you wish…’
‘How can you doubt it?’ and she glanced up at him, her blue-green eyes sparkling with a fury that cut deeper than the German sailor’s knife.
‘Yes, I’ll leave,’ he said softly. ‘I wanted to say how sorry I feel — and that I did — I
She ignored him, lifting the hem of her dress to lengthen her stride, almost scuttling, frantic to cover the last few yards to her door. That was almost the end of the affair, but in her hurry to escape she tripped and, pitching forward, dropped her portfolio. It burst, spilling papers on the sidewalk. ‘Oh God, no,’ she cried in frustration.
He bent down to help her, anchoring as many as he could, their hands close as she scrabbled for the papers with her nails, one hand still to her hat. He couldn’t see her face but he saw her shoulders rise and fall heavily as she struggled to control her feelings, and a few seconds later he heard her strangle a sob.
‘Oh Laura, I’m so sorry.’
And then she looked up, her lower lip trembling, her fine eyes wet with tears. ‘How could you? How could you?’ she asked, and the dam burst, her words flowing in an agonising torrent: ‘Who are you, who — how could you when I loved you? — but I don’t know you — you betrayed Roger — and Nina — everyone — you let me love you, and you lied — liar! You liar! Liar!’
He tried to touch her but she brushed his hand away. ‘Liar! What do you care — liar — you care for nothing, no one — I don’t even know your name — liar,’ and with a heart-wrenching groan she rose from the sidewalk, papers clenched in her tiny fist, and turning to the door — somehow she managed to find the key — closed it quietly behind her. He could hear her sobbing in the entrance hall and a moment later saw her silhouette at the pane of blue glass to the left of the door. She was bent almost double in tears.
‘Laura.’ He rapped on the door once. ‘Laura, let me in — please.’
There was only a thickness of glass between them but she didn’t turn to look at him or reply.
‘Laura, I love you. Please,’ he pleaded, longing to cherish her. But she wasn’t going to open the door. She couldn’t forgive him and perhaps she wanted to punish them both, because she stood crying at the window for at least ten minutes. Wolff waited in silence beside her.
Then, standing straight and without a backward glance to the shadow in the glass, she walked away. He followed her footsteps across the mosaic floor and heard the elevator doors open and close and knew she’d gone. Her leather portfolio was still lying on the sidewalk, papers fluttering in the gusts from passing cars. Moving slowly and in a mist, he painstakingly collected them all and posted the portfolio through the letterbox.
A few days later, he took a passage to England.
36. The English Sickness
BERLIN WAS NOT the city it used to be. Everything was changing and for the worse, Anton Dilger reflected as he shuffled from the platform on to the station concourse. He could read it in the creased face of the factory worker beside him in the queue, and in the rheumy eyes of the old lady with her eggs to sell at market, and he could hear it in the frazzled voice of a mother scolding the children at her skirt. Greyer, grubbier, thinner, the city was shrinking from the fine-figured lady she used to be into a street urchin. Every day of the three months he’d been home had brought new sadness. He shut his eyes for a second, trying to force from his mind the scenes he’d witnessed in Karlsruhe just a few days before, but he could hear an endless echo of them in the huff and rumble of the station.
His sister, Elizabeth, had taken it sorely when he had announced, after only a few weeks, that he was leaving Berlin to become a surgeon at a hospital closer to the Front.
‘You’ve only just come back to me,’ she had protested.
‘Karlsruhe, isn’t so far,’ he had assured her.
Count Nadolny had tried to persuade him to stay, too.
‘Take some time, but we need you here,’ the Count had insisted. ‘Things are worse in Germany — open your eyes, you’ll see.’
And here I am again, he thought.
It was five in the afternoon and the queue for cabs stretched across the front of the station and round the side. Too impatient to wait, he threw his bag on his back like a soldier’s knapsack and set off at a brisk pace. It was a fine June day and he hoped some vigorous exercise and sunshine would lift his spirits a little. But it was impossible to walk away from the war. Cripples begging in front of a church; at a street corner a gang of women in flat caps and bloomers, wielding picks and shovels as their menfolk at the Front used to do; and crossing the Tiergarten in silence a column of fresh young recruits — passers-by turning away, frightened to look them in the eye.
Walking on, the sun blinking, blinding through the trees, Dilger’s mind was confused with angry thoughts, his chest tight with the unconscious pain of memory. Only the death of his sister’s son, Peter, had hurt him like this before. Perhaps he’d been naive not to understand the enemy’s hate sooner.
In his first week home, his sister Elizabeth had asked him to visit a family in the working district of Wedding in the north of the city. The widow of the footman, she’d explained; the poor man had been killed a few months after her Peter and they had no money for a doctor. Dilger had found the family at the top of a tenement block, mother, grandmother and nine pale children in two rooms and a kitchen. The flat was almost empty of furniture and their clothes were riddled with more holes than a Swiss cheese. The youngest was lying listless in her cot, a scrap of skin and bone.
‘How old is she?’ he’d asked.
‘Almost two,’ came the reply. Shocked, he had berated the mother for neglect and she’d burst into anguished tears. What could she do with so many mouths to feed and no money? Scraping by on 120 marks a month, she said; they couldn’t even afford the local food kitchen, and the ration of milk had been cut to a pint a day. They were living on tea and potatoes. ‘We’re all suffering from the sickness,’ she’d sobbed.
‘From what?’ he’d asked.
‘The English sickness,’ she said.
Before he left he gave her some money and perhaps they’d eaten a little better for a few days. When he had described the visit to Elizabeth, she had said it was the same with most of the families in the district. ‘You don’t understand, Anton, you’ve come back from the land of plenty. It’s the same in every city — your English sickness.’ The curse of the blockade, the enemy’s grip on the Atlantic — hadn’t he seen it with his own eyes? Fleets of British ships loading grain, cattle, horses, shells, and America growing fat on the trade while Germany wasted away. His old neighbours in Chevy Chase called it ‘neutrality’. ‘If we don’t win soon, we’ll all be sick,’ his sister had observed.
She was watching for him now at a window and greeted him on the doorstep. ‘Oh Anton,’ her voice quivered a little, ‘I’m sorry — it must have been awful;’ and she kissed him and gave his hand a comforting squeeze. He tried to say something but could manage only a crooked smile. The maid took his coat and he carried his own bag to his room, falling on the bed, breathing slowly, deeply. When he was calmer he rang for some tea and a hot bath.
They didn’t speak of what he’d seen in Karlsruhe at dinner. Elizabeth told him she had visited the Zoological Gardens as they used to do every Sunday, but the gaiety had left the place. No concert band, no beer, only empty tables.
‘And the colonel?’ he asked, picking at his food. ‘Have you heard from him?’
She reached for her handkerchief, as she always did when he mentioned her husband. ‘He’s well,’ her voice was tense, ‘but his regiment has been engaged in the fighting at Verdun.’
‘Oh,’ he replied as casually as he could, then, because he had to, ‘I’m sure he’ll keep well, Elizabeth.’
‘Yes,’ she said mechanically, because that was also the polite thing to say.
Then she scolded him gently, just as she had when he was a boy: ‘You’ve hardly eaten anything, Anton — when so many go without food.’
After dinner they sat in her gloomy drawing room for ersatz coffee, and he drank the last of the colonel’s
