Unity (17 page)
Authors: Michael Arditti
All those bits. Eight hours earlier, she had been lying in my arms. She was a whole. We were a whole. Then, suddenly, all those bits …
Nothing makes sense. Fliss believed in irony, not commitment. She would no more have thrown a bomb than I would have … I can’t think of anything sufficiently improbable. They say that she carried it in her hat, a great black-and-white affair that she asked the wardrobe department to run up for her. And they were happy to help in spite of working at full stretch. Is that the sign of a seasoned terrorist? I wish that you could have seen her as she left for the hotel. Think Catherine Deneuve in
Belle du Jour
. She looked so beautiful: so dignified: so serene. What’s more, she held her head up high. Do they seriously believe that she had a bomb wedged on top of it? So what if it was only three inches wide? So what if it weighed less than a pound? She still had to set it off. We’re talking Fliss: the only actress in Cambridge who could make ‘I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade’
80
ring with conviction. Instead of conducting their forensic tests, they should study some basic psychology. But no, they prefer to cling to their delusions.
Let’s accept – purely for the sake of argument – that the experts are right and Fliss was carrying a bomb. What was she proposing
to do? Take off her hat, place it under the seat and then excuse herself in the middle of the service? She would have had ten seconds, at most, to escape from the blast. Or do they suppose that she intended to sit quietly through the prayers and the
eulogies
and wait for her head to explode? Fliss despised suicide (you remember Ronan Bristow?
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). She loved life. She loved me. That night, she even talked about having a baby. That’s right. The woman who commended Susie Philbeach for smoking during pregnancy and claimed that, if the foetus were stunted, it would make for an easier birth, wanted to have lots of children. They would naturally all be boys, and I had to promise to name the eldest Wolfram.
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Is that the remark of a woman who was
planning
to kill herself the next day? The police aren’t interested. They call it an enquiry, but they merely wish to confirm their preconceptions. I’ve given up trying to convince them. What does it matter what the rest of the world thinks so long as the people who knew her remember her as she was? But I can see nothing but bits: all those bits. It’s as if I have to push my pen over them to reach the page.
Fliss’s bomb – by which I mean the bomb that killed her – was a sophisticated weapon. But you don’t have to be Einstein, or even Ulrike Meinhof, to make one yourself. All you need are a few basic components: sulphur and phosphorous; potassium chlorate, which you can buy at any chemist’s as an antiseptic; ditto charcoal (for indigestion). Put them together with the insides of a lighter and an alarm clock and Bob’s your uncle … or, in
Fliss’s case, your uncle’s dead. It’s kid’s stuff. Any schoolboy with a grudge could construct one. So be sure to keep the science labs locked up at night. Precise instructions are set out in a manual called something like – and I kid you not – Teach Yourself How To Be An Urban Guerrilla.
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The police claim to have found a copy in Fliss’s room. I suspect a frame-up. Nevertheless, when they asked me how she might have come by it, I had no hesitation in naming Geraldine, who’d had a box of Leftist books sent out from England. But, according to her – and to the receipt – they were classic texts by Trotsky, Gramsci and Marcuse.
Geraldine issued a statement deploring the loss of life and admitting a degree of responsibility. But don’t hold your breath. That responsibility only stretched to persuading Fliss to
accompany
her to the Baader-Ensslin funerals, where they witnessed the full brutality of the German state unleashed on the mourners. At the subsequent press conference, she apparently rolled up her sleeves to reveal the livid bruises left by the police who assaulted her. And, suddenly, to her undisguised delight, everything has become about her.
The police called me in for three interviews, although I have to say that I didn’t encounter any brutality – quite the reverse. The only antagonism came from the Embassy official who escorted me which, given the circumstances, was understandable. I confided the full extent of my suspicions about Ahmet and berated myself for having said nothing until then. And, before you accuse me of settling old scores, take a look at the evidence. Why else would a Palestinian – a self-declared militant – come to Germany in the middle of a hostage crisis? It certainly wasn’t in order to visit his brother. Who else out of Fliss’s acquaintance had expressed a murderous hatred of the Jews? Fliss wasn’t remotely anti-Semitic.
On the contrary, her favourite cousin had married a Rothschild. And it’s no use telling me that one of Unity’s uncles had married a German Jewess.
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The position is not the same. If all that isn’t enough to implicate Ahmet, what about his disappearance on the very afternoon of the explosion? No one has heard a whisper from him since then. Moreover, how did he manage to travel so easily when he had no passport, just some sort of Syrian laissez-passer?
I’m compiling a dossier on the ways in which terrorists prey on gullible women that, when published, will clear Fliss’s name. What’s more, I shall save other women – innocent, trusting women – from falling into the same trap. Take the case of the two English girls who, in 1972, were befriended by a pair of Arab students in Rome. The girls were flying on to Tel Aviv where the Arabs promised to join them, giving them a transistor radio as a pledge of good faith. The bomb that was hidden inside detonated in mid-air although, miraculously, it failed to destroy the plane or injure the passengers. The girls had been duped just like Fliss. Only she wasn’t so lucky. She ended up in … bits. All I can see are the bits. They say that they were scattered for yards.
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Do you think that Hitler’s vegetarianism was born of a genuine concern for animals or a revulsion from the carnage that he saw in the trenches? All those bloody flanks. All that exposed offal. All the dead comrades gazing up at him from every plate of cold cuts.
The film has been abandoned. It could survive Ralf’s defection: it could survive Sir Hallam’s departure; but it couldn’t survive Fliss’s death. There were too many key scenes still to be shot. The financial loss will be covered. The one advantage of such a public catastrophe is that the insurers cannot deny liability. The emotional loss will be harder to compensate. Everything feels so incomplete. There was no wrap party, which Dora declared to be as essential to mark the end of a film as a funeral to mark the death of a friend. Then she turned pale and tried to change the subject. She and Gerald and Carole and the rest have returned to England, while the Germans have dispersed around Munich to await Wolfram’s call. In time, I too will have a future – I’m too ordinary not to have one – although I’ve no idea what it will be. The only thing I do know is that it won’t be on celluloid.
I’ve made several attempts to see Wolfram. I never realised how much some of his old associates resented me until I saw the pleasure that they took in conveying his rebuffs. The one exception is Dieter, who not only came to the flat but brought me a bunch of flowers. He disclosed that Wolfram hadn’t slept for a week but survived on a diet of cocaine. To increase his intake, he had sworn to both Dieter and Renate that each was the only one arranging the supply. Meanwhile, whether it’s from a druginduced high or a genuine excitement, he is buzzing with ideas for a new film – an ‘anti-film’, which will intersperse scenes from
Unity
with footage from the stadium, interviews with the public and hard-core pornography. For the moment, he is concentrating on the last.
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So he has no need of a writer. Which is all to the good. Writers have far too much power. Over breakfast, I can decide to send a character to war or to jail or to Hell. Over lunch, I can dispatch another to blow up churches or governments or God. And, provided that it rings true, provided that it is part of a coherent vision (and always provided that it doesn’t cost too much), my blueprint will be followed. Truth, however, is no justification. I know now that a writer must take full responsibility for his ideas, like a scientist with the H-bomb. There is certain research that is too dangerous to publish. It should be left in the study or the lab. I was the one who brought
Unity
to life, even if it required others to bring it to fruition, so I am the one who must shoulder the blame.
You ask when I’ll be coming home. It’s hard to say. I’ve put myself at the disposal of Fliss’s parents for as long as they remain here. In any case, I wouldn’t dream of returning until the Germans release the body. I couldn’t leave her here alone. Body? What body? How can they be certain that all the bits will be hers? You remember how fastidious she was. She even hated sharing a bathroom. It’s unthinkable that she might be jumbled up with strangers. At a pinch she might tolerate her uncle, but not the bodyguards and the Pole. I shall insist that they respect her integrity. It’s the least I can do.
I plan to settle in Hastings for a while. It’s the one place where I can be sure of being left alone. But I promise that we’ll meet up very soon.
In your previous letter – I’m sorry I never replied but I know you’ll make allowances – you mentioned that you’d been asked to produce the school play. I beg you not to accept. Take the boys for model-making, stamp-collecting and country walks, but keep them away from acting. One of them might be hooked.
Luke.
I visited Luke several times on his return, although we failed to resurrect our former intimacy. My friendship with Felicity, from which he had once claimed to draw comfort, now made him wary of me. The horror of Munich had taken its toll. In an attempt to find a meaning – or in despair of ever finding one – he joined a fundamentalist Baptist church and, within months of coming home, moved to Sunderland, where he worked in a series of
dead-end
jobs and devoted himself to the Gospel.
We kept in desultory contact, although the obvious means was ruled out by his church’s taboo on celebrating Christmas. He wrote letters of carefully weighed praise on the publication of my first two novels. His amusement at our changed status was the sole remnant of the old Luke. It was the new Luke, however, who took it upon himself to condemn my sexuality (and, in particular, its public expression in my third novel,
Easter).
He sent a long letter (one habit that he never abandoned), castigating the ‘
abomination
’ and warning that, unless I repented, I was heading for Hell.
He backed up his injunction with a battery of Biblical texts but, although deeply wounded, I resolved to avoid conflict, citing instead the case of my prep school master (he of the
Boys’ Own
definition of evil) who had informed us that ‘the Bible isn’t perfect in every particular. There are several commas that are misplaced.’ He hit back, Bible-first, with ‘The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God.’ While prepared to admit the epithet, I utterly refuted the charge and brought the correspondence to an end.
Luke never married nor, as far as I can make out, did he enjoy any other close relationship. For over twenty years his life, weekday as well as Sunday, centred on his faith. Then, in April 2001, three months after I sent him a copy of Geraldine Mortimer’s diary, he denounced the church and all its works from the pulpit, returned to his lodgings and hanged himself. At his funeral, I sat alongside his two brothers and their wives, from
whom he had also grown estranged. There were no mourners from the church. With his brothers’ blessing, I undertook to provide a headstone. For weeks I agonised over a suitable,
non-scriptural
inscription, finally settling on the simplest.
‘May he know eternal felicity.’
12
Leading girls’ boarding school, whose alumni include the Princess Royal.
13
There was no footnote. Luke evidently thought that the pun could stand alone.
14
The school at which the eponymous hero of Dickens’s
Nicholas Nickleby
was employed. The headmaster was Wackford Squeers (see references below).
15
Nancy Mitford’s
U and Non-U
banished lounges, along with fish knives, notepaper and mantelpieces to a lexicographical lumber-room.
16
The Cambridge student theatre in which we performed.
17
The allusion is to Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum that photography is the truth and film is the truth twenty-four times a second. Meier is not merely inverting Godard but adding an extra lie to reflect TV’s extra image.
18
Thynne did, indeed, work for Conservative Central Office and then, at the 1983 election, was duly returned as an MP. Following the scandal that ended his Parliamentary career, he converted to Roman Catholicism and is now a leading advocate for the restoration of the Tridentine Mass.
19
In this, as in so much else, Luke was mistaken. I didn’t have a study, merely a shared space in a common room where the chairs were allocated according to length of service (mine had no arms).
20
Luke’s handwriting here betrays his fatigue. It is unclear whether he has written ‘fanfare’ or ‘funfair’.
21
Luke and I had both been hugely disappointed by a National Film Theatre screening of archive footage of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s 1913
performance
.
22
The 1976 film, directed by John Sturges from Jack Higgins’s best-selling novel, about a group of Nazis who parachute into England on a mission to capture Winston Churchill.
23
The actual remark ‘War, war, that’s all you ever think about, Dick
Plantagenet
!’ was made by Virginia Mayo to Rex Harrison in the 1954 film,
King Richard and the Crusaders
.
24
This remark reflects a native prejudice that Luke could never quite throw off. Having denounced the excretory associations of Felicity’s sexual
terminology
, he shows no qualms in adopting a similar line with me.
25
The Windmill, famous for being the only London theatre to remain open throughout the Blitz, featured a repertoire of fan-dancers, comedians and, most famously, near-naked women.
26
Roberto Rossellini, the Italian film director and President of the 1977 Festival Jury.
27
The Spanish actor, best known for his roles in Buñuel’s
Tristana
,
Viridiana
and
La Charme Discrète de la Bourgeoisie
, who beat Dieter Reiss to win the 1977 Prix d’Interprétation Masculine at Cannes.
28
Arnold was the headmaster of Rugby School in the 1830s and Neill the founder of Summerhill School in 1927.
29
Given the impossibility of determining from either handwriting or context whether this should read ‘acquisitive’ or ‘inquisitive’, I have opted for the former as the truer assessment of Felicity’s character.
30
Bamforth must be mistaken about the date, since Isherwood and his lover, Heinz, left Germany in 1934.
31
Felicity was right. See Gillian Denny’s biography of Bamforth,
Every Inch A King
, Sinclair Stevenson 1991, page 216.
32
English writer and aesthete, reputedly the wittiest man of his generation. See Marie-Hélène Lancaster,
Brian Howard, Portrait of a Failure
, Anthony Blond 1968.
33
This has nothing to do with fascism but is, rather, the annual Lent carnival.
34
Luke’s fears were misplaced. When I recently viewed the salvaged footage of
Unity
at the Meier Foundation, this scene was particularly powerful.
35
Luke was particularly sensitive on this point, having been harassed by Irish nationalists during his third year at Sidney Sussex, when he lived in Oliver Cromwell’s old room.
36
Luke is mistaken. All the actors, apart from Felicity, were busy during the day I spent on set, but I was warmly welcomed by the make-up assistants and runners.
37
Muv and Farve were the names by which the Mitford sisters knew their parents.
38
Kenneth Tynan, in a characteristically barbed review of her 1963
performance
in
The Second Mrs Tanqueray
, wrote that she ‘tended the frog in her throat as lovingly as if it were about to turn into a prince’.
39
The failed coup against Hitler on 20 July 1944, after which hundreds of suspected conspirators were executed.
40
This appears to be an allusion to Anthony Dupont who went on to achieve fame in the ITV sitcom,
Jack and the Beanpole
.
41
The influential theatre company founded by Bertold Brecht with a
performance
style based on the
Verfremdungseffekt
, which is commonly (and crudely) translated as the ‘alienation effect’.
42
The eight-letter
Gewissen
.
43
Had Luke been writing twenty years later, he would have seen
queer
become a term of choice for young gay men and women. They have
rehabilitated
the word at the expense of many older people’s pasts.
44
Unity Mitford’s friend and governess at the finishing school, whom she later turned against and denounced, on slender evidence, as a Jew.
45
Hitler’s official photographer and close confidant.
46
Andreas Baader, his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, Irmgard Moller and
Jan-Carl
Raspe were imprisoned in Stammheim.
47
Unity’s long-term Munich boyfriend, a photographer.
48
Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign press secretary and an intimate of both Hitler and Unity.
49
On 14 January 1936, a regulation was issued that ‘crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans are to be killed by throwing them into rapidly boiling water. When feasible, this should be done individually.’
50
Hitler’s pet dog in the 1920s.
51
I choose the more striking ‘seared’, although Luke’s writing leaves it
unclear
whether he intends ‘scarred’ or even ‘scared’.
52
Marie Duplessis, the model for Alexandre Dumas’s
La Dame aux Camélias
, died at the age of twenty-three.
53
The line is a paraphrase of one from
The Glass Widow
, the play written by Harris Weston for Dora Manners, which she performed with great success in London in 1965/6. As the play was widely assumed to be based on their marriage, it is unclear who has borrowed from whom.
54
There is no record of
Medea
, or indeed of any Greek drama, among Dora Manners’s credits.
55
It was when reading of Elizabeth Taylor’s marital problems that Luke commented with unwonted sharpness, ‘She must be the first person to travel down the road to Calvary in a chauffeur-driven limo.’
56
Winifred Wagner, born Winifred Williams, was, in fact, Welsh.
57
Wagner’s music was never officially banned in Israel, but there was an unassailable cultural consensus against its performance which began after Kristallnacht in 1938, when the Palestine Symphony Orchestra declared that it would no longer play his works, and which lasted, despite the endeavours of Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim and others, until October 2000, when the Rishon Lezion Symphony Orchestra performed the Siegfried Idyll.
58
Luke is referring to the influence of F. R. Leavis, which was still strong during our time at Cambridge.
59
Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy-chief of the Gestapo, was a talented
musician
.
60
‘The best reason I have for opposing fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.’ From Auden’s essay on Gresham’s in
The Old School
, edited by Graham Greene, Jonathan Cape 1934.
61
Hans Eysenck (1916–97), German-born British psychologist who attracted controversy for his views on racial differences in intelligence, as propounded in
Race, Intelligence and Education, Gower
1971.
62
Now Head of Current Affairs for BBC television.
63
Neither Geli nor Hitler himself were, however, discreet enough. Otto Strasser, one of the founders of the Nazi party, claimed to have received a tearful confession from Geli in which she described her uncle forcing her to urinate on him. Putzi Hanfstaengl asserted that Hitler was subject to a blackmail attempt in 1930 on account of depraved, pornographic drawings he had made of Geli. The coprophiliac elements in Hitler’s sexuality have been identified by writers ranging from the German historian, Konrad Heiden, to the American psychologist, Walter C. Langer.
64
In Noel Coward’s 1941 comedy, a writer and his second wife are haunted by the ghost of his first.
65
A reference to the Bavarian folk dance, the
Schuhplattler
.
66
Although I have allowed the reference to stand, I cannot believe that, even at the age of twenty, I would have said anything so crass. What I may have said is that gay men take up sadomasochism because they had no outlet for their aggression as children or, even, because they had so much aggression taken out on them as children.
67
The only reference to this that I have been able to find, in Richard Huggett’s
The Curse of Macbeth and other theatrical superstitions
, Picton 1981, records that the audience ran out screaming and the leading actor died of a heart attack.
68
On 9 September 1977, at the start of the Schleyer crisis, Prime Minister Callaghan postponed a visit to Chancellor Schmidt in Bonn.
69
Die Bild Zeitung
, Germany’s most notorious tabloid and the thinly disguised target of Heinrich Böll’s
Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
(1974).
70
Worn by the Vietnamese as a symbol of mourning for the dead.
71
This is, to say the least, contentious. Although there is some evidence to suggest that Unity slept with several Nazis including, on her own confession, Stabschef Viktor Lutze, the leader of the SA after the murder of Röhm, there are equally authoritative reports that she died a virgin. Luke’s certainty on a matter about which he would usually express caution is an indication of his pain.
72
The Spanish monk and poet whom Luke had invited to read at the Milton Society in Cambridge. Having put him up in a Sidney Sussex guest room, he awoke in the night to discover that, whatever vows Fray Luis may have observed, chastity was not among them.
73
Luke is referring to the Schichtl magic and vaudeville show, a popular
Oktoberfest
attraction since the early nineteenth century, which traditionally climaxed in a gruesome execution, with barkers announcing the ‘beheading of a live human being on an open and well-lit stage’.
74
The public park in the centre of Berlin. It has remained a busy gay
cruising-ground
.
75
Luke appears to be unaware that he has not previously mentioned Medhurst, the actress playing Jessica Mitford.
76
Bamforth never recovered sufficiently to act on stage again. He did, however, make a number of cameo appearances in films, most notably in the 1982 version of Sir Walter Scott’s
The Black Dwarf
(US title,
The Man of the Moors
), for which his voice was dubbed by Marius Goring.
77
A reference to the D-notice sent to newspapers, asking them to withhold certain information in the interests of national security.
78
Streicher’s newspaper, founded in 1923 and much loved by Hitler,
notorious
for its quasi-pornographic stories about Jews.
79
Dixon of Dock Green
, a long-running BBC television series, presented a benign, if outdated, portrait of the genial and incorruptible British ‘bobby’.
80
Felicity’s Gwendolen in an open-air production of
The Importance of Being Earnest
was a highlight of the 1974 May Week celebrations.
81
A St John’s historian who drowned himself when he failed his Finals. On hearing the news, Felicity remarked: ‘You’re supposed to speak only good of the dead. He’s dead: good.’
82
Although I said nothing to Luke, I wondered whether she might have been influenced by Unity, who had declared after the War that she intended to have six sons, the eldest to be called Adolf and all the rest John. Pryce-Jones page 254.