I am enormously elated as she embraces me; I have had a last-minute reprieve. But there are conditions. We hear Clara and Diana coming back. She whispers: ‘Get us away.’ And she continues with her toilet. ‘She’s much better now,’ I say. ‘It was the shooting and the heat. We’re all relaxing again.’ I laugh. I look at the two women I intend to deceive. They seem merely pleased emotions have settled. I see no reason to feel guilt. It will simply be Alice and me again. We shall finish where we began. Nobody will have lost. There have been no bargains made. But I am already lost; I refuse to consider what I will receive in place of love; or what I shall win to replace the pain and the beauty of worshipping a woman rather than a child. I shall become a coward. The future threatens me and I refuse to acknowledge it. The moment is all that matters. I might have ended my days with affectionate memories and all I shall actually have will be a litany of petty revenges and self-pity. I will come to deceive all women as wilfully as I now plan to deceive myself. I will exploit their romance as mine was exploited. I know all this but I am compelled to continue. Alice has begun to sing that old familiar parting song; finding faults, compiling lists of supposed slights so that she might justify her next decision. And what she can turn against these two friends she can as easily turn against me. I am in that state of disbelief which can sometimes last for days or weeks before the fact of disaffection is accepted. I look away. When shall I be struck? In Paris? Before or after we are married? I will suffer that particular indignity. I will listen to lies about what we have done and distortions of the facts of our life together. I will not leave. I will not, as I should, let her sing that song alone. But all this knowledge is swamped by the tiniest hope that she will change: that what I see is not the truth.
Alexandra. You must not leave me. You must not change. From the triumph of eyes freshly-adult she will one day mock my misery. She will refuse the role which it will have suited her to play, which will no longer be useful to her. She will change her ambitions, but not her nature. I shall be hardly peripheral to her consideration when not long ago I should have been central. From a citadel of lace and velvet she will look down on a wretch. Now she flashes me a private smile. They are getting changed. They are chatting amongst themselves. They prepare themselves for the dinner. Then Clara and Diana leave me alone with Alice again. ‘I must have your guarantee,’ I tell her. ‘I must know you will not betray me.’ She hugs me. She kisses me warmly. ‘How could I betray you, darling Ricky? You are my master!’ I hold her to me, not daring to look at her face for fear I will see the deception too clearly. ‘It’s wrong to do this to Clara and Diana,’ I say. She pulls away from me. ‘That’s stupid. What do we owe them?’ I sit on the chair, my shoulders stooped. She offers me something in her gloved hand, palm outstretched as if to a pet. It is a little pill of opium. Wonderingly, I take it. She turns away. ‘You know, Ricky, that I have no conception of your ideas of morality sometimes. We see things so differently. I don’t plan to do any harm to either Diana or Clara. Do you think that?’
‘No’
‘I love them both. They are wonderful. But you and I have something special. What purpose would be served in blurting everything out? It can only cause trouble—and pain to others.’
‘I should have thought that we owed them—’
She comes to kneel beside me. ‘We owe them nothing. That is our freedom.’
I listen to her as a disciple might listen to a holy man; striving to perceive the wisdom, the new attitude, the truth of what she says.
‘They’re not like Poliakoff,’ she says. ‘They won’t hurt us.’
‘We ought to tell them.’
‘What’s the point?’
As I rise to my feet my legs are trembling. I cannot fathom the changes which have taken place in her strange, dreaming, greedy brain. I am as much at a loss for an explanation as if I attempted to analyse the perceptions and nature of a household pet. Like a pet she is able to take on the colour of any master; to be obedient and passive for as long as it suits her, to respond to whatever desires or signals one might display. But now I disguise my desires, for fear of losing her. Have I therefore lost her to someone who offers her clearer signals? To someone who represents what she calls ‘freedom’? At dinner I look suspiciously around the table, at the Russians, at Count Stefanik, at Caroline Vacarescu, even at honest Egon Wilke, chewing his food with as much relish as if it were the finest beef. And Alice is merry. Alice is the darling of the company. Everyone dotes on her. ‘You cheer us all up, my dear,’ says Frau Schmetterling. She has become much more tolerant of late. Will Frau Schmetterling somehow betray me? I am scarcely in control of myself, though I appear to be as relaxed and as good-tempered and as witty as always. And yet, has Clara taken on that peculiar, impressive dignity of an injured woman; that dignity which induces in any reasonably sensitive man a mixture of awe, guilt, respect, and sometimes envious anger? We drink too deeply. In bed together that night we tire easily and fall asleep. A terrible depression has overwhelmed me. The dream is lost. I am desperate to rediscover it. I get up from that tangle of women early and go to Clara’s room to sleep. I help myself to her cocaine. I look through her books and her musical scores and I cannot rid myself of the thought that I have resisted as heartily as has Clara the thought that she might love me and I her. This scarcely affects my obsession with Alice. I want it to be as it was. ‘In Paris,’ I murmur to myself. ‘It will come back in Paris.’ And then I ask myself: ‘What am I?’ I am corrupted and I am revelling in my corruption. I am the victim of my imagination, trapped in a terrible fantasy of my own devising. I am still awake when, at dawn, the Holzhammer guns begin to fire on Mirenburg. She trembles. She cries out. The shells blow up the Café Schmidt and flesh scatters into the morning air; the statues of St Varoslav and St Ormond fall in a haze of white dust, crashing onto the shattered slabs of masonry below. The Liberty apartments, the baroque and romanesque churches, the domes and the steeples, are falling one by one at first and then in their hundreds. Mirenburg, that city of all cities, is being murdered. She is being murdered. And here is Lady Cromach, startled and anxious, asking if I have seen Alice. Clara is behind her. Have I seen Alice? She cannot have left. But she has taken a coat, a hat. I go out to look for her. The shells are relentless. I can see them going past; I hear their wailing and their thunder. I know her family church, near Nussbaumhof. It is still standing, though most of the other buildings are flattened. I am in time to find her coming down the wide steps, dressed inadequately in a silk tea-gown and a summer cloak. The mysterious vulnerability of her face is emphasised by the stooped set of her shoulders, her nervous eyes, as she recognises me and comes towards me for a few paces before pausing and looking back at others also emerging from the white Gothic arch. ‘What were you looking for in there?’ I ask. She begins to shiver. I go up to her and put my own coat around her. ‘Comfort?’ she says. ‘Certainty? I don’t know.’ I try to lead her back to Rosenstrasse but she will not move. ‘It’s unlike you,’ I say. ‘What?’ she asks. ‘To risk so much danger.’ She frowns. ‘There wasn’t any. The guns started later.’ I smile, almost in relief. ‘I must leave you,’ she says. ‘I must leave you all. I must be free.’ I am sympathetic. ‘So you shall be. You can do what you like. But first we must escape Mirenburg. Get to Paris. Come.’
‘No.’ She stands firm. I act as if I am dealing with a child. ‘Very well.’ I lift my hat and return down the steps, feeling that I have somehow hurt her and myself at the same time. Her confusion is infectious. I stop and look back. She is staring at me from those blank eyes. She is staring. ‘Come along, Alexandra.’ I stretch out my hand. ‘I can no longer afford to indulge myself in this fantasy of youthful infatuation. Either you come with me or I shall abandon you.’