A Small Town in Germany Page 4

  ‘I see. I thought for a moment he was saving us the expense.’

  It was a joke they shared in silence.

  2

  ‘I Could Hear their Screaming on the Telephone …’

  The daily Chancery meeting in Bonn takes place in the ordinary way at ten o’clock, a time which allows everyone to open his mail, glance at his telegrams and his German newspapers and perhaps recover from the wearisome social round of the night before. As a ritual, de Lisle often likened it to morning prayers in an agnostic community: though contributing little in the way of inspiration or instruction, it set a tone for the day, served as a roll-call and imparted a sense of corporate activity. Once upon a time, Saturdays had been tweedy, voluntary, semi-retired affairs which restored one’s lost detachment and one’s sense of leisure. All that was gone now. Saturdays had been assumed into the general condition of alarm, and subjected to the discipline of weekdays.

  They entered singly, de Lisle at their head. Those whose habit was to greet one another did so; the rest took their places silently in the half circle of chairs, either glancing through their bundles of coloured telegrams or staring blankly out of the big window at the remnants of their weekend. The morning fog was dispersing; black clouds had collected over the concrete rear wing of the Embassy; the aerials on the flat roof hung like surrealist trees against the new dark.

  ‘Pretty ominous for the sports, I must say,’ Mickie Crabbe called out, but Crabbe had no standing in Chancery and no one bothered to reply.

  Facing them, alone at his steel desk, Bradfield ignored their arrival. He belonged to that school of civil servants who read with a pen; for it ran swiftly with his eye from line to line, poised at any time to correct or annotate.

  ‘Can anyone tell me,’ he enquired without lifting his head, ‘how I translate Geltungsbedürfnis?’

  ‘A need to assert oneself,’ de Lisle suggested, and watched the pen pounce, and kill, and rise again.

  ‘How very good. Shall we begin?’

  Jenny Pargiter was the Information Officer and the only woman present. She read querulously as if she were contradicting a popular view; and she read without hope, secretly knowing that it was the lot of any woman, when imparting news, not to be believed.

  ‘Apart from the farmers, Rawley, the main news item is yesterday’s incident in Cologne, when student demonstrators, assisted by steel workers from Krupps, overturned the American Ambassador’s car.’

  ‘The American Ambassador’s empty car. There is a difference, you know.’ He scribbled something in the margin of a telegram. Mickie Crabbe from his place at the door, mistakenly assuming this interruption to be humorous, laughed nervously.

  ‘They also attacked an old man and chained him to the railings in the station square with his head shaved and a label round his neck saying “I tore down the Movement’s posters”. He’s not supposed to be seriously hurt.’

  ‘Supposed?’

  ‘Considered.’

  ‘Peter, you made a telegram during the night. We shall see a copy no doubt?’

  ‘It sets out the principal implications.’

  ‘Which are?’

  De Lisle was equal to this. ‘That the alliance between the dissident students and Karfeld’s Movement is progressing fast. That the vicious circle continues: unrest creates unemployment, unemployment creates unrest. Halbach, the student leader, spent most of yesterday closeted with Karfeld in Cologne. They cooked the thing up together.’

  ‘It was Halbach, was it not, who also led the anti-British student delegation to Brussels in January? The one that pelted Haliday-Pride with mud?’

  ‘I have made that point in the telegram.’

  ‘Go on, Jenny, please.’

  ‘Most major papers carry comment.’

  ‘Samples only.’

  ‘Neue Ruhrzeitung and allied papers put their main emphasis on the youth of the demonstrators. They insist that they are not brownshirts and hooligans, but young Germans wholly disenchanted with the institutions of Bonn.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ de Lisle murmured.

  ‘Thank you, Peter,’ Bradfield said, without a trace of gratitude, and Jenny Pargiter blushed quite needlessly.

  ‘Both Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine draw parallels with recent events in England; they refer specifically to the anti-Vietnam protests in London, the race riots in Birmingham and the Owner Tenants Association protests on coloured housing. Both speak of the widespread alienation of voters from their elected Governments whether in England or Germany. The trouble begins with taxation, according to the Frankfurter; if the taxpayer doesn’t think his money is being sensibly used, he argues that his vote is being wasted as well. They call it the new inertia.’

  ‘Ah. Another slogan has been forged.’

  Weary from his long vigil and the sheer familiarity of the topics, de Lisle listened at a distance, hearing the old phrases like an off-station broadcast: increasingly worried by the anti-democratic sentiments of both left and right … the Federal Coalition Government should understand that only a really strong leadership, even at the expense of certain extravagant minorities, can contribute to European unity … Germans must recover confidence, must think of politics as the solvent between thought and action …

  What was it, he wondered idly, about the jargon of German politics which, even in translation, rendered them totally unreal? Metaphysical fluff, that was the term he had introduced into his telegram last night, and he was rather pleased with it. A German had only to embark upon a political topic to be swept away in a current of ludicrous abstracts … Yet was it only the abstracts that were so elusive? Even the most obvious fact was curiously implausible; even the most gruesome event, by the time it had travelled to Bonn, seemed to have lost its flavour. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be beaten up by Halbach’s students; to be slapped until your cheeks bled; to be shaved and chained and kicked … it all seemed so far away. Yet where was Cologne? Seventeen miles? Seventeen thousand? He should get about more, he told himself, he should attend the meetings and see it happen on the ground. Yet how could he, when he and Bradfield between them drafted every major policy despatch? And when so many delicate and potentially embarrassing matters had to be taken care of here …

  Jenny Pargiter was warming to her task. The Neue Zürcher had a speculative piece on our chances in Brussels, she was saying; she considered it vital that everyone in Chancery read it most closely. De Lisle sighed audibly. Would Bradfield never turn her off?

  ‘The writer says we have absolutely no negotiating points left, Rawley. None. HMG is as played out as Bonn; no support with the electorate and very little with the parliamentary party. HMG sees Brussels as the magic cure for all the British ills; but ironically can only succeed by the goodwill of another failing Government.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And even more ironically, the Common Market has virtually ceased to exist.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘The piece is called The Beggar’s Opera. They also make the point that Karfeld is undermining our chances of effective German support for our application.’

  ‘It all sounds very predictable to me.’

  ‘And that Karfeld’s plea for a Bonn–Moscow trade axis to exclude the French and the Anglo-Saxons is receiving serious attention in some circles.’

  ‘What circles, I wonder?’ Bradfield murmured and the pen descended once more. ‘The term Anglo-Saxon is out of court,’ he added. ‘I refuse to have my provenance dictated by de Gaulle.’ This was a cue for the older graduates to raise a judicious intellectual laugh.

  ‘What do the Russians think about the Bonn–Moscow axis?’ someone ventured from the centre. It might have been Jackson, an ex-Colonial man who liked to offer common sense as an antidote to intellectual hot air. ‘I mean, surely that’s half the point, isn’t it? Has anyone put it to them as a proposition?’

  ‘See our last despatch,’ de Lisle said.

  Through the open window he fancied he could still hea
r the plaintive chorus of the farmers’ horns. That’s Bonn, he thought suddenly: that road is our world; how many names did it have on those five miles between Mehlem and Bonn? Six? Seven? That’s us: a verbal battle for something nobody wants. A constant, sterile cacophony of claim and protest. However new the models, however fast the traffic, however violent the collision, however high the buildings, the route is unchanged and the destination irrelevant.

  ‘We’ll keep the rest very short, shall we? Mickie?’

  ‘I say, my God, yes.’

  Crabbe, jerking into life, embarked upon a long and unintelligible story he had picked up from the New York Times correspondent at the American Club, who in turn had heard it from Karl-Heinz Saab, who in turn had heard it from someone in Siebkron’s office. It was said that Karfeld was actually in Bonn last night; that after appearing with the students in Cologne yesterday, he had not, as was popularly believed, returned to Hanover to prepare for tomorrow’s rally, but had driven himself by a back route to Bonn and attended a secret meeting in the town.

  ‘They say he spoke to Ludwig Siebkron, you see, Rawley,’ said Crabbe, but whatever conviction his voice might once have carried was strained thin by innumerable cocktails.

  Bradfield, however, was irritated by this report, and struck back quite hard.

  ‘They always say he spoke to Ludwig Siebkron. Why the devil shouldn’t the two of them talk to one another? Siebkron’s in charge of public order; Karfeld has a lot of enemies. Tell London,’ he added wearily, making another note. ‘Send them a telegram reporting the rumour. It can do no harm.’ A gust of rain struck suddenly upward at the steel-framed window, and the angry rattle startled them all.

  ‘Poor old Commonwealth Sports,’ Crabbe whispered, but once again his concern received no recognition.

  ‘Discipline,’ Bradfield continued. ‘Tomorrow’s rally in Hanover begins at ten-thirty. It seems an extraordinary time to demonstrate but I understand they have a football match in the afternoon. They play on Sundays here. I cannot imagine it will have any effect on us, but the Ambassador is asking all staff to remain at home after Matins unless they have business in the Embassy. At Siebkron’s request there will be additional German police at the front and rear gates throughout Sunday, and for some extraordinary reasons of his own, plainclothes men will be in attendance at the sports this afternoon.’

  ‘And plainer clothes,’ de Lisle breathed, recalling a private joke, ‘I have never seen.’

  ‘Be quiet. Security. We have received the printed Embassy passes from London and these will be distributed on Monday and shown at all times thereafter. Fire Drill. For your information there will be a practice muster at midday on Monday. Perhaps you should all make a point of being available, it sets an example for the Junior Staff. Welfare. Commonwealth Sports this afternoon in the rear gardens of the Embassy; eliminating races. Once again I suggest you all put in an appearance. With your wives of course,’ he added, as if that placed an even heavier burden on them. ‘Mickie, the Ghanaian Chargé will need looking after. Keep him away from the Ambassadress.’

  ‘Can I just make a point here, Rawley?’ Crabbe writhed nervously; the cords of his neck were like chicken legs, stiffeners in the declining flesh. ‘The Ambassadress is presenting the prizes at four, you see. Four. Could everyone sort of gravitate to the main marquee at quarter to? Sorry,’ he added. ‘Quarter to four, Rawley. Sorry.’ It was said that he had been one of Montgomery’s aides in the war and this was all that was left.

  ‘Noted. Jenny?’

  Nothing that they would listen to, her shrug declared.

  De Lisle addressed them all, using as his focal point that middle air which is the special territory of the British ruling class.

  ‘May I ask whether anyone is working on the Personalities Survey? Meadowes is pestering me for it and I swear I haven’t touched it for months.’

  ‘Who’s it marked out to?’

  ‘Well, me apparently.’

  ‘In that case,’ Bradfield said shortly, ‘presumably you drew it.’

  ‘I don’t think I did, that’s the point. I’m perfectly happy to take the rap, but I can’t imagine what I would have wanted with it.’

  ‘Well, has anyone got it?’

  All Crabbe’s statements were confessions.

  ‘It’s marked out to me, too,’ he whispered, from his dark place by the door, ‘you see, Rawley.’

  They waited.

  ‘Before Peter, I’m supposed to have had it, and put it back. According to Meadowes, Rawley.’

  Still no one helped him.

  ‘Two weeks, Rawley. Only I never touched it. Sorry. Arthur Meadowes went for me like a maniac. No good, you see. Didn’t have it. Lot of dirt about German industrialists. Not my form. I told Meadowes: best thing is ask Leo. He does Personalities. They’re Leo’s pigeon.’

  He grinned weakly along the line of his colleagues until he came to the window where the empty chair was. Suddenly they were all peering in the same direction, at the empty chair; not with alarm or revelation, but curiously, noticing an absence for the first time. It was a plain chair of varnished pine, different from the others and slightly pink in colour, hinting remotely at the boudoir; and it had a small, embroidered cushion on the seat.

  ‘Where is he?’ Bradfield asked shortly. He alone had not followed Crabbe’s gaze. ‘Where’s Harting?’

  No one answered. No one looked at Bradfield. Jenny Pargiter, scarlet in the face, stared at her mannish, practical hands which rested on her broad lap.

  ‘Stuck on that dreary ferry, I should think,’ said de Lisle, coming too quickly to the rescue. ‘God knows what the farmers are doing that side of the river.’

  ‘Someone find out, will they?’ Bradfield asked, in the most disinterested tone. ‘Ring his house or something, will you?’

  It is a matter of record that no one who was present took this instruction as his own; and that they left the room in curious disarray, looking neither at Bradfield nor at one another, nor at Jenny Pargiter, whose confusion seemed beyond all bearing.

  The last sack race was over. The strong wind, whipping over the waste land, dashed pebbles of rain against the flapping canvas. The wet rigging creaked painfully. Inside the marquee, the surviving children, mostly coloured, had rallied to the mast. The small flags of the Commonwealth, creased by storage and diminished by secession, swung unhappy in disarray. Beneath them, Mickie Crabbe, assisted by Cork the cypher clerk, was mustering the winners for the prize-giving.

  ‘M’butu, Alistair,’ Cork whispered. ‘Where the hell’s he got to?’

  Crabbe put the megaphone to his mouth:

  ‘Will Master Alistair M’butu please come forward. Alistair M’butu … Jesus,’ he muttered, ‘I can’t even tell them apart.’

  ‘And Kitty Delassus. She’s white.’

  ‘And Miss Kitty Delassus, please,’ Crabbe added, nervously slurring the final ‘s’; for names, he had found by bitter experience, were a source of unholy offence.

  The Ambassadress, in ragged mink, waited benignly at her trestle table behind a motley of gift-wrapped parcels from the Naafi. The wind struck again, venomously; the Ghanaian Chargé, despondent at Crabbe’s side, shuddered and pulled up the fur collar of his overcoat.

  ‘Disqualify them,’ Cork urged. ‘Give the prizes to the runners-up.’

  ‘I’ll wring his neck,’ Crabbe declared, blinking violently. ‘I’ll wring his bloody neck. Skulking the other side of the river. Whoopsadaisy.’

  Janet Cork, heavily pregnant, had located the missing children and added them to the winners’ enclosure.

  ‘Wait till Monday,’ Crabbe whispered, raising the megaphone to his lips, ‘I’ll tell him a thing or two.’

  He wouldn’t though, come to think of it. He wouldn’t tell Leo anything. He’d keep bloody clear of Leo as a matter of fact; keep his head down and wait till it blew over.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ambassadress will now present the prizes!’

  They clapped,
but not for Crabbe. The end was in sight. With a perfect insouciance that was as well suited to the launching of a ship as to the acceptance of a hand in marriage, the Ambassadress stepped forward to read her speech. Crabbe listened mindlessly: a family event … equal nations of the Commonwealth … if only the greater rivalries of the world could be resolved in so friendly a fashion … a heartfelt word of thanks to the Sports Committee, Messrs Jackson, Crabbe, Harting, Meadowes …

  Lamentably unmoved, a plainclothes policeman, posted against the canvas wall, took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his leather coat and stared blankly at a colleague. Hazel Bradfield, wife of the Head of Chancery, caught Crabbe’s eye and smiled beautifully. Such a bore, she managed to imply, but it will soon be over, and then we might even have a drink. He looked quickly away. The only thing, he told himself fervently, is to know nothing and see nothing. Doggo, that’s the word. Doggo. He glanced at his watch. Just one hour till the sun was over the yardarm. In Greenwich if not in Bonn. He’d have a beer first, just to keep his eye in; and afterwards he would have a little of the hard stuff. Doggo. See nothing and slip out the back way.

  ‘Here,’ said Cork into his ear, ‘listen. You remember that tip you gave me?’

  ‘Sorry, old boy?’

  ‘South African Diamonds. Consols. They’re down six bob.’

  ‘Hang on to them,’ Crabbe urged with total insincerity, and withdrew prudently to the edge of the marquee. He had barely found the kind of dark, protective crevice which naturally appealed to his submerged nature when a hand seized his shoulder and swung him roughly round on his heel. Recovering from his astonishment he found himself face to face with a plainclothes policeman. ‘What the hell –’ he broke out furiously, for he was a small man and hated to be handled. ‘What the hell –’ But the policeman was already shaking his head and mumbling an apology. He was sorry, he said, he had mistaken the gentleman for someone else.

  Urbane or not, de Lisle was meanwhile growing quite angry. The journey from the Embassy had irritated him considerably. He detested motor-bikes and he detested being escorted, and a noisy combination of the two was almost more than he could bear. And he detested deliberate rudeness, whether he or someone else was the object of it. And deliberate rudeness, he reckoned, was what they were getting. No sooner had they drawn up in the courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior than the doors of the car had been wrenched open by a team of young men in leather coats all shouting at once.