Our Friends in Berlin Read online

  ‘You eat like someone who hasn’t seen food for days.’

  Amy dabbed her mouth with her napkin. ‘Sorry. “Famished,”’ she added in broad imitation of mine host. Marita gave a half-laugh: the one thing guaranteed to amuse her was mimickry, and Amy made a good impersonator.

  Marita’s appetite was less hearty, and when the waiter hesitated over clearing her half-finished plate she said peremptorily, ‘You can take it.’ She leaned back, lit a cigarette and fixed her gaze on Amy. ‘So … are you relieved to get away from the birdbrains?’ It was her nickname for their secretarial colleagues.

  ‘Rather. Though I don’t have such a disdain for them. The girls are perfectly nice –’

  ‘– and perfectly dreary.’

  Amy sniggered. ‘If it’s so awful why do you stay?’

  ‘I require a few basic skills, enough to give me a proper grounding.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘World domination,’ she said crisply, and they both laughed. ‘I’d like to stand for Parliament, maybe. Shake things up.’

  Amy pouted consideringly. ‘You mean in the general election? Which party?’

  ‘I don’t know. One that isn’t Tory or Labour.’

  ‘Who did you vote for the last time?’

  ‘I forget. How about you?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I wasn’t yet twenty-one.’

  Marita shook her head slowly. ‘Even if I were elected I wonder if there’s anything to be done with this country. Look at those horrors we passed through on the train – the mines, the disused canals, that hideous black river with the scum on top. So many unemployed, the economy failing, the place is at a standstill. I sometimes think I’d be better off out of it.’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  She gave a shrug. ‘Germany, perhaps. I admire the way Hitler has got the country back on its feet. He’s performed an economic miracle and restored national pride. That’s the kind of leadership we need here.’

  ‘I don’t think we’d take to all that marching,’ said Amy doubtfully.

  ‘Oh, that’s not relevant,’ came the impatient reply. ‘All I mean is that we need someone to take the country by the scruff of the neck and shake some life into it. Otherwise we’ll simply go sleepwalking into disaster.’

  Amy hadn’t heard this line of talk from her before. She almost wished they hadn’t started. ‘Who did you have in mind?’

  ‘Of the present lot only Mosley seems to have the will to change things. If I thought it might help him I would join the party.’

  At that moment the waiter came back with the spotted dick and custard Amy had ordered. Marita wrinkled her nose in distaste and lit another cigarette. Mosley and his politics were dropped from the conversation. The landlord put in an appearance, which prompted Marita to retire to the bedroom and gave Amy another twenty-minute test of northern hospitality.

  Later, when they were getting ready for bed, they talked about their plans for the next day. If it was fine they would go for a hike; Amy had already picked out a route on her map. She was brushing her hair in the little oval mirror on the dressing table when she noticed Marita sitting up in bed, watching her. Her gaze held a peculiar dark intensity; it was like being observed by a lynx. Her detective mystery was splayed face down on the counterpane.

  ‘How’s the book?’ she asked, seeking escape from her scrutiny.

  Marita glanced at it indifferently. ‘Lacking in excitement,’ she said flatly, then added, ‘Rather like my life at present. Take no notice of what I said about Parliament at dinner. It’s just idle talk that comes out when I’m frustrated.’

  Amy, taken aback, said, ‘Why are you frustrated?’

  ‘Oh, because … I see jobs going that I know would suit me, but they only want men. I applied for one recently, as campaign agent for an MP, and was turned down flat – simply because I’m a woman. Some don’t even bother to reply! It’s a backward country, this. Another reason I should get out.’

  She stopped, and half snorted a laugh, as though to rebuke herself. Then without another word she turned back to her unsatisfying book. Amy finished brushing her hair and climbed into her bed on the other side of the room. The sheets were cold on her skin, and she shivered. She switched off her bedside light and lay there, thinking. Their time together was proving more revelatory than she’d imagined. She had had no idea of Marita’s failed job applications, or of her disaffection with the status quo. Her candour had been disarming. Amy stole a look across the room at her friend, haloed in the bedside lamp, silently absorbed in her book.

  An unstable mixture of pity and admiration stirred in her, and before she could stop herself she said, ‘If you did stand for Parliament, I’d vote for you.’

  She saw the back of Marita’s head move slightly. But she didn’t reply, and Amy, drifting off, wasn’t sure if she had heard her after all.

  In the morning the rain continued, thinning to a drizzle, but persistent. When Amy returned from the bathroom down the corridor Marita was still in bed, so she dressed and went down to breakfast alone. Over kippers and toast she read the Daily Express, poring over the reports on the trial of Mrs Rattenbury. This lady, aged thirty-eight, the wife of a Bournemouth architect in his late sixties, had been having an affair with her teenage chauffeur, a lad named Stoner. The husband had been killed by savage blows to the head with a mallet; both his wife and the chauffeur had at different times claimed responsibility. Both were on trial for the murder. The story of course had created a sensation, and Amy was as gripped as anyone by its startling elements of squalor and ruthlessness. One queer detail in the evidence had impressed itself on her. Counsel had asked Mrs Rattenbury what her first thought had been when her lover had got into bed that night and told her what he had done. She had replied, ‘My first thought was to protect him.’ A reckless thing to say – and yet a noble one, too.

  Amy was still thinking about it as she went back up to their room, where Marita had just finished dressing, quite unbothered about missing breakfast. She made an ironic enquiry as to whether the landlord had been on entertaining form, and Amy laughed.

  ‘He didn’t have so much time to gas this morning – every table was taken.’

  ‘Good. Pity about this rain. I propose that we take a walk around the town and see if we can’t amuse ourselves.’

  The town, prosperous and handsome, was built on sloping streets with any number of interesting little alleyways vectoring off. Amy was surprised to remember quite a lot of it. Marita looked around, in a faintly regal way, at the orderly shopfronts, the solid merchants’ houses and the bustle of local life. It felt like a place that hadn’t much changed since the Great War, and perhaps earlier. On reaching a quiet backwater Amy gasped, overcome by a sudden recall of the vista. ‘I know this street! There’s a mill here where my grandmother used to work.’ She felt herself drawn down the pavement as if by a magnet, and with every step her memory of it grew stronger. She would know it as soon as she saw it. Marita followed, half smiling at her friend’s excitement.

  And there it was, set off the street, a large stone building with wide double doors, Low Moor Mill. It had about it a becalmed air, and Amy took another moment to realise that the clouded windows told the story. Her shoulders slumped in dismay.

  ‘Oh … they’ve closed it,’ she said in a small voice. ‘This was one of the oldest cotton mills in Lancashire.’

  Marita looked up at the building’s plain, weathered face. ‘When was your grandmother here?’

  ‘Before the war, years before. She was retired when we were last here – I remember someone telling me this was where Grandma used to work.’

  ‘You can tell her that you visited.’

  Amy looked at her. ‘I’m afraid not. She died a few years ago.’

  She continued to stare at it. There would have been hundreds of jobs lost. To think of all those people like her grandmother, the years they had spent here weaving and spinning and printing – all that labour scattered to the winds. She walked
up to one of the blinded windows and peered in, but there was nothing to see. On her shoulder she felt Marita’s consoling hand.

  ‘The way of the world. Yet another industry that’s gone kaput.’

  They walked back up the street, the paving stones dark from the rain and oily underfoot. At the top of the main street the castle loomed, and they followed a winding path to the keep. A spiral staircase took them to the top, which offered an aerial prospect of the town and its pitched slate roofs. The sky, off-white, was smudged here and there by a pewter-coloured cloud. Moments later they heard behind them a din of voices coming up the stairs. They were young voices, reedy and trilling, laughing, and soon the calm was shattered by a wild stampede of schoolchildren. They roamed about, capering, as unselfconscious as monkeys. For about three minutes Amy and Marita stood there, silent and immobile, as the children scuffled about them, and then the teacher’s voice sounded across the air, and – just as abruptly – they were gone. The racket faded to an echo.

  Amy said, after a moment, ‘Have you been following the Rattenbury case?’

  ‘Of course,’ Marita replied. ‘What made you think of that?’

  ‘Oh, those kids, and something I read in the paper today. They say Alma Rattenbury shared a bed with Stoner in the same room where her child slept.’

  Marita gave a wintry laugh. ‘The jury won’t like that. It’s bad enough that she’s twenty years older than the lover. She appears determined to sign her own death warrant.’

  Amy nodded. ‘And yet this woman – I don’t know – there’s something about her I find horribly moving. You know she was once a songwriter, before all this? The press have treated her very badly, they more or less call her a –’

  ‘Nymphomaniac? Well, she’s been a fool, but I agree, they’ve ganged up on her. I don’t care much for her chances.’

  Amy sighed, and felt a low mood gather. ‘How can there be so much hatred? She’s just a woman who made a mistake.’

  ‘But she’s party to a murder, even if she didn’t swing the mallet herself. As for the hatred, you’re too nice to understand. Hatred comes easily to most people.’

  ‘Does it? To you?’

  ‘My dear girl, you of all people should know …’

  ‘You mean Gabrielle Miller? I don’t understand that. I mean, she can be a bit overbearing at times –’

  ‘A bit?! She’s pushy and scheming and out for whatever she can get. Like all her kind.’

  An uncertain pause ensued. ‘What d’you mean, her kind?’

  Marita looked at her almost pityingly. ‘My God, you’re so naive! She’s a Jew, can’t you tell?’

  Amy fell silent. She had believed Marita’s antipathy towards the woman was sparked by a clash of temperaments: both were forceful personalities, and always likely to provoke one another. But it seemed this was not a resentment based merely on personality; it ran deeper, darker. She really must be naive, because it hadn’t occurred to her that Gabrielle Miller was a Jew; the name was hardly an indication, and Amy had not been in their company often enough to know. Her school had been Church of England, and growing up in Epsom she knew of Jews more by rumour than by sight. They were the butt of jokes about money and sharp practice, and little else.

  ‘Would you hate her if she wasn’t a Jew?’ Amy said eventually.

  ‘Yes. Only without the certainty that she couldn’t help being so repulsive.’

  Amy turned away. She cast her gaze once more across the sea of slate roofs, slick with rain. Some line of confessional intimacy had been crossed which, for the moment, was best dealt with by her not saying another word. She hardly knew Marita at all, she realised, and she was too afraid of her to risk further debate on the matter.

  The next morning they had packed and paid at the Swan and Royal and were on the bus out of town. The landlord had seemed sorry to see them go, and expressed a hope they would come to stay in Clitheroe again. ‘We may,’ called Marita, muttering under her breath as they left, ‘but not with you.’ The sky had cleared at last, and the short journey took them down winding country lanes of dripping trees and greenery brilliant from the rain. Fields hemmed with hedgerows climbed away on either side of them. Amy read the paper while Marita stared indifferently at the passing scene. On reaching Whitewell, which comprised no more than an old coaching inn and a small church, the driver helped them down with their suitcases before puttering off again.

  Their room here was homelier than at the Swan, with horse brasses and hunting prints on the wall. It looked out onto a wide sloping meadow, grazed upon by sheep and skirted by a beck. Over the following three days the weather was capricious, alternating rapidly between gloom and glare. A morning that began in sunshine would of a sudden darken, and rain clouds rolled in; the sky could not settle upon a mood from one hour to the next. Marita seemed not to mind being cooped up at the hotel; she lay on the sofa or slouched in an armchair, reading. (She had packed another detective novel.) Amy, restless indoors, eventually defied the lowering sky and set off on a walk, only to be caught half an hour later in a crashing downpour; she took cover under a gigantic oak, raindrops trickling down her neck, before trudging damply back to the inn. She was shivering by the time she got to the room.

  Marita, lounging in the armchair, shrieked out a laugh on seeing her. ‘You look like you’ve been dragged from the river! Sit here and I’ll put this fire on.’

  She went off to the bathroom to fetch a towel while Amy peeled off her stout boots and socks. Despite the frustrations of the weather the mood between them had been buoyant. They had not mentioned Gabrielle Miller again; Amy was wary of provoking her companion, and kept the conversation as light as she dared: she didn’t want to be thought a ‘birdbrain’ like the rest. Outside the afternoon light was shrinking, and the rain still thrashed the windowpanes. She sighed and dozed for a while, lulled by the gas fire. She woke with a start and decided to go in search of a newspaper. Down in the bar a few locals were on the first drink of the evening. On her way out she met the hotel porter, who found her a copy of the Evening Telegraph. Her heart jumped on seeing the headline, RATTENBURY VERDICT: WIFE ACQUITTED. She found a table in the lounge and fell on the story.

  ‘So the chauffeur will hang?’ Marita mused, when Amy had returned to the room, bursting with the news.

  Amy grimaced. ‘He’s been convicted, but the jury has recommended mercy on account of his age.’

  ‘Well, well. That was not the outcome I expected.’

  ‘Nor anyone else, I imagine. The woman was drunk and hysterical when she told the police she’d killed him. She really was trying to protect the boy.’

  ‘You sound positively elated, my dear. D’you suppose justice has been served?’

  ‘Maybe. I couldn’t bear to think of Mrs Rattenbury suffering more than she has already. It’s felt like a witch-hunt.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I gather witches are something they know all about round here.’

  They returned to the subject of Mrs Rattenbury over dinner that evening. Amy felt more relieved about the acquittal than she could quite fathom. ‘In her early years in Canada she was a talented musician – she wrote songs.’

  ‘You told me that,’ said Marita.

  ‘And she was brave. During the war she joined the Red Cross and served as a nurse in France. She was wounded twice and won the Croix de Guerre.’

  ‘You seem very preoccupied by this woman, Amy.’

  ‘I know. I can’t help it. She ought never to have got involved with that brute Rattenbury – I wish she’d had someone to advise her.’

  ‘Mm. To have married three times before the age of thirty suggests an odd partiality.’

  ‘But her first husband died in the trenches –’

  ‘You told me that, too.’

  Amy made a face. ‘Sorry. It’s dreadful, isn’t it, to be so bound up in the fate of one woman when you consider twenty thousand and more have just been killed in that Quetta earthquake? It’s callous, but – but it’s how I feel.’


  ‘It’s not callous,’ replied Marita. ‘Merely honest. Those twenty thousand are a statistic. Natural disasters, however terrible, haven’t the power to move us like an individual tragedy. Quetta will be forgotten soon enough. But I don’t think the Rattenbury case will.’

  Amy nodded, impressed. If some other friend of hers had dismissed the loss of twenty thousand people as ‘a statistic’ she might have felt disgust, or shame on their behalf, but Marita’s tone of cool authority was somehow compelling. No wonder she wanted to go into politics – she would crush the lot of them.

  ‘I was talking to a man at the bar –’

  ‘I noticed. What did he want?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. He just told me that it’s set fair for tomorrow.’

  ‘At last! I know how you love this part of the world, but you must agree that its weather stinks.’

  The next morning Amy slipped out of bed and took fearful steps towards the window. Peeking through the curtains of their room she rejoiced at the sight of a low, sombre sun shouldering over the hills: not exactly basking weather, but it would give them a chance to walk. She returned to her bed, and after dozing for a while she took up the postcard she’d bought in a little grocer’s back in Clitheroe. The photograph on its reverse showed the town high street in a strange sepia light.

  ‘Writing to your sweetheart?’ Marita’s voice from across the room made her jump.

  She gave a half-laugh. ‘It’s actually to my parents.’ She dashed off a few sentences while Marita went off to the bathroom. She hesitated over mentioning her discovery of the shutdown mill, and decided it was too sad to tell. A postcard should be jolly.

  After breakfast they took up the landlord’s offer of a couple of bicycles, which conveyed them through sleepy villages and winding lanes to Bolton-by-Bowland. It was another of the places Amy remembered from childhood, and it cheered her to see the pub and the village school unaltered. They parked the bicycles round the back of the local church, reasoning that they were less likely to be stolen from holy ground. Then they continued up the hill and turned onto a long avenue of mature trees. Marita was suavely attired in a light tweed jacket and knickerbockers (Amy loved the way she dressed) and had a long stride that set a more challenging pace than her companion had anticipated. Amy’s own clothes – a woollen cardigan and skirt under a mackintosh – were making her sweat. They crossed a low stone bridge and joined a road lined with yew trees. As the road dropped away it revealed the outline of Pendle Hill on the horizon.