And blue-lined paper on the legal pad upon his desk.
Alex had reached a natural hiatus in the writing of his Sunday Post editorial. It was known to working hacks as a ‘whip and top’, spinning the same words over and over again-getting nowhere.
When I first came to these islands in the winter of 1910, I knew I had seen the last of my native Russia, [move this??] The prospect of England opened up to me when I watched M. Blériot take flight and I entered into an exchange of letters with Mr H. G. Wells on the subject of powered flight, [more about HG? will the old fart take umbrage?]… Mr Wells invited me to visit him in England. I came. I stayed. My wife, our son, our two daughters and I ended our years a-wandering. [hiatus here, what?] Perhaps the luxury I have allowed myself of speculating upon the fate of that tragic unhappy [?] land has been the whimsical [nostalgic?] indulgence of an exile-or a necessity. In their fate lie [or lies?] all our fates. [Can I say all this again?] Two years ago, I warned my readers that the Nazi-Soviet pact was not the act on which to condemn a country making itself anew. I was all but deluged in mail, none of it complimentary. [Zinoviev letter?] Well, I am going to badger hector you again upon that same matter. Russia…
And on that word the axis of his thought, the top so whipped, spun to no conclusion. Time to read. When in doubt about your own prose, read someone else’s verse.
As ever he had a volume of poetry on his desk, next to the lamp. A blue-bound book. He rimed the pages to see if they fell open at a blue poem. He read a line of Lawrence.
Not every man has gentians in his house…
The blue flowers in his window box were pansies. He could see them from where he sat. The first pansies of spring-a late spring, the first day of double summertime. Long, light nights to come. A deep, velvety royal blue, not the sky blue of the Bavarian gentians Lawrence was describing. It had been years since old Troy had been in Bavaria. England had gentians. He had vague memories of a pinkish plant with a Saxon-sounding name like blushwort or bladderwort-English was full of worts-but the ‘true’ gentian would not grow in this climate. His country home in Hertfordshire was a high plateau, but high in English terms meant a couple of hundred feet. Bavarian gentians were sub-alpine. He was seventy-nine. He’d probably never see one again. If the war ended tomorrow, he’d probably never see one again.
Not every man has gentians in his house…
He read on. Few poets were so long a-dying, few poets had dealt in death so long as D. H. Lawrence.
‘What are you working on, Dad?’
His son Rod had come into the study. Doubtless sent by his wife to tell him lunch was ready. Old Troy looked up at his elder son, tore a page from his blue pad and balled it. Tossed it onto the growing pile in his wicker wastebasket.
‘The old, old story,’ he replied, not meaning to be cryptic.
‘Russia,’ said Rod, not inflecting the word as a question.
‘Russia,’ Alex muttered.
‘Tough going, is it?’
Alex looked at the pile. He had balled twenty sheets or more already.
‘You could say that.’
‘What about Russia?’
‘I was thinking about when she would join us.’
‘Join us?’
‘Us. The war.’
Odd to be spelling out the condition in which they all lived, so simply, so bluntly, to a man in uniform. The war was total-the war was, without exaggeration, England. History compressed. All history brought to fruition in this moment-this meaning. The meaning of England.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t being dense. I meant, isn’t it “if” rather than “when”? Can we be at all sure they will join us?’
‘That’s the problem, my boy. I’m sure. Hardly anyone else is.’
‘I mean, one could pose the same question of the Americans, couldn’t one?’
‘Quite,’ said the old man. ‘When I get round to it.’
Rod opened his mouth to speak, but his mother Maria Mikhailovna appeared in the doorway and cut him short and soundless.
‘Vite! Vite! Lunch has been upon the table these five minutes.’
Alex rose, gathered his dressing gown about him, rubbed with one hand at the two-day stubble of his beard. His wife would give him hell if he were late for a meal; she would not dream of commenting on his appearance.
As they followed her down the corridor, he turned to his son and asked, ‘Will Freddie be joining us?’
Alex had two sons, Vienna-born Rodyon, and London-born Frederick. His ‘English child’, as he thought of him. Frederick was twenty-five, and had sloughed off his blue uniform, almost as Rod had donned his, when Scotland Yard had made him first a detective and then a sergeant.
‘God knows,’ Rod replied. ‘Am I my little brother’s keeper?’
§ 3
Stahl had been lucky. The morning after his departure from Berlin a Heavy Rescue lorry had hit the house next door and demolished the party wall. Twenty tons of rubble had buried the late Herr Holzel, and it was only on the day after that that a team of diggers finally recovered the body. Sergeant Gunther Bruhns, stuck with the task of reporting back to Heydrich at SD HQ on the Prinz Albrechtstrafie, had not been lucky. Herr Obergruppenfuhrer had a headache.
‘Read it to me,’ he said when Bruhns stuck the report on his desk.
‘Read it?’
‘Aloud.’ Heydrich put his fingertips against his high forehead and proceeded to knead the skin with both hands, eyes down, not looking at the man.
The sergeant harrumphed and began.
‘Body found this morning in Kopemikusstraße 9.53 a.m. Aryan male, approximately one metre nine, approximately seventy-seven kilos in weight. No recognisable physical features. Uniform of a Sicherheitsdienst Brigadefuhrer. Letters and notebook in inside jacket pocket are those of Brigadefuhrer Wolfgang Stahl. Body removed to city morgue. No time of death established, but the house had been all but destroyed by secondary blast on the night of the seventeenth. The local warden said the bomb hit a house on the other side of the street about 9 p.m. I checked the duty log. Brigadefuhrer Stahl did leave here at seven fifty-eight. It is perfectly possible that he had arrived home before the air raid.’
Heydrich had stopped kneading his skull and was staring at the back of his hands-long, long fingers outstretched.
‘No recognisable features? What about the blood group tattoo?’
‘Not everyone has them, sir.’
‘They’re compulsory.’
‘I checked. He broke two appointments to have it done-didn’t show up for either. He was booked in to have it done next week.’
‘The face?’
‘There is no face.’
‘The hands.’
‘The hands?’
‘Bring me his hands.’
‘Eh?’
‘Bring me his hands! Go to the morgue and chop off his hands! I want to see his hands!’
Heydrich laid his own hands flat upon the desk, palms pressed, fingers fanned as wide as they would go. He called the sergeant back before he reached the door.
‘Bruhns, has the Fuhrer been told?’
‘No, sir. Not yet.’
Not yet. Somebody would have to tell him. It was perfectly possible to keep secrets from the Fuhrer. Often the only way to deliver what he wanted was not to tell him the bad news. If he but knew it, the Fuhrer was a man habitually lied to by every member of his entourage from his cook to the Chief of the General Staff-but this was unconcealable. Word would spread. If Stahl had died in the raid, then he was, to date, the highest-ranking Nazi officer to die on the Home Front. There was propaganda to be made. If Stahl was dead, Hitler would notice his absence. One day soon he would ask. But if Stahl was not dead… if Stahl was not dead. Heydrich found it hard to believe in such a coincidence. Stahl denounced to him as an enemy agent only hours after he died in an air raid? The denunciation explained one thing-why Stahl had chosen to live in the East, in a petty bourgeois block off the Frankfurter Allee, when the Party had offered him his own villa in Dahlem-one of those taken from the Jews. It was not fitting for an SD Brigadefuhrer-Heydrich had told him to move when they’d promoted him-but it put distance between Stahl and the rest of the Party.