looked over at her husband on the other side of the table as if assessing his likely reaction, then reached up violently and pulled the map down, tearing it through the centre as it fell. A cascade of coloured pins rolled away in every direction across the lino floor.

  Bertram was white with anger. He wanted to hit his wife with one of the pots on the stove, make her pay for what she’d just done, but he held his hand. And an instant later, he realized that it wasn’t just good sense that had stopped him; it was fear too. He’d never seen her like this. She’d been cold to him, keeping him at arm’s length, but she’d always basically done as she was told. Now, since her father’s death, she was different – it was as if something inside her had been broken or released and she’d become a new person whose actions he could no longer predict.

  He got down on his hands and knees and started to pick up the pins. He couldn’t stand mess and disorder. She knew that. That was why she’d pulled down his map – to see him like this, crawling around on the floor; to humiliate him. He looked up and saw the contempt written all over her face.

  ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes, I did,’ she shot back. ‘I need to feel something, and if it doesn’t happen soon, I think I’ll go mad – stark, raving mad.’

  ‘You’re overwrought. It’s the shock. You’ll feel better after the funeral,’ he said, getting to his feet, working hard to control his temper, frightened of the craziness he’d started to hear in her voice. There were still pins that he hadn’t got, ones that had rolled out of reach under the dresser. But they’d have to wait. He’d get them later, when Ava wasn’t standing over him, looking as though she might kick him or throw something on his head. He wanted to get away from her.

  ‘No, I won’t feel better,’ she said, spitting out the words. ‘I’ll feel worse – watching you spending my father’s money, paying off all those debts that you don’t want me to know about.’

  ‘What debts? I – I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Bertram stammered, looking away, wondering how much she knew.

  ‘Oh yes, you do. Do you think I’m blind? Do you think I haven’t seen the letters that have been coming here these last few months?’

  ‘You’ve got no right to look at them. They’re mine; they’re addressed to me.’

  Instinctively, he turned to look through the open door of the kitchen over to the locked bureau in the corner of the sitting room where he kept his papers, and at the same time he unconsciously fingered the keys in his pocket. Ava smiled; she could read her husband like a book.

  ‘Shame on you – running up debts when I haven’t had a new dress since the war started; when I haven’t had any fun in as long as I can remember; when I haven’t left this bloody flat except to go and dance attendance on that old man whom you’ve been so busy buttering up. What did you spend the money on, Bertie?’ she demanded, her voice rising with each accusation as she moved towards her husband with her fists clenched in anger. ‘Some other woman, was it? Some damned Soho whore so you could feel like a man for five or ten minutes?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said, putting his hands over his ears to shut out her voice. ‘You know how I hate it when you talk like that.’

  ‘Tell me!’ she shouted, stamping her foot.

  ‘I made some bad investments. That’s all. I didn’t know there was going to be a war, did I? It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘It never is, is it? Just like it’s not your fault your name’s in my father’s will when you know damned well you got him to put it there, going round there every day, ministering to his every whim, while you let all the rest of your patients go to hell because you couldn’t be bothered. You stole my inheritance,’ she said, looking him in the eye. ‘It’s just the same as if you walked into one of the banks up on the High Street and took the money out of the till.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I did no such thing. Albert left us both his money because we’re married. What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine. You know that.’

  ‘Which would be fine, except that you’ve got nothing – nothing except my father’s money and a mountain of debts. Pretty convenient he died when he did, isn’t it?’

  There! She’d said it. It was as though she and Bertram could pretend that the suspicion wasn’t there as long as she didn’t voice it, but once the accusation had been spoken, she knew she couldn’t take it back. It was between them now, opening up like a chasm that neither of them could bridge.

  ‘I had nothing to do with your father’s death,’ said Bertram, speaking slowly, almost as if he were taking an oath in a court of law. ‘How could you even think such a thing, Ava?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think,’ said Ava, suppressing a cry and putting her hands over her face so she wouldn’t have to see her husband, wouldn’t have to deal with him or even think about him. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that he’d killed her father. He might have a motive, but she felt he was too weak, too law-abiding, to be capable of such an act. Her cry was more a scream of frustration because she wanted to escape from her thoughts but couldn’t. The flat was too small and there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to run away to, except out into the cold, friendless streets, windswept and full of rain.

  She ran blindly into the bedroom and shut and locked the door. Her hands were wet, soaked with tears that she hadn’t felt as they’d streamed down, emptying her of emotion. She lay face down on the brown satin eiderdown, buried her head in the lumpy pillow, and fell asleep, then woke up in the small hours ravenously hungry.

  She unlocked the door and found Bertram asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, curled up under a blanket in the foetal position. He’d undressed to his underwear, and she noticed how he’d folded his clothes carefully and left them on a chair, with his bow tie sitting ridiculously on top. She watched him for a moment in the half-light, listening to his snoring, unable to understand how she could be married to this stranger with whom she had so little in common. Nothing in her life made sense to her any more; nothing added up.

  Shaking her head, she turned away and went into the kitchen and spread a thin layer of jam across the crust of a half-stale national loaf she’d bought at the bakery the day before. There was nothing else left in the pantry. She ate standing up, listening to the rain beating on the roof and running down in torrents from the guttering outside the blacked-out window. In all her life, she’d never felt more alone.

  They drove to the funeral, following the horse-drawn hearse as it made its way slowly across the river. As a doctor, Bertram was entitled to use a car, but he rarely availed himself of the privilege, and Ava was surprised that he hadn’t sold his Austin 7 to help pay his debts. Now, of course, that wouldn’t be necessary.

  Ava felt as if she were r
iding through a ghost town. The incessant rain was only now beginning to ease and the streets were deserted. She glanced over at her husband, watching the careful, over-precise way he held the steering wheel and manoeuvred the gear stick up and down in his leather-gloved hand. It struck her that he was the most repressed person she’d ever met. How ironic, she thought, that a woman who so yearned for life and love should have tied herself to a man so utterly unable to provide her with either.

  It was a half-world she was living in. It always had been. She’d lived her life on other people’s terms, never her own. When she looked in the mirror, she saw Albert Morrison’s daughter or Bertram Brive’s wife, never Ava. Yet she knew it didn’t have to be this way. The country was crying out for women to join the Wrens, to work on the land or in the munitions factories. Every time she went out, posters of beautiful female warriors in tin hats and starched khaki uniforms beckoned to her from the sides of buses or the walls of the underground, their far-seeing eyes gazing into a brave future. Yet up to now she’d done nothing to heed their call. She’d stayed at home, inert and isolated amid the turmoil.

  And it wasn’t just the war she was missing. There was the music too. She listened to it on the radio when Bertram wasn’t there. Jazz and swing; Charleston and tango – infectious rhythms that made her want to kick off her shoes and dance. And sometimes she did, letting go for a moment as she spun around amongst the dreary furniture with her light brown hair thrown up in a whirl about her head.

  On weekend afternoons, she’d seen the shop girls coming out of the Empire ballroom on the King’s Road – starry-eyed, flushed, and laughing. Why couldn’t she have that too? Life was passing her by, leaving her behind. She glanced over at her husband and felt crushed by the weight of him, as though she couldn’t breathe. She wound down the window and leant her head out of the car into the cold air. She could hear Bertram objecting, shouting at her to stop, but she ignored him. The bite of the wind on her face made her feel alive, separate from her dead father, laid out on his back inside his pale brown wooden coffin, bumping along the potholed road in the back of the hearse up ahead.

  A throng of people all dressed in black was milling around on the pavement, but for a moment she was alone. Bertram was bustling about, shaking hands; clearing a path for the pallbearers to bring the coffin into the church; talking to the vicar, whose cassock kept blowing up incongruously in the wind, revealing a pair of long black socks that he was wearing underneath. Neither she nor Bertram was a churchgoer, yet Bertram seemed to be treating the vicar like an old friend. He was clearly enjoying himself. Ava knew there was nothing Bertram liked more than organizing people. He’d missed his vocation, she thought. He’d have made a far better funeral director than a doctor. She turned away, biting her lip to contain her irritation. Everything about her husband seemed to grate on her these days.

  She looked around, scanning the faces of the mourners. There were some she recognized – Mrs Graves and several other neighbours from Gloucester Mansions, her father’s solicitor, and a cousin of her mother’s – but many of them were new to her. She wondered who they were. Old work colleagues of her father’s, she assumed, come to pay their last respects. It hurt her to realize how little she’d known him and how much he’d kept from her. She’d been aware for as long as she could remember that her father worked in the City. Every day he would leave the house in his pinstripe suit and bowler hat, carrying a briefcase with a brass lock, and a black umbrella in wintertime, and every evening he would return, although sometimes late, when she had already gone to bed and would be lying awake in the dark, listening for the sound of his key in the door.

  Ava knew that men who worked in the City did things with money, so she had naturally always assumed that her father was a businessman of some kind. And as she knew nothing about finance, she’d never asked him about his work and he had never volunteered any information. And so it had gone on year after year, until the day he died.

  But now Ava regretted her lack of curiosity. She wished she’d asked him questions, although she suspected that he wouldn’t have answered them even if she had. Their lack of connection had been a two-way street.

  She thought of the still-uncleared flat in Gloucester Mansions and all her father’s books piled up in tottering towers around his desk. She realized with a jolt that she’d never really considered the titles on the spines. She’d thought of them more as objects, physical barriers that he put up to protect his privacy. But she remembered enough to know that most of them were about politics and history and subjects like that; hardly any of them were about money. The books were too many to be a hobby. She realized now that they were a clue to who her father was – someone more interesting than a stockbroker; a diplomat, perhaps, except that he rarely travelled; or someone who worked for the government in some secret capacity that couldn’t be discussed. Maybe there had been an official reason for her father’s silence, an explanation beyond his natural reticence. She’d have preferred that. It would make the failure of their relationship a little easier to bear.

  Alec Thorn would have answers to her questions, but he probably wouldn’t tell her them even if she asked. He was the only one of her father’s work colleagues she’d ever met. Why had her father made an exception for Alec? she wondered. Why had Alec been permitted into the house? It had to be because he was the only one of them her father trusted. Ava remembered how her father and Thorn would stop talking sometimes when she came into the room. Closing her eyes, she could see them now, sitting on either side of the fireplace in the evening with glasses of whisky in their hands, their faces lit up by the firelight, leaning forward towards each other so that their foreheads were almost touching – like conspirators in a Rembrandt painting.

  As a little girl, she’d learnt how to move softly, how to glide around people. Her father had hated any kind of disturbance, and her mother had been nervous, for years a semi-invalid suffering from the weak heart that finally killed her. So Ava would sometimes be practically standing beside her father and Alec before they noticed she was there. She remembered how her father would look up with surprise and irritation and how Alec would be surprised too, but also pleased, reaching out to stroke her hair. For years Alec had been a favourite uncle who asked her questions about school and brought her expensive gifts for Christmas and her birthday, and then later, much later, she’d sensed that he liked her in a different way.

  They’d been eating dinner one summer evening and Alec had got up to go home. But Ava’s father had been in an unusually expansive mood. He’d pushed his guest back down in his chair, poured him another glass of wine, and told him that he was looking thin and pale and that he needed ‘a good woman’ to take care of him. Alec had shaken his head, said he wasn’t the marrying kind, but Ava’s father wouldn’t let it go. ‘There must be someone,’ he’d said. And Alec had looked away, flushing red with embarrassment, and had caught Ava’s eye as she got up from the table to clear the plates. And in that moment she had known. He hadn’t said anything and her parents missed the exchange, but from that moment her relationship with Alec changed.

  He came less, and he was awkward with her when they met. Once or twice when they happened to find themselves alone, he’d hesitated, clearing his throat as if he had something important to say; but someone had always come in at the critical moment, or he’d lost confidence and turned away. The nearest he’d got to a declaration had been after her mother died – the last funeral she’d been to before today. It had been a different church, but the same cold wind had been blowing the brown leaves off the trees, and inside, her father had stood bolt upright beside her in the pew, looking straight ahead at the pulpit as if he were participating in a military inspection rather than his wife’s funeral. And Thorn had come up to her afterwards when they were walking back from the grave to the lych-gate. He’d had no umbrella, and she remembered his thinning hair plastered down by the rain and the look of mute appeal on his careworn face.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ava.
If there’s anything I can do … anything,’ he’d stammered.

  She’d thanked him, expecting that would be the end of it, but he’d leant forward and taken hold of her hand.

  ‘You’re very important to me, you know,’ he’d said, looking her in the eye. And she’d felt sure that he was going to say more, but her father had come up and taken her arm, in a hurry to get home and ‘get the damned thing over with’, as he’d confided to her in the car.

  And that had been the end of it. Five months later, she’d married Bertram. Alec hadn’t been at the wedding. He’d made some excuse and sent an expensive present – a dinner service that they never used – and after that, he’d seemed to fade from their lives. It had to have been six months or more since she’d last seen him, but he was here now. He had to be: Albert had been his best friend. Standing on her tiptoes, Ava searched the crowd and caught sight of Thorn standing alone, smoking a cigarette. He was a little way further up the pavement, keeping his distance from the rest of the mourners. He looked the worse for wear – less hair and more wrinkles, a shadow of the man she’d first met twenty years before. But then the war seemed to be ageing everybody, not just Alec.

  It was time. The coffin had passed through the crowd and been set up on a table in front of the altar, and Bertram came and took Ava’s arm and led her inside. The church with its permanently blacked-out windows made her feel claustrophobic. Sitting in the pew at the front beside her husband, she felt the eyes of the other mourners fixed on her back. She knew what they were all thinking about – not her father, but the manner of his death. The cold-blooded English liked nothing better than a good murder to puzzle over, to discuss back and forth over their Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the morning. Who had pushed him? Was the killer here with them in the church? Would he kill again? It didn’t help that the young policeman from the night of the murder was here too, standing at the back, watching. She’d seen him as she came in.