The Dower House (29 page)

She had not glanced even once at the horizon – and she did not feel the least bit queasy, either. She re-folded the letter and went back to join Felix on deck. ‘Tummy OK?' he asked.

‘For God's sake! Shut up about it!'

‘Sorry. You know the cure, don't you.'

‘I can hardly wait,' she replied wearily.

‘Sit under a tree for ten minutes.'

She burst into laughter and, helped by a heave from the deck, launched herself at him. ‘Oh, Felix!' she cried, steadying herself with a firm grip on his arm. ‘You've been trying to tell me that since we came on board – haven't you! And I never gave the right answer. I'm s-o-r-r-y!'

‘Forgiven,' he said crisply. ‘By the way – before you ask – the “great artist” my father mentions was me.'

‘Well, funnily enough, I did manage to work that out for myself. Also that his deliberately vague talk of “others” is really just about your Tante Uschi. He obviously feared the Gestapo might get their hands on the letter. Do you think he
really
tried to reach Sweden through Denmark?'

Felix was surprised. ‘But surely it was his best hope – his only hope?'

‘That's exactly why I question it. If I had been in his situation and really intended going back to Berlin – the one city I knew inside-out – and if I feared the letter might fall into the hands of the Gestapo, I'd say what he said about living in the shadows in Berlin. And then I'd go into some detail about escaping in exactly the opposite direction. So I think this letter tells you nothing about what really happened to him. But that's the least important part. The rest of it is very moving.'

She did not point out – she did not
need
to point out – that if he had made it to Berlin and had managed to evade the Nazis, then the fact that he had not surfaced after the liberation probably meant that he had been taken to God knows where by the Russians.

No one was coming back from there, either.

At Calais the
Golden Arrow
became the
Flêche d'Or
, whisking them in faded pre-war luxury across the flat autumnal plains of northern France to the Gare du Nord.

‘Does the
Orient Express
still run?' Angela asked.

‘I don't know. Why?'

‘One of the things we used to do in the
KL
was to talk about our dream journeys. One girl swore the first thing she'd do if we ever got free was take a cruise from Narvik in Norway all the way round the top of the world to Archangel and back – in the time of the midnight sun, of course. It was wonderful to think of standing in freedom in endless sunshine.'

‘And your dream?'

‘Mine was to take the
Orient Express
from Paris to Constantinople. I didn't even know if it still ran – I still don't – but that was my dream journey.' Impetuously she took his hands across the table. ‘Except now I'll have this one instead. Truly – I don't think I could have faced going back to Germany without you.'

Mildly embarrassed by her outburst, she made to draw her hands away. But he held them in a tight grip. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I . . . I . . . that is . . . I don't know.' He released her then and looked away.

After a longish silence, while they each stared out at the passing landscape, she said, ‘What are you thinking?'

‘About forests,' he told her – they had just passed through a stretch of dense and decaying woodland. ‘I was wondering why they are places of terror in so many old folk tales and the Brothers Grimm and so on. All dark and gloomy and only half-seen – I was thinking it must have been like a
KL
to our earliest ancestors – a place in which they felt powerless and full of terrors. And they had no alternative they could dream about.' He gazed once more at the darkling landscape. ‘Actually, I don't think I'd have embarked on this journey . . . alone, either. I've been wondering how to ask you if you'd consider coming all the way to Kiel with me. I mean – if it was
fair
to ask you.'

‘I'd love that,' she said. ‘I mean – to meet your Aunt Uschi.'

The house had once belonged to Alfred de Musset. It stood in its own extensive grounds in Ville d'Avray, about halfway between Paris and Versailles. Now it belonged to Nicole's cousins – their hosts for the next few days – Amy and Roger Trocquemé.

‘It's good you have come just in this moment,' she said as she led them up to the attic. ‘Tomorrow . . .' She took them over to a window and showed them that the house was L-shaped, which was not at all apparent from the road. ‘Over there, tomorrow, we have the first French-German conference since before the war. French and German Christians will sit down together and discuss practical ways how we can make sure it's no more war in Europe –
ever
. And you are German, no? Both? And living in England. Perhaps you can join us just for a little while? To give your experiments? Experiences! It could be a much valuable addition.'

They had now climbed three flights of stairs – and, Felix suddenly realized, he had not faced them with his obsessive categorizing of every flight he ever attempted. Mme Trocquemé paused before a door at the head of the last flight. ‘It is possible you can sleep over in the conference wing, but this is nicer.' She waved toward the paintings and prints that lined the passageway and stairs. ‘Especially for the artists. You are artists, yes? You, Herr Breit, especially. I remember the petition for your release from the Gestapo in nineteen forty-two.
Tiens!
Only five and a half years ago – but what years they have been! So much killing. But you were free.'

‘We must all work to see it can never happen again, madame,' Felix said.

‘And we will be honoured to attend your conference,' Angela added. ‘It's very good of you, madame, even to
think
of putting us up when you must be so busy.'

‘Ah! Pfff!' Amy waved away the thought.

‘And, of course,' Felix added, ‘we require no entertainment. I just want to show Miss Worth to Paris before we leave.'

‘The conference, it's only one day,' she assured them. ‘So –' she threw open the door – ‘I leave you to unpack and settle. We have a very simple dinner in half an hour.'

And she was gone before it dawned on them that she somehow expected them to share the room.

From the bottom of the first flight down she called back an afterthought, ‘I'm sorry it's two beds but you are young,
hein
!'

‘Well!' Felix said as he set down his suitcase and hers. His heart was now racing from more than the climb to this attic.

‘Nicole!' Angela said. She looked at her watch. ‘Bloody Nicole! I'll bet she is bathing little Andrew Mercier exactly now and giggling over this trick she has played.'

Felix turned back toward the door. ‘I'll go and explain.'

‘She'll feel so embarrassed,' Angela said, adding, ‘We're not going to be able to wash in this handbasin without bumping our heads.'

‘You think we can . . . ?' Felix hesitated.

‘We are completely grown up, Felix. Not kids who see the teacher's back is turned.'

But later, at the ‘very simple dinner', Roger took a phone call in the hall and then called Amy out there, saying, ‘Nicole,' in a slightly sepulchral tone.

The conversation was brief and, at the Paris end, rather heated. The moment Amy returned, Angela got in first, ‘We
guessed
it was her! We weren't going to make a fuss about it because of tomorrow's conference.'

‘And – as Nicole may have told you, madame,' Felix said, ‘we have both lived in circumstances where personal privacy was not, so to speak, uppermost in our minds. We can manage very well.'

‘Circumstances?'

Nicole had obviously
not
told her.

‘Mauthausen.' Felix pointed at himself. ‘And . . .'

‘Ravensbrück,' Angela said.

‘Oooh!' She sat heavily in a chair just inside the door. ‘Oh!' She shook her head slowly. ‘Oh!'

Roger was watching her closely, wiping his lips on his napkin – mechanically.

The thought suddenly struck Felix. ‘Perhaps we should not take part in your conference tomorrow, madame? It might embarrass your German delegates? Though I should tell you that neither of us bears any individual Germans ill will.'

‘Certainly not,' Angela put in.

‘It must be faced,' Roger told his wife.

‘Of course.' She combined a shrug and a sigh – in which Felix clearly saw Nicole's dramatic sort of mime. ‘Perhaps
le bon Dieu
always intended this for our first conference for peace and understanding.'

‘Then you must know
all
the truth about me,' Angela said.

‘No!' Felix cried.

‘Yes,' she insisted. ‘Until January the twentieth, in nineteen forty-two, I was a technical officer in the
Schutzstaffel
. In my work as a sound-recording engineer I answered directly to Reinhard Heydrich.'

‘The twentieth of January?' Amy looked at her husband, then at Felix. ‘I was in Paris that day. I can never forget it. It was when they . . .' She turned to Felix. ‘But they let you go.'

He nodded. ‘And rearrested me in Vichy, with no publicity, two years later.'

She turned again to Angela. ‘So did you know each other even then?'

She shook her head and went on to explain why the conference was held (to implicate the entire party in the
Vernichtung
) and her own role in recording it, which ended in her defecting to the Resistance and her imprisonment. And how she came to know of Felix's arrest in Paris on that same day. ‘They said there would certainly be a big protest from the artistic cliques in Paris and it was already decided to release Felix again to make good headlines in the papers. The idea was from Goebbels, of course.'

Amy glanced sorrowfully at her husband. ‘Oh, Roger – do you hear? It's true! The Parisians would not mind too much the rounding-up of the Jews . . . but
an artist
!
Tiens!
That's something different. Ooooooh –' her sigh was like a swiftly deflating tyre – ‘where do we even begin?'

And now she was so wrapped up in the alterations she felt obliged to make to the following day's agenda that she completely forgot the other change she ought to make.

And the last thing Felix and Angela wanted was to make a fuss.

‘You go first,' Felix said. ‘I want to have a good look at these pictures.'

‘You won't see much in this light,' she warned him. ‘You know what the richest man in France does? I'm sure he manufactures fifteen-watt lamps.'

She closed the door, leaving him in the pasage. He wondered whether he would, in fact, be able to speak to this conference tomorrow.

The picture at the stairhead was a crude but probably valuable woodcut of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants. Dress the perpetrators in
SS
uniforms and it would be a gruesomely familiar scene. It struck him then that the Trocquemés must both be Protestants – no papal portraits, Sacred Hearts, ecstatic images of the Virgin . . . how quickly life at the Dower House had stripped him of his old European habits.

Could he talk about ‘The New Europe' without invoking his particular experience of the old, which seemed too petty to connect with such vast ideas?

Next was a sepia photograph of Alfred de Musset himself, sitting beneath a parasol on the lawn behind the house; the woodland beyond him had since been thinned to a few specimen trees – prudent gardening or wartime necessity?

And talk to committed Christians? Tell them God must now take lessons from the Humanists?

Click!

Darkness.

He cleared his throat to alert whoever had turned the light off . . . and then remembered it was one of those pneumatic switches that slowly refill with air after you push them in. He thought he remembered where it was and so felt his way gingerly down the flight to where it . . .
wasn't
. He tried a fingertip search for it along the passage but soon gave up. Not even the dimmest light penetrated the windows overlooking the street. He had forgotten that all French villages seemed to have a terror of light – outdoor light – after sunset. Even before the war, playing surrealist games with André Breton in country villages near Fontainebleau, they had walked through one pitch-black and seemingly deserted village after another.

Give them the existentialist answer – tell them they're on a journey to nowhere? The road is a cul-de-sac. There is nothing beyond that door – open it and see for yourselves. The men with the darkness have arrived, disguised as God.Why was he standing here in the dark?

Oh yes!

Forgetting he had descended one flight, he began working his way along the wall, feeling for their door, looking under them for a sliver of light and whispering Angela's name urgently. There was a sudden flood of light overhead and she startled him by almost shouting his name.

‘Er . . . ah . . . yes,' he replied. ‘Don't shut the door. I've got to find the light whadyoumaycallit.'

‘Don't bother,' she said impatiently. ‘Surely this is light enough.'

Stairs
. These of wood. Thirteen steps. Lucky for him?

Halfway up he was transfixed at the sight of her, standing in the doorway with the light behind her – and it certainly was more than fifteen watts. It was only her silhouette, her shadow, against the translucent silk of her nightdress, but . . .

‘Pity you haven't got your sketchbook!' she taunted, doing a coquettish little twirl before skipping out of sight. Her bed played a spring symphony.

As he shut their door behind him she let out a small, quiet fart. ‘Oh dear!' she said. ‘I didn't quite mean that . . . but it does at least answer one unspoken question between us – in this situation.'