Afleveringen
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Chapter 99
The siren jolted Tom from sleep. His body twisted on his little cot. His brain was scalded with exhaustion. He flew ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. He closed his eyes at night, and saw his trembling windshield, felt the shaking of his seat as he opened fire, jerked his head involuntarily as his bullets chewed bits of metal off Nazi aeroplanes. When he slept, he dreamt of flying. It felt as if he had closed his eyes for only a few minutes when the siren started up again. Sometimes, he dreamt of the siren, and even in his sleep, he was afraid that the siren was really going off, and he was losing precious minutes of altitude and interception.
Tom was one of three thousand fighter pilots. Modern warfare had come down to such tiny numbers. Three thousand knights of the air who threw themselves into the sky as a shield against the oncoming German air force, the Luftwaffe.
For the first time in his life, Tom knew complete rage. He had been afraid for so many years that it was a blessed relief to have something tangible and evil to shoot at. He had joined the Royal Air Force in November, 1938, the day after his conversation with Gunther about radar. He met a few of his former students, who wondered what had taken him so long. He contacted a secret tribe he had always dreamed of; men his own age who knew that there was going to be war, and ignored or found amusing the endless antics of the appeasers. Tom was utterly humbled by their courage. They had all read reports about the hopelessness and doom of modern aerial combat. They knew nothing of the existence of radar, but they were unafraid. Tom met two young men who had been present at his great debate at Oxford in 1933, who had voted for the resolution to refrain from fighting for King and Country. One of them was abashed and shamefaced. The other just laughed and said: “Oh, but I’m still not fighting for King and Country. At the time, King and Country were appeasers. Still are. And I still refuse to fight for them. Now, I fight for myself. I am just sad that I shall be saving them as well.”
They were mostly children of the lower middle classes – very few came from England’s elite schools.
There were some refugees from the Continent. By far the most skilled pilots were the Poles. They had a careless sort of courage which allowed them to perform maneuvers which took Tom’s breath away. They did ‘victory rolls’ when returning from combat – one roll for each German plane shot down, which none of the British pilots had the stomach for. To do a victory roll when you didn’t know what sort of structural damage your aeroplane had sustained in combat..? Ugh!
But they were the highest-scoring pilots. Some of the British were good – Lock, Bader, Lacey, Lane – but more than eighty percent of the pilots had never even shot at an enemy plane. This was partly luck – finding enemy planes in the endless blue was very, very hard. And even if you found them, they were so easy to lose again. It happened all the time. One moment, the sky was full of planes; the next, it was empty, and you had to go home alone.
The battle was hard. Very hard. You flew far more than you fought. But the RAF had some significant tactical advantages. They had more fuel for fighting – the Messerschmidt BF109 fighters could only spend half an hour over England before having to turn back to France. The Spitfires had a tighter turning radius than the 109s, and so could get into a kind of ‘spiral’ turning war with the German fighters, inching closer to a good firing position with every loop...
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Chapter 92
Ruth was not by nature a confrontational person, and she agonized over her decision to confront her husband for over a week. It was, for her – and quite literally – the worst thing in the world. Something about demanding something from him – enforcing her will – made her feel as if she were hanging from a frayed rope over an endless chasm.
And what was worse, the events at Munich – which she followed daily in the newspaper – were forcing her to act, and act now. The endless excuses of procrastination were being overshadowed by the need to do something now, immediately, before the time was lost. It’s now or never, she kept thinking, and ruminated for a long time on the last word… Because the ‘never’ has already been happening for twenty years. The ‘never’ is not in the future, but was in the past…
Every time she made a decision, or fixed a time, she shied away. The confrontation and herself were like opposing magnets. The more effort she put into bringing them together, the more they seemed to fly apart.
Her attitude wasn’t helping. After enough time, even badly-married couples can hide very little from each other. She was nervous, and prone to outbursts, headaches, and speaking out of turn. It seemed impossible to confront him. She must confront him.
It had a lot to do with Tom. Ruth knew, in her heart, that she would not see him unless she acted. Oh, she might see him at family functions – or even have the odd, stiff lunch – but it would never be the same again. Never be as it once was. When he was her secret, lovely heart. But it was more than that. It was about much more than Tom. I want to exist before I die, she thought.
But Quentin was always busy, and Ruth didn’t want to warn him of what was coming. If she went to him and said: I need to speak with you about something of great importance tomorrow at seven p.m., he would be tipped off, and all would be lost. He would be busy, or distracted, or would have time to think up some sort of counter-scheme…
And – and he would need time to think. This was the worst part, the part that caused her to bite her nails to the bone. But I cannot give him time to think! It will all be over then! I must force him! I must force him!
To do what? was her first thought. But that was quickly resolved by the newspaper. To oppose Munich. To change sides. To join Churchill and – and Gunther…
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Chapter 84
Ruth vomited, the precious scrap of paper clutched in her fist. She did not keep quiet. She did not hold her hair back. Her customary terror of germs was gone. She was an animal trying to purge a poison.
When she had returned with Catherine from Uxbridge’s little room, she had been struck down by a terrible suspicion. She was no stranger to avoiding her own thoughts, but this one smashed through her defenses like a thundering locomotive through an opening-day ribbon.
When did my brothers die?
They died in 1915. In the summer. Quentin signed for the grenades in the summer of 1915. They were not terribly far from each other. The middle of France. None of her three brothers were in the same outfit; the Army didn’t want to risk wiping out entire bloodlines.
And, strangely enough, the thought had struck Ruth with a grim certainty. She did not imagine that it would be anything other than what it turned out to be. It would be one of them, or… Or… The thought was striking, insistent. Or there was never any reason for you to have stayed in bed…
But that made no sense. How could she have known? My guilt was entirely about my father, she thought blindly, vomiting once more. My betrayal of my husband, my love for and hatred of Gunther, my complicity in the coming of war… I knew nothing about Quentin’s guilt. I knew nothing about what he had done during the war. I could not stand to ask – and now, I know, he could not stand to tell me…
But all lost lives are lived in the shadows of silence. Active silence. Silence that is a turning away. When you cover your eyes, you cover your mouth. And your heart. Your soul.
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BOOK THREE
Chapter 81
Runciman was almost too much for Reginald to bear.
Cuthbert had had his faults, but had been able to rouse himself to some sort of passion about British interests and international affairs. Runciman was almost to urbane to draw breath. He smoked endlessly, through a long black cigarette holder. He had lazy eyes, a long nose and a tiny moustache. He was imperturbable. He yawned when their aeroplane had hit a chilly downdraft over some mountains. Reginald was used to yawns from Cuthbert, but this was quite another matter. Cuthbert’s indifference had been an affectation. Runciman’s was innate.
On the aeroplane, Runciman had made things very clear to Reginald.
“You see, my boy, it’s quite simple. All our negotiation will be a show. We’ve already talked to the German Foreign Office and asked them to give us a list of their demands. We’ve assured them that we are going to press Benes into two dimensions to accept them. Classic diplomacy. We go, we lie, we return. We hint to Hitler what we might do – fight. We hint to Benes what we might not do.” Another yawn. “Fi-ight.”
As Runciman dozed, Reginald’s hands kept wandering over the armrests of his humming seat. The image of his tiny little brother, in a garden shed, turning blue, kept coming back to him. It was accompanied by a question, which he tried to bat away with all the mental hands he could summon, which was enough for a hall-full of riotous applause.
But the question made it through anyway:
What am I doing here?
He glanced over at Runciman’s dozing profile. He saw that the older man had fallen asleep holding a cigarette, still burning in its holder, between two fingers. Reginald reached out and took it, to put it out.
“I say, old fellow,” murmured Runciman, not opening his eyes. “You want one, just ask.”
“Sorry,” said Reginald. “I thought you were done.”
Runciman grunted, turning to the window. Reginald stabbed out the cigarette. He remembered a time, as an undergraduate, when he had tried to smoke for a week, and had been driving when his cigarette fell from his lips into his groin, scalding his testicles, and he had felt trapped panic at his need to keep his eyes on the road, as well as to stop the burning…
Reginald sighed, closing his eyes. If I ever figure out the point of these random little visions…
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Chapter 75
Tom had never seen such joy, and it was a terrible thing to behold.
Even the German troops were taken aback. Crowds of men, women and children lined the streets, screaming themselves hoarse. Shimmering clouds of flower petals rained down on the armed columns, like unicoloured butterflies.
He was watching the parade from the balcony of the British Embassy, with Sir Palairet. The Ambassador was in silent tears. Tom was not far behind.
“The strangest thing,” murmured Sir Palairet, “is that they genuinely believe that they are being liberated.”
“No Jews,” said Tom, looking for yarmulkes in the crowd.
“No, but they haven’t left. They think that… Oh, I don’t know what they think.”
“Where in Europe would they go? Can’t go East. Can’t go West.” Tom sighed. “I don’t know why they’re so happy.”
“Race…”
“Why do they care about race?”
“It’s what failures cling to. So they don’t have to do anything to be special.”
“This is more than the work of failures,” said Tom with a shudder. “This is something far darker. Deeper. Older.”
“Well, we handed it to them, didn’t we?” asked Sir Palairet sadly. He could not tear his eyes away from the procession.
“How?”
“We told them that a country was defined by culture. By race. By history. By… language.” He almost seemed to spit out the last word.
“What do you think a country is defined by?”
“The good,” said Sir Palairet softly.
The word was almost lost among the clatter of boots and the clashing of arms, but it hit Tom solidly, in the solar plexus. The good…
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Chapter 70
A child can go down, into the depths of parental numbness. It doesn’t matter how old the child is, or the parent. The umbilical is sometimes a lifeline, thrown to the future, with which a mother can hope to haul herself up the well of her own dying. And children can so rarely tear themselves from around that well. A parent present, but absent, can be the bottomless quicksand of an entire lifetime.
Tom thought about his mother’s revelation long and hard. It consumed him. Invaded him. He thought about it before going to sleep. He dreamt about it. It greeted him on awakening, during the instant evolution of abandoning sleep. I am a carbon-based life form. I am human. I am Tom. I am not my father’s son.
He briefly considered writing to Gunther, but got stuck on the salutation. Dear… And it really should be something they talked about face-to-face.
It became more and more important, because in the weeks after the Rhineland crisis, Ruth seemed to go down even further. Something was gnawing at the root of her soul, and Tom knew that it wouldn’t be long until that root would give way, and she would fall further, into the numb, floating center of the earth.
The lengths of his responsibilities gnawed at him as well. Tom began to truly hate Quentin. It was not a resentful hatred. It was not just reactive. He hated both Quentin and Reginald, because they provoked suffering and then stood by with slight smiles as it writhed at their feet. They weakened people with scorn and indifference, then turned them over with their toes to mock their weakness. It’s like knocking someone down, then calling them lazy for lying around…
He felt some frustration with his mother as well, but much, much less. It is always harder to pin responsibility on the feminine. Ruth was not free; not politically, not economically, not socially. She had been forced to make a choice – by society, biology, it didn’t matter which – in the full blindness of youth, when her future was almost completely unconscious, and so inevitable.
Tom wept on waking one morning, thinking of his mother’s potential, and felt that he had come as close as he ever had to the root of her depression. She is a wonderful political wife. She is very intelligent. She is moral, quite moral, in her own way. She chose her husband for all the shallow, impractical reasons of youth. She was passionate – imagine her having an affair, then covering it up, then being so full of anger that she denounced her lover at every step. The will to keep such secrets..! For they were kept, and magnificently too! To have Gunther in our house, during the war… My God – I wonder if they made love that rainy day, when Reginald refused to put the destroyer away, when Gunther locked him away… She had a headache, and he ordered her back to bed. And Quentin let it all happen. Quentin had no idea – unless, of course, Quentin did have an idea, but felt that it assuaged something. Took responsibility away from him. To make her happy. And, of course, Quentin has secrets of his own. You can almost smell his secrets; they waft from his pores like spices left damp and underground…
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Chapter 68
Klaus was astounded at the amount of human energy that can be released by pushing all conflicts into the unconscious.
He was an educated man; he knew that the Nazis represented a radical break with European traditions – but then, Germany had never really been a part of Europe anyway. That Europe. The Europe he had studied in England. The Europe of reason and compromise and all the natural difficulties of different viewpoints. In Germany, there were no different viewpoints. There was one note; you could play it loud, or soft.
Klaus had been out of Germany for six years. When he had returned, he had mostly stayed at his father’s house. He had spent a little time in the larger cities – mostly Berlin and Hamburg, but they became depressing as the Depression worsened. His city friends had scattered with the onset of Nazism; a few had fled, most had joined. His local friends – the rural idiots, he called them – were largely indifferent to politics. They were happy that the Nazis were in power, because they got to keep their farms, which had been mortgaged to the hilt during the Depression, when it was impossible to make a living from honest crops. But such city matters as freedom of the press didn’t trouble them much.
In his new ‘Nazi experiment,’ Klaus had tried talking to them about Hitler, but it didn’t do any good. It was quite fascinating, and he found it hard to avoid the alienating contempt of the intellectual. They could only see politics in the most local, tangible and practical of terms. They cared nothing for freedom, the Reichstag or the death of the Republic. They wanted good rains and dependable insurance. They wanted their sons to work and their daughters to get married. They wanted to go to church and sit with a pipe. They wanted to know the words to every song that could be sung. They were the rhythm of the land, of the seasons, of the decades between birth, marriage and re-birth. When he was younger, Klaus thought that they might be wise, in their own slow, stolid way. But now, he knew that it was not so. Extend that principle, he thought, and trees become sages.
The Nazis were a curious bunch. Klaus could never quite decide if they believed their own propaganda or not. They would seem to – some at the salon evenings at Count Orsky’s were most passionate on this point – but in their very next breath, they could as easily say that all these lies were only designed for the masses, and that whoever swallowed such idiotic bait was utterly unsophisticated. Klaus could not follow their transitions.
Another curious item was the Nazi’s ability to combine a hatred of authority with an absolute allegiance to the Fuhrer. When Klaus, early on, began to point out some of the contradictions inherent in the Nazi theory of life and history, he was reviled. Any attempt to bring the authority of logic or experience on their beliefs was considered more insulting than a physical attack. They hated external authorities, but crawled before the image of Hitler without a thought. Most odd...
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Chapter 63
In October 1935, Mussolini’s Grand Army crossed the border into Abyssinia. This land had been independent since the days of King Solomon. It was the only African country to successfully resist European invasion in the nineteenth century.
The Italians had modern aeroplanes, tanks and flame-throwers. The Abyssinians had war-drums, camels and twelve obsolete biplanes. The Italians used poison gas and bombed Red Cross hospitals. The League of Nations applied some sanctions, but not enough to stop the war. The British let oil and coal sail through the British-controlled Suez canal. The French sold oil to the Italians. The League forbade arms sales to either side.
The Abyssinians were slaughtered.
Cuthbert was outraged.
It was the first time any of his employees had seen him anything other than bored and distemperate. It made them all panic. Each of them ran around, feeling the weight of the Abyssinian crisis as he had been directly responsible for it. Cuthbert acted as if he had been against the League of Nations from the start, but had been overruled by his underlings – and now had the full magisterial right of a man who had given good but unheeded advice.
The truth was that the FO was in quite a bind, and Cuthbert felt it most keenly. Throughout his career, he had been in the position of unequalled expert. His detailed knowledge was consulted, deferred to, sought after and never questioned. His position was a kind of weapon; his heavy, bludgeoning personality saw that it never went unused.
But now, things were crawling out into the open. The British public – largely due to propaganda coming out of the FO – were almost fetishistically enamoured of the League of Nations. The League of Nations served Cuthbert perfectly, because he could blame the other members if a British initiative failed, and take personal credit if something succeeded. The greatest engine of the mortal world is the drive to avoid responsibility and fuel vanity. The League of Nations was popular with the people because it served the vanities of the leaders.
Cuthbert was in a very privileged position, and this position was directly threatened by Mussolini. He was the chief civil servant under Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Cuthbert had seen quite a few ministers stumble through the FO – it did not tend to attract the best and brightest – and had loved them all. They had the microphones and interviews, but spoke little but what Cuthbert wanted them to say. The word ‘democracy’ always made him smile. Ministers who went against the policy of the civil service – surely a more permanent and skilled layer – found unpleasant information leaked to the newspapers, or were given poor advice which got them kicked out. In the palaces of power, the civil service were neither king, queen or courtier, but oxygen. An invisible, unfelt substance on which all pomp and power depended.
Being a great civil servant required two things, according to Cuthbert. One had to be very certain, and very patient. “The great virtue of the civil service,” he would say, “is that we are not subject to the vagaries of public opinion. We are the ballast of the ship of state.”
He was not a great fan of democracy, except insofar as the illusion of participation created the moral requirement of obedience. “They vote in the figureheads,” he smiled, “and we tell them what to do. If they succeed, they preen. If not, they leave. But we remain. We always remain.”
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Tom Returns
The size of the crowd was completely unbelievable. Tom had never seen even a tenth of the number in any single place. Tens of thousands of people milled, surged, boiled and cascaded down streets like broken rivers. They changed directions madly, contradictorily, but in strangely consistent patterns, like the flights of small birds in high winds. Many of the protesters had curled lips and out-thrust jaws, and carried bats or sticks or knives or axes. It was medieval; torches flowed up over the crowd like the bright spurting blood of headless devils. The steam of the crowd’s hot breath surrounded the flames, giving the fires a swirling, ghostly base.
The voices of the crowd rose and fell. Tom asked every English-speaker for the latest news, the safest routes. The rumours flew that the government had brought in tanks and cannons to break up the crowd – and even that aeroplanes were being flown in from the military airport to strafe the streets. Everyone was ready to be outraged, violated, to enact the blackest acts of vengeance. Cries of horror and rage swept through the crowd. Tom tried to follow them, with his mind’s eye. He imagined that one man had been injured somehow, and howled out. The crowd, imagining that this was the first ‘whiff of grapeshot,’ or strafing airplanes, or rolling machine-guns, became panicked and hostile. More and more took up the screams of terror and rage, and they swept through the mob, which surged to defend the stricken and avenge the fallen. The crushing crowd caused more casualties, and it took some time for the crowd to understand that, in its zeal to protect life, it was actually taking it.
The bodies would become so tightly packed – and this could happen at any time – that Tom sometimes found that he was pressed up against someone who was grievously injured. One lolling face turned, missing an eye. Another man was missing an arm from the elbow down; his face was pale, rapt. Twice, Tom pushed back at bodies squeezing him tight, only to realize, with a feeling as if he had received an electrical shock, that they were dead men, just being carried along.
More base hands were also at work, both for material and sexual profit. Tom gave up trying to protect his watch, his wallet and his genitals at the same time.
There was a constant cross-current through the crowd, which is what made it so crushing and insistent. There was always some imagined front, where atrocities were being committed and vengeance could be had. The recreational protesters were always trying to get away from these fronts, while the political ones were always trying to get to them.
There was, most of all, a sense of invincibility among the crowd. Tom realized why Rousseau had titled his book ‘The Social Contract,’ because that cold February night, it was clear that here were several tens of thousands of people who simply refused to be ruled. And so they could not be ruled. It didn’t take much. Tens of millions of people in France. Tens of thousands – a tenth of a percent – decide to refuse to be ruled, and it all comes crashing down. Government is an illusion of acceptance, thought Tom. Leaders who forget the fragility of their power can destroy the world…
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Tom Convinces Hart
Tom thought long and hard about going to the continent again. He felt a great excitement in his belly at the very prospect. No, he thought, not ‘going’ to the continent – flying to the continent!
All thoughts of Jacqueline vanished from his mind for the next two days – except for the occasional burst of self-congratulation about having made the right decision. He made long lists of things he needed, and planned possible routes, determining how and when to stop to pick up fuel and more money.
The current crop of pilots were due to graduate in four weeks. When Tom entered the classroom, he was greatly surprised – and slightly alarmed – to see Jacqueline sitting in her usual seat. His eyes raked over her, to see if she had dressed up – or down – to impress or frighten him. She returned his gaze without guile. He felt the force of her will, and suddenly remembered that she was the kind of woman who could sit in a class of men without fear.
After the class, she remained sitting while the others filed out.
He felt sad, suddenly, after everyone had left, and she was alone, staring at him, her books stacked neatly in front of her.
“I don’t mean to alarm you, Tom, but I don’t accept your reasons.”
Her voice was even. Tom nodded slowly.
“I don’t hand myself over to men. I’m not a party favour. Or a conquest.” She smiled. “And if I felt that, even a little, I would curse myself and never speak up. But I wasn’t a conquest, was I?”
Tom shook his head.
“No, I was much more than that. I was – the possibility of love. Not that quick, not that way, we were both greedy. But the possibility.”
“If I didn’t think that,” said Tom, “I wouldn’t have said what I said.”
Her lips pursed so tight it looked painful.
“Sorry,” said Tom. “I don’t want to be cryptic.”
“A friend of mine had her bloke sleep with another woman, and he tried to convince her that he did it out of love for her. Don’t be that bloke.”
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Wendy Finds Out She Is Pregnant Again
The feeling hit Wendy with a dull, cavernous shock. She thought that, if a railway carriage were sentient, it would feel this way, when coupled with a locomotive.
She was on the toilet. Her period was late. She knew.
She felt nothing but that shock. A man gets a job, she thought, which will pay him well, but which he does not want… Or, more likely, a man gets conscripted for a war to defend another man’s homeland…
She shrugged, then laughed, rubbing her forehead. Time to pop out another one, breeder. Tom’s face rose in her mind, and she felt a strange starfish of pain deep within her.
She had been fantasizing about Tom for some time. It was quite gruesome, actually. Greek. Incestuous. She fought with Tom, overtly or covertly, every time they met. She found herself forever driven to test him.
It was very primitive. Wendy needed to be sure that the man she desired could never be broken. Never ever. So she had to test him. Forever. I mean – what if he has gotten weak overnight?
The ‘why’ of the testing was never really explored. She had, lost in the hedge-rows of her hidden heart, one of the deep secrets of femininity, which is a bottomless pool of acidic contempt for male weakness. In Wendy’s world, English men were like England itself – a sinking island surrounded by this rising sea...
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Tom Wakes Up With Jacqueline
Tom stared at Jacqueline as she slept.
I have always been a blubberer, he thought. So, why on earth am I not crying now?
The answer was not long in coming.
Because you have been weak, Tommy…
He nodded slowly. He could barely see her face in the dim, pre-dawn light. Her dark hair was a perfect black; her cheek a faint haze of gray. He wondered just what she was dreaming about. She could be flying in her mind, but is still to me…
A violent wave of sexual desire rocked his body. Tom remembered every detail of the night before. A great mystery had been solved for him.
For as long as he could remember, he had wondered about the moment of Sexual Will. The women he had bedded in university had all been conquests of one kind or another. They had been blinded by his athletic prowess or good looks. They had felt honoured to be going out with him. But still, at the end of every evening, he had felt the moment of Sexual Will, where he had made the decisive move which would result in either acceptance or rejection. Most times, it was acceptance. Nonetheless, it was still a frightening moment, when he let his fingertips tickle a woman’s ear in a motion-picture house, or let his lips rest on the little depression between one of her knuckles.
None of that had happened with Jacqueline.
Tom had missed the company of women. He had been so damn polarized in his youth, between Catherine and his mother (and it did not escape his attention that he generally thought of them in that sequence: ‘Catherine and his mother’) – that he either bedded pretty women, or was fast friends with plain ones. The concept of ‘sexy female friend’ was rather beyond him.
Tom’s womanizing – which had been fairly extensive, but not compulsive – had left him sated but unsatisfied. To his great discredit, he had been rather blasé about it at times. “One enjoys a great meal,” he said, once to Hart. “One does not marry the chef.” (This had been rather cruel to Hart, who had no idea, so to speak, how to even get to the restaurant district.) He felt physical excitement, the thrill of the explorer trekking across new flesh, and truly enjoyed displaying his sexual prowess. He loved the little sighs and coos of surprise he was able to wring from a woman. He loved undermining their prudery with unprecedented licking and unknown angles. In bed, as in life, Tom was a sportsman to the hilt.
But last night had been something quite different. The moment of Sexual Will had, he realized in hindsight, actually been Jacqueline’s. She had put her hand on his forearm twice, and had consciously applauded his return of her caress.
He had wanted to kiss her all at once, to forestall something, if felt. But he had sensed that whatever his rush of desire wanted to forestall was a good thing, which should be experienced. So he continued to talk and listen to her, and something began to mount in his chest. Some sort of wonderful floating spiritual thing which was utterly beyond the flesh. Not alien to it – just beyond it. The body is the pedestal whose base goes to the center of the world. Love is the statue which reaches beyond the sky…
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The Night of the Long Knives
After Tom left Germany, Klaus fell into a depression. He felt as if he were at the bottom of a deep pit, and his friend had just levitated to safety and light. And around him, large pincers were sliding out of a crumbling wall.
Tom had wondered about Klaus’s relationship to Nazism. Klaus wondered this as well. He did not respect reason as an absolute, and so was deeply, tragically susceptible to passion. When reason falls, whoever screams the loudest will rise. It is an iron law.
Klaus did not believe in the supremacy of objective reason, and so he had no choice but to take an anthropological and fate-based approach to his own society. What was ‘right’ was whatever happened. Nothing could be opposed in the face of passion. How could he question passion? With what faculty would he oppose it? More passion? But Klaus was an intellectual, and not given to screaming fits. If he proved that a Nazi’s reasoning was illogical, that meant nothing. Reason was not the essence of life. It was dry, analytic, illusory. It did not touch the heart of things. Only emotions were essential. Reason was an invention of man. Emotions were given by God, the World Spirit, the Essential Animal. Reason divided men. Only passion could unite. Reason was boring. Passion was pleasure! Human reason was limited, pointless. Individual emotions were the endless movements of the Collective Soul.
The rejection of reason also sped up the decision-making process. Rather than get tied down into endless chattering debate – as in the Weimar Republic – the most passionate voice would always win the day. And, to be frank (and this was always understood implicitly), if arguments got out of hand, violence could always resolve matters. And why not? A man willing to maim and kill for a course of action was clearly the most passionate, the most committed to it. And if he won the day, then certainly the World Spirit was behind him. Might was right. Actually, ‘right’ had ceased to exist. ‘Might’ just was.
Now when the terrors of competing tribes descend upon helpless humanity, all the oldest instincts come into play. When dangerous hordes roam the land, individuals begin casting about for a protective group. Klaus fervently hoped that it would not come to that. But things did not look good.
On the night of January 30, 1933, endless columns of torch-bearing Nazi Stormtroopers marched through all the major cities of Germany. They had two main missions in the months that followed: show their might, and destroy the Fuhrer’s enemies. They had pillaged the offices of the Socialist, Fascist, Nationalist and Communist parties, and gathered the names of all members. After that, it was open season. On February 28, the parliamentary Reichstag was set on fire. The Nazis used the event as an excuse for the most bloody persecutions. Herman Goering was in charge of the Prussian police, and he gave them the authority to shoot without consequences. He attached to the police thousands of young Nazis as Hilfspolizi – ‘assistant police’ – and then pointed them at the Communists and Socialists. On March 2, Wilhelm Frick passed Schutzhaft – protective custody – which gave the police powers to imprison citizens without trial or cause, in the newly-formed concentration camps. Hindenburg – then still the titular head of state – suspended civil liberties after the Reichstag fire. Citizens no longer had freedom of the press, of speech, of association or protection from arbitrary arrest...
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Tom’s Flying School
Within six months, Tom had to hire a secretary. He did not have a natural head for figures or schedules, but had found an activity he loved so much that his natural charisma – already strong – flowed even faster and deeper.
He loved to fly. He had graduated from gliders quite quickly. He received his pilot’s license within two months of returning from Germany; three months after that, he was a certified instructor.
He was self-financed. In January of 1934, he bought a new Beechcraft Staggerwing biplane. He advertised around town on lampposts, and flew a sign behind his aeroplane over horse-races, upper-class picnics and garden parties, hoping to snag young men with bravado and trust funds. The sign read:
“First Flight Free! Fly the wild skies! Hendon 4576.”
And they came. They came, at first, out of curiosity, to say that they had been up in an aeroplane. But Tom knew, from his days as an athlete, how important the element of dash was in presentation. So he let his hair grow longer, bought a number of white silk scarves, two creaky leather bomber jackets, and let his stubble grow artfully. He allowed a little more ‘Oxford’ into his accent, and cultivated a fairly dashing demeanour of ‘what was swotting at school compared to buzzing around above the clouds?’ Envy and charisma are two crucial ingredients in early entrepreneurial sales; Tom had natural charm, and could evoke great envy.
One other ingredient also helped to bring great early success his way, and that was his sense of doom.
Death is the ultimate liberator; that is one of life’s deepest secrets. Tom genuinely believed that he had – and the civilized world had – only about five more years to live. He had come to this conclusion – or, rather, his instincts gave him this timeframe – but he found that he was not alone in this. He read in ‘The Times’ that the Defense Requirements Committee felt the same way; they said that Germany was England’s eventual enemy, and that Germany would probably be ready for war in about five years...
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Tom’s Rage
It was some months before Tom and Reginald saw each other again. Both were tempted to write letters to each other, to luxuriate in the bitter monomania of delivered and unanswerable absolutes. Reginald started one such letter many times, hoping to achieve a regal tone of magnanimous injury. No matter how many times he tried, a raging tone of public humiliation kept cropping up. But he kept at it, and his last draft – which he finally sent – went thus:
February 2, 1935
Dear Tom:
I am writing in the hopes that something might be salvaged from our relationship. For reasons I do not pretend to understand, we have always had a strained intimacy. I have done what I could to ease this tension. I always did my best to help you in school. I introduced you to a good social set. I helped you swot. I always advanced your cause – even when, as so often happened, others criticized you heavily.
Tom, it was not my fault that you had to leave Oxford. This seems a point so obvious that it should scarcely need restating, but it seems to have escaped your attention. I have always had your best interests at heart. I have no idea how to convince you of this. You seem so obsessed with thinking the worst of me – and anyone like me – that anything I could say on this point would be pointless. You have your own fixed ideas; I will not dignify them by pretending that they have anything to do with me.
It is also probably not worth re-stating that the entire family is very anxious about you. Mother in particular worries herself sick about your future. Father seems to have given up on you. I try to plead your case, but he refuses to discuss it, and as yet I have been unable to make any headway.
Tom, please try to understand this much at least. We are worried about you because we love you. We are not trying to control you, corner you, force you to do anything or ‘inhibit’ your personality. We just believe that sitting in a room and stewing in endless resentment at the vicissitudes of life is a very poor way to conduct one’s affairs.
All is not lost. It is entirely possible that your talents – which are not inconsiderable – might not go entirely to waste. Through my influence at the Foreign Office, I would be more than happy to arrange for a clerking position of some kind. Though the starting salary and position would be poor, it is my belief that, as long as you keep your tendency to self-pity and physical aggression in check, you could rise in time.
We are not all built for world affairs. Just as I accepted my limitations in your spheres – athletics, womanizing – I invite you to accept your own limitations. We cannot ever be everything we think we can be – or fantasize that we have the ability to become. You are human. You are mortal. You have limitations. You cannot excel everywhere. Life is not an endless rowing race.
As for our recent political debacle, I would be remiss in my duty to truth and honour if I did not tell you, honestly and openly, that I consider your behaviour utterly despicable. To hijack a public debate of mine – one which was important for my career – for the sake of exposing your own ill-informed apocalyptic ramblings – is something that, upon reflection, I can never forget, or forgive. The only chance that we have for any kind of relationship in the future is for this to become a completely closed subject. I shall never speak to you of it. I do not hope that you are capable of respecting my wishes – all I will say is that if you attempt to speak to me of it, I shall leave the room, leave your life, and never return.
With all hopes for the future – and looking forward to some kind of reasonable response – I remain
Your brother
Reginald...
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Tom’s Last Night at the Heppners
It was going to be impossible to sleep. There could be no doubt of that. Tom lay in his little room. It was neither hot nor cold.
One thought seemed unalterable, inescapable, and depressing beyond words.
I can never return to England.
Oh, he could go back. He would go back. As soon as possible. But his England, the England before Germany, before Hitler, the England of a little room and a lot of books, of napping and thinking and watching the slow sway of sunlight against his window – why that England was dead and gone. Worse than that – it was a fairy tale, or Santa Claus, which had never been real except in his imagination. His fantasy, more like.
But – and he had to be honest with himself about this – there was a certain measure of relief. The foreboding he had felt – from when exactly? – well, for a long time, certainly – had broken at last. News anticipated is always worse than news delivered. He could not act in the face of uncertainty, of ambivalence, of fears without clear or traceable causes.
But now the world is acting upon me, and my choices are no longer what they were. They are, perhaps, what I always thought they would be.
Some part of him said: but perhaps there will not be war.
And of course, there might not be. Nothing was inevitable in a world without God, the world he had inherited from his mother. Nothing was inevitable to British rationalism, not in the same way as German mysticism. He thought that Renata was really railing against God, the God who had allowed Hitler into power. She was railing against an inevitability, against something foreordained. She railed against it, but could never fight it. One does not pit oneself against the infinite. All she could do was rail against her son, imagining that God might not have punished them with Hitler if he had fought against Nazism more. But now that Hitler was here, they had to accept God’s will…
Tom reached around, plumped up his tough little pillow, propped it up against the headboard, and sat up, turning to look out the narrow window.
The countryside was dark; there only a tiny sliver of a moon. Tom imagined, for a moment, that the moon was finally showing its dark side, and that silver would never return to its face. But then he almost snarled at himself. The time for bad poetry is past. Fuck metaphors. Their day is done, for the foreseeable future at least. The moon is just the moon. We must not sing its praises, but arm and hunt under its simple light. It is not the face of a lover, but a rock which reflects the sun. It does not illuminate our hopes, but our prey…
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Reginald’s Interview with Cuthbert
When Reginald first entered Cuthbert’s office, at eight-thirty a.m. sharp, he blinked. At first almost inconspicuously, and then far more violently. It seemed, to him, that either his own eyes had melted somewhat, or that the office was made of a kind of wax that could not sustain its own weight when exposed to oxygen.
Not that there seems to be much in here, he thought, taking a gulp of breath. His eyes traveled to the ceiling fan, which did not move, but hung in a wilting fashion. Then, he noticed a potted plant, something like a fern, which hung its leaves over a dark pot with the arc of barrels thrown overboard by desperate sailors on a sinking ship. The furniture seemed to sag as well, as if underwater, and affected by rot.
The man behind the desk – Mr. Rathbone, he reminded himself – also seemed to be seeking some kind of lazy consummation with the earth’s core. The bald head had a fringe of longish, lank hair hanging over the ears, like oil slowly threading its way off a pink dome. The chin – chins, rather – must have presented various difficulties to the knotting of ties, and Reginald suddenly imagined several servants holding up the jowls with some sort of device – possibly the same kind as builders used to carry bricks up ladders – while another servant knotted the tie, reaching into the flesh for the delicate operation, like a veterinarian groping for a breached calf. The shoulders were almost at one with the upper arms. The chest was similarly intimate with the belly. Reginald could not see Cuthbert’s legs, but had an idea that they sort of meandered under the desk, trailing off like tentacles. Standing before this slow, arrested waterfall of vision, Reginald straightened his own back slightly, then bowed.
“Good morning, Mr. Rathbone,” he said.
“Mr. Spencer,” said Cuthbert slowly. Once, as a child, Reginald had watched a football game going on a great distance away, and had been fascinated by the span of time between a ball being kicked and the faint thwup hitting his ears. Similarly, Mr. Rathbone’s mouth worked for at least a second before it produced sound.
Reginald was fascinated. Cuthbert’s eyes seemed like two black holes. They did not blink – there seemed no need to. The eyelids were so low that Reginald thought of a window with the shutters almost down. The man inside would never awaken; the colours on his walls would never fade. There would never be any shadows. It would be like the inside of a cloud…
Reginald shivered. The man sitting before him was perfect – perfect in a way which was almost impossible to define, it hit the senses so completely. Almost everyone I meet, thought Reginald in a flash, is only part of a certain principle, or is a little land of warring principles, or speaks of principles they would break in a flash, for a handshake or a half-penny. But this man is a principle. He is perfect...
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Reginald Decides to Join the Foreign Office
It was almost as if Reginald had been conscripted into childbirth. He had lived a fairly irresponsible life throughout his early twenties. His sudden marriage had been more about infatuation, lust and impulsiveness than any kind of considered choice.
Reginald would say, though, that he was very responsible. He got his papers in on time. He was always available for his students. He was diligent in his studies. He sometimes claimed and spoke of things he knew not, but that was, after all, the academic disease, and he could scarcely be singled out.
Reginald did not think very much about his future; in this, he and Tom had much in common. (In fact, this is probably why Tom’s obvious lassitude provoked Reginald so much, and why he had been unable to visit Tom in his room.) Reginald wanted an impressive future; he dreamed of nodding graciously in the face of endless applause; he loved the idea of entering a room and provoking ripples of “isn’t that..?” He liked the idea of climbing a stage in a tuxedo, and accepting a Nobel or Pulitzer. He liked the idea that, when society faced intractable problems, he would be almost ordered to do a series of radio lectures to address them.
So when it turned out that Wendy was pregnant, his initial shock (and horror, given the circumstances of the discovery, and the ghastly argument which happened right afterwards) quickly gave way to visions of a wise and vaguely ‘American Indian Chief’ kind of fatherhood. He pictured his children – sons, usually – climbing on his lap, wide-eyed and questioning, or sitting cross-legged on the floor as he sat in a leather armchair, delicately tracing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with his flowing hands. My sons, he thought, will see everything in its obvious first instance – that the world is flat, our football team is the best, and capitalism is good – and I will set them straight, and there will be much confusion, and it will take many moons for them to see the wisdom of my words, but they shall come to me when they are older, perhaps when they get to university, and say that they finally understand my thoughts, and apologize for questioning me at any time…
It can be said with great certainty that, throughout the history of man, dreamy reveries about munificent patriarchy have found precious little weight with women vomiting at dawn and weeping over swollen feet that threaten to burst favourite shoes. As a woman watches her youthful figure sail into the foggy realms of pure history, into photos, to be commented on by her children in twenty years (‘is that really mum?’), and grapples with strange eating preferences, and food combinations that would give a starving man pause, she might not have a lot of patience with a man’s dreams about obedience and worship from the coming offspring.
Wendy desperately hoped that she would fall back in love with Reginald. His seed was growing within her; surely that would re-open her heart. And it was touch and go, for a while. But emotional reality always reasserts itself, and it wasn’t long before they began to lean dangerously over the cliff...
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Breakfast with Martin: Klaus Fights Back
It was bread and sausages the next morning. Martin had come back from a long, brisk walk, glowing with irritating, ruddy health. His voice boomed around the house, commanding and cajoling. He had a list of chores Tom could hear him assigning to the children as Tom dressed. Even Tom, who had never had many chores to do, could tell that many of them were pure make-work.
Something about this house sort of clamoured around Tom’s head, like some insistent, possibly-dangerous insect. He felt as if everything Martin did was somehow for his, Tom’s, benefit. To make some sort of impression. The heartiness, the oaken strength, the effortless family rule. Look, this is what a German man is capable of – what has bloodless English rationalism to offer in comparison?
It is, Tom thought, fixing his collar, an entirely one-sided combat. He did not really care what sort of life Martin had carved out for himself, here in this little rural backwater. Sure, he had the respect and deference of a small community of uneducated peasants. He had swarms of children, each unique while he was out of sight, who melted into dead compliance when he entered the room. His wife… Tom made a face, tucking in his shirt. It was the oldest story of marriage. One spouse sucked the other dry. One became an annoying, over-vital ball of false energy. The other withdrew to the shadows, smiling and planning an overthrow of emptiness.
Tom opened his door. Klaus was waiting in the hallway.
“Father has you down for something,” he said, without preamble. “Leave it up to me. There’s something else I want to show you.”
Tom nodded, and they went downstairs.
“Tom!” cried Martin, throwing his arms wide and speaking through some black shards of bread. “How glad we are you should join us! We’re almost done, but we’ve saved you something.”
Martin’s children all turned and beamed at him. Tom almost took a step back.
“Thank you, Father Heppner,” said Tom.
“Tea?” asked Renata, appearing at his right elbow.
“Thanks,” said Tom. A cup came past his head and was set down on the table.
“We’re just going over our ‘Idle Hands’ list,” said Martin. “We are very socialistic. We expect all who eat to work!”
“Amen!” cried the children. Tom stared at them – at Kris and Soren in particular – but could discern no falseness. He had to tear his gaze away from them with an effort.
“Sausage?” asked a soft voice in his left ear. Tom nodded, unwilling to turn around. “Thanks,” he whispered.
A plate of sausages floated down. Tom’s stomach turned, just once, quite slowly.
“So, Tom, I have you and Egbert on the roof of the coal-shed. It has to be painted, but it has to be sanded first. And…”
Klaus said: “Father.”...
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Reginald And Wendy Talk About Being Pregnant
Reginald and Wendy drove in silence. Reginald felt a strange calm, overlying a deep terror.
“I think that…” started Wendy, then stopped. She bit her lip and felt a rising bubble of tears. Her brain was repeating the inevitable mantra of all addicted to self-pity: this is not how it is supposed to be. She felt that a special moment had been torn from her by her brute of a husband, that he was denying her something that was her just due. She turned and stared huffily out of the window, watching the rolling granite, the turning buildings, the families walking hand in hand. They always get what they want. I never get what I want. Wendy settled into her seat. A depressingly pleasant shiver ran through her body. So, this is how the afternoon is going to be spent. I shall be offended, and then he shall be offended… It was horrible, to think of how sad it would be – and terrifying, to think that it could not be stopped.
Wendy and Reginald had reached a phase in their marriage – an inevitable phase, probably, called ‘armed blame.’ They needed the same things from each other, at the same time, but these things could not be two-way. She needed comfort, he needed comfort. He needed sex, she needed tenderness. She needed to be listened to, he needed to be listened to. They both needed unconditional love, but they were neither each others’ parents, so it was impossible. They both needed, but never received enough to satisfy, to assuage, to comfort and bring to heel all the discontents of daily living. They both needed, but never received. Neither could imagine that this was because their demands were irrational. It could only be because the other was withholding, punishing, manipulating. They were maddened by thirst, and could not stir from an oasis whose imaginary water forever turned to sand in their mouths.
Reginald parked the car, and they went inside.
They went inside, and suddenly saw their flat, and stopped in the hallway. Books were everywhere (‘Don’t touch them!’ Reginald always shouted. ‘They’re in order!’). Clothes from the sudden lovemaking of a fortnight past were still at the foot of the sofa. Cups of old coffee and plates with the detritus of toast sat on the side-tables, half-covered with half-finished crosswords. The carpet was vaguely mottled, vaguely crunchy. The cushions on the sofa were uneven. Three and a half pairs of shoes were scattered across the floor. The glass on a picture hanging on the wall had been cracked two months ago, but had not been repaired. The angle had been corrected, but badly.
A wave of depression swept over the couple. They stood, half a foot apart, feeling like they were children who had been playing at ‘house’ for far too long, and it was high time some adult came in and took charge...
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