The Other Side of Love

THE OTHER SIDE OF LOVE

by Jacqueline Briskin

RICH FRIENDS

DECADE PALOVERDE

THE ONYX

EVERYTHING AND MORE

Too MUCH Too SOON

DREAMS ARE NOT ENOUGH

THE NAKED HEART

JACQUELINE

BRISKIN

THE OTHER SIDE OF LOVE

BANTAM PRESS

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Published 1991 by Bantam Press

a division of I ransworld Publishers Ltd

Copyright Š Jacqueline Bnskin 1991

I he right of Jacqueline Bnskin to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents

Act 1988

All of the characters in this book

are fictitious, and any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

“I his book is sold subject to the Standard Conditions of Sale of Net Books

and may not be re-sold in the U K below the net price fixed by the publishers

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form or by any means,

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or otherwise, without the prior permission of

the publishers

I ypeset in 1 Ipt Baskerville by

Chippendale I ype Ltd , Otley, West Yorkshire

Printed in Great Britain by

This is for Bert

Ich rufe die Jugend der Welt (I summon the youth of the world)

Inscription on the bell cast for the Olympic Games of Berlin

We swear that we will take

“art in the Olympic Games in loyal competition, respecting the regulations which govern them and desirous of participating in them in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the honour of our country and the glory of sport.

Olympic oath

Chapter One

hat July of 1936 the weather had been exceptionally fine in Berlin. However, Saturday, 1 August dawned with a fine chill drizzle. By afternoon the rain had stopped, but raw grey clouds sagged above the festively decked city and over the immense new sports facilities nine miles to the west, threatening to drench the crowd packed within the massive granite, limestone and basalt walls of Hitler’s new Olympic Stadium. M

The guest teams had entered in alphabetical order, and the final group, the athletes from the Vereinigten Staaten, the United States, had marched jauntily around the oval perimeter and taken their place on the infield. A hush fell over the great bowl. Then a roar erupted as tier upon tier of spectators jumped to their feet, shouting and applauding.

Out of the entrance known as the Marathon Gate strode the German women’s team.

In the upper reaches of cement benches, the young women in smart white suits and little yachting caps who marched in perfect alignment appeared identical, but from the lower stands, where the foreign dignitaries as well as the high-ranking party officials were seated, individual features could be made out. A bemedalled Luftwaffe general in his sky-blue uniform shouted over the din that the little blonde in the second row, the one with the swinging plaits, was really something special. His neighbour bawled a qualified agreement: she would be more to his taste when she grew up. The

pair consulted their programmes, hoping for some clue to her identity. For months now, the press, newsreels, radio as well as a magazine devoted solely to the Olympics had been pumping out information about each German contestant. The programme showed no photograph of the girl, an omission that was puzzling. For, though too finely built to be the Third Reich’s ideal of womanliness, she possessed that aura of health and vitality so prized by the Ministry of Propaganda, and those plaits were so pale as to be almost platinum, a true Aryan colour.

The Luftwaffe general gazed with yearning lubriciousness after the slim girl.

II

Her name was Kathe Kingsmith.

At seventeen, second-youngest in the German women’s team, Kathe had been a mere reserve until ten days earlier, when the much touted German record-holder in the twohundred-metre dash - and a hopeful in the hundredmetre - had fractured her left ankle.

Kathe’s cheeks were flushed with excitement; her upper lip was raised, giving her a look of vulnerability that was increased by the tension around her green-blue eyes. Last night she had lain in her Spartan cubicle at the Friesen-Haus, where all the women’s teams were quartered, staring into the darkness and visualizing alternating tableaux of herself being crowned with laurel or stumbling to the loud jeers of this compassionless mob.

The standard-bearer, reaching the reviewingstand, dipped the swastika flag until it was an exact two inches from the red cinders of the oval track. The din grew intolerable - a cannon roar crescendo of

“Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

- as the team, in practised synchronization, swung their upper bodies to face the Ftihrer, shooting their arms skywards in the Nazi salute. Kathe’s arm went up a fraction less vehemently - had she been strolling with a friend, it might have seemed that she was pointing out the Chancellor’s seat rather than paying homage.

Kathe Kingsmith was congenitally incapable of the pure patriotic exultation that apparently gripped every other German in the huge amphitheatre. Her heritage cursed - or blessed - her with double vision. Her father, Alfred Kingsmith, was English. This side of her couldn’t help but view the Olympic spectacle squarely for what it was: a masterful job of salesmanship. In Germany, land of her birth, her mother’s country, she saw through the bright cloth waved by the Ministry of Propaganda to the bones of truth below: the Nazi repressions, the racial policies, which she actively loathed. Yet during her annual summer holidays at Quarles, the rambling old country house in Kent that belonged to her uncle and aunt, Euan

10

and Elizabeth Kingsmith, she found herself defending everything about the Third Reich. Aubrey and Araminta, her English cousins, though her best friends, teased her endlessly about her country and its dictator.

The last row of women had passed Hitler’s reviewingstand. Female arms snapped down in unison. Out of the corner of her eye, Kathe glimpsed a group of foreign dignitaries nodding. She knew exactly what they were thinking: These Nazis might be a crude bunch, but what did a little bullying and strutting matter when the end-result was this parade of magnificent young athletes, these orderly polite people, these clean toilets and well-swept streets - this handsome immaculate capital?

To gain the world’s good opinion Adolf Hitler had insisted on hosting the Olympic Games. It was his will that each German be neatly dressed and respond with warm courtesy to foreign visitors. Houses were freshly painted, window-boxes filled with colourful flowers rather than vegetables; shopkeepers had traced the Olympic symbol, five interlocking circles, on their windows. Anti-Semitic signs had been removed, and orders had gone out that no Jews were to be arrested this month; their persons and property were to be respected. This stadium, the largest in the world, the six lavish new gymnasiums, the tennis-courts, the polo-field, swimming-pools, the red-tile-roofed Olympic Village had been built amid recently transplanted trees and hedges that appeared to have grown here for centuries.

The team had halted on their patch of green turf. The amplified orchestra struck up the

“Horst Wessel Lied’, and standing German spectators roared the words as the Reich’s men’s team entered.

Now, with athletes assembled, the soaeches began. Though the women had been instructed to keep thei aze fixed on each speaker, Kathe couldn’t resist a glance towards the Americans. Her New York cousin, Wyatt Kingsmith, whom she had never met, was a member of their basketball squad. Which one was he?

Since earliest childhood, Kathe’s natural curiosity about her transatlantic cousin had been enhanced by the family conversations cut short when she - or any other child or outsider - came within earshot. She had often speculated about the enigmatic haze surrounding Wyatt with her English cousin, Araminta. Araminta, redheaded and even as a small girl knowingly sophisticated, had also been unable to come up with an acceptable reason for the secrecy.

The trumpets sounded another long fanfare, distant gun-batteries rumbled, and twenty thousand white doves were released, their wings susurrating as they swirled upwards into the clouds. A great chorus raised their voices in the Olympic Hymn written by Richard Strauss, and as the final soprano notes soared and faded a single runner appeared in the Olympische Tor. The man held high a torch that

11

spread a glow across the drab afternoon, a sacred flame kindled three thousand miles away on the ancient altar in Olympus and borne here by a relay of runners.

Eyes filling, Kathe forgot her anxieties, forgot the political machinations, forgot her dual loyalties. She was captured by the ancient spirit of the Games: athletes assembling to perform their chosen sport to their utmost capability. She watched the mythic symbol of pure non-national goodwill trot lightly up the stairway built into the Marathon Gate. Pausing at the top, he extended the torch towards the assembly, then rose on tiptoe to dip the torch into the waiting cauldron. Golden tongues of fire leaped and danced.

Tears were streaming down Kathe’s cheeks while she took the Olympic oath.

Outside the Marathon Gate the athletes milled together, a kaleidoscope of uniforms overcoming language-barriers with descriptive gestures, smiles and laughter. Kathe moved through the multinational crush to where most of the Americans were assembled.

“May I help you, Fraulein?”

asked a red-faced older American, obviously a coach, in passable German.

“If you’d be so kind, I’m trying to find one of your contestants. Wyatt Kingsmith.”

She spoke in English so flawless that the red-faced man glanced at her uniform as if to reassure himself that she was indeed in the German team rather than the British.

“That’s him over there, see?”

He pointed out an exceptionally tall group.

“With the other basketballers. The one holding his hat.”

The man moving his straw boater back and forth at his side was not only tall but also broad-shouldered and strong-looking with sunstreaks in his thick shock of sandy-brown hair. He was gazing around with his brows drawn together: an expression of perplexity

- or maybe anger.

Drawing a breath, Kathe went up to him.

“You’re Wyatt, aren’t you?”

she said.

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

He blinked at her as if he hadn’t a clue who she might be. Or maybe he hadn’t heard her. Her voice was soft; and when she felt awkward, which she did now, she had a woeful tendency to blush and to swallow her sentences.

“I’m your German cousin,”

she murmured.

The snapshots that Uncle Humphrey and Aunt Rossie had brought on their European tour two years earlier had not done their son justice. Large craggy features like Wyatt Kingsmith’s did not photograph well, and neither could black and white capture the dazzle of white teeth against a dark tan. Except for the light hair, Kathe decided, he might have been an idealized American Indian. Finally

12

he smiled, a smile suffused with irony that somehow made him yet more attractive.

Angry at herself for noticing his good looks, irritated at him for putting her through her paces, Kathe thought: Americans! They didn’t even dip their flag for the Chancellor; and, like him or not, he’s the host of the Games.

“You must be Kathy,”

he said.

“You made the Third Reich’s track team at the last moment, didn’t you?”

Nodding, she said:

“Kathe.”

“Cater?”

“My name. It’s pronounced Kathe.”

“In America we say Kathy.”

“But this is Germany.”

She managed a smile.

“And we say Kathe.”

“Sorry, but it’s not a sound we have, so if you’re a linguistic purist you’ll have to avoid us Americans.”

Now the grin was openly mocking, and this released her from good manners.

“That sounds good to me,”

she said.