The Other Side of Love (9 page)

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beatings and indignities as Ost-Juden, which was what the press called eastern European Jewry.

“Wyatt, if there’s ever anything you want me to do …

“

“Keep Myron between us, that’s all.”

“I won’t ever tell anyone.”

“Is that right hand of yours on a Bible?”

“I never break my promises.”

“This isn’t just about hurting Dad. It’s me. I like being a Kingsmith. Oh God, Kathe, Kathe. I’m so damn confused.”

She put her arms around him, and for a few seconds they clung together.

That Sunday of the closing ceremonies, the entire family gathered at the Griinewald house for a mid-morning meal of cold meats and rolls. The gold medallists were toasted with raised steins of Weissbier, the raspberry-flavoured beer unique to Berlin. Everyone trooped outside on to the sun-splashed terrace. Porteous sat in an ornate armchair brought from the drawingroom; Araminta reclined in a deckchair with a leg-rest for her cast; the others stood.

Halfway down the lawn that sloped gently to the small lake stood a carriage-house that had been converted to a garage and chauffeur’s quarters. Here, where a stone retaining wall divided the garden, Herr Ley, the gardener, had dug two holes. Kathe and Wyatt, laughing yet self-conscious in their Olympic uniforms, walked down to the small excavations. She planted her oak sapling. As she kneeled to press the soil around the roots a light breeze came up, blowing pale gold strands across her forehead.

Above them, Aubrey shouted:

“Three cheers for Kathe.”

Ragged cries of

“Hip, hip, hooray”

echoed in the sabbath quiet.

Wyatt planted his tree, and three more cheers went up.

“So you’ll let me know how my oak’s doing?”

Wyatt asked as they returned to the terrace.

“I’ll write to you often.”

“Good,”

he said.

“Great.”

*

The stadium was jammed. Twenty thousand more than the official hundred thousand capacity had crowded inside. The reddening sun slipped behind the Olympic flame on top of the Marathon Gate, distant cannon boomed, and high atop the Glockenturrn the Olympic bell began its steady tolling. Trumpeters sounded a stately fanfare, and the flag-bearers of all the nations entered, followed by the teams. When all the athletes stood assembled on the infield, the Olympic banner was ceremoniously hauled down. Eight men were

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needed to carry it outspread to the biirgermeister of Berlin.

The orchestra sounded, and a vast white-clad chorus broke into the farewell hymn. Here and there groups of German spectators crossed their arms, clasping the hand of the person next to them. The linking spread through the amphitheatre to the athletes, and all were joined, swaying to the voices.

Slowly the lights in the great stadium went out. The flame of the Olympic torch drew all eyes. From the loudspeaker system a clear voice called:

“I summon the youth of the world to Tokyo four years hence.”

As though a mighty hand were descending on the sacred fire, the Olympic flame that had blazed steadily for the past sixteen days was deliberately snuffed out.

Thus far the closing ceremony had gone as planned. Now that the Games had officially ended, the spectators were intended to move towards the well-lit exits. But something spontaneous occurred. The majority remained, standing to raise their right hands and sing first

“Deutschland iiber Alles’, then the

“Horst Wessel Lied’. After the strident march beat had faded into the night, the German fencer next to Kathe muttered:

“Why don’t they shine the spotlight on the Fiihrer? This is his Olympics.”

There were similar mutterings all through the darkened stands. A group of masculine voices on the floor of the stadium shouted:

“Sieg Heil! Unser Fiihrer Adolf Hitler! Sieg Heil!”

Others joined in, and the shout spread outwards and upwards. The stone amphitheatre reverberated with the cadenced screams.

Sieg Heil!

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1936-8

While the rest of the world went about the business of making a living, rearing families, dancing

“The Lambeth Walk’, and enjoying Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Germany was bathed in the fiery glow of a thousand torchlight rallies.

SIR AUBR P KlNGSMITH,

A Brief History of Europe between the Wars

I

“Not another word. You’re going back up to Oxford,”

Euan Kingsmith , said in a low voice whose dangerous fury reached across the dinner-table to his son.

“I won’t hear any more Frognall idiocy!”

By

“Frognall idiocy”

Euan meant any step that to his mind could remotely lead to a financial decline akin to that suffered by his wife’s family.

“Why can’t you let me finish, Father?”

“There’s nothing further to say. Ton it you’ll pack your bags

and first thing tomorrow morning yoiM get in your motor-car.

It’s Oxford for you, and that’s that! If I’d only had your chances.”

(Euan’s often-voiced plaints about his lack of educational oppor-

| tunities ignored the facts: true, his formal schooling had ceased at

, fifteen, but that had been his choice. Itching to enter the business,

j! he’d seen extraneous knowledge as a waste of his time and his

i father’s money.)

ij

“I’m appreciative, but reading Literature seems trivial compared

<< with what’s going on in the world.”

1’A fat lot you know about the world! At nineteen”

‘Twenty,”

Aubrey interjected.

“So long as you’re under my roof,”

Euan shouted,

“you will do as you’re told!”

Elizabeth Frognall Kingsmith’s terrified gaze focused down the length of the long oval table at her husband. She had sat at this Sheraton table in this diningroom - called the Blue Room because of blue Wedgwood ovals set above the doors - since childhood. In those

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days there were no scenes of this type. Sometimes she wondered if Quarles had ever heard violence like the hisses and roars that erupted from Euan in all the years since 1707, when Thomas Frognall had raised the rambling cream-painted brick walls. The Frognalls were reticent bookish people who hugged their emotions to themselves, and the same blessed if bottled-up calm would have prevailed now if her two brothers hadn’t been killed in the war, leaving her the inheritor. Both she and Euan, however, considered Quarles his house. Indeed, as he’d just hissed at Aubrey, the roof was his. He had paid for the new slate and reglazed the stainedglass dome that sent multicoloured light into the stairwell. He had also hired a firm of landscape gardeners to replant the flowerbeds and prune the fine old trees that shaded the fifteen acres, wired the house for electricity, added central heating, transformed the three small bedrooms into bathrooms - he had, in his own words, restored Quarles to a fit home for a gentleman.

This remark invariably drew smiles from the neighbouring squirearchy. Among themselves they referred to Euan as poor Elizabeth Frognall’s little husband, for although he was stout and almost six feet tall, he was in trade, which entitled them to feel larger than he.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,”

Aubrey said.

“I’m moving up to London.”

“The flat is mine, too.”

“Grandpa’s offered me a room.”

Euan knew his own father’s quiet intractability. His neck turned a dangerous maroon, and he altered his attack.

“For the sake of argument let’s say you do finish scribbling this book of yours. Who d’you think’ll be interested in what a young pup like you has to say?”

Aubrey, who had enquired the same of himself, took a tiny nibble of blancmange.

Seeing he had scored a point, Euan sat back, his hard mouth curving into a smile of triumph.

“Well, my budding literary genius? Who’ll buy the book?”

“That doesn’t matter. I’m going to write it.”

“Here we go round and round, ooha, ooha,”

Araminta sang, paraphrasing the words of a popular song.

“Don’t be cheeky, miss.”

Euan’s grumpiness was put on. Araminta, his spirited pet, rarely invoked his ire.

“Why must you always have an audience for these boring fatherson rows?”

Araminta asked.

“Yes, Euan,”

quavered Elizabeth Kingsmith to her husband.

“It would be better if Araminta and I both

One glare from her husband had silenced her.

Araminta shrugged.

“You’ll have to finish minus little me. My poor leg feels beastly.”

Blowing kisses at her pale brother, cowering mother

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and protesting, sputtering father, she moved towards the door to the hall. The cast was off, and it was obvious from her jaunty step that nothing hurt.

“Darling, you went at it all wrong.”

“With Father there’s no way for me to go at anything right.”

Aubrey and Araminta sat in the easy chairs in front of the library fireplace, she lounging back gracefully, he hunched forward clasping his hands, which were still shaking although his father had stamped upstairs almost an hour earlier.

“He never lets on how proud he is of those essays of yours, but at business he keeps the copies of Ibis on his desk.”

“I’ve never seen one there.”

“He pushes them all in a drawer when you come to the shop. Poor darling, that’s how he is.”

Araminta yawned.

“I’m dead. It must be this fresh air. Aubrey, tap on my door no matter how early tomorrow morning you steal away.”

After she left, Aubrey looked around. A dozen or so of the small diamond-shaped panes of glass that covered the bookcases were cracked, and the oak pillars that separated the cases were inexpertly repaired. Euan, who had little respect for the mouldering leather-bound volumes, hadn’t restored the room, and in part this was why his son, who had been born with the Frognall love of books and shabby inherited objects, considered the library the true heart of Quarles. Resting his elbows on his knees, he stared gloomily into the fire. As always after these scenes, his confidence was at a low ebb. His father, who dealt in tangibles, yAs right: he was giving up everything for a book that probably wouro never be published.

But the closely written German on flimsy paper had shot cold mercury through Aubrey’s veins. He had described the concentrationcamp in the longest essay. The Ibis editor, a languid young man who worshipped beauty rather than truth, had refused it as

“too brutal’. Aubrey had considered expanding the piece into a slim volume, broaching the idea to his friend Rupert Keiffer. Rupert had introduced Aubrey to his father, head of Keiffer Press. Keiffer senior had read the essay himself, and said:

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, young Kingsmith. Essays don’t sell. No profit in

“em at all. But this concentrationcamp of yours has the gore that novel-readers gobble up. If this were fiction, I might, just might, consider a contract.”

Hardly a promise. Yet even with the knowledge that his attempt might well end in his own desk drawer Aubrey could not flee from the task of bringing the horrors to light.

Thinking of what he had seen in Germany, thinking of Kathe, thinking of his banishment from Quarles, Aubrey watched the

61

embers turn white. Slowly he replaced the brass firescreen and climbed the staircase, his fingers searching out the familiar bulges and depressions in the oaken banister. Passing his mother’s room, he heard sobbing.

Bottle tears, he thought.

Elizabeth’s secret drinking had been a scab across his boyhood, for he believed - erroneously - that the outbursts between him and his father triggered her binges. His hand lifted to tap on the door; then, aware that her desolate sobs would continue as she begged him to obey his father, he moved on, hearing Euan’s muffled snores in the adjoining room.

Euan Kingsmith had been Elizabeth Frognall’s first and only young man. It wasn’t that she’d been ugly. Her face had been a bit too long, true, but the features had been regular and her silky hair the same nice shade of russet as the family collies. Though she had been tall for a woman, her bosom was ample, her waist trim. Being shy, she had made the worst of her assets, disguising her figure with heavy, unstylish tweed suits and clumping about in thick, laced shoes as she’d performed her numerous tasks.

Her mother was dead, Colonel Frognall couldn’t afford a housekeeper, so it was up to Elizabeth to run Quarles. She hired girls from the nearby hamlet of Marwych, she cosseted the ancient grump of a gardener, she pleaded with the tradespeople from Faversham and Canterbury not to press for payment. Though not yet twenty-three, she was well resigned to spinsterhood that spring of 1914 when Mr Euan Kingsmith had come down to buy the Matthew Boulton silver and take a look at the ivory and jade bric-a-brac. Euan was ten years her senior, taller than she, with a hard mouth that she found dizzying. She didn’t dare dream that he might notice her. Yet that same weekend his wonderful mouth was pressed against hers. In hindsight Euan put a practical slant on his choice of a wife, informing himself that he had picked Elizabeth because of this handsome if badly run-down house, her accent, the dogs, the Frognall crest on the family silver. At the time, however, the shy woman with the golden red hair had beglamoured him utterly. When he asked for her hand, there was a pause during which Colonel Frognall’s thoughts - It’s the gel’s only chance; but, dammit, the chap’s so common! - were all but audible and Euan shook with fear.