The Aftermath Read online

  Leyland told the man to move on, apologizing to Shaw for the man’s rudeness.

  ‘But what was he saying?’ Shaw asked, looking at Ursula.

  ‘He said: “Tommy, give us more to eat or we won’t forget Hitler.”’

  Shaw seemed pleased at this rather than offended. The challenge gave him the opportunity to demonstrate something.

  ‘Ask him if he really means that?’ he asked her.

  Ursula relayed Shaw’s question to the man, whose response came back firmly and with a bold contempt.

  ‘He says: “We were better off then than we are now. Things were never this bad – not even in the last days of the war.”’

  The photographer, a man no doubt fearful for his prized job, told the troublemaker to keep it down. But Shaw seemed genuinely interested. He turned again to Ursula.

  ‘Ask him if he is grateful to have his freedom.’

  In answer, the man pointed to the hut. Ursula translated again:

  ‘“Does this look like freedom? I have been in three camps since the end of the war. In Belgium, in Cologne, and now here. I haven’t seen my wife for nine months. Why? Because I fought for my country?”’

  ‘What would make it better?’ Shaw asked.

  The man muttered his reply sotto voce.

  Ursula suppressed a smile and looked at the backs of her hands.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He … is just angry,’ Ursula replied, trying to protect the man from himself rather than Shaw from the insults. ‘It is the stomach talking.’

  Shaw wanted to show that he was a hard man of the hustings. ‘He’s free to speak. I don’t mind. Come on. What was it?’

  Ursula hesitated and looked at Lewis for permission.

  ‘I think it’s important the minister hears what he said,’ Lewis said.

  ‘He said, “Stop treating us all like criminals.” And then … “Go back to England.”’

  ‘I suspect it was stronger than that …’

  Lewis tried not to smile and nodded at Ursula to translate fully.

  ‘It roughly translates as “Fuck off back to England.”’

  Lewis drove Ursula home, paying scant attention to the road, his head full of the things he’d meant to say to Shaw.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For trying to say the difficult thing.’

  ‘I didn’t say nearly enough. Didn’t make myself clear at all. I had an opportunity to make a difference. Now he’ll go back to London and no one will know how extremely grave the situation here is.’

  ‘You are being hard on yourself.’

  ‘I am a chump. I blew my chance.’

  ‘You can’t do everything.’

  This sounded like a reprimand. Up ahead, an abandoned lorry lay jackknifed across the road, its front mounting the pavement, the tracks of the accident already covered in fresh snowfall. As they passed, Lewis saw a figure scurry from the cabin clutching something. He pretended not to see it.

  ‘You don’t have to drive me all the way.’

  ‘I’m not having you walk in this.’

  ‘But this is the wrong direction for you.’

  ‘I insist.’

  The car’s powerful heater pushed hot air out over Lewis’s legs, and the warmth started to rise up and envelop his chest; his fingertips became tingly as the circulation returned. As the temperature rose, the smells of wet wool, tobacco and Ursula’s linen scent mingled inside the cabin.

  ‘What was this name they called you? Lawrence of Hamburg? Is this a good name or a bad name?’

  ‘It depends who says it.’

  It was Barker who’d christened him with that nickname and, at the time, Lewis hadn’t objected: it played to a secret vanity. ‘He’s referring to T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia?’

  Ursula hadn’t heard of him.

  ‘He was a misfit British lieutenant. Stationed in Egypt during the First World War. He had a great knowledge and understanding of the natives – the Bedouins. He wrote a book called The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It’s a kind of bible to me. I carry it everywhere. Barker calls me Lawrence sometimes. Someone in the office must have overheard him.’

  ‘I am interested to know this character.’

  ‘He was always upsetting the authorities. Sticking up for the locals. The army considered him insolent. They hated him for preferring the natives to his own kind. I will lend you my copy. It’s signed. I met Lawrence briefly once. At a Forces do.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He looked as though he wanted to be somewhere else.’

  ‘So do you prefer the natives?’

  ‘It’s a common enough criticism. Even my wife says as much.’

  The noise the car made on the road changed from a sloshing to a blanketed scrunch, and Lewis felt the difference in the softened vibrations of the steering wheel. The mention of Rachael made him grip the wheel tighter.

  ‘I think this is very brave of her to share the house – with the German family. Not many people would be able to do this.’

  Lewis knew this to be true, but he’d not thought of Rachael as being brave.

  ‘Is she … settled in?’

  Settled. Now there was a word.

  ‘I think she … is getting there. She wasn’t … she hasn’t … been well. It’s taken her a long time to get over the loss of our elder son.’

  Lewis had given Ursula the bare fact of Michael’s death after he had discovered her own bereavement. It felt like a fair exchange – a dead husband for a dead son – but he’d not elaborated. Nor did he intend to.

  ‘I think I would find this very difficult. Living with my old enemy. When I blamed them for the death of my son. And then to have a husband who now cares about the enemy. This is difficult.’

  She’d garnered this from very little information. How had she got there so quickly?

  ‘Yes. But … she has to …’ Lewis stopped himself. He was giving too much away.

  ‘Has to?’

  ‘She … I had hoped that with time … she might move on.’

  ‘Why? Time does nothing.’

  Lewis had no answer for this.

  ‘The death of a son does not heal,’ Ursula said.

  Lewis exhaled, long and hard enough to steam up the inside of the windscreen. He reached forward to wipe it with his glove.

  ‘This weather is quite something,’ he said.

  Ursula understood the code. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not my business.’

  ‘No, no. It’s fine.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You have another son, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is he like?’

  Thinking of Edmund made Lewis smile. He enjoyed him, wanted to know him better; but the lack of knowing him niggled and stymied his ability to say so.

  ‘He’s … a good boy …’

  The steering wheel was suddenly yanked from his hands, jerking clockwise then anti-clockwise as though being turned by a drunk ghost-chauffeur. By the time Lewis regained the wheel the car was already sliding sideways, entering into a deceptively calm and elegant spin; rather than struggle against it he let it float across the road and land where it would. Somewhere, he heard himself say, ‘Brace!’ and he reached a stiff right arm across Ursula’s midriff, locking her there until the car landed soft and soundless in a deep drift. Even though the car had come to rest, he left his arm across her and, in the split within the second, he overrode his instinct to retract it.

  ‘I don’t know what happened there,’ he said. ‘It just … the wheel just …’

>   Still his arm lay like a barrier, no longer offering protection. He stared at it, waiting to see what she would do. She put her left hand on his forearm and lifted it away.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was …’

  ‘It’s fine, Colonel. It was an easy mistake.’

  The car was firmly lodged in the drift. Lewis decided that he would see Ursula home and then get himself to the Officers’ Club on the Jungfernstieg, find transport home and get REME to dig the car out when they could. He was desperate for a cigarette. Even the car’s armrest stash was empty.

  ‘I will walk you to your house.’

  ‘You don’t have to, Colonel.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  They walked up the deserted Neuer Steinweg in the old, intact part of the city, the embarrassment Lewis felt over his indiscretion making him walk slightly too fast.

  Rachael had always teased him for his guilelessness when it came to the opposite sex. It was his best defence when away from home: his simple fidelity had always allowed him to survive situations others found too tempting. Sexual shenanigans among his fellow servicemen were common enough, and blind eyes were often turned on their frequent affairs. But he’d never been beset by the temptation that often consumed and sometimes destroyed perfectly rational men. He’d once wondered if there was something wrong with him in this regard. There had been that night in Bremen when his then second-in-command, Blackmore, accused him of being a ‘spunkless monk’. It was in the first weeks of peace, and the celebrations had turned orgiastic, with whole platoons of men pairing off with local German girls. He’d had to rescue the just-married captain from giving it all up for a barmaid. ‘You are a fucking spunkless monk, Morgan. A spunkless monk,’ he’d taunted as Lewis stood in the doorway waiting for his second-in-command to get dressed. ‘I mean, look at her! How can you resist? Don’t you want to?’ The girl lay with one leg straddling the bedsheet, spent and in a deep sleep. She was milky and soft and inviting, but no, he hadn’t wanted to. And it wasn’t, as Blackmore had accused him, due to a lack of red blood cells or an excess of self-control. He really only had those kind of eyes for his wife. But, now, watching Ursula make antelope skips as she tried to avoid sinking into the deeper patches of snow, he wondered if he could rely on that protection. He’d noticed things about her – little movements, little looks – that he’d never thought to notice in anyone other than Rachael; clear, keen, minute observations. It was like being given a pair of glasses that exposed a long-lived-with myopia. What would Rachael see now if she were watching from an alcove? Would she see a British officer doing the decent thing, or a husband taking the first tentative steps towards an affair? He knew what Blackmore would think – indeed, half the men at HQ – but what was he thinking? Was he really just walking his interpreter home, or was his gallant insistence a cover for ungentlemanly intentions? This cold was making a monkey of his mind and a brute of his senses.

  They came to a six-storey town house opposite an old merchant’s house. Ursula began to look for her keys in her handbag.

  ‘This is my aunt’s apartment.’

  Of course. She lived with her aunt. It was why she’d tried to get to Hamburg after fleeing the Russians.

  ‘I would invite you for a coffee, but my aunt is a gossip.’

  ‘That’s … perfectly fine. I wouldn’t expect it.’

  ‘Thank you for walking me home. I will see you tomorrow at the office. Weather permitting.’

  ‘Yes. Weather permitting.’

  Rachael lay in bed, replaying her spat with Lubert over and over again, word for keenly remembered word, right up until the moment he’d kissed her. Despite the shock of the kiss, she did not feel affronted by it. There had been something almost endearing in it: the way he’d slightly missed her lips, his boyish expectation of the slapped cheek. She’d surprised herself how quickly she’d called a truce, but she’d certainly had no peace since. She wanted to ask him why he’d said certain things about her: her past, her loss, her marriage. He’d described her condition with some precision, and it had unnerved her: it was the feeling, one she had not recognized at first, of being understood.

  ‘I would have liked you more if I’d known you then … you are not quite your old self.’ ‘Not quite your old self’. Lewis had said it to her a number of times since Michael’s death, and Edmund must have heard it from his father. Lewis didn’t mean it as a criticism – if anything, he was trying to encourage her – but implicit in it there was a desire, a hope, that she would just go back to being the person he used to find easier to love. To be the person she’d been before the bomb, the ‘old self’ who didn’t think about whether she was truly ‘herself’, happy, or about whether she wanted to make love. But she couldn’t go back. That innocence was lost. The bomb had undone her and she could not see how she would ever return to being that person. And if Lewis couldn’t see this, then he could never help her. When she had asked him, ‘What was it you loved about me before, Lew?’, he had simply said: ‘I just do, Rach. I can’t explain it.’ If she was ever going to heal, she needed someone to explain it.

  She pushed her arm into the expanse beside her. It was cool and empty and, although she’d grown used to having the bed to herself, Lewis’s warm body should have been there. Instead, her groping hand found his folded pyjamas underneath his pillow, confirming his absence. She felt the Viyella and the rope-cord tie. For the whole first year of their marriage they’d gone to bed naked, even in winter. There were no barriers between them, then, and no shame. Of course, they’d had the energy of youth and the confidence and freedom of unsullied pasts, but over the years there had been a steady covering up and putting on of layers. And, since putting on the hard, mourning clothes of Michael’s death, she wondered if she would ever be able to shed them.

  She sat up. There was a light on somewhere in the house, illuminating a strip of the floor through the chink in the curtain. She turned on the bedside light. She had a strong urge to make herself some hot milk: a habit she’d developed during the war when Lewis had been away.

  She listened to the night. It was silent, except for the radiators, which clicked and clanked. She eventually got out of bed and went and peered through the curtain. It was downstairs that a light was on. Perhaps Lewis had got back and was fixing himself a late snifter. She swung her feet into slippers, pulled on her dressing gown and went to see.

  A single orange ember was glowing in the grate of the hall fireplace. She looked up at the disputed picture of the naked maid, and felt galled at allowing herself to be ventriloquized by the controlling spirit of Mrs Burnham. In her own way, Rachael appreciated the painting: it was exquisite – beautiful and inoffensive and all done with the lightest of touches. Perhaps she would make a point of asking Herr Lubert about its back story. And then, she would ask about his back story.

  The drawing-room light was on, and she entered the room expecting to find Lewis nursing a whisky and reclining on the Mies van der Rohe. But the room was empty.

  She went to the bay window overlooking the back lawn, which angled gently down to the river. A few lights across the river twinkled and the snow was still falling steadily. Rachael stared towards the Elbe, which she couldn’t see but knew was down there, flowing towards an England she found increasingly hard to imagine.

  Something then moved across the lawn. It was the size of a deer or a very large dog but too low slung to be either, and it had a thick, curled tail as long as an arm. She switched off the light to see better, and there, striding indifferently across the snow-carpeted lawn, was a great, dark cat – not a dog or a deer but a cat – bulky enough to be a leopard or even a small lioness, languid and unconcerned. It shouldn’
t have been there but there it was and it looked quite at home, quite in its natural habitat.

  ‘Wait,’ Rachael said. ‘Come back.’ She wanted the cat to stop – to be sure it was the thing she thought she was seeing. She wanted it to pause and acknowledge her watching; to turn and lock eyes with hers, give her some complicit, meaningful look, a sign; but the animal passed on without a backwards glance and deliquesced into the night.

  8

  Lubert and Frieda ate a supper of boiled eggs and black bread spread with Petersen and Johannsen margarine. Lubert marvelled at man’s capacity – indeed, his own – to adapt to diminished conditions and recalibrate expectations accordingly. Even in the last, desperate year of the war, a meal such as this would have been considered paltry; now, he savoured every morsel. Even Petersen’s slimy margarine tasted good.

  ‘Frieda? Would you pass the margarine?’

  Frieda slid the porcelain tub across the table and continued to dip her bread into the thin end of her boiled egg, sitting hunched, her forehead oily and one or two spots breaking out, her braided hair and hands still dirty from rubble dust. Her mealtime silences had become so normal that Lubert had taken to reading – something Claudia would have deplored and another sign that his late wife’s influence was waning. ‘Stefan. Are you going to join us?’ she would ask halfway through a meal at which he had been present only in body because he’d been absorbed in the newspaper. ‘Is the world of squabbling men really more interesting than me?’

  Die Welt now lay spread beneath his meal, open at a report about the number of Germans living in camps in the British zone. Since his reckless kissing of Frau Morgan, he’d been half waiting for the eviction notice. Although she’d been quick to forgive, he could feel ramifications brewing in the rooms below. Perhaps he was more like his daughter than he cared to admit. They were both headstrong and a little rash. And, like her, he felt little remorse for his actions.

  ‘I saw someone trying to break into Petersen’s house the other night,’ Lubert said to Frieda, thoughts of Claudia prompting him to make an effort with his daughter. ‘I was going to stop him, and then I thought, no, they might as well use it. It’s a scandal having all these houses sitting empty. It doesn’t make sense.’