Then We Take Berlin (14 page)

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“Not your neck o’ the woods I suppose?”

“I might have seen it from the top of a bus. Where is it exactly?”

“Sort of between the Albert Hall and Earl’s Court.”

Ah—he knew now. He and Abner had pulled a couple of jobs in Earl’s Court.

“This Friday? Like tomorrow?”

“Yes, Holderness, tomorrow. Just gives you time to fit in another driving lesson.”

Wilderness stared at him and said nothing.

Burne-Jones threw him the car keys. Wilderness almost dropped them, clutching them to his blouse with one hand.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t hot wire my car, and if you could see your way clear to making it two gallons of petrol this time I’d be most appreciative.”

Wilderness looked at the piece of paper again.

“Countess? What do I call her?”

“You’ll think of something. Either that or she’ll tell you. But it’s what you tell her that matters. She is a Russian. Don’t ever forget it. And I’ve never been quite sure whose side she bats for. So you tell her nothing you don’t have to. Not the names of your fellow students. Nothing. Not the size of your feet. Nothing. Do you understand me, Holderness?”

§37

Cornwall Gardens was like an island shrouded in mist. If you didn’t seek it out you’d never stumble on it, tucked away as it was between Victorian extravaganzas—the Albert Hall, the museums—and Victorian practicalities—the curve of the Circle line as it cut its way from Kensington High Street to Gloucester Road.

He could scarcely believe anywhere in central London could be so quiet, so utterly devoid of traffic, only a hundred yards from the Cromwell Road.

Douro Mansions was a large and rather dirty redbrick building sitting next to the railway cutting. A hydraulic lift hoisted him up to the ninth floor, with a smooth motion, silent but for the gentle hiss of water under pressure.

When he rang the bell a small face peered around the door.

“Ah you must be Alec’s boy. Aircraftman Wilderness?”

A small woman, with masses of thick, black curls—the high cheekbones and fine lines of a fading beauty.

“Er . . . that’s Holderness.”

“Quite so, quite so dear boy. Wilderness. I haff been expecting you. Come in, come in.”

She left him standing in the open doorway, and, leaning on a walking stick, bustled away to the end of a dim corridor. As he followed he could just make out the dozens of framed photographs that lined the walls—peeling strips of passe-partout, cracked glass, and clinging cobwebs.

She flicked on the overhead light. He could see her clearly now. No more than five foot two, slim, lithe even, but leaning heavily on the duck-head handle of her walking stick.

She met his gaze.

“No, I am not totally increpid, young man. I simply twisted my ankle on the threshold at Derry & Toms department store the day before yesterday.”

Increpid? Why not?

“Perhaps I can sue them? Are you familiar with the law?”

“Only in so far as I break it now and then.”

She smiled at this. For a moment he thought she might laugh, but it was a bubble that never quite broke the meniscus. He could only guess at her age. She could be anywhere between forty and sixty. He was careless about middle age. Ignorant of middle age. Merle was the oldest person he knew. The countess was not of his era and he had no idea which hers had been. Had she been a girl at the turn of the century? On the eve of the Great War? A Russian beauty to drive the young men wild?

“Husbands,” she said, seemingly apropos of nothing.

Then he realised, the photographs. They couldn’t all be her husbands. No one could marry that often.

She tapped lightly with her free hand on the one nearest Wilderness’s chest.

“My first. Leonid Andreyevich Lyubov. Ten thousand acres and a castle in Estonia. Shot himself in 1915. Couldn’t wait for a revolution any longer. Silly bugger.”

Her hand moved like a knight advancing on a chess board, across and down.

“My second. Piotr Ilyich Zakrevsky. Composer of romantic symphonies that were thirty years out of date before the ink was dry on the stave. Taken in the flu pandemic at the end of the Great War.”

Pawn takes pawn.

“Fyodor Ivanovich Ranevsky. A colonel in the Red Army. Loyal to Trotsky. I left him after six weeks. I never knew what fate befell him after 1924. I asked, of course I asked. Letter after letter. Stalin even replied to one. I had him declared legally dead in 1932, so I could marry my fourth . . .”

Straight up almost to the picture rail—rook to bishop 4, her arm stretching out.

“Graf Klaus von Rittenberg. Another ten thousand acres, another castle, but of course he’d abandoned both in East Prussia years before I met him. Died on me. Just before the last war started. Just as well. A German in London. You English would haff locked him up I daresay—Klaus would haff hated being locked up. I didn’t haff the heart for any more husbanding after that. There was the odd candidate, but as you can see I am grown old.”

So, she was a German countess. He’d never met a countess before, of any nationality.

She led him into her parlour—a room lined with books, books in shelves, books stacked on tables, books in piles on the floor, and dust everywhere.

She pointed to a large, empty birdcage.

“I also haff no heart for parrots any more. The one before was an artist, could recite almost whole sentences. ‘Half a league, Half a league . . .’ but then he’d stop. This last was a lazy bugger . . . he’d copy the creaking door or a fart, but he wouldn’t say a damn word. So tiresome. Really I was quite glad when he fell off his perch. Now, Alec tells me you are learning Russian?”

“And German.”

“Very well, from now until you leave we shall talk in one or the other but not in English. That is the rule.
Verstehen Sie?
”

§38

Naturally averse to rules of any kind, much to his own surprise, he found Rada’s rules acceptable and easy.

He had no idea how to address a countess.

“Call me Rada.”

He longed to be out of uniform.

“Wait till the suit you own is better than the uniform the king supplied for free. We both work for him, after all.”

On his second visit, the following Tuesday, he found her on the floor, the duck-head walking stick discarded, clipping articles from newspapers with pinking shears. Not the ideal tool, but clearly what she had to hand. They left the clippings with serrated edges. Part news, part history, part dress pattern.

“What are you doing?” he had asked, as the rules demanded, in German.
“Was machen Sie?
”

“Making history,” she replied. “In so far as the keeping of the record is the making. Others act. I record. I comment. I rage. I kick against the pricks.”

“Sorry, I don’t follow.”

She prised herself off the floor. Surprisingly supple now the ankle had healed. She led him to the longest wall, the one without a window. A room-wide rack of books and folders.

“How old did you say you were?”

“I didn’t, but I’m almost nineteen.”

“A boy.”

“No. A National Service
man
.”

“Quite so,
un ragazzo
. And you know nothing.”

“I know things you don’t know.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how to open the wall safe you have hidden behind that awful oil painting of some old bloke.”

Her head turned to the portrait. He thought she might take offence, but she was smiling.

“My great-uncle Nikolai. How can you tell there is a safe?”

“You hinged the picture at the right hand side. It hangs very differently from the way it would if it were on a wire and a central hook. I spotted it at once.”

“Ah. No matter. You see . . . my files. I have clipped the papers since I first arrived here nearly twenty-five years ago. They hold . . . they hold whatever takes my fancy. And that is the wrong word. Most certainly the wrong word. But they are things of which, I say again, you know nothing.”

“Am I to blame?”

“Of course not,
ragazzo
. But . . . but . . .”

She pulled at one of the thin cardboard folders, and half a dozen tumbled to the floor.

‘Appeasement.’

‘The Rhineland.’

‘Armageddon.’

‘Hitler.’

“Take them, take any, take them all.”

“I thought I was here to learn Russian.”

“You are here to learn. Does it really matter what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then trust me. You are a natural at Russian. And German too for that matter. You don’t need me to teach you languages. A quick polish here, a bit of dusting there. A tweak or two at your accent. You will be of much more use to Alec if you know the world as well.”

“Alec?”

“Colonel Burne-Jones.”

§39

Later. In bed, at Mrs. Wissit’s boardinghouse, he read the file named “Armageddon.” It was everything Rada had ever found on the atomic bomb. Indeed, she had been prescient. Long before the bomb had been much more than a fantasy she had clipped the papers in three or four languages—anything she could find on the meetings of obscure physicists at conferences across Europe at which they discussed the atom and its fission at a purely theoretical level. He made a start on French (“Make what use of that you will, Alec”) and learnt the names of Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Werner Heisenberg. It settled in a sedimentary layer of the mind, compressing slowly into meaning. None of it quite made sense, and none of it would ever quite be wasted. And suddenly it all jerked to the moment, as though kicked into life, as the clippings came almost up to the present and recorded the bombs that had fallen on Japan . . . and the names were names like Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Karel Szabo.

§40

His supposed practice in German and Russian now became a test of how well he could hold his own on current affairs, history, and the arts, in several languages. They would often begin with something close to absurd—she would have him translate an episode of
Tintin
, a page from
Dead Souls,
or the entire menu she’d saved from Quaglino’s one night in 1936 . . .
potages
,
poissons
,
légumes
. . . there were more ways fish could be cooked than he’d ever imagined in a Mile End chippie . . .
Dieppoise
,
czarine
,
meunière
. But that was the point—things he had never imagined. And then they’d dissect the century.

As the days grew longer he stayed later at Cornwall Gardens, often rushing to the Piccadilly Line to arrive at King’s Cross or Liverpool Street in time for the last train of the night.

She would talk to him about anything and everything. The people in Petrograd. The weather in Warsaw. The food in Florence . . . the beer in Milwaukee.

How she had danced with Kaiser Bill in 1912 . . . “more charm than you might imagine.”

How she had dodged anarchists in Moscow in 1918 . . . “monsters who killed for pleasure.”

How she had fled the Bolshevik Cheka . . . “rough justice that became an institution.”

How she had turned back at the British lines near Archangel . . . “such folly.”

How she had crossed Siberia with the remnants of the Czech Legion . . . “not many ever saw home again.”

How she had found herself caught between the Japanese, the Americans, and even the Italians at Vladivostok in 1920 . . . “poor buggers stranded in a land without tomatoes.”

How an American infantry major had taken her back to San Francisco with him . . . “I might have married him but for the uncertain fate of my third husband.”

How she had landed in England, far from penniless, in 1923 . . . “but money isn’t everything.”

How she had been wooed by H. G. Wells in 1925 . . . “he loves to talk, usually about himself.”

How she had plunged into London society . . . “such a fuss.”

How she had danced with the Prince of Wales . . . “such a bore.”

How she had slapped von Ribbentropp’s face at a reception in 1937 . . . “such a pig.”

He stayed later.

On one occasion he slept on the sofa.

“Let us not make a habit of this. I see no reason to let anyone of your age catch me in my dressing gown.”

It had been his bad luck, the next morning, to meet Burne-Jones leaving King’s Cross as he was entering.

Burne-Jones had said, “Anything I should know about?”