The Dower House (3 page)

‘If he hadn't interceded for me, I'd have been taken to Łodz the following day. Sartre was no use at all.' He laughed coldly. ‘I didn't even know I was Jewish until that day.
They
told
me
! I stood at my window watching the others being rounded up, thinking
poor bastards
! Can you believe that?'

‘I can. But will we ever understand? It's so . . .' His long, slender hand groped for a word beyond his horizon. ‘Your English is very good,' he concluded.

‘I lived in America until I was seven.'

‘Ah! Yes – I thought I detected a trace of American there.' He smiled apologetically and then added comfortingly, ‘Only very slight, though.'

The sandwiches and whisky arrived – more than a mere sample. Corvo drank tea and declined all offers to share the food, though Felix could see the man was peckish.
Enjoys self-sacrifice and delivering commonplace opinions as if they were scandalous
, he noted. He could not break the habit of cold-classifying people; in Mauthausen it had spelled the difference between life and death.

Correction: between
survival
and death.

This
was life, beginning again with nothing but a pre-war reputation, a
DP
pension, and a remote future claim against a reviving Germany – if it ever did revive. And meanwhile there was the heady whiff of grants –
CEMA
,
UNRRA
 . . . Plus, of course, the seemingly boundless goodwill of all these splendid Englishmen. Oh yes, and the British Council.

‘Talking of staying,' Corvo said, ‘I trust you have somewhere organized for tonight? Otherwise . . .'

Felix waited as long as he decently could to see what that ‘otherwise' might predicate – not realizing that in polite English usage the word had already delivered a bed and several breakfasts if he wanted them. ‘I'm staying in Bloomsbury,' he said. ‘A very nice man from
CEMA
has given me vouchers and a ration card. He says it's a small, private hotel. I haven't been there yet. My luggage is still at Victoria.' He dropped these personal details as people drop chips at roulette, with a public indifference that masks a churning gut. Would he ever accustom himself to yielding information freely, without the rubber hose, or the live wire an inch from his skin?

Corvo smiled. But so had the first caller from the Gestapo; he, too, had been a lover of art. What home in Germany now housed the largest single collection of Breits in the world? None, if the man had any sense of self-preservation. They'd be at the bottom of a lake somewhere.

‘I expect you're longing to work again,' Corvo said.

Felix looked dispassionately at his fingertips. ‘I did some clay modelling in hospital. I was surprised to discover how much these guys remembered.'

‘Yes, your English really is excellent. It's so important to imbibe a language in one's boyhood.'

Felix stared into the middle distance and smiled as he echoed, ‘Boyhood!'

The English were an enigma. In their heart of hearts, they knew that, although they had stood alone against ‘the Hun' and battled him from Cairo to the Fatherland, those five gruelling years had still not taught them a thing. Europe was still a bewildering, far-off country where Hungary and Czechoslovakia were interchangeable. (Oh yes – his camp-honed ears had overheard that exchange!) From time to time he caught them off their guard, staring into his eyes, looking for answers.

Corvo said slowly, ‘Of all those who survived the camps – I mean, of the few who survived – I believe the artists have the best chance of all. You are in touch with the means to comprehend it . . . convey it to the rest of baffled humanity. Oh dear! Is it patronizing of me to be saying such things to someone like you?'

The whisky burned pleasantly. A long-forgotten sensation, drowsy, fiery, massaged his muscles, slackened off his joints, enabled him to say, ‘Not at all. I agree now, though it's only lately I've been able to think it.'

‘And before?'

‘I was too close to the experience. The idea of taking such an obscenity and somehow fashioning it into art seemed . . . well, an even greater obscenity.'

Corvo pulled a face. ‘I hadn't considered it like that, but now you put it in such terms, I can't think of an answer.'

Felix watched him shrewdly. ‘I could give you a comforting lie, Mister Corvo. Go back in history, for instance. Consider the starving eighteenth-century peasant, dying of consumption as he cuts the clay in the Austrian brickfields, and then the fine, brick-built concert hall where Mozart is heard nightly. It's too remote, isn't it, for the callous obscenity of the one to reach out and touch the sublime beauty of the other.'

‘That's very good – and surely quite true?'

Felix shook his head, gently, because of the whisky. ‘I know at least one man who managed it.'

Corvo leaned forward eagerly. ‘A fellow artist?'

‘An artist of a kind, anyway. Reinhard Heydrich – Himmler's deputy and the actual engineer of the
Vernichtung
of the Jews – there is no English word, I think.'

‘Annihilation?'

‘Too clinical.
Vernichtung
means “turning into nothing”. Can one say “the
nothing-
ing of the Jews”?'

‘One ought to be able to. I see what you mean.'

‘Heydrich once shot a prisoner who dared to warn him that the brake on a quarry wagon was defective. Yet that same Heydrich had his own quartet and was a superb violinist. Sublime, they said.' He shrugged his shoulders and smiled with an expansive, mid-European weariness.

‘Impossible.' Corvo tried the same shrug but lacked the experiential referents. ‘But to get back to art . . .'

‘Ah, but we
were
actually talking about art. Art is
not
on the side of the angels. Nor of the devils, either. Art is on the side of itself. Only itself. I have survived. Mister Wilson and Mister Palmer will probably tell you it was because, for fourteen months, the doctors fed me nothing but peas and beans. But I know that is the least important part of the truth. I survived because Art wished it. Art needed me. For what purpose, Art will now reveal.' His hands gestured a mid-European hopelessness. He noted the effect of his words on Corvo and thought:
Metaphysics works here! I must remember this line
. ‘I have no choice,' he concluded. ‘Like the scorpion that stings the frog in the middle of the river . . .'

At that moment Wilson and Palmer entered.

The greetings were heartfelt but subdued – in a word: English. When they were done, the four men settled in a rough circle of chintz armchairs and Wilson sent McIver for a fresh pot of tea.

‘I was just saying to Breit,' Corvo began, ‘I hope he's not simply passing through on his way to America, like so many. I'm trying to persuade him of the advantages of staying.'

Wilson turned to Felix. ‘It's up to you, old chap. Whatever you decide, we'll do our best to help. I know at least one American who'd sponsor you without hesitation – and he, in turn, would know hundreds more.' To Palmer he said, ‘Willard A Johnson.'

‘Snap!' Palmer said. To Felix he added: ‘Johnson was our host on the day Mauthausen was liberated. Austria was American territory. We just happened to be on a courtesy visit that day.'

‘There'll be a new renaissance in England,' Corvo explained to Palmer. ‘We've obviously lost our empire. Our new role is to play Greece to America's Rome.'

‘I hope you're right,' Palmer said. ‘We're about to rent a Græco-Roman revival house in Hertfordshire – Adam and Sally, Nicole and me.' He smiled at Wilson. ‘It will be the nucleus of
our
post-war renaissance.'

‘May one ask where?' Corvo looked apologetically at Felix for turning the spotlight away from him for the moment. This was interesting. There might be a
Perspectives
article in it. Or
Country Life
at worst.

‘It's the Dower House at Barwick Green. I don't suppose you know it?'

‘Oh but I do!' Corvo placed complacent fingertips together. ‘I wrote a piece on it for the
AR.
Between the wars.' He turned again to Breit, the catch of the week for him. ‘
Charming
place.'

‘By Henry Holland,' Palmer said. ‘With additions by Soane.'

Corvo winked at Felix. ‘Architects and planners, eh! You can't beat them. Perhaps I should explain – Palmer and Wilson here are leading lights in the Greater London Plan, otherwise they'd still be waiting for their demob suits. Abercrombie pulled some strings and got them out. They sit in their offices all day, dishing out neat little prefabs for the proletariat, and then they down pencils and head for their country palace.'

Wilson said, ‘Actually, old man, it's more of a commune – or a community . . . yes, more of a community.'

‘Is it really a palace?' Felix asked.

‘No – it's a pretty run-of-the-mill English country house, actually. Sixty rooms, three floors, Georgian, classical brickwork, pillared portico. There's a remnant of the original Tudor wing at the back, brickwork in English garden bond . . . plus stables, carriage houses, and so on. And five acres of garden.'

‘
Ex-
garden,' Palmer said. ‘But that's one of our communal projects.'

‘It was a Catholic boys' school during the war, evacuated from the Channel Isles. Now it belongs to the South Herts Gravel Company, who, frankly, haven't the first idea what to do with it. However' – he winked – ‘they
do
want to keep on the right side of a couple of ‘leading architects in the Greater London Plan'!' He grinned at Corvo. ‘Ta for the encomium, old boy.' Then back to Felix: ‘But that's enough about us. It's
your
future that's important here.'

Felix bit a lip nervously. ‘Sixty-odd rooms . . .' he mused. ‘For just two families?'

‘Ah! We hope there'll soon be more. There's room for eight or nine. Families, I mean.'

Wilson was on the point of asking Felix if he'd consider joining their budding community when he remembered the rule they had all agreed: No one should ever be invited to join; the first suggestion must always be theirs, so they could never say they were talked into it if things turned sour.

For his part, Felix was wondering how to work around to suggesting that if they had a small stable or outbuilding where he might set up his studio . . . He felt the invitation coming, saw Wilson's eyes dance in preparation. But then, with a brief flicker in Palmer's direction, they lowered again and the warmth fled. It reminded him of the despairing irony of the man from
UNRRA
as he surveyed that ocean of hopeful refugees, in the months after the liberation of Mauthausen: ‘We offer them every assistance short of actual help.'

He understood that to get into this Dower House community he would have to beg. Well, he wasn't reduced to that, yet.

‘You must come out and see the place,' Wilson said lamely.

That note he scribbled on the back of his card, Felix thought, and left pinned to my prison jacket – that was just the reflex shriek of an appalled conscience. It no longer translates into anything. Assistance, yes, but not actual help.

‘Yes, that would be nice,' he said.

Where did one go in this city for a woman? Could one ask such a question in a club for gentlemen?

Friday, 25 April 1947

They emerged from the gloom of Hammersmith tube station, blinking at the bright autumnal sun, now in its evening arc.

Willard stabbed a finger toward the heart of its radiance. ‘Over there!'

Marianne smiled; he always thought it so important to know his way around. For him, Hell must be a
new
foreign city for which he had no map. Arm in arm they walked down Queen Street toward the river. He asked her: ‘When you said that – about Tony being taken from the Elbe and given to the Thames – did you know he actually lives in a houseboat?'

‘No. That was pure . . . flux? Oh –
look
only! God, so beautiful!'

Above them now towered the northern abutment of Hammersmith Bridge, spiky, Gothic, crisp against the bleached sky – a contrast made even starker by the still-unwashed grime of the war years.

They both stopped, no longer man and wife, no longer lovers, but a pair of architects lost in the magical space defined and caged by its tracery. Willard echoed her, ‘Will you just look at that!'

She took it as a gentle correction and stored away the phrase, a lover once again.

‘Why do we respond like that?' he asked. ‘Architecturally it's against all the values we ever learned. D'you suppose we could be in for a Victorian revival?'

They crossed the empty road, still gazing skyward, revelling in the dimensions now cradled between the swooping catenaries of the suspension chains, before they continued their stroll upriver, along the Lower Mall.

The sun burnished her fragile skin; every time he looked at her his love was renewed.

Where the Lower Mall joins the Chiswick Mall proper, they came in sight of the houseboat moorings, between the bank and the long, boat-shaped island of Chiswick Eyot.

‘Heavens, so many!' Marianne exclaimed. ‘It's a small town of boats.'

‘But there's our man!' He pointed out a gray, oil-smeared hulk with the unmistakeable lines of a chine-hulled motor torpedo boat. It was moored to a barge, moored to an ex-pleasure boat, moored to . . . well, three or four other nautical mongrels that, finally, were moored to the bank. ‘The only
MTB
in the pack. Tony always had a taste for the largest and grandest.'

There were perhaps half a dozen such columns of moored boats in all. Looking at them from this distance, Marianne was filled with a warm envy. In the evening sun, the little floating community looked so snug and secure. They must all lead the most wonderful lives. What more could people need than a few cabins, a galley, a mess room – and a huge, inviting city like London just a mile or two downriver? Threepence by Underground or bus. Tony's
MTB
had a new, civilian name painted on her bow in an architect's hand: LITTLE EXPECTATIONS. They stood on the bank and stared at her across the five intervening decks, wondering what to do next. Apart from the obvious ropes there were lengths of garden hose and some lethal-looking electricity cables, but nothing resembling a bell-push or even a line with a can of pebbles at the end of it. An
RAF
type with a Flying Officer Kite moustache poked his head out through a hatch on the second craft from shore, a squat tub of a thing with a sort of potting shed added to its deck. ‘Need any help, old chap?' he asked.