All My Sins Remembered (66 page)

Clio listened to the words of his story, quicksilver little words that were polished in the telling in Miles’s droll way, but she could also hear the dull and unpleasant weight of reality behind them. He had found a room to live in after he had been obliged to leave Gower Street, but he had managed to borrow money from his landlord and then failed to pay any rent, and the trickle of writing commissions had temporarily dried up. There had been no more money, and then there had been an incident.

Miles wiggled his fingers in the air, as if the incident had been comical, but Clio knew that it was not. There would have been drink and some violent outburst, and an aftermath that made her scalp tighten across her skull with the effort not to imagine it. Miles would have decided, or perhaps it had been decided for him, that it was a good idea to leave London. He had cast around for a suitable refuge, and had come up with Berlin, and Clio.

At the end of the story he smiled at her. It was a whimsical smile that she remembered very clearly. It made her sick to realize that she had once found it so charming. In that minute she saw her husband complete and whole, as she had never been able to see him before, and understood that he was helpless.

‘How much do you want?’ she asked.

Miles looked wounded. ‘It isn’t money. Well, actually it is, but I wouldn’t ask you for that. It’s you I need.’

He let the fey mask slip a little, or tried to give her the impression that it slipped. In either case, she knew it was no less than the truth. He did need her. He needed her as a shield, and a cushion.

Clio remembered the pendulum swings of his mood between elation and depression, and the blackness that had engulfed him at the lowest points. He had wept and clung to her. After one of those black fits he had first made love to her, and she had held him in her arms and convinced herself that she could take care of him. As she had done, for more than four years. Miles had been much cleverer than she, and was no less clever now.

‘You are my wife,’ he said. There was a threatening edge in the wheedling tone that made her pity him less.

‘I want to divorce you.’

‘Divorce? My darling, I have
never
believed in divorce. I couldn’t agree to it.’ And now there was triumph, suppressed but still glinting in the corners of his eyes.

Clio kept her voice steady. She had found him in her bed, lying beside a male whore with black fingernails. There was no cause for the mush of pity or sympathy.

‘Then don’t agree to it. But I am not your wife any longer.’

There was a little silence. ‘That is very harsh.’

‘What did you expect?’

Miles hunched his shoulders. His beer glass was empty. ‘I know. I haven’t the right to expect anything. But do you think I’m happy to be the way I am? Pleased, or proud?’

He was playing a role, of course, as he always was, wheedling for her sympathy now, yet Clio understood that there was a seam of honesty in the sham.

‘No, I don’t suppose you are. What can I do?’

He took her intended disclaimer and deftly flipped it. ‘You can let me stay for a little while, now that I’m here.’

‘You can’t stay. You heard Frau Kleber.’

‘I didn’t mean in this room. I wouldn’t expect that, after what you saw. But I could find somewhere nearby, couldn’t I? Or even a hotel, a cheap one?’

Clio summoned all the brutality she could muster. ‘It would have to be cheap. Since I’ll be paying for it, I suppose.’

‘I can stay, then?’

Wearily she answered, ‘Do I have a choice?’

It was hateful to think of Miles in Berlin, weaving himself like a discoloured thread into her life here. But he had come, and he had been her husband for three years, and she couldn’t unpick that. Looking back at the past months she felt that she had been covering over the wound that she had left behind in London, and now it was time to open it up and cauterize it.

Miles stood up and poured more beer into his glass. He was pleased to have insinuated himself. ‘Some for you?’

‘No, thank you.’

He strolled to the window and looked down into the suburban street, as if gauging its potential for him. Then he turned back, and leant against the corner of the table so that he could look down at her.

‘Who are the gentlemen callers? Am I allowed to know?’

Clio took a breath before she answered. ‘There is one caller, as you put it. He is a friend of Julius’s. And my lover, now.’ There, the truth. It was easier than she had imagined.

Miles’s eyebrows made inquiring peaks. He looked amused, even indulgent. ‘A German?’

‘Of course.’

‘Not a
Nazi
, I hope.’

‘I will introduce you. Then you can judge for yourself.’

They would have to meet. She couldn’t hope to hide Miles from Rafael, nor would she want to try.
Cauterization
, she reminded herself.

‘I shall look forward to it,’ Miles said.

‘I think you should go now,’ Clio told him. The beer was all gone; she wanted her room to herself, so she could think.

Miles had got his own way, and was prepared to be amenable in everything else. Clio gave him some marks, and directions to a hotel in a nearby street.

‘Until tomorrow,’ he promised. He kissed her and she held herself very still until he had removed his hands again. When she opened the downstairs door to let him out into the street, she knew that Frau Kleber was watching from her lair.

Rafael and Miles met at a pavement-café table. It was not one of the big cafés on the Kurfürstendamm or Friedrichstrasse, because Jews no longer frequented the main thoroughfares in case of attracting the attention of the SA or auxiliary police. The café was a small, ordinary place on a corner in the Altstadt, with a handful of tables placed outside under a faded awning.

Miles was sitting reading an English newspaper, but he looked up as Clio and Rafael crossed the street. It was the beginning of September, and noticeably cooler. A slight breeze lifted Miles’s fine hair and ruffled it over his forehead.

‘Rafael Wolf, Miles Lennox,’ Clio said, and they shook hands.

Rafael had listened carefully when Clio told him that Miles was in Berlin.

‘I am still his wife,’ she finished. ‘In law, if nothing else. And he is so helpless. It is his helplessness, at the root of everything, that means I have to help him.’

‘What do you want to do?’ he asked her.

Clio considered. ‘I … know how clever and how devious Miles can be. He likes to manipulate people, and it might amuse him or suit him to manipulate us. Or me, rather. To make me feel that I should in some way conceal him from you, or pretend about him in some other way, and so create an untruth between us. He is inquisitive about you. I want you to come with me to meet Miles, so that it is you and I who are one, and not Miles and I. So that there are no secrets. Would you mind that very much?’

Rafael had laughed. ‘Why should I mind? Of course I will meet him, if that is what you want. Only don’t expect me to like him. From what you have told me, I don’t think I shall.’

It was as simple as that. Clio was still amazed by how clear and simple Rafael could make matters that seemed to her to be shadowed and complicated. He was neither jealous nor possessive, and she loved him for it. It was only the perversity of her own nature that made her long to be possessed, and to be able to look into the future beyond tomorrow, or the day after that.

And so Clio and Rafael sat down at the little metal-topped table, and Miles signalled to the waiter. He brought them coffee and schnapps and Clio was amused by the thought that they looked like any trio of friends meeting for a drink and an exchange of the wary talk that passed for gossip in Berlin now.

The sun was bright on the opposite windows, and it was pleasant under the shelter of the awning. A little tongue of happiness licked up inside Clio. Even Miles couldn’t affect her here. She watched him, as he leant back with his foot on the opposite chair. He looked rested and cheerful, just a neat-featured man in a shirt with a worn soft collar.

There was nothing to be afraid of, because she was with Rafael and Miles couldn’t hurt her any longer.

They drank their coffee and listened to Miles’s tourist’s impressions of Berlin. Clio leant closer to Rafael, and he took her hand and folded it under his arm. That was all. Love welled up inside her like spring water.

‘What are your plans?’ Rafael asked Miles.

‘To stay here for a little while. To have a rest, perhaps. I have been working on a book for a long time, and it’s almost completed now.’ Miles’s manner was confiding, almost flirtatious.

‘Clio told me about your book.’

Miles darted a look at her. ‘Clio has been very kind to me.’

‘And to me also,’ Rafael said.

‘Kindness is a fine attribute in a wife.’ He was as delicate as a cat, but the implication was plain.
My wife
.

‘And in a husband too, I imagine.’

Miles inclined his head. He turned his coffee cup a half-circle on its saucer, and then asked, ‘Do you think I should take a trip out to Grünewald? For a steamer ride?’

‘If you like lakes and steamers and pine trees, why not?’

Clio saw sunlight dancing all the way along Garnisonstrasse. She wasn’t afraid of Miles. The wound would be cauterized and then it would heal over completely.

They sat under the awning for perhaps an hour, until Rafael announced that he must take Clio away, because they were expected somewhere else. There was nothing left for Miles to do but to stand up, shake hands and peck Clio on the cheek.

‘I’ll look in to see you tomorrow,’ he called after her.

‘If I’m at home.’

She turned the corner with Rafael, and they walked on arm in arm.

‘Thank you,’ she said at length.

He smiled. ‘I am glad to have met him.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I thought he was like a butterfly. One of those velvety-brown ones with pretty markings. And about as substantial.’

They came to the Spree and turned to stroll beside it. The water was grey flecked with blue, and there were dabs of foam on it that made Clio think of waves in the sea.

‘He says that he won’t divorce me.’

Rafael stopped walking. He took her face between his hands and looked down into it.

‘I want to marry you.’

Clio stood still.

‘But if I can’t it doesn’t make any difference. I love you as much and in the same way. Your poor butterfly doesn’t stand in the way of that.’

‘Do you really want to marry me?’ She was minutely conscious of the river and the stone walls, the little bridges with their high backs to accommodate the barge traffic beneath, and the tall brown buildings with their blank eyes.

‘Yes, I do. I would marry you tomorrow, if I could.’

The simplicity of it. The intricate, breathtaking mesh of loving and being loved. Clio took his hands and gripped them until her fingernails dug into his flesh. The intensity of her sudden determination made her voice harsh.

‘Rafael, I want us to leave Berlin. I want us to go away from here, to England, or to France, to anywhere you like but away from Germany. I have never been happy in my life like this and I won’t let it go. If we stay here …’

He loosened his hand from her grasp and put his arm around her shoulder, drawing her face closer to his.

Rafael knew what would happen to him if he stayed in Berlin. It could only be a matter of time before the men in uniform came for him as they had come for the others, those he knew and the hundreds more that he did not. There was still work for him to do here and now amongst those who were robbed of their homes and their livelihoods by the Nazis, but he would be no more use to anyone once he was in prison or in a camp.

For days, Rafael had been debating with himself whether to leave Berlin or to stay until the inevitable happened. To leave would be to run away, he had no doubt of that, but if he did leave there would be some hope for himself and Clio, and the possibility that he could make himself useful elsewhere. The argument went round and round in his head, but he had come no closer to resolving it.

He had said very little to Clio about his anti-Nazi work, because he believed that the less she knew the safer she would be. But it was hard not to be able to share his dilemma with her. He saw her intent face now, and her struggle with herself not to exert too much selfish pressure on him, and he knew how much he loved her.

For an instant, then, the decision seemed simple.

‘We’ll go,’ he whispered, before the moment of clarity deserted him. ‘If you want it so much.’

The sun seemed to swing over Clio’s head, making a dizzy arc in the slot of sky as they held each other.

‘I want to go home, to your apartment. Now, this minute. Please, Rafael.’

‘There is the U-Bahn,’ Rafael said.

A handful of days went by. In a blaze of happiness Clio told Julius, and Pilgrim and Isolde, and Miles himself that she would be leaving Berlin soon, with Rafael.

‘That is the best news,’ Julius said. ‘The best possible news.’ Clio shone with a kind of delight that he had never seen in her before. It made him feel dry and brittle by comparison.

‘Come too. Come back to London,’ she begged him.

‘I might, soon. Not just yet.’ The effort of removing himself from Berlin seemed too great. He had his familiar routines of practice and teaching – even if he could no longer perform in public – and the seclusion of his rooms, and the solitude of his life in the wary city suited him. He could think of nowhere else he particularly wanted to be.

Clio noticed his lethargy, and worried about it, but she knew that Julius was not to be persuaded against his will.

‘You should come home,’ she repeated, but Julius only nodded and smiled absently.

Pilgrim told her, ‘You are right to get out of Germany. It begins to be oppressive, as well as dangerous. I don’t mind a little danger but I can’t bear gloom. Isolde and I have been talking about Paris.’

‘Paris, why not?’ she agreed absently.

Clio was ashamed of their desertion. She knew that she was making Rafael leave the place where he was needed, but she was also certain that there was nothing else they could do. Almost every day they heard news of Jews who were leaving or had already left. The reports of arrests for ‘fighting with Stormtroopers’ or ‘consorting with German girls’ and the unexplained disappearances were so common that they no longer remarked on them. Now that the decision was made she felt a feverish anxiety to be away that she had a struggle to suppress. Rafael was making his own arrangements, and she tried not to hurry him. He was worried about Grete and his father, and about the vulnerable people he would be leaving behind.