Dr Berlin (6 page)

‘OK. Let’s look at that interview again.’ Bomberg wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He set the machine and sat back to watch.

The short extract began with a shot of a uniformed colonel in the British Occupation Force replying to Pountney’s question about the future of the Allied presence in West Germany.

‘The Soviets are threatening to change the status of West Berlin by merging it with the German Democratic Republic. That would mean the Allies would be able to enter Berlin only with East German permission. Such a situation is wholly unacceptable. Not surprisingly, we would interpret such a move as an aggressive act. If we don’t oppose the Soviets on issues as fundamental as this, we will be pushed out of Berlin and possibly out of Germany. If we are to stop the Soviets having their way, we must convince them that on this issue we mean business.’

‘You mean stop them by force,’ Pountney asked from behind the camera.

‘If we have to, yes.’

The camera held the officer’s face for a moment. Was he smiling? Certainly not, Pountney concluded. He was showing the proper distaste for the possibility of conflict. Then he was gone, and Pountney once more filled the screen. He looked troubled, perplexed even. He held the microphone in front of him like a torch.

‘In a few weeks or less, the Soviets say, they will bring their
sector of Berlin under GDR rule. The West cannot accept such a move without destroying its own position. In America and the Soviet Union, military budgets are suddenly being substantially increased, the first moves in the inevitable game of political brinkmanship that may bring the world ever closer to an East–West confrontation. Suddenly we are hearing talk of war. The question is, now we’ve got on this treadmill, how do we get off again?’

The clip ended. Pountney turned off the monitor.

‘That was a smile, no question,’ Bomberg said excitedly. ‘The man was enjoying himself. That’s what I object to. The British Army threatening war on the Soviet Union off its own bat is news so good that we’ve got to keep it in. You can’t possibly cut it out, Gerry. We’re going to be headline news tomorrow. God, what a bloody shambles.’

Behind the indignation, Pountney sensed Bomberg’s excitement.

Marion was in the bathroom when she heard the key turn in the front door. She ran quickly into the bedroom and got into bed, pulling the sheets up to her neck. It was absurd, but she still felt embarrassed if he saw her naked when he was dressed.

‘Bill?’

She knew who it was – who else had a key to her flat? – but that didn’t stop her calling out.

‘I’m late, I’m sorry. I got held up.’ He came in, carrying his jacket and eating a sandwich. ‘The bursar collared me after my supervision. Some nonsense about wanting me to join the wine committee. Of course I refused. He must know by now I’ve never joined anything in my life.’ Gant, sitting on the end of the bed, put his bicycle clips on her dressing table, a habit which always irritated her, and began half-heartedly to untie his shoes. ‘How was your morning?’

She’d had a sleepless night, debating whether to ask him why he had suddenly turned against her at the Blake-Thomas meeting. She had watched the dawn light spread across the rooftops of Cambridge and had sworn she would say nothing, but now he was here in her bedroom her irritation at his lack of any greeting – not even a perfunctory kiss – coupled with those bloody bicycle clips, pushed out of her mind the promise she had made to herself.

‘Why didn’t you support me yesterday, Bill?’

‘Berlin’s the wrong man, Marion, and it would have been dishonest to say otherwise.’ He sounded weary, reluctant to debate the issue further.

‘You were in favour when we talked last week.’

‘I said he was an interesting candidate. I wasn’t unequivocal in my support. I remember telling you that I had some reservations about Berlin and I needed time to think before I reached a decision.’

That wasn’t her recollection but she wasn’t prepared to argue about it. She hesitated. Should she close it now, forget about it, or risk a quarrel? She’d already gone too far to withdraw.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d changed your mind before the meeting? I’d been counting on your support. You could have telephoned me or left a message.’

‘My opposition can’t have surprised you, surely.’

‘It was a shock to hear you were against me.’ She noticed he had stopped undressing. ‘What have you got against Berlin? I don’t understand why you’re so opposed to him.’

‘I think his book was overrated.’

‘Oh, come on, Bill.’ Was this professional jealousy talking? Berlin’s achievement highlighted Bill’s failure to make anything of his academic career. ‘
Legacies
of
History
got a wonderful reception, here and in the States. We can’t all be wrong.’

‘I can’t shake off this feeling that somehow he’s fooling us. He isn’t who he wants us to think he is. He’s a phoney.’

They argued then, bringing the unhappy debate of the previous day into the bedroom. She put on her glasses so she could see him properly. He sat hunched on the end of the bed, an exhausted, defeated figure. She felt a moment’s regret at her outburst. Then she saw that while they’d been talking Gant had put his shoes on again.

‘Bill, if you’d rather not.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no rule that says we have to make love. We can just have lunch if you’d prefer.’

‘Are you sure?’ The relief in his voice was undisguised. ‘I don’t want to disappoint you.’

She slid out of bed, wrapping herself tightly in the sheet. What kind of inhibition made her hide herself from him?

‘Go and see what’s in the fridge while I get dressed.’

She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Was that it, then? Was this how it was going to end? In the early weeks of their affair she had allowed herself to rewrite the truth about Bill Gant. His academic promise had fizzled out, she told herself, because the demands of his invalid wife were destroying him, and he either couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was happening to him. He needed rescuing and she had felt an overwhelming need to reinstate the man she believed still existed somewhere behind the exhausted mask he presented to the world. Ideas don’t die, she told herself, nor does real talent, and Bill had had ideas and talent when he was young. It is energy that fades, especially when drained away through impossible emotional demands, and with it that special self-confidence so necessary to sustain academic theory. Poor Bill.

She would restore his belief in himself by rebuilding him through love. She would make no demands on him, except that he make love to her once or twice a week. From that the relationship would grow. She would watch over his steady recovery. In time, they would write history together. They would make their reputations, and she would laugh at deriders
like Michael Scott, who claimed there was never any way back up the slippery slope of academic advancement once the downward slide had begun. They would build their lives together. That was her unspoken dream. She took Bill Gant in her arms once a week on Wednesday lunchtimes and tried to work her magic on him.

How she had longed for him in those first weeks of their affair last autumn, an intoxicating time when she had still believed her dreams were possible. Each Wednesday morning she’d had difficulty concentrating on her supervision. The moment her students had gone, she’d rush off on her bike to buy something savoury from the French delicatessen in Petty Cury, then to Fitzbillie’s for a treacle tart – Bill had a sweet tooth – before racing back to the flat to await his arrival. Sometimes the tension of the minutes until she heard him put his key in the door was almost unbearable. Why was she always so afraid he wouldn’t appear? Why did she always fear that in her letterbox one day she’d find a note ending the affair? Couldn’t she have more confidence in herself? Sometimes, after he had gone, she would lie in bed crying.

No notes came. He kept their appointments every Wednesday. But the magic didn’t work because magic cannot be one-sided. Bill Gant remained what he was, a tired man whose reserves of life had been wrested from him by the demands of a mad wife. He could not be revived because there was no longer anything left to revive. He came to Marion for comfort and relief, for someone with whom he could share the misery that was slowly destroying him. He made love to her with a clumsiness that upset her, as if he was careless of her feelings. He slept in her arms, not peacefully, but twitching and sometimes calling out. Too late she learned that Bill Gant was a lost soul, and that lost souls have nothing to give. They can only take. The relationship, she realised, was indeed one-sided. She felt empty and resentful. That he needed her was clear. That she had made a mistake in believing they might
have a life together was also clear. She was trapped in an affair she now wanted to end because she had overestimated her own powers. In his fragile frame of mind, wouldn’t rejection destroy him?

She continued to let him come to her flat; she allowed him to make love to her; she dreamed of ways of breaking off the relationship but on each occasion, as Bill described the worsening of what he called ‘this business with Jenny’, her nerve broke and she said nothing. She had fooled herself and now she was caught in a plot of her own making.

No, this wasn’t how it would end because it wasn’t ever going to end. There was no way out. Her life would be an endless cycle of Wednesdays, dreary apologies for late arrivals, bicycle clips on the dressing table, clumsy grapplings with each other’s bodies and endless stories about Jenny, each one worse than the last. She felt a sudden desperation spiral up inside her, bringing tears to her eyes. Only with an effort was she able to control it.

Bill Gant was eating a piece of cheese when she came into the kitchen. He’d put plates on the table and cut some bread.

‘All I could find,’ he said. ‘The cupboard is bare and so is the fridge.’

No thinly cut French ham today, no mushroom salad with a sweet French dressing, no treacle tart. She’d not had time to go shopping. The truth was, she hadn’t even thought about it. She’d only got back to the flat ten minutes before he arrived.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘You’ve already had a sandwich. Here—’ She handed him his bicycle clips. ‘You forgot these.’

She brought out an opened bottle of white wine from a cupboard and poured him a glass. Bill looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to another.

‘Marion.’

‘Yes?’

‘The thing is …’ He stopped in mid-sentence, at a loss for
words. It was bound to be more bad news about Jenny and her regular visits to the local sanatorium. ‘I had to take Jenny into Fulbourn last night.’

Poor Bill. No wonder the years of coping with Jenny’s bouts of mania had run down his energies and come close to finishing him.

‘I’m so sorry.’ She wrestled with her guilt. She could imagine the strain he was under because of Jenny. Had she been too hard on him earlier when she’d attacked his opposition to Berlin? All she had done was make his mood worse. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to make love. ‘You should have told me at once.’

‘She’d complained of not feeling well all this past week.’ The words burst from him with an intensity that defined his misery. ‘I tried to convince myself that there was no danger of something brewing up. When I got home yesterday, she was sitting in a corner, crying. She wouldn’t let me come near her. I tried to reason with her but she wouldn’t listen. Eventually I had to call an ambulance. She screamed when they took her away. Said some terrible things, all of them without foundation. Everyone in the street heard her.’ Suddenly he burst into tears. ‘I can’t take much more of this, Marion. I’m at the end of my tether.’

She held his head against her as he wept, patting him gently until his tears stopped. She’d met Jenny once, a couple of years ago, at a faculty do, a pale, silent, vacant figure who had clung desperately to Bill’s side, wouldn’t talk to anyone, drank a glass of water and asked to be taken home early.

‘Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.’

She waited while he slowly pulled himself together, her arms around him protectively, feeling guilty at her outburst, comparing her selfishness with his desperate need for sympathy which she had all but denied him.

‘I’m not going to desert you,’ she said. The moment called for convenient lies. Truth would have to wait for another day.

‘Thank you.’ He looked up at her soulfully, smiled briefly and touched her hand. ‘I knew I could rely on you.’

She looked at him with compassion in her eyes, wondering if he knew that compassion isn’t love and, if he didn’t, how she would tell him.

Poor Bill? Poor Marion.

Viktor Radin’s hands were burning. The pain brought him reluctantly out of the warm, enveloping mists of unconsciousness, forcing him to open his eyes. The same white-walled room, the same bed, the same saline drip keeping him reluctantly alive. If only he had the strength to tear it from his arm he could be done with the process here and now. The glare of the day had gone but it was not yet dark. While he’d been asleep the blinds that had earlier been lowered against the sun were now raised so that he could see into the garden as the shadows lengthened. No clocks anywhere – he had asked for them to be removed. Another day was passing. How many more would he have to endure before the darkness came?

His looked at his hands, swollen and useless on the sheet, a cruel cartoon image of hands, misshapen and broken, the relic of the time of madness that he tried so hard to forget and never could. A fire was burning in his fingers, spreading across his palms, into his wrists and up his forearms. Only once before had he experienced pain like this, and he had buried that time in his life years before. Why was it all coming back to him now?

*

They came for him before dawn, as Elza had warned him they would. Why had he never listened to her? Why had he always mocked her anxiety? They banged on the door of his apartment, shouting his name. Confused and frightened, he
had got out of bed and let them in. When he thought about it afterwards, it seemed like a dozen policemen or more but it was probably only two or three. They ordered him to get dressed, giving no explanation. He obeyed automatically. Elza stood by the door of the bedroom, a worn dressing gown over her nightdress, white-faced and terrified, crying silently as he hurriedly gathered a few clothes into a holdall. Before he could say goodbye, they pushed him out of the apartment, down the stairs and into a waiting car, Elza too terrified even to touch him as he passed. The noise had woken Olga, and his last memory before the door of their apartment was slammed shut was the voice of his daughter calling for him out of the darkness. Its poignancy nearly broke him. Were those the last words he would hear his daughter speak? Would he ever see her again?