The Aftermath Read online

‘But I don’t understand,’ Rachael said. ‘Are other families doing this?’

  ‘None of them has requisitioned a house like this. It’s not really the same.’

  Rachael had no space for this. It did not matter how grandiose, how replete with rooms, how exquisite the art or the action of the piano; were it a palace with separate wings and outhouses, there still would be no room for a German in it. She looked for a cigarette in her handbag. She was determined not to let Lewis light her, as was his wont; but he had already flipped his American-style lighter and, as she leant forward, he cupped her now-trembling hand with his and lit it for her.

  ‘Wait until you see it. It’s a wonderful house.’

  Lewis had always had a two-pronged attack in mind. Should the soft approach fail to convince, then he would give them the hard slap of disparity and drive them through the worst Hamburg had to offer. He instructed Schroeder to follow him in the luggage-bearing Austin 16 on a slight detour through the ruins so that ‘Frau und Sohn might understand the situation better’.

  Lewis steered with exaggerated care around the bomb craters in the road, but for the first few minutes Edmund’s excited response to the Mercedes prevented him from delivering his corrective lecture. Sitting between mother and father, son exclaimed breathlessly and enthused unabashed at the supreme feat of engineering this car represented. In the same way that he had been thrown by Bach being a German, the sheer beauty of this beast undid Edmund’s sense of superiority.

  ‘It goes up to two hundred.’

  ‘That’s kilometres per hour.’

  ‘Can we try it?’

  ‘I don’t think these roads will allow us, Ed.’ And, with this, Lewis delivered the first of his killer statistics: ‘Do you know that we dropped more bombs on Hamburg in a weekend than the Germans dropped on London in the entire war?’ He said it to Edmund, but he wanted Rachael to hear it, wanted her to take in its full force; to eliminate the prejudice and self-pity. Almost on cue, the ruination of Hamburg opened up around them, and if, at first, it looked no different to the mental pictures they had of London, Coventry, Bristol, the scale of it accumulated with every yard. There were no standing structures ahead of them, behind them or on either side, only rubble, and rivers of people moving at the side of the road.

  ‘They started it, though, didn’t they, Father?’

  Lewis nodded. Of course. They started it. They started it when their grievances were stirred in a pot by a conjurer; they started it with every arm raised and armband worn, with every rally attended and road built, with every utterance applauded; they started it with every shop smashed, every plane launched and bomb dropped. They started it. But where were they? Where was the master race that swallowed continents now? Surely it wasn’t these pathetically clad, feeble-limbed troglodytes plodding along at the side of the shattered road?

  ‘They don’t look like Germans, Father.’

  ‘No.’

  Still no response from Rachael.

  ‘You see those black crosses? They indicate bodies buried in the rubble. There are still over a million German civilians unaccounted for.’

  Lewis looked at Rachael to see if any of this was registering, but her face was a determined blank.

  Set your face that way then, Lewis thought. You’ll see it soon enough.

  They passed several families lugging a lifetime’s leftovers on the back of a cart.

  ‘Where are all these people going?’ Edmund asked.

  ‘They’re DPs. Displaced people returning to the city. Or people who have been thrown out of their homes to make way for the likes of us.’

  ‘Mother says they live in billets.’

  ‘They do. But there aren’t enough of them. We’re building a new camp every month.’ He would have to show them what a camp for displaced people looked like at some point.

  ‘Are those like the camps we saw in the Illustrated News?’

  ‘No. Not like those.’

  ‘But they deserve it, don’t they? For what they did? In those camps?’

  Lewis had to check his irritation. Breathe in. He isn’t to know.

  ‘Father?’

  Outside, the people flowed on either side of the road with faces bent on nothing more than the immediate, the daily bread and that they might be delivered from any more evil, but Lewis could not bend his spine any further back in support of them. He must say something of justice, too …

  ‘Some do, Ed. Yes.’

  And, with this, Rachael offered her only words of the short journey:

  ‘Of course they do.’

  As the strange convoy – hunched, doughty British Austin trailing sleek, all-conquering German Mercedes – scrunched up the gravel drive, Stefan Lubert checked his watch and walked down the steps to greet the new occupants. He pulled his jacket straight and made an effort to look dignified, humble and grateful all at once – a difficult combination for a man of his temperament. Next to him, Heike and Greta stood in line, ready to offer their services to the family. He could sense their nerves and hear their whispered commentary:

  ‘They’re not as ugly as other English.’

  ‘I like their clothes.’

  ‘Poor Master, he is putting on a brave face.’

  ‘The lady is pretty …’

  ‘Not as pretty as our mistress.’

  Greta was being loyal to the memory of her mistress, of course, but Claudia had not been pretty. Handsome, elegant, graceful, aquiline, but not pretty. Whereas Frau Morgan, as Heike had spontaneously observed, certainly was, and her unsmiling and stonily set face could not quite disguise it. Dark auburn hair; wide almond eyes, small full lips, petite but full figure, olive skin. Where was she from? Not England, surely. She must be Celtic. Spanish even.

  ‘She does not look happy.’

  ‘Perhaps she is used to living in a castle.’

  The colonel came and shook Lubert’s hand warmly.

  ‘Frieda wanted to greet you, but she is not feeling well,’ Lubert said. ‘I hope you will forgive her absence.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lewis answered, and he beckoned Rachael forward. ‘This is my wife – Frau Morgan.’

  Lubert put out a hand, but Rachael offered no reciprocal action.

  ‘How do you do?’ Lubert said, retracting his hand and converting the gesture into an ushering, introductory sweep. ‘My staff. Heike. Greta. Richard, you met at the gate. I commend them to you.’

  Heike curtsied emphatically, Greta minimally.

  Still no words from Rachael, Lubert noted. Perhaps some catatonia had afflicted her as she drove through the ruins.

  ‘And Edmund,’ Lewis said, turning and calling his son over: ‘Ed!’

  In his excitement, Edmund had wandered off towards the lawn, where he was now running with arms outstretched like a plane, making noises of war. The boy wasn’t thinking and, as if to show he didn’t mind, Lubert laughed. But Rachael was embarrassed.

  ‘Ed! Stop that! Come and say hello.’

  Lubert was surprised to hear her voice. She speaks!

  Edmund ran over to greet Lubert and the staff. Heike giggled at his antics.

  ‘How do you do?’ Edmund said to Lubert.

  ‘Welcome to your new home,’ he replied. ‘I hope you like it here.’

  Lewis had not exaggerated, Rachael thought. The house was wonderful. If anything, he had undersold it, probably from an ignorance of what really made it special but also because he was not entirely comfortable with its grandeur. He was free of the social pretension and material aspirations that drove his colleagues, a characteristic the more socially alert Rachael had always loved in him but which now, for some reason, irritated
her. As Herr Lubert gave them the guided tour she felt caught between needing to show the German that she recognized excellence and appreciated culture as much as anyone and making her general misgivings known. With every room he explained, Herr Lubert seemed to be compounding her sense of inferiority and dislocation. Whatever he was actually saying, all she was hearing was: ‘You are welcome but it is still my house.’ By the time they reached the balcony overlooking the river, Rachael had had enough. As Lubert offered to show them his own apartments – at the top of the house – she cut the tour short, saying she was tired from the journey. The shock of facing her new circumstances had, if anything, jolted the fatigue out of her; but she could no longer tolerate the presence of this urbane and – was she imagining it? – slightly impertinent German who spoke English with a perfect cadence and without the silly plums of received pronunciation. Rachael had half hoped the lack of a shared language would keep things simple and separate, but this man’s facility was going to complicate things unless boundaries were firmly and clearly laid down.

  Later, when Lewis went to tuck Edmund into bed, he found his son lying on the floor. He had pulled the doll’s house out into the centre of the room and Lewis could see that he had already re-created the house in a simulacrum of the Villa Lubert, placing furniture up on the roof where the German family now lived, and finger-sized dolls in their respective spaces: two dolls – one male, one female – for Lubert and his daughter; one each for himself, Lewis and Rachael.

  ‘Bedtime, Ed.’

  Edmund got up from the floor and climbed into the four-poster.

  Lewis had not tucked his son in for a long time and wasn’t sure of the routine. Should he read a story? Say a few words? Offer a prayer? Instead, he pulled the blanket up over Edmund’s chest and just over his cloth soldier, Cuthbert. Lewis wanted to touch his son’s face and caress a lock away from his eyes, but he lacked the confidence so patted the cloth soldier instead.

  ‘How do you like it here?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s big,’ Edmund replied.

  ‘You think you are going to enjoy it?’

  Ed nodded. ‘Why didn’t the girl come and say hello?’

  ‘I think she isn’t very well. You’ll meet her soon enough. Maybe you can play together.’

  ‘Will that be allowed?’

  ‘Of course. Once we’re settled in.’

  Edmund paused, as if about to say something else, but his father had already switched off the bedside light.

  ‘Night, Ed.’

  ‘Goodnight, Father.’

  And, with that, Lewis left the room, Edmund thinking that perhaps it was best not to mention the encounter he’d had about an hour before, when he had wandered along the landing to the staircase that led to the top floor, where the Luberts’ apartments were situated.

  He had only wanted to have a look up there, nothing more. He’d climbed the first flight and, when he got to the turn in the staircase, he’d come across the girl, with a blond pigtail, her arms out, a hand pressed against each wall and her legs suspended in mid-air in front of her as though she were performing on a gymnasium horse.

  ‘Hello,’ he’d said. He stood there staring at her, intrigued, wondering if this was Frieda. She looked to be perfectly strong and healthy, not sick at all.

  ‘Are you Frieda?’ he asked.

  But the girl just stared back at him, keeping her legs perfectly horizontal, and then, very slowly, she started to open her legs to reveal her knickers. Edmund was mesmerized, unable to look away. For how long he looked he couldn’t tell – it felt like several minutes – but he was rudely startled from his gawping when the girl suddenly hissed at him – hissed just like a cat – and he backed down the stairs, keeping his eyes on her all the time, lest she suddenly pounce.

  Lubert woke from a bad dream to find himself in an unfamiliar room and a house that was no longer his. In the first uncertain seconds of waking, he wasn’t sure where he was, and his consciousness, scrabbling for sensory clues, cobbled a confusion of memory, location and time that placed him in the single bed at his grandmother’s summer house on the island of Sylt, the same bed where he had once made love to Claudia while downstairs, in the kitchen, his sisters prepared lobster and crab for supper. How well the young lovers had used the hammering of shells to disguise the creaking of the headboard and their ecstatic cries.

  He opened his eyes, and the light, seeping through the half-open curtain, broke the illusion: he was not in his own bed (another man and another wife lay there now), he was in the bedroom that his old driver, Friedrich, had used before war had forced a shedding of staff, the same room that Claudia had then used as an adjunct to her always overflowing dressing room. He was in his house but he was no longer its master, and the mistress of the house was gone, never to be smelt or caressed again. And yet, he could smell her – or a memory of a time with her. The silk eiderdown he now lay beneath once belonged in that summer house on Sylt, before the island’s homes had been commandeered by the Luftwaffe for their seaplane base; it had retained a smell of the sea and it was this that had conjured the vivid association.

  Lubert pulled the quilt up to his nose, breathed in its scent and was transported again to the day he came down the staircase with his flushed fiancée to eat the feast prepared by his sisters, the herby, salt-fish smell of Claudia on his knuckles mingling with that of the bouillabaisse, and Claudia smiling at him across the table as he surreptitiously sniffed his fingers for proof of her passion. As Lubert gave himself to this memory, the smell of his own arousal wafted up from beneath the quilt, inviting him to re-enact that scene all over again.

  Afterwards, he felt no guilt, just a low-grade humiliation that this was all he had now: reminiscences edited and recut for quick, mechanical effect. He sat up and felt the tepid clump of semen on his belly already going cold. Wasted. Neutered of purpose. It was this legacy – more than the ruins, the material destruction or the atrocities – that Lubert thought about most: the truncating and rearranging of relationships that had once seemed unbreakable, a million lovers losing the loves of their lives and having to start again. Of course, for some – the unhappily married, the unevenly yoked – the interruption was an opportunity. According to the banter of the men at the factory, the shortage of German males was a good thing for all of them. There were simply more women to choose from, and more women choosing. It was the ‘new’ economics of supply and demand. But Lubert did not want to choose or be chosen; the one he had chosen – and who had chosen him – was still, even gone, more present to him than any prospective relationship.

  He wiped his hand on his nightshirt and got up from the bed to pull the curtain fully across. The room was still cluttered with belongings hastily transported from the master bedroom and study after the unexpected reprieve granted by the colonel. They were the things Lubert had always imagined he’d grab first in the event of a fire: his architectural worktop and utensils; the pressed flowers from his wedding day; and two of the most valuable and treasured objects in the house: Léger’s self-portrait and von Carolsfeld’s naked maid. But, rather than feeling the loss of things, Lubert had experienced an unexpected exhilaration in having to pare back his possessions – a sense of being almost bare, light enough to go anywhere.

  At the window, he peered out across the lit lawn. The quarter-moon was visible in the cold, clear, purple sky but the light being cast across the garden was emanating from the master bedroom, where, no doubt, the kind, upright British officer and his pretty but simmering wife were reacquainting themselves after a long separation. Lubert tried not to think of it, but not thinking of it only made a scene spring to mind more clearly: they were in his bed; perhaps they kept the
light on the better to see what they had been missing; perhaps they talked and talked before making love; or they made love first, talked then made love again. Were they, as he and Claudia had always preferred, lying on the bed without covering, or were they quiet, furtive lovers hiding themselves beneath the linen?

  The light from the bedroom below went out, the balcony, garden and trees pooled into blackness and a fuller canopy of stars revealed itself. Presuming that the occupants of his old bed had completed their rituals of reunion, Lubert left the window and got back beneath the salty eiderdown of his single bed.

  Rachael sat at her new dressing table in her new bedroom, brushing her hair. Somewhere, directly above her in the top apartments, she imagined Herr Lubert preparing for bed and laughing at that woman’s rudeness and her inability to recognize the artist of one of the paintings he’d pointed out in the billiard room – who was it? Léger? She had never heard of him.

  She did not want to move from her kidney-shaped dressing stool. If she had the condescension of a man above her, she had the approbation (and expectation) of the man behind her. In the quarter-section of the mirror she could see Lewis in his pyjamas sitting on the high, narrow bed watching her, and she could sense his mixture of annoyance and arousal. Lewis disliked any form of unkindness, and the fact that he hadn’t yet said anything to her was perhaps because he was hoping to ‘have a moment’. Rachael stopped brushing her hair; she didn’t want to send the wrong signals. The expected moment of their physical reunion had arrived, but she was not ready to give herself to it.

  ‘Don’t you like the house?’ Lewis asked. It was gentle enough, but, by his standards, this was almost a confrontation.

  ‘I’d prefer it if the owner wasn’t living in it.’

  Rachael watched Lewis reach for his cigarette case, take a cigarette and light up. A combat reflex: ammunition for battle; tricky terrain to cross: light up.

  ‘You might have been a little friendlier towards him,’ he said. Again, reasonable – she had been unfriendly; but Rachael needed no red rag to charge him. Her laugh sounded more hysterical than she felt but her choice of words was calculated. An argument would put off the sex for another time.