"Yes, he got his face mixed up with the spokes of-"
"Please: I get enoughofthatsortofthingfrom Harry. Go on with the non-bloody bits. "
"He did well at school -Mina thought he was a genius -and actually got a year in college. At Bremen; he wanted to bea naval architect in those days. Then Hitler invaded Russia, everybody remembered old man Eismark had been a pinko, and Gustav washove into the night. "
"He was lucky not to be in a concentration camp or the Todt Organisation."
"He was lucky to have a talented sister. She'd already made a bit of a name for herself, only locally but you know what the Germans are about music, and the district party bosses liked romantic pieces so she became the star turn at their more respectable booze-ups. That was when she started using her mother's name, Linnarz, to get away from the Eismark stigma. And they tolerated Gustav- gave him a job on the land – as long as it kept Mina happy and she kept them happy. There must have been a lot of that sort of thing, when you come to think about it: tolerating ideological undesirables as long as it suited your own book – not that National Socialism had much ideology beyond being first at the trough. It couldn't last, of course."
"What went wrong?"
"The party got a new Kreisleiterwho didn't dig music and wasn't going to have any damned Commie subverting his cabbages, so he blew the whistle.Mina got the tip-off just in time and they became U-boats, went underground. Just who did it for them she didn't seem to know, it was all contacts of Gustav's. Probably he made some useful friends in Bremen;Mina said he was always asking her if she'd heard any interesting gossip at her musicalsoirées.Butone way or another, somebody came up with the fulltabled'hôte:safe havens, roadnames and the paperwork to back them up. Even money from time to time. This was November '43."
George made a long thinking, grumbling noise, then said, mostly to himself: "The paperwork must have been good… if they were living on it for eighteen months… they weren't escaped prisoners of war trying to reach Switzerland on a hand-copied Fremdenpass… Could they have been in with the real Communist underground?"
Agnes lifted her eyebrows in a facial shrug; George knew far more about that period of history than she did. "Could have been. I thought it was pretty badly penetrated, but…"
"Oh, it was. The Gestapo was just about running the Communist party by 1944, but to do that they'd have to let some small fry run free, and from their point of view the Eismarks would be very small indeed. They didn't actually go in for sabotage or anything, did they?"
"No, according to her theyjust stayed undercover-separately – in small villages and so on until the end of the war.
George grunted and finished his sherry. "Thank God: now I can have areal drink. What about you? Same again?" He pressed a bellpush. "Come along, young Algar: what about this marriage? – when do we get to that?"
"Very soon, " Agnes said patiently."Brigitte Krone: she was living with one of the families Gustavhid up with that winter. Parents had been killed in the Hamburg bombing, so perhaps she was feeling lonely. Anyway, all the other young men were away at the war, Gustavmust have been spending just about all his time indoors, young love wove its spell and… 'ow's yer father?" Agnes lapsed into stage cockney.
George frowned, absent-mindedly gave their order to the servant who had appeared, and said: "I don't know… marriage seems a public sort of affair. I'd've thought that would be adding enormously to the risk…"
"There was a growing need for marriage lines. "
He looked puzzled.
"Oh, for heaven's sake. The girl was in the club, knocked up, a bun in the oven – 'ow's yer father?"
George stiffened into the Compleat Civil Servant. "If you intend me to infer that she was pregnant, then for the life of me I can see no reason why you don't actually say so. I don't find all two-syllable words either incomprehensible or, when comprehended, necessarily shocking."
"She was pregnant," Agnes said, staring at the low coffee-table, not at George. "And marriage itself might have been a useful bit of insurance for Gustav: herrelatives or guardians would have been less likely to inform on her husband than on some passing stranger who could get his trousers open in Olympic time."
"Is there something," George asked icily, "about the atmosphere of this place that causes you to come up with suchexpressions? If so, we can easily adjourn to Fred's Caff in Brixton where you might react by trying to speak the Queen's English."
Agnes looked up. From over George's shoulder stared the portrait of a general whose handling of an attack in the South African war had caused so many casualties to his own brigade that he had immediately been promoted away to see if he could do the same thing with divisions and corps. In 1915 and '16 he had proved he hadn't lost his old touch, and so died in bed at a great age, garnished with colourful honours, many of them from grateful countries whose soldiers he hadn't got killed even on purpose. He was looking at Agnes with exactly the expression he would have chosen had he lived to see a woman in his club.
"It must be something about the place, " she agreed meekly. "Must try harder. Where were we?"
"Gustav wasjust getting married."
"Yes. That happened in May 1944. The boy, Manfred, was born in the October. "
George did mental arithmetic on his fingers. "That means around January… Gustavdidn't waste much time about…"
Agnes didn't say a word. She looked very much like somebody not saying a word.
"And the wife, Brigitte: when did she die, or was supposed to have died?"
"April 1945, just before the end of the war.Mina said Gustavsaid she'd been killed by Allied planes. She hadn't been around herself at the time and said Gustavdidn't like talking about it much. Fair enough, I suppose."
"Where did this happen?"
"She didn't say."
"Isn't that odd?"
"She wasn't hiding anything. If our people had asked her, she'd have had to answer. It was her applying for asylum, not us inviting her. But they can't have asked: why should they? They weren't interested in her war story, they'd heard a million war stories. They just wanted to know what was going on in East Germany there and then. She only mentionedone place after they'd gone underground and that was where Gustavgot married: Sangerhausen. In East Germany, now."
"So we can't get at the marriage certificate," George brooded. There was a burst of male laughter from the bar, which had suddenly filled up with men wearing MCC ties; the day's play at Lord's would have ended just about twenty minutes ago. The servant fought his way clear and delivered their drinks; George grunted, Agnes smiled and shifted carefully on the sofa. There was no way to be comfortable on it, and even movement was risky because the old leather was cracking like dry parchment.
"Mind you, " George said abruptly, "that certificate must be sheer balls because he'd have to use his roadname on it. Not Eismark at all."
Agnes sipped and shrugged. "They did the best they could in the circumstances. It showed willing."
"It also showed the baby was started before the marriage. Is there any leverage in that?"
"No, not even in the GDR. It wasn't adultery, he Did The Right Thing by a girl who had only months to live, Hitler's hounds baying at their heels… They weep over muck like that on their side, too. "
George nodded. "The baby was only five months, still in arms.-Why didn't he get killed, too?"
"A good question, and one widely asked in East Germany, I imagine. Manfred's a big boy now and a full colonel in the SSD. Old Gustavmay still have some old-time socialist ideals about the rights of man, but the general feeling is that Manfred would have done well on the faculty at Belsen. "
"So I'd heard. But anyway, that's all she had to say?"
"That's only onepage of what she said. There's at least another thirty about life in the GDR in the fifties, how they treat musicians, how she brought up baby Manfred while Gustav wasoff in Moscow learning to run a shipyard and getting booster shots of dialectical materialism. It read as if having to play auntie instead of Schumann first gave her the idea of coming over – Here's our hunter home from the hill. "