A War of Flowers (2014) (50 page)

She sat for a moment. In the stillness of the park, the distant traffic was muted like the faint roar of the sea. Taking out her compact, she could see that there was no one behind her and the
leaf raker, having completed his pile of leaves, was gradually moving away. She was about to extract the cigarette packet from her bag when she remembered something that Leo had taught her.

If time allows, perform a trial run.

Rising smartly she walked back through the stone arch and along a mossy gravelled path, fringed with evergreen shrubs. The vegetation was damp from the recent shower, with silver beads of rain
trapped in the clefts of the leaves and a dank, loamy smell rising from the earth. She performed a loop of the park, walking at a measured pace right around a small lake, before returning along a
different path and re-entering the arch. When she did, she discovered that the stone bench was now occupied by a man in a sage-green, Loden overcoat who stood up as she approached.

She had not seen him in five years, but he had barely changed. Leo Quinn was tall and sinewy, leaner, perhaps, than ever, with the same high cheekbones and strong jaw, but a few more lines
around his eyes. His face, though she had half-forgotten it, was instantly familiar; that demeanour, so valuable in a spy, that seemed to register expressions with only a flicker before they were
suppressed. The delicate Irish colouring, fine red-gold stubble on his chin and the brush of hair resistant to pomade. The firm mouth, whose lines appeared to be compressing some intense emotion.
The shock of seeing him knocked the breath out of her. The noise drained from the world and every lineament of her body quivered, like an instrument touched by a bow. After a few seconds she
said,

‘I might have guessed it would be you, after that message you sent.’

‘I didn’t send any message.’

‘You must have done.’

‘What was it?’

‘Ovid? The man from London Films quoted a line of Ovid. I assumed it was a message from you.’

‘It wasn’t.’

Her heart plummeted within her.

‘Shall we walk?’ he said.

They headed out of the park and turned left in the direction of Alexanderplatz. He kept in step, the way she remembered, hands in pockets, eyes straight ahead, not looking at her. He must have
seen her approach the DLB the first time and then waited – knowing she would make a trial run, because that was what he had taught her.

‘What did it say? This line that wasn’t a message?’

‘
Good manners and a fine disposition are the best beauty treatments
.’

He smiled tightly.

‘I see.’

‘What do you see?’ she said, almost stepping off the kerb into the path of a tram, and feeling his hand lightly restraining her.

‘It’s an exercise I set.’

‘You set it? Are you a teacher now?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Oh. I didn’t know.’

He fell silent again. There was so much Clara wanted to say, but she could see no way to breach this wall of awkwardness that had grown up between them, consigning them to an icy formality. All
the times she had dreamt of being reunited with him and now this. His eyes avoided her. All the questions she yearned to ask him over the years hovered unspoken as chill courtesy imprisoned them.
Was he married now? Engaged? Was Leo happy to see her, or did the terrible memory of their parting play through his head, the way it did through hers?

They walked without a route. Where were they heading? Leo kept his hands plunged deep in his pockets, his gaze fixed straight ahead, his steps keeping pace with her own in the way she
remembered, as though they shared a purpose. As they progressed northwards, through the fringes of Friedrichshain towards Prenzlauer Berg, to her consternation she realized that their path was
taking them down a street which would lead straight past the former SIS safe apartment – the yellow-painted, turn-of-the-century block, with white-scrolled detail above the entrance where,
five years ago, he had asked her to marry him. Leo must have detected it too, because a wince went through him and without looking up at it he turned, sharply, to cross the road.

When they were safely past the block and had rounded the corner, he finally spoke.

‘I should apologize. I’m here because of a last-minute change of circumstances. The man who should have been here was diverted. So please forgive me if it seems
inappropriate.’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘Good.’ His mouth was still taut, as though he was holding everything back.

‘I did go yesterday, to the Siegessäule. But I got waylaid,’ she said. ‘There was no way to warn you.’

‘Of course. It doesn’t matter. You found the DLB. I assume you were about to set up another meeting.’

‘Yes. There are things I need to communicate. I need to talk to you, Leo.’

‘By all means.’

‘Not here.’

‘Where?’

‘My apartment.’

‘And that is . . .?’

‘Winterfeldtstrasse. Number 35. Apartment six.’

‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

He made an abrupt turn, rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.

By the time he knocked at her door, Clara was still in a daze. As she let him in Leo took a quick, hungry look around the room, as if he wanted to absorb everything in it at a
single glance, because of what it might say about her. The photographs on the mantelpiece, the potted geranium on the kitchen table, the oil painting of a saxophone player in jagged greys and
browns which he recognized as by the artist Bruno Weiss.

‘You said you had something to show me.’

She went across the drawing room and his eyes followed, taking in the small, blue-covered copy of Rilke’s poems on the desk, as she removed the leather-bound
Mein Kampf
from beneath
its wobbly leg.

‘I found these.’ She prised the page open and took out the stack of cards. He frowned.

‘Eva Braun was banned from keeping a diary by Martin Bormann. He said it was too dangerous because intimate details about the Führer could fall into enemy hands, but Eva
couldn’t stop herself. Her diary was important to her – it was the only place she could talk about her real feelings – so she found a way to hide it. Everyone knew she was a
mad-keen film fan, and she collected cigarette cards of the actors, so it wouldn’t seem strange to take her album around with her, and that’s where she wrote it. All her fears about
Hitler, everything he confided to her about his plans. All in her own handwriting. See.’

She turned over the cards and handed them to Leo, who shuffled through them with growing amazement.

‘How did you get this?’

‘The album was stolen from Eva Braun, and the woman who stole it disappeared on a cruise. It was my godson who found it . . .’

‘Your godson?’

‘Erich Schmidt. Remember?’

It was the first time she had referred to their shared past. He nodded, head bent, still scrutinizing the cards.

‘There’s this one too.’

She felt in her pocket and withdrew the card bearing the portrait of herself. Leo hesitated, squinted at the picture, then turned it over and read.

Last night Wolf told me that after the war he would marry me. When is after the war, I asked. When Poland is subjugated, he explained. Very soon, Poland will cease to exist.

‘This is astonishing.’

‘It’s written proof, Leo. That’s what they need. You must take these back to London. I’ll give you other examples of her handwriting, to verify it. We can’t let the
politicians think it’s all over; that Hitler’s demands have been met and he’s no threat any longer. I heard Richard Dimbleby on the wireless saying Chamberlain’s achievement
was a triumph. It’s dangerous to assume that Hitler has no aggressive intentions. It terrifies me.’

‘Don’t be terrified, Clara. No one I know believes any such thing.’

It was the first time he had used her name and the first time she had heard a note of anything in his voice that was like concern. He stood there, in his coat, while his sea-green eyes,
unreadable as ever, pulled her in like a tide. The stillness between them was almost tangible.

She said, ‘Why did you not come to the Siegessäule?’

‘I did. I was right there. You didn’t see me. But then, you were with a man.’

‘That was Max Brandt. He’s one of ours. Codename Steinbrecher. I wasn’t expecting him there at all. He surprised me.’

‘You had your arm in his.’

‘That was . . . work.’

‘It didn’t look like work,’ his voice was bureaucratically flat, ‘when you kissed him.’

‘I was saying goodbye. He’s a good man, Leo, and he’s in danger. He needed to leave Berlin and he wanted to see me before he did. If you were there, you should have come and
spoken to me.’

‘Should I?’

‘Yes. You should. If you were that close, the least you could do was make contact.’

They stood, separated by only a narrow, trembling distance, and he was so quiet that she feared for a moment he was angry. When he did speak, his voice was low and level.

‘Is that what you think, Clara? The
least
I could do? I watched the only woman I have ever loved arm in arm with another man. I watched you kiss him. And you think I should have
made contact? It was all I could do to walk away.’

Five years stood between them. Five years in which the thought of her had been drumming through his head, the woman who made flesh all the beauty and mystery of women he had ever learned or
written about, whose contours he had traced so often in his mind. He remembered the day, five years earlier, when she had come to him, her face wet and pearls of raindrops captured in her hair, and
he had realized he would never love or want a woman more than her.

She was trying to frame a reply. The words took shape in her mouth, but they struggled on her lips as she tried to quiet her mental turbulence.

‘Are you free?’

‘I haven’t been free since the day I met you.’

His eyes were gulping her in, then he reached out and she felt the tensions of her ordinary life fall from her like chains. She stepped towards him and ran her hand across his face, discovering
the feel of it still inside her fingers, imprinted there. Her body fitted into his perfectly as though they had been designed for each other.

Leo wanted to talk, but knew that if he began to talk, he would not stop, so he kissed her, and then he found that he was shrugging off his coat and jacket, easing his braces, while their mouths
met.

She pulled away.

‘Wait.’

He tried not to stare at her too obviously as she undressed, unpeeling the layers of clothing and uncovering the body he remembered so well until she was entirely naked. She lifted her arms to
free the clasp of her necklace and he recalled the same gesture when she had been standing before a mirror in a West End apartment, her slim forearms raised to comb her hair. The elegance of her
shoulder blades, the wrist where blue veins ran like ore through a stone, and the dark river of her hair flecked with gold.

He took her pearl necklace, set it down, tenderly kissed her naked neck and encircled her trembling body with his own.

Much later, when the evening sun was a faint glow and a few stars already glimmered in the sky, she brought him coffee and toast and sat naked in bed beside him. He was smiling
at her, as though he would never stop. He looked around the room and every item in it, from the desk, to the red armchair, to the pictures on the wall, filled him with indescribable tenderness,
because they belonged to her. Clara’s possessions seemed imbued with her, unlike the contents of his own soulless Bloomsbury flat, which had nothing of him in it, apart from a clock on the
mantelpiece left by his late father, ticking away his life. He sensed a great iceberg of emotion that had lain submerged was melting and overflowing inside him.

Downstairs someone was banging away at a piano, and the dusky light filtering through the leaves of the tree outside cast the room with a greenish tint. Clara felt as though they were suspended
in that aqueous green light, inviolate from everything around them, and she had the momentary bliss of satisfaction, as when a puzzle is completed and every piece has fallen into place.

‘I thought about you all the time. I had no idea where you were.’

‘I tried to forget you. I deliberately attempted to block Germany from my mind. I involved myself in other areas.’

‘And other women?’

His only answer was a shrug, a gesture that dismissed every woman he had met in the past five years, and expressed the absolute irrelevance of her question.

‘I tried different ways of thinking about us. All sorts of metaphors. I had an image of us as two planets, circling each other from afar but never actually leaving each other’s
orbit. Pulled by such gravitational attraction that our paths would always be joined.’

‘Did you worry about me?’

‘Of course.’

She laid her head on his chest, so his voice was a low rumble, reverberating through his flesh and entering hers.

‘Why did you never contact me?’

‘I wrote to you. I must have written a hundred letters. But I never sent them.’

‘I often thought of telephoning. Just to hear your voice.’

He traced a curl of hair around her ear.

‘You probably couldn’t have found me if you’d tried. It’s a strange, transient place, the Intelligence Service. People disappear without trace and you don’t know
whether they’ve been sacked, or rumbled, or simply posted elsewhere. That happened to me, until I was approached by a man called Dansey . . .’

She sat up.

‘Lieutenant Colonel Dansey?’

‘You’ve heard of him?’

‘Guy Hamilton told me about him. What’s he like?’

Leo recalled the tall, lean figure with a clipped moustache and wire-rimmed spectacles who had taken him for lunch at the Savoy Grill.

‘I think he’s very astute. Hamilton probably told you Dansey has firm ideas about the security of our network in Europe. And he’s working on alternatives. He’s looking
for people who will be able to move around Europe fairly easily, if circumstances arise. Who are fluent in several languages and so on. With a valid reason to travel.’