The Dower House (10 page)

Fritz came with the bill. ‘
Hat es Ihnen gut geschmäkt?
' he asked, addressing Felix in particular.

He replied, in German, that he had enjoyed the meal immensely. Fogel told the waiter that Herr Breit was a distinguished artist and that he, Fritz, would probably be seeing quite a bit of him because he was going to direct an important project at Manutius. Faith tried to interrupt this exchange, squeezing Fogel's arm rather hard and reminding him of an afternoon appointment.

‘
Ja-ja-jaaa
,' he said, shaking her off. He simply signed the bill and handed it back.

As they left, Felix paused in the doorway and took one last look at the
BBC
blonde. Once again she was talking earnestly to Fritz.

Back at the Manutius office, after his farewells with his new employer, Faith showed him back to the lift. This time she took his arm and held it tight all the way. ‘You'd never have dared push him that high without my coaching,' she told him.

‘Could I have gone higher?'

‘Not a penny. Aren't you glad we met, though? When are you going to show me this capitalist kibbutz?'

Felix gently pushed open the door to the Palmers' part of the house and tiptoed along the corridor to the stairs that led up to Willard and Marianne's flat. Nicole heard him nonetheless. ‘I think they went out,' she said, appearing at the half-landing as if by magic.

‘I saw their lights as I crossed the yard,' he assured her.

When he drew level she hissed, ‘How can you?'

He shrugged.

‘She didn't just
work
in Germany, you know. We all worked for the Germans in one way or another. We had no choice. But she had a choice – and she choiced to join the Nazi Party. She worked for
Speer
!'

‘I wish I'd been so lucky.'

‘How can you say such things? You of all people? I don't understand you.'

‘I'll tell you then. Speer called all his officers and sergeants together one day and asked them what they'd do to a machine operator who didn't oil his machine so that it broke. And they said they'd beat him into the middle of next week. So then he told them that his slave labourers were the finest machines they were ever likely to come across. He wanted the maximum output from each and every one of them, and he wasn't likely to get it if they were starved and beaten black and blue – was that understood? In Mauthausen, the harder you worked, the quicker you died. So, Nicole, you wish to ask me once more why I would have been lucky to work for Speer – me of all people?'

‘
Alors!
' She turned on her heel in disgust. ‘You people can make black white and white black. Well,
I
will never fraternize with that one.
Jamais, jamais, jamais!
'

‘The loss is yours,' he called after her as he started on the last flight.

Steps
 . . . pitch pine.

Her remark –
you people
– had not slipped by him. An unconscious anti-Semitism from an all-too-conscious anti-Nazi. Not at all uncommon in France.

Nicole turned again and followed him. ‘You know that new electric cooker they have – the monster he got from the
US
base?'

‘That's one of the things I want to see now.'

‘She heats their apartment with it – it's true. She turns it on full and leaves the oven door open. We're going to have a horrid electricity bill all because of her.'

‘You've seen her doing it?'

‘Not me. I won't set foot in the place. But just go and look at the meter if you don't believe me. The wheel spins faster than you can watch. It must be her. Who else?'

He opened the Johnsons' door and called out, ‘Anyone home?'

‘Felix!' Willard called back.

‘We're in the south room,' Marianne added.

‘See – lights on everywhere!' Nicole shouted as she went back downstairs.

‘Nicole!' he called after her. ‘Don't you know what sort of scars you get if you keep up picking at the wounds?'

She slammed a door.

Willard and Marianne had turned their largest room into a temporary workshop, full of American power tools running off a 110-volt transformer. The other families had each lashed up some kind of kitchen in their portions of the house but for most of them it was still a matter of carrying large enamel bowls of used washing-up water to the nearest lavatory for emptying. The Johnsons, however, were making the kitchen to end all kitchens – a combination of American gadgetry and Scandinavian design. In fact, the way they planned it, the entire apartment was to become a lived-in advertisement for their architecture-and-design partnership. When they had finished, this temporary workshop would become their studio, where clients could see for themselves the sort of quality they could expect.

Willard was lighting a log fire and cursing the short chimney for not drawing very well. ‘What can we do for you, Felix?' he asked between puffs.

Marianne was laying out tongue-and-groove matchboarding, all cut to size and sanded to a fine satin finish; she was swapping boards around, trying to get an even scattering of the cinnamon-red knots, each of which she had carefully blinded with French polish.

‘Or should I try to make random groupings of them?' she asked Felix when she had got them perfectly distributed.

‘Are you a designer or an artist?' he asked in reply.

‘What's the difference?'

He told her.

Nonplussed, she said, ‘I guess I'm an artist pretending to be a designer, then.'

‘Just like me. I'm a sculptor who's going to have to pretend to be a typographer.'

‘Eh?'

‘Say again?' Willard added.

‘I got hired today by a publisher in London to make the specifications for a series of books – a five-volume encyclopedia of modern Western art.'

‘Hey man . . . wizard . . . well done!' The congratulations rained upon him.

Willard gave up on the fire and said, ‘This calls for a celebration. Did you eat yet, Felix? Let's see if anywhere's open for dinner.'

‘No, honey,' Marianne insisted. ‘We've got to stick to our quota. Sorry, Felix. I'll cook us a dinner here. Say you'll stay for that.'

Willard said, ‘I'll go get a bottle of wine from our cellar.' Over his shoulder he added, ‘She should never have gone to Germany. That Teutonic sense of duty has ruined her.'

Left alone, Marianne smiled apologetically as she and Felix drifted toward the half-finished kitchen. ‘He thinks if he makes enough jokes about it, Nicole might even laugh one day.'

‘Can I peel potatoes or something?'

‘We peel them
after
they're cooked, don't you? The English throw away the best bits.' She set half a dozen to boil. The stove was not being used as a room heater.

‘Shell peas, then?' He saw a basket of them behind the door.

‘Peas? You don't mind?'

He shook his head. ‘I call them lifesavers.'

She tipped out a heap of pods on the plain deal table and put a large, broken-handled saucepan beside it. ‘We'll save the empties in that for the chickens.'

‘Pods, they're called.'

Occasionally their hands touched as they reached for the same pod. Their eyes met and they smiled. On the third or fourth occasion she squeezed his hand deliberately and said, ‘I am really grateful to you, though, Felix.'

‘For?'

‘You know what for. You give us hope that Nicole will one day be reconciled with me. If you were not here – and if you were not so . . . what's the word?
supportable
to me – we should never have taken this apartment, though we love it so dearly.'

He continued shelling the peas.

‘D'you know what's so wonderful now?' she went on. ‘To wake up in the small hours and just listen to the silence. And to know it's not the silence you get before a raid. To look up at the moon and clouds and not even think of bombers up there. And if you hear a lorry, it's only for milk or cattle or something.'

‘To know it's safe to make babies?' he suggested.

She smirked.

‘That's the usual consequence of waking in the small hours. In Vienna they used to call them “children of the night watch”.'

‘You should get married, Felix,' she said.

‘Maybe one day,' he told her. He thought of Faith Bullen-ffitch and then thought no. Faith was a collector, not a marrier. He wondered about the
BBC
woman, too – though he knew that was just fantasy.

‘That's enough peas,' she said, adding after a brief silence: ‘You must be psychic or something.'

‘Me?'

‘What you said just now – about making babies?' She spread both hands across her belly, a protective gesture.

‘Oh! That's marvellous! When?'

‘Sometime in July.'

‘Golly! You're not showing?'

‘I know. To do with rationing . . . I hope! Willard and I started it last November, still in Hamburg . . .'

‘So
that's
why he came back!'

‘No. He didn't know until I told him that day – Thursday the fifteenth April. But his . . .
Unterbewusstsein
– what's that?'

‘Subconscious?'

‘Yes. It must have told him. And now you're the first I've told – in the community. Willard doesn't want me to tell anyone until it shows – which it must any day now.'

‘So why tell me?'

‘I don't know. I feel I sort of owe you . . . sort of more than most.'

They heard Willard talking to Tony on the stair.

‘So, Felix,' he said when he joined them, ‘tell us about this publishing thing.'

Marianne stripped the parboiled potatoes and diced them into a pan of hot lard, adding chunks of carrot, spam, and sausage. ‘We call this
pytt-i-panna
,' she said, though it wasn't strictly true; it was the nearest the English rationing system would allow.

‘It's a crazy world,' Felix said. ‘The people who actually design the books and edit them and so on get six hundred a year . . .'

‘Hey!' Marianne was impressed.

‘All I do is make some vague specifications and do one abstract sculpture, which we can colour and light in different ways for each chapter opening . . . and just look at things generally . . . “consultant”, they call it . . . one day a week . . .'

‘And?'

He was afraid to go on, after Marianne's response.

‘They pay you double?' Willard guessed.

‘More. Sixteen hundred.'

‘Felix!' Marianne shrieked. ‘You're going to be rich! Will you be godfather?'

Willard darted her a glance.

‘I told
him
,' she said. ‘He won't tell anyone else.'

Willard glanced from one to the other. Felix had seen that same uneasy light in Adam's eyes when he found Sally and him having tea together the other day. He was beginning to realize he'd have to get some sort of partner soon; what Adam called the ‘dynamics of the community' demanded it. Especially if he was no longer the poor
DP
who roused that community's impulse to charity.

‘Actually,' Willard said, ‘it's no more than your due, Felix. I assume the publisher . . . what's his name?'

‘Wolf Fogel. The Manutius Press.'

‘I guess this Wolf guy gets to keep your piece of sculpture, eh? So he's getting your consultancy services cheap.'

‘It's sixteen hundred per volume. And five are planned.'

Willard whistled. ‘Seven and a half grand! That's more like it.' He laughed. ‘So how's about the godfather thing?'

‘Marxfather?' Felix suggested. ‘God never did too much for me.'

‘Marx? Are you crazy?' Willard was genuinely shocked.

Felix backed out of the minefield. ‘Humanist father?'

‘That's good!' Marianne put in hastily.

Willard yielded. ‘Oh . . . I guess so. It won't play too well in Peoria, but what the hell.'

Willard was right, Felix realized. ‘The Wolf guy' would end up with a new, post-war Felix Breit to grace his Hampstead home, and all paid for by his firm. He realized he needed an agent – fast. Perhaps Corvo could suggest one.

Thursday, 15 May 1947

Sam Prentice, 3½, disappeared when he got bored with being shown over the Dower House. Arthur Prentice said he probably couldn't come to any harm and went on asking about the price of season tickets on buses to Welwyn North and trains between there and London; May, his wife, who could not decide whether she liked the ground-floor front or the first-floor front better, went in search of the boy. Hannah, 2, toddled at her side, talking scribble.

She hunted through all eight cellars without success. Ditto the rest of the house, all the way up to the Johnsons' top-floor flat. They were away – in Hertford, buying paint.

‘Look at these,' May said to her daughter, walking among Marianne's nylons, which were strung along the passage to dry. She let them brush lightly across her face. ‘Eight pairs! Just make sure you marry an American when you grow up, pet! I wonder what her frocks are like? D'you think we dare? D'you think Sam's hiding in one of those wardrobes? I do.'

But Marianne's wardrobe was a disappointment after the promise of those nylons.

‘Well, pet, we start off a bit more level,' she sighed.

‘Sam!' Hannah murmured, staring out of the window.

‘He's not here. That's definite.'

‘Sam.'

May went to join her and saw him at once – wrestling with a piece of timber twice his own length out in some sort of chicken run built against the outside of the walled garden. That foreign sculptor man was there, too. Mr Breit. He was also waving a bit of wood about. ‘Let's go and see what they've found,' she said.

It wasn't that she distrusted Mr Breit – well, she did, really . . . a bit, anyway, or maybe not distrust. The thing was she couldn't quite fathom him. The way he'd looked at her when they were introduced – if an Englishman had looked like that, she'd have been tempted to slap him. But with foreigners it was different. She'd learned that in the war, after Italy capitulated and they'd let the Eyetie
POWS
out to work on farms and places. Foreigners didn't mean any harm by it; it was just their way. So she felt no distrust of
him
, just of his strangeness.