The Other Side of Love (21 page)

Wyatt said bitterly.

“Did you send letters to the rest of the family?”

Rossie didn’t answer.

“Kate,”

Porteous said at the dinner-table,

“I shan’t bring up the matter again, but I do feel responsible, sending you off to New York last summer. This business between you and Wyatt must stop. Mark you, he’s a very decent young chap, if a bit hot-headed. But he’s not for you. Cousins shouldn’t marry. And, besides, you’re such a tender little thing, taking everything to heart. He’s all push and energy - it’s the American in him. Let him racket around London with Aubrey while you and Araminta take the boat train to Ostend. Or maybe you could go down to Nice.”

Porteous cajoled with alternate holidays. Kathe picked at her shrimp mayonnaise, then at her saddle of lamb.

They were being served the trifle, whose peaked whipped cream was embedded with candied violets and mandarin oranges, when Aubrey arrived.

Kathe, at first delighted to move away from the personal, grew silent again as the two men explored the Sudetenland issue. The Sudetenland had been taken from Germany by the Versailles Treaty to become the western half of the newly formed nation of Czechoslovakia. Since May, Hitler had shrieked demands that the territory be restored to the Third Reich. The Propaganda Ministry had been spewing out horror-stories of Czechs persecuting Sudeten Germans. Recently panzer divisions had settled along the GermanCzech border, leading Czechoslovakia to mobilize every male between six and sixty. Europe was stricken by a bad case of war nerves.

They had coffee in the drawingroom.

“It’s a fine night, Kathe,”

Aubrey said.

“Are you too tired for a stroll in the park?”

“You young people don’t need to rush out to have a private chat,”

Porteous said a little stiffly.

“Go on in the garden.”

The garden wasn’t a garden at all but a terrace above the flatroofed kitchen. The potted rhododendrons hadn’t done well, but the white roses that climbed from a pair of Italian urns spread luxuriantly across the trellis behind the marble bench. Kathe sat, feeling the chill of the smooth stone through her dinnerdress. Aubrey stood with one foot on the low balustrade, gazing up at the narrow new moon as if seeking advice on how to begin a speech.

“No,”

Kathe said.

“Absolutely not.”

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He turned.

“What?”

“You asked me out here to tell me to forget Wyatt.”

“What on earth gave you that idea?”

The blood had rushed to Aubrey’s face, but it was too dark for Kathe to see.

“Nothing like that at all. I was wondering … Kathe, have you ever heard of Winston Churchill?”

“Churchill? Your politician?”

“He’s in the House of Commons, yes. As a matter of fact, he’s held most of the cabinet posts. Quite a well-known character here. Grandson of the Duke of Marlborough. Writes articles and books.”

“Our press hates him. He’s against Hitler.”

“Very much so.”

Aubrey drew a breath.

“He’s invited us to tea tomorrow in his chambers.”

“Us?”

Her long skirt rustled as she got to her feet.

“The Houses of Parliament? You have come up in the world.”

“I’m refusing.”

“Whatever for?”

“I can see you’re fagged out from the journey,”

he muttered.

She needed ways to hurry the interminable hours until she saw Wyatt.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

IV

Parliament had adjourned, and the corridors of power echoed emptily to Kathe and Aubrey’s footsteps. After waiting briefly in an anteroom whose shabby Jacobean furnishings were the genuine article, they were ushered into a large office saturated with the aroma of cigar smoke.

Churchill rose from his desk. Elderly tout, considerably shorter than Kathe, his pudgy pink face remiiMed her of a baby crossed with a pug dog. Yet as he stamped across the carpet to greet them there was something impressive about him that she recognized from Clothilde. Both moved with the same patrician self-assurance, as if the ground welcomed them.

“Tea won’t be for a few minutes,”

Churchill said, and cocked a bushy white eyebrow at Aubrey.

“What have you told Fraulein Kingsmith.”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Well, then, busy yourself outside while I explain.”

As the door closed on Aubrey, Churchill surveyed Kathe.

“Your Olympic photographs didn’t do you justice. Do sit down.”

He pulled out a chair.”

‘Fraulein Kingsmith, I congratulate you on your involvement against the Nazi regime.”

“Aubrey told you about that?”

“Josef Kahn, the theoretical physicist, for whose knowledge we are most grateful, mentioned your assistance to him and his wife.”

Frau

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Professor Kahn was lame. Though the couple had held legitimate emigration papers, there had been nobody to drive them from their shabby flat in Kreuzberg to the Anhalter terminal.

“Don’t look so concerned. You’re absolutely safe.”

“There are other people involved,”

she said.

“Professor Kahn and the rest of us are most circumspect.”

Churchill’s gold watch-chain glittered as he thrust out his round belly.

“Fleet Street’s labelled me a busybody and warmonger. But you obviously agree that the Nazis are a foul crew and must be stopped.”

“Politics is out of my realm.”

The sense of owing two separate allegiances which had stirred during the conversation at her grandfather’s dinner-table now settled like glue in her blood-vessels. The flesh around her mouth felt hard.

“All I do is occasionally drive somebody or pass on an envelope.”

“Helping us would involve even less.”

“Helping you?

“In a most minor way. For example, should you hear something unusual, like a factory taking on more workers, or see more uniforms on the streets - any such trivial information - you would pass it on to Aubrey.”

“Tell Aubrey?”

Her voice rose.

“You’re asking me to spy?”

“I’d never phrase it so dramatically. But the Nazis have a highly organized observation-ring in this country, while we”

“No,”

she interrupted thickly.

He blinked at her.

“What?”

“I’m a German.”

“Of the highest type. Already you’re disobeying your laws.”

“I’m helping innocent people.”

“I, too, wish to help them. Miss Kingsmith”

Kathe noticed the switch from

“Fraulein”

-

“your father is British.”

“My mother’s German. I was born in Germany. Aubrey told me that you have an American mother. If an American asked you to pass on information to Washington, would you?”

“Not at this time,”

he said.

“But, if there came a day when wickedness were abroad in the land, yes, I would.”

“You were born here. What about your conscience?”

“My conscience would demand that as an Englishman I do my utmost to stamp out the wickedness.”

V

Wyatt knew immediately that his mother had sent those letters. Possibly Alfred had despatched warnings from Berlin. The older family members joined ranks to allow him as little time as possible alone with Kathe. Euan, now fully recovered from his heartattack and back at work, procured a box at the Duchess, taking them to see

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the hit play The Corn Is Green. Elizabeth flustered into town to give a dinner at the flat. With Araminta’s help drawing up guest-lists, she also arranged parties at Quaglino’s and lunches at the Savoy. Porteous took the family young people to dinner amid the gilt angels of the Cafe Royal. There was a weekend at Quarles during which Wyatt swore he could hear Euan patrolling the corridors. The rare hours they had to themselves, Wyatt found himself unable to suggest they head for Aubrey’s one-room flat. Knowing how his host felt about Kathe, it seemed vicious to make love on the lopsided divan. After a week, Wyatt set aside a large portion of his traveller’s cheques to take the cheapest single at the Dorchester. The hotel guests were almost exclusively American, and Kathe in her New York clothes was more or less inconspicuous as she travelled up in the lift to his room.

“What are you thinking?”

she asked.

“That we should be spending the entire month like this.”

They were entwined on his bed, the dusk slanting from the window to paint a blue gleam across their naked bodies.

“What, with Grandpa and Uncle Euan and Aunt Elizabeth in the wings?”

He kissed her breast, rubbing his cheek back and forth across the chiffon softness.

“Kathe,”

he said, and broached what had been on his mind since the previous December.

“Let’s elope to Gretna Green and tie the knot.”

A pigeon cooed on the twilit window-ledge, a truck backfired in Park Lane. She kissed his shoulder, which was still damp with sweat, an aphrodisiac scent to her.

“Mmm, niA-and salty. Gretna Green marriages haven’t been legal for ages.”

*

“I’m sick of having an ocean between us.”

“What about law school?”

A memory popped into his mind. Kathe in that white uniform, crowned with laurel, standing below the giant swastika while the crowd roared out

“Deutschland uber Alles’.

“That sounds suspiciously like a put-off,”

he said.

“Your mother wrote to me.”

“Yeah, I know. Look, so there aren’t hordes of hitched law students. But that doesn’t mean I can’t swing it.”

“All I think about is being married.”

“Then, stop thinking. Plan an elopement with me.”

She sighed.

“I can’t go back on my word.”

He had heard that damn excuse once too often but, even so, he was surprised to hear himself ask in a loud courtroom voice:

“How do you feel about the Leventhal side of me?”

“Wyatt, please don’t do this to us.”

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An oppressive pain settled in his forehead, as if a hatchet was sinking into his skull.

“Answer the question.”

“If only you realized how much you’re hurting me.”

“It’s no fun and games for me, either. Kathe, level with me.”

She turned her head on the pillow, looking away from him.

“Sometimes … this makes me ashamed to say … Sometimes I think I love you more because of it.”

She paused, asking in the same muffled voice:

“Why must you always keep picking on me for being German?”

“I love you in spite of it. So let’s make an honest American of you.”

“Wyatt, why won’t you understand? My parents let me come here and meet you because I’d given them my word to wait. They trust me.”

For a long few seconds he peered at the face on the pillow next to his. How could this madonna loveliness hide such a diamond-hard will? Tears swam in her blue-green eyes.

“It’d be easier,”

he sighed,

“if I hadn’t fallen for you in such a damn big way.”

“So we’re all right?”

He raised up to kiss her eyelids, then her breasts.

“Mmm, aren’t these soft and sweet? My, aren’t you sweet and soft here? … Yes, do that … and that … Ahh, love, love, love

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Chapter Nineteen

That summer of 1938, Hitler continued to howl ultimatums while the far less militarized Czechs steadfastly refused to surrender the Sudetenland. By September an unendurable tension gripped Europe. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the French Premier, Edouard Daladier, whirled more and more feverishly between Czechoslovakia and Germany, browbeating the Czech government, pleading with Hitler. On 2iSeptember, Chamberlain, his grizzled moustache pulled sternly er his prominent teeth, carried his furled umbrella aboard a plane to Munich. Amid the architectural treasures of that Bavarian city, he handed Germany the living, beating heart of Czechoslovakia: eleven thousand square miles that included most of the country’s coal, iron and steel as well as its defensive wall. Cheering crowds filled Downing Street on the Prime Minister’s return. Chamberlain went upstairs, standing at a second-floor window to brandish the treaty that had slain another country as he proclaimed that the parchment ensured

“peace in our time’. The Times declared that no hero had ever returned with nobler laurels. And when Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the Munich pact was an unmitigated defeat, hooting shouts of protest silenced his warnings.

Parliament, like the rest of Europe, longed to believe that Hitler’s territorial hunger and bloodlust was assuaged.

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Early on the gloomy afternoon of 9 November 1938, Kathe pulled into the narrow courtyard behind the Unter den Linden shop, putting the car in neutral before she eased on the brake, which tended to work stiffly. She succoured the old Steyr now that Gunther was no longer around - in early October, the chauffeur’s SS Reserve unit had been called up for duty in the new Czech Protectorate. Stepping into the dinky windowless cloakroom, she exchanged her heavy winter coat for the black linen coverall worn by the sales staff, then glanced in the steel mirror to smooth her coronet of plaits. Fraulein Kingsmith was ready to perform her duties.