The Other Side of Love (73 page)

| He promised”

In the hospital, he told me. All I could think of was that damned letter arrived when you needed me so much … And after the war

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I put on such a dumb, stupid, holier-than-thou act.”

He shook his head.

“There’s no way to apologize, so I won’t try.”

“But you got Erich back for me,”

she said softly.

“He’s mine, too.”

They gazed at each other for another moment, then Wyatt said:

“Aubrey suggested I meet you. Kathe, he’s given me every opening. I told you, he’s the better man.”

She coloured.

“He’s always trusted me.”

“Yes, I know. And loved you.”

He bit his lip.

“I’ve loved you, too. Even when love showed its other side, I loved you.”

A clock tolled the quarter-hour, a bus hooted, and the fine rain drifted down. Neither of them moved. Another church bell tolled.

“Soot,”

Wyatt said hoarsely. Lifting his hand, he touched her cheek with trembling fingers.

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1988

The 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the first since 1972 not beset by a major boycott, promise intense competition and stirring moments. *

“Sports Illustrated’, Special Preview Edition, the Swnmer Olympics

Olympic Stadium

1315 Women 200 m Round 2

The Seoul Olympian, 28 September 1988

Above the broad lazy Han river the blue of the sky is as vivid as any of the colours in the national flags Afghanistan to Zimbabwe that flutter around the swooping perimeter of the Chamsil Olympic Stadium. At one end of the arena, a Russian heaves her javelin while near by a barrel-bodied Finnish hammer-thrower whirls in his cage. Korean volunteers in yellow and white uniforms are emerging from a tunnel, followed by a single file of eas*striding young athletes in warm-up suits, the contestants in the sftond qualifying round for the Women’s 200 Metre Race.

Marlys Kingsmith, tall and blonde, is in the heat. Most of the family raise binoculars, smiling and pointing her out, but the two adolescent boys are exchanging their flags for the Stars and Stripes: Erich’s son is lowering the red, black and gold stripes of the Federal Republic of Germany while his redheaded cousin and closest friend, Sir Aubrey Kingsmith’s only child, carefully furls his Union Jack.

Lady Diana Kingsmith, a startlingly attractive, fortyish blonde, touches Aubrey’s arm, and says something inaudible in the cheer’ng. Possibly a reminder about the sun on his bald pate, for he puts on his Olympic cap. She is highly protective of her distinguished husband.

Geoff-ey Kingsmith, who heads Kingsmith International, the worldwide chain of luxury-good shops, has resumed his businesscentred conversation with his older brother, Erich. Geoffrey lives in a Manhattan brownstone, but five years earlier Erich moved from New

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York to West Berlin, headquarters of the department store empire whose flagship is Leventhal’s. In 1963, Wyatt and Rathe had jointly inherited, out of the wind or so it seemed to outsiders, the elegant long-respected Berlin emporium.

Kathe smiles ruefully at the two middle-aged businessmen below her. The years have enhanced Erich’s original resemblance to Wyatt, while Geoffrey has grown to look almost exactly like Euan. The only hint that Geoffrey gives of his illustrious paternal ancestry is the dubious one of purchasing Mainwaring Court for the corporation, and transforming the history-laden mansion into an opulent country hotel. The brothers have been expanding into property now that Wyatt has stepped down from the presidency of Kay-Ell, the holding company that controls the Kingsmith and Leventhal chains. Wyatt himself is more active than ever in the Children’s Foundation, Kathe’s life’s work.

II

Aubrey is also watching the two men ruefully. Impossible to discern the circumstances of their birth in opposing war zones: these two hard-headed entrepreneurs are closer than most birth brothers.

Sir Aubrey is by far the most illustrious of the clan. Rumours of a Nobel swirled around him long before he was summoned to Stockholm. The Queen tapped on both his shoulders, a knighthood for his ten-volume History of the British Isles and for his histories of the Second World War. He has earned a fortune from the elegant spy-stories written under his pseudonym, C. Osmond. The Trosper Novels, as they have come to be called, in their own way also chronicle European history from the rise of Hitler through the Cold War and Iron Curtain to this recent thaw.

He turns around to look at Kathe and Wyatt, who both have their field-glasses focused on Marlys, the daughter of their youngest son, Timothy. They have aged well, as happily married couples do. Wyatt still has his thick shock of hair, white now, a handsome contrast to the tan, and he retains that look of strength. And as for Kathe … well, Aubrey cannot be impartial. To his eyes she has changed very little. She is as slender and shapely as she was in her girlhood, and the few wrinkles, the gentler flesh of her jawline have softened that almost religious oval purity of her face, making her yet more beautiful.

Kathe lowers her binoculars, catching his glance.

“Poor Marlys,”

she says.

“What competition.”

“As I recall, you had that Stella Walsh and a horde of other speed demons to beat,”

Aubrey retorts.

“Apropos. I drove out to the Griinewald last week, when I was in Berlin. I can report those two oak trees of yours are flourishing.”

“Don’t I know it!”

Wyatt laughed.

“Kathe always drags me by.”

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*

‘Aubrey, don’t you swallow one word of that

“dragging” nonsense. Ask who insists we go inside, ask who disturbs Doctor Bruch to take our snapshots every time.”

“I always do what you want, don’t I?”

Wyatt drapes his arm around Kathe’s shoulders.

Considering Aubrey’s age and most fortunate of marital circumstances, why should it hurt to see Wyatt affectionately embrace a woman with near-adult grandchildren? Yet he swallows sharply and looks away. His most vivid memories are the ones shared with Rathe, the most treasured night in his life the night he comforted her with his body in the ruined city of Darmstadt.

She would have been as happy with me. There is no shading of doubt in the thought.

Since his ascension to fame, enough women had thrown themselves at Aubrey to make him realize that he isn’t such a bad fellow after all. For the thousandth time he wonders whatever possessed him to leave the field clear for Wyatt. Kathe would have honoured her promise; she would have married him if he hadn’t sent Wyatt off to Victoria to fetch her and Erich, if he hadn’t lied outrageously by telling her that he’d misjudged his affections as well as his abilities to be a good father to another man’s son. Yet, even released from the pangs of conscience, Kathe didn’t leap into Wyatt’s open arms but instead returned to Germany, taking Erich with her, using the accrued profits from Kingsmith’s and the money he took from his own savings as her

“salary”

and

“bonus”

from CI4 as she’d told him she would, to feed, clothe and medically rehabilitate thirteen orphans at the GarmischPartenkirchen chalet, the modest beginnings of the far-flung Children’s Foundation. It wasgfe until two years after the war that Kathe took his arm to descenfFthe staircase of Porteous’s house for her marriage to Wyatt.

On the red cinders, contestants are lining up in the electronic starting-blocks. A red-jacketed judge raises the starting-gun. The Kingsmith roar - Marlys, Marlys, Marlys - is swallowed by the reverberating thunder around the grandstand.

The finish is close.

The family, like everybody else in the Stadium, peers expectantly past the Olympic flame to the immense television screen. Kingsmith, M-has not qualified.

Tears show on Kathe’s cheeks. on t choke up, love.”

Wyatt hugs her against his side.

“Marlys

ew what she was up against; she told me just getting this far as

K?hS’ant WaS her b’SgeSt thrilL for a u tears”

triough, are not for her granddaughter’s loss but

his *nother. Olympics. For the heartbreakingly young Wyatt with Irns raised in triumph, and for the line of relatives she sees -

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actually sees superimposed on the blue-shadowed stands across the stadium. Sigi in his field-grey uniform, Araminta with her flaming red hair, the foreign uncles and aunts, her parents so proud and dear, Porteous turned in her direction as if he could see her. Of all of them in that row of seats, only that boy who exuberantly waved his straw boater, only Aubrey, is in the land of the living.

Then the past fades, and Kathe is once again surrounded by her family, the descendants of her beloved ghosts. Knuckling away her tears, she rests her head on Wyatt’s shoulder.