Freya Read online

  ‘Miss Wyley, welcome. Come and sit here,’ she said, gesturing at the sofa by the fireplace. ‘I don’t usually light a fire in May, but today has been unseasonably cold.’

  It was maddening that Bedders created such a force field of amiability. If she had been a scold or a nag it would have felt very much easier to perpetrate a deception upon her. That her tutor had been friendly and encouraging gave a painful tweak to the guilt amassing within. Once they were settled with their tea Bedders enquired as to how she was getting along with Leo Melvern at Corpus, whether his tutorials on Chaucer were much to her liking. Freya wondered if Melvern had made an official complaint about her essay work, but since Bedders made no reference to it she assumed he hadn’t.

  ‘And all else is well? How’s the boxing?’

  ‘It’s rather fallen by the wayside,’ replied Freya. ‘Women aren’t admitted to the university boxing club.’

  ‘Then I dare say the men have had a narrow escape – I’m sure you would have given them what for.’

  Freya smiled, and in the little pause that followed she modulated her tone towards the confidential. ‘I have something to ask you. Um, my mother is about to have an operation – I gather it’s quite serious. She’s coming out of hospital next week and will need a good deal of rest and recuperation. Someone will have to attend on her, which is difficult, since she lives in a remote part of Sussex. Naturally I feel the responsibility is mine, so I’d like your permission to take the week off.’

  Mrs Bedford frowned her concern. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it.’ She hesitated a moment before continuing. ‘Forgive me, I understood that your father is still …’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ said Freya, drawing her features into a grave expression, ‘but my parents are – separated. He’s abroad at the moment, working. I have a younger brother at Cambridge. Other than that there’s no immediate family who can help. We’re quite close, my mother and I, and she’ll appreciate my being with her.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ the tutor replied. ‘It is perfectly natural that you should be at her side, and I’d be very willing to give you leave for the week. My only concern is that it’s so very near your examinations. What if your mother’s convalescence requires a longer commitment of your time?’

  ‘Oh, she has a good friend coming down from London the following week. It’s only because she was unavailable next week that I’d like to volunteer to help. As for the exams, my mother’s place will be quite conducive to study – it’s very quiet, so I should be able to work without interruption –’

  ‘Apart from tending to your mother.’

  ‘Yes – apart from that.’

  Bedders went to her desk and arranged the necessary paperwork, reminiscing the while upon similar missions of mercy she used to undertake for her ailing father, the unavoidable nature of filial responsibility and the often disobliging behaviour of the patient. Eventually a college exeat was in Freya’s hands, and another obstacle had been dislodged. She had been surprised, in the end, by how fluently she could lie: that whole business about the friend relieving her after a week had been made up on the spot.

  ‘I’ll inform Dr Melvern of your absence,’ said Bedders as she held open her door. She gave Freya’s arm a maternal pat. ‘Such a troubling time … Perhaps you could write to let me know if there’s anything you need.’

  Oh, just a couple of airsickness tablets and a map of Nuremberg, Freya thought – that should see me right.

  10

  The ground below loomed up towards the plane, at first the same relentless flat fields, russet-topped villages and placid grey rivers winding on, and on. A forest would break up the monotony and then vanish. The next time she glanced out of the tiny window they were directly over an ashen necropolis, a wilderness of ruins from which it seemed no phoenix should ever rise. The plane banked abruptly, as though it had just glimpsed the devastation for itself and made an instinctive lurch away. Freya flinched too: had she just seen all that was left of Nuremberg?

  Ten minutes later they had landed on a strip flanked by a dreary cluster of grey and green outbuildings, not so much an airfield as a makeshift shanty town where planes were received and unloaded and turned around like so many pack mules. The place was swarming with military personnel, most of them American, all in a frenzy of toing and froing and none taking the smallest notice of the new arrivals. Freya, in uniform and carrying a small suitcase, felt herself to be invisible amid the vast, hurrying scrummage. She wanted something to drink, but the only sign of commercial activity was a long desk from which a quartermaster was selling American cigarettes. Freya asked for a packet of Chesterfields.

  ‘Only sell ’em by the carton, ma’am,’ the man drawled.

  ‘I don’t have any German marks,’ she said.

  ‘Be no good to me if ya did. Got sterling?’

  She bought two cartons, and asked him where she might find transport; but he only shrugged. After another brusque exchange with a passing mechanic she found herself on a little concourse at the edge of the airfield. The noonday sun was turning up the heat, and she felt sweat prickling beneath her serge tunic. Two GIs, bareheaded, were lounging next to a dusty jeep, one of them wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief. Both were drinking from a jerrycan. She approached them and put her suitcase down.

  ‘May I please have some of your water?’

  They stopped talking and turned blank bovine gazes upon her. The senior of the two looked at the jerrycan he’d been drinking from, and put it aside. From the back of the vehicle he lifted an identical one out, unscrewed the lid and handed it to her. She thanked him and took long gulping draughts, too eagerly; the water spurted down her chin and onto her front. Finished, she swiped her wrist across her mouth and handed the can back, suppressing a small belch. She asked them if they knew a place called the Schloss Vogelsong. Yup, they did, it was a huge old villa about three clicks away – the press had taken it over.

  ‘Is there a bus or something I can get there?’

  The pair exchanged a swift look that Freya read as Is she kidding? The one who had given her the water muttered something to his pal, who nodded and pushed himself off the bonnet where he’d been leaning. They performed a laconic little ritual of parting.

  ‘I can drive you,’ the water-giver said, turning back to Freya.

  ‘That’s awfully kind,’ she said quickly, which he answered with a soundless chuckle and threw her suitcase onto the back seat of the jeep. Without a word he opened the passenger door for her to climb in. Replacing his helmet he got in and drummed a little tattoo with his fingers on the wheel. Then, as if remembering the civilities of another time, he extended his hand. His name was Richard Caplan, a first lieutenant who’d been stationed at Nuremberg since the Allied forces had taken the city in the final month of the war.

  ‘I’ve just seen it from the plane,’ said Freya. ‘There didn’t seem to be much of it left.’

  Caplan nodded slowly. ‘We bombed that place and then some. January ’45. I guess three-quarters of the city got wiped right there.’ Even after that, he added, the fighting had been street by street, and at times house by house.

  They were driving through flat countryside, all but deserted. An occasional convoy rumbled past them. When he took his helmet off again Freya made a sidelong study of him; she was fascinated by the bullet-shaped outline of his head, the scalp shaved so close he wore merely the rumour of a haircut. His ears seemed tiny against the slabbed skull. The tendons in his neck stood out, and his jaw worked a piece of gum with stoical indifference. Yet when he turned out of profile his face, far from brutish, contained almost a schoolboy delicacy, with a ridge of freckles across his nose and a dimple at his chin. He asked her questions – where she was from, what she was doing in Germany – and listened carefully to her answers, though offered no comment of his own. She had an idea that in civilian life he had been well mannered.

  On the horizon she spied a small white-walled castle, fussily gabled and turreted, set
on rising ground and girded with mature trees.

  ‘What’s that place?’ she said, pointing.

  ‘Where you’re headed. That’s the schloss.’

  Freya blinked her surprise. It looked like a palace out of a Grimm fairy tale. As the jeep turned down a drive into a shrub-lined park Caplan turned to her, shaking his head. ‘This is where the grounds start – can you believe it?’ The schloss was still at least a mile in the distance. As the grandeur of the place bore down on them Freya wondered aloud at the wealth that could have financed its construction.

  Caplan said, ‘A guy told me the family owned the biggest pencil factory in Germany.’

  Freya replied, after a pause, ‘I never knew there was that much money in pencils.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  Up close, the Schloss Vogelsong was almost grotesque in its extravagance, a fantasy of turret windows, heraldic arches and flyaway spires. It was the sort of building a megalomaniac opera producer might have conceived in a dream, and laughed about on waking. Caplan parked the jeep and, perhaps out of curiosity, followed her into the marbled entrance hall. A grand staircase spiralled upwards, echoing the clamour of voices within; but those voices didn’t belong to the schloss’s usual guests, corseted ladies with their pet dogs and corpulent gentlemen who talked of nothing but money and hunting. Now it was home to journalists whose instinctive reaction would be to scoff. They stood about in huddles, some in urgent converse, others in casual groupings redolent of a cocktail party. Smoking seemed to be their competitive sport.

  The lieutenant, by way of taking his leave, pointed out a makeshift sign that read REGISTRATION. Freya wondered if she could engage him to drive her into Nuremberg one day, but thought better of it: he might be offended by the presumption.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said.

  ‘Glad to help,’ Caplan replied, and gave a little mock bow that was his first and last indication of a sense of humour. Then he said, ‘So long,’ and turned back out of the entrance hall. As she watched him go she felt a stabbing regret that she hadn’t asked him the extra favour. The vaulted corridor down which she stepped would not have been out of place in a national art gallery. Arriving at the office for registration she presented her passport, visa and letters of transit. She asked the clerk behind the desk whether the place was always this busy.

  ‘Oh, this is only a quarter-full,’ said the clerk. ‘The rest of them are at the courthouse. They finish at five.’

  She was handed a pass and a key to the women’s quarters. This was not the schloss itself but a large Victorian villa in the grounds, which she found at the end of a winding gravel path. The caretaker was a local hausfrau who may have been any age between fifty and eighty. Having inspected her pass, she took her up to the main bedroom, which was now a dormitory: camp beds had been squeezed into every available space. The woman shook her head and explained in broken English that there was no room. Freya replied that she absolutely must have a bed, and held the woman’s gaze until she appeared to capitulate: on the next floor, she was shown a smaller room holding six cots, all recently slept in. An exhausted mattress lay in one corner, and from somewhere the woman found unused linen, indicating that this would be her resting place. She went off, muttering to herself in German.

  The warmth in the room oppressed her, and she opened a window. It overlooked an orchard and, beyond that, a forest of pines. She surveyed her cramped quarters: even at Plymouth she had always had her own bed. Heaped ashtrays, suitcases flung open, a frowsy smell of bodies. There was something sad about the way a sudden influx of strangers could transform elegance into slovenliness. She made a little tour of the building, and found that every room, without exception, was crammed to bursting with travel cases, clothes, cameras, newspapers. In a bedroom along the corridor from her own she saw a young woman sitting cross-legged on a bed, furiously clattering away at a typewriter. She lifted her head on sensing Freya’s presence, smiled distractedly, and bent again to the keys.

  At five o’clock she walked back to the schloss and came across, in its cavernous recesses, exactly the thing she was looking for. She might have known that no gathering of journalists would have countenanced digs that didn’t include a bar. It was already filling up. She had brought a book to occupy her during the wait, Pavilions of Smoke, an early collection of Jessica Vaux’s essays she hadn’t read before. The stock photograph of the author, reproduced opposite the title page, had always fascinated Freya. It showed Vaux in her mid-thirties, a dark-haired woman whose uptilted gaze seemed of a piece with the stern, unyielding tenor of her prose.

  The bar, run by Americans, was bountifully stocked, and she had just ordered a Martini when Stephen appeared in the doorway. He was wearing one of his sober navy suits from Huntsman, with a thin black tie. His tired face creased into a smile on seeing her.

  ‘I could do with one of those,’ he said, nodding at her drink and planting a kiss on her cheek. ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘Oh, a few hours ago. And there was nearly no room at the inn. I’ve got a scrubby old mattress in a room with six others.’

  ‘It’s the trial of the century. Half the world’s press are here.’ He gestured at the high corniced ceiling. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘You look like you’ve come from a funeral.’

  ‘It’s rather like one – a funeral they don’t know how to end. Odd thing is, everybody in that courtroom seems bored to extinction, the judges, the lawyers, the guards, the interpreters – even the defendants, if ghosts can look bored. Really, the trial’s dragged on for so long you can actually see people yawning through it.’

  Freya made an exclamation of disgust. ‘How dare anyone be bored?’

  ‘They’ve been through the evidence, mountains of it. Now the lawyers are having their turn, which means a great deal of nitpicking. Some argue that the court has no legal validity – that’s Goering’s line.’

  Stephen had completed a few sketches, which he showed to her. They were variations on the Nazi hierarchy seated in two rows, some of them slumped, faces turned away, some staring dead ahead. Freya leafed through them, and shook her head. ‘They all look so … insignificant.’

  He nodded agreement. ‘You should see them in the flesh.’

  ‘What are the chances of you getting me into the courtroom?’

  ‘Non-existent. I told you that in London. You’d never get past the security.’

  Freya paused, brooding. ‘So … was she there?’

  ‘It’s a very full gallery. And to be honest, I’m not sure I’d recognise her.’

  She stared at him in disbelief. His vagueness was sometimes unfathomable. She opened her copy of Pavilions of Smoke to the page with the photographic plate and held it out for his inspection. He squinted at it for a moment.

  ‘Ah … I did wonder. The hair’s gone grey, but yes – she’s been there.’

  ‘Has she got a room here, too?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her around. She may have rented somewhere.’

  That would be just like her, Freya thought, to keep herself apart from the press camp. The woman had spent her whole life going it alone, shunning friend and foe alike. But here she was, in Nuremberg, and Freya was damned if she were to be thrown off the scent now. She considered her options. If Jessica Vaux wasn’t staying at the Schloss Vogelsong, and her lodgings couldn’t be discovered, the only thing for it would be to intercept her outside the courthouse and positively demand her attention.

  Stephen, frowning, said, ‘So you squared all this with the college?’

  ‘They were fine. My tutor gave me an exeat.’

  ‘Decent of them, to let you go like that.’

  Freya nodded. Her father’s vagueness could also be played to advantage. If he was willing to believe that the college would give her time off to travel abroad, just before her exams, she wasn’t about to disabuse him. Tomorrow she would accompany him to the city’s Palace of Justice, and prepare herself to waylay Jessica Vaux. Such
a plan showed initiative, she thought, something that would appeal to the writer’s maverick personality. And yet it also smacked of desperation, like a stage-door Johnny waiting to pounce on a famous actress. She might just as easily tell her, in the words of Jimmy Erskine, to piss off, and nobody would blame her.

  The next day, a Tuesday, she was back in uniform and on one of the buses that took the journalists into town each morning. The Palace of Justice, with its imposing multi-windowed facade, had been one of the few public buildings in Nuremberg to have survived the Allied bombing. Up the steps swarmed the functionaries, the gowned judges, secretaries, interpreters, lawyers, soldiers, journalists, all overseen by the unsmiling guards, their faces harassed with boredom. Freya found that she was permitted to enter these vast municipal precincts and mill about with other interested parties in the antechambers and corridors. But, just as Stephen had warned her, there was to be no admittance to the sanctum of the courtroom without a pass.

  Wednesday and Thursday followed the same pattern. She got off the bus with Stephen, stationed herself in the palace forecourt and searched the incoming crowds for a glimpse of Jessica Vaux, without success. Returning to the schloss, she occupied the daytime with revising Chaucer and reading The Allegory of Love until Stephen returned in the evening. Worryingly, he had not seen Jessica Vaux in court all week. On the Friday morning Freya got to her waiting post an hour earlier than usual, reasoning that her quarry might be timing her arrival to avoid the crush. But once again there was no sign of her. Rather than mope all day she decided to explore, catching one of the shabby streetcars that took her into the heart of the old town. From the air the bombed streets had appeared uninhabited, scoured of life. But once off the tram she encountered little pockets of activity, women trundling prams laden with a few pathetic possessions, grey-faced pensioners shuffling along broken cobbled roads, or standing in doorways of blackened shops. There was nothing to buy, anywhere, though there was fuel to scavenge: in an alleyway two young women were breaking up rotten window frames for firewood.