After the Cabaret (11 page)

‘Yes, I know the type,' said Greg.

‘He was wearing corduroys, an open-necked blue shirt and a huge tweed jacket, probably someone else's, with bulging pockets. He was carrying a bottle of something foreign, which he presented to Cora with a bow. He had that kind of attractive English style,' Bruno said, ‘great aplomb, nice manners, but still rather boyish and endearing.'

‘When they tell you something, believe the opposite and then start looking for the third thing,' Greg said.

‘Yes, well, they made very good double agents,' said Bruno. ‘Though I was never sure whether Theo was involved or not. He was never found out, but his career staggered when the others were exposed. But that was later. That night Theo moved forward – he had physical grace, too, what a lucky boy he was – and got Sally down from the little stage just as she finished the song, and they began to dance. Vincent was sober that night, by a miracle,
and played ‘Plaisir D'Amour' again. It was very romantic.

‘I don't know when they'd last seen each other. Sally'd been in love with Theo since she'd been at school but there was Berlin in those strange days before the war, all heightened senses and danger and sex and – oh, you couldn't describe it. You can imagine them as the linden trees greened and the sun came out, walking hand in hand past cafés with open doors and the smell of coffee coming out – and all the time, the terror continuing. Ah well,' said Bruno, ‘we all grew up under the Chinese curse, I suppose, “May you live in interesting times.” After Germany they'd met in Madrid, where Theo was reporting for
The Times
.

‘So – it was years since they'd been in Spain, but Sally had kept him in her heart, even though there had been plenty of others in her arms. I couldn't tell you how real this love of Theo was – what does real mean? Who can tell about another person? She believed it anyway, at that time.

‘She told me they walked through St James's Park. It was very quiet and, as usual, searchlights cut the air. The grass gleamed with frost. They kissed under a tree. She said, “I love you.”

‘He said, “Oh, God, Sally, you know how it is – the war and everything. You know – I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.”'

‘It was an old joke between them. Later, when she was feeling bitter, she told me it was always an old joke between false lovers and their women. This time, though, she said she gave the correct response. She said, “Lucky Honor Moore.”

‘“Let's go home,” he said, and they walked over the
grass, she leaning against him, past two soldiers supporting a third, an air-raid warden on a bike taking a short-cut, figures pressed against trees.

‘“Oh, Theo, I'm so happy. I'm dancing on air.”'

‘He was a devil for women.' Bruno glanced at his watch. ‘I must go soon. I have a difficult tenant in my basement. There are complaints about the plumbing.' So the old man owned the house he lived in, Greg thought, without surprise. He wondered vaguely why the meticulous Bruno hadn't fixed the place up better. Standing up, he said, ‘OK, thank you.'

‘No – I have to talk to the plumber, but not just yet,' Bruno told him. ‘The photographs you may see of Theo do him less than justice. They could not show his lightness, intelligence, his speed of movement. Or his charm and glamour. There was an exciting touch of haggardness in his features. He was an adventurer. He was a radical, sacrificing himself for a cause – a hero, a young girl's dream, if that young girl was in rebellion from a bourgeois family. As Sally was – as so many girls were, at that time.

‘Perhaps they were a little spoilt, those young men of that generation. So many of their fathers, uncles, older
brothers had died in the Great War. These, the survivors, were precious and it was believed much rested on them.'

‘I guess it might have been thought they would have to go to war themselves,' Greg said. ‘As they did.'

‘All Europeans expect to have to go to war,' Bruno told him dismissively. ‘With you, war may be a disturbance in the natural order. Here, even when you think it's all forgotten, it's just in hiding, waiting to come out.'

‘I hope not,' Greg said doubtfully.

‘Ah – I'm an old pessimist,' Bruno said. ‘However, Sally's honeymoon with Theo lasted less than a week. In the attic – and New Year's Eve at the Savoy, with everybody in uniform and wondering what the next year would bring – how gay they were. Then, suddenly, one morning Theo was gone. He left a brief note on the dining-room table, pinched a kit-bag that one of Pym's pick-ups had left in the sitting room, put his few things in it – the pipe, his father's VC and a volume of Xenophon – and went off to whatever secret thing he was doing next. Pym's poor soldier boy was punished for losing his kit-bag. Briggs said Theo had stolen away like a thief in the night and recalled some ugly incidents from their Cambridge days. Sally was distraught but stood up for him, saying he'd only left so early not to disturb anyone.

‘Pym was furious. If you drew a chart like a family tree of that group but showed only who had been to school or university with whom, who had grown up with whom, who had been in love with, slept with, desired but not had whom, well, it would be a big, big map with many, many names on it, some surprising. At that time I thought Pym's rage
was because he, like Briggs, had been in love with Theo. Imagine that adolescent greenhouse of a school they had all been to. Imagine all those boys trapped there, like a prison. Then imagine Sally and Theo coming downstairs arms draped around each other – think of baby Gisela, positive proof of their love. I saw Pym's face one morning when they came into the kitchen. It was glowing, frightening almost – he went very pale and his eyes burned. He had to turn away to conceal his feelings.'

Bruno paused for effect, then said casually, ‘I thought that was why Pym blackmailed Sally into dropping into occupied France.'

‘What?' exclaimed Greg. ‘Sally dropped into France?'

‘Oh, yes,' said Bruno. ‘I'm surprised you didn't know.' He glanced at his watch again. ‘I must go. I shall be busy until the weekend. Will you be available then?'

‘Will I!' said Greg, and sat on after the old man had left, thinking, Sally? France? When? Where? Why? Was it true? Was Bruno leading him astray? Above all, what kind of a book would he end up writing?

Greg spent the next few days on research concerning the men and women parachuted into or landing secretly in occupied France in 1941.

Since his last meeting with Bruno, he had been increasingly worried that the old man was misleading him. Before he had embarked on his attempt to write Sally's biography, his chief source of information about her had been the novelist Charles Denham's
Autobiography of War
in which there had been no mention of her having been dropped into France. However, finally he discovered her name in a volume of reminiscences by a former SOE operative. The reference was ambiguous: ‘Among the others who played their part during the early years of the Second World War were Captain N. M. Armstrong and Miss Sally Bowles.' Not much, but when Greg read these words in a dusty book at the British Museum his heart soared and his confidence was restored in Bruno Lowenthal. He clapped the book shut and bounded out of the library.

That day he rang Katherine and told her. He called his editor in New York and told him. The editor was not very excited – but Katherine was. ‘Greg, darling,' she said, ‘I'm trying to arrange a few days in London. But ring me as soon as you hear what Bruno says. God, I'm looking forward to seeing you.'

‘Me too,' said Greg, with feeling.

He was also delighted to hear from Katherine that her cousin had now agreed to rent him 13D Everton Gardens, a flat on the second floor of a forbidding red-brick Edwardian block near the British Museum, overlooking a small street and a sad square of unhappy-looking trees surrounded by iron railings.

The apartment consisted of a sitting room ten feet by ten feet and an even smaller bedroom. It was approached by a narrow stone staircase or a minute lift with tricky folding grilled doors. In America, Greg thought, this tiny hovel, with its hissing gas fires and ancient kitchen, which resembled the sort of apartment featured in a forties public-information film, would have seemed fit only for a prisoner out on parole or an unsupported mother. However, he had come to understand that it represented a peculiar kind of British luxury, the kind, somehow, that the Katherine Ledbetters and their kin seemed able to command.

In return for the favour, Greg saved Katherine's cousin's life by disconnecting the gas fire, pulling it out and clearing from behind it eighteen inches of accumulated rubble. He cleaned the fire itself and replaced it, feeling fairly certain now that neither he nor the cousin would die of carbon-monoxide poisoning due to trapped fumes escaping into
the room. He decided not to tell Katherine about this, for she and others like her believed that only paid strangers were capable of doing such jobs properly. He also cleaned the kitchen and bathroom and that, with his reading, kept him occupied until the long-awaited visit by Bruno.

On the day Bruno was due to arrive Greg stood at the window of the flat, staring down into the rainswept trees of the square. He brooded. Would Bruno lie to him? And if so, why? If the old man was, as Greg had originally supposed him to be, lonely and fairly embittered then Greg and his questions might be just an entertainment for Bruno, a way of alleviating boredom. But he doubted this, while recognising how little of Bruno's life he knew. Bruno had shown him his flat, his shop and his car which had told Greg only that he was prosperous. He had revealed nothing of other parts of his life, such as his present friends and acquaintances or how he spent his spare time. Bruno had put Greg in a sealed box, apart from the rest of his life.

Greg had seen from the outset that Bruno did not much like him, but he had not taken this personally for he suspected that Bruno did not much like anybody. The old man's attitude had been civil but distant, masking, but not very carefully, a kind of contempt for Greg based on Bruno's greater age and experience, and on what Greg had come to know as the deadly European contempt for the American, which said, silently, ‘You may be perfectly nice, but that's easy for you. You're soft and sentimental. You've been privileged. You've never had to find out what life is all about. We Europeans know all that.'

Greg was also beginning to suspect that sometimes he
bored Bruno. But if Bruno didn't want to talk to him, why was he doing so? The advantage seemed to be all on Greg's side. Could this be some terrible game he was playing, Greg thought in depression – misleading foreigners for fun?

Suddenly, unexpectedly, homesickness swept over him. He wanted to be back in America. He wondered if he might not have been better off lecturing at Fraser Cutts and putting together a paper on some small subject requiring minutely detailed knowledge and concerning something that had happened so long ago there were no living sources, just books and bits of wood and broken pottery, not awkward and possibly untrustworthy human beings.

Greg was the son of liberal parents, his father a lawyer, his mother a former social worker. Both had been civil-rights activists in their youth. They had been freedom marchers in the South; they had worked for Bobby Kennedy. Greg had no quarrel with their attitudes, was merely slightly embarrassed and depressed by them. He felt he could go for a long time without hearing about redneck attacks, police charges on Vietnam demonstrators, tear-gas, the Scottsboro Boys or the three assassinations that had ended their era. Some of the most mortifying occasions of his boyhood had been at the annual reunion barbecue his parents held. He recalled the stoned, grey-bearded man who had tried to pull him on to his knee when he was ten and had said into his face, ‘Keep the faith, boy. All we ask is that you keep the faith.' As soon as they could, he and his sister had found reasons not to be there on what his sister called Old Revolutionary Day.

However, his background meant that Greg was no stranger to the idea of conspiracy, government chicanery and the abuse of power. Those who looked at him and chose to think him a well set-up, prosperous young American, innocent, unsuspecting and
naïf
, were, as far as he was concerned, welcome to do so. In fact, Greg Phillips had a
naïveté
deficit. Where hope, trust and belief in authority should have been, there was a big, black hole.

He knew this. He thought Bruno was beginning to know it too. But he couldn't rid himself of the nagging feeling that Bruno, like a skilled chess player, was leading him towards some disastrous end. Yet he knew, too, that he and Bruno were beginning to understand each other.

Finally, Bruno came. Greg went down to meet him and took him up in the lift. Jammed together, they creaked up slowly.

‘One of my friends from Cambridge found me this flat. It belongs to a cousin.'

‘A lady-friend?' hazarded Bruno.

‘A lecturer at Cambridge. I knew her when I studied here.'

‘Ah – so,' Bruno said. The lift stopped. They got out and entered the flat. Bruno looked about him and went to the window. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I recognise the style.'

Greg had bought provisions. Now, hoping to please his unyielding guest, he offered coffee and cake. Bruno accepted and Greg set about producing the snack.

When this was done he placed it on a low table by the gas fire, set up his tape-recorder and said to Bruno, ‘I saw from
the memoirs of a Captain Clegg that Sally was dropped over France, but he didn't say why.'

‘He probably didn't know,' said Bruno, biting into a cake. ‘It was all secret. Pym's doing. He must have threatened her otherwise she wouldn't have gone – she was brave but not that brave, and you must remember, too, that Sally was a Communist and Hitler and Stalin were still allies. Whether they liked it or not, the British Communists had to go along with it. Stupid, of course. When were politics not stupid? But she had to go to France. I think it was in the early summer of nineteen forty-one.'