Bond 10 - The Spy Who Loved Me (6 page)

Well, I settled down in my new job as ‘Assistant to the Editor’ and I was given more writing to do and less legwork and in due course, after I had been there for a year, I graduated to a by-line and ‘Vivienne Michel’ became a public person and my salary went up to twenty guineas. Len liked the way I got on with things and wasn’t afraid of people, and he taught me a lot about writing – tricks like hooking the reader with your lead paragraph, using short sentences, avoiding ‘okay’ English and, above all, writing about
people
. This he had learned from the
Express
, and he was always drumming it into my head. For instance, he had a phobia about the 11 and 22 bus services and he was always chasing them. I began one of my many stories about them, ‘Conductors on the Number 11 service complain that they have to work to too tight a schedule in the rush-hours.’ Len put his pencil through it. ‘People, people, people! This is how it ought to go, “Frank Donaldson, a wideawake young man of twenty-seven, has a wife, Gracie, and two children, Bill, six, and Emily, five. And he has a grouse. ‘I haven’t seen my kids in the evening ever since the summer holidays,‘ he told me in the neat little parlour of number 36 Bolton Lane. ‘When I get home they’re always in bed. You see, I’m a conductor, on the 11 route, and we’ve been running an hour late regular, ever since the new schedules came in.’”’ Len stopped. ‘See what I mean? There are people driving those buses. They’re more interesting than the buses. Now you go out and find a Frank Donaldson and make that story of yours come alive.’ Cheap stuff, I suppose, corny angles, but that’s journalism and I was in the trade and I did what he told me and my copy began to draw the letters – from the Donaldsons of the neighbourhood and their wives and their mates. And editors seem to love letters. They make a paper look busy and read.

I stayed with the
Clarion
another two years, until I was just over twenty-one, and by then I was getting offers from the Nationals, from the
Express
and the
Mail
, and it seemed to me it was time to get out of S.W.3 and into the world. I was still living with Susan. She had got a job with the Foreign Office in something called ‘Communications’, about which she was very secretive, and she had a boy-friend from the same department and I knew it wouldn’t be long before they got engaged and she would want the whole flat. My own private life was a vacuum – a business of drifting friendships and semi-flirtations from which I always recoiled, and I was in danger of becoming a hard, if successful, little career girl, smoking too many cigarettes and drinking too many vodkas-and-tonics and eating alone out of tins. My gods, or rather goddesses (Katharine Whitehorn and Penelope Gilliatt were outside my orbit), were Drusilla Beyfus, Veronica Papworth, Jean Campbell, Shirley Lord, Barbara Griggs and Anne Sharpley –the top women journalists – and I only wanted to be as good as any of them and nothing else in the world.

And then, at a press show in aid of a Baroque Festival in Munich, I met Kurt Rainer of the V.W.Z.

T
HE RAIN
was still crashing down, its violence unchanged. The eight o’clock news continued its talk of havoc and disaster – a multiple crash on Route 9, railway tracks flooded at Schenectady, traffic at a standstill in Troy, heavy rain likely to continue for several hours. American life is completely dislocated by storms and snow and hurricanes. When American automobiles can’t move, life comes to a halt, and, when their famous schedules can’t be met, they panic and go into a kind of paroxysm of frustration, besieging railway stations, jamming the long-distance wires, keeping their radios permanently switched on for any crumb of comfort. I could imagine the chaos on the roads and in the cities, and I hugged my cosy solitude to me.

My drink was nearly dead. I kept it just alive with some more ice cubes, lit another cigarette, and settled down again in my chair while a disc jockey announced half an hour of Dixieland jazz.

Kurt hadn’t liked jazz. He thought it decadent. He also stopped me smoking and drinking and using lipstick and life became a serious business of art galleries and concerts and lecture halls. As a contrast to my meaningless, rather empty life, it was a welcome change and I dare say the diet of Teutonism appealed to the rather heavy seriousness that underlies the Canadian character.

V.W.Z., the Verband Westdeutscher Zeitungen, was an independent news agency financed by a co-operative of West German newspapers rather on the lines of Reuters. Kurt Rainer was its first representative in London and when I met him he was on the look-out for an English Number two to read the papers and weeklies for items of German interest while he did the high-level diplomatic stuff and covered outside assignments. He took me out to dinner that night, to Schmidts in Charlotte Street, and was rather charmingly serious about the importance of his job and how much it might mean for Anglo-German relationships. He was a powerfully built, outdoor type of young man whose bright fair hair and candid blue eyes made him look younger than his thirty years. He told me that he came from Augsburg, near Munich, and that he was an only child of parents who were both doctors and had both been rescued from a concentration camp by the Americans. They had been informed on and arrested for listening to the Allied radio and for preventing young Kurt from joining the Hitler Youth Movement. He had been educated at Munich High School and at the University, and had then gone into journalism, graduating to
Die Welt
, the leading West German newspaper, from which he had been chosen for this London job because of his good English. He asked me what I did, and the next day I went round to his two-room office in Chancery Lane and showed him some of my work. With typical thoroughness he had already checked up on me through friends at the Press Club, and a week later I found myself installed in the room next to his with the P.A./ Reuter and the Exchange Telegraph tickers chattering beside my desk. My salary was wonderful – thirty pounds a week – and I soon got to love the work, particularly operating the Telex with our
Zentrale
in Hamburg, and the twice-daily rush to catch the morning and evening deadlines of the German papers. My lack of German was only a slight handicap, for, apart from Kurt’s copy which he put over by telephone, all my stuff went over the Telex in English and was translated at the other end, and the Telex operators in Hamburg had enough English to chatter with me when I was on the machine. It was rather a mechanical job, but you had to be quick and accurate and it was fun judging the success or failure of what I sent by the German cuttings that came in a few days later. Soon Kurt had enough confidence to leave me alone in charge of the office, and there were exciting little emergencies I had to handle by myself with the thrill of knowing that twenty editors in Germany were depending on me to be fast and right. It all seemed so much more important and responsible than the parochial trivialities of the
Clarion
, and I enjoyed the authority of Kurt’s directions and decisions, combined with the constant smell of urgency that goes with news agency work.

In due course Susan got married and I moved out to furnished rooms in Bloomsbury Square in the same building as Kurt. I had wondered if this was a good idea, but he was so
korrekt
and our relationship was so
kameradschaftlich
 – words which he constantly employed about social situations – that I thought I was being at least adequately sensible. It was very silly of me. Apart from the fact that Kurt probably misunderstood my easy acceptance of his suggestion that I find a place in his building, it now became natural that we should walk home together from the near-by office. Dinners together became more frequent and, later, to spare the expense, he would bring his gramophone up to my sitting-room and I would cook something for both of us. Of course, I saw the danger and I invented several friends to spend the evening with. But this meant sitting by myself in some cinema after a lonely meal with all the nuisance of men trying to pick one up. And Kurt remained so
korrekt
and our relationship on such a straightforward and even highminded level that my apprehensions came to seem idiotic and more and more I accepted a comradely way of life that seemed not only totally respectable but also adult in the modern fashion. I was all the more confident because, after about three months of this peaceful existence, Kurt, on his return from a visit to Germany, told me that he had become engaged. She was a childhood friend called Trude and, from all he told me, they were ideally suited. She was the daughter of a Heidelberg professor of philosophy, and the placid eyes that stared out of the snapshots he showed me, and the gleaming braided hair and trim dirndl, were a living advertisement for ‘
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
’.

Kurt involved me closely in the whole affair, translating Trude’s letters to me, discussing the number of children they would have, and asking my advice on the decoration of the flat they planned to buy in Hamburg when he had finished his three years’ stint in London and had saved enough money for marriage. I became a sort of Universal Aunt to the two of them, and I would have found the role ridiculous if it hadn’t all seemed quite natural and rather fun – like having two big dolls to play at ‘Weddings’ with. Kurt had even planned their sex life minutely and the details which he insisted, rather perversely, on sharing with me, were at first embarrassing and then, because he was so clinical about the whole subject, highly educative. On the honeymoon in Venice (all Germans go to Italy for their honeymoons) they would of course do it every night because, Kurt said, it was most important that ‘the act’ should be technically perfect and, to achieve this, much practice was necessary. To this end, they would have a light dinner, because a full stomach was not desirable, and they would retire not later than eleven o’clock because it was important to have at least eight hours’ sleep ‘to recharge the batteries’. Trude, he said, was unawakened and inclined to be ‘kühl’ sexually, while he was of a passionate temperament. So there would have to be much preliminary sex-play to bring the curve of her passion up to his. This would need restraint on his part, and in this matter he would have to be firm with himself, for as he told me, it was essential to a happy marriage that the climax should be reached simultaneously by the partners. Only thus could the thrilling summits of
Ekstase
become the equal property of both. After the honeymoon they would sleep together on Wednesdays and Saturdays. To do it more often would weaken his ‘batteries’ and might reduce his efficiency at the ‘Büro’. All this Kurt illustrated with a wealth of most explicit scientific words and even with diagrams and drawings done on the table-cloth with a fork.

The lectures, for such they were, convinced me that Kurt was a lover of quite exceptional finesse, and I admit I was fascinated and rather envious of the well-regulated and thoroughly hygienic delights that were being prepared for Trude. There were many nights when I longed for these experiences to be mine, and for someone to play upon me also like, as Kurt put it, ‘a great violinist playing upon his instrument’. And it was inevitable, I suppose, that in my dreams it was Kurt who came to me in that role – so safe, so gentle, so deeply understanding of a woman’s physical needs.

The months passed and gradually the tone and frequency of Trude’s letters began to change. It was I who noticed it first, but I said nothing. There were more frequent and sharper complaints about the length of the waiting period, the tender passages became more perfunctory, and the pleasures of a summer holiday on the Tegernsee, where Trude had met up with a ‘happy group’, after a first ecstatic description, were, significantly I thought, not mentioned again. And then, after three weeks of silence from Trude, Kurt came up to my rooms one evening, his face pale and wet with tears. I was lying on the sofa, reading, and he fell on his knees beside me and buried his head on my breast. It was all over, he said between sobs. She had met another man, at the Tegernsee of course, a doctor from Munich, a widower. He had proposed to her and she had accepted. It had been love at first sight. Kurt must understand that such a thing only happened once in a girl’s lifetime. He must forgive her and forget her. She was not good enough for him. (Ah! That shabby phrase again!) They must remain honourable friends. The marriage was to take place next month. Kurt must try and wish her well. Farewell, your abject Trude.

Kurt’s arms were round me and he was holding me desperately. ‘Now I have only you,’ he said through his sobs. ‘You must be kind. You must give me comfort.’

I smoothed his hair as maternally as I could, wondering how to escape from his embrace, yet at the same time being melted by the despair of this strong man and by his dependence on me. I tried to make my voice sound matter-of-fact. ‘Well, if you ask me, it was a lucky escape. Any girl as changeable as that would not have made you a good wife. There are many other better girls in Germany. Come on, Kurt.’ I struggled to sit up. ‘We’ll go out to dinner and a cinema. It will take your mind off things. It’s no good crying over spilt milk. Come on!’ I freed myself rather breathlessly and we both got to our feet.

Kurt hung his head. ‘Ah, but you are good to me, Viv. You are a real friend in need – 
eine echte Kameradin
. And you are right. I must not behave like a weakling. You will be ashamed of me. And that I could not bear.’ He gave me a tortured smile and went to the door and let himself out.

Only two weeks later we were lovers. It was somehow inevitable. I had half known it would be, and I did nothing to dodge my fate. I was not in love with him, and yet we had grown so close in so many other ways that the next step of sleeping together was bound, inexorably, to follow. The details were really quite dull. The occasional friendly kiss on the cheek, as if to a sister, came by degrees closer to my mouth and one day was on it. There was a pause in the campaign while I came to take this kind of kiss for granted, then came the soft assault on my breasts and then on my body, all so pleasurable, so calm, so lacking in drama, and then, one evening in my sitting-room, the slow stripping of my body ‘because I must see how beautiful you are’, the feeble, almost languorous protests, and then the scientific operation that had been prepared for Trude. And how delicious it was, in the wonderful privacy of my own room! How safe, how unhurried, how reassuring the precautions! And how strong and gentle Kurt was, and of all things to associate with love-making, how divinely polite! A single flower after each time, the room tidied after each passionate ecstasy, studious correctness in the office and before other people, never a rough or even a dirty word – it was like a series of exquisite operations by a surgeon with the best bedside manners in the world. Of course, it was all rather impersonal. But I liked that. It was sex without involvement or danger, a delicious heightening of the day’s routine which each time left me sleek and glowing like a pampered cat.