The Aftermath Read online

  More children were pressing in now, hands out, including a boy with one leg who leant on a golf club for support.

  ‘Choccie, Tommy! Choccie, Tommy!’ they called.

  Lewis had no more food to give, but he did have something more valuable. He took out his cigarette case and tapped out ten Player’s. He handed the cigarettes to the eldest boy, whose already distended eyes bulged at the sight and feel of the gold in his hands. Lewis knew that his transaction was illegal – he had both fraternized with Germans and indulged the black market – but he didn’t care: those ten Player’s would buy food from a farmer somewhere. The laws and regulations that the new order had imposed had been concocted in a mood of fear and revenge by men sitting at desks, and for now – and until an unknown time in the future – he was the law in this particular bit of the land.

  Stefan Lubert stood before his remnant staff – the hobbled gardener, Richard, the breathless maid, Heike, and the obdurate house cook of thirty years, Greta – and gave them a final set of instructions. Heike was already crying.

  ‘Be respectful, and serve him as you would serve me. And Heike? – all of you – if he offers you work, you must feel free to accept. I will not be offended. I will be glad to have you here, keeping an eye on things.’

  He leant forward and wiped a tear from Heike’s round cheek.

  ‘Come. No more tears. Be grateful that we don’t have the Russians. The English may be uncultured, but they are not cruel.’

  ‘Do you want me to serve refreshments, Herr Lubert?’ Heike managed to ask.

  ‘Of course. We must be civil.’

  ‘We have no biscuits,’ Greta pointed out. ‘Only the cake.’

  ‘Fine. Make tea and not coffee. Although we don’t have coffee. So this is just as well. And serve him in the library. It’s too bright in here.’ Lubert had hoped the officer would come on a dull, grey day, but the early-autumn sun was sending its best light through the art deco stained glass that decorated the high window opposite the minstrels’ gallery and on to the floor of the hall, making it all the more inviting. ‘Now, where is Frieda?’

  ‘She is in her room, sir,’ Heike said.

  Lubert steeled himself. The war had been over for more than a year, but his daughter had still not surrendered. He needed to suppress this little putsch now. Wearily, he climbed the staircase. At Frieda’s bedroom door, he knocked and called her name. He waited for an answer he knew wouldn’t come then entered. She was lying on her bed, her legs raised a few inches off the mattress. A book – a signed copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain which his wife, Claudia, had given him for his thirtieth birthday – was balanced across her feet. Frieda did not respond to her father’s presence but continued to concentrate her efforts on keeping her weighted legs in the air. They were beginning to tremble with the strain. How long had she been in this position – one, two, five minutes? She started to breathe furiously through her nose, trying to disguise the effort, refusing to show weakness. Her strength was impressive, but it was joyless, another of those Mädel routines she had religiously kept up since the war.

  All strength, no joy.

  Frieda’s face began to flush and a tiara of sweat formed at her forehead. When her legs began to sway from side to side, she did not let them drop; instead she lowered them in a controlled way, as of her own will.

  ‘You should try the Shakespeare – or perhaps the atlas,’ Lubert said. ‘That would test your strength better.’ Although his jokes tended to ricochet back with redoubled velocity, lightness was still his preferred weapon against her fierce and humourless moods.

  ‘The books are not important,’ she said.

  ‘The English officer is coming.’

  Frieda sat up suddenly, without using her arms. She swung her legs athletically to the floor and wiped the sweat back over her braided hair. The ugly, defiant look she had adopted in these last few years pained him. She stared at her father.

  ‘I would like you to greet him,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because –’

  ‘Because you are going to give up Mother’s house without a fight.’

  ‘Freedie. Please don’t talk that way. Please come. For Mutti’s sake?’

  ‘She wouldn’t leave. She would never let this happen.’

  ‘Come.’

  ‘No. Beg.’

  ‘I would like you to come now.’

  ‘Beggar!’

  Unable to stare his daughter down, Lubert turned and walked away, his heart pounding. At the bottom of the stairs he caught himself in the mirror. He looked gaunt and sallow and his nose had lost some definition, but he hoped this would help. He had dressed in his most moth-eaten suit. He knew he would be giving up his home – it was one of the finest on the Elbchaussee and more than any luxury-starved, middle-ranking officer from England would be able to resist – but it was important to make the right impression. He had heard stories about the Allied forces purloining all manner of treasures since the surrender, and the imperialist, philistine English were known abusers of people’s cultures – he was particularly nervous about the paintings by Fernand Léger and woodcuts by Emil Nolde which hung in the main rooms – but he had the idea that if he could deport himself in the right way the English officer might think well of him and be less inclined to abuse his possessions. He poked the ashes of the previous evening’s fire and rearranged them slightly to show that they had been burning furniture. Then he took off his jacket, loosened his tie and struck a pose somewhere between dignified and respectful: hands at his sides, one leg slightly askance. This felt too casual, too informal, too confident, too close to who he really was. He pulled the jacket back on, tightened his tie, smoothed back his hair and stood more erect, his hands clasped meekly in front of his trousers. That was better: the demeanour of a man who was ready to hand over his house without rancour.

  Lewis and Schroeder did not speak for the rest of the journey. Lewis could see Schroeder’s lips moving as he replayed the encounter with the ferals and recited silent expressions of disgust and irritation, but he elected to say nothing more about it. The car soon reached the outer limit of the city and the edge of all that the British and Americans had bombed so comprehensively three years before. The road was now smooth, with plane trees lining the verges and whole houses lying behind high hedges and gates. This was the Elbchaussee, and these were the homes of the bankers and merchants that had made Hamburg rich and its port and working districts such a desirable target of Bomber Command. They were grander, more modern, more impressive than any residence Lewis had seen outside of London or any house he might have expected to live in.

  The Villa Lubert was the last house on the road before it turned away from the River Elbe, and when he saw it for the first time Lewis wondered if Captain Wilkins had made a mistake. It lay at the end of a long drive lined by poplar trees: a great, white wedding-cake structure built in the grand style, with porticos and a large, semicircular, colonnaded balcony. The ground floor of the house was raised several feet from the earth and split by an imposing stone staircase climbing to a lower-level balcony. Pillars wreathed in wisteria supported an upper balcony from which the residents could watch the Elbe flow some one hundred yards away. Lewis was shocked by the bright elegance and size of this house. It was not quite a palace, but it was still a residence more suited to a general or a chancellor than a through-the-ranks colonel who had never owned his own home.

  As the Mercedes turned into the circular drive, Lewis could see three figures – two women, and a man he presumed to be the gardener – forming a guard of honour. Another figure – a tall gentleman in a loose-fitting suit – came down the stairca
se to join them. Schroeder eased the car round the drive and stopped right in front of the welcoming committee. Lewis didn’t wait for the driver to open his door; he let himself out straight away and made for the man he presumed to be Lubert. Lewis was half into a salute when, at the last moment, he redirected his hand to shake that of his host.

  ‘Guten Abend,’ he said. ‘Colonel Lewis Morgan.’

  ‘Welcome, Herr Oberst. Please. We can speak English.’

  Lubert clasped Lewis’s hand with friendly strength. Even through the gloves, Lubert’s hand felt warmer than his own. Lewis nodded to the women and the gardener. The maids bowed, and the youngest of them gave him a curious look, as though he were a member of a lost tribe. She seemed amused by him – by his accent or perhaps by his odd uniform – and Lewis smiled back at her.

  ‘And this is Richard.’

  The gardener clicked his heels and stuck out an arm.

  Lewis took his bare, calloused hand and let that lever-arch arm yank his own up and down like a piston.

  ‘Please – come in,’ Lubert said.

  Lewis left Schroeder sitting in the driver’s seat with his legs resting on the running board of the Mercedes, still sulking after being reprimanded, and followed Lubert up the steps into the house.

  The house revealed its true self inside. Lewis did not much care for its style – the angular, futuristic furniture and the awkward, difficult artworks were too modern, too outré for his tastes – but the quality of the build and the skill of the design were to a standard superior to anything he had seen in an English home, including that of the Bayliss-Hilliers, who lived in the manor house at Amersham and whose home Rachael coveted and believed to be the acme of all residences. As Lubert walked him through the house, graciously explaining the function of various rooms and the history of the place, Lewis began to project ahead to the moment when Rachael would step into this house for the first time and he could see his wife taking in the light, clean lines of these rooms and her eyes widening at the grandeur of it all – the marble window seats, the grand piano, the dumb waiter, the maids’ bedrooms, the library, the smoking room, the fine art – and as he imagined this he had a sudden, unexpected hope that this house might in some way make up for the lean and distant years the war had laid between them.

  ‘You have children?’ Lubert asked as they climbed the stairs to the bedrooms.

  ‘Yes. A son. Edmund.’ He said the name as if reminding himself.

  ‘Then perhaps Edmund would like this room?’

  Lubert showed Lewis into a room that was full of children’s – mainly girls’ – toys. A rocking horse with bulging black eyes and a china doll perched side-saddle on its back stood at the far end. A doll’s house as big as a kennel and built in imitation of a Georgian town house had been placed at the foot of a small four-poster bed. Several mid-sized dolls sat on its roof, their legs dangling over the tops of the bedrooms, a line of porcelain giants squatting on someone else’s home.

  ‘Your son will not mind the girls’ things?’ Lubert asked.

  Lewis couldn’t say for sure what Edmund would like or dislike – his son had been ten when Lewis had last seen him – but few children could object to such space and treasure.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said.

  With every beautiful room and every intimate piece of information – ‘This is where we liked to watch the boats’; ‘This is where we liked to play cards’ – Lewis felt more uncomfortable, as if Lubert were heaping hot coals on his head. He would have preferred some hostility, or at least a brittle, silent resistance – something, anything, that might harden him enough to make this task easier – but this civil, almost quaint, tour was making the whole business worse. By the time they arrived in the master bedroom – the eighth bedroom on this floor, with its high and narrow French-style box bed and oil painting depicting the green spires of a medieval city hanging just above its headboard – he felt wretched.

  ‘My favourite German city,’ Lubert said, catching Lewis staring at the spires, trying to work it out. ‘Lübeck. You should try to see it if you can.’

  Lewis looked but didn’t linger. He moved towards the French windows and looked out across the garden and the River Elbe beyond it.

  ‘Claudia – my wife – liked to sit out here in the summer.’ Lubert went to the windows and opened them out on to a balcony. ‘The Elbe,’ he declared, stepping out and sweeping his arm in a 180-degree arc from end to end of the vista. It was a proper, great European river, wider and slower than any in England, and here, at the bend, it was almost at its widest – perhaps half a mile across. This river and the cargo it carried had built this house and most of those along the northern bank.

  ‘It flows into our Nordsee. Your North Sea?’ Lubert asked.

  ‘It’s the same sea in the end,’ Lewis said.

  Lubert seemed to like this, and he repeated the phrase. ‘The same sea. Yes.’

  Others might have seen Lubert’s performance as an attempt to make Lewis feel bad, or they would have detected in his upright poise all the haughtiness and arrogance of a race that had sought the world’s destruction and now had to face the consequences, but Lewis did not see things that way. In Lubert, he saw a cultured, privileged man humbling himself and clinging to the last cliff of civility in order to limit the damage to a life already ruined. Lewis knew this whole show was an attempt to win him over, to lessen the blow in some way, perhaps even persuade him to change his mind, but he could not condemn Lubert for trying, nor could he summon up the faux anger with which to play the aloof, decisive man of expedient.

  ‘Your house is wonderful, Herr Lubert,’ he said.

  Lubert bowed in gratitude.

  ‘It is more than I need – more than my family needs,’ Lewis went on. ‘And … certainly much more than we are used to.’

  Lubert waited for Lewis to finish, his eyes brightening, sensing a surprise retreat.

  Lewis looked out across the great river that flowed out to their ‘shared sea’ – the sea that was carrying his own estranged family towards him now. ‘I’d like to propose a different arrangement,’ he said.

  2

  ‘“You are about to meet a strange people in a strange enemy country. You must keep clear of Germans. You must not walk with them, or shake hands or visit their homes. You must not play games with them or share any social event. Don’t try to be kind – this is regarded as weakness. Keep Germans in their place. Don’t show hatred: the Germans will be flattered. Display cold, correct and dignified curtness and aloofness at all times. You must not frat … ernize …”’

  Edmund repeated the word: ‘“Fraternize”? What does that mean? Mother?’

  Rachael had just started to drift at the ‘cold, correct and dignified’ part and was picturing herself displaying these characteristics to unknown Germans. Edmund was reading ‘You are Going to Germany’, the official information booklet that every Germany-bound British family were given as part of their travel pack, along with ample bundles of sweets and magazines. Getting her son things to read out loud had become Rachael’s tactic, a simple way of encouraging him to learn about the world outside while at the same time giving her space to think.

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘It says we must not fraternize with the Germans. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means … being friendly. It means we are not to enter into relationships with them.’

  Edmund considered this. ‘Not even if we like someone?’

  ‘We won’t have anything to do with them, Ed. You won’t need to make friends with them.’

  But Edmund’s inquisitiveness was a Hydra: just as Rachael cut off the head of the last question,
another three appeared to replace it.

  ‘Is Germany going to be like a new colony?’

  ‘A bit, yes.’

  How she had needed Lewis over the last three years to bat back the constant questions. Edmund’s bright, curious mind needed a foil and a sounding board. With Lewis away and with her old, attentive self temporarily absent without leave, Ed’s questions had largely been met with faraway, preoccupied nods. Indeed, Edmund had grown so used to his mother’s delayed reactions that he repeated everything twice, as though she were an old, deaf aunt who had to be humoured.

  ‘Will they have to learn to speak English?’

  ‘I imagine they will, Ed, yes. Read me some more.’

  Edmund continued:

  ‘“When you meet the Germans you will probably think they are very much like us. They look like us, except that there are few of the wiry type and more big, fleshy, fair-haired men and women, especially in the north. But they are not really as much like us as they look.”’ Edmund nodded, relieved to hear it. But the next part threw him. ‘“The Germans are very fond of music. Beethoven, Wagner and Bach were all Germans.”’ He stopped reading, confused. ‘Is that true? Bach was a German?’

  Bach had been a German, but Rachael could barely bring herself to admit it. Beautiful things surely belonged on the side of the angels.

  ‘Germany was different then,’ she said. ‘Keep going. It’s interesting …’

  The booklet stirred a primitive and reassuring emotion in Rachael. She could feel herself affirming its essential message: when all is said and done, Germans are bad. This idea had served the general purpose of getting them all through the war, bringing a consensus that stopped them from blaming anyone else. Germany could be blamed for almost everything that had gone wrong with the world: bad harvests, the cost of bread, lax morality in the young, a fall in church attendance. For a time, Rachael had gone along with it, letting it serve as a catch-all explanation for her various low-grade domestic dissatisfactions.