All My Sins Remembered (71 page)

‘I won’t shame you,’ Clio promised in a calm, even voice. ‘I won’t walk down the Woodstock Road with my illegitimate child. I shall go away until after he is born, and stay until the circumstances are forgotten. And if … if Rafael doesn’t come back to us, then I shall look after his son as he deserves to be looked after. I shall count myself lucky to have that much of the father.’

The note of bravado grew tremulous, at the end. But Eleanor didn’t hear it.

‘How will you live? Cut off from your family and friends, all the life that you have been brought up and educated to? How will you manage?’

‘I will manage,’ Clio said.

Eleanor saw then that she could, and would. She stood up, stiff-backed, and walked out of the room.

When the door closed Nathaniel leant forward very slowly and took Clio’s hands between his own. ‘She will come round, you know,’ he told her.

‘Pappy, I’m sorry to hurt you both.’ Clio was sobbing now. He put his arms around her and held her against him.

‘I think you are very brave, Clio. But I am sorry, too. I can’t pretend that I am not.’

Clio cried, ‘But I am glad I am having the baby. If I didn’t have Rafael’s baby I would have nothing.’

‘Where will you go?’ he asked gently.

Without thinking Clio answered, ‘To Paris. I have always wanted to live in Paris. Pilgrim and Isolde are there, so I won’t be alone. And I have always liked Pilgrim.’

Paris was between Berlin and London. Paris was a cosmopolitan city, where she could be anonymous and invisible. The idea took root and began to grow.

‘I will help you as much as I can,’ Nathaniel said.

The apartment was on the Left Bank, up the Boulevard St Michel, near the Jardins de Luxembourg. It was high up, on the fourth floor, with views from its mansard windows over purplish slate cliffs, and more windows, and the distant peaks of roofs descending towards the river.

There were two rooms, misshapen under the eaves, under-furnished and chilly in cold weather, but full of moving patterns of light. Clio established herself in this place like an animal building her nest. She hung the little blue oil painting of a bedsitting room on one wall, and set out her new typewriter on the table by the window.

She told the concierge that her husband was a Jew who had been interned by the Nazis in Berlin.

‘
Ma pauvre petite
,’ the woman murmured. ‘
Et vous êtes enceinte, aussi
…’

In this place, half-hypnotized by the swimming light and by the faint butterfly strokes of her baby, Clio began to write.

She started with slow sentences and hesitant paragraphs. Then slowly the paragraphs began to move, dancing under their own momentum, and they shivered and began to knit together, twining more closely and insistently and running faster over the blank pages, until she stood back almost breathless with the speed of it. The story grew out of her and then ballooned away, out of her control as if it were no longer part of her, like a baby being born.

The writing became Clio’s novel about herself and Rafael, and the Café Josef and Wilmersdorf and the burning of the Reichstag. It was published, not then but later, as
Berlin Diary
, and of all the books she was to write it was the best, and the one for which she was remembered.

Winter turned into spring while she was writing it. She saw Pilgrim and Isolde, and went for slow walks beside the river where the willows on the tip of the Île St Louis grew faintly green. The concierge looked out for her, and she became part of the life in the little cobbled street between the
boulangerie
and the newsstand where she bought her foreign newspapers. The
patron
of the corner café called after her when she passed, and she stopped to talk to her neighbours when she saw them. But mostly Clio was content to be alone.

And then, in March, there was the telephone call.

The concierge called up the stairs to her, as Frau Kleber used to do. Clio climbed awkwardly down. Her pregnancy had made her no longer quite certain of the dimensions of her own body. The old-fashioned black telephone was housed in a dim cubicle at the back of the narrow hall.

‘Clio, it is Grete here.’

Grete was crying. At first Clio could not distinguish the words. And then her fingers closed around the warm black bakelite with a sharp and pure spasm of joy.

‘He is out. They let him out. He wouldn’t stay here, even for one hour. He is on his way to you, Clio.’

Clio went slowly back up the stairs. Her face was wet, and she could hardly see her way. She sat down on her bed, watching the thin ribbons of sunlight move across the ceiling, waiting for him.

At last, she never knew how many hours later, he knocked at her door. When she opened it she saw a gaunt man with a speckled grey beard, the hollows in his face like fist-marks. But he held out his hands to her, and it was Rafael. He looked, for a long moment, as if he were seeing for the first time. And then he knelt down and put his arms around her, with his face pressed to her stomach.

‘They let me out. They just put me outside the gates, in the early morning, with my papers.’

Clio knelt too, and touched the sunken contours of his face with the tips of her fingers. ‘It must have been Grace’s doing. It must have been.’

They clung to each other then, blind and deaf.

‘I love you,’ Rafael said.

‘I love you,’ she repeated.

Clio’s baby was born in Paris, in May 1934. It was a girl, although she had never doubted that she was carrying a boy.

Clio wanted to give her a German name, but Rafael would not let her. In the end they named her Rosemary Ruth, but from the day of her birth she was called Romy.

Eighteen

London, 1936

The route of the march led along Oxford Street towards Hyde Park. At Hyde Park Corner, the Leader would address the crowd. Alice marched with her head up, swinging her arms to the rhythm of the pounding feet.

Behind the big plate-glass windows they passed were bright displays of summer fashions, but Alice didn’t even glance at them. When she did turn her head a little to one side it was to see if she could catch a glimpse of her own reflection in the shimmering glass. But mostly she stared straight in front of her, at the Union flag and the lightning-flash BUF banners proudly floating at the head of the march. Mosley was there, heading the column, and her thoughts were fixed on him.

She let herself be carried along by the singing and the chanting. The patriotic songs seemed to enter right into her soul, burning her with images of freedom and England. It was no effort to keep on marching, even though they had already come a long way. She was buoyed up by excitement, and her feet seemed to float over the hard road.

Alice loved marches and meetings. She attended them all, or as many as her work for Grace allowed her to. These fascist gatherings were like sharp peaks sticking up out of the monotonous plain of her life. They gave meaning and perspective to what was otherwise dull, and monotonous, and puzzling.

The ordinary business of life did puzzle her. Alice suspected that she was not quite like other girls. She was not like Tabby or Phoebe, for instance, and certainly nothing like the daughters of her parents’ friends with whom she had come out, who were interested in nothing but potential husbands and dances and clothes. Alice was interested in her Cause, and she pursued it with greedy anxiety. Because if she did not have that, she thought, what else would there be?

Very occasionally, with a kind of numb and clumsy regret, Alice would feel that it might perhaps be more comfortable after all to be like the other girls. It might be pleasant to have a suitor, and then maybe a wedding, and children and a home of her own. But then at once she would feel guilty, as if she had betrayed the beloved cause and the Leader himself. She would take down her photographs, or her party handbooks, and fix her attention on those.

And on days like today, then she had no doubts at all. It was glorious to be here, marching, and she felt sorry for anyone who was not.

They came to Oxford Circus, and streamed through the channel that the police created for them. There were shouting and fist-waving protesters behind the shoulders of the police, but Alice was used to that. One of the policemen walking on the flank of the march was keeping pace with her, she noticed. He kept looking at her. He had a very young, pink face under his helmet. She looked ahead, resolutely denying his attention.

At last they came to Hyde Park Corner. The marchers flowed into the park and surrounded a flag-draped podium. Alice dodged and squirmed her way forward, closer and closer to the edge of the platform until she was standing almost directly beneath it. The hecklers had closed in too, and the chanting began to rise between the two factions. The antifascists called their taunts:

Hitler and Mosley, what are they for?

Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war!

and the supporters in response, set up a drowning roar, ‘Mosley, Mosley!’ Alice crooned the Leader’s name, her eyes closed and her arm raised in the fascist salute. She forgot the policeman, and everything else except what was happening on the platform.

Mosley climbed up the steps ready to speak. He came closer to the microphone until his mouth almost touched it. There was a sigh from the crowd, like a gust of wind rolling through the trees.

His subject was peace, and the terrible threat of war, and the Jews.

‘We do not attack Jews on racial or religious grounds. We take up the challenge that they have thrown down, because they fight against fascism, and against Britain. They have striven for the past eighteen months to arouse in this country the feelings and passions of war with a nation with whom we made peace in 1918. … We fought Germany once in our British quarrel. We shall not fight Germany again in a Jewish quarrel!’

The cheering was like a storm now. The heckling was all but obliterated by it.

Alice cheered with the others. It took only a small effort of will, she knew from experience, to focus very closely on the words as they boomed over her head.

There must be no war, of course.

It was unthinkable that there could be a war with Hitler’s Germany.

It was the organized power of the Jews that was striving for war policies. It was not Nathaniel who was guilty, of course, nor anyone like him. Alice almost smiled at the idea. Nathaniel went quietly on in Oxford, teaching his linguistics to lumpy undergraduates, as he had always done.

But there was a sinister force, separate from her family and the people she knew. It was the weapon of financiers and bankers and industrialists, all of them Jews. It was unseen but no less threatening for that, and it was working against British order and equality and opportunity. It was this force that must be opposed, before it was too late.

This was what Alice knew.

The speeches went on. Alice felt dizzy with exhilaration as she listened and cheered and pressed closer forward.

And then when it was over, when she was right up against the edge of the podium, there was more triumphant singing and chanting. ‘Britons fight for Britain only! Britons fight!’

She craned her neck up to see the polished boots and black trouserlegs of the men on the platform, and their torsos foreshortened by the awkward angle of her head. She felt that they were superior beings, poised so far above her. It would have made her angry, if she had had the strength for it. But she was tired now, and her throat ached.

Then someone came forward and stooped down to her level. She saw his dark moustache and bright eyes.

‘Alice, what are you doing down there, all on your own?’

It was Mosley himself. He reached out one hand and took hold of her wrist, and at the same time one of his lieutenants caught her other arm. They swung her up, so that she hung in the air for an instant with the crowd pressing behind and beneath her, and then her feet found the boards of the platform and she stood upright, and the Leader steadied her with an arm around her shoulder.

The view was wonderful, a sudden panorama of upturned faces and bobbing hats and waving hands, and she could see the ribbon of police uniforms at the edge of the crowd, the brown shiny flanks of the police horses, and the protesters excluded beyond them.

There was a ragged, ironic cheer. Alice lifted her hand and grinned, shyly, like a child unexpectedly noticed by the adults.

‘What would Grace say?’ Tom Mosley was asking her. He was laughing but she could see that he was concerned.

‘She knows I’m here, really she does,’ Alice earnestly promised.

‘Are you sure?’ He was teasing now, and it made her feel awkward, but at the same time pleased and excited.

Behind them the crowds were beginning to disperse. Some of the marchers were forming up into ragged columns, still contained by the dark blue markers of police uniforms, and the singing and shouting had become vague and fractured, without the antiphonal chorusing of before the meeting. On the fringes, away from the platform, there were scuffling fights and some stone-throwing.

‘Are you going back to Vincent Street now?’

Alice nodded, touched with the invariable feeling of anticlimax that came after meetings.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said.

Her face bloomed her delight at him.

‘I thought I’d drop in to see Grace,’ Mosley said, when they were ensconced in his car. Alice sank back in the passenger seat of the Bentley, admiring it and the panache of his driving. They seemed to skim along twice as fast as the rest of the mundane traffic in Park Lane.

‘She might be at the House,’ Alice ventured, knowing perfectly well that she was. Cressida would be at school. There was no one at Vincent Street except Nanny and the servants. She held her breath, and her wish was granted.

‘Oh, I’ll look in anyway,’ he said.

The house was empty and very quiet. They went up to sit in Grace’s creamy drawing room. The Leader seemed perfectly at home there. He leant back against the sofa cushions, crossing one leg over the other, watching Alice with his bright, penetrating stare.