The Hothouse by the East River (15 page)

Here in
the green depths of England, in this spring of 1944 a perfectly innocent person
can panic; better a P.O.W. camp in the green depths of Germany together with one’s
own unit, all in it together. Paul’s mind fidgets around with this thought.
Better off in the army, getting ready for the Invasion, preparing, who knows,
to meet your death; it is not so very appalling when you rattle and bash over
the countryside in an armoured car, in a convoy, and life suddenly comes to an
end. Better than burrowing like a mole with secret work under the omniscient
eyes of these creeping Jesuses in soldiers’ uniforms or clean brown corduroys.
Colonel Tylden, the Chief of Security comes in. He shakes their hands. He
apologises for troubling them. He pulls up his chair and sits down. Overture to
Act I.

Since
Paul was last called in, Elsa too has been interrogated alone. After a month’s
silence, it is still apparently the question of Kiel. Now they have suddenly
been invited together. It is almost like a marriage ceremony, so closely does
this experience unite them, seeing that the security officer does not care a
damn whether his questions will separate them or not. All he wants to know
about is Kiel. What does it matter, Paul thinks, as he feels Elsa’s
apprehension from where she sits at the opposite angle of Colonel Tylden’s
desk, half facing both men. — What does it matter what there was between her
and Kiel, and what Kiel might have been to me? All that matters is that we’ve
been brought together, at short notice, without chance of rehearsal.

It’s
something, Paul thinks, to know suddenly how much trust there is between us.
After all, this experience is something.

‘There
are just one or two loose ends…’ Colonel Tylden pulls at the right-hand
drawer of his desk. It does not move. He gives a self-deprecating little laugh.
‘Locked, I always forget.’ He reaches to the table behind him from which he
takes a small dark green government-issue metal box. This he sets before him
with due system. He opens the mysterious object. It is nothing but a
card-index. Putting his fingers behind the last card at the back he brings
forth a key. With this key he opens the locked drawer in his desk, saying with
a smile, ‘Now you know where we keep our secret of secrets.’ He opens the
drawer, pulls out a file, lays it before him, jerks his arms to ease the
sleeves of his coat, gets down to business and opens the file.

He
thinks we are school-children, Paul thinks, because he himself has the brain. of
a school-boy. Colonel Tylden was responsible for taking Kiel on., and plainly
he is now trying to make up a report from a lot of tangled irrelevancies in
order to distract attention. from the fact that he was taken in by Kiel.

‘You
both saw him frequently, alone,’ the officer says. ‘Did you often. see him
together?’

‘Yes,
fairly often.,’ Paul says, ‘and in company with others, of course.’

‘We did
have to work with him,’ Elsa says.

‘Oh
yes, I know. And you two have been on separate shifts. Did you ever see him
together outside working hours? Not separately, but together?’

‘We met
him in the village not long before he left,’ says Elsa, ‘I think.’

“We met
him about ten days before … Let me think, yes, over a week before he went.
‘We met him in the village about three in the afternoon and stopped to talk
about five minutes, that’s all.’

‘What
did you talk about?’

‘Really,
I don’t remember,’ Paul says. ‘Do you, Elsa?’

‘No, it
was just a chat, quite cheerful.’

‘Nothing
important, anyway,’ says Paul, ‘or we would have remembered.’ And indeed he is
trying to remember what they talked about when he had walked down the village
street with Elsa that day, and encountered Kiel.

‘Kiel
was unaccompanied?’

‘Yes,
he must have got leave to go out by himself.’

‘He was
in a happy mood?’

‘Quite
cheerful,’ Elsa has said, and it is simply true. Colonel Tylden, not by any
perceptible movement or expression, but merely by keeping silent three seconds
longer than they expect after Elsa has given this reply, appears to think it
not true. He goes on. ‘Cheerful?’ he says.

‘Yes,’
says Paul. ‘I remember at least it was a fine day and I don’t see there was
anything special for one to be uncheerful about.’ Colonel Tylden is making a
little note on a pad in some tiny cypher. Paul does not let his eyes dwell on
this and Elsa also looks politely away from the note-pad. Obviously he is
making a memo to check whether the weather was fine in the afternoon ten days
before Kiel left or whether it rained.

‘It’s
difficult to be sure of the date,’ Paul says.

The
Colonel leans back and folds his arms. ‘Fine-looking chap, Kiel, don’t you
think?’ He is addressing Paul.

‘Awfully
good-looking,’ Paul says. ‘He could be an advertisement for breakfast food.’

The
Colonel gives a relaxed laugh. He looks at Elsa. ‘What do you think of him?’

‘I
thought he was fun,’ Elsa says, ‘for a German.’

‘In
what way, fun?’

‘His
sense of humour,’ she says. ‘And one wouldn’t have thought he took anything
seriously.’

‘Evidently
he did,’ says Tylden and flicks the papers in the files. What about those loose
ends he has to tie up, thinks Paul. When is he coming to the loose ends?

But
evidently Colonel Tylden’s loose ends are destined to float in the vague
cosmos; he discerns that the couple are not to be embarrassed by his questions.
He looks suddenly worn out by the problem. He flicks the pages of the file and
sighs. After all, he has to take responsibility for Kiel. Half-heartedly he
checks various points from the statements he has previously obtained separately
from them.

To
Elsa: ‘You went for walks with him. Did you notice anything strange?’

‘No,’
says Elsa. ‘He once climbed a walnut tree at one o’clock in the morning in
between one broadcast and another, but I thought it was fun, not strange.’

‘Yes,
you told me that.’

To
Paul: ‘You had this fight with him, of course?’

‘Yes,’
says Paul, ‘but as I said it wasn’t anything to do with the work. It was just
one of those things that happen when one is cooped up in a group.’

‘Quite,’
says Tylden. And he gives up the struggle, says goodbye, and they leave.

They
have put on their shabby raincoats and are walking with their bicycles down the
park that leads from Security Headquarters to the main drive. Although they are
in the open air, with no one near them, the instinct to keep silent lingers
until they have passed through the country gate.

In the
broad drive they do not mount their bicycles. It is an avenue of plane trees,
dripping with luminous rain. They walk slowly. It would have been possible,
Paul thinks, for us to talk sincerely about Kiel if this meeting had not taken
place. Now it’s too delicate a subject. I will probably never know exactly
what Kiel was to her, she will always wonder if Kiel was anything to me. After
all this questioning, one’s denials and protestations would be slavish. Kiel
has talked; God knows what he’s said about us.

Innocently
Elsa says, ‘You’d think he had some reason to set us against each other, asking
us along together to probe about Kiel.’

‘I
don’t think he thought of our feelings,’ Paul says. ‘Tylden just wanted
information and if his questions were inconvenient for us, he simply wouldn’t
care. I see his point of view. It’s his job to be ruthless.’

‘Very
embarrassing,’ Elsa says.

Silently
Paul cries, Help me! Help me! I don’t want to hear, to know, her story one way
or another. ‘Kiel is gone,’ Paul says. ‘Forget him.’

“Well,
everyone’s curious to know what’s happened to him.’

‘I
expect news will filter through sooner or later.’ They come to the gate of the
park, mount their bicycles and ride towards the Compound through the warm rain.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Paul says. ‘Spy or no spy, Kiel is a rotter.’

‘He’s
probably a loyal German. at heart,’ she says. ‘He probably feels justified.’

‘German
or Zulu,’ Paul says, ‘if he ever did any good it was by oversight.’

The
rain has petered out. They dismount at the bridge and stand for a while
watching the pebbly river. Since Kiel’s departure, Paul has changed his hours
of duty to coincide with Elsa’s. Four in the afternoon till midnight. Now that
Kiel has gone, who knows who else? He thinks of the other men at the Compound,
the English, the refugees and the German prisoners. Perhaps, he thinks, none of
them can quite replace Kiel for a woman, only, perhaps, Miles Bunting, and Elsa
doesn’t get on with him. Perhaps none of them, but who knows?

‘Don’t
worry, Paul,’ Elsa says, suddenly. ‘Nobody will believe a word Kiel says. How
could they?’

‘Forget
Kiel, he’s nothing but a spent breath to us.’

He is
sitting at his obscure table in the bar on West Fifty-fifth Street. ‘Same
again,’ he says to the waiter.

‘What
was it?’

‘Scotch
on the rocks,’ he says. He pushes farther away from him a plate of small
gherkins that the waiter has put on the table. The band is resting. The bar is
now half-full, and more people arrive from time to time through the double
doors, pausing to look round for the best vacant spot or perhaps someone they
know. Paul tries to focus his hearing amongst the general chatter and laughter,
and echoing glass, on the sounds coming from the central table where Elsa is
sitting with the Princess Xavier, Miles Bunting and the man who might be
Mueller, might be Kiel. The Princess is sitting with her back to Paul,
expansively conversing to left and right, with her fur wraps hanging over the
back of her chair. Paul watches the lips of the other three, he strains to
listen, but catches nothing of what they are saying.

The
bar-waiter stops at their table and takes an order: their second round. Elsa
nibbles an almond, and laughs. She is looking straight at Paul, now, but does
not appear to see him. She is wearing her new red dress with a matching short
coat, and over the back of her chair her sable coat, too, is thrown back, the
furs, mysterious and rich, spilling over the brown satin lining. Where did she
get her money?

Where?
And what is she doing here in this place at this time? One should live first,
then die, not die then live; everything to its own time.

Miles
Bunting pays for the drinks when they arrive. He drinks beer; Kiel has a dark
Scotch or Bourbon placed in front of him with a soda-bottle fizzing from its
mouth; Elsa’s drink is colourless, vodka or gin. as usual, and comes
accompanied by a small yellow-labelled tonic bottle. The Princess has ordered
something reddish-brown, God knows what it is. The waiter wipes some spilt
liquor from the table, flicks the cloth over his other arm and goes to his next
customers.

Miles
Bunting raises his beer mug towards Elsa with a smile that reveals for a moment
through his middle-aged flesh the angular and nervous features of his youth.
But why is he toasting Elsa? He was always against Elsa, she was afraid of him.
He used to snub her. Paul sees her again as she sat in the prefabricated hut,
crying over her typewriter, and Miles Bunting coming out of the door into the
moonlight of the Compound. In that past there was no word of the future. How
has it come about? Paul thinks, they will have to go back to the dead, they
must all go back. The Dixieland music starts up with a shock of sound. The
drummer beats the drum and the cymbals, the piano-keys pelt into the bloodstream,
the people in the bar either stop talking or start shouting to each other.
Elsa leans her elbow on the table, rests her head in her hand and looks dreamily
from one to the other of her companions.

Some
new arrivals appear at the door, stand a while looking round and, finding
insufficient space, go out again. As they leave, a man in a raincoat with a
sheepskin collar makes his way in. He smiles when he sees Elsa’s table, makes
straight for it and, still smiling, obtains a chair to join the party. He does
not speak for a while, indicating as an excuse the music-vibrant air around
them.

A young
couple come and sit at Paul’s table. He shifts his chair politely to make more
space for the woman, then scrutinises the couple rather anxiously, timid with
some unnecessary fear. ‘Have I seen them before? Do they, too, belong to my
life?’ Paul pulls his glass towards him. The couple are not known to him at
all. He looks again over to Elsa’s table. It is the man in the raincoat who has
just come in. whom Paul recognises; he knew who it was, really, the moment he
came in. Colonel Tylden. Tylden is here in this bar in the heart of Manhattan,
now seated beside Elsa, talking cheerfully to her as if he saw her last week,
and the week before that.

The
music stops. Paul gets up and goes over to Elsa’s table. She is saying, ‘My son
is an aesthete and my daughter is, well, she’s still deciding.’

Miles
Bunting looks up at Paul. ‘Oh, look who’s here!’ he says.

‘Paul,’
says the Princess. ‘Paul,’ says Elsa. ‘Make room for Paul,’ says Princess
Xavier, ‘and get another chair.’