Dora didn’t come to these gatherings. She had left our party in January, before the election, arguing that its very existence would split the left vote against ‘the rabid little brute’ even further. As usual, she was right.
And by mid-1933 she was involved in something much bigger. Dora referred to it as the counter-trial, but it was officially called the Commission of Inquiry into the Reichstag Fire. This was to be a spectacular event: a mock trial in London before some eminent international judges. It was ostensibly to examine the evidence against poor mad van der Lubbe and the others indicted for arson, so as to discredit their upcoming trial in Germany and hopefully save their lives. But its true purpose was to put the Nazi gang itself in the dock–to show the regime’s terrorist beginnings in the fire and the crackdown that followed. Then, we thought, it would be impossible for Britain to continue to ignore or tacitly support Hitler.
Dora couldn’t talk about her work, but I knew she was using her underground contacts to help smuggle witnesses from Germany into Britain. Once, she was so thrilled she let slip that she had managed to get the former Berlin President of Police–who had overseen the investigation into the fire–to come. She had been spending her nights translating into English these witnesses’ testimonials for the judges.
Through her friendship with Lord Marley, Dora had ensured high-level British support for the trial. Lord Marley was a handsome, serious, stubborn man with large dark eyes, a prominent brow, a jet-black moustache and a significant girth. He had had an illustrious war he never spoke about, after which he had taken up difficult causes as if there were no matter of conscience involved, but simply because ‘one mucked in and did what one could’. He was as much a man of deep persistence as deep principle: he had tried five times, unsuccessfully, to be elected to parliament (before he was raised to the peerage) and it took him four visits to the flat before he agreed to stop calling me Dr Wesemann, but only if I would call him Dudley. Because of his work helping refugees, he had recently had to shrug off the title ‘Jew-lover’ in the papers. ‘Not much of an insult,’ he said to me over breakfast with a grin, ‘now, is it?’
One afternoon in early August Dora said, ‘I’m home tonight, so I might just sit in. On your meeting–if that’s all right.’
I was pleased, but Hans was annoyed. In Berlin he had known everyone worth knowing, been au courant with news and gossip before it hit the papers. Here, Dora was well connected in a way he could never be. It made him relive the rivalry of those early meetings in Munich. And, worse, the parochial insecurity that had dogged his childhood: the feeling that real life is always elsewhere, and it is going on without you.
‘She deigns to come,’ he muttered, lacing his shoes in our room. ‘How utterly thrilling.’
‘Be nice,’ I said. ‘It can’t do us any harm.’
I’d recently noticed that Helmut had begun to get the sunken, grey-skinned look of a man living on ‘tea and two slices’–the bread and margarine they doled out at workhouses. There was a kind of pride, even among exiled socialists, and we pretended for Helmut’s sake we did not see his hunger. But Hans and I decided our meetings should involve food. Mathilde had brought meatloaf last time, and now it was my turn.
I’d never cooked in my life. Mrs Allworth gave me a ‘foolproof’ recipe. ‘A nice piece of beef in the oven,’ she said, ‘stoked medium, for forty-five minutes, then leave it to rest for ten. Put the taters in with it. Can’t go wrong.’
I did as instructed, and the others arrived to find the flat steamy with a powerful smell new to us: the smell of British beef.
When Helmut came in he had one eye socket the colour of eggplant, marbling into yellow at the edges. The lid was red, barely open.
‘Good Lord,’ Mathilde said, putting down her knitting.
‘Small altercation,’ Helmut said, pulling out a chair at the head of the table. A refugee in his boarding-house had accused him of ‘turning’ and smashed his face into the door handle. ‘He looks worse than me now, I can tell you that much,’ Helmut went on, taking his papers out of his satchel. ‘It’s probably him, anyway. The ones who accuse are the most likely to be doing it, aren’t they?’
I looked at Dora, who had one knee against the table and was turning a pencil over, top to bottom, again and again. She said nothing. Nor did anyone else. It would have been easy to become paranoid here. Rumours were already rife of refugees who couldn’t manage this life of fear and deprivation–and who turned informer for the British. Or worse. We had no proof the Gestapo were already active here, but there was talk.
Then Mathilde placed her plump brown hands one over the other on the table. ‘Important, I think,’ she said, her voice so calm she might have been discussing the distribution of milk to kindergartens, ‘not to let our energies be sapped. By mistrust. Probably ill-founded. And,’ she looked pointedly at Helmut over her glasses, ‘most certainly damaging.’
So we sat at the table. We might have been in a small, low-ceilinged attic kitchen in a miasma of hot meat, but we would not be derailed. Dora picked at a hangnail. Her presence made all of us–apart from Mathilde, who was imperturbable–feel we had to show what we’d been doing. The boy started to eat bread. Hans smoked. His leg jigged up and down.
I took the dish out of the oven with a mitt I’d bought that had the Tower of London embroidered on it. The meal looked like a meal should look. I lifted out the beef and put the potatoes back in the oven to crisp. When I started carving I noticed the meat had a colour and texture–pinky-red and stringy–I’d never seen before.
Hans winced. ‘What happened to that cow?’
Dora looked up. ‘That beef,’ she said, ‘is corned.’
‘Ow.’ Hans threw me a sympathetic glance. I stared at the steaming burgundy jerky–it was a cut for boiling, not roasting.
‘No matter,’ Mathilde said firmly, and then it wasn’t. I hacked it into threads of meat and served it up.
Helmut declared the meeting open. The first agenda item was the international trades union conference coming up in Brighton. One of us should go, he said, because no German delegation would be allowed to come. Perhaps there might even be a chance to encourage the unions here to help the German unionists, now underground at home. Helmut knew someone in the London Society of Compositors who could get us a ticket. We all agreed that he should be the one to attend.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘agenda item number two: printing of our bulletin.’
‘Whatever it’s called,’ Hans mumbled. I threw him a beseeching look.
It was my turn to report. I told the meeting that the Independent Labour Party had agreed, in principle, to allow us to use their printing machine, but that it was broken at the moment.
‘That,’ Hans interjected, ‘is the least of our worries. Our main problem is that we can’t expect to make much of a splash rehashing information that’s already out there. We have to find sources of our own.’
‘I thought we dealt with this,’ Helmut said. ‘We don’t have sources, so we decided to make the bulletin like a digest.’ He was looking at Hans, unwilling to go back over old ground. ‘Didn’t we?’
But Hans was uncomfortable summarising the news instead of breaking it. And particularly so in front of Dora. Helmut kept on talking in his straightforward, carthorse way, as if Hans really hadn’t remembered what had been agreed at the previous meeting.
‘Second problem, remember,’ Helmut was saying, ticking it off on his thick fingers, ‘was that our articles for the press would need to be in English. So someone would have to get them translated. And third, we can’t put our names to them, obviously, but we decided an anonymous piece wouldn’t carry much weight. So—’
‘I could help with that.’ Dora spoke for the first time, not looking at us, but at the meat on her fork. She was not a group person. Like Hans, she was impatient with quorums and agendas and minutes and firsting and seconding. But unlike him, she could now do things quicker alone.
Hans sat up. ‘You have a sour
ce inside Germany?’
‘Sort of,’ she said.
‘We could work together then.’ Hans’s face was bright with sudden purpose. ‘Write the articles.’
Dora put the forkful of stringy beef in her mouth. I don’t think she ever really tasted food.
‘What sort of material is it?’ Helmut asked.
‘You know,’ Dora said, responding to Hans with her mouth full, ‘I have to translate it all anyway. By the time I’ve done that, the article has nearly written itself.’
Hans slouched back in his chair.
‘It’s reliable,’ she nodded, in answer to Helmut. ‘I’m getting a lot about the Reich’s new air fleet at the moment.’ She removed a piece of meat from between her teeth.
The question of where her information was from hung in the air. No one asked. We were learning that though it might have been one for all and all for one, there were among us unspoken hierarchies of knowledge and trust.
‘And just on the anonymous issue,’ Dora said, ‘I agree. We shouldn’t publish anonymously if we can avoid it.’
‘But we can’t—’ Helmut began.
‘We must find an English person,’ Dora continued over him, ‘in whose name it can be done. This protects us–and it protects our sources. Also,’ she pushed her plate away and patted her jacket pockets, then her trousers, for cigarettes, ‘it’s easier for the English to trust one of their own.’
‘You can say that again,’ Hans said under his breath.
She ignored him. ‘Think of it as the Trojan Brit. For everything,’ she chuckled, striking a match, ‘we need to find a Trojan Brit.’
Hans was crushed, though Dora was only being funny and direct and businesslike as usual. But from this distance, I now see that since she had left Toller’s flat, these qualities were no longer the surface manifestations of a deeper tenderness in her. They were more like defences.
At the end of the meeting Dora took Helmut aside, near the balcony. I was clearing plates at that end of the table.
‘Just on the TU conference,’ I heard her say, a current of authority in her voice. ‘Be very careful how you talk about supporting the underground.’
‘Of course,’ Helmut said. I couldn’t tell whether he bridled a little at being told what to do by a sparrow of a woman fifteen years younger than he.
When the others had left, Hans and Dora and I sat in the kitchen among the dishes and ashtrays. The door out to the balcony was open. The sky was the greyish-yellow night-blanket of a coal-burning city, only marginally higher than our own yellow-grey ceiling.
Hans’s unhappiness had deepened over the evening. ‘It’s Bertie, isn’t it?’ he asked her. His knee was uncontrollable. ‘He’s sending you material.’
Dora was sitting back in her chair with her ankles crossed. She would be returning to her room to work into the night, roughing out translations and articles. Some refugees we knew had been reported for political activity–betrayed by the noise of their typewriters–so she saved the noisy typing for the daylight hours when the neighbours were at work.
‘Yes.’ Dora exhaled a rod of smoke.
‘Sending it here?’ I asked.
‘To the ILP offices. And anyway, that’s the beauty of him being in Strasbourg,’ Dora said. ‘A French postmark.’
Hans looked at her sideways from under his brows. ‘You didn’t trust us with that information? About Bert?’
‘It’s not you two.’ Dora jerked her head to indicate the door the others had left through. ‘I barely know those people.’
‘Are you serious?’ Hans asked. ‘Helmut is a typesetter, salt of the earth. Mathilde is your old boss, your friend–isn’t she? Eugen is a founding member of the party. What’s-his-name is just a boy.’
Dora was silent. The air seemed to go out of Hans; his shoulders narrowed into the green couch. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Bertie chose you, not me.’
‘Don’t worry about it, my love,’ I said. ‘Don’t take it personally.’
‘There’s some other way to take it?’ His voice was stung. He was bending back matches in the matchfold and flicking them over, igniting them one by one.
‘I really wouldn’t read too much into it,’ Dora said. ‘It’s just that I’m the obvious choice because of my English.’
Hans pushed up off the couch, towards the door. ‘He didn’t even tell me,’ he said, to no one in particular. He left to smoke and pace on the balcony.
The doorbell rang. Dora moved into the hall and picked up the handset. ‘Come on up,’ she said, leaning into the wall, one bare foot resting on her knee. When she pivoted back around she was alight.
In one minute Fenner Brockway was at the door, smiling and panting just a little. I saw what she saw: a tall, innocent-looking man, lanky as a folding ruler, with a long face and a thatch of dark hair. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes keen and bright behind round, rimless glasses. His body was so long he was concave; it looked like his belt was holding him up. Fenner was the leader of the Independent Labour Party and an old friend of Dora’s, ‘a true English gentleman’, she called him. I’d been negotiating with him to use the ILP’s printing machine for our bulletin.
‘Did I miss something?’ Fenner asked, scanning the debris in the kitchen.
‘Party meeting,’ I said. Hans waved a silent greeting from the doorway and resumed circling outside. ‘Also,’ I added, ‘some rather spectacular beef. Corned and roasted.’
Fenner grimaced dramatically, sucking air through his teeth. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh dear.’ He smiled. ‘I meant to tell you, Ruth. Those wax plates are fixed. Awfully sorry about all that.’
‘Not at all. Thanks. Once we’ve agreed on a title we’ll be ready to print.’
I washed up. Dora made more coffee and they retired to her room. Then I went outside to keep Hans company. He was watching the street over the back. The people under the streetlights could not imagine lives like ours, cornered and chased up here.
‘Trojan Brit,’ he nodded over his shoulder towards Dora’s bedroom. ‘More like they are inside her.’
‘Hans!’ In our liberated circle we didn’t criticise people for the lovers they took.
‘You have to remember she’s alone here,’ I said. ‘We have each other.’
‘And she has whoever she wants.’ His bitterness stunned me.
In our bedroom he kept pacing. His reflection caught in the windowpanes, a pale shape fleeing one square for another. He undressed and slid into bed. Switched off the bedside light and stayed turned away from me.
In this place of silent damp queuing–the bodies evenly, appropriately spaced–of milky tea and bad coffee and bread full of air, there was no way for Hans to feel he existed. He was ploughing his days into a novel, hoping to emerge one day famous and triumphant from between its covers. But in the afternoons he came back from the reading room like someone who had mislaid himself.
I was little comfort in a world that was failing him. Though he never said so, I sensed Hans was scornful that I could find satisfaction and purpose in these mundane meetings, in feeding people, writing cheques–the small inglorious steps of a foot soldier in this battle. His desire left him. When we made love he handled my body like he was servicing a machine. My dreams shocked me. In one I opened my legs and inside me was a huge mouth with a ridged palate and an epiglottis dangling red at the back; a mouth open in a silent scream of want.
Hans sat up in the dark. He took his clothes off a chair and collected his wallet from the bedside table. ‘I’m going to see Werner.’
Recently Hans had made a new friend–a German, Werner Hitzemeyer, who called himself Vernon Meyer to fit in with the English. Werner lived with his brother in Golders Green and was Liberty of London’s representative for Germany. When Hans told me Werner could still travel freely back and forth to Berlin, I’d said, ‘So he’s one of Them.’ Hans had exploded, shouting that I’d become paranoid, I’d let Them win over me, that the whole world was not politics, that elsewhere other life went on. T
hat other life, I supposed, included a neat blond man with a small moustache and a case full of fabric swatches who went out nights with my husband.
‘All right,’ I said. He slipped out into the dark.
It hurt, but not enough for me to try to stop him. For all Hans’s glamour and success, I had always, deep down, felt the more solid of us, an anchor for his high-flying. I thought he would get through this, and would come back to me. But the price of letting him go was that my own life began to seem second-rate to me, as if I were an understudy in it and someone of effortlessly more charisma and talent would shortly step in. Perhaps he had already.
In the morning Dora came out to make coffee. I was cleaning lenses at the table with a soft cloth and alcohol, preparing to start a new project, photographing the workers at the docks. Mrs Allworth’s husband, a foreman there, had arranged entry for me. Dora wore a singlet and pyjama bottoms. It was warm up here already.
‘Hans left early?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. I kept polishing.
‘Ruthie?’
I put the lens and cloth down. I’d have to look at her. ‘Why can’t you include him?’ I said. ‘Give him something to do?’
‘He’s writing the Great Novel of Exile, isn’t he? That’s quite a job.’
‘Don’t be cruel.’
‘I’m not being cruel,’ she said, but her voice softened; she knew making fun of him was a cruelty to me as well. She pulled out a chair and straddled it back to front. ‘I’m being careful. For all our sakes. Bertie’s and mine and both of yours.’
I bit my lip. ‘He just wants to be useful.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll think of something.’ And she took her two cups back into the bedroom.