The Haunting of Toby Jugg (22 page)

While I had Deb under it occurred to me that it would be interesting, and perhaps useful, to find out a bit more about her. So I made her wheel me out to the summer-house, where I knew that we should be safe from interruption, then told her to sit down, relax and tell me about herself.

There ensued the most extraordinary conversation in which I have ever participated. Deb did most of the talking, while I just put in a question now and then or helped her with a few words when she seemed to find difficulty in expressing her thoughts. I told her to talk in German, as I thought that would be easier for her, and for the best part of two hours she spoke in a monotonous, toneless voice, revealing her inmost thoughts and beliefs.

I must confess that I felt rather a cad prying into her secrets by such unscrupulous means; but this taking to pieces of a human being proved absolutely fascinating, and in my present situation I feel fully justified in taking any steps that may strengthen my hand against Helmuth.

The first thing that emerged is that she is in love with him. Apparently he made a play for her soon after she arrived here and she fell for him right away. She is thirty, and has never cared much for young men. Helmuth is forty-five and a fine specimen of manhood; besides which his outsize brain gives him an additional attraction for any woman as intellectually inclined as Deb.

She was seduced when she was seventeen by a medical student who was a lodger in her father’s house, and has had a number of
affairs since; she is by no means the prude that her thin-lipped, hard little face led me to believe. In fact, the glimpse that I caught of this other side to her when I asked her to fish the fly out of my eye was truly revealing. I did not go into the details of the matter, but I am sure that Helmuth met with little trouble in making her his mistress.

However, for the past few weeks the
affaire
had not been going at all well. Helmuth has been neglecting her, and it is for that reason she has been encouraging Owen Gruffydd, the village schoolmaster. It struck me as pathetic that she should attempt to make Helmuth jealous, and particularly of anyone like that.

Helmuth’s sex-life is in the true Weylands tradition, and if she told him outright that she was thinking of going to bed with Gruffydd he would probably say: ‘Why not? I hope you enjoy yourself.’ As it is I doubt if her poor little ruse has even registered with him. If it has I can imagine him chuckling to himself at the thought of anyone attempting to set up a small-time teacher as his rival. Helmuth evidently felt like a little amusement, but is now tired of her, and nothing she can do will get him back—unless he feels the urge again, and then he is capable of taking her off a better man than Gruffydd, whether she likes it or not.

Gruffydd seems to be a respectable type, and he wants her to marry him. I can understand that, as although Deb might look pretty small game in Bond Street she must appear quite a glamour-girl to anyone who lives down here in the back of beyond. She does not love him, but they have tastes in common and the marriage would give her security; so she is toying with the idea. The trouble is that she is still in love with Helmuth and determined to get him back if she can—although she knows that the odds are all against it leading to anything permanent—but, meanwhile, Gruffydd is pressing her for an answer; and, as his ‘old Mum’ is fighting tooth and nail against his marrying a Jewess, Deb may lose him altogether unless she grabs him while he is all steamed up about her. So she is in a bit of a jam at the moment.

I learned quite a lot about her early life and it turns out that she is really a Russian, although she was born in Germany. Her family were Russian Jews living in Kiev until 1905. That was the year of the abortive revolution, and as many of the nihilists who
staged it were Jews it was followed by an exceptionally fierce pogrom.

In those days it was quite an ordinary occurrence for a
sotnia
of Cossacks to gallop their ponies into a ghetto, apply their knouts lustily to the backs of anyone who came in their way, and loot a few of the richer houses. It was done by order and just the simple Czarist way of keeping the Children of Israel from getting above themselves. But this time the authorities had got really angry and were marching hundreds of these wretched people off to Siberia; so Deb’s family decided to get out while the going was good, and the whole issue migrated to Leipzic. She was born seven years later.

In the first great war most of her uncles and cousins fought for Germany; but when the real Russian revolution came in 1917 they all deserted, or got themselves out of the army, as soon as they could, and went back to Russia to join the Bolsheviks. Deb’s father seems to have been both cleverer and better educated than the rest of his clan. In the dozen years he had lived in Germany he had taken several degrees, and by the outbreak of the 1914 war he was already a junior professor at Leipzic University. So he and his wife decided to remain and bring up their children as good Germans.

Despite Germany’s defeat, and the chaos and hunger that succeeded it, between 1918 and 1933 the Kain family prospered. When Hitler came to power the old boy was a leading light on his subject and much revered by his colleagues; his eldest son was a doctor, his second son reading for the law, two daughters were married, while Deb, who was then twenty-one, was getting on well with her training as a professional nurse, and engaged to a bright young journalist.

From 1930 on, while the Nazi boys were getting control of first one thing, then another, the Kains suffered a certain amount of unpleasantness, although nothing compared with what the old folks had known during their youth in Russia. But after Hitler became Chancellor things began to happen.

It was the usual sordid and horrifying story, beginning with ostracisation and ending with violence. The old professor died of a heart attack, after having had his trousers pulled off and being
chased ignominiously down the street by a pack of young hooligans. A Nazi truncheon smashed the nose and
pince-nez
of the doctor brother, blinding him in one eye; but all the same he was frog-marched along the gutters for a quarter of a mile before they flung him into a prison van, and he finally disappeared, presumably to a concentration camp.

Within a few months the whole family were dead, in prison or in hiding. Deb appears to have been the only lucky one, if you can call it lucky to survive seeing your fiancé caught in a
bierhalle
, hustled into a corner and used as a target for several hundred bottles, while your own arms are held behind you and you are forced to look on. Anyway, she got away to England.

I asked her how she managed it and she replied: ‘The Party got me out.’

At that I was a little mystified, as we had been talking of the Germany of 1933, and in that connection, to me, ‘The Party’ signified the Nazis. But a brief question to her soon cleared the mystery up. Her two brothers and her fiancé were all members of the ‘Communist’ Party, and it was the Moscow-run Communist Underground that got her by devious means across the German frontier.

She had been provided with a letter to a Miss Smith, who runs a private nursing-home, and a nursing service for out-patients, at Hampstead. On reaching London she presented her letter and was taken on. For the first two years she worked in the home, until she had completed her training; then she was put on the regular roster for small outside jobs alternating with periods of duty in the home. Now she is one of the senior Sisters and either has charge of a floor in the home when in London or goes out to jobs such as this, where the pay and responsibility are high.

I remarked that while the pay might be good here my case was a routine one involving no danger to life, so there was little responsibility attached to it; and added that, since she had such cause to hate the Nazis, I found it surprising that she had not seized the opportunity to help in the fight against them, by volunteering for active service with one of the military organisations on the outbreak of war.

Her reply came as tonelessly as everything else she had said,
but it positively made me blink. She said: ‘I could not do that because if I had I should have been making a contribution to the British war effort.’

I pondered that one for a moment, then I recalled the fact that, although she was a Jewess and an anti-Nazi, she had been brought up as a German, so I hazarded: ‘I suppose you still have pleasant memories of your childhood in Germany, and so have a sentimental reluctance to see the Germans defeated?’

‘No,’ came the answer. ‘I have long outgrown all such stupid sentimentality, and I am an Internationalist. I feel no obligation to either country.’

I said to Deb: ‘If you had remained in Germany I suppose it is a hundred to one that you would have died like your sisters from ill-treatment and starvation in a Nazi concentration camp. As it was you succeeded in getting to England, where for the best part of ten years you have had the full protection of British justice, and been free to live where you chose and earn your living in any way you like, with absolute security from any form of discrimination, oppression or persecution. Don’t you really feel that you owe this country something for that; and that instead of taking cushy jobs like this you ought to have offered your services when the first call went out for nurses for the forces?’

‘I could not,’ she said. ‘I was under orders not to do so.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘The orders of the Party. The Soviet Union had entered into an alliance with Germany. It was not for me to question the wisdom of Comrade Stalin and the Politbureau. The order came to us all that we must do nothing to aid Britain in her war against Germany.’

I stared at the expressionless face in front of me. I suppose I should have realised a few minutes earlier that, if Deb’s brothers and fiancé had been active Communists and ‘the Party’ had smuggled her out of Germany, the odds were that she was a member of it, too. But I hadn’t; and, as far as I knew, I had never met a real dyed-in-the-wool Red who owned a Party ticket before.

‘I see,’ I said slowly. ‘But how about your own feelings? I can understand your having felt a certain loyalty to the Comrades who saved you from the Nazis, but doesn’t the ten years of security that we gave you mean anything to you at all?’

‘I had to live somewhere,’ she replied. ‘I would have gone to Russia if I had been allowed to, but I was ordered to come here. The British Government is Capitalist and Imperialist; it is the keystone of resistance to world-rule by the Proletariat, and more Comrades were needed to work for its overthrow.’

At that, I began to wonder if I ought not to do something about Comrade Deborah Kain, and try to find a way to tip off our security people that she is one of the secret enemies in our midst. But on second thoughts I realised that it would be futile. The British Union, as the Fascist Party calls itself, has been banned, and its leaders live on such fat as is left in the land on the Isle of Man; but not the Communists. They are our gallant allies and are still permitted to share our dangers and ferment strikes, when and where they like. This is a free country—even if the Home Office is run by a collection of lunatics who are incapable of understanding that Fascism and Communism differ only in being two sides of the same penny—and Deb is legally just as much entitled to her opinion as I am, even if she would like to kill the King and have Churchill thrown into a concentration camp.

Still, on the offchance that some day somebody at the top may
see the red light, and the information then prove useful, I asked her: ‘From whom do you receive your orders?’

‘From Miss Smith,’ came her reply.

‘Who gives her hers?’

‘I don’t know.’

As I expected, they are still working on the old cell system. But what a clever racket. An expensive nursing organisation must get lots of calls from important people who have had operations or gone sick. Bright girls like Deb can be sent out to look after them. No one suspects a trained nurse; papers are left about and telephone calls made in their presence. The Reds must pick up quite a lot of useful information on the way the war is going, and the industrial situation, like that.

‘Are all the nurses in your organisation Party Comrades?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, no; at least I don’t think so. Owing to the war there is a great shortage of private nurses, so in these days Miss Smith takes on anyone she can get.’

From that it appears that I have been honoured. No doubt Miss ‘Smith’ decided that as I am potentially a great industrial magnate it would be worth sending one of her ewe-lambs to look after me; but if she hopes to pick up anything worth while about the Jugg aircraft plants I fear she is going to be disappointed.

However, as a matter of interest I asked Deb if she had learned anything worth reporting since she had been in Wales.

‘Only about Owen Gruffydd,’ she said. ‘He is Labour and wants to stand for Parliament after the war. He is very Left and has the right ideas already. If I marry him I am sure that I could make something of him. The fact that he had joined the Party would be kept secret; and it is part of the plan that we should get as many Comrades as possible elected under the Labour ticket. Besides, if he got in I should meet a lot of his fellow members. I took out naturalisation papers in 1938, so I am already a British subject, and I could work on them to get me nominated by the Labour Central Office as their candidate for another constituency. I am quite as intelligent as most of the men I have met, and I am sure I could get myself elected, if only I were given a chance as the official Labour candidate in a good industrial area.’

That was the end of our conversation. I had always thought Deb to be a hard, capable, superficially intelligent little go-getter, but I was far from realising the height of her ambitions or the depths of her perfidy. This last revelation took me so aback that I could think of nothing else to ask her, so after a few moments I told her to forget all she had said, and woke her from her trance.

Then I closed my own eyes, in order to avoid looking at her, and said I felt like a nap. But I didn’t go to sleep. I sat there feeling shattered and sick—just as though I had found a toad in my bed.