The Other Side of Love (2 page)

“But we’ll be seeing each other this evening.”

Her parents were giving a reception to introduce the London and New York Kingsmiths to their circle. Kathe and Wyatt, as the clan’s Olympic athletes, were the guests of honour.

“The coach doesn’t want us racing around,”

Wyatt said.

“I’ve sent Uncle Alfred a note, explaining I can’t make it.”

“Grandpa told me he’s looking forward to talking to you.”

Their mutual grandfather, Porteous Kingsmith, was the founder of Kingsmith’s, that renowned Bond Street purveyor of rare art objects, fine china, crystal and silver. Porteous had established Kingsmith colonies on Unter den Linden and Fifth Avenue by sending forth his two younger sons, Alfred to Berlin, Humpbpey to New York.

“He’ll be disappointed.”

W

Wyatt blinked. Kathe sensed that she had pierced some barricade he’d erected between himself and her. Then his lips tightened.

“Tomorrow I’m heading into the centre of town, so I’ll be having a bite of lunch with the gang at the Adlon Hotel.”

His meaning was only too obvious. He wanted no part of the German branch of the family. Obviously he was one of those foreigners who lumped anybody within the boundaries of the Third Reich as a jackbooted supporting actor in the Nazi drama.

“Then, willkommen in Berlin,”

she said, hoping to match his acidity. To her dismay her voice cracked.

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The much-touted Olympic Village, spacious, comfortable tile-roofed cottages, had been built for the male athletes; but Dr Goebbels, as Minister of Propaganda, having accurately gauged that world press would pay little attention to the women contestants, had quartered them on the outskirts of the Reichssportsfeld in Friesen-Haus, an already existing, Spartan barracks. Regulations dictated that for the entire sixteen days of competition the female contingents would remain here under the stern chaperonage of the Baronin von Wangenheim. Only because her mother was a distant connection to this dragon was Rathe allowed out this evening.

As she emerged, the immaculately kept 1924 Austrian Steyr was waiting; and Gunther, the chauffeur, snapped his arm up in a Nazi salute, giving off the aroma of his sweat-drenched uniform.

“Heil Hitler. Fraulein Kathe, I never cheered so loud in my entire life as when you went marching past the Fiihrer.”

“Thank you, Gunther.”

Her voice was constrained.

Nobody in the family liked Gunther, but he was an Ancient Combatant, honoured as one of the brown-shirted young toughs already on the Nazi Party roster in January of 1933, so sacking him would have brought Alfred Kingsmith, who was British-born, to the less than welcome attention of the Gestapo.

Gunther rambled on about the true Germanic spirit of the Opening Ceremony. Kathe, blocking out the rise and fall of his voice, stared into the twilight. An evening wind lifted the damp bunting of the

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Olympic flags and the long crimson banners centred with black swastikas that alternated in colonnades along the entire* nine miles of the Via Triumphalis, a brilliantly lit ceremonial boulevard comprised of the various thoroughfares that ran in a straight line from the heart of Berlin to the Olympic Sports Complex.

They turned southwards, winding through the dark Griinewald, that vast wooded parkland outside the city, coming to where lights and silhouettes of immense roof-tops could be glimpsed through the trees. This was the Griinewald’s Villa Colony. A mere merchant like Alfred Kingsmith could not have afforded this impressive neighbourhood had he not bought here during the lunatic inflation of the early twenties. With a laughably small sum of hard currency pounds sterling he had purchased a lumber magnate’s furnished mansion. As Gunther eased between ivy-covered gateposts the big, exuberantly gabled house burst into view, lights ablaze in variousshaped windows and on the fretwork porches. The gingerbread motif was carried out within. Every moulding, door-jamb and dado was etched with birds and animals, with wreaths, with unknown flowers. The furniture was adorned with similar fancifulness. When Kathe was small, she had often imagined herself inside a cuckooclock palace.

“Ah, there you are, Kate,”

called Alfred Kingsmith in English, the language he invariably used with his only offspring. His German, though grammatically impeccable, was grotesquely accented.

He was leaning over the lavishly embellished railing that surrounded the stairwell. From here, even Jftth his thick-lensed pincenez, he could see only the slender wMte blur of his daughter’s uniform. He had inherited the poor vision that afflicted most of the Kingsmith family but that had bypassed Kathe. Her eyesight was perfect.

Alfred was tall and full-bellied. With his greying hair combed flat from a precise centre parting and his somewhat shiny Savile Row dinner-suit he presented the stiffly dignified appearance that takes most men a lifetime to acquire. Alfred, however, had looked much the same in 1909, when at the age of twenty, a gravely deliberate young Englishman, he had first arrived in Berlin to open a Kingsmith branch on Unter den Linden.

Alfred sedately descended the stairs.

“Well,”

he asked, patting his daughter’s hand,

“have you decided where to hang your gold medals?”

The slight gruffness in his teasing indicated his paternal love and pride.

She kissed him, feeling the smoothness of his heavy, recently shaved jowl.

“Let’s wait and see how fast the others can run.”

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‘The von Graetz family have always been top-notch sportsmen.”

As he said his in-laws”

name, Alfred’s mouth stiffened.

Clothilde Kingsmith was a direct descendant of Erhart of Graetz, who in the early thirteenth century had pledged his sword to the militantly Christian Teutonic Order, fighting valiantly to bring the True Faith to the heathen Prussians. Erhart’s line had produced warriors and daughters who wed warriors. Clothilde’s first marriage, to Captain Siegfried von Hohenau, scion of an equally aristocratic Junker family, had come to an untimely end when the captain was killed on peacetime manoeuvres a few days after the first birthday of their son, also named Siegfried. Both the von Hohenaus and the von Graetzes had attempted to cut short the stately young widow’s inclination towards Alfred Kingsmith. Not because he was an Englander several years younger than she; no, not at all. What made the match impossible was the suitor’s plebeian birth. A shopkeeper! In 1914 there was a muted outburst of thanksgiving that Clothilde’s misguided affections had been ended by the war. Alfred returned to his side of the Channel, where his eyesight had rendered him unfit for active duty and he had served in the Foreign Office. In December of 1918, when he returned to war-ravaged Germany, Clothilde, aged thirty-four, mother of a ten-year-old son, had married him immediately. The von Hohenau family kept up a limp relationship because of Siegfried, known as Sigi. The von Graetzes, however, wasted no time on the Kingsmiths. Rathe had never met her widowed grandmother or her spinster aunt. Though this rift was never mentioned, and Clothilde seemed untouched, and though Alfred made it a point of duty to mention their maternal line to his daughter and stepson, Rathe was aware how much the snubbing had wounded him.

Linking her arm in his, she said:

“I’ll give it my all.”

They fell silent as feminine footsteps echoed with heavy firmness on the stone floor of the diningroom. Alfred bowed formally as his wife came into the hall.

Clothilde Ringsmith’s matronly curves were rendered pillar-like by a dark-green silk gown cut in the waistless style of a decade earlier. Her greying blonde hair was coiled around her ears, and she used no cosmetics. Utterly secure in her background, she gave no thought to self-embellishment or the vagaries of fashion. Her plumply mild, unpainted and unwrinkled face gave no clue to her remarkable strength of will. Here, after all, stood a woman who, during four long and bitter years of warfare, had refused to break off her unsanctioned engagement to an enemy - a lower-class enemy at that - despite the family outrage that had increased geometrically after her two brothers had fallen.

“Good evening, Rathe,”

she said in German - she spoke not a word of English. Looking with disapproval at the trim white uniform, she

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added:

“The Baronin should have permitted you to wear a party-dress to greet our guests.”

“Oh, Mother,”

Kathe groaned.

“You can’t really mean we’re going to stand in a receiving-line?”

“Naturally.”

“But now only politicians stand and shake hands all night.”

A slight frown showed in Clothilde’s still firm skin.

“I don’t understand you, Kathe. How else can one welcome guests?”

“My dear,”

Alfred interposed,

“this is a special evening for the child. Possibly after a respectable time the young people may be excused?”

His words ended on a questioning note.

Clothilde drew her lips together. Once having determined a course of action, she found change all but impossible.

“We shall see,”

she said. At a chime, she glanced at the wall-clock.

“Eight. Where is Siegfried?”

Til see if he’s in his room,”

Kathe said, darting up the overcarved staircase.

As she neared the corner room, she heard the radio playing a waltz. Sigi’s door was ajar.

Lieutenant Siegfried von Hohenau wore trousers with the deep red stripe of the High Command of the Army, yet in no way did he present the picture of a smartly turned out career officer. Comfortably slouched in an armchair, ashes from his pipe salting his tunic, circling a pawn back and forth above the chessboard in time to the waltz, he looked amiably content, a family man at home - which he was. Though he ha left for a military gymnasium in Potsdam when he was fourteWi and thereafter had slept infrequently in this large room with the twin gable peaks, he considered the Griinewald house as his true anchor-place. With much the same affable contentment, he viewed his mother’s English husband as his father.

Kathe’s glance was drawn to the left wall, which was adorned with a tapestry so ancient that the picture had faded to scarcely differentiated browns. Once this tapestry had graced the stone castle whose original tower had been raised by Erhart von Graetz. Above the pair of dimly seen, badly fraying knights was woven the von Graetz family motto: Liebe zum Vaterland, Treue zumEid. From earliest childhood, Kathe had been drawn to the frayed must-odoured cloth with its inscription. Loyalty to country, fidelity to oath …

Sigi, seeing his half-sister at the door, gave her a smile of remarkable sweetness. Despite the gulf of over eleven years and paternal bloodlines from opposing sides of the trenches, Sigi and Kathe were close.

“A day to remember,”

he said.

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‘My main worry was that I’d trip and fall.”

She sank to the patterned carpet near his chair, clasping her hands around her upraised knees.

“Sigi, I’ll get killed in the first qualifying heats.”

“Stop fishing for compliments. We both know how fast you run.”

The waltz stopped. An announcer began his excited description of the firework display over the Olympic Stadium. Sigi reached to turn off the radio.

“I finally met my American cousin,”

Kathe said.

“Oh? He introduced himself?”

“Vice versa. Then he glowered.”

“At my little sister? I’ll challenge him to pistols at dawn!”

“He thinks we all have swastika-shaped hearts and pray every morning and every night to the Fuhrer.”

“Hitler!”

Sigi snorted. Though not remotely military in his attitude (he had entered the Army only because he was too soft-hearted to deny the wishes of his dying paternal grandfather), he wholeheartedly shared one tenet of the Prussian officers”

creed: LanceCorporal Hitler was a jumped-up politician.

“Americans aren’t all for their president’s New Deal. Why should they assume we’re a hundred per cent behind the Nazi hero?”

She shrugged, showing her own bafflement.

“He’s not coming tonight. He said their coach won’t let them gad around. In the next breath he was telling me that tomorrow he’s visiting his parents and the British side at the Adlon.”

Sigi tumbled chess pieces into the box.

“Is that a note of disappointment?”

“The party’s to honour him.”

“What’s he like, this American cousin? No, don’t tell me. I can see by your eyes. He’s a handsome brute, a Hollywood film star.”

“Oh, stop it, Sigi. You know I can’t bear teasing.”

Car doors slammed outside. English voices.

Kathe pushed to her feet with rapid grace.

“They’re here! Mother sent me to get you, and she’ll slaughter us both if we aren’t in line when the door-bell rings.”

Sigi’s eyes twinkled.

“Our Lady of the Clock.”

Clothilde’s habit of moving through her days on a schedule and attempting to get her family on to similar timetables was a source of kindly amusement to Sigi and of massive irritation to Kathe. Pulling his shoulders back, sucking his stomach in, he clicked his heels and bent his elbow stiffly for her.

“Gnadiges fraulein.”

“Oh, Sigi, you fool!”

Laughing, Kathe brushed a few stray ashes from his tunic collar and took his arm.

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“Well, Kate, so you’re up to big doings,”