But I saw her hand was trembling and her arms too, shoulders, teeth. I lowered myself into the chair opposite.
‘Probably better that Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse come after us than the real Scotland Yard, anyway,’ she said, thinking aloud.
‘Really?’
‘Well,’ she steadied her hands on the table and looked at me squarely, ‘they can’t send us home.’
‘No. I suppose not,’ I said. ‘Golly gosh, I feel a whole lot better now.’
Dora smiled fleetingly. Then she leant forward and took hold of my wrists. Her palms were damp. ‘I don’t want you to tell Hans.’
It was an order, an entreaty, and an invitation to betrayal, all at once. I shifted back in my chair, away from her eyes. Her hands slipped down to hold both of mine.
‘I mean it, Ruthie.’ She was gripping me. ‘I want you to swear it.’
‘You’re wrong about him.’
‘I hope so.’ Her fear came out like anger. ‘Just swear it.’
The command in her voice riled me. ‘I know you’re wrong!’ I cried. I had mistrusted him once; now I would make good by defending him. I pulled my hands away. ‘I can’t stand all these secrets, I—’
‘Where is he now?’ There was no bitterness in her voice and she was looking at me squarely.
‘He said he had a meeting about an article. Dee, please–don’t make me shut him out. It’s hard enough for him.’
‘For all of us.’ She meant it. ‘You swear it to me.’
Afterwards she went to the bathroom cabinet and got what she needed. And I told myself that I was protecting Hans by not telling him, not adding to his terror.
Rudi’s murder did not rate a mention in any London paper. Why would it, the murder in February ’35 of an obscure German radio technician exiled in Czechoslovakia? Some people from our party went out from Prague to the inn near Slapy, where Rudi had been living under the name of Otto Fenech. They pieced together what happened from talking with the publican, the maid and the Czech police.
Rudi had been in the hotel for six months. The staff considered him a quiet fellow who liked to chat but spent most days in his room. By midwinter he was the only guest.
One Tuesday a young German couple came to dine at the inn. They got into conversation with Rudi because he was the only other person there. On the Saturday they returned, bringing another friend. The friend remained up in his room, while the three others dined together. After the meal the girl fought with her boyfriend, who excused himself and went upstairs, saying he’d drunk too much. ‘Good riddance,’ the girl said.
The publican described this girl as exquisite, fair and slim and fine. It looked, he said, like she might have drunk too much as well. Once her boyfriend had left, she nestled in close to Rudi.
Rudi was upstairs escorting her back to her room when the third man appeared in the bar, the maid ahead of him at gunpoint, her hair in papers. As she and the publican were herded down into the cellar they heard two shots, followed some moments later by a third.
When the meat delivery man let them out the next day they went up and found Rudi in the corridor. He had been shot in the chest and also, the coup de grâce, in the forehead. There were nail streaks on his wrist.
A trail of blood led down the stairs and outside to where the visitors’ car had been parked. Afterwards, Bertie learnt from sources in the government that the girl had been wounded–one of the shots must have clipped her as she stood with Rudi. She was Edith Sander, hired by the Gestapo to accompany its agents Naujocks and Schoenemann. The men carried her to their car and raced to Germany. A policeman who stopped them for speeding said he’d seen no girl, only a pile of blankets in the back. When they went to take her out at the Leipzig hospital she was dead.
Strangely, Rudi’s transmitter, so lovingly installed in the roof, had not been disturbed. Bertie heard that Göring was pleased with the success of the mission. The ‘boyfriend’, Naujocks, was promoted.
Rudi’s murder racked me more than Lessing’s, and not just because I’d known him. What I hated most, after the fact of his death, was the interval between the last shots–the time he must have lain breathing his own blood on the floor, aware it was the end.
And I was distressed, too, by the slow ebbing of the girl’s life in the speeding car, even though she was one of Them. It was the knowing what was coming, the fatal black curtain, that got to me. Did she think, And that was it? That was me? I started to wake with night terrors, often in a half-empty bed.
Hans, though, seemed to be managing better. He was busy finding publications for articles by refugees and taking solace in his nights on the town. As I winnowed out my feelings about Rudi’s killing, I realised it was also the elaborate, theatrical effort they had gone to that troubled me. The first, innocent visit of the lovers to the inn, and the later ruse of their drunkenness and spat. Their Czech number plate. The speeding back over the border to backslapping and beer and the awarding of breastpins. And a dead girl written off as matériel on their ledger.
‘Do you think they rehearsed it?’ I wondered aloud to Hans. We were walking under the plane trees near the British Museum. ‘I mean, how do you think they plan these things?’ I had my camera gear in a backpack. My hands were fluttering loosely in front of me, shaping messy questions in the air. ‘Does someone—’
‘Shhh,’ he said, eyes to the pavement. ‘Keep your voice down.’
I lowered my voice. ‘I want to know,’ I said. I had to get this fear out of me. ‘Do you think they sit in their offices in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and one bright spark comes up with the plan, another with the dialogue, a third with the costumes—’
‘Honestly, Ruthie.’ His voice was scornful, sharp. He was shaking his head and breathing heavily, concentrating on his tread on the pavement. Our most common ground, our most uniting activity, had always been to make something ridiculous. Or at least to see, together, the ridiculous in our own situation.
Why wouldn’t he play the game, our game, any more? It was a refusal of intimacy, the in-joke of our marriage.
Perhaps he was too afraid to talk about it, I told myself. Though the way he went about each day as if nothing had happened, it was hard to tell. I didn’t know if his was true insouciance or a front. I let it drop. On the one hand I didn’t want to increase his fear, and on the other, if I was wrong, I couldn’t begrudge him for managing better, under fire, than the rest of us.
It was worst of all for Bertie. Rudi’s murder shattered him. Whatever equilibrium he had managed to recover after the football incident–mainly just by allowing day upon day to accumulate between him and it–left him. The courage to continue in Strasbourg rested on the belief that he would be all right, and he simply couldn’t summon that up any more in a place where the Gestapo could kidnap him on an afternoon drive. Hans had had no luck obtaining a passport from the embassy, where the officials told him all passports had to be issued from Berlin.
And Bertie was poorer than a church mouse. Hans and I did what we could. Once, we sent him a pair of boots. We tried to sell subscriptions to his Independent Press Service bulletin in Britain, but we had few takers. Bertie sent Hans chapters of the book he was writing on the Reichstag fire, called Who? Inside the Arsonists’ Arsenal–in which he attributed responsibility to a clique close to Göring–hoping Hans might place them in journals. We sent him money occasionally, telling him it was from selling his material and enclosing a copy of an article from a British newspaper or magazine that covered similar topics–a report from an unnamed political prisoner, the training methods of the SS. Mostly though, it was money of mine.
One afternoon, Hans came back uncharacteristically happy.
‘Dora home?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Sit down, Ruthie.’ He had an idea. His face was bright with it. His friend Werner, he said, knew a graphic designer in Switzerland who was now forging passports. If we could just get Bertie to him, along with fifty pounds, this man could make him a perfect passport.
r />
‘Well?’ he beamed. Hans looked as happy as if he were saving himself.
‘But how does Bertie get into Switzerland, without a passport?’ I asked. I didn’t know quite how to believe in such a plan.
Hans grabbed my shoulders. ‘They barely check from France,’ he said. ‘Look, I know it’s risky–but he could be snatched from Strasbourg now, as it is!’ He squeezed me. ‘This fellow has done lots of passports before. None have been found out. It’s Bertie’s only chance.’
I felt an uneasy lurch–I couldn’t tell if it was hope or fear.
‘Have you told him?’
‘Not yet.’ He kissed my forehead. ‘And another thing,’ he said, ‘you can’t tell a soul.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not even Dora,’ he said. He looked at me tenderly, his eyes bluer than blue. ‘I’m telling you because I promised you I would.’
I nodded, slowly. I could see he wanted to do something useful, pull his rabbit out of the hat. ‘Bertie won’t be telling a soul either,’ he added.
For several weeks I put by what I could from my father’s money. We needed to pay the forger, Hans’s travel costs to Switzerland, his and Bertie’s living expenses there and tickets back here. In the end I sold a ring and got my father to send more. We told Dora that Werner had offered to take Hans hiking in Switzerland. This opened up another crack of deceit in my life at Great Ormond Street. I developed a permanent knot in my stomach.
As his departure grew nearer it became clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to stay in the flat when Hans was gone, eating breakfast and dinner with Dora while keeping his scheme from her.
Dora noticed my withdrawal. One day, walking home along Theobalds Road, she said, ‘Look, I wouldn’t have asked you to keep it from him if it wasn’t important. And it really doesn’t do him any harm not to know.’
I realised she thought I resented her for making me promise not to tell Hans about the visit from ‘Scotland Yard’.
‘It’s not that,’ I said.
‘Well, what then?’
And then I was completely stuck. I could hear children over the wall of the schoolgrounds skipping rope to a sing-song chant.
‘I think I need to go away for a while,’ I said. ‘Get out of the flat.’
Dora looked relieved, put her arm through mine. ‘I know how you feel,’ she said.
‘But then Hans and I will both be gone and you’ll be there…’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go and work with Walter for a bit?’
Dora’s ex-husband had recently, narrowly, escaped the Gestapo, and was running the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party-in-Exile in Paris.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
I might not have gone, except it turned out that Mathilde needed a room, so she would stay with Dora while I was away. And once Hans was back here with Bertie, the need for secrets would dissolve and we could all be together again.
‘Knock, knock.’
Who’s there? I want to say. It’s the only answer, isn’t it? But I don’t because they are sending a hospital counsellor to assess me, and at my age the line between dry and deranged can be hard, even for trained professionals, to see. The woman is tall and slim, with a blond ponytail and honey-coloured glasses.
‘Come in, come in,’ I say instead.
‘I’m Hannah,’ she says. ‘I’m a counsellor in this hospital.’
‘Not religious?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she smiles. ‘Would that be a problem?’
‘Not my problem.’ I smile right back.
‘You won’t recognise me,’ Hannah says as she sits down next to the bed, ‘but I saw your accident. I was walking with my daughter near the water and we saw you fall.’
‘I don’t, really…’
‘No. You wouldn’t.’ Her voice is calm, her face open. ‘We live in the flats near there, because it’s close to the hospital. Still, it is a coincidence, isn’t it?’ She opens her clipboard and takes something out. ‘Sarah wanted me to give you this.’
She passes me a crayon drawing in bright colours where everything is on the same plane: sun and moon together in an aqua sky which meets dark-blue water in a perfect straight line, lots of triangular sails and a rosy-beaked pelican bigger than a yacht. In the foreground there’s a road. The drawing is painstakingly done; the bold crayon strokes make each thing moving, alive. Except for a stick figure in a red-triangle dress lying flat on the road. Cars with headlights like eyes bear down on her. But a little-girl stick figure stands by her. She has a large hand, fingers like five spokes of a wheel, and with it she holds the hand of the one on the ground.
‘Thank you,’ I say after a while. ‘I am very sorry she saw, your daughter saw…’
‘She’s fine.’ Hannah passes me a tissue from the bedside table.
An orderly comes in to empty the bin. He is an old Vietnamese man and he smiles at us, as at grandmother and granddaughter.
‘The doctor comes every day,’ I tell her as the man leaves.
‘That wasn’t the doctor.’ There’s a softness to her voice, but a firmness too.
‘I know that.’ I must make more of an effort if I want to go home, and not into some sort of compulsory assisted cell for the weepy and confused. ‘I was just saying, the doctor comes to each cell every day.’
Hannah looks at me closely. I realise what I’ve said.
‘Well, you know–compartment.’
She nods. ‘They tell me you were a teacher of literature.’
‘Yes. French and German.’
‘Would you like me to bring you something to read?’ Hannah is looking at my bedside table–the high, hospital thing–which is suddenly, incriminatingly, naked of decent reading material.
‘You know,’ I say, in my best teacher’s tone, ‘I’ve been rather busy.’ The grey eyes widen, just a little.
‘Remembering,’ I explain. She nods again. ‘It’s all starting to make sense to me,’ I add. The nods get slower, the look closer. ‘Which can’t be a good sign, can it?’ I laugh and then Hannah does too. She is relieved, I think, to find me sane.
‘Do you understand what is happening here?’ she asks then. I look at her and see that her job is hard.
‘In terms of “time elapsed and time to go”?’
She nods once more. Picks up my hand.
‘Dear,’ I say, ‘you don’t need to worry about me.’
And then we just sit, this stranger holding my hand. In the expanding silence I wish to reassure her: the end is no problem for me. I willed it once, and I can face it now. It is what happened in my personal three-ring circus–the cat’s-paw sleight of hand, the balls under cups and the trick pony, the man in the gorilla suit and the note in a pocket, the girl in the lake and the cities blown to dust–that waits for me now. But I say nothing, lest I seem mad. And who, after all, would believe it? We don’t understand one another, we may not ever give each other just what we need. All that remains is kindness.
When she leaves she stops at the nurses’ station. I hear one of them tell her, ‘You know, she was in prison under Hitler. In the resistance.’
‘Yes,’ Hannah says, a small clip in her voice. ‘And let’s not send her back there, shall we?’
TOLLER
This morning it’s pelting down outside, early summer rain. When Clara walks in, her hair wet, clothes wet, it takes me a moment to register that she is crying.
‘The St Louis is going back to Europe.’ Her arms are flung loose, dark strands plastered to her forehead. ‘The coastguard fired a shot—’ She chokes. ‘Off Florida.’
There has been nothing but silence from President Roosevelt.
‘Paul was so close, and now, and now…’ She sits and weeps, head hung over her lap. I lean forward and place my hands on hers till they too are wet, and she gets a handkerchief from her bag.
‘The captain seems like a good man,’ I say. ‘He will try to dock in Antwerp or Lisbon or somewher
e. It won’t be straight back to Germany.’
Hope-pedlar, snake-oil merchant–who am I to know? I can’t remember how anyone gives comfort any more. Clara looks up, sniffs. She believes me, because the alternative is unthinkable. She wipes her eyes while I nod, pants on fire.
RUTH
The week before Hans left, we were invited, along with Dora and Professor Wolf, to a costume ball at Mrs Franklin’s in Paddington.
‘I’m afraid,’ Wolf had announced at breakfast when we’d talked about it, ‘on that evening I am not available.’ As if juggling competing ball invitations were the bane of his London life. Dora didn’t care; she had plenty of friends to see at Mrs Franklin’s, and business there to conduct. But I saw then that everyone thought her so independent as to have no needs, or at least none that they, single-handedly, could meet. This is the curse of the capable; it leaves them prone to pockets of aloneness, sudden elephant traps in the ground.
Hans and I dressed together at home. He wore his beloved tails and fashioned a baton from a coathanger. I put on my best dress–a long cream silk thing–and took a piece of sheet music: we were a conductor and his singer. Dora marked her cheeks with three dark stripes of my lipstick, grabbed a feather I’d been photographing from the mantelpiece and stuck it in a headband.
We were on time, which is to say, too early, and were let in by the butler. The three of us shuffled to one side of the marble entrance hall and stood with our hands behind our backs, expectant as staff. But tonight the house had lost the stuffy formality of afternoon tea and clocks. Furniture had been cleared for dancing. Side tables held vast, round-bellied vases of flowers, hydrangeas and gladioli, peonies and roses in arrangements so gloriously abundant they looked thrown together by some careless, generous-spirited giant. In a back room someone barked last-minute instructions, as before a live performance. The string quartet on the other side of the hall chinned their instruments.
The music must have alerted our hostess. Mrs Franklin appeared at the top of the massive red-carpeted staircase, a cross between a battleship and a giant Fabergé egg.