She lit the gas under the kettle. 'At heart he was a pansy, wasn't he?'
'Yes.'
'Did he make advances towards you?
'Not physically. He would never have dared. And it would have repulsed him. He was far too sensitive.'
'I thought that pansies had just as much sexual drive towards each other as men and women?'
'That's true. But there're a number of men who love women and find physical sex repugnant.'
'Hand me that teapot, there's a darling.'
'Archie's left us alone in the flat? Without even a servant on the watch?'
'Why shouldn't he?'
'Isn't that typical of Archie. He always does what he thinks he should, rather than what he wants. It's a form of self-honesty, I suppose. And
'It's why he became a socialist. Because he thought he should. He could have fulfilled himself much better by spending his money as dutifully as any other millionaire.'
'It's why he let me play the parasite on him so long. And kept that awful man Watson.'
'Very _cordon noir,_ wasn't he? Did you know that Watson was a crook? He'd done the most awful things, killed someone and escaped with his neck. He learnt how to cook in prison. I wonder what happened to him?'
'Probably got a job as catering officer in the Army.'
She laughed, pouring steaming water to heat the silver pot. 'It's why Archie married me. Because he saw it as exactly what he _should _do, as the best thing for both of us.'
'To save you from the unspeakable disgrace of marrying the butler's boy?'
'You should never have let me get away with it. You should have carried me off and married me when we escaped from France. I'd have gone willingly, darling, honestly.'
'I shied away because I was afraid of being hurt. Surely you of all people can understand how I grew up with an inferiority complex? It's kept me from a lot of delicious things in life. Perhaps even from claiming the fame for discovering penicillin.'
'I hope you don't take sugar? We've used all the ration.'
'You've never been happy with Archie, of course?'
'Not really.'
'If you would really have married me in 1940, why were you such a bitch to me before the war?'
'I was frightened. Don't forget, I'd grown up with you as unattainable to me as I to you. Then my mother bolting, and realizing that my father was a pansy. I felt insecure, so I played the bitch. A lot of girls do that. Women appear to be unfeeling, when they're only frightened of their feelings. During the war I wasn't frightened of anything at all. It was the same throughout the country, wasn't it? Everyone had something more important to think about than their complexes. All the madhouses were empty.'
'When's Archie likely to be back?'
'Hours. Poor dear, he thought he would spend every day bringing justice and light to the world. Instead, he passes all his time in a beastly office at the Elephant and Castle, arguing over details of pensions and things with lawyers.'
'He's left us alone because he thinks he should show how he trusts us.'
'Oh, Jim, you are exasperating. He left us alone because he thinks I deserve a little adultery.'
In the bedroom she threw off her hat and a pair of orange laced-edged silk French knickers. But we were both so eager she fell on the coverlet in the rest of her outfit. I enjoyed Sir Edward's daughter while she was still in her mourning clothes from his funeral. Not bad for the butler's boy.
The fourth death could have been my own. The next day I called at Ainsley's office, which had files stacked everywhere and a busy air of closing down. 'This might interest you,' he said, sorting through a sheaf of photographs on his desk and flicking one towards me. It showed the page of a printed book, a column of names and addresses, each entry numbered, resembling a telephone directory. My own name struck me at once.
'Elgar, John,' the entry started in bold type. '1911. geb., Chemiker, London W. 1., Harley Street, RSHA IV E 12, Statpoleit Dьsseldorf.'
'That's from the Gestapo's Sonderfahndungsliste GB, Special Search List for Great Britain,' Ainsley told me cheerfully. 'Our Field Intelligence unearthed it. It contains about two and a half thousand names, put together by one of Himmler's boys called Schellenberg. You're in distinguished company. There's Noel Coward, David Low the cartoonist, Rebecca West, Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell…those figures after your name are the number of your file in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.' That was the Reich Central Security Department. He folded his hands across his red knitted cardigan with a smile. 'They were going to establish Gestapo headquarters in London, Liverpool, Birmingham and so on.' Then for the first time I heard Ainsley laugh. 'Just think of the people you'd have to be seen dead with! I think Noel Coward made that remark about it.'
'I'm flattered the Nazis thought me so important in Wuppertal.'
Ainsley tossed another photograph across the desk, of a round-faced bespectacled nonentity in SS uniform, not unlike Himmler himself. 'That's SS Colonel Dr Franz Six, former professor of economics at Berlin University. He was to have been in charge of the fun. Instead, he had to content himself with the mass murder of Russians with his Einsatzgruppen. At the moment, thank God, we've got him locked up at Nьrnberg. Looks a nasty piece of work, doesn't he?'
'And thank God Hitler's Operation Sealion never came off.'
'I can console you that the invasion would have been an unmitigated disaster for the Nazis.'
'Because the RAF won the Battle of Britain?'
'No, my dear fellow.' He gave me a wise look. 'Because the Fleet was anchored at Scapa Flow. The Germans had no ships, and we could have blown their barges out of the water. Britain always wins wars by sea power. I fancy that Hitler's famous intuition told him that, as the man didn't know a bowsprit from a barnacle.'
37
It was almost two years later. I was having dinner with Jeff Beckerman at Munich in the middle of December, 1947. He had been driven in a US official car 150 miles from Stuttgart to meet me.
'Seeing you here's saved two precious days,' he declared jovially. 'Now I can cancel the Savoy and pick up the _Queen Mary_ from Cherbourg.'
'So Britain's not worth visiting any longer?'
'Commercially, no,' he replied frankly. 'Attlee's government may be swell for the British working man, but it doesn't exactly encourage anyone to try making any dough.'
Jeff lit a cigar between courses. He was still fatter, in a civilian suit like myself, with a flashy tie. We were both staying the night at a hotel run by the American Government for the flock of officials and businessmen at the time gently cropping its way across Germany. It was a warm, comfortable, well-stocked oasis in a city still dark, cold and damaged.
Our table was by an upstairs window, and I could look over the Marienplatz by the Munich Rathaus, where about noon on November 9, 1923, Hitler and his Brownshirts picked up Julius Streicher on their way to the Feldherrenhalle, where the Nazi revolution came to grief under the muzzles of the police carbines. In his triumphal days, Hitler ceremoniously retraced the route, Gцring, Ribbentrop and the rest all marching in jackboots along the tramlines.
I recalled the official photographs Ainsley had shown me, taken at Nьrnberg in the early hours of October 16, 1946. The same Nazis were lying on top of plain black-painted coffins against a background of brick, the cut nooses still round their necks, each body neatly labelled with an adhesive strip. Ribbentrop wore a dark striped suit and stylish tie, Keitel's face was a mask of blood, Frick wore the sporty tweed jacket he had affected during his trial, and Gцring having pre-empted the hangman lay on an Army blanket with his right eye a little open, looking at the camera with a wink of death.
We talked about prewar days in Wuppertal. I told him of Gerda, with a child from some unknown SS Schьtze. She could never know that I had brought her the penicillin. But she had written effusively thanking me for the bar of
