PM_E_441 - Cold Snap

by Francis King

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Francis King

  Dedication

  1947

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  1950

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  1983

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Francis King

  PM_E_441 - Cold Snap

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  Dedication

  FOR

  All of them –

  wherever they are

  1947

  Chapter One

  More than thirty years later, while the shrill voices soar upwards to the school chapel roof and then flutter downwards, Christine again hears, as she does more and more frequently now, the precise words spoken by her cousin Michael in the Balliol room overlooking Broad Street. At the time they seemed so trivial, now so momentous.

  ‘Before I introduce you, let me take your coat. I’ll hang it here. I’m afraid you must have had to trudge through this ghastly snow. When is it going to end? It’s like the war. That too seemed just to go on and on and on forever. Are your feet wet? They look as if they must be. Come and sit here. No, not there. Here. You’ll find it much more comfortable.’

  Each word is distinct in her recollection. But so far she sees nothing. Then, as he continues: ‘Good. Now let me introduce my friends to you,’ he and the three Germans miraculously materialise before her.

  She realises now, as she did not even suspect at the time, that he deliberately used those words ‘my friends’ because he could guess, as he could with uncanny certainty almost always guess her feelings, that she did not in the least welcome the presence of the German prisoners in his room.

  ‘Klaus. Ludwig. Thomas.’

  As he pointed in turn at the men standing awkwardly in front of their chairs, he might have been exhibiting three geological specimens to his students. On hearing his name, Klaus at once extended a hand in an attempt to shake Christine’s. But deliberately she ignored it. She saw Michael briefly wince, and then no less briefly purse his lips. ‘We’ll have to speak English now that Miss Holliday is with us. Miss Holliday speaks little German, I’m afraid. That leaves poor Klaus rather out in the cold.’ He went on in the near-perfect German that he had acquired with daunting speed during a postgraduate year at Göttingen: ‘I hope you won’t mind if we speak English now, Klaus. I’m sorry.’

  Klaus shook his head, gave an embarrassed giggle, and then gazed down at the shaggy pile of the carpet, the smile gradually fading from his face as if one muscle and then another were relaxing under the taut skin.

  Ludwig turned to Christine: ‘Miss Holliday.’ Typically he had at once filed away her name in his memory. ‘I have been learning English ever since I first came to England. That is now two years, five weeks and, yes, four days. You see – I know exactly! Each morning, when I wake, I remind myself. First thing.’ He stared across at her for some seconds with large, protuberant, light-blue eyes behind thick lenses. Then he asked, almost coquettishly, head on one side: ‘Do you think my English good, Miss Holliday?’

  ‘Very good.’ It was the truth.

  He was the least attractive of the three men. They all wore shabby clothes, the collars and cuffs shiny with wear. But at least the two others were not merely tidy but had even made an effort to be smart – hair carefully brushed, boots highly polished, battledress trousers, with their regulation patches at the knees, decisively creased. He, in contrast, had not bothered to shave that day, a black stubble already bristling on his narrow, protuberant chin and above thick, red lips that, whenever he flashed one of his frequent smiles, disclosed small, irregular teeth; his hair, worn en brosse, was lacklustre; and there was a ridge of dirt under each of his square nails.

  ‘When I came to England, I could speak English hardly at all. But now – I’m an Interpreter in the camp.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes, it’s good. Being an interpreter is far better than working out in the fields. I work in the office – and the office is dry and warm.’

  Aware of Michael’s gaze on her, she forced herself to prolong a conversation that she would much rather have terminated. ‘ How did you learn English so quickly?’

  ‘Because I have a special gift.’ He laughed. ‘No, no, I’m joking! I taught myself. Mostly. That is why I like to talk to English people. But most English people’ – he pouted, shrugging his narrow shoulders – ‘for them to talk with a German prisoner …’ He stared at her and then grimaced, as though, while masticating, he had suddenly bitten on a piece of grit. ‘Now I’m beginning to learn Russian too. I always like to be prepared for every possibility.’ He cocked his head to one side and, disconcertingly, gave her a wink.

  ‘Ludwig is indefatigable,’ Michael put in, sensing her dislike. ‘You know they produced a Schiller play – Fiasco – at the camp and he was the stage manager. It was far from a fiasco. I went myself. People from outside were allowed to go.’

  ‘Schiller’s Fiasco! Quite an undertaking.’ She was making an effort, not for the Germans but for Michael. She had never heard of the play, much less read it.

  Ludwig leaned back in his chair, smiling and clicking the fingers of his right hand. In the weeks ahead Christine was to become used to both that self-congratulatory smile and a clicking, like that of invisible castanets, that seemed to demand ‘Look at me, here I am, attend to me!’

  ‘And do you speak English?’ Still making an effort for Michael’s sake, Christine turned for the first time to one of the other two Germans, who was sitting farther away from the coal fire, his head tilted sideways, so that she could see no more than what the flickering flames intermittently revealed.

  ‘Yes, I speak a little. But not as well as Ludwig, of course.’

  ‘True, true! Not as good as me!’ Ludwig laughed, once again clicking his fingers
. ‘He graduated in English. He taught English at a secondary school. But he doesn’t speak English properly.’ He shook his head. ‘ That is the truth. You can hear for yourself. His pronunciation is poor.’

  From the kitchenette, seldom used except when Michael had his German visitors, Christine suddenly became aware of a faint, flattened whistle. ‘ Is that your kettle?’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Michael jumped to his feet. ‘I hope it hasn’t boiled dry. What an idiot I am!’ He rushed out.

  There was an awkward silence, which prolonged itself until his return. ‘No harm done. But the water had almost all boiled away. So I had to add a lot more and wait. Sorry about that.’

  Soon he was busying himself with pouring out Earl Grey tea from the silver teapot.

  ‘Where shall I put your cup, Thomas? Here?’ He turned to Christine, to whom he had already handed a cup. ‘It’s rather inconvenient for Thomas at present. He was wounded in the right arm and somehow – perhaps they set it badly – it wouldn’t function properly and gave him a lot of pain. So recently they decided to operate on it, and then put it into plaster, as you can see.’

  Christine stared at the grubby white of the plaster. ‘ I suppose that means you don’t have to work.’

  He nodded.

  ‘So you have plenty of time to do what you want to do?’

  ‘Plenty of time.’

  ‘And what do you do with that time?’

  ‘Sleep.’

  Was he joking? Although the tone of the clipped monosyllable suggested boredom, even irritation, he must be joking. After all, Ludwig was laughing and Michael was smiling. She forced herself also to smile.

  ‘Thomas is lazy.’ Ludwig lowered his head and gulped noisily from the teacup clasped in both his hands as though to warm them. ‘I tell him he must study to improve. Then perhaps he too could work as an interpreter. As I said, his pronunciation isn’t good. You can hear for yourself. Like an Englishman speaking German on your Overseas Service. Also his grammar needs improving. English grammar is difficult. Too few rules – or is it too many rules, all contradicting each other?’

  ‘Yes, I am lazy’ Thomas muttered. Slowly he put out his left hand, slowly raised his teacup and no less slowly lifted it to his lips, as though to demonstrate that laziness. All at once he looked abject. How old was he? Christine tried to guess. Impossible. There were deep lines on either side of his mouth and muddy shadows under eyes that seemed somehow unfocused, as though they were used to glasses. But the skin over his cheeks and forehead had a youthful smoothness. No one could have thought him conventionally handsome, but with his wide lips, straight nose and thick, wavy brown hair, he was, even in his shabby, soiled uniform, an attractive figure. If one saw him in the street, one might well look at him and wonder what were the circumstances that had brought him to a prison camp in Oxford from the war so recently over.

  ‘I tell Thomas that he has so many opportunities,’ Ludwig continued. ‘I should be very happy to have all my days free. We have so little free time – even in the office where I work – and after work, pout! One is so tired that it’s difficult to study. And the noise, you cannot believe! There are thirty – no, now thirty-one – men in our hut. But during the day Thomas has the hut to himself.’ He extended a hand to Christine and all but touched her forearm. ‘Don’t you agree with me? He should study to improve his life. It’s bad for him to be idle.’

  ‘Perhaps he reads.’ She swivelled round, a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, and asked: ‘Do you read?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I read.’ He gave a perfunctory smile. ‘I have read almost every book in the camp library. Many of them are not very good books. Most of them are in German – so they do not help with my English.’

  Michael, who had begun to refill Klaus’s cup, looked up: ‘I can always lend you anything you want. You know that, Thomas.’

  ‘Yes, you are very kind, always very kind.’ Biting his lower lip, he stared into the fire. ‘ I wish I could repay you,’ he added almost inaudibly. In the weeks ahead Christine would notice how the burden of gratitude for favours he could not return would make him hostile or sulky.

  Yet again Ludwig clicked his fingers, as though to summon an inattentive waiter or a dog. ‘If you please, Michael. May I keep that Shakespeare you lent me?’ Hastily he added: ‘I mean, keep it for another week.’

  ‘For as long as you like.’

  ‘Is it expensive to buy such a complete works?’

  ‘Not really. I suppose you could get one for, oh, about five shillings.’

  ‘Five shillings!’ Ludwig’s voice squeaked upwards, like chalk on a blackboard. ‘For us prisoners five shillings is very expensive.’ He turned to Christine: ‘We get only six shillings a week. Can you imagine? – a week! That’s less than one shilling a day. That’s not much to buy razor blades, shaving cream, toothpaste – oh, many, many things. It’s not much, is it, Thomas?’

  Thomas, hands resting one on either knee, gave a small shrug. He did not look at Ludwig.

  ‘It’s worse for Thomas. Thomas gets paid nothing – nothing at all!’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. No work, no pay. It’s quite simple.’ Ludwig glanced round his audience, as if he had just produced a witticism and expected to be applauded for it.

  ‘Then how on earth do you manage, Thomas?’ Michael leaned forward in his chair. ‘You never told me about this. Why on earth not?’

  ‘Horst – my comrade – lends me money.’ He did not look at Michael. His voice was weary.

  ‘Horst makes a lot of money,’ Ludwig took up. ‘He’s very clever. You say ‘‘clever with his hands’’, yes? Horst is clever here’ – he tapped on his forehead with a forefinger – ‘ but also very, very clever with his hands. Give him a spoon and he’ll make a bracelet or a brooch for you. He makes beautiful ships in bottles. He makes toys. He’s one of our capitalists’

  ‘And aren’t you also one of your capitalists?’

  ‘Me?’ Michael’s irony was lost on him. He laughed, displaying his crooked, discoloured teeth. ‘Yes, I get along okay.’ He drew a theatrical sigh. ‘Perhaps, if I save, I can afford a Shakespeare Complete Works. I should like one of my own. That more than any other book. But five shillings – five shillings! For a prisoner, that’s a lot of money.’

  ‘If you like, you can hang on to mine. Keep it.’

  ‘May I? May I really, Michael?’ Ludwig was delighted with what he imagined to have been his finesse in extracting this gift. ‘Oh, you’re kind, very kind! Michael’s always so kind to me, Miss Holliday – to all of us.’ Suddenly he jumped up, stooped over Michael and threw an arm round his shoulder. ‘Thank you, thank you!’

  Michael shifted uneasily and waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, it’s nothing at all.’

  ‘For me it’s everything!’

  Through all this Klaus sat doggedly munching sandwich after sandwich, and thinly cut slice after slice of brown bread and butter. As the others talked, he would from time to time look up to smile or nod, in a pretence of listening and understanding. His appetite was prodigious. So was Ludwig’s. Everything that Michael pressed on them they took without demur, filling themselves with fodder as camels fill themselves with water at an oasis in preparation for the dry days ahead. Thomas, on the other hand, merely from time to time took a tiny bite from the sandwich on the plate beside him.

  ‘Sugar?’ Michael held out the Georgian silver bowl to him. ‘Oh, no, of course you don’t take it. Klaus? Take as much as you want,’ he added in German. ‘I never use it, so don’t worry about my ration.’ Christine knew that he was lying. He had always liked sweet things. ‘Sorry – I seem to have forgotten the tongs.’

  In an effort at gentility, Klaus did not help himself from the bowl with his fingers but instead used his teaspoon, rattling it around to gather up lump after lump. Each time there was a plop as the lump fell into the tea, and each time he would give the same embarrassed, apologetic grin. The last lump, the fourth, fell from so great a height that tea
splashed on to his hand. Hurriedly he wiped it on his trouser leg.

  Ludwig thrust his whole fist into the bowl and drew out at least half-a-dozen lumps. They all went simultaneously into his cup, causing the tea to brim over and slop into the saucer.

  ‘I see you like tea with your sugar.’

  Christine had spoken half humorously and half in disapproval of his blatant greed. Surprisingly, he showed himself more vulnerable than she would have expected from his self-confident manner. He blushed, mouth ajar. ‘ We don’t always get sugar with our tea or coffee in the camp.’ He looked across at Michael, teaspoon in hand. ‘Sorry, Michael. I’m a greedy bastard.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Please! I told you – I never take sugar. Have all you want.’

  Soon after that another prisoner, remarkable for his towering height and skeletal emaciation, entered the room, cap clasped in bony hands. This was Horst, the ‘ capitalist’ of whom Thomas and Ludwig had spoken. He was several years older than the others, his close-cut hair greying above large, pointed ears and his mouth puckered at the corners. The skin of his forehead was yellow and also puckered. He looked stern, unamiable, ill. He clicked his heels and bowed stiffly from his narrow waist, as if on a hinge, when Michael made the introductions between him and Christine.

  In carefully precise English, he explained: ‘I am sorry. I came for Thomas. I think that we must go. It is a long walk. And it seems as if it will snow again.’ In a low voice he muttered something in German to Thomas, who at once jumped to his feet.

  ‘Yes, yes! I’m very slow in this weather. I’ll be glad when I get rid of this.’ He raised the arm in plaster. ‘It makes me slower. Strange. I don’t know the reason. After all, it’s not my leg but this arm that’s kaputt.’

  ‘Couldn’t you take a bus?’ Christine was prepared to offer the fare.

  Horst, not Thomas, answered. ‘German prisoners are not allowed on your buses. Didn’t you know that? Walking is good enough for us, you understand.’