The Winter Garden (2014) (38 page)

‘I take it seriously, you see. Part of the uniform.’

She took a quick look, gasped and looked away. She knew about cyanide capsules, though she had never seen one before and hoped she never would again. The thought of carrying death with you
everywhere you went was sobering. Yet she persisted.

‘I’m just as controlled as you, Ralph. That experience is the same for me. I understand everything about the need to avoid risks. Dissembling is part of my nature too. But I’m
here in your apartment, aren’t I? You expressly brought me here.’

‘I had to,’ he replied, curtly. ‘It was unavoidable.’

Finally, his rejection had its effect. He was speaking as though she were a parcel, delivered to the wrong address. Flinging off the sheets she swung her feet round and rose from the bed.

‘Thanks for your hospitality then.’ Her head was light as the blood rushed to her legs and tears stung her eyes. Frustration and annoyance mingled in her. ‘Do you know what I
think? I suspect you believe you’re the only person who has a sense of independence and that any woman you meet will try to entrap you. Don’t worry, Ralph, that’s not going to
happen with me. I’m perfectly happy as I am. I haven’t the remotest interest in trying to snare you. I’m leaving now.’

She snatched up her bra and was pulling on her clothes when he reached out behind her and imprisoned her in his arms.

‘Wait.’

She struggled out of his arms and continued buttoning her blouse.

‘Please, Clara! Let me explain. I shouldn’t have kissed you.’

Her fingers were trembling, but she had her back to him and she persisted with the buttons, furiously.

‘I don’t see why.’

‘It would be a crazy idea.’

‘You’ve already made that quite plain, thank you.’

‘I’m a good deal older than you.’

‘You’re not particularly old. And I’m not some young girl who doesn’t know her own mind.’

‘Calm down.’

‘Stop talking like you’re my father or something.’

He reached out a hand. ‘You’re being unreasonable.’

‘Leave me alone, Ralph! I understand.’

‘You understand nothing!’ He looked exasperated. ‘Just . . . don’t speak.’ Taking her by the shoulders he forced her to face him, then with deft deliberation
unbuttoned the blouse she had just buttoned, slipped it off, and took her in his arms and onto the bed.

His body was a revelation. His chest, carved with muscle, was lithe and taut. Though he had made play of his age, his body was as hard as a man half his age with only a slight fold of flesh at
the stomach. There was a reddish line of hair running down the centre of his chest to his belly. Softly he kissed her eyes, nose, shoulders and breasts, then ducked his head down and his lips
grazed her belly. As she arched beneath him, he turned, fumbled in a drawer beside the bed and she heard the rip of foil, before he turned back to her with a hunger that amazed her.

After everything he had said about self-control, it was a joy to abandon herself entirely to sensation, to feel the pleasure flooding her body as he towered above her. She revelled in the sense
of his skin against hers, breathing his breath, the intimacy of his face a few inches from her own. After so long on her own, just the touch of a man, his fingers searching her out and his limbs
entwining hers, was startling and new. She felt delicate and precious beneath his hands, like the piece of fine art he had once compared her to. Yet his touch was firm too, turning her over deftly
beneath him, controlling himself, spicing his urgency with a deliberation that prolonged her pleasure, gripping her hips hard to steady her beneath him. At the edge of Clara’s mind the
thought of death, that he carried with him wherever he went, only made her surrender more complete.

When he had finished, he lay with his arm flung beneath her and soon fell asleep, his breathing growing deep and slow. But Clara couldn’t sleep. For a long time, she lay thinking, then she
propped herself up on one elbow to look at him.

As she watched, she saw his body shudder, the twitch of movement rippling across his tanned skin. At one point he muttered something, and she craned towards him but couldn’t make it out.
She wondered what was going on in that dark undertow of thought; what private dreams he had that left him quivering in his sleep.

They spent the whole of the next day together, in bed and out of it. Clara lay soaking in his deep porcelain bath, feeling her bruised limbs relax, using his Pears soap, whose
translucent amber with its familiar carbolic tang reminded her powerfully of the nursery bathroom of her childhood, with its clanking pipes and towels like stippled cardboard. She stood at the
mirror and explored the bump at the back of her head, trying to conceal the gash on her temple with make-up. The smell of onions and mushrooms rose tantalizingly from the narrow kitchen where Ralph
was making lunch with what he had in the cupboard. She craned her neck and saw him cut a square of butter from its waxy wrapping and send it sizzling in the pan.

‘So tell me about Babelsberg,’ he called from the kitchen. ‘Is it everything you imagined?’

‘I never imagined it, because I’d never acted on film before I came to Berlin. It was a whole new art for me. Coming here was a step into the unknown.’

His voice had lost its wariness and was full of unguarded enthusiasm. He had thrown a white cloth over his small dining table and lit a candle, but offset the romantic touch with a small, ironic
bow, offering her a glass of Hock.

‘German wines are much better than we give them credit for, but no one much drinks them back in Britain.’

The lunch he had prepared was surprisingly good. Though the onion soup was canned, the mushroom omelettes were springy and glistening with butter. He had made a salad of cabbage and apple. She
ate ravenously, realizing how hungry she was. It was as though all her senses had been starved up to this moment. His eyes searched her face anxiously as she ate.

‘I hoped you might have an appetite. I’m not much of a cook, but I can knock up the basics.’ There was something endearing about this admission. It was like a chink in his
armour. Clara savoured every mouthful, realizing that it was years since anyone had cooked specifically for her.

When they were sated, she lay on his cracked leather sofa with her head on his lap as he talked, smoothing her brow with deft, hypnotic strokes.

‘My father was vicar of St Anselm’s in Brooklands. It was a standard, redbrick, Victorian place with a standard Victorian congregation to match. I think Dad had ambitions to be a
bishop, but he didn’t have quite the right connections and by the time I was aware of it, he seemed always to have a lingering resentment about him. Not that he’d ever express it, of
course, he was far too buttoned-up for that, but it was clear he intended to fulfil his ambitions through me. He always wanted me to follow him into the Church; unfortunately he was
disappointed.’

‘You’re not a believer then?’

He gave a dry laugh. ‘When I was younger I was perfectly happy to pay lip service to God. The kind of childhood God you say grace to, or pray to when your dog is ill. But the war changed
everything. After what I saw there the idea of God meant nothing any more. How could a God of love preside over such desolation and misery?’

‘Did you tell your father that?’

‘He would have seen it as weakness. My father didn’t have much patience with human weakness.’

‘And you do?’

‘That depends entirely on the human.’

His fingers traced her hair tenderly as he spoke. ‘The only person I discussed it with was Tom. We’d always talked about everything, especially politics, even if we didn’t
always see eye to eye. Tom was an intellectual. He was the kind of person who sees things entirely in black and white. Ideologies mattered very much to him, more than people, I sometimes thought,
and yet after the war he lost interest entirely. He said all politicians were a load of frauds and none of them were any better than the others. I suppose the war affected everyone in different
ways. That’s why it surprised me when I heard he’d gone out to Spain. I got a letter from him at Christmas, saying that the place he was holed up in had come under heavy bombardment and
he didn’t rate his chances of coming out of it alive. Since then I’ve heard nothing.’

‘Surely there are people you could ask? I mean you have so many connections?’

‘Spain doesn’t work like that, Clara. It’s not orderly like Germany. People don’t keep records of every prisoner taken, or every body found. Whatever the moral chaos of
the Nazis, their filing skills are second to none. But Spain is, well, it’s a maelstrom. I . . .’ He looked away, unwilling to finish the sentence, as if by uttering the words he was
making them true. ‘I rather suspect that Tom’s dead.’

Then he smiled, a little too brightly.

‘Still. There’s no point discussing it.’

He fell silent so Clara began to talk about her arrival in Berlin, about meeting Leo Quinn and agreeing to spy on the Nazi women for him. Her discovery that her maternal grandmother Hannah
Neumann had been Jewish, a fact which Clara’s own mother had never told her. Her determination to do everything she could to bedevil the Nazi regime. Ralph was a good listener. He absorbed
her story without interruption, just the occasional nod, or raised eyebrow. The intimacy between them felt so complete it was as though they had not just stripped off their clothes, but entire
layers of their being.

‘What you said before, that I understand nothing. What don’t I understand?’

He sighed, and kept stroking her hair. ‘The thing about me is, I’ve always needed to maintain control. I’ve become used to keeping other people at arm’s length.
That’s the job, isn’t it? Control. Distance. Self-discipline. What you said about learning to build an invisible wall around oneself, well it’s true. It’s essential, in
fact, if you’re going to do what I do. Nothing should breach it.’

‘And now you’ve let me breach it?’

‘Perhaps I was crazy to think I could avoid it. Or that I wanted to.’

Later, she watched him as he shaved, the blade flashing smoothly backwards and forwards as he scraped against his face, the splash of the hot water as he rinsed his razor, the
intense concentration as he stared into the clouded mirror. Seeing her watching him, he kissed her and she ran her fingers through his damp hair where it was threaded with grey at the temples. For
the first time in years she was free of the caution that waited at the edge of her mind, the need to keep part of herself secret. She hoped it was the same for him.

At one point he left the apartment to fetch milk and food and out of habit she had a quick look around the bedroom. There was the Harris Tweed jacket with leather on the elbows hanging in the
wardrobe, and clothes neatly folded in the drawers with an orderliness that spoke of a boarding school training. When she felt beneath them she found nothing but a torch. She unearthed a photograph
of a couple she took to be his parents in old-fashioned clothes standing in front of a wisteria-framed oak door, and another of Ralph standing next to a young man in cricket whites whom she guessed
to be Tom. He was shorter than Ralph and a handsome man, though there was a severity in the set of the jaw and a hardness in his chiselled cheekbones that suggested a certain arrogant
self-assurance.

When she heard his key in the door she resumed her place on the sofa and picked up
The Times
, trying to focus on the crossword. Her eyes glazed over the clues.
A prize for
exhaustion, 7 letters
. But almost immediately she put the paper down again. Her mind was so full of Ralph, she didn’t require any distraction. He came up behind her and kissed her.

‘Atrophy.’

She frowned.

‘Seven letters, prize for exhaustion. A trophy.’

‘Oh, of course.’

‘On which subject,’ he said, reaching down to pull her towards him, ‘how exhausted are you?’

She kissed him back, and they went to bed again.

Afterwards, she saw him looking at her, his eyes glazed with thought, and she questioned him.

‘To be honest with you, generally after I’ve slept with a woman I want nothing more than for her to leave as fast as possible.’

She laughed. ‘I suppose I did ask you to be honest with me.’

‘I feel differently now. It’s like . . . I don’t know, like jumping into some damn Scottish loch and feeling the water so bracing that the blood rushes to your heart. Being
with you reminds me I’m alive.’

The following morning when she woke he was not in bed beside her. She slipped quickly into her clothes, brushed her hair and came into the kitchen where he was standing at the
window, wearing his dark silk dressing gown, staring sightlessly out at another leaden Berlin sky. He acknowledged her with a slight hunch of the shoulders.

‘Ralph.’

She approached and touched him, tentatively. He faced her, once again brisk and businesslike, with the inbuilt rigidity of the military man.

‘I need to be out today. I have a meeting with Rosenberg. We’re driving out to the Staaken airfield where he’s going to show me the Messerschmitt Bf 109. They’ve refined
it in Spain, apparently. It’s much improved. Then we’re on to inspect the new Heinkel factory at Oranienburg and after that there’s a dinner. It means I’ll be out pretty
much all day. I can’t see myself getting back much before eleven.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘And there’s a lot going on in the next few days. You’ve heard of Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator?’

‘Of course.’ Wasn’t it Lindbergh who had helped Mary with her visa?

‘He’s coming over. It’s supposed to be an unofficial visit but all the air force top brass are turning out to meet him. There’s a reception at the Adlon.’

‘I’ll get my things together.’

‘No. Wait.’

He turned to her, took her in his arms and brushed the hair out of her eyes.

‘There’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t want to worry you until absolutely necessary. It was selfish of me, I know, but I just wanted a little time alone with you
before . . .’

‘Before what?’