The Dower House (33 page)

‘But almost the whole city was rubble,' Felix said. ‘Where did you dump it?'

He laughed. ‘I didn't dump it – I graded it properly and sold it! Mostly to the city, for filling craters . . . mending roads . . . Within a year I had a dozen trucks – British army surplus. And also three fuel tankers. I was still carrying rubble but now also goods and fuel. And so it went on. I had unemployed boys carrying messages around the city on bicycles. Now they have Vespas.'

‘And it's all legal?' Angela asked.

He was surprised. ‘Why not?'

‘Well . . . rationing for one thing.'

‘Rationing?' He shrugged. ‘It's not severe. Next year they say it will end completely, anyway.'

‘Next
year
?' Felix exclaimed. ‘
You'll
be sending
us
food parcels next!'

‘You think that's a joke? What about those Americans, eh – our enemies of three years ago? They're giving us hundreds of millions of dollars to get back on our feet and stand up against the Russians. And to the British – their
allies
of three years ago? To them they say, “Now you can pay us back our war loans!” We're lucky they weren't
our
allies!'

He had driven straight down to the northern bank of the Elbe, to Neumühle and Övelgönne, avoiding the Elbchaussée until forced to join it; the route also avoided the Reeperbahn area where Willard and Marianne had been reunited.

‘By the way,' he said, ‘what is the ration in England now?'

Angela answered, ‘A quarter-kilo of meat, ditto fat, ditto sugar, ninety grams of bacon, sixty of cheese, sixty of tea, two litres of milk, a pound of bread, and a hundred-twenty grams of bon-bons. And that's it!'

He looked at her askance in the mirror. ‘Well, that doesn't sound too bad. It's more than most Germans eat in a day.'

They laughed. ‘That's the ration for a
week
!'

He whistled. ‘We
must
organize those food parcels!'

They drove on past Klein Flottbeck and through Othmarschen.

‘All the trees!' Felix sighed. ‘Gone!'

‘Blame last winter. We got as warm sawing them down as we did when burning them. A lot of land round here is owned by English merchants. The
RAF
never bombed it much, not even in 1942.'

‘Gomorrah.'

‘Yes. Even though the great Blohm and Voss armaments factories were just across the Elbe. And the Luftwaffe
HQ
just up the road here. Property is sacred to the English,
Gott sei dank
! Ah – that's Jacob's Restaurant. I have a table booked there for us this evening.'

A few hundred yards farther up the Elbchaussée they turned into a once-imposing gateway, now stripped of all its ornamental ironwork, and started along a newly gravelled drive that led up to a large stucco villa, classical in style and dating, Felix guessed, from the mid-nineteenth century.

‘By the way,' Treite said, ‘Birgit, whom you're about to meet, likes to be known as Frau Treite. I
will
marry her one day, when there's time, but I swear – if you take even a few days off in Hamburg nowadays someone else has stolen a contract from right under your nose. You are not married, eh? May I ask . . . that is . . . do you . . . what would your preference be for . . . ?'

‘We can share a room,' Felix said.

‘Even a bed,' Angela added.

‘Good.' He relaxed, killed the motor, and stretched luxuriously. ‘Life is good. We don't deserve it, but life is good.'

‘Our house never had a bathroom,' Angela said after he had showed them their room. She felt the mattress and approved. The décor reminded her of Kitty's, the Gestapo brothel in Giesebrechtstrasse – lots of pink, lots of silk, lots of smoky-grey glass, and carpets that swallowed your feet.

‘Our bath hung on a nail.' Felix stripped to his waist and went to wash.

‘Ours too, but there was no special room. That remark of his – “we don't deserve it, but life is good” – that was a sort of apology, you realize? I could feel all the way that he wanted to say
something
about us both having been in the
KLS
and also that he
didn't
want to say anything, either. I think that's the nearest he'll get.'

‘Good thing, too.' He spoke through the towel as he scrubbed his face dry. ‘One of my fears was that people would dwell on it.' He inspected the towel. ‘God, that train was dirtier than I thought.'

‘D'you suppose he's completely legitimate? He's certainly not the person Marianne remembers.'

She took his towel, after a brief tussle. ‘We might as well get just the one dirty. We can share a clean one tomorrow.'

‘In England he'd certainly be classed as some kind of posh spiv – but that's because there are so many thousands of rules and restrictions on everything there. I know we've only been in Germany less than a day but I already get the feeling that there's a lot more enterprise and . . . I don't know – freedom to
do
things here.'

‘I can't wait to see what sort of woman Birgit is.'

In fact, ‘Frau' Treite was a surprise to them both. They half-expected a bubbleheaded showgirl, ignorant but self-assured, ten years his junior and pneumatic of build; but she was, if anything, slightly older than him, dark, reserved, and lissom in a little black dress. She wore small diamond earrings and an intaglio brooch depicting a lady in profile, in ivory on a brown enamel ground; that, too, was ringed in diamonds. Everything about her was tasteful and understated. Angela suspected that Treite would not marry her until he felt he was good enough to
deserve
her.

But when the introductions were over and Manhattans poured out she said, ‘And it's true you both survived the
KLS
?'

‘
Katze!
' Treite gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘What?'

He shrugged awkwardly. ‘Anyway, the people who put them in the
KLS
are either hanged or in jail or being hunted like rats. It's over.'

‘The Ravensbrück trials have been held in Hamburg,' Birgit said. ‘At the Curio House. They say there will be at least three more. They've already hanged quite a few.'

Angela drew breath to name a few of her favourites but Felix cut her short: ‘Did Marianne tell you much about us?' he asked Treite.

But it was Birgit who answered with, ‘How
is
Marianne?'

‘You know her, too?' Felix said.

She glanced uncertainly at her man, who said, ‘You don't know?'

‘What?'

‘I don't know if I should tell you.' After a pause he continued, ‘Well, why not. It's nothing shameful.'

Birgit took over. ‘She stayed with us – not in this house – where we were before. But she went through a bad time when Willard threw her over and went back to America . . . didn't eat . . . drank too much. But Hermann knew just what to say.' She grinned at him.

Like one confessing to a mean trick he said, ‘I told her we were sure Willard would come back. And he'd look for her – he'd go straight to her old lodgings. Of course, I didn't believe it. But
she
did. She pulled herself together and went back there. But instead of living on her father's allowance she started this pavement-artist thing, which just about kept body and soul together. Then she wrote to us from London – thankyou-thankyou-thankyou! So my lie was the truth.' He shook his head at the strangeness of life. ‘I don't think she touched her allowance since 'forty-three. It must have been a tidy sum by 'forty-seven – a wonderful dowry for Willard!'

‘Willard has just opened an office in Mayfair,' Felix said quickly – for he had seen Angela draw breath, presumably to say that they knew nothing of this ‘dowry' (and doubted Willard knew about it, either).

‘Willard always fell on his feet,' Hermann said admiringly.

‘He's not the only one,' Birgit said. Then, glancing at her watch – a primly elegant Philippe Patek – she added, ‘Our table is waiting. We can walk – it's just down the road.'

Jacob's in 1947 was like Jacob's in 1937 except that the few uniforms on display were ‘best blues' or khaki rather than
Feldgrau
. An elderly trio played selections from Johan Strauss, Millöcker, von Suppé, and Lehár . . . with an occasional soaring up to Mozart. And a booking in the name of Treite evidently commanded a table at the centre of the enormous bow window, with a view through the linden terrace to the Elbe. And a bottle of Sekt on ice in a silver cooler.

‘Hard to believe there's a war on,' Angela said as they took their seats.

The Treites looked at her in surprise.

‘It's a joke in England.'

The sommelier filled their glasses and it was
Prosit
all round.

The maître-d' took their orders – or, rather, recommended the turbot, which they all accepted. Angela and Felix wanted
Aalsuppe
, Birgit and Hermann melon.

When the man withdrew, Hermann said, ‘We have Erhard, who says, “Let the people make the choices and make the money.” You have Attlee, who says, “We'll take your money and spend it on making all your choices for you.” Can it be true that they're forcing industry to go where unemployment is high?'

‘What's wrong with that?' Angela asked.

Hermann glanced at Birgit and spread his hands in a gesture of jocular hopelessness. ‘What's
right
with it?' he countered as four commis waiters brought their entrées. ‘Do they ask
why
there's high unemployment there? Perhaps the factory site is on the far side of some mountain in Wales? Or the telephone exchange is the same as it was in nineteen twenty-seven? Or all the people with technical training have gone to Coventry, where business is booming
despite
Mister Attlee? Or the workers are split among thirty different trade unions and negotiations are a nightmare?' He grinned. ‘I read the English papers, you see. England spent eighteen million pounds
a day
throughout the war and now they're so deep in the hole they can't see the way out. Also . . .' He hesitated.

‘What?' Angela asked. ‘And this is not the Hermann Treite that Marianne once knew.'

‘War destroys more than the
physical
world. I was going to say – Germany has so many advantages, not just American aid. We will never try to develop atomic weapons. Big saving. We have had our illusions of empire taken away. More big savings. Poor France. Poor Britain. Old-fashioned industries mostly intact. Old-fashioned thinking . . .
absolutely
intact! Give us ten years and we'll be the powerhouse of Europe.'

The empty Sekt bottle was replaced by a Mosel from the Bruderschaft vineyard in Klüsserath – not chilled, as it would have been in London, but cool. Deliciously cool.

‘Did Hermann mention your papers?' Birgit asked Angela.

She, in turn, glanced at Felix and then let out a brief, explosive sigh at the impossibility of explaining – or justifying – what she was about to say. ‘The thing is . . . the thing is . . . Felix and I . . . I mean, when we started this journey at Victoria Station –' she glanced at him – ‘how many months ago?'

He shook his head. ‘I don't remember. I think it was in another lifetime.'

Birgit cottoned on before her man, who seemed bewildered. ‘You fell in love!' she cried, clapping her hands and then resting them in an attitude of prayer below her open mouth; her eyes begged them to go on.

‘We fell in love . . . oh . . . lo-o-ong ago . . .'

‘The first day we met,' Felix said. ‘We only found the courage . . .
I
only found the courage to admit it when we were in Paris.'

‘Nowhere better,' Hermann put in.

‘Meanwhile he's started living with another woman.'

Birgit made a strange little indrawn scream and turned great searching eyes on Felix. He laid a demonstrative hand over Angela's wine glass and said, ‘With a woman who has never said she loves me – which she doesn't – and whom I've never told I love – which I don't. It is an arrangement that suited her career and my career at a particular time.'

‘And the sex is good,' Angela assured Birgit with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an ingénue.

‘To sex –
prosit!
' Hermann said with all the shifty-eyed enthusiasm of the embarrassed. ‘All sex is good.'

‘You asked Angela about those papers,' Felix reminded Birgit.

Angela cut in: ‘The thing I was going to say was that . . . well, life is very different now from the way it was. Even from the way it was last week.' She smiled at Felix. ‘I did what I could back in 'forty-five. I gave it to the British, who say they can't now find it.'

‘But they found what they
say
is the true protocol of that same meeting,' Hermann said. ‘A fake, in my opinion.'

‘Not entirely,' Birgit said with quiet insistence.

‘You've read it?' Felix asked.

‘I've read them both – the protocol they dug up for the von Weizsäcker trial—'

‘He wasn't even
at
the Wannsee meeting,' Angela said.

‘But Luther, who reported to him, was,' Hermann pointed out.

One waiter removed their dishes, four others served their turbot.

‘None of your fancy Frenchified sauces,' Hermann pointed out.

‘Anyway,' Birgit continued after an interval of appreciative chewing, ‘when Hermann showed me the British protocol, at first I agreed with him that it was a fake – especially the covering letter, which is in very poor German. But when I read your transcript of what was actually said that day, I changed my mind.'

‘This is
her
theory,' Hermann said dismissively.

‘You think the protocol the British found is
genuine
?' Angela asked.