All My Sins Remembered (75 page)

‘Don’t you care about Britain?’

Clio regarded her coldly. ‘Not in the way that you and your fascist friends pretend to care. Britain will survive. I care far more about Rafael and Romy.’

Alice’s fist slammed on the table, making the plates and glasses ring.

‘There is no pretence. We are being led sideways towards a war with Germany by a conspiracy of Jews. We made peace with Germany in 1918 and the Führer is our friend.’

‘He is no friend of mine or Rafael, or of Julius or any of our friends in Germany. You have never been there, Alice. What do you know about the misery and the violence and the suffering caused by your precious Führer?’

Clio was shouting now, like Alice.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rafael with his head resting on one hand, the broad fingers splayed out in the hair at his temple. He was wearing an old brown jersey with a strand of wool unravelling at the cuff. She thought how much she loved him.

‘Rafael spent months in Oranienburg. What do you think that was like?’

‘What had he done?’ Alice asked.

Clio’s hand shot out, but Rafael caught her wrist.

‘Don’t,’ he ordered her gently. It was as if there were no one else in the room. He spoke to her alone, for her alone to hear. Alice was completely excluded. ‘You will wake up the baby.’

Alice stood up. She rested her fingers for a moment on the cloth that was still scattered with crumbs from their dinner. Then she walked away and into her bedroom and closed the door. Clio and Rafael heard the key turn in the lock.

They cleared away the dishes and washed up, moving around one another in confined spaces, and made the little rooms tidy again, but Alice did not re-emerge. Later, in the darkness, they made love with Romy breathing evenly in her low bed next to theirs. Clio reached out for Rafael, blindly touching the landmarks of him, aware of the solidity of their happiness.

In the morning, they discovered that Alice was gone.

The door of her room was open, revealing the empty cupboard and the bedclothes roughly pulled up. Romy had woken them early, but Alice must have been up earlier still. She had crept out with her suitcase, leaving them no message.

Romy wandered into her old bedroom and peered around with interest.

‘Alice gone?’ she said.

‘Yes, Romy. Alice has gone, for a little while.’

Clio and Rafael waited anxiously for two days.

They had no idea where Alice might have gone, or even how much money she had had with her. Clio’s only conviction was that she had not returned home, either to London or to Oxford. On the morning of the third day she was on the point of telephoning Eleanor and Nathaniel when the wire came from Berlin:
Alice here with me. Few days only. Don’t worry. Julius
.

It was Alice who had directed him to wire, Clio knew that, and who had not wanted her to worry about her whereabouts. The two faces of her sister, the unstable fanatic and the affectionate child, slipped and slid in her memory, never coalescing.

‘She will see now what it is like,’ Clio said, through her anxiety.

‘Perhaps,’ Rafael answered.

Nineteen

‘The usual table, for the English lady.’

Alice followed the waiter through the crowded restaurant with her head up. She was becoming used to the glances from the other diners, and to the business of sitting alone at this usual table. She didn’t read, although she sometimes brought a newspaper with her, mostly for appearance’s sake. She ordered from the semi-comprehensible menu, chewed through whatever it was that was brought to her, and waited, watching the door and the other diners.

On her very first day at the restaurant she had been lucky. She had hardly been able to believe it when it happened, but the Führer himself had come in with a small party, and had been seated in an alcove diagonally across the room. He had not noticed her, of course, but she had been able to look at him from where she sat. Her food had gone cold as she repeated to herself,
The Führer. Sitting across the room, where I could touch him
.

She felt rewarded for everything.

Alice had not stayed for very long in Berlin. She discovered very quickly that there was no opportunity to reach him there. She had seen him once, in the Wilhelmstrasse, being driven in a big black Mercedes car. She had gone to some of the torchlight parades and big outdoor rallies to hear his speeches, but there she had been just one in a crowd of thousands, kept in her place by the police and Hitler’s stormtroopers. It had been stirring and magnificent to see the torchlights and hear the singing of ‘Deutschland über Alles’, and to be a part of so much conviction after the fighting and heckling that surrounded the fascists in London, but it was not what she wanted. Alice had decided that nothing less would do than to offer her allegiance directly to Hitler himself.

So she had told Julius that now she found herself in Germany she wanted to travel in order to see more of the country and its people. Julius had tried but he had been unable to change her mind, or to convince her that it was unsafe to wander around on her own. She had a little money, and she was more than old enough to take responsibility for herself.

Alice had come to Munich, where the Führer was at home. After a few days she had discovered the Osteria Bavaria and at once, by some miracle, he had materialized with the members of his inner circle, only a few feet away from her.

She had come back every day, to eat her solitary meal.

The hope that he might come in and might even acknowledge her outweighed the discomforts of her cheap
pension
, the emptiness of the days, the suspicion that she was stared at and speculated about. Nothing mattered to Alice except the certainty that her devotion was unique, and her unshakeable determination that she was going to bestow it in the right place. Her love and her willingness to serve had gone unrecognized in London, and then had been humiliatingly rejected. Even now, the thought of that made her cheeks sting. But here, at the heart of fascism, she did not believe that she would be rejected again. The Führer would see her, and ask who she was, and then she would be drawn into the circle where she belonged.

It was only a matter of time, Alice told herself.

There was a little stir, near the door. There was Captain Rattenhüber, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard. The
maître d’hôtel
bent attentively to hear what Rattenhüber was saying. Then there was a brief flurry of waiters around the empty alcove table, and a moment later the Führer and his guests appeared. It was a smaller party than usual, Alice saw. She recognized Himmler, Lammers the Reichsnotar, and Hoffman, the photographer.

They passed by her table. Alice wanted to stretch out her fingers to touch his coat but she kept them out of sight, twisted together in her lap. Then, after they were seated, she saw the Führer glance in her direction at last.

His eyes seemed to burn straight into her head.

She longed to jump out of her chair and go to him, to invoke her relationship with Grace, to offer anything that might make him notice her properly. But then, after a moment’s examination of her face, he looked away again. He was absorbed in conversation at once.

Alice did not bow her head. She sat upright, with her hands still folded, while the hum of the restaurant went on around her.

Hitler asked Rattenhüber, ‘Who is that lady?’

The answer came quickly. ‘It is a young English
Fräulein
. Her name is Hirsh. She is staying alone at the Pension Post near the Mauerkirchstrasse.’

‘Hirsh.’

‘That is correct.’

Alice sat at her table until the Führer and his party swept by her. Only long after they had gone did she allow herself to wander back to her silent room at the Pension Post. The next day she was in her place once more, and on the day after that. It was only a matter of waiting patiently enough for the attention that she knew was her due to be bestowed on her.

A day came.

There was the now familiar stir at the door of the Osteria and the gavotte of waiters around the table that was always kept empty. He came in, with his guests, and Alice was certain that they all looked at her.

Today, she thought. There was a suffocating flutter in her chest. Her one good leather handbag was on the floor beside her chair. Automatically she reached down for it and slipped it on to her lap. She snapped the gilt clasp open and rummaged amongst the familiar contents. She was searching for the little gold powder compact that had been her twenty-first birthday present from her aunt and uncle Leominster. There was a mirror inside the lid, and she wanted to be sure that her makeup looked just as she wanted it. Before she found the compact her fingers touched another smooth metal surface, but this was cylindrical, not flat. It was the barrel of a small revolver, a 6.35 Walther.

Alice had paid some attention to the warnings that Julius delivered in Berlin. She had not really believed him when he insisted that it was dangerous to wander around unaccompanied in Hitler’s Germany, but she had decided that she might just as well have some kind of protection. And then in a tiny place in the Alt-Kölln, part pawnbroker’s and part junk shop, she had seen the little gun. It had a pretty pearl handle, and it was cheap.

‘A lady’s gun,’ the shopkeeper had said, smirking a little, when he handed it over.

She found the powder compact. Alice took it out and opened it, glancing at her reflection in the octagon of glass. She frowned and dabbed the pink puff into the well of powder. Then she patted it surreptitiously over her nose until the shine was subdued.

When she looked again she saw that the Führer was watching her. He was sitting with his back straight and his hands clasped on the white cloth in front of him. And then, with his eyes still on her, he inclined his head in a bow of greeting.

Relief and satisfaction and enchantment flooded in a great wave all through Alice’s body. She knew, at last and for certain, that this was her signal. It only remained for her to stand up and cross the restaurant, and to make herself known to him. She had long ago worked out the words she would use.

I have come from England. I am a cousin of Lady Grace Brock, the English Member of Parliament. I have long been an admirer of the Nazi party and, if you will allow me, of Mein Führer. My name is Alice Hirsh …

They were all looking at her now. Alice began to smile, the same smile that Tom Mosley had seen in Grace’s drawing room, a long way off in Vincent Street.

She stood up, her hands still vaguely groping with her leather handbag.
Now or never
, ran the flicker of thought before she stepped forward. She was doing something, at last, after all the waiting and wishing …

Alice was always physically awkward. As she dashed forward, the dangling strap of her handbag caught over the back of the unoccupied chair facing her own. There was a second while she half turned to tussle with it, but her own forward impetus was too strong. The chair rocked and Alice stumbled with it. Then the bag seemed to twist itself out of her hands and the chair fell with a great crash away from her. Alice overbalanced and fell too, and the contents of her handbag leapt and spread themselves over the floor of the Osteria Bavaria at Hitler’s feet.

She was trapped on all fours between the tables and the legs of the diners. All around her, it seemed, there were people springing up from their places. She had only one thought, and that was to retrieve the contents of her bag, the cosmetics and the little gun, and her purse containing a few marks and a photograph of Nathaniel and Eleanor in the garden at the Woodstock Road. She tried to scramble forward on her hands and knees.

The moving legs and shiny boots were too quick for her. She was surrounded by them. There was a lot of noise, and a thicket of hands snatching for her gun. One of the big boots trampled on her outstretched fingers, and she gave a small yelp of pain.

The hands descended and caught hold of her arms, wrenching at her shoulders. Alice found that she was suddenly hoisted upright.

Somewhere, beyond her confusion, she was reminded of Hyde Park and the way that the Leader had lifted her to safety on to the podium.

She looked round instinctively for Hitler. But all she could see were SS men, angry faces and brown uniforms.

She tried to say, ‘I’m sorry, how stupid,’ but she forgot her few words of German and the English words came out sounding thin and meaningless. Then she saw one of the SS men hand her gun to his captain. And it was only then that she understood how her actions must have appeared. Far too late, the danger of her position struck her like a blow between the eyes.

‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ she whispered.

‘Be quiet,’ the captain ordered viciously.

Her hands were pinned behind her back so tightly that they hurt.

‘Walk,’ one of the SS men commanded. She could smell the sausage and beer on his breath, his face was pushed so close to hers.

For the last time Alice looked around for the Führer, but he had been removed by his bodyguards. There was no hope of protection. These people were all her enemies now.

‘Help me,’ Alice called out into the close air. Nobody moved, except her captors.

The SS men propelled her forward, past the silent diners. She saw the meaty, red faces of the Munich bourgeoisie gaping at her from behind the barriers of the tables.

Outside the Osteria Bavaria Alice was pushed into a black car and driven away.

‘Where is she?’ Eleanor cried.

Nathaniel replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. ‘Julius doesn’t know,’ he answered.

Eleanor’s face crumpled like paper tissue. She was plump and her skin was still unlined, and to her husband she looked like one of her own children helplessly weeping. He knew that he should try to protect her from this, but they had always shared everything and he did not know how to keep secrets from her now.

‘He is afraid that it may be the worst. After what they say she tried to do.’

Julius had been informed by the police in Berlin that Alice had been arrested following an attempt on the Führer’s life in a Munich restaurant. She would be detained as an enemy of the Reich.