Earthly Powers (71 page)

       There was peace for a week, peace so pure as almost to be palpable. Then I received a telephone call from Falkirk. It was the voice of a Presbyterian inspector of police, articulate under the burrs and very grave. A young man by the name of Strayler had been picked up trying to steal a bicycle. He gave your name and address, sir. At the moment he is in the lockup. He comes before the magistrate in the morning. He has no visible means of support. He says he was robbed of everything, money, rucksack, even, as is evident from his appearance, razor. Tomorrow he will get off with a caution as this seems to be his first offence and he is an ignorant foreigner. But what do you propose doing about him, sir? I said I would telegraph money for a ticket back to London, mean while keep him in a cell and feed him nothing but bread and water. Beat him if he causes trouble. Trouble, aye, do you hear him now? I heard Teutonic shouts and hangings a long way away. Dearly as we'd re'ish administering a wee bit of corporal punishment, sir, this is Scotland, not Nazzy Germany. He gave me the address of the police station.

       I groaned in my very bowels. What was I to do with him? The only thing was to break Strehier's resolution to stay in Nazi Austria, indifferent to the future, ready to face the worst. God help us, none of us then realised in our innocence what the worst was. If Strehier had not yet been cuffed and trounced off to camp it was because there was no hurry: there were plenty of undistinguished Jews around to persecute first before insulting the Swedish Academy. I saw it as the only solution: the reunion of father and son on free soil, but a long way from Albany. Was I myself now to assume the burden of arranging for Strehier's asylum? The morning mail had a letter from a certain Professor Waldheim of the State University of Colorado, inviting me to come over and give a series of lectures and seminars on the contemporary European novel. Who better qualified to give them than the most distinguished contemporary European novelist of them all? I would write to Waldheim. There would be no difficulty about arranging for Strehler's temporary asylum in Britain, though the agony of getting the Reichsfluchtsteuer and the other punitive imposts paid and the man himself to see that his future lay with his son would be intense: the agony had better be shared. The P. E. N. organisation must help, as also Strehler's British publisher.

       I went to see Charlie Evans at Messrs. William Heinemann and discussed the situation with him. I was told, over a glass of warmish Amontillado, that Strehler was, of course, a highly prestigious author and Heinemann was honoured to have him on the list, but unfortunately he did not sell anywhere near so well as Willie Maugham and Jack Priestley. There was probably something like thirty-five pounds due to him in royalties. I went to see the urbane secretary of P. E. N., who, over a glass of warmish South African sherry (Spanish sherry was out, definitely out, it stank of republican blood), told me of his admiration of Strehler's work and what a good idea it would be to get him out of that horrible fascist Germany, Hitler's no better than Franco, damn their four eyes, and the next general meeting of P. E. N. would discuss what could be done. I went back to Albany and the clear realisation that it would all be up to me.

       Heinz returned hangdog, in filthy shirt and shorts and with golden fuzz all over his chin. The Albany porters shook their heads when they saw him. They shook their heads when they saw me: my tenure would be cut short, no doubt about it, this was, despite Lord Byron, an establishment of long cherished respectability. Heinz cheered up in the bath, singing, with a slight Scottish accent, "The Umbrella Man": "Toora lumma lumma Toora lumma lumma Tooraleye eh Any urn be r-ellas Any urn be r-ellas To mend to-day?"

       He came out shaven and suited and hungry.

       "How the hell," I said, "did you manage to spend all that money so quickly?" Robbed by men he had thought good and decent. "Why did you try and steal a bicycle?" The only way to get back to London. I toyed deliriously with the notion of buying him a bicycle and sending him to Land's End on it. He was overjoyed to be back with me in London, he said. He desperately desired to see Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Wearily I took him that evening. We had to join a long queue. A couple of files ahead was Val Wrigley with a nondescript boy.

       Val waggled his fingers and stepped back to join us, saying first to the boy, "You have the money safe, Charles? It is two tickets you must ask for. I am not deserting you." And to me, "Well, whom have we here? Such handsomeness, bracing as a bath with pine essence in it, straight, I take it, from some health through joy camp among the conifers." Val was always very sharp and quick. He could even tell, something in the eyes and mouth and incurious ears perhaps, that Heinz probably did not understand much English. "Very toothsome, I must say."

       "This is the son of the great Jakob Strehier. Heinz, darf ich einen grossen Dichter vorstellen—Valentine Wrigley." And then, hope and cunning beginning to boil within, "Here, Val, is your chance to do something for the cause of the oppressed."

       "Jewish, is he? One would never have thought. Aryanly delicious." That damned misused word.

       "I am not Jew."

       "All right, dear, nobody's forcing you." And to me: "I know your hypocrisy, Kenneth Toomey, I haven't forgotten. Cause of the oppressed, indeed. Not one ounce of altruism in that aging carcass. I know you of old."

       "Your own carcass doesn't look too good."

       "No? Handsome is as handsome does. Do get him to say that in German. A most sinister language it's become, hasn't it? Sends shivers right through me." The queue moved forward. Heinz seemed much taken with Val's uninhibited admiration. Em grosser Dichter. Handsome was as handsome did.

       I said coarsely, "Untouched, I can assure you. And properly house-trained."

       "Death of the libido? My dear, I saw Sigmund Freud with his daughter in a pub, would you believe it? That mouth looks terrible. He was quite bucked to hear somebody talking about the Oedipus complex. Speaks beautiful English, very slangy. Getting some splendid refugee specimens, aren't we?" And he twinklingly nudged Heinz.

       I got Heinz briefly off my hands by giving him Val's address and sending him there with his racquets and suitcases. Before that I gave him money daily to spend most of his time with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which he adored. He saw it seventeen times and it improved his English. "Magic mirror on the wall," he recited to the cheval glass, "who is fairest of them all?" He knew the answer to that. He could reel off the names of the dwarfs. He sang "With a Smile and a Song" in falsetto. Walt Disney did not wholly tame him but he quietened him down. Temporarily.

CHAPTER 52

It was not until the third week of August that the mode of action for getting Jakob Strehler out of Nazi Austria presented itself. I will not disgust the reader with an account of the ménage Heinz and I conducted in a rented house on the outskirts of Herne Bay during the month of July. In that period Heinz was complaisant if often petulant, though he was soothed by the admiration of girls on the beach. There was also a dance hall he visited nightly. He only twice got into the hands of the police, and that was for drunken brawling. Talk of deportation for refugee delinquents was not now heard much, the Home Office adjusting itself to the steady incoming flood of the persecuted. Heinz seemed now to understand the British way of life and to settle down somewhat. Val Wrigley, unwilling for a whole month to admit to me his inability to control his enforced guest, sent him off to be a guest elsewhere. Heinz was even, for a time, a kind of prisoner in a kind of concentration camp. This was called a Ferienslager and was run by the Freie Deutsche Jugend; it was situated near Scunthorpe and its Pleasures were imposed draconianly. It was, Heinz shuddered, full of Jews. The guards on the gates were Jewish and very tough. They would hit anyone trying to get out without a permit. Everyone had to stay in and learn strength through joy. Heinz once tried to swim away from the camp but strong Jewish lifeguards dragged him back to shore.

       During the first two weeks of August, which we spent home in Albany (I had started a new novel), Heinz was well-behaved but furtive and I feared the worst. He did not ask for money. He stayed in all the morning and read children's comic papers of the order of the Rainbow and Chick's Own, in which disyllables were divided for greater ease of comprehension with hyphens. I bought him a portable gramophone and English lessons on disc, but he preferred to listen to popular songs and learn the words. He sang in his bath: "Two slippy people In dawn's early light And too much in laugh To say good night."

       He also sang "Blue Orchids" and "Skylark" and "Stay in My Arms, Cinderella." We ate lunch fairly amicably together, and then he would quietly go out. Where? To Hampton Court by river. To the cinema. Sausages and chips will I eat in a Lyon's Corner Haus. Have you finished the money I gave you? No, it gives a little left, thank you, perhaps tomorrow you will give. He would return, somewhat shifty but quiet and not too drunk, at about eleven.

       Mrs Ollerenshaw, who cleaned my apartment, said to me, "Are you sure it's all right me not cleaning his room, Mr Toomey?"

       "Not cleaning his—?"

       "He keeps his door locked. He says he always cleaned his own room and changed the sheets too when he was living where he used to live. Least, that's what I think he says. He doesn't speak English like what you and me do."

       "Sorry, I never thought about it. I've been concentrating on this—Locked now, is it?"

       "Always locked, Mr Toomey. You never know what young men get up to. I knew one that kept white mice in his bedroom, wouldn't let nobody in. Perhaps if you had a spare key we might take a look at what he's up to."

       "I've no spare key. There was just that key always in the door."

       "Well, it's in his pocket I'll wager." She had three or four knobby warts on her face with grey filaments waving from them. She was a decent hardworking woman, grey and dusty, glad of the used garments I gave her for her unemployed husband.

       "I'll have a word with him when he gets back, Mrs Ollerenshaw."

       He did not get back that day. I received a telephone call from Savile Row police station. He had been picked up trying to steal a wristwatch from a jeweller's on Regent Street. Very angry I walked round and found Heinz indulging in loud plaintive Sprechgesang which nobody understood, though the jeweller, a speaker of Yiddish, caught one or two words. "It's the accent," he said, "I don't understand the accent." I spoke to the desk sergeant.

       I said, "You must understand I have no legal responsibility. This is a refugee wished upon me by an Austrian Jew I haven't even met. Out of charity I've done my best for him, but here my charity stops. The law must take its" course.

       "He didn't get away with it, sir. He'll only get a fine or a caution. If you've taken responsibility for him you'll have to go on taking it. Some mad ideas get into the brains of some of these coming over here from Germany and suchlike. It's the sense of being like free that does it. He's sorry for what he's done, you can see that. Nobody wants to be too hard on him. Perhaps Mr Goldfarb here might like to forget all about it."

       "This," I groaned from my stomach, "is going to happen again."

       "Happened before, has it, sir?"

       "Well," I wavered, "very nearly."

       "Like the sergeant says," said Mr Goldfarb, a kind shrewd man hooknosed like a StŸrmer cartoon, "we forget all about it. But we don't forget all about it till tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning I telephone perhaps to drop the charge. Let him spend the night thinking what our people go through over there and being thankful that the British people are decent."

       "He's Jewish himself," I said.

       "It takes all sorts," said Mr Goldfarb.

       Heinz's pockets had been emptied all over the desk. There was, among the coins, handkerchief and Durex, a single key. This I took. "That's the best way," I said to the sergeant. "Frighten him a little. Loud voices and bread and water."

       "This isn't Nazzy Germany, sir."

       Heinz's room was in a remarkable state. The windows were fast shut against the poison of fresh air, the stench of various brands of cigarette tobacco was nauseating, the bed was unmade and the sheets were filthy. The room was full of stolen goods. How he had sneaked these in without my seeing I did not know, for not all were pocketable. There were, for instance, two suitcases and a dispatch case, an ormolu clock, a portable radio, and a partly eaten wedding cake. In one of the drawers money was neatly stacked—I didn't count it: that would have taken a long time and another drawer was loud with Ingersoll watches, all of which he must have conscientiously and regularly wound. In yet another drawer there were three British passports. I sat down heavily on the dirty bed and looked at them. And then the mad idea dawned. Heinz had found the only means of getting his father out. Unfortunately, all the passports had been stolen along with ladies' handbags—from, I presumed, Victoria Station: Mrs Hilda Riceyman; Miss Flora Alberta Stokes; Dr. Julia Manning-Brown. Dr.—the great epicene title. Dr. Manning-Brown was a physician born in Leicester on April 9, 1881. She was five feet six inches tall and had hazel eyes and no special peculiarities. She looked as kindly at me as her passport photograph would allow: a plain though noblenosed woman with chin uplifted as in pride of profession or, perhaps, sex. Her passport had been issued by H.M. Consul General in Nice. The official chop had been applied carelessly low to her portrait: its rim rose into the frame like the sun at first light. Jakob Strehler was, I knew, in his early sixties: he had been late in begetting Hem rich Mordecai Strehler, as that villain's own travel document, here too nesting, called him—a document rich in eagles and swastikas and compound words of great length. It was as though there had had to be a leisurely seeping into the seed conduit of familial depravity which, in the father's instance, had been cathartized only through the creative imagination. How tall Jakob Strehier was I did not know, but the Reich was a land of meters and no scrutinising official would trouble to look for a conversion table. Hazel eyes? Everybody's eyes were hazel, except those of my dear sister Hortense. Hazel was a nut not a colour. Strehier's new name would be Julian Manning-Brown: there was just space to insert the letter. The problem would be a photograph.