Orders from Berlin

by Unknown

  All that was missing were the stockings. She’d found to her horror that all her rayon pairs were laddered, but she resisted the temptation to follow the advice in a Picture Post article she’d read a few weeks before that suggested girls should draw a line with a soft lead pencil up the backs of their calves and thighs to make it look as if they were wearing silk. It wasn’t worth the risk of humiliation if Seaforth saw through the deception, and Ava consoled herself with the fact that, true to its era, the dress’s hemline fell well below the knee.

  She put on her coat and picked up her bag, then paused just as she was about to go out of the door, looking back at the flat. Bertram was gone, but his possessions were everywhere – his doctor’s bag on a chair, his hat and mackintosh hanging on the coat rack, his war map on the wall. She rebelled against the silent reproach of these inanimate objects, filled with a sudden anger against their owner. It was her turn to have a chance at life. Abruptly, she took hold of her wedding ring and pulled it from her finger. It didn’t come off easily and she had to tug hard. The knuckle was sore afterwards, but she welcomed the pain. It marked her departure from the married life she wanted desperately to leave behind. She felt like throwing the ring away, but an unexpected caution stayed her hand and she dropped it into her purse instead.

  In the communal hallway downstairs, she almost collided with two of her neighbours as they came in through the front door. They looked at her askance, barely returning her greeting. News travels fast, thought Ava. She hadn’t read the newspapers for the last two days, but she found it hard to believe that there hadn’t been some report on Bertram, and there would be more to come. She’d be lucky if it didn’t make the front pages: BATTERSEA STAIRCASE MURDER – WOMAN’S HUSBAND CHARGED WITH FATHER’S MURDER. A nice salacious story to distract Londoners from the misery of the latest casualty figures, but for Ava it would be the ruin of her reputation. She would be transformed overnight from an anonymous housewife into an object of ridicule. There would be no going back. Ava shuddered, pulling her coat tight around her body as she turned the corner at the end of the street, heading towards the river.

  This time it was Seaforth who was late. They had arranged to meet by the fountain in Sloane Square, and she had just begun to think that he wasn’t going to come when she caught sight of him hurrying across the King’s Road towards her.

  She’d wondered on the bus if he was going to kiss her when they met. She didn’t know whether she wanted him to or not, but then when he did, brushing his lips against her cheek, she found she liked it and that she wanted him to do it again. She had to be careful, she realized; she had to resist the spirit of recklessness that seemed to possess her whenever she was with him.

  He’d booked a table in a small Italian restaurant. It was on a side street just off the square. At the corner, by the Underground station, they passed two newspaper hawkers who were shouting the evening headlines, competing with each other for attention. They seemed to take it in turns, each news item more horrible than the last and bellowed in a louder voice.

  ‘Read all about it: Hospital hit in Shoreditch. Seventeen dead.’

  ‘Land mine explosion in Whitechapel. See all the latest pictures.’

  ‘I hate this war,’ she said, hurrying past. ‘You can’t get away from it.’

  ‘And you can’t stop it, either,’ said Seaforth. ‘It’s like a machine they’ve turned on and now they can’t turn it off. However hard they try, they can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Not that they seem to be trying too hard, judging by Churchill’s fighting talk.’

  ‘That’s because it’s too late. No one in this country wanted war.’

  ‘Maybe not. But that’s not my point,’ said Seaforth, warming to his theme. ‘Think of the last war: the war to end wars. Four years of slaughter, and for what? Twenty years of peace. Doesn’t that tell you anything, Ava? About what’s happening; about the future?’

  ‘You can’t talk like that,’ she said, appalled by Seaforth’s cynicism. She couldn’t understand it – it was almost as if he were happy about the arrival of Armageddon.

  ‘Why not? If it’s the truth? Wars are fought so that the people who make the machines can make money out of them. The only difference now is that the machines are more powerful and the weapons are more deadly. I tell you, behind every tank, behind every bomb, is a man with a roll of banknotes – pounds or Reichsmarks, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to fight. The Germans are evil. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘What. All of them?’

  ‘Yes, all of them,’ she insisted. ‘There was a woman in the butcher’s shop the other day who told me about one of their fighter pilots flying low over the park last week. He saw her out with her children and he tried to machine-gun them. She got the kids under a bench and lay on top of them, and they survived somehow. But she said he was laughing – laughing while he tried to kill them. Can you believe that? I hate the Germans. And I’m surprised you don’t too,’ she added passionately. ‘They killed your father, didn’t they? Isn’t that what you told me?’

  Seaforth flinched and she stopped, wishing she could take her words back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ he said harshly. ‘The war must go on. The beast must be fed.’

  At the restaurant, Seaforth kept twisting about in his chair after they had sat down, unable to get comfortable, and he seemed to settle in his seat only after the waiter had brought them wine and he had downed two glasses in rapid succession.

  He looked up, catching her eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not being good company tonight, I know. There’s a lot of pressure at work, but I should learn to leave it behind when I’m not there.’ It was an olive branch and it should have made her feel relieved, but instead she felt for some reason that he was putting on a mask and the real Seaforth was the harsh nihilist she had glimpsed on the walk over.

  ‘I’m glad I’m here,’ he added, reaching out and covering her hand with his. ‘You look beautiful tonight, Ava. Really you do. Forgive me for being such a brute.’

  And she did, trying hard to banish her doubts. How could she not forgive him, looking down at his long, slender fingers touching hers? Like a pianist’s, she remembered she’d thought when he’d put his hand on her arm at the funeral.

  ‘You’re not wearing your ring,’ he said, turning her hand over and looking up into her face as if he were asking a question instead of stating a fact.

  ‘I didn’t want to think about Bertram,’ she said, but realized as she spoke that it was a vain wish. She knew she wouldn’t have any peace until she’d found out who’d killed her father.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘None of this has been easy.’

  ‘No, but it would help if I knew what you want with me,’ she blurted out. If only he’d open up, then maybe she could start believing in him; maybe she could enjoy his interest in her.

  ‘I want nothing,’ he said, looking her in the eye. ‘Now that I know you’re safe, I want nothing except the pleasure of your company. I like you, Ava. Isn’t that enough?’

  It wasn’t, but she couldn’t tell him that. So she smiled and, leaning forward, finished her glass of wine and waited for him to pour her another.

  The siren went off just as Seaforth had finished paying the bill and they’d got up to go. Ava hated the sound of it, and instinctively she put her hands over her ears, trying to block out its undulating wail.

  He looked at her and smiled. ‘You really have had enough of the war for one night,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To my place. It’s near here. Just around the corner.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘I’m a man of many secrets, remember?’

  ‘What about the siren? Shouldn’t we take shelter?’

  ‘With the trogs down in the Underground?�
�� he asked, pointing down the street towards the square, where a rapidly growing queue of people had formed outside the Tube station. ‘It’s up to you, but I think I could live without overflowing toilets and rats for one night. There’ve been no bombs in Chelsea for a couple of days now, and there’s a shelter round the corner in Cadogan Place if you get scared. And I can take you home later. I promise,’ he added, noticing her hesitation.

  Ava wasn’t really frightened of the bombs, at least not before they had started to fall. She was more concerned about what kind of signal she would be sending Seaforth by going back to his house or flat or wherever it was that he lived. She didn’t want him to think of her as some woman of easy virtue who could be seduced over a couple of bottles of wine in an Italian restaurant, but she’d come out determined to find out what made him tick, and to do that she needed to see where he lived. It was an opportunity that she couldn’t afford to pass up.

  He took her arm and led her behind the Peter Jones department store into a district of tall, turn-of-the-century red-brick houses. Ava knew that it took money, a lot of money, to live here on the borders of Knightsbridge, and she wondered how Seaforth could afford it. But perhaps spying paid well. She remembered how affluent her miserly father had turned out to be.

  They turned the corner and came out into Cadogan Square. It was the jewel of the neighbourhood, visually impressive even without the wrought-iron railings that had been removed the previous year to be melted down for the war effort. The tall, stately houses surrounding the gardens on all four sides seemed unchanged by time, far removed from the bustle of Sloane Square two blocks away and the war-torn world beyond. There was no one in sight as they walked across the grass and then up the wide steps of a well-maintained house under a brick portico supported by elaborately decorated Corinthian columns. The door was unlocked and they went inside and took a narrow, wood-panelled elevator to the top floor.

  When Seaforth opened the door of his apartment, she let out a cry of surprise. Even in the failing light, the panoramic view was extraordinary. There were landmarks she recognized in all directions – the tower of Westminster Cathedral, Big Ben beside the river, and to the south the white chimneys of Battersea Power Station. She would have liked to spend longer staring out of the windows, but Seaforth was already going round lowering the blackout blinds.

  He turned on the lights and went to hang up her coat, leaving her to look round at the furnishings of the apartment. She could see straight away that they were expensive, but she was now prepared for that. She was surprised rather by the look of the place. It was not at all what she would have expected. Everything was modern, characterized by hard, severe lines. The sofa and the armchairs had tubular steel frames, and the desk in the corner was made of some form of metal too. A pair of rectangular jet-black vases on a table in front of the centre window held no flowers. There were a multitude of books, and she recognized some of the titles from her father’s collection, but their arrangement was entirely different from the organized chaos in Gloucester Mansions. Here the spines were lined up in precisely descending heights on built-in bookcases. Nothing was out of place.

  She looked around in vain for something personal, something to connect the room with its owner, but there was nothing. It was as if no one lived in the apartment. She felt she was standing on a theatre set, waiting for a play to begin.

  There was only one picture, but it dominated the room. It hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece and depicted the distorted head of a human being. The skull was half caved in and the eyes had almost disappeared up into the bulging grey forehead, pushed back by the open howling mouth. All this set against a burning orange background. Ava was horrified by the painting. It was like nothing she’d ever seen. She could not deny its hard, visceral power, but she realized that the vision behind it was of life as pain – an endless, searing brutality that only death would end.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Seaforth, watching Ava with interest as she took in the picture.

  ‘It’s terrifying. Who painted it?’

  ‘An artist called Francis Bacon, who believes that men are meat,’ said Seaforth with a wry smile. ‘He’s a penniless alcoholic gambler who paints over his own pictures because he can’t afford to buy canvas, but I’m quite sure that one day people will say he’s the century’s greatest painter – if he doesn’t kill himself with booze before his time, which is more than likely,’ he added.

  ‘Why do you like his pictures?’

  ‘Because he tells the truth.’

  ‘That men are meat?’

  ‘That they are cruel, certainly. How could you think otherwise after what has happened in the world in the last thirty years? But let’s not talk about that any more,’ he said with a smile. ‘We keep coming back to the war and that’s the subject we agreed to avoid, wasn’t it?’

  He went into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving her sitting on the sofa. She felt frustrated. The apartment was beautiful but impersonal. It told her nothing about Seaforth. She needed to make something happen.

  Just as he was coming back into the room, the phone rang. He went over to the desk and picked it up, listened for a moment, and told the person at the other end of the line to wait.

  ‘I’m sorry. I have to take this,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Is there somewhere I can freshen up?’ she asked.

  He pointed towards a half-open door across from the kitchen and returned to the telephone.

  She went through the door and found herself in a bedroom – a thick carpet and expensive modern furniture – and beyond, through another door, the bathroom was a vision of white tile and chrome and glass. But it was a vision that Ava resisted. If she was careful, there was time to look around. She could hear Seaforth talking in the room behind her. There was nothing personal that caught her eye except for a single photograph of a young man in uniform on top of a chest of drawers opposite the bed. It looked like Seaforth, but it wasn’t him. She opened the drawers, but, as she suspected, they were full of clothes, so she went over to the night table by the bed and opened the drawer in that. There was a book inside – an old, battered book. She picked it up and began to turn the pages. It was a diary of some kind, written in September and October 1915.

  She chose an entry at random and began to read:

  All day it has rained. Just like yesterday and the day before that. There are corpses of our mates that we can’t get in from the German wire. It’s death to try – the Boche leave them hanging there like warnings. As the days pass, they swell until the wall of the stomach collapses either naturally or when punctured by a bullet, and then a disgusting sweet smell floats back to us across no-man’s-land. We thought it was gas at first until we realized. … And the colour of the dead faces changes from white to yellow to red to purple to green to black to slime. These are things that I thought I would never see. I do not know why I am writing them down. There can be no God that would permit this slaughter.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Give that to me, damn you!’ Seaforth yelled. She’d never heard him shout or even raise his voice before, but now he was angry, transformed by rage into a person she didn’t recognize.

  He was coming towards her now. She had no idea what he would do, but she could see that his eyes were focused not on her, but on the book in her hand. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know why he cared about it so much; it was enough to know that he did. It gave her an opportunity, and at the last moment she threw it at him. It bounced off his chest and fell to the floor, and instinctively he bent to pick it up. And in the same moment she ran past him into the living room and wrenched open the front door of the apartment.

  Out on the landing she hesitated for a second, unable to decide between the elevator and the stairs; but the sound of movement behind her forced her to choose. She dashed down the stairs, taking them two at a time, somehow managing to stay on her feet, until she reached the hallway at the bottom.

  She s
topped. She had to. She was doubled over, hanging on to a pillar in the semi-darkness. It was the only way she could stay upright. Her heart was beating like a hammer in her chest and her legs felt like lead. There had been no sound of pursuit on the stairs, but now to her horror she could hear the elevator cage descending from above. He was coming. She knew he was. For a moment she was unable to move, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, staring at the elevator door. But then she forced herself to look away. There was still time. Clutching her aching side, she pulled open the heavy front door of the building and went stumbling onto the steps.

  She put out a hand to steady herself but found no support, and losing her balance, she fell forward onto the pavement. She lay still, unable to get up. Someone was leaning over her, taking hold of her arm. She wanted to resist, but she had nothing left, only surrender.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ asked a voice. ‘That looked like a nasty fall.’

  She opened her eyes and saw a kindly-looking old man staring down at her. She wondered who he was for a moment, until her eyes focused on the ARP letters on his tin hat and she realized that her rescuer was an air-raid warden doing his rounds.

  He helped her to her feet. Leaning on his shoulder, she looked back through the door of the apartment building and saw nothing – an empty shadowy hallway; no sign of Seaforth at all. It was as if nothing had happened.