All My Sins Remembered (62 page)

Grace’s expression softened when she looked at Julius. Some of the stiffness seemed to melt out of her rigid back. ‘Will you do what they say? If you won’t leave Berlin? Pilgrim and Isolde will look after you.’

‘I shall be here,’ Clio said coldly, but Grace ignored her.

‘I have to go back to London tomorrow, Julius. I want to know that you are not in any danger.’

‘From Hitler and Streicher and the Jew-hating bully-boys,’ Clio hissed. Rafael took her hand and drew it towards him, restraining her.

‘Will you do what Rafael tells you?’ Grace insisted.

Wearily, Julius nodded his head. ‘Yes.’

It was agreed that Pilgrim and Isolde would bring him food, and books and newspapers, and whatever else he might need. There was no more discussion.

When the others were preparing to leave Grace said, ‘I am going to stay here for a while with Julius.’

Clio saw his face. It was as if the evening’s humiliation had never happened.

After they had gone, Grace half knelt in front of Julius. He was still sitting in the same position, with his head bent. Grace put her hands on his shoulders, then leant slowly forwards until their foreheads touched. Their profiles seemed to reflect one another, like the Victorian paper silhouettes Grace had cut out as a girl.

‘I’m sorry for this evening,’ Grace whispered. She could not have borne for all the rest of them to know how much it had disgusted her, but it was important to make the confession to Julius.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Julius answered. At that moment it was the truth.

He put his fingers under her chin, and tilted her face upwards. Then he kissed her on the mouth, but so lightly that his lips only brushed against hers.

Grete and Rafael took Clio back to the Adlon Hotel. She was crying as they crossed the Pariser Platz, and the tears left icy trails on her cheeks in the cold wind. The three of them kissed goodnight, clinging together for an instant, before the Wolfs melted away into the darkness. The concierge in his buttons and braid handed Clio in through the heavy doors. As she crossed the ornate foyer under the chandelier she told herself, This is the last time. Tomorrow I will find lodgings.

The decision seemed to commit her to Berlin.

On the evening of February 27, 1933, Clio prepared dinner for Rafael in her new room. Behind a curtain in the deepest recess of the room there was a tiny kitchen cubicle with a cold-water sink. Frau Kleber, the landlady, had drawn back the curtain with a flourish when she showed off the bedsitter to Clio.

‘See! Your own cooking place. You will not have to prepare your food with Kleber and me in the kitchen downstairs, and you will be able to entertain just who you like in fine style.’

Clio had ignored the broad wink, but she had taken the room. It was expensive, eighteen marks a week without board, but it was in a tranquil street in Wilmersdorf not far from Rafael’s apartment. She had arranged her clothes in the creaking wardrobe and placed a few books on the shelf over the narrow bed. It was an odd place to call home, she thought, but after three days she felt more comfortable in the room than she had ever done in Gower Street with Miles.

This was the first time she had entertained Rafael. She had enjoyed an afternoon trip to the local street market to buy food and flowers, and she had spent an hour chopping vegetables and braising meat in the blistered aluminium pan provided by Frau Kleber.

When Rafael arrived they had made love and then, laughing at his protests, Clio had climbed out of bed to heat up the dinner and set knives and forks on her rickety table. For a little while Rafael lay and watched her, but then he grew restless and turned on the new wireless that stood on the table beside the bed.

The wireless had been his house-warming present to her.

‘So you will always know what is happening,’ he had said. ‘Or at least, what is happening that they want you to know about.’

Clio remembered that she was polishing chipped plates when she heard the wireless announcer’s report.

‘The Reichstag building is on fire.’

They listened to the bulletin in silence. Clio put the plates down, very carefully, in their respective places.

‘We should go and look,’ Rafael said, when the announcement was over.

‘What about the dinner?’ The disruption of their evening dismayed her. She felt as if huge outside events were thrusting clumsy fingers into their small world.

‘We can come back and eat dinner later,’ he told her.

They took the U-bahn together to Potsdamer Platz, and then walked down Friedrich Ebert Strasse in the direction of the Reichstag. The street would normally have been almost deserted, but now it was crowded with people, all moving in the same direction, with their faces turned up to the night sky.

It was a dismal, rainy evening. They should have been walking in near darkness, but instead of the dark there was an ugly red glow licking the undersides of the clouds and reflecting back from the puddles. When they came closer they saw that the whole sky above the Tiergarten was like a curtain of flames.

Clio and Rafael stopped in front of the Brandenburg Gate. The crowds were very dense, held back by cordons of police. Clio’s first, startled impression was of how quiet the mass of people was. They whispered to one another, but no one shouted or waved or drew attention to himself.

She looked up at the burning building.

The great, heavy dome stood out against the dull red sky, a powerful two-dimensional black silhouette in a veil of coquettish sparks. From the windows in the square towers on the eastern side columns of flame suddenly leapt upwards, and clouds of smoke poured upwards into the pall that hung over the old trees of the Tiergarten. The Reichstag on fire was beautiful, and monstrous.

Firemen had run ladders up against the wings of the building. Their tiny black figures danced among the intricate ornaments of the roofline. In the crimson light even the jets of water from their fire hoses looked like spurts of liquid fire.

Rafael began to shoulder his way through the crowd. Clio wormed her way behind him until they reached the ropes of the cordon. There was a man standing at the very front, staring impassively at the flames as they reached higher. Rafael shook his arm, and when the man turned Clio recognized one of the
habitués
of the Café Josef.

‘How did it start?’ Rafael asked.

The man grinned sardonically, his eyebrows reaching into reddish peaks. ‘Arson. Marvellously well prepared, so I hear. Dozens of bottles of petrol and bundles of rags soaked in it, all stowed in strategic places, everywhere in the building. And then the man responsible ran right round and set light to them all.’

‘
One
man?’

‘How could one man have done it?’ Clio asked, bewildered.

The man’s demonic smile faded. ‘Ask Goering how,’ he snapped. Then he elbowed his way past them and was swallowed up in the crowd.

Clio and Rafael stood pressed together, shifted from side to side by the movements of the mass like stones rolled by the tide. The roar of the fire was like a deep voice, and the whispers of the people sounded puny and inconsequential against it. Clio strained to hear what they were saying.

‘A man has been arrested. A communist. He has confessed everything.’

‘They will pay for this. They must be made to pay.’

Clio looked up at Rafael. She saw that his eyes glittered, reflecting the red light like everything around them.

They stood at the cordon for a long time. They were too far away to hear what he promised, or even see him inside the protection of the cordon and the ranks of his SA, but Goering had come to look at the fire. His words were, ‘We will show no mercy. Every communist must be shot on the spot.’

At last, the fire burnt lower. The ribs of the building still glowed crimson, but there were no more jets of fire.

Rafael and Clio turned away with the other onlookers and their whispers, and made their way back to Wilmersdorf.

Neither of them wanted the food that Clio had prepared. They drank the bottle of wine that she had bought and listened to the account of the burning of the Reichstag as it was broadcast.

The fire was reported as having been started by a Dutch communist named Van Der Lubbe. He had been arrested in one of the corridors of the Reichstag with a lighted torch in his hand. Although he had lost his coat and shirt he was carrying his Party membership card in the pocket of his trousers.

Rafael leant across and twisted the brown knob. Silence flooded back into Clio’s room.

‘What did your friend mean when he said, “Ask Goering”?’

‘He meant Goering is the man who will know how and why it was done.’

It was very late when Rafael went home to his own apartment, but Clio knew that she would not sleep. She took a cheap exercise book out of the drawer of her table and began to write a description of what she had seen and heard.

Sixteen

Elizabeth enjoyed working in the library. From her student days onwards she had always felt at home in libraries, but the London Library was her favourite. She liked the book stacks with their iron grille floors that gave unsettling views of the tiers above and below, and the smell of old bindings, and the clank of readers’ feet on the stairs linking the floors. She found the monotonous hum of the overhead strip lights a soothing accompaniment to her dipping and browsing along the packed shelves. Sometimes she sat down at one of the little tables at the end of an aisle, partly to read whichever book she had most recently winkled out of its order but also to enjoy the absence of daylight, the solitude, the sense of enclosure within a humming shell of concentration.

She was fond of the reading room, too, with its views of the trees in St James’s Square and the row of leather armchairs containing old men noisily asleep. It was satisfying to spread out her apparatus of file index and lined pad beside the stack of books on one of the tables, with an uninterrupted day of calm literary pursuit ahead of her. It was much better than trying to work at the kitchen table at home, where the children or the telephone interrupted her every ten minutes.

Today, however, she was heading for the Library’s basement where the newspaper archives were stored. She was pursuing Grace’s Parliamentary speeches through the coverage they had received in the contemporary press. It was laborious work, but there was the occasional reward of some editorial comment or gossip feature set alongside the political report that made it more worthwhile than a straight reading of Hansard.

Elizabeth had a biographer’s enthusiasm for her research. It was absorbing to pursue the confetti details of another life and then to piece the scraps together, fragment by fragment, to make a picture. Her problem was that the research sometimes became more than a means to an end. In the past it had become an end in itself as she burrowed more deeply, piling up more and more of the little snippets and neglecting the broad outline of the picture.

It would not happen this time, with her biography of Grace Brock. Elizabeth had firmly resolved that it would not happen. She needed the money, the portion of her publisher’s advance that would become due on delivery of the completed manuscript. The roof of the house needed expensive attention, and the central heating boiler would not last another winter. She must finish the book, and do it quickly.

But for today, just today, the yellow newspapers with their breath of a different time were so beguiling …

The bound volumes of
The Times
from 1931 to 1940 were shelved together at the far end of the room. Elizabeth took off her knitted jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, then set out her pad and pencils ready for work. She ran her forefinger along the row of tall red spines with their gilt lettering and took out the volume marked January–June 1933.

Elizabeth turned the brittle pages with great care. The library was transferring its newspaper collection to microfiche, but for the time being she could derive an almost sensual pleasure from handling the real thing. It was like holding a taut thread that stretched directly between Grace and herself.

She settled in her place, propped her chin on her hand, and began to read.

The dry, sober language of
The Times’s
reports and leaders unrolled in her head. She read the accounts of the Reichstag fire and then of the Enabling Bill that allowed Chancellor Adolf Hitler rather than President Hindenburg to rule Germany by decree. There were magisterially disapproving descriptions of the violence and intimidation practised by the Nazis during the March 1933 election campaign, and of the persecution of Jews and boycotting of Jewish businesses throughout Germany.

Elizabeth turned forwards, and backwards again. Grace’s name suddenly leapt out at her from the columns of newsprint. There was a report of a speech that she had made to the House in defence of freedom of opinion. She had been referring to a violent confrontation in Piccadilly Circus in which a handful of Mosley’s Blackshirts, peddling anti-Semitic pamphlets, had been mobbed and threatened by an angry crowd.

Grace had been careful to disassociate herself from any taint of anti-Semitism on her part. But the newspaper had quoted her words. ‘I would defend to the death the right of British men, and women, to hold their own opinions, if those opinions are neither treasonable nor directly threatening to the common good.’

Elizabeth’s mouth curved in a smile. She picked up one of her sharp pencils and copied the report word for word on a file-index card. Her methods were slow, but they suited her well enough. She added the newspaper reference and date, and slotted the card into her box. There was another bonus, too. On the very next page she discovered a society reporter’s description of a Mayfair luncheon party. Amongst the guests was ‘Lady Grace Brock, MP, chic as always in a taupe double-breasted jacket, finished with white piqué collar and cuffs, and a black velvet hat trimmed with a fine mesh veil.’

The contrast between the two manifestations of Grace was deeply pleasing. Elizabeth hummed under her breath as she copied out the second and filed it alongside the first.