The Other Side of Love (70 page)

“So that was your little rowdy bossing the gang?”

“Erich’s a leader, yes,”

she bristled.

The boy shook clear of Cosway’s hand and moved towards them. He glanced at Wyatt with curiosity but no sign of recognition. It had been too dark to see his abductor.

Wyatt cleared his throat with a grating cough before he extended his hand.

“Good morning,”

he said in his badly accented German.

“I’m Captain Kingsmith.”

The child lifted his cap politely, permitting his right hand to be briefly engulfed.

“Delighted to meet you, sir.”

For all his mischievous wildness, his manners never deserted him.

“Kingsmith? Like Kathe and Aubrey?”

“The three of us’re cousins.”

Wyatt said.

“Is your name a secret?”

“I’m Erich Detten no, Schwagermann.”

“Bit of confusion there. What’s the matter? Just get married?”

Erich laughed. Attempting to pay back humour with humour, he said:

“Girls change their names when they get married!”

“Anyone can see that you’re no girl, buddy.”

Erich gave an upended grin so resembling the one on Wyatt’s face that Kathe’s hands loosened on the Frankfurter Rundschau and it fluttered to the cracked pavement.

To prevent the folded sheets from blowing away, Wyatt put down his shoe.

“Corporal, you and my buddy here hike back to the hotel. We’ll be along in a few minutes.”

The corporal saluted.

“Yes, sir.”

Erich had picked up enough English to understand.

“Kathe promised I could watch them put down the pipe.”

“But I’m taking you to lunch. So march!”

Wyatt emphasized his German with a swatting motion.

Erich stood with hands on hips for a long moment to prove he wasn’t intimidated, then with a merry smile brought out his new American phrase.

“So long, pardner.”

Watching the boy turn at the shell of a shop, Wyatt sank back down on the bus bench. With the lengthy undisturbed hours of self-recrimination and dismal soul-searching, he had imagined himself altogether prepared for the elemental shock of coming face to

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face with Erich. In biblical terms, his seed, the fruit of his loins. Yet looking into the rounded face, marking the resemblances, he had been battered by the accretion of many years, a ton of emotional garbage. There was no space at all for the unstudied tenderness he’d felt at Quarles when he’d first held Geoff.

“Erich’s very outgoing.”

Kathe spoke with pride.

“He’s quite remarkable for a fiveyear-old, especially when you consider the war and all the catastrophes and turnabouts he’s had. He can read. He can add. He’s learning English. And he plays Corporal Cosway’s harmonica.”

Wyatt bent, stiff and dizzy, to gather her four-page newspaper. Pointing to the hospital jeep, he said:

“I borrowed transport.”

After they got in, he stared at the large red cross painted on the hood.

“What is it?”

she asked.

“Maybe you’ve wondered why I stopped having visitors.”

He shook his head, falling silent again. He had argued Captain Wertheim, his doctor, into permitting him to leave the hospital for one purpose. To tell Kathe that he knew about Erich. He had planned apologies, planned the words to tell her of his shame.

“It doesn’t matter,”

she said softly.

“There’s no way I can ever repay you.”

She’s given you the perfect opening, he told himself. Say it! Tell her when a kid’s yours gratitude’s not in order. But his tongue had gone rigid. The speeches formulated in his hospital bed suddenly proved unsayable. But why? For one thing, anything he said would be grossly unfair to his brother-in-law. Aubrey had always loved Kathe. Unlike himself, Aubrey had always trusted Katflfe. Aubrey was engaged to Kathe. Maybe out beyond the last, mostWlistant galaxy there was an implacable universal Judge who handed out equitable sentences, but in the mean time it was up to those involved in the case to do the right thing. What greater injustice than to give himself an edge because Aubrey had been decent enough to set him straight about Erich?

Starting the hospital jeep, he asked:

“You and Aubrey set the date?”

“Not yet. Erich and I are visiting England. When we get back we’re going south to GarmischPartenkirchen. There’s money from Father’s share of Kingsmith’s and”

She stopped abruptly.

“Well, there’s money. The chalet’ll be perfect for Erich and a few other children.”

“Orphanage?”

“A home. For all of us. After Aubrey’s demobbed, he’ll come over. Then we’ll have the wedding.”

Wyatt curved around a jammed horse-drawn tram.

“You’re getting by far the better Kingsmith - by far the better man.”

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‘It all seems so long ago, doesn’t it? Before the war everything seemed so … well, rosy and innocent, so hopeful.”

Her sigh wavered.

He would have given everything he owned to reach for her hand. Instead, he gripped the gear-shift.

“That’s how the past always seems, innocent and hopeful.”

“The war was monstrous - all the unspeakable things that happened, the millions killed. I can’t tell you how I miss Mother and Father and Sigi. Araminta. I think of them all the time. Yet … well, without the past there wouldn’t have been my Erich. Or your Geoff.”

The path narrowed between two great pyramids of rubble. Wyatt didn’t see the bomb hole. Jolting over it, he stifled a groan.

“Don’t get me wrong.”

His voice was so low that it mingled with the vibrations of the jeep’s engine.

“I’m grateful with my whole heart that

“Minta and I were married and had time together - God knows I’m grateful. Geoffs my son; I’m crazy about the kid. But the thing is, now I know exactly how Dad felt about the biological lapses.”

“You’re saying … ?”

“Remember Peter? The Honourable Peter Shawcross-Mortimer? He was shot down over the Mediterranean.”

“Geoffs Peter’s child?”

“Genetically speaking, yeah. But he’s mine. And I’m going to be just as good a father as Dad. Only one thing I’ll do differently, and that’s tell him as soon as he’s old enough. Then it won’t come as such a big shock to his system.”

“Poor

“Minta … But it was very dear of you”

“Nothing like that,”

he interrupted.

“Araminta was terrific; she made the world jump and hop. I loved her. Not the way I felt about you. That went further than love. The right term’s insanity.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the giveaway tremor of her eyelids, her blush. It was as if he had pressed his naked body to hers. He looked away quickly.

Kathe was biting her lip. Now, if ever, was the moment to tell him the truth. Yet she couldn’t say the words. Only in part because she feared his incredulity. To a far greater extent she kept her silence for the same reason Wyatt had. Aubrey.

Braking outside the Excelsior, Wyatt mopped at his sweating forehead.

“You better go back to hospital and rest,”

Kathe said.

“I need some lunch is all.”

IV

He took her and Erich to the snack bar at the Casino. Erich ordered a cheeseburger, French fries and a chocolate malted, finishing a surprising amount of the enormous portions. When they left, thick

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cumulus clouds hunkered over the tumbled city, and raindrops were splattering against the canvas top of the jeep. This time the detour signs led them through the Messe, Frankfurt’s famed conventionhalls. Despite the weather, the grounds were crowded. In and around the massive disembowelled buildings, blackmarket dealers furtively exposed stolen army goods, impoverished men and women hawked their possessions, and pathetically underdressed Schatzis solicited the American soldiers.

Erich, kneeling in the back seat next to Kathe, stared through the isinglass window.

“Look, there’s”

He stopped abruptly.

Wyatt slowed the jeep.

“Who?”

The child’s mouth snapped shut, and he sat back in the seat.

“You saw somebody,”

Wyatt said.

“I see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.”

Wyatt made a U-turn, returning slowly through the pedestrians and bicycles. An old man balancing a huge box on his handlebars swerved, his wheels skidding. The box toppled. A thin matron raised her umbrella with a vitriolic glare at the American jeep.

Wyatt turned to look questioningly at Kathe.

She shook her head.

At the Excelsior, Wyatt laboriously climbed the staircase to their rooms. Taking a furled comic-book from his pocket, he flattened it to show Superman streaking across the cover.

“Bought you a present, Erich. It’s in English, but you can figure out the pictures.”

The boy opened the magazine. Captured by the vivid squares, he drifted into his room.

“Where’s your corporal?”

“It’s Sunday and raining; he knows \ frwon’t be going anywhere.”

“The kid saw somebody back there atHhe Messe.”

“He grew up around here. It could have been anyone. Even if Groener were crazy enough to be in Frankfurt, he’d hardly come to a hotel swarming with Americans. Besides, Aubrey gave the desk clerks cigarettes not to let up any visitors.”

“The one with the red scar along his jaw told me where you’d be this morning.”

“You stayed here. He knows you. Wyatt, there’s no need to worry. This is your first day out; you’re overdoing it.”

“Ever use a pistol?”

“When Sigi practised, I pestered him to teach me.”

“Then, take this.”

Wyatt was leaning against the door-jamb.

Kathe decided it was the lesser of two evils carefully to store his Colt service pistol in her capacious handbag and risk having Erich find it rather than to argue.

“You gave us a wonderful afternoon,”

she said.

“Now go back to bed.”

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7

“My father’s a blackmarket grocer,

My mother makes illegal gin,

My sister makes love for a quarter,

My God, how the money rolls in.”

The farewell parties in the upstairs diningroom followed the same sequence. Drinks before the meal, endless toasts to the lucky bastard on his way home during dinner and afterwards much wetting of the whistle as voices were raised in songs that - according to the age and background of the celebrators - varied from Stephen Foster to the obscene. Fortunately Erich was a sound sleeper.

Kathe sat at the table by the window, a letterpad on her knee.

Dear Aubrey, she wrote. Her nib rose from the paper.

Tonight anything she set on paper would be inadequate. Even had she been capable of the brutality of candour, words would be feeble distortions of her state of mind. There were no phrases eloquent enough for her euphoria at seeing Wyatt, no exoneration for her mean buttery delight when she’d heard Geoff was Peter’s son. Sighing, she crumpled the stationery and replaced the pen in the hotel desk-set. How strange, she mused, that Wyatt, at least to her admittedly hypersensitive eyes, had not fallen for Erich - his son

- while Aubrey lavished unstinting affection on the child. Marrying Aubrey’s the best thing, she thought. The very best.

She and Erich would visit England. At long last she would embrace

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her grandfather, smell his Bay Rum and cigar odour, feel his sensitive fingers transcribe her face. Then she would introduce him to his great-grandson. Porteous would not question the irregularities of the child’s birth: he never permitted the iron of conventions to jam the compass point of love. It wouldn’t be the same at Quarles. Euan and Elizabeth were far too laden with proprieties to accept that most visible fall from grace, an illegitimate child. Also - or so she had gleaned from Aubrey - since Araminta’s death they had become yet firmer patriots and therefore would view her as the enemy. As she thought of a stay with her future in-laws, a hint of nausea brushed her, but then she was comforted by the thought of Araminta’s son. Closing her eyes, she envisioned Erich and Geoff

- or, rather, the little boy in the snapshots - merrily chasing each other around ancient oaks of the lovely careless Kentish garden.

At a tap on the door, she looked up.

“My sister makes love for a quarter

The goodnatured roar almost drowned out the

“Room service for the tray, bitte’.

II

The tray had already been removed. Had she not been sunk in woolgathering about the trip to England, she would never have opened the door. And, having answered, she would have slammed it shut immediately. Hadn’t Aubrey used the same protective camouflage of a uniform? As it was, she blinked at the stocky American major with the combed-back blond hair.

The momentary hesitation was all Groener needed. With a palm on her shoulder, he sent her spinning backwards towards the dressingtable. The raucous singing covered the

“am of the door.

“So, Kathe, good evening.”

He planted his polished shoes apart, guarding the exit.

“We meet again. And this time without either of your captains.”

Fear dried her mouth, but she knew Groener well enough to accept she must hide this fear.