The Girl in Berlin (33 page)

Alan took the Bakerloo line to Great Portland Street station and walked along Bell Street to Edith’s flat. He’d reached a decision. He had to end the affair. Irrationally, he blamed Edith for the turmoil in his marriage. She was too demanding … possessive … her behaviour at that party. He’d thought Dinah hadn’t a clue, but she was no fool, he’d underestimated her. He’d make it clear to Edith – perhaps he’d wait until they’d made love though …

To his surprise Edith was dressed in a cool, blue linen dress and looked as if she was about to go out.

‘Darling! How very formal! It makes you look so prim. I can’t wait to take it off.’ He approached, put one arm round her and engulfed her in a kiss as with his other hand he undid her top button and roughly pushed his hand inside to squeeze her breasts.

Edith pulled herself out of his grasp and stepped away from him. She smiled her cat-like smile. ‘You’re so impatient. Sit down, I have something to tell you.’

Alan’s stomach lurched. Oh Christ! Pregnant. Just when he’d decided … He lowered himself uneasily onto her hard little sofa. ‘What is it, darling?’

‘I’m getting married.’

Married …

‘Well – say something, darling.’ Her smile was more provocative than ever.

He sat staring at her. Eventually he croaked out: ‘Who to?’

‘The banker, Sir Avery Pearson.’

‘
What
! I don’t believe you. You’re joking. You’re having me on.’

She shook her head indulgently. ‘On the contrary. We’re getting married at Chelsea Register Office on Friday.’

Fury drove him to his feet. ‘You bloody bitch! What are you
talking
about! You never even told me you’d met him. Why didn’t you tell me? Two-timing little tart.’ He surged towards her.

Her air of triumph held steady, but she put out a hand in front of her to ward him off. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You have no rights over me. Who are you to talk? You were never going to leave your wife, were you.’

He swung out blindly and slapped her face. They both recoiled, she with a hand to her mouth, he angrier than ever, but now with himself as much as with her. He flung round furiously and slammed out of the flat.

He made for the nearest pub and sat numbly smoking. He’d been a bit drunk. He really shouldn’t have hit a woman. Yes, he must have been drunk. All that champagne with bloody Kingdom. His generalised rage, embracing Kingdom, Colin, Edith and Dinah gradually seeped away into self-pity until he was empty, completely drained.

Half an hour later he trudged up the path alongside the cemetery, dreading what he would find at home. ‘Hullo,’ he called uncertainly from the hall.

Dinah had had an unexpected encounter with Dr Blunt at the Courtauld. As she climbed the splendid Courtauld staircase to
the landing where it divided and then surged upwards in two stony curves, she was close to tears. She had cried a lot since the awful row with Alan. You would have thought you’d run out of tears, that the ducts would dry up, but no, on the contrary, there were always more. She despised herself for it, but she couldn’t stop. Her head was down, her lips pressed together, her face distorted. She almost bumped into someone running down. It was Dr Blunt.

‘Mrs Wentworth! Dinah! Is something the matter? You look rather pale. You’re not – is it another—’

She laughed rather miserably. ‘Oh no, I’m not pregnant.’

He took her elbow and steered her swiftly back up the stairs to his office and soon Dinah to her own amazement had poured out her sorry story of a wife betrayed. As she talked she knew Dr Blunt was lapping up the gossip and drama, but she also felt his sympathy was sincere. He offered no practical advice, but it was a relief just to talk about it.

For, to her surprise, there’d been no-one she could talk to. She’d thought she had staunch women friends, but at this moment of crisis there’d been none to turn to. Pride had prevented her from unburdening herself to Reggie. Of the others, one, a psychoanalyst, would, Dinah felt, have been too ‘psychological’ about it, seeing Alan’s as well as Dinah’s point of view; another lived in the country; she didn’t know the peace group women well enough; while of course to mention it to her mother would have been unthinkable.

‘Shall we ask Miss Lefebvre to bring us some tea?’

The tea came, with some of Miss Welsh’s cakes as well. Dinah watched Dr Blunt. Although he was so tall and so thin, he was large-boned, as his wrists, which protruded from the too-short sleeves of his shabby jacket, proved and it was rather endearing, the clumsy way he arranged the cups, handed her a plate and poured the tea. And he seemed to be too tall for his chair, swung one leg over the other and folded himself
like a retractable ruler. His flannel trousers weren’t properly creased, but his black lace-up shoes gleamed like ebony. Dinah wondered that a man could be such an aesthete, so intensely sensitive to the beauty of works of art, yet so indifferent to his own appearance and surroundings. Jeremy, one of the few to have seen the inside of Dr Blunt’s flat at the top of the building, had reported that it was more like a barracks than a home, ‘positively spartan’.

Here in the ramshackle study the Poussin painting glowed on the wall behind them, with its depths, its light and shade, the intensity of its yellow, and the richness of mysterious blue, a powerful, numinous presence.

Dinah sat in the shabby armchair at right angles to Dr Blunt’s.

‘You really must come back to us full-time in the autumn,’ he said. ‘You must have an independent life of your own.’ A smile stretched his papery face and revealed surprisingly large teeth.

‘I think that’ll be really difficult with the baby,’ she said. ‘He’s over a year old now, you know, and he’s so active. He’s walking. He’s almost a toddler.’ But she stopped, for she felt sure Dr Blunt wasn’t interested in babies.

‘The longer you put it off the more difficult it will be. You’ll probably have more children, your husband will grow more and more used to your being at home—’

She knew it was not that he rated her especially highly as a student. It was not even that he was particularly interested in her. It was rather that he wished for her to experience to the full the matchless opportunity of studying at the greatest art-history institution in Britain, perhaps anywhere. Polly complained that he didn’t care about the women students, but Dinah didn’t criticise him for that. A fair number came from upper-class families for whom the study of art was an appropriate preparation for the future wife of a rich man who would
cherish family heirlooms and add to them with judicious new purchases. It was the men who would be the curators and who, trained by Dr Blunt, would carry his legacy into the museums of the future.

Polly, set on a serious curating career, was an exception. Dinah felt that she herself was more a kind of anomaly, a girl who, for some unknown reason, Dr Blunt had decided to take under his wing.

Perhaps Dr Blunt needed someone to talk to as badly as Dinah did, because he began to reminisce about the 1930s and Dinah, listening, knew that he was as agitated about the disappearance of the missing diplomats now as he had been on the day the news had broken. He talked about the rise of fascism all over the world – ‘it wasn’t just in Germany or even Europe, there was Chiang Kai-shek in China—’ the Soviet Union had been the only hope. She could tell from the way he talked about Guy Burgess how important the friendship had been to him. Burgess was the one who had influenced him towards communism and whose disappearance had … hurt – angered – frustrated him? After a while he stopped talking and lay back in his chair, seeming shattered.

‘You look rather tired, Dr Blunt.’

‘These endlessly pestering MI5 people – I’m absolutely exhausted. There’s one in particular. He remembers everything I say and then if I say anything –
anything
– that seems to be inconsistent
in the smallest degree, the minutest particular
, he picks me up on it and we go all the way back to square one and start again. And it’s all completely pointless, because I don’t know anything. They’ve wrung me dry. I’m a limp rag.’

She couldn’t believe it was still going on. ‘But they surely must know you had nothing to do with it. Just because you knew them—’

‘They still think I helped them get away. And if I did that it means I knew more about them than I let on.’

‘That’s just absurd, Dr Blunt.’

Dr Blunt smiled his twisted smile.

And in the charged silence, for a moment there was an electric current charging the atmosphere with expectation. As if he was about to say something extraordinary, as if—

‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more. I’m sorry to bore you with it. Especially when you’re having such a beastly time.’ He laughed. ‘Oh, what a bore it is, feeling sorry for oneself. We’re both feeling sorry for ourselves today, aren’t we. I think perhaps we should move on to gin and tonic.’

Dinah hardly ever drank gin and certainly not at 11.00 a.m., but she accepted a small one. He raised his glass.

‘To you, Dinah. I’m looking forward to seeing you back here full-time in the autumn. Don’t let anything stand in your way. You owe it to yourself – and to your son – to make the best use of your talent. You have a real feeling for the work.’

She smiled, embarrassed, but she knew it was the highest compliment he could offer, more than offsetting, in his eyes at least, the tiresome banality of an unfaithful husband. And to hide her pleasure, she simply said: ‘I must get back to the library. Miss Welsh will wonder where on earth I’ve got to.’

‘There was one other thing,’ said Dr Blunt in a different tone of voice, unfolding himself and standing up. ‘Your father’s a lawyer, I believe.’

‘That’s right.’

‘If ever I needed to discuss this business with someone …’

‘Oh, I’m sure he’d be only too pleased to help. But it won’t come to that, will it?’

‘I don’t expect so.’

Dinah was still thinking about Dr Blunt’s words when Alan came home.

‘I bought some gin on the way home. D’you fancy a drink?’

She didn’t tell him she’d had some earlier in the day.

Drink in hand, Alan swallowed. ‘Look – Dinah—’

She stood at the sink, her back towards him.

‘I’ve – I’ve behaved so badly. It didn’t mean anything, you know. It was just – it was nothing. She – I was stupid, thoughtless, I never cared for her – please …’

Dinah turned towards him and leaned her back against the sink. ‘Then why did you do it? If it meant nothing to you. You knew it would hurt me so dreadfully.’

Alan raised his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I’ve given her up. I told her I couldn’t see her any more. And I
didn’t
think.’

‘Well, you should have thought.’

‘But when we first met we talked about what being married meant and how we shouldn’t be jealous and possessive. You said that. You agreed.’

Dinah pressed her lips together. She wasn’t looking at him. ‘Well, I was silly and inexperienced. I had
no idea
. I don’t care what I said then. I understand things differently now. I’m a mother now. That changes everything.’

He stood with hanging head. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It mustn’t happen again, Alan. I couldn’t stand it. It’s not fair on me, or on Tommy.’

‘Of course, of course. I promise.’ And as he said it, he meant it, overcome with affection and pity. Tommy. And he did understand that he’d hurt her, although it was beyond his imagining how much.

‘I think it’s important that I go back to the Courtauld in the autumn. Go back properly, I mean, as a full-time student. Dr Blunt wants me to.’

‘But what about Tommy? If motherhood’s so important to you.’ Already he was in danger of becoming truculent.

‘We’ll have to have a nanny. Or I may be able to make a different arrangement with Mary. I’d like to help Mary. Her real ambition is to be a nurse, but she hasn’t any education. If we
pay her properly she’ll be able to save up – she may need to do some courses, I don’t know, I’m going to find out about it.’

‘But Dinah—’

‘I don’t want to argue about it. I just want to do it. You do what
you
want. All the time. Don’t you. And now I want to do what I want for a change.’

An awful sense of dismay and something he couldn’t put a name to welled up in him. He put his arms round his wife and murmured, ‘Of course, of course, whatever you want,’ sincerely determined at that moment to be a better husband and to make Dinah happy.

thirty-five

M
CGOVERN WAITED FOR FRIEDA
outside her place of work, as he had done when Hoffmann had taken him to meet her the first time. She saw him and crossed the street with that curiously sideways walk of hers, as if she were drifting away, evasive and yet drawn to him.

‘I thought you might come,’ she said. ‘I hoped, anyway, but I was afraid you might have left. I was going to come to your hotel. I need your help now. You are going to help me? Tomorrow is my last day at work here. I won’t be coming across any more. They make it more and more difficult. You are supposed to promise not to. It is seen as unpatriotic. I shall have to find work there, on the other side.’

‘I’d like to take you somewhere nice,’ he said, wanting to be kind to her and at the same time dreading the conversation they must have.

‘To your hotel, perhaps.’

He shook his head. He wanted to avoid anywhere where they would be alone and she might tempt him into doing something he’d regret. The scene by the lake had to be forgotten. In any case, the evening with Celia Black and the Major had changed everything.

‘You heard about Colin and my father?’ She spoke without emotion.

‘You must be worried about them,’ he said, stupidly, almost forgetting for a moment that she hated her father.

‘Worried? How stupid it was of them to go there. But at least one thing is clear now. It is quite certain that Colin cannot help me. But you will help me now, won’t you.’

They walked in the direction of the Kurfürstendamm.

‘Let’s go to the Kempinski.’ He didn’t know where else to take her. He was still a stranger here, shut out from the secrets of this black city. He longed to get away from the place altogether, but he had to talk to her first, had to know if his theory was correct.