Little White Lies (8 page)

LIONEL
London, England/Caracas, Venezuela

He went through the formalities with a weary acceptance that surprised even him. He’d lost count of the number of flights he’d taken between London and New York in the past year alone. He was a veteran, now. How quickly we become accustomed to the unaccustomed, he thought to himself wryly as he followed the now stooped figure of Uncle Paul through the various checkpoints before they reached the lounge where businessmen like themselves met before a flight was called. Tickets, passports, boarding cards . . . he produced them mechanically, one after the other until they were finally on board.

Dirk Schofeld, their business associate from Holland, was uneasy. It was his first flight. ‘I’m a virgin, would you believe it?’ he’d quipped nervously, much to Lionel’s amusement. It was obvious. Once inside the lounge, he quickly downed one brandy after another. Uncle Paul looked on in faint but marked disapproval. He was not a drinker. Neither was Lionel, to be honest. His mother (
Baruch HaShem
,
may she rest in peace
) had developed an appreciation for brandy that had lasted right up until her death and Lionel still missed those evenings by the fire when he would come home, hang up his coat and hat and find her in the study, reading, a glass of brandy waiting for him, and a plate of those small English digestive biscuits that she so liked. He felt the habitual pull of sadness. Yes, it was two years since her death but there were days he felt the loss as though it were yesterday.

‘Perhaps
now
you’ll marry,’ Uncle Paul had said to him, a few months after the elaborate funeral to which every single bank employee had been invited. He’d always maintained it was Sara that had kept him from the
chuppah
. Lionel shook his head. No, nothing like that. He’d just never met a woman he wanted to marry. At forty-seven he was a confirmed bachelor. He lived in the same, very comfortable set of apartments in St James’s Park that he and Sara (
Baruch HaShem
) had shared for over twenty years. Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it. In the living room was his vast collection of books, their beloved artworks that had been retrieved from the Altona house in Hamburg after the war, and three dogs.

His sister Lotte had married shortly after their arrival in England and now lived with her husband and two children in the countryside, a few miles from Cheltenham. She rarely came up to London and when she did, she was full of complaint. Bettina – fiery, hot-headed Bettina – had run off with a group of young, idealistic Zionists at the unbelievably tender age of seventeen to join a
kibbutz
. He’d come home one day to find her gone; it was a new world – there was nothing he could do. She refused all offers of financial help; she was a
kibbutznik
, not an heiress. He and Sara, once they’d got over the shock of it, shared many an evening alternately wringing their hands and laughing in admiring disbelief. It was in her blood; the girl couldn’t help it.

Of the remaining siblings in Germany, three had eventually found their way to the United States and Barbara was safely in Australia. Otto was dead. He, along with other lesser members of the family who’d stubbornly refused to leave, was caught trying to make for the Dutch border in 1942, a year too late. He died at Auschwitz, together with his wife and two small daughters, the only members of the Hamburg Harburgs to have met such a fate. In some ways thankfully, his father had died of a heart attack shortly after Lionel took his mother and sisters to England – at least Hitler hadn’t got him. All in all, Lionel reflected in those sombre moments when he allowed himself to think on it, they’d been fortunate. But it didn’t ease the pain of Otto’s death. His own brother: gassed, dumped, disposed of, like an animal led to slaughter. He had never been able to visit Auschwitz and he never would. Never.

He shook his head quickly to clear it and tried to concentrate on the business ahead. For the second time in his career, he sensed great changes in the air.
He
could see, even if Uncle Paul couldn’t, that the era of the gentleman banker was almost gone. Clients no longer shook hands on a deal, expecting the handshake to hold firm against competition, dips in the market, losses and risks and circumstances beyond one’s control. Now clients and bankers spoke to one another through their lawyers. But the changes didn’t stop there. Between bankers themselves, the old rule about not treading on each other’s toes or poaching clients by offering better deals elsewhere, was dying. Advertising and marketing, those anathemic ‘professions’ that seemed to him to be a mixture of everything he despised – flattery and pseudo-psychology – had crept into the industry with disastrous results. Suddenly everything was up for grabs, including loyalty. Their competitors were now stealing accounts that had been in the firm for decades. Colleagues appeared to have no qualms about stabbing each other in the back, all in the name of increased profits. Yet Uncle Paul wouldn’t countenance the thought of striking back. He was proudly adamant. The Harburgs did
not
do business that way. They would not lower themselves by joining in the frenzy.
Their
clients would never leave them. Relationships at Harburg’s were for life.

He was wrong, as it turned out. He was now an elderly man, almost bent double with curvature of the spine but he was stubborn. His wife had passed away almost five years earlier. With no children or grandchildren to occupy him, Uncle Paul lived for the bank. He came in every morning by chauffeur as he had done for over half a century and clung to his seat on the board.

But Lionel was a very different type of banker. He was a twenty-first-century man. He’d been born at the
fin-de-siècle
, at a moment when the old order of things was being swept aside. His decision to flee Germany and what he saw as his failure to save other members of the family from Hitler had made him wary, both of the past and of the future. He kept a wary eye on both but trusted in neither. He’d come to the painful conclusion that the only place that mattered was the here and now. He was a man of action, not words. In an unconscious rejection of his own father, perhaps, he stuck to his belief that what mattered most was the
ability to act
.

The trip to Venezuela was one such act. It was time for the bank to move away from the European upper-middle classes who had been their traditional clients and find other avenues for business. If they didn’t, he told Uncle Paul flatly, there would be no banking legacy to pass on. It was a touchy subject. P. N. Harburg & Son, the London branch of the family business, was Uncle Paul’s baby, the replacement for the children he’d never had. With Lionel’s unexpected arrival in London, the delighted Uncle Paul had added the ‘
& Son
’ to the bank’s name. It mattered little that Lionel was not his son. He was a nephew but more of a son than anyone could ever have guessed. Now, in the twilight of his life, it pained him dearly that there might be nothing left of the bank worth handing down. It didn’t make for the most cheering conversation between them.

Lionel drained the last of his champagne and fiddled with the radio headset, turning the dials until he found a station playing the sort of classical music he favoured. The strands of Mahler drifted over him and he felt immediately calmer. Venezuela was a young country, rich in raw materials and with a newly elected president who seemed pro-market, pro-reform and, crucially, pro-European. It also had a sizeable and affluent Jewish community. Oddly enough, it was Dirk Schofeld who’d made the first approach. He had associates in the Dutch Antilles and through them he’d managed to secure an invitation to dine with the influential Hausmann family at their Altamira home. Lionel was no fool. The first round of introductions was certainly important but after that it was anyone’s guess which way the wind would blow. The name Harburg was still a force to be reckoned with – but so too were Rothschild and Warburg and Lehman and Loeb and there were no longer any guarantees that any one of them wouldn’t be on the lookout for the same business opportunities as the Harburgs. Indeed, times had changed.

He lifted the window cover and looked out. The ground lay under a thin blanket of fog. Caracas would be sweltering, so they’d been told. The tropics. He’d never been to the tropics, he thought to himself as he felt the engines revving up below them. His trips abroad had always been across the Atlantic, to New York and Washington, or to Europe, and to Israel, of course, with Sara (
Baruch HaShem
) and to visit Bettina. He’d found it mostly hot and baffling.

There was a loud ‘ping’ above his head. They were ready for take-off. He felt the familiar rumbling shudder that was both sound and feeling that seemed to go on for ever. They taxied slowly out to the runway; there was a few minutes’ wait whilst Dirk drained the last of his bottle of wine, pausing to mop his sweating face. There was a pause as they lined up down the long length of the runway, then a tremendous burst of energy as the plane began to race towards the horizon. He felt his whole body being pressed backwards into the seat as though some giant hand had come down on him, then the breaking free, the moment of flight, a bumpy, upward thrust as the plane lifted itself into the air. He remained with his face pressed against the window – no matter he’d seen it all countless times before. A few bumps and dips then the aircraft steadied itself and ploughed on blindly through the fog. It was a miracle, a modern miracle.

The fog thinned and lifted, wispy clouds zooming in and out of focus until suddenly they were properly free, sailing onwards into the vast, iridescent blue. A tremendous feeling of wholeness came over him, a renewed sense of his own power and energy and strength. The faint anxiety – not yet sadness, not quite depression – that had been with him all week lifted and he felt himself freed of his own dark moods. As they soared above the clouds he felt as though he could reach out and touch them, just as he might reach out and touch the future he couldn’t yet see.
London–New York–Miami–Caracas
. The journey before him was all the proof he needed. The flight from Germany, their twenty-odd years in England, the horror of the death camps and the loss of so many members of their extended family . . . the immense pain of it all was suddenly lifted from his shoulders. He felt alive again, thrillingly alive.

EMBETH

At dinner that evening, sitting opposite him and in front of her mother’s disapproving glare, she found herself unable to drag her eyes away. He had an energy that burned so that she felt the heat of it, even yards away. It burned through his shirt, spilled out into his eyes and was there in the quick, restless way his hands moved as he talked. He was full of plans. Ideas. Opportunities. Her father was similarly captivated. She wondered how old he was. Forty? Fifty? It was hard to tell. She didn’t think he was married. He wore no ring and spoke of no wife or children back in London. Unlike so many of the men who dined
chez
Hausmann, he actually addressed the odd question to
her
.

‘Did you enjoy America?’ he asked her after the first introductions had been made and they found themselves next to one another as they strolled into the dining room.

‘Er, yes . . . yes, I did.’ Embeth suddenly found her voice. ‘Ithaca was . . . is beautiful.’

‘I’ve never been. I hear it’s magnificent in winter.’
Vinter
. His voice was deep, with a rich layering of many accents. He was German, so she’d been told, although he’d lived in London for long enough to be considered British. ‘And do you ski?’

‘Er, yes . . . yes, I do, actually.’

‘Here in Caracas?’

‘Oh, no, no, we—’ She looked up at him uncertainly. He was smiling. Teasing her. She blushed. ‘No, of course not. In Europe. We go to Switzerland most years.’

‘Ah.’

And then her mother placed her hand on his arm, deftly steering him away.

‘He’s not
that
old,’ Mercedes said firmly, dipping the giant battered prawns into a large copper pot of boiling oil. There was a satisfying hiss as they hit the oil, puffing up immediately. She deftly ladled them out a few seconds later, hot and glistening, onto a paper plate. ‘Here, try one.’

Embeth picked it up gingerly with her fingertips and bit into one end. A hot fragrant rush of coriander, chilli and lime flooded her mouth. It was delicious. She devoured it in seconds. ‘
Está bien
,’ she said, nodding in approval. ‘So . . . you don’t think he’s too old?’ She returned to the all-important topic at hand. It was two days since the dinner party and she’d woken that morning to the news that Lionel Harburg was coming back. To dinner. Alone, without his elderly uncle and that dreadful Dutchman whom they’d all disliked.

‘For what?’ Mercedes looked at her slyly. ‘For you?’

Embeth blushed and looked away. ‘No, not for me,’ she mumbled. ‘I was just wondering, that’s all.’

‘Hmph.’ Mercedes wasn’t fooled. ‘S’better like that,’ she said knowingly. ‘S’better when the man is older.’

‘So how old
do
you think he is?’ Embeth asked, ignoring her somewhat suspect advice. How would Mercedes know what was better? As far as Embeth knew, the closest she’d ever been to a man was her father.

‘Forty-seven,’ Mercedes said, not without a hint of triumph. ‘
And
he’s not married.’

Embeth’s eyebrows went up. ‘How d’you know all that?’

The corners of Mercedes’ mouth went up, almost mockingly. ‘What? You think I don’t know things?’

Embeth suppressed her own smile. She was right. There was little Mercedes and Sophia
didn’t
know or see. Forty-seven. It seemed veritably ancient, though Lionel Harburg certainly didn’t
look
ancient. ‘How d’you know he’s not married?’ she asked after a decent enough pause.

Mercedes shook her head. ‘His collars. They’re not pressed properly. No wife lets her husband out of the house like that. No, there’s no wife. You want another one,
chica
?’ she indicated the battered prawns.