The Aftermath Read online

  Upon making her first walk through the house, she had found herself in a small battle with it. It wasn’t just the plants: the furniture and most of the fittings and fixtures were anathema to her. She knew she was in the presence of a certain kind of excellence, but it was not a style she could love or even aspire to; and while she could appreciate the space and proportion of the rooms, she felt intimidated rather than liberated by the minimal furnishing. She wanted light and space but needed comfort and familiarity. If asked to describe it, she would have used the word ‘modern’ and meant it pejoratively. The chairs, for instance, seemed to have been stripped to their barest function, having no softness, comfort or charm – no quality that Rachael thought necessary in a chair. And the same went for the sideboards, the lamps, the tables. There was nothing pretty or frivolous or homely about any of it. Everything in the house seemed a bit clever, a bit clinical and soulless. There was too much to offend the eye of a middle-class Welshwoman raised on dark-wooded Victorian furniture, coal fires, upright pianos, sensible, inoffensive prints of castles and botanical drawings. Only the drawing room, with its ebonized Bösendorfer piano and ottoman came remotely close to resembling a room she might actually want to sit in; if she could just get the strange chair in the corner moved – maybe replace it with the simple, if boxy, two-seat sofa from the master bedroom – then she might start to feel more at home.

  Rachael stared more closely at the chrome-framed leather recliner. Was it even meant for sitting on? It looked like a chair on which a painful operation might take place. Perhaps it wasn’t a chair; perhaps it was an artefact. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps that was the point. Whatever the idea behind it, she did not care for it.

  ‘You should try it.’

  She turned to find Herr Lubert, inexplicably dressed in the navy-blue overalls of a car mechanic and holding a great hoop of keys in one hand. He looked ruffled, his hair unkempt and flying up and out to the side as though he’d slept on it when it was damp. Lewis always gelled his hair back and kept it as polished and immaculate as a piece of uniform; Lubert’s free-flowing, boyish style seemed like that of a deserter or an artist trying hard not to conform.

  ‘It’s a Mies van der Rohe. The House of Construction?’

  Rachael was so thrown by his appearance – his get-up, the hair, his ease – that she didn’t hear the words at all.

  ‘The chair,’ Lubert explained. ‘It’s worth trying. It’s meant to be one of the most comfortable chairs ever invented.’

  ‘It doesn’t look it,’ Rachael said. ‘It looks – quite the opposite.’

  Lubert smiled, a little too cockily, a little over-familiar.

  ‘Well. That is an interesting observation. It was designed by someone who was trying to reject “unnecessary adornment”? Is that the phrase?’

  Rachael was still wondering how to comport herself in this scene. What was the appropriate mien? What did she think of this answer? Why was he wearing blue overalls? And his English … The man’s English was so natural she had to remind herself that he was a German and on no account to be fraternized with unless in the communication of essential practicalities. But he was still doing all the talking.

  ‘He was of the Bauhaus school. They wanted to simplify things,’ Lubert went on. ‘Take them back to the functional. That was the philosophy.’

  ‘Do you need a philosophy to make a chair comfortable?’ Rachael said, surprising herself, and feeling that this was curt enough to punctuate this already uncomfortably long conversation with a full stop.

  Lubert’s face lit up.

  ‘But that is it! Behind every artefact, behind every object, there is a philosophy!’

  She had to put an end to this dialogue. It was setting a very poor precedent for future interactions. The careful lines she had planned to lay down – had started to lay down – were already being crossed.

  Herr Lubert held out the key ring.

  ‘As lady of the house, you should have these. The keys to every room, with a label indicating which is which.’

  Rachael took the keys. ‘Lady of the house’. She didn’t feel it, or believe she could play this role convincingly.

  ‘I hope that you slept well, Frau Morgan,’ he added.

  Choosing to hear in this innocent banality an inappropriate familiarity, Rachael decided to assert herself.

  ‘Herr Lubert, I want to be very clear with you from the start. I am not comfortable with the arrangement here – sharing a house with you – and I think it right and proper that we communicate only about what is essential. We must be civil, of course, but it is not appropriate that we … pretend to be friendly when that is not … not helpful … to our situation here. We must have clear lines of demarcation.’

  Lubert nodded at her peremptory abbreviation, but he did not seem remotely convinced by it and – astonishingly to her – continued to smile in a most carefree way.

  ‘I will do my best not to be too friendly, Frau Morgan,’ he said. And, with this, he bowed and left the room.

  ‘Guten Morgen, alle.’

  ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Governor. Guten Morgen, Herr Oberst.’

  ‘Es ist … kalt.’ Lewis hugged himself and patted his arms with his gloved hands.

  Everyone agreed. It was very kalt.

  Lewis had started to make a point of stopping to say hello to any German who might be at the gates of the headquarters – a commandeered former library – for the district of Pinneberg. Today, there were more people at the gates than usual. The approach of winter could be seen in their vapour breath, and the usually submissive, docile crowd seemed fretful; with the season’s change coming, the need to find a bed in one of the camps for the displaced was becoming urgent.

  He said his good mornings, bowing to the women, smiling at the children, saluting the men. The children giggled, the women curtsied, while the men returned his salute and waved the papers they hoped would gain passport to bed and roof. Through this engagement, Lewis tried to convey reassurance that all would be well, that a normality was being restored, even though the stench of hungry breath which Major Burnham had so callously identified, and at which Lewis had trained himself not to wince, was a pungent reminder that they were – more than one year into the occupation – still failing to meet the people’s most fundamental needs.

  Once inside the perimeter, Lewis made a mental note to have the barbed wire that surrounded their offices removed. He wasn’t sure who or what it was keeping out, but CCG seemed to think it needed protecting from a panoply of beasts: the Werwolf, fabled militant resistance to the Allied victory; the feral children scavenging in the rubble; predatory and infectious German women prowling for men. Then there was the rumour that animals had escaped from the bombed Tiergarten Hagenbeck and were still at large in the Hamburg suburbs. If anything, the ugly metal in which the authorities had wrapped themselves made the British the zoo animals and the indigenous people the gawping visitors, pulling faces at the nervous, alien creatures behind the wire.

  Captain Wilkins was ensconced at his desk, reading a booklet.

  ‘Morning, Wilkins.’

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  ‘It’s called “The German Character”, and it’s by Brigadier W. E. van Cutsem. CCG are insisting we reacquaint ourselves with it. They’re keen that we get to grips with the dangerous elements in the German personality before we get things up and running. He makes a good point. Here: “There may not be an outward show of hatred, but it’s there, simmering just below the surface, ready to be called forward in all its ferocity and bitterness. Be aware: this is a people that don’t know when they’re defeated.”�
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  Lewis was still standing, putting off what he felt to be the emasculation that occurred when he was seated behind a desk. He looked at his young second with a barely suppressed exasperation.

  ‘Wilkins. How long have you been here?’

  ‘Four months now, sir.’

  ‘And how many Germans have you talked to?’

  ‘We’re not really permitted to talk to them, sir –’

  ‘But you must have conversed with some. Observed them. I mean, met some.’

  ‘One or two, sir.’

  ‘And what do you feel when you encounter them?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Are you afraid? Do you feel their hatred? Do you look at them and think these people are a mere pistol shot from insurrection? A people that are just waiting for the signal to overthrow us?’

  ‘Hard to say, sir.’

  ‘But try: try to say. Have you seen the people at the gates? Do you look at those waifs and strays, those skeletal, yellow, stinking, homeless people bowing and fawning and scraping for food and shelter and think: By God, yes, I must remind these people that they have been defeated?’

  Wilkins tried to mutter something, but Lewis wasn’t waiting for an answer.

  ‘I’ve not met a German who has difficulty in believing they have been defeated, Wilkins. I think they have, to a man, accepted it, gladly, and with some relief. The real difference between them and us is that they have been comprehensively and categorically fucked, and they know it. It is we who are taking too long to adjust to this fact.’

  ‘Sir.’ Wilkins put the offending booklet down and picked up some less controversial paperwork. He looked almost hurt. There was an uncharacteristic sharpness in his boss’s tone today.

  Lewis immediately lifted a hand in apology. He had meant every word, but they had come out far too emphatically, spiked with the accumulated tetchiness and disappointment he’d been feeling since Rachael’s arrival in Hamburg. He’d not slept well at all and although he’d told himself – told Rachael – that it was all down to having to share a bed after months of stretching his feet out into the cool recesses of requisitioned hotel beds, the truth was that their reunion was not the completion he’d hoped for. He’d hoped she’d take to her new surroundings with the same elan she’d shown in their first home, the grim, colourless rented abode in Shriven-ham. She’d once been lithe in times of changed circumstance, but here she seemed quite demotivated, found everything rebarbative. Including him. Michael was weighing her down more heavily than he’d anticipated and he had not only misjudged this but made matters worse with the wrong words, then with no words. Here, at work, he had eloquence and emotion and conviction; with Rachael, he experienced a strangled ineptitude. And still, two weeks on, they had not ‘had a moment’.

  Of course, none of this was Wilkins’s fault or concern.

  ‘I suggest you get out more, Wilkins. Meet the people. It’s the best antidote to that theoretical claptrap. It doesn’t help having our headquarters here, but you need to see the reality of conditions a few miles east. Fraternize. That’s an order.’

  ‘Sir –’

  There was a knock, and Captain Barker’s rotund, cheery head appeared at the door. He surveyed the scene, sensed an atmosphere and opted to keep the rest of himself in the corridor.

  ‘Sir, the women are ready to see you.’

  ‘Right, Barker. Thank you. How many are there?’

  ‘I’ve whittled them down to a choice of three, sir.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’

  ‘Chose the prettiest ones, sir.’

  Lewis permitted himself a smile. The British zone might have become a Mecca for the maladjusted – redundant colonialists from India, carpetbaggers, failed civil servants and idle policemen – but the odd gem got through. And Barker was a gem, working hard at everything he did while maintaining the lightest of touches; he was neither out for petty gain nor escaping failure in another realm; he said he’d come to Germany to make a difference and seemed free of the presumptions or the unction with which so many of the new young breed of officers arrived. Such probity sparkled in the dung, gave Lewis hope that he had something to work with.

  ‘Do they speak good English?’

  Barker glanced back outside to the corridor, signalling that the women were within earshot.

  ‘Each one is fluent,’ he said. ‘To narrow it down, I asked them to name as many English football teams as possible. One of them named Crewe Alexandra.’

  ‘You think Intelligence uses such sophisticated recruitment methods?’

  ‘Of course not, sir. Intelligence would pick the ugly ones.’

  Crewe Alexandra was first. Lewis stood as she entered and ushered her towards the chair opposite his desk. He pushed aside the files that were blocking his view. In her brimmed hat and velvet gown she resembled an aristocratic suffragette, a look somehow accentuated by her outsized army boots. She had a wide, angular face with heavy eyebrows and wolfish, preternatural eyes that looked both at and through Lewis simultaneously. He had the peculiar sensation of having met her before somewhere, and although this was not the case he blushed, as though the thought were proof of some deeper, inappropriate emotion. He composed himself and scanned the hastily typed-up report that Barker had put together.

  ‘Ursula Paulus. Born 12 March 1918. Wismar?’

  ‘Yes. That is correct.’

  Since the war, it had been much harder to guess people’s ages. Loss, separation, deprivation and an unrelentingly poor diet had aged everyone, the women especially. Facial lines creased into old fat folds and hair greyed and thinned, plucked or shocked out of colour and vigour. Lewis discerned more life lived, more wisdom, more pain in her expression than in that of the average 28-year-old.

  ‘You come from Rügen Island?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you get to Hamburg?’

  ‘I walked.’ She looked down at her boots. ‘I’m sorry. I have not yet managed to find better shoes.’

  ‘I won’t be making my decision based on couture, Frau Paulus. Where did you learn your English?’

  ‘I taught it at an elementary school on the island.’

  ‘You didn’t want to stay on Rügen?’

  She shook her head and Lewis decoded it:

  ‘The Russians.’

  ‘They do not treat German women kindly.’

  ‘That is an understatement.’

  ‘It is a … euphemism?’ she asked, checking this was the right word.

  Lewis nodded. Smart, as the Americans liked to say.

  ‘You speak Russian?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘It could be helpful. If the Soviets have their way, we could all end up speaking Russian.’

  Lewis looked down at Barker’s notes again.

  ‘You served at the naval base in Rostock during the war. What did you do?’

  ‘I was … you call it a stenographer.’

  ‘What about your husband? Does he have work?’

  ‘He died at the beginning of the war.’

  ‘I’m sorry … it says here you’re married …’

  ‘Well. I am … Until I marry again.’

  Lewis raised a hand in apology. ‘I understand. Your late husband served in the Luftwaffe.’

  ‘Late … you mean dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. He died in France. In the first weeks of the war.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Lewis raised one palm and jiggled his leg impatiently. ‘So, Frau Paulus. There are hundreds of German women applying for the job of interpreter. Why should I choose you?’

  Ursula gave him a curiou
s smile. ‘A girl has to keep warm.’

  Lewis smiled at her honest answer. He made a cursory move to check something in the files of the other two women, but it was a token gesture. He had made up his mind. He would have to interview the other candidates, but neither of them would overturn the decision he had already made. It was partly the pressing need to get on and his allergic reaction to sitting behind a desk, but Frau Paulus had won him over before he’d even managed to assess the quality of her English or her suitability for the job. He needed to be around people who exuded such uncomplaining grace. And he wanted to know about those boots – their provenance, the roads they’d travelled, the experiences had in them. He saw himself – later, in his car perhaps – asking her about them and her telling him the story of how she had walked from Rügen Island to Hamburg to escape the Russians. He reached over to one of the freshly delivered boxes containing questionnaires, took one and handed it to her.

  ‘It’s mandatory that you complete one of these. I apologize for the silliness of some of the questions.’ He then took something else from a drawer in his desk: a booklet of British Armed Forces vouchers. He tore away two and handed them to her.

  ‘Use those to purchase some new shoes.’ She took them tentatively, as though unsure of his intentions; perhaps it was a test.

  ‘Please,’ Lewis encouraged. ‘A governor’s interpreter must look the part.’

  And, with this, Ursula lost her poise; she sighed as though releasing a long-held breath and then, reaching across the desk, she took Lewis’s hand, clasped it in her two and thanked him, spontaneously in German, and then, remembering herself, in English: