The Dower House (9 page)

He laughed. ‘
Someone
will have to.'

‘When we have tea. Meanwhile, you tell me about these artists. I'm obviously going to have to bone up on them a bit. Bonnard – you mentioned him last week, when you described being arrested in Paris. Did you ever meet Manet?'

‘Manet died thirty years before I was
born
, for heaven's sake! My grandfather was friends with Monet – he's the only Impressionist I ever saw in the flesh. But I know many Post-Impressionists – Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Vlaminck, Derain, Chagall . . . friends and acquaintances. Rouault. I can get many private informations, if you are interested.'

They beguiled the next couple of hours with the
V&A
's prints and his reminiscences. At one point Faith said, ‘The two I really don't understand are Picasso and Braque. They did their paintings . . . what? Thirty . . . forty years ago. I really ought to understand them by now. But I don't!'

Felix thought awhile; at length he said, ‘Go and look at back-numbers of
Vogue
from the time of the Great War. Did it exist then? Well, any fashion magazine from that time. In fact – any magazine, any newspaper. And then look at the equivalent today. What's the difference? I'll tell you what the difference is – Picasso! Today's magazines . . . newspapers . . . advertising . . . they would look completely different without the Cubists and the Surrealists. And Picasso was prominent . . . pre-eminent? . . . in both. I never liked the man but I can't deny him that. He's the giant.'

From that moment on, he sensed a certain shift in their relationship, in her estimation of him. Every now and then he caught her looking at him as if to say, ‘I need to know you a lot better than I do.' Behind it, perhaps, was the thought that he could be very
useful
to her. He relaxed even more in her company then; ‘
You
could be useful to
me
' was the motto of his homeland.

And it cuts both ways, of course.

After fifteen minutes or so the Curator of Prints himself asked if he might join them and he, too, listened to Felix's tales in fascination. Before they left he asked if he would return some other day and repeat the stories to a shorthand note taker.

‘You should charge them for it,' Faith told him as they made their way down to the tea room.

‘Don't tell me what to charge for.' He gave her arm a friendly squeeze. ‘I'll suggest an intimate dinner to which he might also invite the Curator of the Tate and the head of the sculpture school at the Slade. Or the Royal College.'

She laughed. ‘I'm sorry, Mister Breit. I shouldn't have . . .'

‘We're from the same mould, Miss Bullen-ffitch. You needn't worry.'

‘But I do. You have such an unworldly air. You seem so vulnerable.'

‘I'm vulnerable when it comes to book design – I make no secret of that!'

They brought their tea and biscuits to one of the tables and she began: ‘You are only vulnerable, if you try to get too technical. Don't! Fogel has first-rate book designers in the house – people who know all about typefaces and ems and points and serifs and stuff like that. He doesn't expect anything like that from you. From you he wants an artistic –' her hands began to shape huge, airy spheres – ‘overall view.'

‘From the depths of my ignorance!'

‘From the profound depths of your artistic sensibility! Listen! You know the difference between an artist and a designer? A designer
always
has logical reasons for whatever he does. He can always say, “I chose these four tints because we can get them with only one colour separation and black.” Even if he really chose them because they're pretty. See? The blighters always have a logical reason. But that's what keeps them down at the level of mere
tactics
. They're just lieutenants and captains – fortunately for
you
, General Breit! Because you can step in with the grand, overall strategy.'

The tutorial continued for another half-hour, until Felix's head was so stuffed with typographical arcana that it almost made a coherent whole.

‘I'm just putting together snippets I've picked up since going to work at Manutius,' she warned him

‘Which is how long?'

‘Two months – a lifetime. Two months
is
a lifetime with Wolf Fogel, believe me. It won't be a sinecure, Mister Breit. It'll be one frantic day each week.'

‘You mean I should ask a lot of money?'

‘Of course.' Her eyes narrowed. ‘What d'you call a lot of money?'

He shrugged. ‘Four hundred?'

She slumped in her chair and asked the cracked glass tabletop, ‘Am I wasting my time with this man?'

‘More?' he asked.

‘
Much
more! Ask for two thousand and stic firmly at sixteen hundred – and that's per volume, mind.'

‘My God!' His hands began to tremble. ‘That's four times what I'm getting in—'

‘Listen – when Fogel meets other publishers he boasts about two things: how
little
he pays his slaves and how
much
he pays his consultants. You ask for four hundred and he'll want you to come in every day. For sixteen hundred he'll be so grateful you can spare us one day a week. This is not the
real
world, you know – it's the world of publishing.'

He liked that ‘us'! ‘Whose side are you on?' he asked.

‘Need you ask? D'you know the secret of success, Mister Breit? Never acquire any skill that might detain you at the bottom. I actually learned shorthand-typing before I realized my mistake – and I'll kill you if you ever tell Fogel I can do it.'

Wednesday, 14 May 1947

The Manutius Press occupied the entire first floor of a nondescript, three-storey, 1930s glass-and-concrete box in Rathbone Mews, not quite two hundred yards from the Saint Giles's Circus end of Oxford Street. The ground floor was a cross between a warehouse and a shop, where all kinds of war surplus was for sale. The commissionaire, a one-armed ex-soldier, showed Felix to the lift. ‘If it doesn't work, sir,' he said, ‘the stairway's down the end there.'

It worked; no steps today.

Faith Bullen-ffitch was waiting for him in the vestibule; the man must have buzzed her. ‘Fogel has booked us for lunch at Schmidt's,' she said as she led him along the corridor. ‘Sorry about the lino. We can't get a requisition to replace it.'

The walls were all of light steel framing filled in up to waist height with asbestos board, painted and repainted many times, the latest coat being cream; above it, frosted wired glass rose to the ceiling – all paper-thin. As they progressed she said, over her shoulder: ‘Editorial, editorial, typing pool, design, Ozalid room, copy, editorial . . .'

Almost all the doors were open, allowing Felix (when he wasn't admiring the way Faith walked) a composite of Utility office desks, none tidy, young men in shirt sleeves, ties loosened, jackets draped over chair-backs, sucking pencils as they read, drumming fingers as they read, typing two-fingered, closing their eyes as they waited for telephone connections. Where she indicated
design
, men and some women stood hunched over machines that looked like some kind of camera obscura, with lights below and a hooded canopy above.

‘Production's in the other corridor,' she concluded. ‘And here's the nerve-centre. Me, Mister Wiggs of accounts – Hans Dreyer, who . . . does all sort of useful things – and—'

‘What's on the top floor?' he asked.

‘Nothing but ghosts.' She opened a door with a flourish. ‘Fogel!'

Fogel leaped out of his chair and pirouetted round his desk with extraordinary grace for so large a man. ‘Breit!' He advanced on Felix, right hand fully extended. His left, holding a large cigar, hovered nearby. He had large, slightly watery eyes of a penetrating blue; their lower lids hung a little slackly, forming cisterns which maintained that watery sheen. His hair was so minutely wavy that it would have been impossible to caricature it, especially with so much brilliantine. His lips were never still – nor were his eyes. ‘I've been looking forward to this meeting ever since Bullen-ffitch told me about crossing you at the
V&A
,' he said. ‘Sit down. Ve go for lunch soon. A sherry? Anything? You smoke a cigar?'

Felix declined all offers. ‘
Bei mir ist es ganz überaschend
 . . .' he began.

‘English!' Fogel looked both pained and apologetic. ‘It's politic in these times. You speak English, no? America? You were a boy in America?'

‘Sure. But I get so little chance to speak German.'

‘Oh you get used to that.' He grinned. ‘Where you live now? They speak German there? Sit, please.' He waved a hand toward a sofa, facing his desk.

‘There's a Swedish girl . . . woman . . . married to an American. She speaks perfect German.'

On the sofa he was a good thirty centimetres beneath Fogel, now back at his desk – which was certainly not from the Utility range.

‘You live in their house?' Fogel asked.

He explained about the Dower House.

‘A kibbutz.' Fogel chuckled. ‘A kibbutz of capitalists! That should be interesting.'

The conversation skated briefly over a number of topics – Fogel's grandfather, Felix's grandfather, the villa on the Wannsee, artists Fogel had known in Vienna, artists Felix had known in Paris and Berlin . . . shame . . . blame . . . survival.

When the cigar was ready for mashing to shreds, Fogel stood abruptly. ‘Vee lunch,' he said. ‘You can speak German to the vaiters. Fritz is very good. He knows all from Schiller. Can you believe – all in the war a German restaurant stays open in London, very popular with
BBC
people, and nobody breaks the vindow glass even! Come – ve go!'

It was barely a quarter of a mile but they took a taxi up Rathbone place and into Charlotte Street, where Schmidt's was to be found. Fogel enlivened the journey with a joke about a diner who tells the waiter that his sauerkraut is not very sour. And the waiter tells him that's because it's actually spaghetti! And the customer laughs and says, ‘Ach so! No, no! You can leave the plate because – for spaghetti –
it's already quite zauer enough
!'

When they were seated at
his
table in Schmidt's, he returned to the joke and said, ‘This is precisely our problem vith modern art, Breit – our series. Ve cannot simply look at a piece of modern art and say it's good, it's bad, it's zo-zo. First ve must ask what it's set out to be – is it Surrealist-Sauerkraut or Symbolist-Spaghetti? Every act of criticism begins with the question:
Papiere bitte, Herr Künstler!
And this, dear Breit, is where you and your artworks will be zo absolutely crucial. They
are
that framevork. You can do it, yes?'

Felix, who hadn't the first notion of what was really wanted of him, even now, played for time. He said he would prefer to look at whatever work had already gone into planning and outlining the series.

But Fogel would have none of it. ‘In that case all you make is an illustration of
our
vork. All you do then is follow us. But you are not our follower – you are our
Führer!
Ve flounder with labels – Dada . . .
Fauves
 . . . Abstract Expressionist. Ve shuffle cards. But you – you come crashing in with just one
zupreme
flash of genius and you pull it all togezzer. You make the grand synthesis in
one
sculpture! Ve light it in many different ways. Ve put it in different backgrounds. Ve combine it vith uzzer material. No?'

Throughout this and several other inspiring monologues Fogel's hands gestured dynamic but unhelpful shapes, neither grace notes toward any kind of sculpture nor rhetorical flourishes to guide Felix through the vehemently sincere opacity of the man's thoughts. The entire meal was shrouded in that same rich fog of allusion and cajolery. Fogel's restless gaze quartered the room as often as it settled on Felix, who now realized that he was going to see nothing of the restaurant and its other clientele – whom both Fogel and Faith Bullen-ffitch seemed to find every bit as interesting as they found him. So, after the Bratwürst and Sauerkraut (both of which he could eat without surrendering any ration coupons), he made an excuse and went to the gents. Most of the other customers, he now saw, were men in city suits but there was a more bohemian group at a cluster of tables at the farther end of the restaurant.
BBC
types, he guessed. Among them was a young woman in a long-sleeved floral-print dress who looked rather interesting. On his return he hung back in the dark of the passage and studied her as long as he dared.

She was statuesque and blonde, with short, tight curls that clung around her head. The one word that occurred to him, watching her every move, was ‘dignified'. She held her head high and spoke without animation to her two companions, both men and both clearly somewhat in awe of her. Her face had a sculptural quality, like a de Lempicka. All her gestures were precise and unhurried. When she spoke, they listened; when they spoke she had no hesitation in cutting in once or twice. As he re-entered the restaurant she broke off what she was saying and stared at him. Their eyes met and, for some reason, Felix found himself responding with the faintest of smiles and the smallest nod of his head before threading his path back to Fogel.

‘Someone you know?' Faith asked.

‘Who?'

‘Never mind.' She gazed pointedly over his shoulder.

He turned and followed her gaze. The de Lempicka woman was talking to Fritz, their waiter.

At the coffee-and-brandy stage Fogel began to bargain over the fee for his work on the series. Remembering what Faith had told him at the
V&A
, he parleyed his way up to a sum that seemed dizzyingly unreal. Curiously, the harder he pushed, the more delighted Fogel appeared.