The Girl in Berlin (7 page)

‘Did the interview go well?’ She’d waited for him in the hotel bar while he was interviewing Eberhardt, but on his return, they’d wanted only to get upstairs, gripped by the compulsion of lust.

‘It was a disaster! How on earth I’m going to edit it … he said one or two things … I began to think he might be paranoid, but I suppose some of these old émigrés have plenty to be paranoid about …’

Edith asked the right questions and listened dutifully for a while, but Alan sensed she was not really interested. As if to prove him right, she suddenly interjected: ‘Why is he living in Deal? It’s such a dead end sort of place. You’d have thought Hampstead or Golders Green would have been more congenial.’

‘He’s not Jewish, Edith. Look – we’d better hurry if we don’t want to miss the train.’

‘Do we have to, darling? There’ll be another one. Let’s stay a little longer—’

She moved her hand against his thigh under the prim table cloth and then further into his crotch.

‘For God’s sake, Edith, this is a provincial hotel—’

But she knew how to excite him and of course they went back upstairs. She’d had her hair cut short so that it fluffed around her sharp face. He’d preferred her in her Evita Peron incarnation, ash blonde hair pulled tightly back into a sort of bagel. Yet there was a curious frisson in making love to this gamine. Her body was voluptuous and not gamine at all, but that contrast only added to the piquancy.

Afterwards he regretted it. It was weak to have let her entice him into the sagging bed and its crumpled sheets again, especially as she became triumphalist, demanding and imperious. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you broached the subject to your wife? Does it all have to be such a secret? Wouldn’t it be fairer to tell her the truth?’

He was straightening his tie in the triple mirror, three images of himself multiplied to eternity. ‘What is truth, said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer,’ he quoted, lightly enough, but trying to slam a metaphorical door in her face. Marriage to Dinah suited him very well and he was not about to have that disturbed.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘We mustn’t miss another train. We need to get going. I have to get to the Beeb at least before lunchtime. I want to start work on the interview as soon as possible. It’s going to be a nightmare, getting anything usable out of it.’

The wind tossed them about along the front.

‘This is exhausting,’ said Edith. She took his arm. They had no fear of being recognised here.

At the London terminus the sense of licence illogically persisted, so it was a shock when Alan heard someone shout his name. He looked round at the passengers on the busy concourse – it was well past the rush hour, but people seemed to have become addicted to travel since the war – and recognised the owner of the voice with a mixture of surprise and dismay.

‘It’s been a long time, Wentworth! When did we last … 1945, was it? How are you? Good to see you. You’re looking extremely well. And Miss Fanshawe – I heard your poetry reading on the Third Programme. The one about the girl in the park was particularly moving.’

‘Kingdom!’ Alan was completely rattled that Kingdom knew who Edith was, but there was no way out of this situation. It was already too late. They’d been rumbled.

‘I’m so glad we’ve run into each other like this. I was going to get in touch with you anyway. I have an idea for a programme … Have you time for a coffee?’

‘I’m late for work already. I don’t—’

But Edith interrupted him. ‘Just a quick coffee, darling, I’m dying to hear more about what your friend thought of my work.’ She glanced flirtatiously at Kingdom.

Alan had no choice. ‘I’m sorry, forgive my rudeness. This is Miles Kingdom, Edith. Miles – Edith Fanshawe, the poetess. But perhaps you’ve met already.’

‘No, but I know and admire your work, my dear. There’s a tearoom in the station.’ Kingdom strode purposefully ahead of them towards it and inside motioned them to a free table. Seated, he turned to Alan, ‘I loved the production of that Jean Paul Sartre play you did. Three people in hell for all eternity. The ultimate vicious circle. Fantastic idea. Sartre’s a genius. The ingénue loves the man, the man lusts after the lesbian, the lesbian wants the younger woman. What a sensational play. “Hell is other people!” It was the absolute essence of French cynicism, or was it really nihilism.’

‘Existentialism,’ said Alan mechanically, but aware only that this was another triangle of hell, the man, his mistress and the friend who knew too much. Not that Kingdom could be described as a friend. Sullenly he watched Edith, who less than two hours ago had put away porridge, bacon and eggs and toast, but was now demolishing a fat Bath bun, while Kingdom tried to draw him into a conversation about the Beeb. Of course he didn’t have an idea for a programme. It was just a fishing expedition, to try to find out how many Reds there were in the Corporation. He was subtle about it, but Alan wasn’t fooled.

In a futile attempt to scotch any idea Kingdom might have had about dirty weekends by the seaside, he said: ‘We were in Deal, interviewing Konrad Eberhardt, the writer.’

‘Really?’ Kingdom was smoking. ‘That’s what they call it at the Beeb, is it, a trip to the seaside?’

Edith laughed.

‘Remind me who he is,’ said Kingdom (but surely, Alan thought, he must know perfectly well) ‘… some clapped-out, old mittel-European warhorse? Scientist of some kind? Altogether rather passé, I’d have thought. What was the point of interviewing him?’

‘He wrote that book of essays about philosophy and the role of the scientist, don’t you remember? We thought it might be interesting to find out what someone like that really feels about the Cold War. It didn’t go that well, actually. He spoke very oddly at times. Confused, paranoid even, to tell you the truth. Talking about spies and people being after him. He seemed to be thinking of going back to East Germany.’

‘Really?’ Kingdom glanced from under his lashes and laughed drily. ‘Well, he must be insane then. No-one in their right mind would ever do that.’

‘He was rambling on about some autobiography as well. Claimed it would reveal all, “spill the beans” was his exact phrase.’

‘So you may have a scoop on your hands.’

‘I think that’s very unlikely.’ Alan could bear the situation no longer and stood up. ‘I have to go.’ Edith rose too. He’d half hoped she might stay behind – but on second thoughts, no, that would have been fatal. She’d have hinted like mad about their liaison.

‘Just before you go – piece of luck, meeting you like this. I wanted to have a word about a friend of yours. Colin Harris. I believe he’s back in London.’

Another unpleasant surprise; Alan said curtly: ‘What about him?’

‘I wondered if you’d seen him at all.’

‘I have as a matter of fact. Why?’

Kingdom shrugged. ‘Nothing, really. I just wondered why the sudden return. We thought he’d settled down behind the Iron Curtain.’

‘He’s completely harmless, Kingdom, surely you’re not suggesting he’s a security problem.’ Alan’s bad conscience about Colin now translated itself into outright hostility towards Kingdom. ‘Is this all part of your lot’s idiotic belief that all queers are traitors? If that’s the case, you can stop worrying. He’s getting married to some German girl. Frieda someone. They’re thinking of coming back here to live. That’s what he said, anyway.’

Kingdom raised an ironic eyebrow. ‘A change of direction! I wonder if there’s been a political change of direction as well.’ He raised his hat and said: ‘I’ll be in touch,’ as they parted outside the tearoom. ‘I’m delighted to have met you, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘What does your friend do? I thought he was rather a charmer. Quite glam, actually.’

‘He’s a spook.’

‘A what?’ Edith looked baffled. ‘A spy, secret service.’

‘A real spy? How exciting!’

‘He’s saving us from communism.’

Edith missed the irony. ‘My goodness,’ she said solemnly. But then Edith was a Catholic. Yet, in spite of knowing that Catholics and communism were chalk and cheese, Alan had been shocked when Edith had declared herself an admirer of General Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator. This – a terrible political faux pas in Alan’s social circles – did nothing, of course, to cancel out the gripping compulsion of those hoarse gasps, those contortions in the creaking bed, those clenching orgasms. On the contrary, it added to the excitement to be pleasuring a Catholic crypto-fascist, whose groans must bear witness to the knowledge that she was committing a mortal sin.

‘Why is a spy called a spook?’ enquired Edith. ‘What an odd word for it. A ghost.’

Alan had never thought about this. ‘That’s a good question. I suppose … well, they’re invisible, aren’t they; spies, like ghosts.’

‘A lot of people don’t believe in ghosts and perhaps not in spies either. I believe in ghosts. Actually, I find them easier to believe in than spies.’

‘Hmm, spies as apparitions – I like that. A spectre is haunting Europe. A secret, invisible world of conspirators that most people don’t know exists and probably, like you, don’t believe in. But unlike ghosts, they certainly do exist.’

‘Haunting’s always a premonition of something bad, isn’t it? Who’s to say that those who knew us in life don’t come back to try to protect us or perhaps do us harm?’

‘Well, I hope Kingdom isn’t going to haunt us.’ But Alan had an unpleasant feeling he might.

They didn’t kiss on parting, but he said, as he always did: ‘When shall I see you again, darling?’ As he hurried towards the underground station he was, however, feeling rather sick of Edith. Too demanding, too … enveloping. And she never thought about anyone except herself.

Back at work he began the daunting job of trying to edit the farrago of nonsense spouted by Eberhardt. As he listened to the interview before getting it transcribed, he felt increasingly depressed. Perhaps he could splice a few extracts from the material into some wider programme about the pre-war intellectual diaspora from the continent, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sell that idea. Eberhardt hadn’t had too hard a time. He’d never seen the inside of a concentration camp, and had got into England with relative ease, unlike so many of his Jewish compatriots. Yet perhaps even exile itself was enough to blight a life, or perhaps the pain of being a German, a citizen of that disgraced, dismembered land, whose crimes were so frightful, could send you a little insane.

Possibly a programme about scientists … the scientist had become a sinister figure these days. But with all the atomic stuff that was a hot potato, too much security and secrecy around all that … And what Eberhardt’s political views really were was anyone’s guess, so there wasn’t much mileage in that sort of approach: Reds who saw the light …

Alan’s own leftish enthusiasms had waned, as he admitted to himself without much regret. He was just another parlour pink, he supposed, whose vaguely socialistic leanings combined quite comfortably with a Hampstead home, a convivial social life and the best of most things money could buy in these austerity times. Perhaps at the end of the day the political fevers and passions of his youth were simply less important than he’d once believed them to be. Certainly, these days he was more interested in Tommy than in atomic warfare, keener to build his career than fuss about communism. But he still didn’t like the anti-Red witch hunts, avoided the fashionable anti-Soviet extremes. Which was why he worked for the rest of the day on trying to see how Eberhardt the scientist could be used to demonstrate that it was all more complicated, that it wasn’t black and white. His task wasn’t easy.

Eberhardt stood in the middle of the room. He was looking for something, but what was he looking for? He was all of a muddle.

His pipe had gone out. He pulled it from his mouth and dug at the bowl with a pencil. By the time he’d got it alight again he’d forgotten that he’d forgotten what he was looking for.

He went for a walk. He went for a walk every day. Sometimes it seemed as if one walk ran into the other with only a blank in between. People saw him as he hunched along the front, a dark figure who’d become familiar, yet who didn’t look as if he
belonged. Sometimes he muttered to himself, like a tramp.

The plaintive shriek of the gulls as they launched themselves into the wind above the waves surprised him, because he kept forgetting he now lived by the sea and would often turn into a side street, taking a route from his past and becoming bewildered when familiar landmarks failed to appear. The High Street was reassuring, since it wasn’t that different from the one in Norwood, where he’d lived in London. Sometimes, on the other hand, he looked up expecting to see the Frauenkirche and then dimly remembered the bombing of Dresden.

The gulls were a puzzle, though.

His routine was still just about intact. After his walk he had something to eat and then got down to work. Ideas crashed about in his brain and untangling them was an arduous labour.

seven

‘S
O THEY’VE GOT RID OF THAT APE
, General MacArthur,’ said Kingdom, as he and McGovern walked across St James’s Park. ‘His idea of dropping a nuclear bomb on North Korea wasn’t
quite
the move to thrill Uncle Joe, was it. Or Chairman Mao. Just a
tiny
bit of an adventurist, our general. Fortunately our esteemed prime minister has talked the Americans out of the idea. So that’s all right. One up to us. All the same, the North Koreans did it – crossed the partition – so why not the Russians in Berlin? That’s what you always have to remember about Berlin. That’s where they’ll invade.’

‘Would that no be a wee bit risky?’

‘An optimist, eh.’

‘Just realistic. The Russians are no so very reckless, would you say.’

‘The Red Army has five million men – five times the size of the US army. They’re sitting there, across the border, twiddling their thumbs. But you may be right. You probably are. What’s in a way more interesting is that Berlin is a hotbed of … how shall I put it? There are thousands of madmen, informers, spies, opportunists, each of whom has his own agenda. That’s why someone like Harris is dangerous. Especially now.’