Death in Berlin (12 page)

‘It’s odd how women like that can always get people to stick up for them. And people like Johnnie - and Robert - to marry them…’

Her voice cracked a little on the last word, as though she was suddenly near tears, and all at once Miranda was sorry for her. There was some tragedy in Norah Leslie’s past; a tragedy that was still real and alive and unforgotten. Perhaps she had once loved Robert, or Johnnie Radley, or both, and had lost them in turn to this unknown Stella?

Miranda thrust her hand impulsively through the older

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woman’s arm and said quickly: ‘You don’t really know Stella at all. How could you, when you only met her for the first time about three days ago? She’s a darling. Really she is; wait until you know her better, and then you’ll see for yourself.’

Mrs Leslie smiled. It was a smile that did not quite reach her eyes, but her voice had lost its hard, brittle tone when she spoke: ‘I’m sorry. I should not have said that. You are her cousin and her guest. It was unpardonable of me to discuss her with you. I don’t

know why I Oh well, shall we forget it? There’s a shop near

here where they sell all sorts of odds and ends of china and glass. Let’s go in and poke about.’

The Melvilles were not mentioned again and the remainder of the morning passed pleasantly enough. Mrs Leslie dropped Miranda back at the house a little before one o’clock, and actually accepted an invitation to come in for a drink.

Stella was in the drawing-room arranging sprays of cherry blossom in a green celadon vase. She had hung her own cream brocade curtains in place of the somewhat uninspired cretonne ones supplied by the Army, her own pictures were on the walls, and the room already looked individual, elegant and essentially Stella’s. She dispensed sherry and admired the tiny china roses that Miranda had bought at a junk shop, and Mrs Leslie, possibly in an effort to atone for her outburst in the Kurfurstendamm, was friendly and pleasant until Robert arrived home, when she rose abruptly, and with something of a return of her former manner said she had no idea it was so late, and left.

‘You know, she’s really quite a nice woman,’ said Stella. T thought she was utterly beastly when we first met her.’

‘Oh, Norah’s all right,’ said Robert easily. ‘I wonder why she married old Leslie? Nice chap, but a bit of a bore. Funny, I always had an idea that she’d married a foreigner. But perhaps that was Sue, her kid sister. I wonder what happened to Sue? I must ask Norah.’

8

The two buses, both full of sightseers and provided with Englishspeaking guides, left for their tour of Berlin from the Naafi building in the Reichskanzler Platz, and rolled off down the magnificent sweep of the Kaiserdamm towards the Charlottenburg Gate and the Victory Column.

The guides began to point out places of interest. The Opera House. The heap of rubble that had been the Technical University, from the battered steps of which Hitler had stood to review his bombastic military parades. The Charlottenburg Gate …

Miranda looked out at the shattered ruins and began to wish that she had not come. It was interesting no doubt, but also appalling. The magnificent work of men’s hands - the colleges built to increase knowledge and the boastful monuments to cornmemorate past glories, the golden-winged Victory atop a towering column whose decoration consisted of the gilded barrels of guns captured in the Franco-Prussian war - all pockmarked and disfigured by man-made weapons of destruction, or blasted into senseless heaps of rubble.

The stupidity of it all! The waste and horror of man’s inhumanity to man.

She gazed at the scowling statues of Moltke and Bismarck and Roon, joint architects of this ruin, and, a few hundred yards away, at the new Russian war memorial - a signpost pointing the way to more and greater destruction - and she shivered in the airless warmth of the overheated bus.

Above the Brandenburg Gate flew a great red flag, flapping out against the sky. ‘We are now entering the Russian sector,’ said the

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guide: ‘To the left you will see the ruins of the Reichstag that the Nazis burnt as an excuse for a purge of the Communists.’

The palace of Marshal Blűcher; the French Embassy; the Adlon Hotel - more ruins. Mile upon mile of ruins. The skeletons and skulls and bones of houses. The evil birds let loose on Rotterdam and Coventry, London and the Loire, Malta and Crete, and a thousand towns and hamlets of Europe, coming home to roost…

It will take years and years to clear all this away and build it up again, thought Miranda with horror.

‘Well, they asked for it, and they certainly got it!’ commented a stout lady in a puce coat and a magenta hat who was sitting next to Miranda: ‘Serve ‘em right, I says. But it’s a proper mess, ain’t it. Seems a pity some’ow.’ She sighed gustily and relapsed into silence.

Marx-Engels Platz. A noticeable absence of pictures of Stalin. Lenin Allée and the headquarters of the People’s Police. Stalin Allée and the First Socialist Road - the New Utopia and the New Hope personified by a long canyon of newly built and half-built apartment houses; block upon block of ‘Workers’ flats’, identical, yellow-tiled, ugly. The Unter den Linden, that once-gay thoroughfare, now a drab street where the famous linden trees were smashed and stunted and the few pedestrians wore sullen and unsmiling faces. The Waterloo Memorial, ironic reminder of the days when the great-grandfathers of the Luftwaffe and the S.S. had been the admired allies of Britain.

The buses drew up outside a pair of ornamental park gates and the guide said: ‘We are now at the Soviet Garden of Remembrance. It is the burial place of many hundreds of their soldiers. We may dismount here and enter the park. It is requested that you do not light cigarettes or make jokes in the sanctuary, and gentlemen who enter must remove their hats.’

Stella and Robert, who had been sitting together just behind Miranda, waited for her by the door.

‘You’re looking very seductive, Miranda,’ commented Robert, tucking her hand under his arm. ‘Isn’t she, Stella? Who would have

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believed that such a hideously plain kid could grow up into such a delectable eyeful? When I left for Egypt she was a scruffy schoolgirl with a perpetual sniff and a gym tunic; and now look

at her!’ ‘She looks marvellous,’ agreed Stella, taking her other arm and

giving it a little squeeze.

‘You look pretty good yourself, darling. But far too expensive for this sort of party,’ said Miranda. ‘With so many red-hot comrades surging around, you look almost offensively capitalist.’

Stella laughed. Then it only goes to show how deceptive appearances can be!’

Her words brought back an echo of Mrs Leslie’s conversation of the previous day, and Miranda frowned at the memory, and turned to look at her. She has changed, she thought; but could not be sure in what way or even why she should think so. Perhaps it was something to do with the way in which Stella looked at Robert. It was, thought Miranda, a new look and one that she had only noticed during the last few days: a strange compound of anxiety and strain; a look at once protective and possessive.

Had Sally Page been the cause?

Sally was there now, walking buoyantly on the other side of Robert and chattering in her clear, high voice; her inexpensive teenage clothes making Stella’s tiny grey-feathered hat and silverygrey fur coat appear sophisticated and expensive and mature.

Miranda looked up at Robert and was conscious of a sudden pang of anger and resentment. It wasn’t fair, she thought. Robert would continue to look outrageously handsome when Stella was old and grey-haired and Sally middle-aged and faded. When Robert was sixty there would still be women who would sigh when they looked at him. His hair would be grey at the temples but they would think it added to his attractions, for the clean, beautiful planes of his face would still be there and his grey eyes would still crinkle at the corners when he smiled - as he was smiling now at Sally Page.

Robert was a darling. Good-tempered, indolent, charming and

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entirely lacking in vanity, and Miranda had a deep affection for him. Nevertheless she was suddenly sorry for Stella.

Turning a corner, they stopped in involuntary admiration at the sight before them. They had been walking along a wide path between neatly kept flowerbeds towards a large statue of a dejected and drooping woman - ‘Mother Russia mourning for her children,’ murmured the guide behind them - that stood at a convergence of paths and faced a long, wide, stone-paved causeway that ended in a short flight of stone steps. Flanking the steps on either side rose a wall of polished red marble that had once formed the floors of Hitler’s Chancellery, but had now been fashioned into the shape of two vast, stylized red flags, half lowered in salute to the dead.

Below each flag, and at the top of the steps, was a statue of a kneeling Russian soldier, his bared head bent in homage statues, steps and the towering expanse of red marble dwarfing the stream of sightseers to pigmy proportions.

Robert gave a low expressive whistle, and Andy Page said, ‘Crippen!’

The expression might have been inappropriate, but the tribute was none the less sincere.

From the top of those steps they looked down upon a sunken garden with stone-paved paths that skirted grassed lawns, each lawn bearing an immense iron laurel-wreath and flanked by large blocks of stone sculptured in low relief with scenes depicting Soviet soldiers in battle, Soviet citizens being bombed by German planes and Soviet troops liberating cities. At the end of each block were inscriptions in Russian, evidently extracts of speeches by Stalin, and at the far end of the sunken garden stood a tall, grassy mound.

A steep flight of stone steps led up the face of the mound to the sanctuary; a small, circular building on its summit that was topped, and entirely thrown out of proportion, by a gigantic bronze statue of a Russian soldier, sword in hand, holding a ‘liberated’ child and crushing a huge broken swastika under one booted foot. {-,;’• ,!s:

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They certainly do things in a big way,’ said Andy Page, busy with a camera. ‘How long do you suppose this will stand?’

‘Until about five minutes after the Russians move out of East Germany, whenever that is,’ said Robert. ‘A pity, because it would make a magnificent ruin. Something that future ages would run tourist trips to see - like Karnak and Luxor and the Acropolis. Let’s go and take a look inside that sanctuary arrangement.’

They moved down the steps towards the sunken gardens, and Miranda released Stella’s arm and fell back. She did not in the least want to join the slow-moving queue of people who were filing up that steep stairway towards the tiny building on top of the mound. It gave her an unpleasant claustrophobic feeling even to look at it, for the small sanctuary seemed a wholly inadequate pedestal for the colossal bronze figure it supported, and strongly suggested that it might collapse at any moment under the strain of the weight above it.

Miranda preferred to remain outside in the sunshine and the cold spring wind.

She walked slowly round the sunken garden, looking at the bas reliefs, and presently turned into a shaded path between shrubs and flowerbeds that led away from that part of the garden.

The path was deserted except for a solitary woman wearing a small black hat and a dark red coat trimmed with black passementerie. And this time there was no mistaking Eisa Marson.

There was no reason why Mrs Marson should not be there. She had obviously travelled in the other bus, which accounted for the fact that Miranda had not noticed her before. But why was she behaving so oddly?

She stood at the junction of two intersecting paths and peered furtively down them, first on one side and then on the other; quivering anxiety in every line of her body and turn of her head; and when footsteps sounded from the path to her right, she shrank back, stiff and tense, until they died away again.

An entirely natural and unmentionable reason for her display °f agitation occurred to Miranda, and stifling a laugh she moved

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discreetly back round the angle of the path where a cluster of bushes and young trees provided a thin screen of leaves between herself and Mrs Marson. If anyone approached them from this direction she could at least cough loudly to warn her!

But she had been wrong about Eisa Marson.

Quick, light footsteps crunched the gravel of one of the paths, and a man wearing a shabby raincoat and a dark, peaked German cap appeared beside her.

Miranda saw him look swiftly over his shoulder to the right and left as Mrs Marson had done: a frightened, furtive look. It seemed impossible that he should have failed to see Miranda when she herself could see him so clearly through the thin screen of leaves, but he obviously did not do so, and there was that in his face, and in Eisa Marson’s whitefaced fear, that kept her from moving.

The man spoke quickly, but in so low a tone that she could not make out what he said or even in what language he had spoken. She saw Eisa Marson’s stiff lips move in reply, and once again the man threw a swift, hunted look around him. Then drawing a small packet from under his coat, he handed it to Mrs Marson, and turning on his heel walked quickly away.

Eisa Marson opened her capacious handbag and stowed the packet away with trembling fingers. Even at this distance Miranda could see that her hands were shaking uncontrollably. She managed to shut the clasp, and then with another hunted look up and down the paths, she turned and hurried away in the opposite direction to which the unknown man had gone.

Miranda remained where she was, staring down the deserted path. What had Eisa Marson been up to? Stories of the notorious Berlin black market flashed across her brain: was that why she had looked so frightened? Had Harry Marson accompanied his wife on the conducted tour, and if so, where was he?

A bank of cloud had come over the sun and the day was suddenly cold and drab. Miranda shivered.

‘Bird’s nesting?’ inquired a gentle voice behind her. Miranda started violently and whipped round. ‘./ťť•>,>„..ť Ť, *