All My Sins Remembered (76 page)

That was all. There was no more information.

‘It’s a mistake. Alice wouldn’t have done that,’ Eleanor sobbed. ‘We both of us know what Alice believes.’

‘What do we really know?’ Nathaniel murmured.

It seemed that with the approach of old age he had lost the order that had once been the kernel of the old house. With Eleanor, he had been the spine and the skull of the family. Their children had been strong limbs that had once moved independently but as part of the whole body. But now he felt that the limbs were broken off, and they twitched painfully out of reach of the messages that his brain tried to convey. He sat in his old desk chair and watched his wife weeping.

‘I shall have to go to Germany,’ Nathaniel said.

‘I’ll go back to Berlin and find her,’ Rafael told Clio.

They were sitting at the round table, watching the last butter-yellow sunlight fading on the roofs of the houses across the street. Romy had fallen asleep on her bed with her thumb in the triangular soft pocket of her mouth.

Clio was frightened. All the dark terrors of the last days in Berlin had dropped around her again like a curtain falling over a window.

‘Romy and I will come with you. We must all stay together.’

‘No.’

Rafael never argued, and he rarely denied her anything. But Clio knew that his refusal was absolute. She thought of poor, confused and unhappy Alice in some prison or camp, and then she looked across to the open door of Romy’s bedroom. She felt the dead weight of inevitable misery pressing on her shoulders.

‘You don’t have to go back to Berlin for Alice’s sake,’ she attempted.

‘I think I do.’

He would go to do what he could for Alice, although he did not have much hope that he could reach her. But the memory of his own time in the camp was still vivid, and he could not stay comfortably in Paris with the thought that Clio’s sister was suffering in the same way.

Alice’s capture filled him with fear and with a paradoxical blind determination to help her whatever might come, but in another more rational part of himself it only crystallized a need that he had felt for a long time. Rafael believed that he had slipped away from his people and his country, and left behind responsibilities that he ought to have stayed to share. Perhaps, he thought now, his unwilling return might help to absolve some of the guilt that clung to him.

‘When?’ Clio made herself ask. It struck her now that this moment had always been lying in wait for them, beyond the precious happiness of their time in Paris. It was for that very reason that it had been so precious to all of them.

‘As soon as I can. Tomorrow.’

Julius was living in an apartment block in a cocoa-brown street not far from Clio’s old place at Frau Kleber’s. When the street bell rang up through the murky hall he went out on to his balcony and looked down into the road. The windows to the left and right of him were showing their Nazi flags, but his own was bare.

Nathaniel was standing with his face turned up to Julius’s windows. He looked exhausted after his hurried journey.

Julius turned back into the room. Rafael was sitting reading in the one armchair. They had not spoken to each other in the last hour, because there was nothing at all to say. All their enquiries after Alice had met with silence and – worse than silence – narrow suspicion. The unexpected ringing of the street bell had jerked their heads up and set them sniffing the air like dogs.

‘My father is here,’ Julius said.

He opened the outer door and drew Nathaniel inside the shelter of the building before he opened his arms to him. Then the two men embraced, Julius holding Nathaniel as if he were the father and not the son.

‘Is there any news?’ were Nathaniel’s first words.

‘None. Not yet,’ Julius said. ‘You should have told me you were arriving today. I would have come to the station to meet you.’

Rafael stood up, putting his book down carefully on the arm of his chair. He heard the two men coming heavy-footed up the stairs, and then in the doorway he saw a broad black-and-grey-bearded patriarch with a lined, clever, humorous and weary face. Clio’s father.
Romy’s grandfather
, he thought. The generations that had seemed caught between Clio and himself spun away freely, reaching back into the past and on, unseeably, into the future.

He wished then for a happier meeting ground.

He held out his hand. ‘Rafael Wolf,’ he said.

And Nathaniel’s great smile when he saw him even wiped away, for a moment, the sombre concerns that had led them both to Berlin.

‘My son,’ Nathaniel said.

Julius stood behind him, taller but much thinner and more fragile-seeming than his father, and smiled too.

‘We have been doing what we can,’ Rafael explained later. ‘It is not very much, I am afraid to say.’

The three men had gone out to a workmen’s café in the neighbourhood. They sat in the back of the room, in the shadow of a high counter, and were served soup and
Würste
by an indifferent girl in a stained apron. Nathaniel saw the faces in the streets and the customers in this shabby bar.

‘There are Jews here,’ he murmured. ‘Living openly. It cannot be so bad.’

Julius dipped his spoon into the soup. ‘There are perhaps half as many of us left as there were before Hitler came to power. Every day there are fewer. There are streets we can no longer walk in – the Kurfürstendamm, Wilhelmstrasse – and many Jews no longer go to public theatres or concert halls or cinemas for fear of the Nazis. Our children are unable to go to the state schools. I could not guess how many Jewish homes and businesses have been destroyed. Or how many Jews have been rounded up and sent to the camps.’

Julius looked at Rafael. ‘Rafael and I cannot work in Berlin. But life of a kind still goes on. The synagogues are still open. You will find us in places like this, sitting in the darkest corners, not daring to ask one another what will happen.’

‘Yet you are still here,’ Nathaniel said.

‘I was preparing to leave,’ Julius told him. ‘Rafael did right. He left Berlin and went to Paris to be in the open and to live a life with Clio instead of existing in the shadows here.’

Rafael put down his spoon. Very courteously he told Julius, ‘I did not do right. I felt that all the time I was in Paris, I should have been here, where I belong.’

He thought of the little rooms in the Marais, and the cradle that he had made for Romy, and of Clio working at her typewriter with her dark head bent and her shorter hair revealing the soft nape of her neck. He wanted to close his eyes, to bring them closer, but he looked steadily at Clio’s father and brother instead. He could see the family likeness in the wings of their eyebrows and the mobile lines of their mouths.

But yet, none of them resembled each other as closely as Clio and Grace did. He had never spoken of that to Clio. She was proud of her physical likeness to Julius.

The first twins, the mothers, must reflect one another like images in a glass.

‘But you had been in Oranienburg,’ Nathaniel excused him.

‘All the more reason to stay. I survived that. It is survivable.’

Rafael suddenly smiled. He reached his hand across the table to cover Nathaniel’s and Nathaniel, who for all his command of languages also believed that physical gestures spoke more eloquently, turned his own palm upwards to clasp it.

Rafael told him, ‘I am glad to be in Berlin now. We will find Alice, and get her back somehow.’

For the first time since he had arrived in Berlin Nathaniel began to believe that it might be possible.

‘Can you think of anything you might be able to do, beyond the official channels?’

Nathaniel had already been to see the British Ambassador and the Police Commandant. Their response had been to warn him, as if he had not understood as much, that Alice was accused of a very serious crime.

‘Julius and I are doing the best we can through the unofficial connections.’ Except that, as Rafael had discovered, so many of the old cells and links that had centred on the Café Josef were broken.

It was Julius who answered him, the obvious answer. ‘There is Grace.’

Grace stared into the green glass shade of the reading lamp on her desk. The bulb within made a soft yellowish glow and her unfocused eyes made a clearing of it, a sunny clearing in a grass-green forest. Realizing that her mind was wandering Grace sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. It had been a long day, and she would have liked to let her head fall against the back of her chair so that the weight of sleep could drag her effortlessly downwards.

Alice
.

The stupidity of what the child had done almost blinded her.

Grace had no doubt that Alice had made some clumsy mistake in her unfathomable double pursuit of admiration and Nazi glory. Tom Mosley had told her enough to enable her to guess what Alice might have been up to. But to drop a revolver at the feet of Hitler and a dozen SS men seemed beyond the bounds of
gaucherie
even for Alice.

And this evening Julius had telephoned from Berlin. It had been a bad connection and his voice had crackled and faded before suddenly sparking in her ear, as clear as if he had been standing beside her.

‘Grace, can you help us again?’

It had given her an odd shock of pleasure to hear him.

She had found herself answering, ‘If I can, of course I will,’ while all the time she was listening just to the sound of his words.

The call had been very short. After he was gone she sat thinking, holding the comforting link of the receiver against her throat.

She imagined Julius and Nathaniel, and Rafael whom she disliked, alone together in the thick stew of Berlin. Perhaps they were in the Café Josef, or whatever the place had been called, where Rafael used to go to stir up his communist potions. What would they do, the three of them, to try to secure Alice’s release from the Nazis?

When she thought about it, Grace guessed that the Hirshes were probably ready to blame her for what had happened because of her political influence on Alice. But Grace was clear-sighted enough to recognize that whatever effect she had had on the child, it was much less significant than the incoherent longings that came from within Alice herself.

Please help us
.

They might secretly blame, but they were also willing to appeal to her. And Grace wanted to respond, not so much for Alice, the little idiot, but for Julius’s sake. Only it was much more difficult than the Hirshes in their naïvety imagined.

Grace had been severely reprimanded by the Foreign Office for failing to follow the official channels in her last petition for a German prisoner.

The German Ambassador at Lady Astor’s had listened gravely to what she had had to say, and had promised to look into the matter as a personal favour. Grace had also written to Hitler himself, and had received a letter from an aide pointing out that the Führer was not directly concerned with such matters, but an investigation of the case would be placed in hand.

That was all. Grace had been as discreet as she thought it was possible to be, but the news of her intervention had travelled. She had been summoned for an interview with the Foreign Secretary and the Chief Whip, and informed that in future she would adhere scrupulously to the proper diplomatic procedures in her dealings with the Reichsführer and his government. She never discovered whether her intervention had anything to do with Rafael’s eventual release from Oranienburg.

The green light was hurting her eyes now. Grace reached for the swan neck and clicked off the switch.

She could choose: to do what she could from London for Alice, or to go directly to Berlin. The House was still in recess, although there was enough happening elsewhere in London. Mrs Simpson had just been granted a divorce from her husband and it seemed that the entire Government, and every dinner table in Mayfair and Belgravia, was waiting to see what the King would do.

In the dark of her study, Grace listened to Julius’s voice within her head. Then she picked up the photograph of Anthony that stood in a silver frame on her desk. Cressida had bought her the frame, for a birthday present, and had placed the snapshot under the glass. The light from the hallway glinted on the silver and glass now as Grace turned it from side to side.

The decision was already made. She would go to Berlin.

Grace flew to Tempelhof. Julius watched her plane approaching out of the whitish autumnal sky and followed it as it touched down and skimmed over the runway to a little patter of applause. There was a festive atmosphere at the Berlin airport. Berliners had taken to coming out for an afternoon excursion, paying fifty pfennigs to watch the planes dipping in and out and listening in the meantime to the band playing on the roof terrace of the excellent restaurant.

Julius saw her as soon as she emerged at the head of the plane’s steps. She was wearing a suit in some pale colour that made her waist look tiny. He lifted his arm to wave to her, and dropped it again, feeling foolish in the realization that she couldn’t possibly distinguish him in the press of so many other people.

But when she came through the arrivals gate, coming straight towards him without any hesitation, she turned her face up in greeting and touched her mouth to the corner of his.

‘I saw you as we came in, up there on the terrace,’ she said.

‘Did you?’ The idea that she had been watching so closely for him made his breath catch sharply in his chest. To hide it he stooped down to lift her suitcase, fussing unnecessarily with the straps of it.

They went back to Wilmersdorf, with Julius paying for an unaccustomed taxi instead of returning, as he had come, by tram and bus. Grace was to stay at the Adlon, but she insisted on seeing Nathaniel first of all. He was waiting with Rafael at Julius’s apartment.

Grace and Nathaniel embraced each other. Nathaniel held her and cupped her cheek in his big hand as if she were his own daughter. Grace was touched by his warmth, and it made her feel glad that she had come on this chase after Alice.

‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled at him, with more optimism than she truly felt. ‘With the four of us to contend with, how can the Nazis fail to release her at once?’