The Aftermath Page 10

  ‘Sehr gut, Vater.’

  Lewis laughed. ‘You’ve been here a month and you’ve already got better pronunciation than me.’

  ‘Why am I learning German if we’re not allowed to speak to them?’ asked Edmund.

  ‘You can speak to them, Ed. In fact, I encourage you to. The better we understand each other, the quicker we’ll get things fixed here.’

  ‘How long will it take to fix things?’

  Lewis looked at Rachael this time. He needed to calibrate his answer carefully.

  ‘The optimists think ten years. The pessimists think fifty.’

  ‘So, no doubt, you think it’ll take five,’ she said.

  Lewis gave a concessionary smile: she knew him too well. ‘So, Ed, have you managed to talk to Frieda yet?’

  Edmund shook his head. ‘She’s a bit older than me.’

  ‘Maybe we should all have a game of canasta or cribbage one evening. Or watch a film on the Ace.’

  Heike entered the room, carrying a tray on which to stack the plates. The maid moved with her customary skittishness, trying to get in and out as fast as she could, like a swallow stealing seed under the watch of a farmer.

  ‘Delicious, Fräulein Heike,’ Lewis said in German.

  ‘You are delicious, Fräulein Heike,’ Edmund parroted, also in German, not realizing his mistake.

  Heike stifled a giggle, bowed and collected the plates, pausing at Rachael, who had not eaten more than half of what was on hers.

  ‘Sind Sie fertig, Frau Morgan?’

  Rachael waved at her to take her plate away.

  Edmund watched the maid carry the plates to the dumb waiter and put them in the hatch. Heike then gave a tug on the rope and they were pulleyed down to the kitchen by an invisible hand.

  Rachael waited for Heike to leave the room before speaking.

  ‘See? She was doing it then. Smirking.’

  ‘She’s just nervous. Half-terrified she’s going to make a mistake and lose her job. Any German with a job is on tenterhooks.’

  ‘Why do you insist on defending them all the time?’

  Lewis shrugged. By his standards, it was almost an expression of despair. He took out his cigarette case, clicked it open and offered one to Rachael.

  She wanted one, but she refused.

  ‘I’ll have mine afterwards.’

  Lewis tapped the end of the cigarette, put it to his lips, lit it and dragged deeply, shooting the smoke from his nostrils in a relaxed snort.

  The squeaking pulleys of the dumb waiter announced the arrival at the hatch of pudding.

  ‘Does it go all the way up to the Luberts’ floor?’ Edmund asked.

  ‘I don’t want you playing with it, Ed,’ Rachael said. ‘It’s not a toy.’

  He nodded. ‘Will we have servants when we go back to England – like Auntie Clara did?’ he asked.

  ‘Only the very rich will be able to afford servants now,’ Lewis said.

  ‘But Herr Lubert has servants, and he works in a factory.’

  ‘That’s just until he’s been cleared. Once he’s been cleared, he can go back to being an architect.’

  ‘Cleared?’ Rachael asked.

  ‘Of … having any Nazi affiliations.’

  ‘He hasn’t been cleared of that already?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s a formality.’

  ‘Well, I thought you’d at least check first.’

  ‘Lubert is clean. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘But you don’t know that.’

  ‘Barker did the extra background check. I’d never have let him stay here if there had been the slightest hint of anything nasty. Rachael … Please.’

  Edmund decided to use this moment to say goodnight. This was one of those conversations where Grown-Ups needed Children out of the way.

  ‘May I get down now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Of course,’ Rachael answered.

  Edmund kissed her; his father ruffled his hair.

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said.

  As Edmund left the room, he could hear his parents picking up on their unresolved conflict, their voices rising and falling with those strained sounds of pleading and justification they sometimes made. A parental argument was perfect cover. He went upstairs to his room to get Cuthbert, found a pencil and paper in his desk then took them to the hatch of the dumb waiter on the first-floor landing, just outside his parents’ bedroom. He lifted its sliding door to reveal the single rope dangling in the recess of the shaft that ran between the three levels of the house. He tugged it and, a few moments later, the lift came up from the kitchen. He lay Cuthbert on the platform, scribbled a note and tucked it under the grenadier’s bearskin.

  ‘Find all the sugar you can, Captain, and bring it back to base.’

  ‘Are you sure this is allowed, sir?’

  ‘Do as I say, Cuthbert, there’s a good fellow. We’ll meet at 2000 hours in the basement. Keep an eye out for Grown-Ups along the way.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  Edmund pulled the rope and, after a few seconds, Cuthbert descended. Edmund closed the sliding door and tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen, keeping to the carpet runners to muffle his tread.

  In the kitchen, he found Heike rolling dough and singing along to a song playing on the radio; the song was being sung in English by a husky-voiced, foreign-sounding woman and Heike was taking great delight in imitating the singer’s low growl.

  ‘Guten Abend, Fräulein Heike.’

  The maid yelped at Edmund’s surprise entrance then acted as though she had been caught listening to enemy transmissions, switching off the radio and wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘Guten Abend, Herr Edmund.’

  Edmund went straight to the hatch. He lifted the gate, took the note from under Cuthbert and handed it to Heike. She looked at it and read it aloud: ‘Zucker?’

  ‘Bitte.’

  Heike made a pretence of disapproval but was happy to play the game. She went to the larder and came back with three sugar lumps. She put them on a plate and, understanding his game, put the plate in the hatch, next to the cloth soldier. Edmund gave Cuthbert his orders:

  ‘Take the supplies back to base, Captain.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  He tugged the rope, closed the hatch, thanked Heike and ran back up the stairs to greet the returning hero. When he arrived at the first-floor hatch he slid the door back, but the platform was not there. He pulled the rope again and waited, but there was no movement. He tugged yet again and waited. Still nothing. He ventured putting his head in the hatch to look down. There was nothing but black below. Twisting his head to look up, he saw that the underside of the lift had stopped at the hatch a floor above, at the Luberts’ apartments. Perhaps Herr Lubert had intercepted the transport and thought the sugar was for him. No matter. Edmund was happy for the Luberts to have it. They needed the calories. He retracted his head from the shaft, pulled the rope one more time and this time there was movement: the lift began to descend. The rope vibrated and the platform made a squeaking trundle as it came down. When it came into view and stopped at the hatch, Edmund immediately saw that something was wrong: Cuthbert’s head was missing. He took the decapitated torso from the platform and examined it. White wool and yellow stuffing hung out of the gape where the head used to be. His head might have got caught in the lift – it had always been slightly loose – and come off in the shaft, but the physics of this didn’t seem right. It was only then that Edmund noticed that the sugar on the plate had gone.

  Lewis undressed slowly, waiting for a signal, a sign from Rachael that tonight
they might make love. He stood in his walk-in dressing room in his trousers and removed his shirt, button by button, pausing to look at something on his cuff, pretending that there was a thread of loose cotton there, eking out the seconds to allow time for Rachael to call it. There had been a time when this subtle dance wasn’t needed, when she instigated as much as he did and asking was easy; but now this whole business suddenly required an ability to interpret and understand the nuances of a dialect Lewis had not spoken for over a year.

  He pulled off his shirt and stood there stripped from the waist up. It was rare that they made love once they’d put on their nightclothes. If he rushed too quickly into his pyjamas, she would take this as a cue to shut up shop for the night. The opportunity had to be seized in that moment of undressing, or just before it, when one of them – usually him – would suggest they have a moment. It made making love in winter more of a struggle. Rachael felt the cold easily and, after their first years of marriage, did not usually linger long between day- and nightclothes; although the room was warm – indeed, the whole house was easily kept at a temperature that belied the cold outside – he had to strike before the air between them chilled too much. His defence of the giggling maid and then the issue of Lubert’s undecided status had upset her, but he was determined. This drought had to end. He must make his move.

  She was at the dressing table and down to her camisole, pulling her hair back with one hand and taking off her make-up with the other. Lewis watched her perform her routine ablutions, her bare arms and straight, petite shoulders tormenting him with their loveliness.

  ‘Are we going to …’ His voice trailed off.

  Rachael had opened one of the small drawers in the dressing table and found a necklace of interlinked garnets which clinked and crackled as she held them up to the bedside light.

  ‘This must have belonged to … her.’

  She held the cold stones across her throat and then across the span of her hand, feeling the weight of them. ‘They’re pretty.’

  ‘Darling? Aren’t we going to do this …?’ He said it with more purpose, more force than usual. Had they not once made vows to honour one another’s bodies? He was prepared to use this line if she refused him now.

  Rachael put the necklace down and dropped a soiled cotton dab into the waste-paper basket. ‘Do you have a thingy?’ Her expression was neutral, giving a hint neither of desire nor distaste. But it was enough. He immediately felt himself stirring. Faint with the anticipation of it, he rummaged in his kit box for the regulation prophylactics issued along with cigarettes to all servicemen across Germany. A soldier’s every appetite and addiction catered for.

  Lewis saw Rachael stand and slide under the sheets in her camisole. Still no suggestion of excitement or even anticipation in her movements, but he didn’t care. He tore off a contraceptive from the strip of six and walked towards the bed, his erection already pushing at his trousers. He sat on the bed with his back to her, hoping she hadn’t noticed, and pulled off his socks, trying to calm himself.

  Rachael leant over to his side of the bed and picked up his silver cigarette case.

  ‘Did you think of me when you smoked?’ she asked.

  ‘Sixty times a day.’

  ‘You don’t have to say that.’

  ‘It’s true. I worked it out. We were apart for 32,000 cigarettes,’ he said.

  ‘And when you thought of me, what did you think about?’

  ‘Mostly?’ He gave her the honest answer. ‘This moment now.’

  Rachael looked at him with surprise. ‘Do you have it ready?’

  He bit the metallic wrapping and pulled the condom out, placing it on the pillow while he pulled his trousers and undergarments off. Rachael put the cigarette case back and sat up to pull her camisole over her head and shoulders. Even this half-glimpsed, perfunctory movement was exquisite to him. He slipped under the sheet, still hiding himself, feeling vulnerable and uncertain. She lay on her side facing him, head propped on her elbow. Once they were naked together, all the assuredness and confidence transferred from him to her. It was as if he slipped down the ranks from colonel to private while she rose to field marshal.

  Rachael picked up the rubber sheath.

  ‘Shall I put it on for you?’

  Lewis couldn’t answer. He nodded, but as she reached for him under the sheet he intercepted her hand with his and drew her towards him to kiss her. He wanted to slow things down, needed to slow things down. He was well ahead of himself. They kissed, but her lips remained pursed, unopening. She withdrew to continue with her task, pulling back the sheet to sheathe him. Lewis lay back to let her, trying to focus on the ceiling above with its rippled cornicing, anything to avoid getting there too soon, but even the mechanical movements of her first, cold touch were too much to bear and he ejaculated, emitting a gasp of pleasure, relief and despair all in one go.

  ‘Ah! Arrived too soon. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Rachael said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.

  ‘You got off at Fratton.’

  ‘Barely left Waterloo.’

  Rachael’s apparent lack of disappointment added to Lewis’s own. He was annoyed at himself. His innate discipline and patience had deserted him when he had most needed it. And the mention of Fratton (the last station before Portsmouth) only reminded him of a time when their desire had always got the better of their common sense.

  He grabbed the hand towel beside him and dried himself.

  ‘It’s been too long. I’m not used to –’

  ‘It’s all right.’ And Rachael touched his face, soothing his brow.

  ‘I –’

  ‘Shhh. It’s perfectly understandable.’

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine. But cold.’ And she sat up, extracted her nightie from beneath the pillow and started to pull it on.

  Lewis sat up and swung his legs to the floor, his disappointment already fading. Even this truncated satisfaction was better than none. The release had broken up the pent-up, colic irritation he’d felt these last few weeks. By the time he was dressed in his pyjamas and lying under the sheets with the lights out, his mind had already returned to the zone where he felt safest and more effective: to the less complicated needs of a thousand faceless Germans and the rehabilitation of a country.

  Long after Lewis had fallen asleep, Rachael lay, as she always did, on her left side, listening to her heartbeat. She stared at the glittering mound of the garnet necklace at her bedside, catching the light from the half-open curtain. She resolved to return it to Lubert as soon as possible, although this had as much to do with curiosity as propriety. The fact was she wanted to know more about the woman who had once worn it. The necklace had triggered a sequence of sparkling scenes in her mind in which Frau Lubert starred. And while this imagined Frau was graceful and elegant in each vignette, her visage remained imprecise and generic, no more than a composite of cosmopolitan elegance. Rachael wanted to put a face to the image. She almost needed to have a picture in her mind in order to dismiss it. Perhaps Lubert would settle the issue by showing her a photograph. Something. Under the guise of being friendly and fair, she would be able to settle a matter that had been nagging at her since her arrival in the house.

  ‘So, where do you live?’ Albert asked Frieda.

  They were queuing for the truck, having come to the end of a long shift clearing the remains of a demolished school in St Pauli. Frieda had worked hard and kept her head down all day. Thanks to Albert, what had begun to feel humiliating and punitive had become something to look forw
ard to – even enjoyable.

  ‘On the Elbchaussee, near the Jenischpark.’

  ‘One of the big houses?’

  She nodded, unsure if this was good or bad.

  ‘So you are from a rich family?’

  Frieda shrugged. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘But you still live in your house?’

  She nodded again, embarrassed at this line of questioning; dreading having to explain her current circumstances.

  ‘I live not far from you,’ he said.

  ‘Whereabouts?’ she asked, relieved that her social status had not put him off.

  ‘I’ll show you if you like.’

  The Rubble Runners in the back of the truck were made up of middle-class Hamburgers and the flotsam and jetsam of workers drifting in from the east. The women, their hair tied up in tight turbans and dressed in the outsized overcoats of dead husbands, resembled fishwives from Landungsbrücken. They were just as pungent, too. The men were numerically inconspicuous and, apart from Albert, middle-aged. All of them, whatever their former status, clutched the food vouchers received in payment for their day’s work, which had become the sole object of their ambition.

  Frieda sat next to Albert, their legs touching, both of them listening to the chorus of complaints around them. Today’s moaning was led by an effete-looking man who wanted everyone to know his true profession.

  ‘It is impossible to stay warm doing this work. First we get hot and sweat and then the sweat turns cold and clammy.’

  ‘At least we are getting paid,’ one of the women retorted.

  ‘I’m a dentist. I have a profession. I’m not made for this kind of work.’

  ‘What’s so special about pulling teeth?’ the lady came back at him. ‘Magda here is a general’s wife. And I was a radio announcer at the concert hall.’

  The dentist, whose face was ashen from dust and disappointment, had the will to complain but not to argue. Arguing required energy. ‘I’m just saying, that’s all,’ he muttered, his words tapering off.