The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (17 page)

The flower of Gaul shall be struck by four strokes of war

The Time of Blood shall begin in the fourth year.

I wish to remain sceptical, though in fairness I must add that in her document NOVA APOCALYPSIS SORORIS ANGELICAE she wrote ‘The first blow shall be on Ister’. Ister is the Danube and the Battle of Blenheim took place not far from the Danube.

As for the rest of her prophesies . . .

**

It is two in the morning as I write this. I am seated at a table in my hotel room. I will leave tomorrow. Certainly I will leave tomorrow, if I can stay awake. I fight sleep in this lonely, quiet place. I must not fall asleep in case I dream and she comes to me again over the sea of blood. This time she will reach me, I am sure. Last night she had run to the bottom of the hotel wall and was beginning to climb up it to my window. She climbs well. Her fingers penetrate the walls as if they were made of soft cheese, and the blood from her torn fingers runs down the walls in streams.

When she reaches me I shall be told what is to come, and the hateful gift must pass to me.

PARMA VIOLETS

‘She’s been here for over fifty years,’ said Dr Maddox, the Senior Consultant Psychiatrist at the Morsby. ‘There’s nothing much wrong with her really, except that she’s completely institutionalised. Care to ask her something? She’s quite harmless. Won’t attack you or anything.’

Smith peered through the little window in the door onto which had been screwed a small rectangular label bearing the single word, CANTEMERE. He had come to the Morsby Hospital to be interviewed for a post as a Junior Psychiatric Consultant and was conscious of being under scrutiny himself.

The room was like the private room of any hospital, perfectly comfortable and well appointed, but bland. The colours were mushroom, pink and pale blue, and there were no pictures on the walls. Nothing there seemed to be the private property of its occupant, an elderly woman who sat very upright in a chair by the window, quite still, doing nothing. She must have been in her seventies at least, possibly much older. Her hair was white and her face still carried traces of great beauty. Her lips smiled but the large blue eyes, remarkably clear and bright for one of her age, told a different story, one of fathomless grief.

‘Go in and talk to her,’ said Dr Maddox.

Smith entered the room and introduced himself. The woman nodded, shook his hand then waved him to a seat opposite her. Smith was conscious, even before she spoke, that he was in the presence of ‘a lady’.

‘My name is Cantemere,’ she said. ‘Mrs or Miss Cantemere, whichever you prefer.’ The accent was clipped and upper class, of the kind Smith had rarely heard except in old films of the 1940s and 50s. Having spoken these words the lady smiled sweetly, but when Smith tried to engage her in further conversation she remained silent. It was not that she was ignoring his presence: she looked him straight in the eyes and nodded from time to time quite equably. It was as if she had set herself a vow of silence and was determined to keep it. After a while Smith said goodbye to her politely and left the room.

As they were walking down the corridor Dr Maddox said: ‘It’s a rather odd story, would you like to hear it?’ Smith nodded eagerly. This was turning into a very odd job interview.

Once they were in his consulting room, Dr Maddox went to a set of shelves containing rows of cassette tapes, all neatly labelled. He extracted one and put it in the cassette player on his desk. Smith had the feeling that everything had been prepared beforehand and that from the first Dr Maddox had intended him to hear the story of ‘Mrs or Miss’ Cantemere.

‘This is her speaking, about ten years ago now,’ he said. ‘The tape’s been edited to cut out pauses, repetitions, extraneous material, but every word of it is hers, unprompted.’

He switched on the cassette player.

**

My name is Cantemere. Mrs or Miss Cantemere, whichever you prefer. Julia Cantemere, actually. It’s an unusual name. The legend has it that we are descended from the Cantemir family who were Princes of Moldavia. There is supposed to be a direct ancestor called Prince Dmitri Cantemir who was Imperial Chancellor to Peter the Great and all that. I don’t know if this is true, or, if it is, how our branch of the family came to England. So there it is.

Well, my grandfather was a rich man, owned a couple of coal mines in Derbyshire, don’t you know. He had two sons and my father was the younger. Of course the elder son got most of it, but my father was quite well provided for. He was a parson and when he moved to a London parish, I was able to do the Season. This was 1937. Just before the War, you know.

I had the best time. Absolutely killing. I was presented at Court as a
debutante
, then there was Queen Charlotte’s Ball and after that there were dances every night, or so it seemed. Even my Pa gave one. Pretty smartly I palled up with two other girls that I’d been at school with: Bunty Hetherington and Ida Hart-Hemsley. We called ourselves the Three Musketeers and, my dear, we just
shrieked
with laughter the whole time. Bunty was our leader. She was an absolute hoot, got us into all sorts of hot water, but fun, don’t you know. Nothing nasty.

Well, one evening, fairly late in the Season, we’d been to the Huntercombe’s dance and it had been pretty drear, for some reason, so Bunty said ‘Let’s go somewhere else’. I said ‘Where?’ and she said ‘Oh, anywhere, darling, let’s just go out and explore.’ So we left, there and then. We had a couple of boys in tow as I remember, Roddy Samford and Billy Millington, but they don’t matter. I believe they died in the war.

The Huntercombes lived just off Belgrave Square, so we—or rather Bunty—thought it would be a lark just to wander about till we saw a house with lights and a bit of noise coming from it and simply invite ourselves in. Well, nothing looked terribly promising till we came to Chester Square. There was a house—I don’t exactly remember now, but it was down the end where the church is, on the right hand side. We could see that the drawing room on the ground floor was lit up and there were people dancing to jazz on the gramophone, so Bunty said ‘That looks like fun,’ and just marched up to the front door and rang the bell.

Well, the door was opened by this positively svelte looking butler, and Bunty said: ‘We’ve come to the party,’ and the butler just let us in! So we went in to the drawing room where there were about a dozen people, men and women, like us in white tie and evening dresses, some dancing to the gramophone, some just sitting about and talking. They were a bit older than us, but I must say, they were awfully decent, and welcomed us in positively with open arms.

I felt a bit embarrassed about crashing like this, so I asked who our host or hostess were. I had this vague idea of apologising to them or something. But they said that the host wouldn’t mind. He wasn’t there at the moment, but he would be shortly. His name was Diels, apparently, and he was something frightfully high up in the German Embassy.

It was good fun; there was some top-class champagne, and the other people were fearfully interesting. Artists, you know, and that kind of thing. There was a painter and a poet and, my dear, this world-famous violinist whose name I’ve quite forgotten, but you’d know at once who it was if I could remember it. All the same, I still had a nagging feeling of guilt about our host, so I got it into my head—I don’t know why, it must have been the champagne—that I must go and look for the host and personally thank him.

I went out into the hall, intending to ask that glamorous butler, but there was no-one about. Everything was terribly gleaming and polished, you know. There were these black and white marble flagstones on the floor and this great mahogany staircase with a red carpet on it. So I started to climb the stairs.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw all these doors on the landing, and only one was open. It was the one that opened on to a room directly above the one where the party was going on. So, greatly daring, I went in.

It was a library: my dear, simply floor to ceiling with books. There were a couple of electric table lamps alight and a fire burning in the grate. I was quite overawed, you know, but hold on! There’s something I should say here that’s frightfully important. The door I’d come in by was the only door to this library. I couldn’t see any other. You must remember that.

Well, I suppose I should have got out at once, but I just loved that room. I had this thing about books and libraries, you know: must have got it from my Pa because he was a frightful old bookworm, bless him. So I started to look at the books. It was the most marvellous collection and all bound in leather and vellum and that sort of thing. Most of the titles meant nothing to me, but I do remember there was an edition of Suetonius’s
Lives of the Caesars
bound in purple leather. Too sumptuous! And this made a great impression on me because, you see, my Pa used to teach me Latin and Roman History. That was his favourite, and he let me read all sorts of things, but the one thing he wouldn’t let me read was old Suetonius. Apparently it has all this terribly shocking scandal in it about the emperors of Rome. So you see when I saw that Suetonius in purple leather I thought it was the most fearsomely decadent thing I’d ever seen. After all, I was only twenty, you know.

I pulled one of the volumes out, and I remember thinking I’ll just have the tiniest peep when I heard a voice say ‘Hello!’ It was the most tremendous shock and I dropped the book and turned round. And there at the far end of the room was standing this young man in white tie and tails.

It was too odd, you know, because I had been standing looking at the books just by the door and he would have had to come in and cross all the way to the far side of the room without my hearing him before he spoke. I wish I could describe him to you properly, but somehow I can’t. Isn’t that the most awful thing? I know he was dark and slim, about my age and a little taller than me. I do remember that he had the most beautiful hands. And I can’t tell you what his voice sounded like either, except to say that it was a very nice voice. Nicest in the world, don’t you know.

As you can imagine, I was simply covered with embarrassment, but he didn’t seem at all bothered. I asked him if he was our host, Mr Diels. No, he said, Herr Diels was his uncle and he was staying in the house with him. He told me he was studying music. I asked him what his name was and it was then that I got the second shock of the night.

He told me his name was Julius Cantemere. The surname was spelt exactly like mine. And I’m Julia Cantemere. It was terribly odd, because I’d never heard of any other Cantemeres outside my immediate family. Julius told me that both his parents were dead, but that his father had been English. As far as we could tell we were no relation or anything. His mother, Hannah Diels, sister of Herr Diels, had been born in Hanover.

I’m not sure what people mean when they talk about ‘love at first sight’. You hear someone saying how they saw this other person across a crowded room, their eyes met and they just immediately know. Well, that wasn’t me. Not bang, like that. For me it was rather like when you go to stay in a house in the country where you’ve never been before. You arrive in the dark, and the next morning you wake up in your bedroom to find the sun is shining through the curtains, and for a moment you don’t quite know where you are. Then, slowly, very slowly, you come to your senses, and you begin to realise that you’re just in the most lovely place in the world. Well, that was how it was with me and Julius. After a few minutes we simply knew we were made for each other; can’t explain it: we used to finish each other’s sentences, that sort of thing.

I can’t remember how the evening ended, but I know Julius and I arranged to meet somewhere the next day. The other thing I do remember is that I left without having met Julius’s uncle. I never knew whether he was somewhere else or had been in the house the whole time and just didn’t appear.

After that Julius and I were meeting the whole time. Suddenly I found that he was at all the dances I went to. Bunty and the rest just accepted him as one of us and we went round together. They thought he was wonderful, of course, but they knew he belonged to me. Naturally we were known as the Cantemeres from the off, and it was just taken for granted that we would marry. I took him to see my parents and they loved him too. He wasn’t earning any money really, though he was already a wonderful pianist, but he had a generous allowance from his uncle who was childless, apparently.

Well, we wanted to get married straight away, and my parents just didn’t have the heart to object. They could see how blissfully happy we were. Of course we needed to ask Julius’s uncle too, because, though Julius was over twenty-one—just—he had, as they say, ‘expectations’ of his uncle. Everything was so perfect then, I barely noticed how reluctant Julius seemed for me to meet his uncle, but eventually a day was arranged and I went to see him at the house in Chester Square.

I met Julius in the hall and he told me that Uncle Joachim, as he called him, was waiting for me in the library. Of course, I had expected us to go and meet him together, but for some frightful Germanic reason, Uncle Joachim had insisted apparently that he interview me alone. Well, I can’t deny I was frightened, but at the same time, you know, I was so deliriously in love, I think I could have walked through fire for Julius.

So I climbed the stairs and found the library door which was shut and knocked on it. After a while I heard a voice say: ‘Come!’ (It sounded more like ‘Kom!’) I went in.

It was a dull, overcast sort of day—fearfully drear—and what light there was in the room came from the two great sash windows that looked out on Chester Square, so it was pretty gloomy as you can imagine. At the far end of the library stood a man. Half of him was in shadow but I could see enough to make out that this was the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life. Simply too enormous, my dear. He must have been at least six foot six and broadly built with it. He was pretty fat too, but he carried his weight well, so I got the impression that a lot of it was muscle rather than flab. His head was a matching size and what hair he had was cut ‘en brosse’. I don’t want to give the impression that he was some sort of comic book Teuton: there was nothing at all ridiculous about him. I don’t remember too much about the face: heavy features, sort of brutal in a sophisticated kind of way, if you know what I mean.