All That I Am (34 page)

‘In terms of “time elapsed and time to go”?’

She nods once more. Picks up my hand.

‘Dear,’ I say, ‘you don’t need to worry about me.’

And then we just sit, this stranger holding my hand. In the expanding silence I wish to reassure her: the end is no problem for me. I willed it once, and I can face it now. It is what happened in my personal three-ring circus–the cat’s-paw sleight of hand, the balls under cups and the trick pony, the man in the gorilla suit and the note in a pocket, the girl in the lake and the cities blown to dust–that waits for me now. But I say nothing, lest I seem mad. And who, after all, would believe it? We don’t understand one another, we may not ever give each other just what we need. All that remains is kindness.

When she leaves she stops at the nurses’ station. I hear one of them tell her, ‘You know, she was in prison under Hitler. In the resistance.’

‘Yes,’ Hannah says, a small clip in her voice. ‘And let’s not send her back there, shall we?’

TOLLER

This morning it’s pelting down outside, early summer rain. When Clara walks in, her hair wet, clothes wet, it takes me a moment to register that she is crying.

‘The
St Louis
is going back to Europe.’ Her arms are flung loose, dark strands plastered to her forehead. ‘The coastguard fired a shot—’ She chokes. ‘Off Florida.’

There has been nothing but silence from President Roosevelt.

‘Paul was so close, and now, and now…’ She sits and weeps, head hung over her lap. I lean forward and place my hands on hers till they too are wet, and she gets a handkerchief from her bag.

‘The captain seems like a good man,’ I say. ‘He will try to dock in Antwerp or Lisbon or somewhere. It won’t be straight back to Germany.’

Hope-pedlar, snake-oil merchant–who am I to know? I can’t remember how anyone gives comfort any more. Clara looks up, sniffs. She believes me, because the alternative is unthinkable. She wipes her eyes while I nod, pants on fire.

RUTH

The week before Hans left, we were invited, along with Dora and Professor Wolf, to a costume ball at Mrs Franklin’s in Paddington.

‘I’m afraid,’ Wolf had announced at breakfast when we’d talked about it, ‘on that evening I am not available.’ As if juggling competing ball invitations were the bane of his London life. Dora didn’t care; she had plenty of friends to see at Mrs Franklin’s, and business there to conduct. But I saw then that everyone thought her so independent as to have no needs, or at least none that they, single-handedly, could meet. This is the curse of the capable; it leaves them prone to pockets of aloneness, sudden elephant traps in the ground.

Hans and I dressed together at home. He wore his beloved tails and fashioned a baton from a coathanger. I put on my best dress–a long cream silk thing–and took a piece of sheet music: we were a conductor and his singer. Dora marked her cheeks with three dark stripes of my lipstick, grabbed a feather I’d been photographing from the mantelpiece and stuck it in a headband.

We were on time, which is to say, too early, and were let in by the butler. The three of us shuffled to one side of the marble entrance hall and stood with our hands behind our backs, expectant as staff. But tonight the house had lost the stuffy formality of afternoon tea and clocks. Furniture had been cleared for dancing. Side tables held vast, round-bellied vases of flowers, hydrangeas and gladioli, peonies and roses in arrangements so gloriously abundant they looked thrown together by some careless, generous-spirited giant. In a back room someone barked last-minute instructions, as before a live performance. The string quartet on the other side of the hall chinned their instruments.

The music must have alerted our hostess. Mrs Franklin appeared at the top of the massive red-carpeted staircase, a cross between a battleship and a giant Fabergé egg.

‘Hulloooo, dears,’ she waved, chins wobbling and the dog-in-a-bag under her left arm.

She smiled and nodded and began her descent. Her emerald-green skirt, a massive, bone-segmented thing, moved all of a piece. As her foot peeped out to find the stair, I gasped to see it clad in a faded brown, rubber-soled house slipper. By the time she reached us I had understood that Mrs Franklin was dressed as some kind of courtesan, albeit one whose comfort, in her own home, would not be compromised.

‘How lovely, how utterly lovely.’ She kissed me and Dora on both cheeks and took Hans’s hand between her soft little paws. ‘That you could come. I thought of you with all that, that terrible Herr Goldschmidt business. I feel I ought to have done more. Really, so much more.’ Her body was overflowing its corset, blossoming from a dark wrinkle of cleavage up to her heavily powdered face. A large black mole had been enthusiastically pencilled above her lip.

‘But not at all, Eleanora,’ Dora cooed. ‘Your open Sundays are a wonderful thing. Very much appreciated by all of us. As they were by Helmut too.’

I looked at Hans, who was collecting a champagne coupe from a waiter’s tray. Then he turned, smiling down into Mrs Franklin’s eyes. He took her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘And you would be Madame…?’ The sheer beauty of him could be disconcerting at close quarters. Mrs Franklin laughed like a girl.

‘Mme de Staël,’ she said, her teeth yellowing mildly under the carmine lipstick. ‘Though I don’t really suppose anyone will recognise me.’ She laughed again.

In that instant I saw the eccentricity and generosity and ever-so-slight wariness of the English that I’d grown to love, the luxury of Mrs Franklin’s class being an insouciance about how one is perceived. At home in Silesia at such a ball, the flowers would have been arranged in a classical, symmetrical order; the carpets would never be allowed to fray so nobly, and no hostess would greet her guests with messy lipstick and tender insecurity and in slippers. I felt how far we had come since our first encounter in this house, when our lostness had made us trigger-quick to take offence. If Hans recollected being slighted here, he showed no sign. He seemed in his element.

Mrs Franklin sailed off to greet a black-faced, white-lipped minstrel with a banjo under one arm who was coming through the door. Behind him a veiled Mata Hari with a bared navel was taking off her coat. Girls in black uniforms and unmade faces bore trays of champagne and gin; oyster flesh swayed in china spoons.

Hans had been scanning the rooms to each side of the entrance hall for faces he knew. His colour was high and his lips slightly open. When someone started playing the latest Noël Coward hit on a piano we followed the music into the room on the left. Toller was near the fireplace, turned away from us, but his head was unmistakable. He was moving his hands like a conductor, a cigar for a baton. People had gathered in a semicircle around him, enthralled. Christiane, willowy and taller, was dressed in a man’s suit as Chaplin’s Little Tramp.

Dora peeled off in the opposite direction. I took a glass of champagne from a passing tray.

In the back corner of the large room an elderly German in a green loden suit and high collar stood alone under a potted palm, both hands on his cane. It was Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, the pacifist and human-rights activist. In exile, he had become a kind of uncle to us younger refugees. A gently smiling melancholic, he managed to give us the impression that things as they were, although so unprecedented in our lives and, after all, so unlikely, had predictable outcomes nevertheless. Without ever saying so, he gave us to understand that we would, one day, go home. I was always pleased to see him.

Hans and he were quickly deep in conversation about the questions that Cocks and Churchill had raised in parliament. Hans was pressing Otto to see if he knew the source. ‘It’s got to be one of us,’ Hans smiled. ‘Who’s not standing up to take the credit?’

I gulped my drink. Otto shrugged his shoulders. ‘The truth will out,’ the old man said, ‘one way or another.’

‘Aha!’ Hans exclaimed. ‘Here’s someone who might enlighten us.’ Lord Marley was striding our way, no doubt looking for Dora. He was his tall, calm and magnificent self. I couldn’t tell who he was dressed as–he wore a short red jacket and long dark boots. He stood with his feet together in front of us, his eyes bright, waiting.

Hans moved to introduce them. Facing Lord Marley, he opened one arm to encompass the older German, who, leaning forward, offered his good ear. Palm fronds reached and dipped, unnoticed, over his head.

‘May I present,’ Hans addressed the Englishman, ‘Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt. You perhaps know him, at least by reputation?’ Otto made a little bow.

Hans turned, gesturing now to the other, ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is Marley.’

The Englishman gave a slight start, of the kind I would not have noticed before we came here. It was the subtle shock-and-bemusement reaction to a faux pas and it froze for a split second the air between them.

Then Lord Marley smiled and proffered a hand. ‘Dudley will do fine,’ he said.

The elderly German noticed nothing. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Dudley.’

I felt a thrumming of blood in my brain. I excused myself and placed my glass on a small chiffonier. The floor listed. Snippets of conversation, a high tinkle-laugh, floated towards me as I walked. People an obstacle course.

In the room opposite I found a wing chair near a fire. My mind had gone blank. It was a sensation like wind, like a vacuum. I could think of only one place where Hans, in his assiduousness to master the manners of this country, could have learnt that a lord should be referred to by one word alone–the same place where the people wouldn’t have known that this was only the case when writing.

The horror of it crept up on me. The fire leapt and licked. I hoped he would not come over. I had to find Dora. My legs felt flimsy. To my right a flamenco dancer in a backless dress and red shoes danced loosely with a mummy, or a victim of some kind.

Staring at the fire, I recalled the ember on my mother’s carpet. Surely this matter of titles was something Hans could have learnt anywhere, and as easily mislearnt? Perhaps I was as paranoid as Hans had been telling me lately, my brain reduced to a rat’s thing of instinct and survival so I saw only treachery and threat everywhere.

A pair of shined shoes with fine rounded toes dented the silver pile of the rug. Hans placed one hand on the back of my chair and smiled down, the small solicitous smile of an attentive but not overly concerned husband to his wife in front of a ballroom crowd.

‘Ruthie?’ His voice said, Nothing can be wrong. It said, This is innocence and your thoughts are unworthy.

‘Dance?’ Hans asked. ‘Or are you…?’ I realised he thought I was suffering from period pain, or the ache I sometimes got in my hip when it rained.

‘No–yes, yes.’

The trick of dancing is that it allows extreme physical closeness, of touch and breath, at the same time as it is possible to have an entire conversation without eye contact. This is why it is so popular for risky, initial intimacies. For questions.

I affected a lightness that surprised me. ‘You
have
been mixing in exalted circles,’ I said to his lapel. ‘How on earth did you know to introduce Dudley as Marley, instead of Lord Marley?’

Hans nodded over my shoulder at an acquaintance I did not recognise, a fair-haired man with a small moustache in a jockey’s silks and cap. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Common knowledge, I suppose.’ He turned me, deftly. I glimpsed Dora deep in conversation with Fenner Brockway, his wide forehead half covered by a pirate’s hat made from newspaper. Fenner was leaning back, laughing hard at something Dora was saying and wiping his eyes. ‘It’s an old-boy public-school thing, isn’t it?’ Hans mused. ‘Or perhaps from the army–I know they just use one name, anyhow.’

I nodded. He seemed so calm and sure and I wanted to credit him with an honest mistake.

I said nothing to Dora. But that night, for the first time in my life, I got so drunk that later I could not remember how I got home. I drank to obliterate the night, to require Hans to be solicitous, to force him to come home with me and put me to bed, even if I did not see him do it.

Dora spent the next two nights at Professor Wolf’s. When Mrs Allworth came on the Tuesday I asked her, as casually as I could, about the use of surnames and titles in schools and the army, and she said she knew it to be so from her time working in a big house. When I told her that Lord Marley had seemed surprised to be called Marley, she smiled. She explained that, no, a lord would usually be introduced as Lord So-and-So, though his school friends and army buddies and, occasionally, his wife might use his surname or title alone.

By the time I saw Dora again I had decided that the incident was exactly what it had seemed, a small slip-up entirely of Hans’s own making, understandable given the intricacies of the English class system, the different terms of address, verbal and written. Hans left the next week for Bertie and Switzerland, and I packed for Paris.

Dora came to see me off at the station, something I later wondered about. Sentimental scenes of arrival and leavetaking were not her forte. She was businesslike until the last minute, checking she had my Paris address, making sure I had the money she had scraped together for Walter, and handing me a sealed letter for Bertie she wanted posted from Paris. We walked along the platform till we found my carriage and stood in front of its steps. The train steamed impatience; a dyad of red lights flashed alternately at the outgoing end of the platform. Dora put a gloved hand up to my cheek.

‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, as if the idea were just occurring to her. Then, ‘When I see you again it’ll be nearly summer.’

I nodded. We had plans to go walking in the Lake District in June. I took the keys to the Great Ormond Street flat out of my coat pocket. I had had another set cut for Mathilde (so many!–one for each internal door, like a secret, or a cell) so I could take mine with me. I held them up and dangled them.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ I said.

She put the back of her hand to her forehead in mock histrionics, to forestall a scene. ‘
Quel drame
.’

I hugged her for a long moment, till she pulled away. ‘Better get on then,’ she said. ‘Have a kir for me at La Coupole.’ She shifted her weight from foot to foot, clapping her hands together against the cold: the muffled sound of wool on wool. ‘Righto.’