The Hothouse by the East River Page 11

  ‘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 o
ther 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.’

  ‘Come away,’ Paul says to his wife. ‘Come away, love, they’re all dead.’ He squeezes past the next table to reach for Elsa’s sable coat. He presses it round her shoulders and pulls her arm, lifting her to her feet. ‘Being dead’s a drug,’ he says, ‘you’ll get hooked on it.’

  ‘You always said you were coming to America after the war,’ Colonel Tylden says. ‘And so you did. I never thought you would.’

  Elsa wriggles into her coat, laughing lightly.

  ‘Are you going, Elsa?’ the Princess says. ‘Can I give you a lift? My car will be here at ten-thirty. Where are you going? The streets are dangerous.’

  Elsa’s hand is in Paul’s and he is drawing her towards the door, where he stops to collect his coat. While he puts it on she stands patiently waiting, smiling in a very amused way towards the table she has left. Paul takes her arm and they go out into ‘West Fifty-fifth Street.

  ‘If we walk over to Fifth we’ll get a cab,’ Paul says.

  At the corner of Sixth Avenue they stop at the traffic lights. ‘Do you know I think those characters are following,’ Elsa says without looking round.

  Paul glances behind. The group are standing at the kerb outside the bar. Princess Xavier’s Rolls passes at this moment, and as Paul watches, the driver pulls up outside the bar and gets out. The

  Princess is helped and eased into the back seat with her wraps. The three men pile in without looking in Paul’s direction; the driver returns to his seat and drives west with the one-way traffic towards Seventh Avenue.

  Paul turns again to Elsa and takes her arm. ‘I doubt if they’re following us. They didn’t look. They’ve gone,’ he says. But he stops again to see if, at Seventh Avenue, the car turns the corner, which it does.

  He takes Elsa’s arm. ‘It could be that they’ll turn. the block to meet us,’ Paul says. The lights at Sixth Avenue have changed and they cross quickly, his hand on Elsa’s arm and her feet skipping light-heartedly. When they reach the opposite pavement she says, ‘Oh, they’ll follow us, all right,’ but she doesn’t look back.

  Still holding her arm Paul stops at a bright-lit doorway. ‘We can go in here for a while. It looks like some kind of a nightspot,’ he says.

  The nightspot goes by the name of The Personality Cult, announced in. mauve and green lights. Through the door a blue-carpeted staircase descends below street-level to a man in evening clothes who takes the money.

  Mirrored walls reflect them in a dim rosy light. They are passed to the coat-check counter and then to an usher who opens a pink-lit shiny door. Paul propels Elsa through the doorway after the man. They come upon. a sunburst of colour, sound and movement. Paul stops to blink for a moment while Elsa, ahead, turns back to beckon him on. When he catches up with her she says, ‘This deadly body of mine can dance, too.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Paul says. “We’ll dance.’

  VIII

  ‘After the war,’ Paul is saying, ‘Elsa and I are going to settle in America.’

  It is late in the spring of 1944. Paul, in London with Elsa, has just returned from one of those missions to the United States which only key-people of the British services are sent on.. Paul’s official place on these trips is a minor one but he is known as an expert on Serbo-Croat affairs and is always called in as an. aide when. the Balkan situation. is to be discussed. Besides, he once, as a journalist, interviewed Tito, and this has given him a unique place in his branch of Intelligence; moreover, his interpretation of Tito’s politics and predictions of his moves have proved surprisingly accurate. Thus, Paul has been on his third much-envied trip to New York and has come back to England on a Sunder-land aircraft, in the wartime late spring of 1944.

  Paul sits half-reclining on. the bed in the London hotel, leaning back on the pillows and drinking whisky that he has brought back from Bermuda where the plane stopped. Elsa unpacks a parcel of wonders that Paul has brought over for her. She takes out the presents, all unobtainable in England, or rationed — a box of Dupont stockings, a box of Lanvin soap, a bottle of Chanel No. 5 scent, a white frilly blouse, a purple-brown. transparent scarf, a large tin of Ceylon. tea, two packets of Californian raisins and a little antique box to hold saccharine pills. One by one they are looked at and smiled over and gasped about.

  Elsa puts them into Paul’s suitcase. They are leaving for the country in two hours’ time, on the evening train.

  She packs her treasures away. Two raps on the door. ‘Come in,’ says Elsa without looking up. The door opens a little way, and Colonel Tylden’s head, with a jovial off-duty grin, peers round it. Elsa looks up.

  ‘You’re back,’ he says to Paul, looking at the whisky bottle.

  ‘If you bring along your tooth-glass,’ Paul says, ‘you can have some.’

  Tylden goes to collect his glass and reappears m the room. Elsa has finished packing, but her bag is still open.. The new presents lie on the top. Tylden pours whisky in. his glass then pours in some water from the tap of the wash-basin. He, like others from the Compound, generally stays at this hotel when up in London. on official business. Today there are some more Compound people in the hotel, getting ready to go back to the country. There has been a conference with other intelligence units. Always, when this happens, the Compound people for a brief time form a friendly sort of affiance which disappears when they are back in the country, hemmed in with their German collaborators.

  ‘How was it?’ says Tylden.

  ‘After the war,’ Paul is saying, ‘Elsa and I are going to settle in America.’

  ‘Good idea,’ says Tylden, sitting down in a squeaky cane armchair. “Wish I were younger.’

  Two raps on the door. ‘They’ve smelt the booze,’ Tylden says. Elsa opens the door and in flounces Poppy Xavier in her bulging tweed coat and trousers. A vo
ice in the corridor and then another, laughing.

  ‘There are no glasses,’ Elsa says. ‘You have to bring your own.’

  Poppy Xavier now occupies the cane chair, which seems to feel the strain. Colonel Tylden stands leaning against the wall, his drink in his hand. In the corridor, the sound of retreating footsteps, laughing voices, and the footsteps again., first outside the door and now, all coming in to the room. Lanky Miles Bunting, holding two glasses, is followed by a man and a woman in British naval officer’s uniform. Cheerfully, Paul shares out his bottle. From nearly a mile away comes the muffled thud of a bomb. This is one of the V-2s, for which there can be no warning siren, silently approaching and suddenly landing to demolish.

  ‘Another one of those,’ says the naval officer.

  Poppy says, ‘In a way I prefer no warning. You don’t have to scuttle to the cellar.’

  ‘If it’s a direct hit,’ says Tylden, ‘nothing can save you.’ As he speaks a second explosion gives out from a distant part of London.

  ‘Tilbury end, I think,’ says Miles Bunting. They are settled in their compartment and the train is about to leave St Pancras station. Poppy Xavier smiles in the window seat. Elsa lolls next to her. Paul is giving a final push to his suitcase which stands outside in the corridor. Miles Bunting is reading an art book. Colonel Tylden in the seat looking out on the corridor says to Paul, ‘You’ve got a good job waiting for you in America, have you?’

  ‘Quite good. Columbia University.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘And I think we’ve got somewhere to stay. A rather nice flat belonging to some friends of my family. They’ll keep it for us. It looks out on the East River. Do you know New York?’

  ‘I know it well,’ says Colonel Tylden.

  A V-2 bomb hits them direct just as the train starts pulling out. The back section of the train, where they are sitting, and all its occupants, are completely demolished.