The High Flyer (5 page)

V

Since I was a sun-and-sand holidaymaker Germany was hardly my first choice as a honeymoon destination, but Kim wanted to relax in an environment he knew well and I could see too that it was an exciting place to be now that the fall of the Berlin Wall was generating talk of German reunification. Realising how keen he was to sample the Deutsch-buzz and acknowledging how frazzled I felt after the divorce-mess, I decided I was more than willing to postpone my dream of a long-haul flight to the Seychelles, and anyway I was so pleased to be Mrs. Betz at last that I found the last thing I wanted to be picky about was the location of the honeymoon.

Fortunately Germany turned out to be fun. What a difference it makes to travel in a foreign country with someone who can speak the language! We visited Cologne, so that Kim could show me his parents’ city, and then we withdrew for Christmas to a very grand castle which had been converted into a hotel. It seemed strange not to be trekking north to Newcastle and Glasgow for the annual pulse-check, but I was secretly relieved to delay exhibiting Kim to my family.

“Will they be upset?” Kim had asked in concern when we had been planning the honeymoon, but I had assured him my parents would understand.

In fact it was not until I reached Germany that I wrote to my parents to inform them I was married. After revealing my husband’s name I wrote to my mother: “Don’t be cross at missing the wedding—it only lasted a couple of minutes, certainly not long enough to justify a trip south, and hardly anyone was present except a few people we’ve known for years. I’ll send you some copies of the honeymoon photos so that you can see how nice-looking he is. He’s a forty-nine-year-old lawyer with a top job at an investment bank—” I paused to debate whether I should mention that he was of German descent, but decided this fact was best omitted. I then wondered whether to mention that he was half-Jewish, but decided this fact was best omitted too. Provincial people could be so insular. Finally I concluded: “—and he came to England from America many years ago. He was educated at a famous school and at Oxford, so he’s got class as well as brass—all right, I know he’s not exactly ‘the boy next door,’ but I was never going to marry one of those, was I? Love, KATIE.”

This letter took me a long time to write and my labours had to be aided by two large glasses of German champagne. But afterwards I dashed off a note which read: “Hi Dad—sorry no Xmas viz this yr— honeymooning in Krautland—Kim’s a bank lawyer, surname BETZ, Yankish accent, naturalised Brit, earns megabucks, drives a Mercedes, wears Savile Row suits (like James Bond) and
even has handmade shoes
. Everything totally brill. Love, KITTY. PS. Get the pic? £££ are his business. So don’t be dumb enough to dream of fleecing him.”

I mailed both these letters with relief.

Then at last I was entirely free to luxuriate in marital bliss.

VI

I noticed that every German we met assumed Kim was a German citizen living only temporarily in London, and Kim never made any attempt to disillusion them. He certainly never mentioned South America, but on the other hand, as I said to myself, why go looking for trouble? Everyone knew South America had been a favourite destination after the war for those Nazis who feared they would have a date with the prosecutors at Nuremberg, and it would have been tedious for Kim to keep explaining that his Jewish father had left Germany in the 1930s. I thought it was very sensible that whenever he was asked where he came from he simply said: “Köln.” No one ever expressed any surprise, and it made me realise that his German, unlike his English, was unmarred by any trace of a foreign accent. I had studied German at school so I could speak the language in a limited fashion and understand more than I spoke, but I could not hear the different accents. I only knew Kim was never questioned about his.

“I simply speak as my parents spoke,” he said easily when I raised the subject, “and we always spoke German at home.”

I said, thinking of my own past: “Accents can be such a problem.”

“The trick is to convert them into an asset by making them all part of playing the system. That’s why in Germany I pass myself off as a German, in England I pass myself off as an American and in New York I pass myself off as an Anglicised Jew. That way I can make my background work for me wherever I happen to be.”

“Con man! Well, at least my Home Counties accent is better than yours is!”

“You think so?” he said laughing. “You should listen to yourself after a couple of vodka martinis!” And the conversation then concluded as I attempted to wallop him with a pillow and he wrestled the pillow from me in order to put it to a more imaginative use. It was such a luxury to have both the leisure and the stress-free environment to enjoy sex frequently.

Indeed, by the end of the honeymoon we had almost forgotten what stress was, and when we arrived back in London we smooched for some time in my moonlit living-room high above the City before bowling into bed in an ecstasy of happiness. I was such a hardened cynic that I still hardly dared believe such happiness could exist, but the evidence for such a blissful state now seemed incontrovertible. Perhaps I finally dared to ditch my cynicism when I realised Kim was just as stunned by our happiness as I was.

“I feel quite different,” he confided that night. “I don’t feel dislocated any more.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never felt at home anywhere. It was as if some part of me was missing and I was always searching for answers which I was never able to find.”

“What answers? What were the questions?”

“It doesn’t matter, not any more. This is home, isn’t it? You’re the missing part of me, and this is where I fit in, here with you.”

Pulling him on top of me I said: “I think you fit in here very well.”

A satisfying interval passed.

Some time later he said suddenly: “I want to show you the photograph now,” and began to scramble out of bed.

As he had told me all his old photographs had been lost during the move to Oakshott many years before, I assumed he was talking of a more recent picture, but the black-and-white snapshot which he pulled from its special place in his wallet was yellow at the edges inside the plastic folder which protected it. “I couldn’t show you this before,” he said, “because the past seemed so disconnected with the present that I felt there was no way of sharing it, but now that I’m more all of a piece . . .” Leaving the sentence unfinished he pulled aside the plastic folder and mutely handed me the photograph.

I saw a small boy of perhaps three or four, with dark hair, bright eyes and a radiant, trustful smile. He was wearing long trousers and a shortsleeved shirt. Standing beside him was a large dog, an Alsatian, tail in the middle of a wag, and in the background was a motherly woman with an indulgent expression. All three figures were standing on a lawn by a stone urn planted with flowers.

“That was my nurse who got sacked,” said Kim, “and that was my dog which got lost. I still think of them.”

After a pause I said: “When I was small I had a cat which got lost. I still think of him too.” There was a silence while I wondered whether this response was adequate, but Kim seemed satisfied by the implied message that I could understand his feelings of bereavement. I wanted to ask questions but was afraid of mishandling the subject when it was still clearly so painful. I merely noted the absence of any equally cherished photograph of his parents.

“I wish I had photos to show you of my own past,” I said at last, “but I’ve never made a hobby of photography.”

“Well, I don’t need to see pictures of your family, do I? I’ll soon be meeting them in person.”

“Right.” Not for the first time I tried to visualise taking Kim to meet my father, but yet again the scene proved unimaginable.

Meanwhile Kim was saying tentatively: “Will you tell me some day what happened?”

“What happened when?”

“When your parents split up.”

“Oh, that! Well, I’ll tell you now—it’s no big deal. The bailiffs came again and my mother decided that was one visit too many, so she and I took a bus across Glasgow to stay with her sister. In the flat next door lived this old man, and the old man’s son used to come up from England twice a month to visit him—the son had gone to Newcastle to find work and he’d actually found it, he was employed. Better still, he was respectable and decent and never went near a gambling shop. The next thing I knew I was being shovelled off to primary school in Newcastle and all the bloody awful little Geordie kids were trying to use me as a football because I spoke broad Glaswegian.”

Kim silently slipped his arms around me and pulled me close to him. As I pressed my face against his chest I heard myself add in a rapid voice: “I just wish I’d been allowed to take my cat but my mother said no, she couldn’t cope. So I made my father promise to look after it but of course he didn’t and it disappeared. He never kept a single promise he ever made. End of story.” Raising my face from Kim’s chest again I managed to say: “We don’t have to talk about the past any more, do we? After all, it’s only the present and future which matter now.”

But unfortunately this statement proved to be mere wishful thinking.

Less than two months after our return from the honeymoon Sophie’s phone calls began again.

VII

I did not tell Kim the trouble had restarted. He was in the midst of a high-powered deal and working morning, noon and night. He did not need any more stress. I was working hard too but I did not find Sophie as upsetting as he did because by this time my prime emotion was neither rage nor nausea but bewilderment. Why was she still calling me even now I was married? Was the woman so obsessed that she had no idea when to stop emoting and face reality? At this point I considered the possibility of labelling her a stalker.

The first time she phoned she said: “This is Sophie Betz. Forgive me for calling again, but—”

I had no intention of forgiving her, not after her feet-dragging over the divorce. Both my sympathy and my patience had long since been exhausted.

The second time she called she did not announce her name but said in a rush: “I really do think it’s my moral duty to—”

I hung up. I was not about to listen to yet another attempt to deliver religious nutterguff.

The third time she said: “Look, I must see you!” and the fourth time she said simply: “Listen!” but I managed to slam down the receiver before she could utter another syllable. After that she rang several times but did not speak; it was as if she hoped to lure me into a conversation by arousing my curiosity. How did I know it was her? Well, who else would it have been? It was hardly likely that a second nutter had started to pester someone who had an ex-directory number.

Naturally I considered the possibilities of either changing my number or having a second line installed, but I did not see how either of these plans could be accomplished without telling Kim the whole story, and I was not yet so desperate that I felt driven to share the bad news with him. Anyway if Sophie’s PI could find out unlisted numbers, any changes I might make to my telephone line would be pointless. I did toy once more with the idea of getting an answering machine, a move I could explain merely by saying I wanted to be up to date, but I felt unwilling to risk the chance of Kim pushing the playback button and hearing loony messages from his ex-wife.

By this time we were well into 1990 and my irritation was greatly increased when my much younger half-sisters wrote a joint letter criticising me for not trekking north at Easter to check the pulses and display my husband. What impertinence! I was hardly about to remain soft as Andrex tissues while being lectured by two girls who thought London was some kind of gold-plated cesspit, so I phoned each one up and bawled them both out. Of course I knew I should have trekked north, but I had felt compelled to insist to Kim that we should spend the Easter holiday in Paris.

The basic problem, as I well knew, was that if I took him as far as Newcastle I would be unable to invent a plausible reason for not taking him on to Glasgow and by that time I had realised I could not display him in Glasgow until my father’s current situation had improved. On my forward-planning calendar I made a note to sort out the whole mess in September. Then I returned with relief to concentrate on my new life as Mrs. Betz.

After our wedding we had held a reception for a hundred of our better-known acquaintances at the Savoy, and as soon as 1990 dawned many of these people started inviting us out to dinner. It was difficult to fit this active social life into our schedules but we both knew the effort had to be made; all these people were connected in some way with our careers. Neither Kim nor I had close friends—I suppose outsiders often have a chronic difficulty in dropping their masks and being themselves— but we had innumerable acquaintances, some of whom I liked very much and who appeared to like me. I was interested to note that Kim’s Jewish acquaintances held him in high esteem. From them I learned that he regularly gave to Jewish charities, and this impressed me, particularly as he had never mentioned making any donations to good causes. It also became clear that he must have studied the Jewish culture in depth; in fact one of his Jewish acquaintances remarked to me how commendable it was that Kim had chosen to honour his father’s Jewishness instead of denying it, even though his father had apparently shown no interest in observing his religion.

“But how much of this interest of yours is real,” I said unwisely to Kim after this conversation, “and how much is just the result of you playing the system in your usual fashion?” I knew he had always worked for Jewish firms and would have been more than capable of zeroing in on the best ways of demonstrating his solidarity with them.

To my horror Kim took deep offence and became very upset. “If you think for one moment that I’m not a hundred per cent sincere in my commitment to the Jews—”

Secretly cursing myself for such a stupid blunder, I rushed to apologise and swore I admired both his commitment and his sincerity.

That was when I decided that the subject of his Jewish connections was almost as tricky as the subject of what Germany had got up to between 1939 and 1945. Kim himself never talked of the war if he could avoid doing so, and I had only once heard him volunteer a comment on Hitler. He had said: “Too bad no one gassed that shit at birth,” and his tone of voice had indicated that the subject of the Third Reich was hardly likely to surface frequently in our conversations.

Anyway, there we were, slaving away at our jobs in the May of 1990 and shimmering away in our social life with our backs firmly turned on the past, when Sophie suddenly abandoned the phone calls to the flat and decided to harass me at work. She could hardly have picked a time which suited me worse. Jacqui, my secretary, had departed for a fortnight’s holiday in Greece, PersonPower International had had the nerve to send me a heterosexual male called Eric Tucker to take her place, my chief clients were whingeing, the dinosaurs were stamping, the whippets were breast-brushing, the fluffettes were nicknaming me Slaughter instead of calling me Carter, the crises were constant—and to cap it all my first post-nuptial attempt to host a dinner-party was looming on the horizon. In short, my stress levels were mounting at an alarming rate and I definitely did not need my life to be further complicated by a reappearance of Ms. Fruity-Loops spouting nutterguff. When Tucker the Temp buzzed me with the bad news I wanted to shatter my oak desk with a karate chop.

“Excuse me, Ms. Graham,” he said over the intercom, “but there’s a call for you from a Mrs. Sophie Betz. I remembered you said Betz was your married name so I figured this could be someone you might want to talk to, but I did say to her that I thought you’d just left for a meeting, so—”

“Terminate her,” I said, and severed the connection.