The Aftermath Read online

  Rachael recoiled at the sight of the pawned semi-precious gem and the thought of the cook having to sell an heirloom. There was something too brash about Susan Burnham tonight. She seemed irritated by something: was it that she wasn’t quite the sun at the centre of this little solar system?

  ‘“Nobleman” is usually code for arms manufacturer, isn’t it?’ Captain Eliot asked, looking to the de-Nazification officer for verification.

  Burnham swilled his wine. ‘If it were that simple, we’d round up all the vons in Germany.’

  ‘How is your “Nopleman”, Rachael?’ Susan asked. ‘Is he behaving himself?’

  She asked the question loud enough for everyone to hear, and for Rachael to have to answer.

  ‘It has its awkward moments, but I think it’s working as well as can be expected.’

  ‘Do tell us about the awkward moments.’

  ‘They’re trivial things, really,’ Rachael dead-batted. ‘What plates we share. Who uses the side door. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like living under the same roof,’ Mrs Thompson said. ‘How do you do it?’ She asked this as she might ask after a patient who had a terminal disease. ‘I would find it quite unsettling.’

  ‘We manage. As you said, Pamela: we are the lucky ones.’ With a waft of her napkin, Rachael announced the next phase of the evening.

  ‘I think it’s time we had a sing-song.’

  The party gathered around the piano. The book of carols was already on the stand and, taking her place, Rachael launched into a rambunctious rendition of ‘I Saw Three Ships’, before stomping though ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’. During each chorus, Major Burnham began smacking out the tidings of great joy on the side of the Bösendorfer with his open palms, drumming with an uncoordinated rhythm, shout-singing off the beat. His inebriation was probably not that apparent in this relatively intoxicated company, but Rachael was unnerved by it: it had come on him quickly; the urbane, subtle man she’d discussed things with at dinner had turned brutish. She steadied the ship with ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and tried to calm things with ‘Silent Night’, which Burnham insisted they sang in German and spoilt by cynically over-pronouncing the words to sarcastic effect.

  ‘How about some Gilbert and Sullivan?’ Captain Thompson asked. He’d found the complete leather-bound editions on the back of the piano and opened a volume to The Pirates of Penzance. ‘Here’s one for you, Major.’

  Burnham put his glass down and straightened himself. Rachael could smell his hocky breath and feel that suppressed anger bubbling up. He sang in tune, aggressively and without inhibition:

  ‘I am the very model of a modern major general.

  ‘I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral.

  ‘I know the kings of England and I quote the fights historical.

  ‘From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical …’

  Rachael slowed the tempo to allow him to keep up, but the witty gallop of the lyrics was too much for him. After getting through the first line of each stanza, he la-la-la’d his way through the rest, while banging his hands more and more violently on the piano top. Halfway through the last stanza the vase on the back of the piano was sent crashing to the floor by the vibrations.

  ‘Oops!’ Burnham said.

  Rachael stopped playing and stood to inspect the damage: the vase had broken cleanly into four sections.

  ‘Keith!’ exclaimed Susan.

  ‘My apologies,’ Burnham said. ‘I’m sure it can be fixed.’

  ‘It’s not my vase, Major. It belongs to the house.’

  ‘Oh. Oh well. That’s all right then!’ And he laughed, and, to Rachael’s alarm, the others laughed, too. As she was picking up the broken pieces, the door opened. For a moment she thought it was Lewis come back, but it was Herr Lubert.

  Lubert looked as though he had done, or was about to do, something appalling: his forehead was badly cut just above one eyebrow, the blood still glistening, and his whole frame was heaving from him breathing hard. He stood there staring at them all like some prophet stumbling upon an orgy.

  ‘Herr Lubert?’ Rachael said, half clarifying his identify for the guests; half checking his next move. ‘Are you all right? You’re bleeding.’

  Lubert looked at the vase, and then at Burnham. His nostrils were flaring; the rise and fall of his chest and shoulders made him look as though he were steeling himself to lift the piano and crush the major beneath it.

  ‘Sorry about the vase, old chap,’ Burnham said. ‘I’m sure that with the help of … all the king’s horses … Frau Morgan can put it back together again …’

  Rachael glanced at Susan Burnham, ordering a swift intervention with her eyes.

  ‘Come along, Keith,’ Susan finally said. ‘I think you’ve had enough.’

  ‘What? Let’s have another song. Perhaps Herr Lubert can join us?’ And he began smacking out the beats to the galloping tune still playing in his head.

  ‘I’d ask you not to hit the piano like that,’ Lubert said. He was now staring at Burnham with undisguised threat, his hands clenched into hammers. He had not stopped looking at him since he’d entered. Burnham was sober enough to be riled and hit the piano harder, making the strings thrum.

  ‘I think you’ll find this piano is requisitioned, Herr Lubert. Which means it’s the property of the Control Commission. Which means – in effect – that it’s mine.’

  Sure that Lubert was going to strike the major, Rachael stood up, placed the pieces of vase on the piano, and placed herself between the two men. She spoke to Lubert directly and softly: ‘We’ve all had a little too much.’

  Lubert looked at her and unclenched his fists. He looked at Burnham one more time then turned and walked from the room, muttering, ‘Sie ekeln mich an!’

  ‘Ha!’ Burnham cried. ‘Did you hear that? “You disgust me”! He said we disgust him. We disgust him!’ He turned to Rachael, demanding she instantly extract an apology and mete out some sort of punishment.

  ‘I think he meant you, Keith,’ Mrs Burnham said, and this time she took her husband by the arm and steered him towards the exit before more damage was done. ‘Time for bed.’

  ‘“But I am the very model of a modern major general …”’ he protested.

  The evening was over. It was not the ending Rachael had planned – they would skip cards and charades around the fireplace – but she wanted everyone to leave as quickly as possible. Her only thought now was to find Lubert. The guests politely withdrew with mingled compliments, thanks and apologies. Ten minutes later, she closed the door on a distraught Mrs Eliot, who hoped that everything would be all right and that Rachael might attend the Anglo-German group and perhaps bring Herr Lubert, too.

  Rachael was just about to head upstairs to the top apartment when she heard a groan. There, seated in the armchair in front of the fire, leaning forward with his head in his hands, his hands over his eyes, was Herr Lubert, breathing heavily through his teeth, making a sound like the tide on a pebble beach.

  ‘Stefan?’

  Lubert opened his good eye – the other had now closed over – and looked through the lattice of his fingers. He could see the cello of Rachael’s hips and the sequins of her dress sparkling in the firelight.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  He felt her hand on his shoulder and dropped his own to reveal his injury, looking up so that she could inspect it more closely. She winced at the gape.

  ‘How did this happen?’

  He thought: I was nearly killed by a sign that said ‘Let Germany live!’, but he couldn’t think how to say it, and spea
king hurt anyway, so he just groaned.

  ‘Let me get something for that,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a tick.’ Rachael went upstairs to fetch treatment, her sequinned dress making a chinkly ruffle as she went.

  Lubert rested his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands again, smelling his wound on his palms and tasting the metal of his blood. The evening’s events replayed in a vivid, dizzy spin. He could remember the signs of protest: ‘We want to work!’ ‘Bevin, stop the demontage!’ ‘Let Germany live!’ He’d been a reluctant protester, bullied by his work colleagues into joining. He was afraid of jeopardizing his clearance; but he also hated crowds. With their capacity for brutality, for unthinking, they made him nervous and misanthropic. But this crowd had been reassuringly shabby and serried and he had had a sudden conviction that it was better to be with his brothers and sisters in the cold than in the cosy compromise of his own house. They had listened to Schorsch’s clever speech appealing to the British sense of fair play while calling them on their sense of humour, showing Germans that it was fine to laugh and possible to cock a snook at authority – something they’d not done with confidence for years. They’d even sung the German anthem, stoic rather than defiant, and without the demented zeal of recent years. It was the sound of a people finding their voice. And then, suddenly, a honking horn and a revving engine created a dissonance, as a British staff car tried to get to the factory gates. The people tried to move aside. One or two started to bang the roof of the car to register their frustration. Then one of them leant both his hands against its side and pushed it, making it rock. Others joined him, thinking it good sport. They rocked the car so hard, its wheels left the ground. Lubert could see the officer inside, his expression passing from anger to fear. Then, as though they didn’t realize their own strength, the young men tipped the car right over, on to its side, sending the officer sprawling sideways against the roof, leaving him with his face pressed against the glass like a gulping goldfish. It was almost comic, but Lubert had sensed that something terrible was about to happen. And then rifle shots sounded. The first froze everyone into a flinch. The second sent them into a swirling stampede like sheep changing direction en bloc, shepherded by invisible bullets. Lubert went with the herd, feeling himself being carried; something had struck him on the brow, but he kept going; for a few yards he moved without using his legs. And then he saw sparks and felt a ringing as a knee struck his temple. He was on his hands and knees, and it took a while to realize that the red dots on the white were his own blood spotting the snow.

  Rachael returned to the hall with lint, bandage and iodine.

  ‘Let me see.’

  She stood over Lubert and lifted his chin gently with her finger to get to the cut. ‘You might have got grit in it.’ She pulled up the footstool and sat in front of him. She soaked the lint in iodine, the white material yellowing out. ‘This will hurt,’ she said.

  Lubert winced and shivered with the sting.

  ‘What happened?’

  Lubert could picture it, but not explain it. His head throbbed so much.

  ‘They … agh!’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  Rachael held the lint there, with her hand over it, leaning her weight forward to make it easier. Lubert moaned with the deep, cleansing pain of it and reached for her arm for solace. They stayed in this position for a while and, despite the pain – or because of it – he held her arm for as long as possible, and she didn’t mind. After a while, she pulled the pad away to look at the cut.

  ‘That looks clean. Right. Let me put this on …’

  She unfurled the bandage and wrapped it around a fresh lint, soaked in more iodine, moving around him to get to the back of his head, her belly passing inches from his nose; she completed the circuit and fastened the bandage with a safety pin.

  ‘There. That’s Girl Guides for you. How does that feel?’

  ‘It stings. But thank you.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the major. He was drunk.’

  ‘Thank you for intervening. This would have been an international incident, I think.’

  His face was inches from hers. Rachael noticed the lines around his eyes and saw a sadness she’d not seen in their previous encounters. She imagined kissing him and, in that instant, she knew that she wanted to and that she could. As she held the patch with one hand, she feathered his cheek with her other, then she kissed him gently on the lips, the action overlaying the intent like a palimpsest. She held her lips there long enough for their breath to mingle. She waited for the tripwires and electric fences to kick in, the alarm bells and searchlights, but the restraints did not come. She entered the new territory without anyone stopping her. It was that easy.

  ‘I prefer this kiss to the other,’ Lubert said.

  Rachael looked down, aware of where she was again.

  ‘Is this … part of a plan to get me thrown out of the house?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s … a thank-you,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For waking me up.’

  9

  The factory floodlights illumined a churned-up snowfield where dropped placards lay all around like dead storks. The upended staff car had been cordoned off with tape as the epicentre of the crime scene. A few German policemen stood around in the dark, looking unsure of their place in it all. Surveying the detritus of the riot, Lewis felt overwhelmed by a sense of losing what slippery grip he had on matters.

  The military policeman who’d given the order to fire – a Major Montagu – talked him through what had happened, but the how and why couldn’t change the what. A monumental fuck-up had occurred – and on his watch.

  ‘The officer was trying to drive to the gates when he was surrounded by an angry mob. They started to attack the car. We fired warning shots, but they continued to rock the car until it was tipped over. Luckily, they couldn’t get to him with the car on its side.’

  Montagu described the incident with mechanical detachment. Lewis waited for him to complete his report, but Montagu stopped there.

  ‘Then you opened fire on unarmed civilians,’ Lewis said.

  ‘We had no choice, sir.’

  ‘It’s the dead who don’t have a choice, Major. Three of them, damn it!’

  Lewis walked around the car to where there was blood on the snow. On its side, the Volkswagen looked even more like an insect.

  ‘They would have lynched him if we’d left them to it.’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  ‘Without doubt, sir. They had become … a senseless mob by then. We believe there were subversive elements in the crowd,’ he went on. ‘People who just came to stir up trouble. Possibly Werwolf, sir.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Have you arrested any of them?’

  Montagu puffed himself up and muttered his answer curtly: ‘We are holding half a dozen for questioning.’

  ‘Children, are they?’

  The military police had recently been heavily criticized for arresting over a hundred children caught stealing coal. The press had got hold of the story, but the facts – the age of the children – had been changed.

  Lewis picked up one of the placards. It read: ‘Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job!’ He held it up for Montagu to read. ‘You know who they’re quoting?’

  Montagu was beginning to chafe at the barrage of questions. ‘You would have done the same – had you been here.’

  Lewis hurled the placard away. ‘We offer them democracy and then punish them for exercising it.’

  Barker drove Lewis to an emergency meeting with his boss, General de Billier.

  ‘The major was right,’ Lewis said. ‘I shou
ld have been there. Or at least I should have sent a bigger detachment to support them.’

  ‘It was meant to be a peaceful demonstration, sir. The union assured us of that. The rock apes panicked. That was not your fault,’ Barker replied.

  ‘I feel a sacking coming on.’

  ‘I doubt that, sir.’

  ‘Why else would I be called to a midnight meeting with de Billier?’

  ‘He’s probably got a new single malt he wants your opinion on, sir.’

  Lewis managed a smile. The general was a big whisky man, known for picking men on the basis of their ability to distinguish between a blend and a single malt.

  ‘They can’t sack you,’ Barker continued. ‘You’re one of the few people who understand what they’re doing here. My guess is they have something else in mind.’

  ‘I’m far from being the indispensable man you think, Barker.’

  If, outwardly, Lewis brushed off the compliment, inwardly, he received it, storing it as antidote to his creeping self-doubt. In the army, the straightforward ‘Well done’ was rare. Praise, when it was given, was usually counterbalanced with insult. This reticence to encourage or compliment wasn’t just a military affliction, there was something very English about it, he felt. It sprang from a combination of reserve and realism which Lewis recognized in himself, as well as a fear of letting someone get too big for their boots: one reason why – the English liked to say – they would never suffer dictators as readily as their continental neighbours.

  ‘I’ve almost got that register done, sir,’ Barker went on.

  ‘Register?’

  ‘The missing-persons register. The one you asked for?’

  Lewis could hear the sound of crashing crockery: how many other plates had he set spinning and forgotten about? His idea of compiling a list of ‘the missing dead’ – the unaccounted for from the bombing – and checking it against the names of everyone still in a hospital, infirmary, convent or convalescent home in the region was one of several things he’d instigated but had fallen by the wayside as more urgent matters pressed in.