The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (18 page)

He told me to sit down, which I did, as far away from him as possible, but then he approached. He had a heavy tread and his vast thighs chafed together as he walked so there was a great rustle of cloth on cloth. Then he was standing over me. It was like being at the bottom of a huge rock or something. Too frightful. But what I remember most was a smell, because it was so unexpected. It was a perfume, quite feminine, very strong. I couldn’t place it at first, then I remembered. It was Parma Violets, a scent you could buy from Floris in Jermyn Street, you know. My mama was specially fond of it and I’d bought some for her that last Christmas.

When Uncle Joachim spoke it was in a low, throaty voice—almost a whisper—with a heavy German accent. He said: ‘So! You like the books.’ You see, I’d been looking round at them: anything rather than look at him. He said: ‘I have many books, concerning all kinds of things. All knowledge is good, no? None should be forbidden. This is how we become strong. Do you not think so, Miss Julia Cantemere?’

I nodded. I was simply petrified by this time. Then he walked over to the bookcase and pulled out one of the purple volumes of Suetonius and he started to read a bit from it about the Emperor Tiberius on Capri. Oh, it was utterly frightful, my dear, too disgusting—I can’t tell you! All about these young boys and girls he got to—well, enough said. And every few sentences he would look at me and study how I was taking it all. It was awful. It was somehow like being watched while you’re undressing, only worse, because it was as if he were seeing right inside me. It’s terribly hard to describe. It was like a rape.

Well, in the end, he finished and put the book back. He came over to me and put his hand—horrible great paw—on my head. And he said: ‘But soon you will be married, no?’ I looked up at him and he was laughing at me. ‘You must not look so shocked, little Miss Julia. Here! I will give you another book. A charming one, and you must read it. It will not hurt you.’

He walked over to a shelf and pulled out the most beautiful calf-bound volume with wonderful gilded stamping on it. The book had been bound in the eighteenth century but the printing was sixteenth or early seventeenth. It was William Adlington’s translation of
The Golden Asse
—Apuleius, you know. I never read it till long after: wish I had read it sooner!

He pressed the book on me and said: ‘Here! I give you. It has the most beautiful love story of the young lovers Cupid and Psyche. It is my present for your engagement. My blessing on your union!’

Well, of course, I suppose it was very kind of him, but there was something about the way he said it that was really rather beastly—I don’t know—as if he were picturing in his mind Julius and me—together, if you know what I mean. So I took the book, thanked him and literally fled downstairs. And that was the first and last time I ever saw Uncle Joachim.

I had to wait for a while in the hall for Julius because he wasn’t there. After a bit he came out of the drawing room, and I showed him the book and told him that Uncle Joachim had given us his blessing. So then we went off and had the most huge tea at a Lyons Corner House and everything was bliss again.

We were married the following Spring and I’m relieved to say that Uncle Joachim could not come to the wedding. Apparently he was away on some terribly top-secret German Embassy business. This is 1938, I’m talking about, Munich and all that, so you can imagine. But he did give us wedding presents. To Julius he gave a simply vast cheque. I was not quite so delighted by my present, though. It was that awful purple leather bound edition of Suetonius and a huge bottle of perfume from Floris. The fragrance was Parma Violets.

You can’t describe happiness. For the first six months Julius and I were in heaven; that’s all I can say. We found this dear little flat on the top floor of a house in Fitzroy Square, and we just lived. Julius went on with his studies, but he was already beginning to make a name for himself as a pianist. He could play anything, you see, from Mozart to Gershwin at the drop of a hat, so he was always in demand at parties, and I went with him.

I think it was towards the end of the year that things began to change ever so slightly. Oh, it wasn’t Julius’s fault. He was still the same loving, darling Julius that he ever was, but, you know, he was beginning to be really rather successful, and he couldn’t take me everywhere to all his concerts. And they used to take a lot out of him. He would come back simply drained and just sleep the clock round. I got terribly bored when he wasn’t there, and just a little frightened. Suppose he had an accident, you know, on the way home, that sort of thing. Add to that, I somehow thought I’d be pregnant by then but I wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong: by any normal standards we were still pretty blissful. I was a young chump, I suppose. I expected the heaven to last for ever and I wanted to bring it back to what it was. Anyway, that was why when our wedding anniversary was coming up, I got this simply wild idea into my head. Or it may have been Bunty’s idea, I don’t remember. I used to confide in Bunty, and she was bored as well because she’d just married this fearfully rich man, in ball bearings or potted meat, or something too mundane like that. Anyhow, the idea was that Julius and I would go to Uncle Joachim’s house and go into his library and, my dear, we would re-create that moment when we first met. And we would do it on the anniversary of our wedding. Too romantic, or so I thought.

Julius didn’t seem awfully keen on the idea. In fact, I think he secretly hated it, but because he was a darling and loved me to distraction, he agreed to go along with it. So we arranged to go to the house in Chester Square on our anniversary. Uncle Joachim was away on business, as usual, but the place was still fully staffed, apparently.

It was a lovely April evening when we got to the house in Chester Square. The butler let us in and we went upstairs together. Before we went in to the library Julius turned and looked at me, and he just said: ‘Are you sure?’ I can’t describe how he looked at me, but it was as if I were a sort of stranger. I said yes and we went in.

There were two lights on in the library, one at a desk, the other a standard lamp by a wing chair. I had the strange feeling that the room had only just been occupied, but by whom? Uncle Joachim was away and I didn’t think the servants would be great readers. I told Julius to stand exactly where I had first seen him that night, at the far end of the room. I took up my position by the books where I had been. Then for some reason I shut my eyes for a couple of seconds and turned round to see Julius. But he had gone. He wasn’t there! Oh, God—!

[There was an obvious break here in the recording which, when it resumed, was in a slightly different acoustic.]

I called for him. I yelled. I ran all over the house looking for him. I shouted and rang for the servants, but they had all gone for some reason. Perhaps they were only hired by the day, I don’t know. I tried the library for secret doors in the bookcases, all that lark, but nothing. I screamed the place down. I remember running into the library for the umpteenth time and just completely collapsing onto a sofa in utter floods. It was then that I became aware of this smell. I could smell that scent of Parma Violets that Uncle Joachim wore. It was so strong it was like a handkerchief drenched in the stuff being put over my face. It suffocated me. I think—I’m sure—I must have fainted.

I don’t know quite what happened after that; I can’t really tell you anything except that I was in sheer Hell, my dear, and have been ever since.

**

‘I won’t play any more, of the tape,’ said Dr Maddox. ‘After that she becomes incoherent. But, from bits and pieces she’s said since, I gather that she went on frantically searching for Julius, but he had simply vanished, leaving behind not a single clue to his whereabouts. She got the police to search the house in Chester Square, but by the time they had a search warrant to go in, they found the place deserted. Everything—servants, books, furniture, the lot—had gone, and no trace of Uncle Joachim. It appears he was merely renting the place. We’re talking about only five months away from war by this time. Well Julia just went on looking—hired private detectives, the lot—and became more and more desperate. The war came, and then the Blitz. The house in Chester Square took a direct hit one night and the following morning they found Julia Cantemere wandering about in its ruins and refusing to leave. That’s when her parents decided to have her committed to an asylum; they died soon after in another air raid, and she’s been in institutions ever since. She came here about six or seven years after the war was over.’

Smith asked: ‘What else do you know about her? I mean beyond what she’s told you.’

‘Well, not much. Her name really is Cantemere. She was a debutante and a parson’s daughter and all that. And she did marry a Julius Cantemere in 1938. We have her marriage certificate. And we know he disappeared in April 1939, but beyond that, nothing.’

‘What about Uncle Joachim?’

‘The German Embassy has no records of such a person having been on their staff, but that proves nothing. So,’ said Dr Maddox. ‘Do you believe her story?’ Smith hesitated. He had a feeling that he was being tested in some way, and that the job he had applied for might depend upon the answer he gave.

At last he said: ‘Does that matter? Surely the important thing is that
she
believes it.’

Dr Maddox nodded approvingly and got up. ‘There is one further piece of evidence I’d like you to look at,’ he said.

He went to a glass fronted bookcase behind his desk and opened it. ‘Mrs Cantemere came to us with very little personal property, but there were these.’ Smith saw that among the medical texts and psychiatric journals were three books sumptuously bound in purple calf with gilded lettering. Dr Maddox took the first volume out of the bookcase and handed it to Smith.

‘Suetonius?’

Maddox nodded. ‘But read the inscription on the fly leaf,’ he said.

Smith opened the book. There were some fine marbled endpapers, innocent of a bookplate, and then two blank pages, one of which was inscribed in slightly faded blue-black ink:

To my darling Julia, with unfailing love, Julius.

Smith looked up at Maddox, baffled. ‘It’s from Julius, not Uncle Joachim,’ he said. Dr Maddox merely nodded. Smith again examined the fly leaf which he now noticed had been very faintly stained by the drops of some liquid. Tears perhaps?

Wafted from the gentle upward blow of air as he closed the book, Smith caught the scent, faint but heady, of Parma Violets.

DIFFICULT PEOPLE

One Saturday in the Summer of 1968 a young man walked into my father’s art gallery in Jermyn Street with a large portfolio under his arm. I was seventeen at the time and happened to be present when this occurred. During the school holidays it was my treat every Saturday morning to help out my father at the gallery, then we would go to lunch at the Traveller’s Club.

The young man seemed an unlikely customer. He looked barely twenty and he wore ultra-fashionable Carnaby Street clothes, a turquoise shirt with a floral pattern and skin tight vermilion corduroys.

‘Can I help you?’ said my father, an unfailingly polite man.

‘Old Master Drawings,’ said the young man. His face interested me. It was not exactly good looking—the mouth too wide, the brow too prominent—but his features were distinctive. He was of medium height, broad shouldered and stocky; a powerful physique lurked under the floral shirt. His deep set blue eyes looked at you with unhurried intensity.

‘We do have a number of Old Master Drawings,’ said my father. ‘Which period interests you in particular?’

‘I don’t want to buy. I want to sell,’ said the young man, holding up his portfolio. I knew even then that this was not the way my father usually did business.

‘I see,’ said my father, allowing an uncertain note to creep into his voice. ‘May I have a look, Mr—?’

‘Paul Xavier,’ said the young man.

My father indicated a table upon which Xavier could lay his portfolio. ‘I’ll be happy to have a look,’ said my father. ‘Give you my opinion, but naturally I can’t promise . . .’

‘Yes. I understand,’ said Xavier. There was something about the way he said these words which appealed to my father. It was neither truculent, nor obsequious: he spoke as if he were making a simple statement of fact.

My father opened the portfolio. In it were about thirty drawings mostly on tinted paper, in pen-and-ink, silverpoint, sanguine, chalk and other media. There were drapery studies, nudes, portrait heads, and one or two exquisite botanical drawings in conté highlighted with white chalk. They were beautifully done, but something about them made me uneasy, and I knew that my father felt the same.

‘I’m afraid I don’t deal in Modern work,’ he said. ‘These are not by Old Masters.’

I could see now that they weren’t. They were highly accomplished pastiches of Old Master drawings in the style of Leonardo, Dürer, Raphael, Mantegna and others of the High Renaissance.

‘They’re not fakes or anything. I’m not saying they’re actually old,’ said Xavier.

‘Who did them?’ my father asked.

‘I did,’ said Xavier.

My father complimented him on his remarkable accomplishment and asked him where he had studied.

‘I didn’t,’ said Xavier. ‘I started by copying out of books. Then I used to go and copy at the National Gallery. But I’m not self-taught. The Old Masters taught me.’

Again my father complimented him and said that regretfully he could not sell any of his drawings. In his gallery he dealt exclusively in Italian and Flemish work of the High Renaissance and Baroque period. There were people, he was sure, who would be delighted to sell his work: he would be happy to give him some names and introductions.

Xavier nodded, shut the portfolio, said ‘Okay!’ and started to walk out of the shop. My father stopped him. He said he genuinely would like to help, and he would like to buy some drawings, not to sell, but for himself.

That morning my father bought two drapery studies and secured a promise from Xavier that he would come and discuss his career with him. This was something I had never known my father do before, but I think it was because of the guilt he felt about dealing in dead art while doing nothing to advance its living cause. His profound lack of sympathy with Modernism—indeed with almost anything produced after the Impressionists—inhibited him. Perhaps he saw Xavier, who seemed to have the skills and ideals of his favourite Old Masters, as a way of salving his conscience.

So my father became Paul Xavier’s mentor and Paul, in many ways, became mine. I was an only child and he was the ideal older brother. Though only four or five years older than me he was a decade ahead of me in experience. He had come from a broken and impoverished home in Stepney, and almost everything he knew he had taught himself. His extraordinary gifts as a draughtsman had been recognised early on: there had been a flurry of interest in the papers and then he had been forgotten, but he persisted. At the time I first knew him he was living with his girlfriend Christine in a flat in Hammersmith. They survived on Christine’s income as a travel agent and by his doing occasional labouring jobs himself. His views on life were sometimes crude, but forged by his own experience, not someone else’s. However, as with all autodidacts there were gaps in his expertise. To some extent, we complemented each other because I, cautiously brought up and well-educated, had acquired a little learning in just those areas where he was weakest.

One of his lacunae was in the field of professional relationships. Like many artists, particularly at the beginning of their careers, Paul believed that talent would carry all before it; that as soon as his astonishing gifts were recognised, art lovers would flock to buy his work. The concept of cultivating clients and patrons was alien to him, whereas I, from an early age, had watched my father at work and absorbed some of his diplomatic skills. This is how I came to be involved in the whole affair of Victor Lyons and the portrait.

Before I knew Paul I had met Victor on several occasions at my father’s gallery. The name Victor Lyons means nothing today, but at that time he was quite famous. He had a habit of appearing in the gossip columns and society pages, his name always prefixed by the words ‘Property Tycoon’. He was one of the first and most successful of the developers who emerged in the late 1960s, men who took unfashionable and run down areas of London like Islington, Fulham, or Clapham, and turned them into nesting places for the up-and-coming. I have no idea whether Victor was typical of their breed, as I never met another like him, but, as a person, he gave the impression of being a type rather than a complete individual. He was in his early forties, on the small side, but well built, with a square head and decisive regular features. He dressed smartly but somehow not very elegantly. Even in casual clothes there was a sense that he was wearing what was expected rather than what suited him.

The feeling that he had no real taste of his own was confirmed by my father to whom Victor had gone to find out what sort of Old Master paintings he ought to have hanging in his home. Victor had said to him: ‘Always go to the top man, whatever you want, whether it’s bricks, ball bearings or great art.’ He was full of such materialistic maxims, culled probably from one of those self-help business manuals with catchy titles that still regularly make the best-seller lists.

My father found him something of an embarrassment because Victor seemed almost to take pride in his philistinism. ‘I just want the best, and you know what the best is,’ he would say to my father who reluctantly obliged by producing for him some well-provenanced and solid artistic property.

When Victor decided that he wanted a portrait made of his new young wife—there had been a previous model, discarded for unknown reasons—he consulted my father who decided to take the risk of recommending Paul Xavier. He told Victor that Paul was comparatively unknown, but that he was destined for great things. This delighted Victor who saw an investment opportunity in his romantic gesture.

My father negotiated a good price for Paul but was too tied up with other affairs to tackle the business of introducing client to artist. This fell to me, as I had the leisure, the inclination and an opportunity to make use of my very recently acquired driving licence. So, one Saturday morning in May, I drove Paul out to Victor’s house at Gerrards Cross in the white Mini I had been given on passing my test. I was an indulged young man.

I am not sure that I had any idea of the responsibility with which I was being entrusted, even though my father tried to impress its seriousness upon me.

‘I want you to be careful,’ he said. ‘See that Paul doesn’t put his foot in it too much. You’ve met Victor, and you’ll meet Carmen his wife. They’re what I call “difficult people”.’

I had heard him use the phrase before and I asked him what he meant exactly.

‘Observe and find out for yourself,’ he said.

We had been invited to lunch. For Paul and I the expedition was pure adventure; it was a crystal bright early Summer’s day, and our spirits were high. As we drove there we talked incessantly, so much so that twice we got lost and I had to stop to consult a map. (Paul, for all his visual sense, was quite hopeless with directions.) Paul did most of the talking: speculating on his future fame as a portraitist, telling anecdotes about his vagabond boyhood in Stepney and his trips across London to art galleries where he would sit down and copy the paintings for hours on end.

‘You know I told you that the Old Masters taught me? Well, it’s true. Quite literally. I don’t want you to tell your father this. I have a great respect for him, but he wouldn’t understand. They talk to me. I sit in front of Caravaggio’s
Supper at Emmaus
in the National Gallery trying to capture that amazing foreshortening of Christ’s arm, and he talks to me. He wasn’t a queer by the way. He told me so. All the critics are saying he is, but it’s rubbish. I know.’

I made no comment. In quite a short while I had acquired an understanding of how Paul was to be dealt with. You could laugh with or at him about everything except his opinions and his art. These were to be beyond ridicule or criticism. For someone as essentially tough as he was he could be morbidly sensitive. When discussing Paul’s character with my father, I asked him if this is what he meant by ‘difficult’.

‘Oh, no. Paul’s a mighty ego, but ultimately not difficult at all. He has bottom, you see.’

This was another of my father’s enigmatic phrases which I could never persuade him to explain. He seemed to regard it as part of my education to find out for myself what he meant.

**

Both Paul and I had somehow expected Victor Lyons to live in a grander house, but Gerrards Cross goes in for substantial comfort rather than grandeur. His home was one of those detached mock Tudor mansions set in its own grounds along a leafy avenue of similar mansions. The wheels of my Mini crunched into deep gravel as we came to rest beside Victor’s Bentley. Paul stared at the spacious but unexciting proportions of the house, an apotheosis of suburban living.

‘I’d pay good money not to live in a place like this,’ he said defiantly. ‘It’s so dead.’

The door was opened by a swarthy Hispanic butler and we were ushered into a large mock baronial hall. The place was bigger than it had appeared to be from the outside. Everything, including the suit of armour which guarded one of the wooden pillars of the stairwell, was new. The place had the feel of a luxury hotel rather than a home.

We were ushered through to a large conservatory where, beyond the lush tropical vegetation, great sliding glass doors opened onto an emerald lawn, smooth as a billiard table; beyond that, a belt of poplars; beyond that, a white wicket gate leading onto a golf course. Now I realised why Victor Lyons had chosen the house. An exquisite Persian Blue cat reposing on a white wrought iron table stared at us in a nakedly hostile manner. We were allowed what I suspect was a precisely calculated minute to take in these splendours before Victor made his appearance. A chrome plated trolley laden with glasses and a huge jug of iced and fruited Pimms was wheeled in.

‘Carmen will be with us in a minute. She’s just upstairs . . . doing things.’ I thought I could detect a trace of nervousness in his manner. He wore an immaculate pair of fawn slacks and a canary yellow cashmere cardigan over a check shirt, his Saturday uniform.

Embarrassing preliminaries were glossed over by the distribution and sampling of Pimms, a drink Paul had never tasted before. During a pause I complimented Victor on his proximity to the golf course. It should have been the right thing to say.

‘They tried to blackball me, you know,’ he said resentfully.

‘What’s—?’ began Paul, but I restrained him with a warning glance.

‘Luckily,’ Victor went on. ‘I already had a stake in the place. I was able to point out a number of legal difficulties which they might be getting into if they refused me. Anyway, water under the bridge. I’m on the committee now.’

‘But why—?’ began Paul again. Fortunately, at this moment, Victor’s wife Carmen made her entrance.

Her feet were bare and she would have looked as if she had just got out of bed had she not been so carefully made up. She was dark and a great sweep of deep chestnut-coloured hair half covered one eye. Her figure was superbly voluptuous, her legs perfectly shaped. Her face was heart shaped and dominated by large, sleepy brown eyes. She wore a simple dress of dark red shot silk. Something about her confused me. The physical impression that she exuded was immensely sophisticated. She had the sexual allure of a thirty year old, and yet it would have been quite obvious, even if I had not been told, that she was actually not much older than I was.