Tremor of Intent (6 page)

I was going to say something about ends not justifying means, but I remembered that it was right for prisoners-of-war to drop razor-blades into the enemy's pigswill and that, if they'd bombed Coventry, we'd bombed Dresden. That if they'd been wrong we'd been wrong too. That killing babies was no way to kill Hitler, who'd had to kill himself anyway at the end. That history was a mess. That Fascism had been the inevitable answer to Communism. That the Jews could sometimes be as Father Byrne had portrayed them. I shuddered. Was somebody brainwashing me? I looked at Brigitte, but she, replete, glowed only with sex. I clenched my teeth, wanting her on the floor then and there, Roper looking on. But I merely said: ‘You've joined Father Byrne in condemning the warmongering English. And, of course, the money-grubbing Jews. You two would get on well together now.'

‘That horrible Church,' said Roper passionately. ‘Jewish meekness, turning the other cheek, draining the blood from the race. Nietzsche was right.' Brigitte nodded.

‘What the hell do either of you know about Nietzsche?' I asked. ‘I bet neither of you's ever read a word of Nietzsche.'

Brigitte began: ‘My father –' Roper said, mumbling a bit: ‘There was a very good summary of his philosophy in the
Reader's Digest
.' He was always honest. ‘– at school,' ended Brigitte. I said: ‘Oh, my God. What do you want – blood and iron and black magic?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I want to get on with my work. The first thing is to get my degree. And then research. No,' he repeated, somewhat dispirited now (perhaps that was overeating, though: he'd tucked away half a chicken and a slab of ham and a bit each of the four kinds of cheese, all with bread in proportion). ‘I don't want anything that causes war or could be used to make war more terrible than it's been already. All the dead, all the innocent children.'

‘My father,' said Brigitte.

‘Your father,' agreed Roper. It was as though they were toasting him. And for a moment it was as if the Second World War had been conjured expressly to kill off Herr Whoever-he-was.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘And my Uncle Jim, and the two children evacuated to my Aunt Florrie's house who found a bomb in a field, and all the poor bloody Jews and dissident intellectuals.'

‘You say right,' said Brigitte. ‘Bloody Jews.'

‘We must never be allowed to start another war like that one,' said Roper. ‘A great nation in ruins.'

‘Not starving, though,' I said. ‘Plenty of Danish butter and fat ham. The best-nourished bastards in Europe.'

‘Please,' said Roper, ‘do not call my wife's people bastards.'

‘What is that word?' asked Brigitte. ‘Many strange words he knows, your fiend.'

‘Friend,' I amended.

‘A great nation's bones picked over by Yanks and Bolshevists,' said Roper, ‘and the French, a rag of a nation, and the British.' Strangely, two cathedral choirs sang in my head, antiphonally:
Babylon the Great is fallen – If I forget thee, O Jerusalem
. I said: ‘You always wanted a unified universe. Tautology and all. Remember that no science now can be wholly for peace. Rockets are for outer space but also for knocking hell out of enemies. Rocket fuel can speed man into the earth or off it.'

‘How did you know about rocket fuel?' asked Roper, wide-eyed. ‘I never mentioned –'

‘Just a guess. Look,' I said, ‘I think I'd better be going.'

‘Yes,' said Brigitte very promptly, ‘be going.' I looked at her, wondering whether to be nasty back, but her body got in the way. Perhaps I'd said enough already. Perhaps I'd been discourteous. I still had fragments of Uncle Otto's ham in my back teeth. Perhaps I was ungrateful. I said to Roper: ‘It's a messy sort of journey back where I'm going.'

‘I thought you were in Preston.'

‘No, a country house some way outside. A matter of a last bus.'

‘Well,' he said unhappily, ‘it's been nice having you. You must come again some time.' I looked at Brigitte to see if she would corroborate that in smile, nod, word, but she sat stony. So I said: ‘
Danke schön
,
gnädige Frau
.
Ich habe sehr gut gegessen
.' And then, like a fool, I added: ‘
Alles
,
alles über Deutschland
.' Her eyes began to fill with angry tears. I got out without waiting to be shown out. Jolting on the bus into town, I kept seeing Brigitte's great
Urmutter
breasts wagging and jumping inside their white cotton blouse. Roper would undo a button, and then the catechism would start: ‘Whose fault was it all?' – ‘England's, England's' (most breathily). It would continue, intensifying, to the point where she would lose interest in catechising. I turned myself into Roper. Oh yes, cupping a fine firm huge Teutonic breast I too would breathily revile England, would blame my own mother for the war, would say, preparing for the plunge, that not enough Jews had been plunged into gas-chambers. And afterwards I would take it all back, though not in any chill disgust of
post coitum
: rather I would call her an evil bitch, very hot, and strafe her. And then it would start again.

That was a significant event in Roper's life, sir. I mean his going into the death-camp and seeing evil for the first real time – not the pruriently reported evil of the Sunday rags, but stinking palpable evil. For the sake of scientific rationalism he'd jettisoned a whole system of thought capable of explaining it. I mean Catholic Christianity; face to face with an irrational emptiness he'd made himself a sucker (ah, how literally) for the first coherent system of blame that had been presented to him. There's another letter I haven't mentioned, a letter in reply to that letter of mine advising him to get stuck into the German women:

‘I've tried to do what you said. It's reminded me in a queer way of the old days of going to confession. Blasphemous, those still in the fold would think. I met this girl in a small beer-place, she was
with a German man. I was a bit drunk and a bit more forward than I'd have normally been. The man sort of slunk off when I came to their table. I think it was her brother. Anyway, I bought her several beers and gave her three packets of Player's. To cut a long story short, before I properly knew what was happening I found we were lying on the grass in this sort of park place. It was a lovely evening –
Mondschein
, she kept saying. That was right for what they call LOVE. Then, when I saw part of her bared body under the moon, it all came over me – that camp and all that bare wasted flesh there, not at all like hers. I sort of grabbed hold of her in a kind of hate you could call it, and I even screamed at her while I was doing it. But she seemed to like it. “
Wieder wieder wieder
,” she seemed to keep on crying. And then it seemed to me that I'd done wrong to her, raped her even, but, worse than that, I was sort of corrupting her by all this, she took such pleasure in what was meant to be hate but became a great joy I was sharing with her. I loathe myself, I could kill myself, the guilt I feel is shocking.'

The day before I got this letter I received a telegram from Roper. It said: ‘
DESTROY LETTER WITHOUT READING PLEASE PLEASE WILL WRITE EXPLAINING
.' He never did write explaining. What he did instead was to expiate his fancied wrong to the woman shrieking for more in the moonlight. Girl rather than woman. Brigitte must have been very young at that time.

It was a long time, time enough to forget Uncle Otto's smoked salmon and coffined ham and his niece's unpleasantness, before Roper and I met again. When we did meet again, he was, overfulfilling his wife's prophecy, a
real
doctor, not just, like horrible dead Goebbels, a man with a first degree. He rang me up at home,
very breathy and very close to the telephone, as though it were an erogenous zone of Brigitte's. Urgent, he said. He needed advice, help. I could guess what it was going to be.
Wieder wieder wieder
.
Ach
, the lovely bloody
Mondschein
. I suggested a Soho restaurant the following evening. A German restaurant, since he liked German things so much. There Doctor Roper, white hope of research in cheap rocket fuel, got very drunk on sparkling hock and moaned and whined. His wife was playing away. And he loved her so much still, he said, and he'd given her everything any decent woman could – ‘What exactly has happened?' There was a vinous touch of satisfaction in my voice; I could hear it and it was hard to suppress.

‘He was in the house one night when I got back late, a great red German lout, and he had his coat off and his shirt open, a big fair hairy chest, and he was drinking beer out of a can and he had his feet on the settee, and when I walked in he wasn't one bit abashed but just grinned at me. And she grinned too.'

Abashed. ‘Why didn't you bash him and kick him out?'

‘He's a professional wrestler.'

‘Oh.' I had a swift vision of Roper on the ropes, neatly cat-cradled in them, a parcelled crucifixion. ‘How did all this start?'

‘We took this house, you see, and it's in a fairly slummy part of London, because houses are the very devil to get in London but –'

‘You've been in London long?'

‘Oh yes.' He stared at me as though his coming to London had been headlined in the more reputable newspapers. ‘Hard to get, as I say, but the Department helped and we didn't want a flat any more, and Brigitte said that she was to be an
Englische Dame
with stairs to go up and down –'

‘Come to this wrestler.'

‘We went into a pub for a drink, you see, in Islington it was, and then there was this big blond man talking bad English with a very strong German accent. She spoke to him, talking about
Heimweh
– that's homesickness, she was homesick, you see, for somebody to
speak German to, and she found that he came from about thirty miles from Elmshorn. So that was it pretty well. He's under contract to wrestle in England or something and he said he was lonely. A very big man and very strong.'

‘Wrestlers usually are.'

‘And very ugly. But we had him back for supper.' Roper spoke as though ugliness would not normally get you an invitation. ‘And very – you know, absolutely no intelligence, with this big grin and his face all shiny.'

‘That was after eating, I take it?'

‘Oh no, all the time.' Roper was growing as obtuse as his wife to the tones of irony or sarcasm. ‘But he did eat like a pig. Brigitte cut him more and more bread.'

‘And she's rather taken to him, has she?'

Roper began to tremble. ‘Taken to him! That's good, that is. I came home one night, late again, very tired, and you know what I found?'

‘You tell me.'

‘On the job.' Roper's voice rose. His hands clenched and unclenched. They seized the sparkling hock and poured a sizeable tremulous measure. Then, panting, he said, loudly so that people looked at him, ‘On the bloody job. I saw them. His big bloody muscles all working away at it, enjoying it, and she was there underneath him crying out
Schnell schnell schnell
.' The solitary waiter, a German, took this for a summons and started to come too. I waved him away. To Roper I said: ‘Oh no.'

‘Oh bloody yes. And even he had the bloody grace to see this was all filthy and wrong and he didn't grin this time, oh no. He slunk out, carrying half his clothes. You know, it was as though he expected me to hit him.'

‘You should have knocked the daylights out of him,' I said. An improbable idea. ‘And so that's the end of that. I never thought that marriage would work, somehow.'

He looked at me wet-lipped. Part of his dithering now seemed out of shame. ‘But it did, you know,' he mumbled. ‘It took me a long time to forgive her. But, you see, seeing them like that – I don't quite know how to put this. Well, it gave us a new lease of life, in a way.'

I understood. Horrible, but life remains life. A new lease of. ‘You mean, even though you were tired coming back home at night, you were able to –'

‘And she was sort of penitent.'

‘So she should be. If I ever caught any wife of mine –'

‘You wouldn't understand.' A flash of drunken sweetness peered, then went. ‘You're not married.'

‘All right. So now what's your trouble?'

‘It didn't last all that long,' he mumbled. ‘It was working late and not eating enough, I suppose. I've been having this bit of tummy trouble, canteen food.'

‘This was all right, though, was it?'

‘Oh yes.' We'd had
Kalbsbraten
followed by
Obsttorte
. Roper, in a distracted kind of passion, as though waging a secondary war at threshold level, had cleaned my plates as well as his own. ‘She's been going on at me as an effete Englander, no ink in my pen, no pen at all, only a little
Bleistift
. Now I've become one of those who encouraged the Jews to engineer Germany's downfall.'

‘Well, you always were, weren't you? As an Englishman, I mean?'

‘I'd seen the light,' said Roper in dark gloom. ‘That's what she used to say. Now she's brought this bloody big blond beast back again.'

‘So there was a sort of interim, was there?'

‘He was on the Continent, doing a kind of tour. Now he's in London, wrestling in the suburbs.'

‘Has he been back in the house?'

‘For a late supper. Not for anything else. But I can't vouch for what happens in the afternoons.'

‘You condoned it, you bloody fool. They've both got you now.'

‘He's not abashed any more. He grins and goes to the fridge to get more beer. She calls him Willi. But the name he wrestles under is Wurzel. On the posters it says
Wurzel der Westdeutsche Teufel
.'

‘Wurzel the mangle.'

‘The West German Devil is what it means.'