Of Love and Other Wars

by Sophie Hardach

  On the night of 16 December, Mannheim was bombed. The operation was thought to have yielded excellent results. About 100 tons of high-explosive bombs were dropped and 14,000 incendiary bombs, the Chief of Staff reported. Extensive fires were caused, some of which were still burning when the air force struck again on the night of 17 December.

  Mrs Morningstar felt neither pride nor pity when she saw blurred footage of the attack at the pictures. Her first thought was that the flashes of light on the dark screen did not look like explosions or raging fires at all, but like the white dots on a Laue photograph.

  2

  Mrs Morningstar watched the screen turn into a Laue photograph; young Esther Adler picked up a pair of tweezers and pulled the photograph out of a tub filled with developer.

  The country was in the middle of the Great War but there had never been, she was certain of it, a more exciting time to be a scientist. They numbered twelve at the lab, guided by the Wizard. Twelve pence to a shilling, twelve researchers to a lab: it was such a pleasing number, one that could be cleaved like a crystal to produce threes or fours or sixes, or indeed twos.

  She pegged the photograph to a washing line and hurried into the Wizard’s living room with the others. They sat down on the floor, balanced hot mugs of tea on their knees and waited for the circus to begin. Gottfried laid out a hypothesis in his slow, long-winded way and was soon interrupted by the Wizard: ‘You are aware, of course, that your Laue photographs will continue to be blurred until you learn to control that trembling hand of yours?’

  The others laughed. Perhaps Esther laughed, too. The Wizard, sitting in a dark green velvet armchair, lit his pipe. He was a horse trainer leaning against a fence, smoking his pipe, watching the colts and thinking to himself: this one needs more guidance, but that one, with a bit of encouragement, could win the National.

  When her turn came, Esther explained her latest ideas for examining the structure of graphite. She had built her own cylindrical camera out of brass tubing, bits of lead and sealing wax. Her brother’s alarm clock and a nail served to turn the crystal.

  ‘It works beautifully,’ she said, ‘though I’d still be without a spectrometer if Gottfried hadn’t taught me how to weld.’

  The gratitude on his face was an expression she would remember years later, when an emigrant in a long coat turned up at her door with that secret smuggled parcel in his hands.

  *

  That night, she packed away her tools and looked around to find all the others had left. She locked up the room and fetched her coat. The Wizard’s private flat was above the lab, and she decided on a whim to show him the dried Laue photograph.

  ‘Miss Adler.’ He opened the door himself, as if he had been expecting her. His fingers curled snugly around a glass of wine. The hair was clipped close around his widow’s peak and she wondered whether it was true what they said, that he sympathized with the Bolsheviks.

  Flustered, she began to talk about the lab, increasingly nervous as she noticed his eyes flitting in distraction from her face to the books she held to her chest. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. He told her to wait in the doorway and came back carrying a small pouch.

  ‘Open your hand,’ he commanded. ‘Palm up.’

  She did as she was told. He let six, seven small stones tumble into her open palm.

  ‘Rough diamonds,’ he said softly.

  She knew what they were. She was the daughter of a diamond cutter. It was infuriating that the Wizard thought these glassy pebbles would dazzle and impress her: she was a scientist, not a chorus girl. To her, diamonds were interesting the way rock salt was interesting, and graphite, and benzene. Most infuriating, of course, was his apparent idea that this was why she had knocked on his door, to flirt like an infatuated schoolgirl; and there was no way in which she could now right this misconception.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘How very lovely.’

  He smiled, picked the diamonds from her palm one by one and dropped them back into the bag. His fingertips tickled her nerve ends, but she held still.

  *

  The following week, she taught one of the young men in the lab how to weld. He was an Irish mathematician, charming and brilliant, but he had two left hands when it came to building and handling instruments. The interrupters for his Shearer gas tube would fill up with gas and pop off with a loud bang. Esther tried to help him handle the gas tube, causing much laughing and jumping and shrieking, and their coats were smeared with grease and dust. When she looked up, the Wizard was standing there in his pristine white coat.

  ‘You’ve come out to save us, have you?’ the Irish fellow cried, lifting his hands in helplessness. Esther hoped the Wizard would wave his hand over the Shearer tube and silence it with a single command; such an unscientific thought.

  He joined them and scrutinized the bad-tempered instrument; tapped it with the stem of his old brown pipe.

  ‘There’s a straightforward solution to your predicament, but I would like to see if you can find it yourselves.’

  Esther held his gaze.

  ‘I know what we’re going to do,’ she said. ‘Let’s put it on the roof. Then it can bang away as much as it likes.’

  His thin mouth widened into an amused grin and he rubbed his hands with boyish delight. ‘Splendid.’

  ‘Was that the solution you were thinking of?’

  ‘No, but yours is far more original.’

  They carried the instrument up to the roof and spent the rest of the afternoon building a protective shed around it. It continued to pop off twice a day, and the muffled bang became the lab’s very own gong for luncheon and tea. The Wizard loved nothing more than to startle visitors with the mysterious noise. And since it had been Esther’s idea, he invited her out for dinner in Soho as a treat.

  *

  They talked about graphite. He confided in her that he found Gottfried’s work a little slipshod, it did not have quite the rigorous quality he expected from his men. What were her views on the lab? He did not mind about the Shearer tube; that kind of bang-smash-boom could be invigorating, but only when underpinned by rigorous work. Did she agree? What did she think?

  He pulled his pipe from his mouth and tapped the back of her right hand with it. The end was still a little moist and warm on her cold skin.

  When they finished their baked salmon he took her hand, turned it upside down and gently stroked the life lines on her palm.

  ‘You’ll think me a fool for saying this, but I have never met anyone quite like you, young lady.’ He leaned forward now and whispered urgently: ‘Esther . ⁠. ⁠.’

  And she felt strangely powerful in that moment, more powerful than any of the men at the lab. The mighty Wizard had turned into a glassy pebble she could roll around in the palm of her hand. When he told her he had a room nearby where they could talk more privately, she thought of the horror this question would cause in everyone she knew in Hatton Garden, and then she said yes, that would be very nice.

  They walked down the road, up a fusty staircase, into a grubby room. He slammed the door shut and lunged at her with what she presumed to be an expression of unfettered desire. She was a little taken aback but let him squash her against the wall with his large soft body. He kissed her on the mouth. It would hardly do to voice a sudden change of mind now. His hand crept towards her left breast and squeezed it somewhat desperately but he did not try to remove her dress. She kept her eyes wide open and stiffly bore the squeezing and rubbing, and he was mercifully unbothered by her lack of enthusiasm. He continued to chafe against her through their clothes in an angry act of physical exertion that left him huffing and red-faced. Up close, his flushed skin was porously lined and his breath smelled of tea and curdled milk. She turned her face away.

  So this was the passion people wrote about in poems. She had never much liked poetry.

  On the bus home, she made herself invisible in the corner of her seat. A whispered conversation with an old school friend came to her: ‘I’m alway
s worried about going too far, because I don’t really know what “too far” means.’

  How utterly ignorant they were. And she a scientist!

  Later she told herself that she must have enjoyed it in some way. It was a logical conclusion. No one had forced her to meet the Wizard in Soho, and no one forced her to return to his flat two days later with a paper she wanted him to see. She had done it out of her own free will, and therefore must have found some pleasure in it.

  The paper was not related to any of her research in the lab. She had started working on it long before the era of the Wizard. ‘A Theory of Diamond-Cutting’ was its modest title; she had never shown the final version to anyone.

  Esther knocked on his door.

  An hour later, she buttoned up her blouse and hoped she could scrub the ink off her skin before her mother or any of her sisters saw. What a lot of nonsense he had written on her breasts with his tickling fountain pen. And then she thought that she was perhaps wrong to call it nonsense, and that other girls would find it romantic. She was a cold fish, lacking in the warm-blooded vitality that men found so attractive.

  Her shyness was charming, he said.

  She gathered ‘A Theory of Diamond-Cutting’ from the floor, wondering if she could ask him now to read it. There was a muffled cough. She glanced up, but the Wizard was still talking. Another cough. It came from the next room.

  She clasped her paper to her chest and ran out and down the stairs.

  *

  The next day, a handful of men marched up to the roof to dismantle the Shearer tube and bring it back into the lab.

  ‘The Wizard’s orders – we’re to rebuild it until we get it right.’

  They came back down laughing, hooting, carrying the components of their trophy high over their heads: ‘Put it down, gently does it! Here he is . ⁠. ⁠. Sir, sir, where would you like us to put it?’

  The Wizard smiled and directed the spirited traffic into a far corner of the lab. He grabbed his belt and hitched up his trousers over his protruding stomach. It was a tic she had not noticed before, and she found it unpleasant.

  She accompanied him to a lecture a week later, a luncheon talk for a circle of gentlemen with a leisurely interest in wine and science. They were financial supporters of the institute, and as such had to be entertained by the Wizard with popular, greatly simplified presentations of his research, a task he referred to as ‘throwing pearls’.

  He had brought two raw diamonds, which the gentlemen weighed in their palms as if they handled such stones every day. The Wizard, once again enjoying his role as circus magician, held one of them up between his thumb and index finger.

  ‘Gentlemen, how many of you believe that the diamond is the hardest substance known?’

  Dozens of white hands with signet rings went up.

  ‘And quite right you are, too. I assume the same number of you would be happy to wager that the diamond is indestructible?’ He placed the diamond on the polished table before him. Esther handed him a hammer, which he wielded over the stone.

  Heads nodded.

  The Wizard passed the hammer back to Esther, faithful assistant to the great conjuror.

  ‘I am sorry to say, gentlemen, that you would have lost the bet as well as a perfectly good stone. Diamonds cleave along certain planes and can be split by a light blow on the right spot, as many a rash gambler and many a diamond-cutting apprentice will have learned to their cost.’

  ‘Which is why they add a culet,’ Esther, stiffly occupying a chair in the corner, murmured absent-mindedly.

  ‘Miss Adler?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I was only pointing out that diamond cutters tend to flatten the sharp tip of their stones for precisely that reason, to prevent them from splitting. They call it a culet,’ she said. ‘Which is French for posterior.’

  The gentlemen sniggered.

  ‘My assistant has a passion for jewellery.’ The Wizard spoke with a slight distaste that evoked images of dirty, crowded, loud Hatton Garden, the cutters and merchants scurrying along the narrow dark streets. ‘Our problem with women scientists,’ he continued, winking at his audience. ‘They do become distracted by pretty stones and sparkle.’ This was met by another round of laughter. Esther tugged at her collar for air. She caught some of the men glancing at her with interest, and was certain that they all pictured her and the Wizard in a damp Soho room. The image was unbearable to her.

  When they left the club, the Wizard did not speak to her. She felt dreadfully awkward but did not know how to apologize for interrupting his lecture. His disdain was quite justified; she had acted like a goose.

  The next day, the nice Irish mathematician approached her with some hesitation. He cleared his throat, rubbed his nose, bit his lip.

  ‘We are ordering a hamper for the Wizard’s wife, the poor thing.’ He gave her an embarrassed glance. ‘Would you care to contribute at all?’

  They all knew, then, or thought they knew.

  Not long after that day, she became Mrs Morningstar and left the lab. When she took up a teaching position at Bentham College, her students were greatly impressed by the fact that she had once assisted the famous Wizard.

  Yes, she said, his lab was a wonderland; they had all had a marvellous time.

  You, You, You

  1

  Paul left Wormwood Scrubs to find the streets thronging with khaki. Soldiers and their sweethearts were everywhere. Front pages and posters blared at him to do his bit. Girls wore yellow and red scarves printed with fire-bomb fighters and patriotic slogans: ‘London! Alert!’, ‘Dig for Victory!’. The main change, however, was the proliferation of injured young men in the streets. Paul had entered prison when the main thrust of the war had still to be outward, an outward flow of men and guns that he refused to join. Now some of the flotsam and jetsam of that initial flow had been washed back. Paul saw men of his age who had already learned to butter a piece of toast with one hand, who kept their face slightly turned when they spoke to girls to hide the missing eye. He received a letter from the Ministry of Labour and National Service exempting him from military service on the condition that he do medical work. Instead of relief, he felt a vague sense of shame, as if he had cheated his way out of an unpleasant duty. He hoped this feeling would pass once he joined an ambulance unit, once he was part of a group of Quakers who bound wounds under fire. But then he found out that hundreds of young pacifists thought exactly like him: everyone wanted to serve in an ambulance and no one wanted to mop a floor in a hospital under the judging glances of strangers.

  Paul added his name to the long waiting list for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and in the meantime found a job mopping floors. Sometimes he went for a Sunday walk on the Heath with Miriam, but after a few of those walks he had to admit to himself that their friendship had been easier when he was still in prison. On the Heath, they saw limping men in khaki, and tired nurses sitting on benches with their eyes closed, and more than once Miriam quickly steered him down a wooded path to avoid a family friend coming the other way. They might as well have tried to take a Sunday stroll around the fields of Flanders and pretended they were picking poppies for a bouquet. Both knew this could not continue, that they were trying to keep up a friendship that had no anchor in the real world. But then there were those moments when they entered a dense stretch of woodland with no one else around, when Paul helped Miriam up a slippery rock and she held on to his shoulder to steady herself, and she smiled that lovely smile at him, and the outside world and the war ceased to exist.

  When the air raids started again he slept in the shelter at the hospital. He loathed the shelter: the smell of so many ill and exhausted people reminded him of prison. To escape it he volunteered to help with the casualties and was thanked for his indefatigable bravery. Again he felt that he was cheating, that he was pulling a mask of bravery over an act of cowardice: to him, rushing around amid the sirens was far less frightening than being trapped underground behind a closed door.

  It was
during one of those nights, when he was taking a quick nap in an office, that someone hammered on the door and he opened it to find Miriam stumbling in. There was a peculiar expression on her face, a look of confusion and a certain helplessness, as if she had lost her bearings, as if that natural confidence that carried her through life had vanished from under her feet. He thought of the time he had dragged her over the frozen, cracking pond towards safer ground and was gripped by that same urge to help her.

  Her words came out in quick garbled bursts but he gathered that the munitions factory where she worked had been hit and one wing destroyed.

  ‘You’d better go back there. I can come with you if you like. They’ll be counting the . ⁠. ⁠.’ He almost said ‘dead’, but the look on her face made him change it to ‘. ⁠. ⁠. girls.’

  When he moved towards the door, she held him back with rising panic in her eyes.

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t go back there. You don’t know what it’s like . ⁠. ⁠. whenever I hear them coming, I know they’re looking for me.’

  He began to say that everyone felt that way, that he had felt exactly the same when he was in prison, but she interrupted him, half mad with fear.