Freya (25 page)

She knew she could only bear it by doing something.

Man's most remarkable talent, according to the writer Jessica Vaux, is for ignoring death. ‘We live in the knowledge of our permanent extinction, and yet we go about our everyday business in a haze of ignorance – as in ignoring – which I suppose is the necessary condition of life itself. Even in this place, one can see in men that fundamental resistance to what is staring them in the face.'

‘This place' is Nuremberg, a city that has experienced an intimate and traumatic proximity to death for several years. Towards the end of the war its citizens lived through the imminent prospect of destruction from the air as Allied bombing intensified. Then, in the final months, the old town was almost obliterated after two SS divisions sealed themselves within it and had to be blasted to atoms by American artillery. ‘Ghost town' does not quite convey its desolation, for trees still stand, trams still run, people still scavenge for a living in its ruins. Walking through it one morning in July I became aware of a curious stench rising up from the rubble, so thick and enveloping one could almost taste it. When I asked about this, Mrs Vaux explained that the Nazis did not dig out their dead after air raids. The rubble over which I had to scramble concealed more than thirty thousand corpses. ‘All German towns stink on hot summer days like this. The lit lanterns you can see on the debris have been placed there by mourners who are marking an anniversary. Another cruelty the Nazis visited on their people – they wouldn't even give them a proper burial.'

And now Nuremberg is the site of another struggle, less violent but possibly as momentous. At the city's Palace of Justice the trial of twenty-one leading Nazis has entered its ninth month, an unprecedented effort to bring to book the perpetrators of an unprecedented crime. It has not been a straightforward prosecution, and never could have been – though it is unlikely that anyone foresaw the way legal complications would baulk the process and sink the courtroom into a grinding deadlock. ‘A citadel of boredom,' was how Mrs Vaux described it. She has been reporting on the trial for the
Tribune
, and her accounts of its tortuous proceedings reveal undimmed her unique combination of strengths: her quick understanding, her journalist's instinct for the vital detail, her almost musical ear for phrase-making.

Her picture of the defendants has offered a veritable
galère
of grotesques. She has likened Goering's appearance, for example, to that of ‘the madam of a brothel … his professional mask enacting a cold struggle between geniality and calculation'. Or Hess, bearing ‘the frightened air of an asylum inmate, his deranged personality scoured of every clue to his past'. Or Schacht, whose stiff posture reminds her of ‘a disobliging corpse that has belatedly refused to fit himself into his coffin'. Yet the prolonged trial of these men, as Mrs Vaux observed, may exert a paradoxical effect. While the monstrousness of their crimes demands the gallows, their pitiable humanity cries out for mercy. ‘Even murderers can touch the conscience of their judges,' she has written. ‘Subjected to scrutiny day after day, the man inside the murderer will out. And it is hard to stare for long at a man one means to destroy.'

In her own life Mrs Vaux has been on close terms with death. She was born Jessica Beaumont in 1897, the middle daughter of a lawyer with a practice in London. Her mother was a renowned illustrator of flowers. An idyllic Edwardian childhood in Surrey was suddenly upended when her father dropped dead of a heart attack at Victoria Station. A beloved older brother, Louis, was killed at Mametz on the first day of the Somme offensive in July 1916. She volunteered as a nurse in the same year, and tended the horrific suffering of men returning wounded from France. ‘Their cries at night were dreadful,' she said. ‘I still hear them.' After the war she recounted some of her hospital experiences in an article for the London
Evening Standard
, her debut in print, and quickly established herself as a journalist of exacting principles and wide-ranging interests. In the early 1920s she wrote angrily about the plight of the industrial poor, and wittily about the vanities and pretensions of London society. Restless in England, she landed a job as foreign correspondent on the
Sketch
, and while in Berlin wrote her first book,
Funeral Rag
, about the Weimar Republic. It became a best-seller.

One reason she had abandoned England was the continual besmirching of her name by the gutter press on account of her affair with a married man. Bad enough that the man in question was the novelist Henry Burnham, seventeen years her senior; she then further inflamed the scandalmongers on announcing that the child she had borne a year earlier was his. (Burnham initially denied his paternity – ‘which I'm afraid was characteristic of him,' she said.) She did not allow motherhood to cramp her ambition, however, and took her son on her travels, to Berlin, Prague and Budapest. In Spain during the Civil War she reported on the strife among the International Brigades, and narrowly escaped with her life after a bomb half destroyed the hotel where she was billeted. Her son was at boarding school back in England when Mrs Vaux, then in Paris, felt the windows of her apartment vibrate from the German guns approaching in the summer of 1940. She boarded one of the last trains out of the city with only a typewriter and a suitcase for company.

Her life has always cleaved to this precarious and provisional course; she cheerfully admitted that, since leaving London in 1926, there is nowhere she has ever felt settled – no place that she could not leave behind at an hour's notice. And no one, apart from her son: she was married to Philip Vaux, a civil servant, for six years before she began to chafe at the routines of domesticity, and walked out. It was not a decision she was proud of, she said, though when a Fleet Street columnist ran a story that she had separated from Vaux because of an affair with another man, she sued the newspaper and won. (This is the first interview she has given about her life in the ten years since.) She is, essentially, unbiddable, and the fact that she knows who she is has made it easy for her to understand others. A publisher recently offered her ‘a great sum of money' to write her memoirs, but she declined it without regret. ‘My life isn't a story I wish to tell – I don't want to be looking back when there's still so much ahead.' How would she feel about someone else writing her biography? ‘I would resist it while I'm alive. The thought of somebody clambering around my private life is abhorrent.' Potential biographers should beware: Mrs Vaux has been known to sleep with a loaded revolver under her pillow.

In Nuremberg she has been feted by her comrades in the press as if she were royalty returning from exile. Her voice, cracked and drawling, is somewhat grander than her suburban background, though she herself is without snobbery. She seems (I suggested to her) as comfortable talking to a waiter as she does to a writer. ‘Waiter, writer – it's quite often the same job. Scribbling on a pad, watching people, endless late nights.
Waiting
is what a writer does a lot of.' She writes in pencil, lying on her bed for hours at a time. She produces reams of copy which she then compresses into a piece. ‘I can only operate properly if I can write it down; that's the way I discover what I think about something.' Are there any advantages, I wondered, to being a woman and a writer? ‘None whatsoever,' she replied crisply. ‘You could have a good time as a woman in this job, and I certainly have. But you'd have a much better one as a man. A woman must be always justifying herself. She has to fight her corner all the way, whereas a man does as he likes just by virtue of being a man.' She speaks with authority: in the Fleet Street of the 1920s she was sometimes the only woman in the newsroom.

Her forthrightness is legendary. She has denounced Churchill for his treatment of refugees from the Eastern bloc, sent back to their own country to face certain death. Of politicians on the left and right she is disdainful – ‘the imbecility is remarkable on both sides' – yet she would never decline to vote. She talked a little of an admired older cousin who became a suffragette. ‘She was force-fed at Holloway for months and lost her health because of it – nearly lost her life. After what she and others went through I think it would be disrespectful – shameful, actually – not to vote. But one does despair of the people we are obliged to elect.' At the Palace of Justice she cut an imperious figure; her famous gaze, piercing as Medusa's, is rightly feared. When she learned that I had not been inside the main courtroom (the security has been intense) she insisted on showing it to me, and remonstrated with the young military policeman on guard with a few choice words. We were allowed through: such is her force of personality.

Of the trial's outcome she has refused to speculate, though according to those on the inside it seems likely that all, or nearly all, the defendants will be condemned to hang. ‘Whatever happens,' she said, ‘we have learned what they did, beyond all doubt. That is the crucial achievement of Nuremberg.' It is fitting that Mrs Vaux is present at this, a turning point in the century's bloody pageant of cruelty. And yet one terrible doubt remains, the one that returns us to where we began. She has looked too long at those men in the dock not to feel misgivings about the death penalty: more blood on our hands. However vile the crime, can we justify hanging the criminal? ‘I don't suppose there can be anything more appalling than to rob someone of life,' she said, and pondered this for a moment. ‘Or maybe there is one thing – to rob them of hope.'

A dishwater light seeped beneath the curtain, which drooped three inches short of the sill. Freya, lying in bed, resented that gap and its call to premature wakefulness. She had been meaning to fix it since the day she'd moved in. The house had no heating, and on a February morning the miserable chill bit deep into the bones. She felt herself starting to shiver, and no matter how tightly she pulled the blankets around herself she couldn't stop.

Fed up with this she got out of bed and groped her way from the bedroom onto the landing. On the floors below nothing stirred in the low dawn light. Her bare feet on the wooden floorboards made the smallest creak. She was never sure how many other tenants lived in the building at any one time; from her vantage on the top floor she only heard the occasional muffled voice, or the clanking of pipes when somebody was running a bath. Looking east you could see the steady backs of the mews terrace that ran parallel: blank uncaring windows, ancient guttering, a shooting gallery of chimney pots. From somewhere on the street she heard the modest clop of the milkman's horse.

She gave a one-knuckle tap on the door across the landing and sidled into the darkened bedroom. Adjusting her eyes to the curtained gloom she could tell from her stillness that Nancy was asleep. Her mass of auburn hair was spread over the pillow; in sleep she always looked perfectly composed, like a model about to be painted by Millais or Rossetti. Lifting the bedclothes Freya climbed in and, shivering still, moulded herself around her slumberous form. The warmth from her body was blissful in its relief. Nancy stirred blearily, and said an unintelligible something to a phantom of her sleep. They had both been stunned by the cold of the house.

‘Ouf,' whispered Freya. ‘Like blocks of ice.' Nancy's feet were the only part of her that would never warm. The first winter she had got chilblains.

Their rooms were on the top two floors of a house on Great James Street, a long Georgian terrace on the fringes of Bloomsbury. Freya had spotted it in the ‘For Rent' columns of the
Standard
, and they had moved in, like a couple of excited newly-weds, three years ago. It was a ‘respectable' address, reflected in the carved door hood and glazed square fanlight. Only gradually did the place disclose a hidden multitude of shortcomings, including a roof that still leaked from bomb damage, a temperamental gas meter, splinters from the uncarpeted floors, and windows that rattled in the winter gales.

The location was its principal advantage. Both of them could walk to work from the house, Nancy to the publisher's offices in Bedford Square, Freya to the magazine she worked for near Fetter Lane. And if the gas was off, or they were tired of tinned soup, there was a good fish and chip shop round the corner. It was here that Freya had called for her supper yesterday evening after working late. She had taken a cod fillet back for Nancy, and they shared it companionably huddled on the sofa, in their coats.

An hour or so after crawling into Nancy's bed she woke again on hearing the thump of the letter box. Her inclination to collect the post was offset by an extreme reluctance to forsake the warmth of the bed. She could tell from the change in her breathing that Nancy too was awake.

‘The temperature's dropped to minus forty,' said Freya, raising her head. ‘I'm just going outside, and may be some time.'

Receiving no reply to this announcement, she got up and quickly put on a dressing gown over her pyjamas before tiptoeing downstairs. The post had brought two letters for her and one for Nancy. She made them each a cup of tea before getting back into bed.

‘Here, for you,' she said, handing over her letter, which Nancy fixed with a narrow appraising look.

‘I think I know what this is,' she said, and opened it. Freya watched her face while she read its contents, and guessed it was not good news.

‘Well?'

Nancy folded the letter away. ‘They've turned
Double Personal
down. Said that it showed considerable promise, blah blah, but it's “not suitable for our list”, whatever that means.'

Double Personal
was Nancy's latest novel, or rather her latest attempt to get a novel published. Since coming down from Oxford six years ago she had written two others: both had been rejected.