The Aftermath Read online

  Frieda continued to eat, without looking at him.

  ‘Poor Petersen,’ he said. He spread some more black bread with the margarine. If having to eat in Greta’s old kitchenette was a demotion, thinking of his neighbour stuck in some Nissen hut put things in perspective. The margarine magnate had once owned a Rolls-Royce, a racehorse and a huge sailboat which he used to sail up and down the Elbe like an ersatz von Spee. His mansion had been the first house on the Elbchaussee to be requisitioned, along with his boat, cars, horse and pride; not only had he suffered the humiliation of being rehoused in the Nissen huts in Hamm, but, nine months after being requisitioned, his property remained empty, the British having either failed or forgotten to fill it.

  ‘How are things on the rubble runs?’

  ‘It’s hard work.’

  ‘Your mother would be proud of you.’

  ‘Have you forgotten? She’s dead.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten this, Freedie. How could I forget? I know that I looked for her all those months when I didn’t want to accept it. I have accepted it now.’

  He could only get so far in his attempts to reach his daughter before he hit rock. And this was the seam through which he could not drill, the hard foundation of all her anger. A knock at the door saved further pointless excavation.

  ‘Come in,’ Lubert said, expecting Heike.

  It was Rachael. Lubert stood up, more from sudden nerves than politeness. This was surely going to be it. As far as he knew, it was the first time Rachael had been up to their quarters. Perhaps the colonel was waiting downstairs to speak to him. They would chat about the weather and then he would challenge Lubert to a duel.

  ‘Frau Morgan.’

  Rachael quickly – respectfully – took in their surroundings, the humble kitchenette, calculating the square footage relative to her own.

  ‘I found this – in a drawer,’ she said. ‘I thought I should return it.’ She held out Claudia’s garnet necklace.

  Lubert took it and, as he felt the weight of the necklace and heard the crystal clink, he had a flash of remembrance. He had purchased it for Claudia when they were courting and he’d been nervous that it would be no match for her own, inherited finery. Her evident delight when she saw it quelled his panic and confirmed what he’d hoped, namely that she didn’t really care for riches.

  ‘Thank you, Frau Morgan. Frieda, you should have this.’ He passed the necklace to his daughter. Frieda took it, squirrelling it away in her smock pocket without a word.

  Rachael addressed Frieda directly now. ‘I also wondered if you, Frieda, would like to have your hair done. We have … I have a hairdresser coming to the house tomorrow.’

  Rachael looked to Lubert for the translation.

  ‘Freedie,’ he said in German. ‘Frau Morgan is very kindly offering to let you have your hair done. Would you like this?’

  ‘What’s wrong with my hair?’

  ‘Nothing. But … think this would be a good thing … for a young lady. This is … a kind offer.’

  Rachael seemed aware of Frieda’s discomfort. ‘Only if you want to …’ She turned to Lubert. ‘She doesn’t have to give me an answer now. Renate is coming tomorrow. If she would like to come, then she will be here in the afternoon.’

  Rachael looked quite different today, Lubert thought. Her hard carapace had fallen away.

  ‘Thank you. Frieda?’

  ‘Danke.’

  It was mumbled, but it was thanks nonetheless.

  The Skeleton was late. It might have been the weather, but this had never stopped Herr Koenig before. It could have been his weak chest – the pulmonary susceptibility he said had kept him from having to join the Wehrmacht – although in recent weeks he’d looked well: less cadaverous than usual and with some pink to his complexion; no longer the senescent man Edmund had first encountered. The cake and milk that Heike brought and the chocolate bars that Edmund slipped his way had plumped him out. He’d started taking his coat off for the lessons. He’d even talked about his hopes.

  Edmund watched the entrance as keenly as a sentinel, waiting for a dark figure to break the white scene. He was impatient for his tutor to come. Today was their last lesson before Christmas and he was going to give Koenig a surprise early present: the four hundred cigarettes that would enable him to get a Persilschein and thus free him to start that new life in Wisconsin with the brother with the bullhorned Buick. After initially declining Edmund’s offer of help, Herr Koenig had changed his mind, saying that if ‘Hamburg’s Robin Hood’ could help him get to America he would be very grateful (just as long as he said nothing about it to anyone). The flattery of being compared to England’s greatest hero-thief stirred Edmund to be a little bolder with his filching: taking cigarettes for the ferals had proved easy enough; and it had taken him only two missions to take what he needed for his tutor. The full four hundred – smuggled downstairs in the doctor’s bag he used for his toys – now sat at the foot of Koenig’s empty chair.

  Heike entered with a slice of cake and glass of milk – and Herr Koenig had still not arrived.

  ‘Hello, Edmund.’

  ‘Hello, Heike.’

  As Edmund’s German had improved, the two of them had begun to speak to each other with a flirty confidence, adopting a greeting built on Edmund’s original linguistic faux pas.

  ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Today I am very well.’

  ‘You are a delicious girl.’

  ‘And you are a delicious boy.’

  She set the tray down on the coffee table.

  ‘Where is Herr Koenig?’

  Edmund shrugged.

  Heike went to the curtain to look out of the window, her feet passing perilously close to Edmund’s life-changing gift. She did a little Koenig impersonation, lifting her hands into paws and screwing her mouth and nose to rodent effect. ‘Perhaps … he is still underground!’ The maid was a comic in any language, and Edmund giggled, despite feeling faintly disloyal to his tutor. Heike nosed around the room, her gaze landing on Edmund’s book. ‘What is this?’

  Edmund looked down at the illustrated German translation of Gulliver’s Travels that Lubert had lent him and which Herr Koenig had got him to read out loud. He showed her his favourite colour plate: Gulliver pinned down by the Lilliputians.

  Heike looked at it in astonishment. ‘Read some to me …’ she ordered.

  Edmund opened the book at no page in particular and read in a confident and fluid German: ‘This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects are not to be seen through a magnifying glass where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse, and ill-coloured.’

  ‘English ladies have the best skin,’ Heike said. ‘Look at your mother. She has beautiful skin.’

  Edmund nodded, although he had never had cause to think his mother’s skin beautiful or made enough comparison between English and German women to know.

  Heike started looking at her own skin in the mirror over the mantelpiece, turning her jaw this way and that, pinking her cheeks with little smacks, looking for blemishes. ‘I get many compliments from gentlemen about my skin. Some say it is like a peach. Do you think it is like a peach, Edmund?’

  Edmund wasn’t sure of this word ‘peach’ but he understood it well enough when Heike mimed eating a piece of fruit.

  ‘Do you like my skin?’

  Edmund shrugged.

  ‘Rude English boy,’ she said. ‘You don’t think I have admirers?’

  Edmund couldn’t make out this word either: ‘admirers’. But He
ike continued, sharing more intimate confidences.

  ‘My Josef went to the Eastern Front. He never came back. Perhaps I will have to find an Englishman. Do you think I should marry an Englishman? What do you think, Edmund?’

  Was she asking him to marry her? He shrugged again.

  Heike lifted a mock-warning finger: ‘Don’t touch Herr Koenig’s cake!’ She made another rodent face and left the room.

  Edmund stared at the slice of cake and the glass of milk, but they did not induce desire. They just made him feel sad. Whenever the time came for Herr Koenig to drink his milk and eat his cake, Edmund made a point of looking away or reading his book. It was partly out of respect – it felt like a private moment that shouldn’t be observed at all – but also because he found his tutor’s routine, with its noises of mastication, the little squelching sounds, the collecting of the crumbs, the licking of the milky lips as abhorrent as rubbing a rough woollen jumper against a painted wall.

  The clock tick-tocked, and the tick-tocking amplified to a nagging ‘Koe-nig, Koe-nig, Koe-nig’. After a few minutes, Edmund put his book down and went to the window.

  ‘Koen-ig, Koen-ig, Koen-ig – where are you?’

  Still no sign of him, but as Edmund watched the gates his father’s Mercedes appeared, coming up the drive like a black ship dividing the ice floes of an Antarctic sea. His father was never home during daylight; indeed, being gone before breakfast and back after sundown, he might easily have been nocturnal. What was he doing home this early? Perhaps he had picked Herr Koenig up along the road?

  But it was only his father who emerged from the car, bending over and leaning back inside to fetch his briefcase and a file. He then did something slightly odd: instead of walking straight up the steps to the door, he stood there looking at the house, as if weighing some important matter. He then took in a very deep breath, the magnitude of the following sigh apparent from the volume of vapour. He came up the steps slowly and entered through the front door, his steel-clipped heels sounding louder and louder as he approached the study. Edmund looked at the bag of booty, but it was too late to hide it. His father was already standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hello, Ed.’

  ‘Hello, Father.’

  His father raised a smile that didn’t quite make it as far as his eyes. He closed the door behind him and went and sat in Herr Koenig’s chair. He leant forward towards his son, lit a cigarette and sighed out the smoke. His movements were precise and particular but so practised they seemed effortless. Edmund noted it all: the way he bit his top lip the moment after exhaling and scratched the back of the hand, not holding the cigarette with his thumb. His father was an agreeable animal to watch and easier to emulate than his mother, who was more complex and chameleon-like. But today his father seemed more serious than usual. Did he suspect something? His father had rarely shown anger towards him; his long absences and the fact that almost all the disciplining in Edmund’s life had been done by his mother meant that Edmund couldn’t think of a single instance of his father reprimanding him. Despite this, he was sure that admonishment was coming his way.

  ‘Are you all right?’ his father asked.

  Edmund nodded.

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  His father didn’t look cross; but he did have the look of someone who had something very difficult to say. Edmund was suddenly reminded of the time he had sat him down for ‘a little chat’ after Michael’s death. An exchange that went something like:

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Nod.

  ‘Good. That’s good. Well. If you want … if you need to talk about … anything … let me know.’

  A shrug. A nod. And that was all.

  His father now looked at him in almost the same way.

  ‘I’m afraid Herr Koenig won’t be coming today,’ Lewis said. ‘He won’t be coming back at all. He’s in trouble.’

  ‘It was my fault …’ Edmund blurted.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘I told him to go to America.’

  His father looked puzzled.

  ‘I … was trying to help him. To start a new life.’

  The four hundred cigarettes were creating a Brobdingnagiansized parcel of guilt that was either going to burn its way through the bag or render it transparent. His father traced Edmund’s eyes.

  ‘There’s something in the bag? For Herr Koenig?’

  Edmund nodded.

  Lewis leant forward, cigarette in the middle of his mouth, eyes screwing up from the smoke, and opened it.

  ‘Mother said you were trying to smoke less. I didn’t think you’d need them all.’

  Lewis studied the loot. ‘I was wondering where they’d all gone.’

  ‘He needed four hundred to get a Persilschein.’

  ‘Four hundred?’

  ‘It’s four hundred for a Persilschein. Two hundred for a travel pass. Five hundred for a bicycle.’

  ‘How do you know all this, Ed?’ His father seemed amused – almost impressed.

  ‘From … my friends. The ones across the meadow. The Boys Without Mothers.’

  ‘Have you been – “helping” them, too?’

  The shame bowed Edmund down and lowered his voice. His ‘yes’ was almost imperceptible. Through his regular stipend to Ozi, he must have already passed on dozens of packs in the last two months.

  ‘I was only doing what you have been doing.’

  Lewis stubbed his cigarette out in the onyx ashtray on the desk. ‘Giving is good. But stealing isn’t, Ed. Even if you’re trying to help people, it’s not the best way. You should have asked me.’

  Edmund nodded. He felt the sad weight of his father’s disappointment. He ran one thumbnail up and down the back of the other, keeping his emotions at bay. He couldn’t look at his father in case he cried. He must not cry.

  ‘Anyway, it’s just as well you didn’t give them to Herr Koenig. He was not what he seemed. Not a headmaster. He worked for the Nazi Special Police.’

  ‘But he couldn’t fight. He had a weak chest. I could hear him wheezing. All through the lessons. He didn’t like Hitler. He wouldn’t even talk about him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But … I don’t understand. Are you sure? He didn’t seem a bad person.’

  ‘You can’t always judge a book by its cover, Ed. Sometimes … the bad in someone … is buried quite deep.’

  Edmund felt a looping in his chest. Whatever heinous crimes his tutor had committed, he was sad at the idea of not seeing him again, of him never making that new life in Wisconsin. This was even worse than having been deceived.

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  His father scratched the dark hairs on the back of his hand. ‘He will probably go to prison.’

  The cake and the milk looked bereft. Koenig would never drink that milk or eat that cake. Edmund started to worry at the cover of Gulliver’s Travels with his fingernail.

  ‘So are you a Big Ender or a Little Ender?’ his father asked.

  Edmund shrugged. He knew that his father was referring to the war in the book waged between people who ate their boiled eggs from the fat end and those who ate them from the thin, but he couldn’t respond with lightness.

  ‘I was thinking we might get Herr Lubert to help out with your lessons – at least until we find a replacement tutor.’

  Edmund was trying to recall every moment he’d spent with Koenig, trying to find the clues he’d missed so that he might reassess him in the light of this awful revelation. ‘He just didn’t seem a bad person,’ he repeated.

  ‘I thought he was a good man, too. I took him at his word. I was wrong. But that doe
sn’t mean you shouldn’t trust people. Sometimes you have to trust bad people in order to help them. Even if they betray that trust.’

  ‘I’m sorry I took the cigarettes.’

  His father nodded.

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’ Edmund asked.

  ‘Well, I might smoke them.’

  Edmund stared hard at the bag. ‘Can I give them … to my friends? They need them to trade for food.’

  ‘They should get food from the camp. Where are your friends living?’

  ‘I’m not sure. They seem to move around.’

  ‘Orphans?’

  Edmund nodded.

  ‘How many of them are there?’ His father seemed more curious than cross.

  ‘Six or seven, I think.’

  His father looked at the bag for an age. He joggled his leg again, the way he did when he was thinking about something, then pushed it across the floor towards Edmund.

  ‘Make sure they don’t spend them all at once.’

  Rachael was inking the last place card as Lewis entered the dining room. She wrote the name – Major Burnham – in her flowing cursive then folded the card and placed it on the seat next to hers.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked him.

  ‘Lovely,’ Lewis said. ‘It suits you like that.’

  ‘I meant the table – but thank you.’ She touched her curls. ‘I had Renate do a job lot. After she did me, I got her to do Heike. And then she did Frieda. Although Frieda took a bit of persuading.’

  ‘Herr Lubert must have been grateful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These things all help. I’m sure Frieda will remember it.’

  Rachael had been moved to see Renate set her hands on Frieda’s shoulders, using gentle words to distract her, before undoing the tightly wound plaits and stroking out her hair, combing it down to the small of Frieda’s back. ‘My, my. What do we have here? Like Veronica Lake,’ she’d said.