All That I Am (29 page)

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘As ever.’ I ran my fingers over the corners of my mouth. ‘But I think we should leave it.’

She nodded, slowly. She understood that I wanted to have this said. And that I would never say it, publicly, of myself.

I had known her to be unhappy; I had at times made her unhappy. But I do not believe she ever had that particular sickness, the one that robs you of all will and purpose. I do not believe it.

RUTH

A woman in a headscarf like a Madonna brings the newspapers around the ward every morning, on a trolley.
Give us this day our daily news
… Twenty years at the Methodist college and all my references have become Christian. I take the two broadsheets, though I never get through them.

One day, lying on the grass at Regent’s Park, Dora rummaged in her big bag and passed me
The Times
. ‘Look at this,’ she said.

‘“Fred Perry: ‘I have more Wimbledons in me’”,’ I read out from the back page.

‘Having an affair with Marlene Dietrich, apparently,’ Dora said. ‘But that’s not it. Page three.’

I opened to page three. The headline was ‘Versailles Outfoxed’. The byline was a British journalist along with ‘first-rate German sources’.

‘Mine,’ she beamed.

‘You first-rate source, you,’ I said. She laughed that great, head-thrown laugh of hers. I looked back down at the paper. The article was about how, although the regular German army was limited by the Treaty of Versailles to a hundred thousand men, the paramilitary organisations under Hitler’s personal control numbered in the millions. The SA alone now had 2.5 million members who brawled in the streets with impunity.

‘So many men,’ I wondered aloud. ‘He’ll have to find something for them to do.’

‘It’s called a war.’ Dora was sitting cross-legged, pulling up single strands of grass and stroking them idly against her palm, then tossing them aside. Ernst Röhm, she said, wanted Hitler to allow the SA to swallow the whole of the regular army, so it would become just a small training arm of the Brownshirts. In its own defence, the army was threatening to declare martial law. ‘Which would be the end of Hitler,’ Dora said. ‘However it plays out,’ she tapped the newspaper, ‘Versailles is a joke.’

We celebrated her coup at the Marquis of Granby with half-crown meals and wine. We stayed out late, didn’t worry about looking over our shoulders at the pub, or in the street. At the end of the evening we walked home arm in arm, our steps in time. The moon was a hole punched in the sky, the light still on behind.

Dora skipped up the few steps to our front door, checked the basket behind it for mail. There was a letter from her mother, one from Bertie to me, and an invitation to the Liberty sale for Hans.

‘Nothing sinister in that,’ she said.

‘I’m not so sure,’ I replied. She laughed.

We raced, still elated, up the stairs. I was behind her; she was humming some latest English hit, making time with her steps: ‘“When my baby/comes to me/we will sit in the—”’

Our door hung open. The lock smashed off the jamb. Inside, the world was white, sharded and broken up. Paper all over the floor. The hall cupboard door in front of us jemmied open too–documents spewed off the shelves. I saw the grey half-print on one of a shoe.

Dora motioned me to silence. Slipped slowly into each room, checking they were gone. Then without a word she went to the cupboard and started to pick up her papers. I looked down where I stood and saw a document from the textile works at Zeulenroda; another typed and signed ‘S.A. Black Bear’.

I went into Hans’s and my bedroom. Every drawer was pulled open. Underwear, trinkets, my Dutch cap–on the floor. The bed was stripped, strewn with our clothes, the pockets pulled out from trousers and jackets and dresses. The cardboard box I kept my photographs in had been tipped over the floor. I walked out.

In the kitchen the mess was brutal. Drawers had been pulled loose and the cupboards were all open, ashes dumped from the stove and trodden through the flat like a taunt: they knew we couldn’t call the police. An egg had been smashed on the counter and Nepo sat lapping at it, calm and neat as ever.
What did you see, puss?
They’d pulled my rolls of film from the ice chest and exposed the reels, which hung now in bizarrely festive curls over the table.

I went back to our bedroom. Books lay pulled open and broken-backed over the rug; the scrolled curtain-rod ends had been unscrewed, as if they might hold something. They lay oddly on the ground like severed ears, or question marks.

Dora was in the doorway, still not speaking.

I looked up. ‘They took their time.’

‘Or knew where we were.’ She was holding a document. ‘If this is still here I doubt there’s anything missing.’ Her hand was shaking. The document was from Bertie, via his source inside the army. It was what Dora had used for the
Times
article.

She gestured around us at the papers everywhere. ‘They might have photographed some of this though. Left it all here as evidence to get us with later.’

I understood her words but I couldn’t string their sense together. ‘Who’s they?’

We glanced back at the front door, which we could no longer close, let alone lock.

‘Could be either,’ she said. She was tapping her lips with her fingers.

I didn’t want to sleep in the flat. What if they returned? But Dora said we couldn’t go; we couldn’t leave all this material here with the door open. For the neighbours, or anyone else, to find. She called Professor Wolf. He came around from his room in Boswell Street, in his hairy cardigan and carrying his briefcase, as if to convince himself he was here on business, or perhaps to give a special, one-off, night-time tutorial. He looked more frightened than we were.

I wedged a chair under the remnants of the lock to keep the front door closed. Then I put a trunk full of books behind it. Dora and Wolf went to bed. I couldn’t lie down alone, so I spent the night putting away all the exposed and fingered things in my room. When daylight came I spread fresh sheets on the bed and tried to sleep.

Before Hans got back from France we had a new lock put on the front door, and a thick bolt and chain added across the top. We also had Yale locks fitted on all the internal doors: living room, kitchen, bedrooms, and replaced the one on the hall cupboard. We carried rings of keys and became our own warders.

Dora negotiated with the other tenants in the building to have the fanlight above the entrance door boarded up. She told them we’d suffered a burglary and had money and jewellery taken; she mentioned a ‘spate’ of thieving in Bloomsbury.

Mr Donovan, the nice retired insurance salesman who lived in the flat underneath us, was used to minutely assessing risk. He said, ‘But they didn’t get in through the fanlight, did they?’

‘No,’ Dora replied, ‘someone opened the door to them, or they picked the lock.’

‘Just to put them off then, is it?’ Mr Donovan said, but he didn’t object.

I don’t think we knew ourselves why we wanted the fanlight boarded up. It doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps we were already beyond reason and dealing now in omens and signs, battling an unseen enemy fierce as God.

Dora worked more furiously, if anything, after the break-in. I ran errands for her, delivered messages by hand to other refugees, one or two to Westminster. I bought stationery, cigarettes, groceries. We had a few more desultory party meetings at the flat, at which I took the minutes. But mostly I wanted to be out of there. I worked in the ILP offices on the next edition of
The Other Germany
. And I went to the docks as often as I could.

Late one afternoon Dora came into the kitchen with a piece she was typing. I was washing up.

‘Listen to this for me, will you?’ She had it in her hand. ‘It’s Toller. “There comes to man sometimes a sickness, psychic or spiritual, which robs him of all will and purpose and sets him aimlessly adrift in a longing for death, a longing which lures him irresistibly to destruction, to a mad plunge into chaos.”’

She looked at me. ‘You can’t write that if you haven’t felt it,’ she said. ‘Can you?’

I didn’t know whether her question was rhetorical or not. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It probably wouldn’t occur to you.’

‘That’s what I tell him.’ She sat down. ‘I say his insight comes from that dark part of him. If he denies that, he’ll be cut off from what feeds his writing.’ Her face was as open as I had ever seen it. ‘Do you think if you love someone there are parts of them you should pretend are not there?’

I turned around, holding my wet hands out from my sides. I thought of Hans out all night with Edgar, or examining paisley swatches with Werner Hitzemeyer, aka Vernon Meyer. I had told myself that each of us must maintain some small private life, even in a marriage. I did not believe, despite one’s best efforts, that the whole world could be made visible. I stared at the table, my eyes hot and full. ‘You’re asking me?’

‘Oh Ruthie,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She got up and put her arms around me and kissed my shoulder softly. ‘I’m not good at this.’

I suppose she meant she was not good at leaving anything tacit. Her bare feet padded back across the lino into her room. The typewriter started up again.

That night I undressed before I remembered to draw the curtains. As I lifted my arms to pull the nightgown over my head I caught my reflection in the black window, the rack of my ribs a cage to hold my heart. I thought of one of my first dates with Hans.

We had gone to the
Rummel
, the local fair. In his caravan on a mock throne sat Agosta the Winged Man. His ribcage was inverted, wings of bone were pushing out the skin of his chest. A single rogue cell division in the gamete and a life is reversed, becomes something to display in order to make the rest of us feel normal. At his feet sat Rasha, an African woman from America, with her chest bared and shells strung around her throat. The shells had gently frilled lips which nearly met but not quite; they were tiny, porcelain-white vulvas, enfolding the darkness inside them. Rasha held no interest for Hans, but Agosta fascinated him, with his fine poet’s eyes, his perfect mouth.

Outside the caravan a man in an ape suit approached us. Breath floated out of the mouth-hole in his costume. How little it takes–some fur, a couple of glass eyes, a rubber navel–to make someone into something else. We scratched the ape playfully–
Oo oo ahh ahh
–though we would never have so touched a stranger. Freud was in vogue then, and Hans made a remark about our true inner beast being on display: we wait to see the creature scratch its bottom or pick its ears in public so that we feel more civilised, though deep down we know we are not.

But as I patted the poor fellow in the suit I did not think that we were all bestial inside, waiting only for the opportunity to gratify ourselves, covering with effort and sublimation all our animal desires. I wondered whether it wasn’t the other way around; whether inside all of us there might just be a cleaner, purer, more hairless version too naked for the world.

I am aware from his cough of a male nurse who has come in and taken my hand to check my vital signs and scratch them into the all-knowing tablet at the foot of the bed. I keep my one uncovered eye closed. As he finishes I open it to catch him leaving. His hip clips the bunch of keys someone has left in the cabinet by the door. They chinkle and swing.

The keys were hanging on the outside of Dora’s bedroom door. I was just home from the docks, mid-afternoon, ten days after the break-in. Nepo jumped up to paw the keyring.

‘Dora?’ I said softly.

No answer, so I went into the kitchen and made coffee. Her big bag lay on the couch. There was no typewriter clatter. Maybe she had company.

I turned on a lamp and started to sort slides, holding them up to its shade. The flat was very quiet.

A couple of hours later I knocked on her door again–it would be odd for her to sleep during the day. Unwanted thoughts of too much Veronal, too much morphine. Though of course she was the world’s expert in these things.

‘Dora?’ No answer.

Was it locked?

I turned the handle. It felt wrong–what if she wasn’t alone?–but I kept pushing. The
shhhh
of papers moving behind the door, one of the many stacks–a whole city of paper, crooked skyscrapers covering the floor, and I come as the wrecker.

She was lying on the bed fully clothed. Alone.

‘Dee?’

Her eyes were open.

‘Dora?’ I heard the catch in my voice.

She moved her eyes to me and smiled without warmth, without lifting her head. ‘Come here.’

I approached the bed. ‘What is it? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Lie down.’ She patted the covers beside her.

I lay down and looked up and it was like being on Primrose Hill again. In our tower I felt the earth’s spin. She rolled an arm over me and put her forehead to my shoulder.

‘Sometimes, if I am still too long, I freeze,’ she said, her words muffling into my body. I knew it wasn’t from cold.

I started to talk, to fill the room with sound, painting word-pictures, concrete and contained and, most of all, of things that were alive. I told her that if you look up through the bare twigs of a plane tree against a white sky you can see that the seed pods hang down straight, festive as Christmas decorations. I told her Nepo holds his tail with both paws to clean it. I told her that her ear is a pink cup to catch notes.

She breathed in and out slowly, holding me. ‘Don’t you leave.’

I suppose she thought that I might also go to France. ‘I won’t,’ I said.

I hadn’t written to Hans about the burglary, because there was nothing he could do but worry. As it was, he telegraphed me that he was coming home early. ‘All OK here,’ it said.

I ran downstairs to meet him. He’d grown a narrow moustache and looked, suddenly, very French. He gestured to the crudely hammered boards above the door, his face twisted into a question. I blurted out then and there about the break-in. His hand flipped to his mouth. For a moment I thought he might not come in.

‘We might as well put a red mark on the lintel,’ he said.