The Other Side of Love (69 page)

never love him. It was ridiculous, and he knew it, to believe that the untamed passion she had nursed for Methuen before the war and all during the war would fade, or even lessen. His jealousy was equally ridiculous. His friend, Roger Methuen, whom he had always envied for that spontaneous courage, that heedless generosity, that skin which tanned a rich chestnut instead of splotching red. What was the point for him, Trosper, to keep listing to himself the childhood memories and adult pleasures that he and Analiese shared good music and books? He inwardly admitted an unromantic type like himself didn’t deserve her. She was exquisite, she was brave, her character was the purest essence of gold, and like gold her actions were never tarnished. He might not comprehend certain of her motives, but she invariably deserved the great reservoir of trust that he’d placed in her a trust that Methuen lacked. Analiese knew Methuen had never banked on her; she knew that he often considered her the enemy. But love, as Carmen had sung, is a wild free bird.

A bit sticky, Aubrey decided, but emotionally accurate, and therefore suitable for the pen of C. Osmond. He replaced the notebook, turning the small key in the lock of his valise.

447

Snow fell on Frankfurt that day and the next. On Sunday the sky was a hard Prussian blue and sunlight bounced off the whiteness, dazzling the eye.

Aubrey, taking off his wet gloves and brushing them against his coat, stepped back, watching the large and small bundled-up figures put the finishing touches to the snowman. Kathe’s long hair had tumbled from its upsweep, and as she kneeled on the path next to her son the platinum strands fell on to the boy’s more buttery yellow thatch. Her face blazed with the same rosy-cheeked pleasure as his. The two were searching the slush for bits of gravel. With an exultant cry, Rathe found three matching stones and handed them to Erich. He pressed them like buttons down the snowman’s rounded front.

“Splendid!”

Aubrey exclaimed.

“Now all he needs is a hat.”

He took of his cap, crowning the snowman’s head.

“Captain Tommi,”

Erich said with a salute.

The adults smiled over his head.

“It’s three o’clock,”

Aubrey said. Visiting hour. In his unobtrusive way he was examining the barbed wire strung above the privet hedge of the hospital’s slit of a garden, the burly sentry pounding the cleared pavement, the armed staff sergeant in the metal security-shed.

“Captain Snowman Tommi needs a private to order around,”

Aubrey said.

“Why don’t you and Kathe start while I run on up?”

Kathe and Erich moved a few feet, scrabbling up snow with

448

sweeping movements of their hands, the two of them enclosed in a bubble of shared laughter. He seems to be comm around Aub thought, yet he knew that any obscure impetus could transform the child to anger or sustained silence.

The sun’s warmth was melting the snow. The marble steps were slippery. Aubrey, in leather soles, ascended with mincing caution hoping like some ridiculous adolescent schoolboy that Kathe wouldn’t look up to see him.

Wyatt had shaved off the heavy fajr stubble. Healthy colour showed in his face. Instead of the hospital gown he wore blue check flannel pyjamas whose unbuttoned top showed crisp beige chest hairs and a broad swath of bandaging.

“You’re looking fit,”

said Aubrey.

“The fever’s down.”

“Been chasing the nurses?”

“According to the Geneva Convention a prisoner need reveal only name, rank and serial number.”

They laughed, and Wyatt asked:

“Did I hear Kathe and the kid outside?”

He had not yet called Erich by his name and, since children Weren’t permitted to visit, had not seen him since the shooting.

They’re building snowmen. She’ll be in later.”

Aubrey sat on the white-painted chair.

“Tonight I’m flying to Hamburg.”

“Big doings in the British Sector?”

“As far as my superiors are concerned, I’ve been in our zone the entire time.”

Aubrey paused. Tve asked r an MP to keep an eye on the two of them.”

W

Wyatt was no longer smiling. His cheeks were gaunt, his jawbones showed, and it was possible to see how much weight he’d lost in the past week.

“Will they protect Germans?”

“In this case, yes. I suggested to Lieutenant Rockwell that Groener might contact Kathe.”

“Must have been a good strong suggestion,”

Wyatt said.

“When Rockwell dropped by yesterday, he told me there wasn’t a ghost of a chance we’d see the Nazi bastard again

“

Aubrey looked at the window, his eyes narrowing in the brilliant winter sunlight.

“In Hamburg I’ll be making arrangements to take them home for a visit.”

“Visit?”

Wyatt’s smile was rubber-lipped.

“Won’t you be tying the knot?”

“Not yet.”

Aubrey turned to his brother-in-law.

“When we do, you could be the best man.”

It was a seemingly innocuous, even gratifying request, yet something hot and wary flashed between them. Erich’s childish laughter

449

could be heard, a remote merry sound out of place in a hospital out of place in this ruined city.

Wyatt looked away first.

“The thing that gets me, really gets me, Aubrey, is her and Groener. Do you understand it?”

The twin furrows between his eyebrows showed the question was not rhetorical.

“How could she have let that arrogant thug near her?”

Aubrey held his breath. The quiet room with the old-fashioned German hospital furniture, the chipped enamel bedpan and urinal, the linen screen seemed poised. Everything in absolute stasis like the instant before a cracked dam breaks, before a delayed-action bomb explodes. He had known all along what Kathe felt for Wyatt. And one needn’t be gifted with great intuitive powers to be aware of Wyatt’s emotions for her; risking his skin to get Erich was a sign for anyone to see.

She ordered me never to tell him.

Yet … was it the right thing to let Wyatt remain in the dark? Was it fair to the boy, or to Wyatt - or, for that matter, to Kathe? Be unfair, then, Aubrey commanded himself. I’ve always loved her, I’ve always trusted her. We’re far more alike. She’ll be happy with me. I’ll spend my life making her happy.

Unfortunately for Aubrey, he was highly susceptible to acting against his own self-interest.

“Aunt Clothilde wasn’t the sort of mother a girl in trouble could go to,”

he said.

“But how did she get involved with him in the first place?”

“A Lebensborn home was secret.”

“Will you quit going round in circles?”

“Erich’s birthday’, Aubrey said with clipped precision,

“is April the tenth.”

The words seemed to be printed between them in the stuffy medicinal air.

“What?”

“April the tenth, 1940.”

Wyatt’s eyes narrowed, and he was silent for over a minute.

“Are you saying’, he finally asked in a clogged voice,

“that he’s mine?”

“You know that better than I do.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

Aubrey might have too much integrity for his own good, but he was far from sainthood.

“In New York you told me yourself that you’d sent a letter breaking it off.”

“I sure as hell didn’t know she was pregnant.”

“And now you’re going to say you’d have

“done the right thing”?”

“I’d have sold my soul to marry her.”

“Unfortunately Kathe wasn’t there to gauge the availability of your soul. And you can’t honestly believe she’d let you marry her as a commitment. Let her child be your burden?”

450

‘What about now? She’s had a hundred opportunities to tell me.”

“Just answer one question honestly.”

Aubrey spoke without heat.

“Would you have accepted Erich as your son?”

“I just told you”

“Or would you have put her through a cross-examination about dates and proofs?”

“Probably.”

Wyatt lay back in the pillow.

“Yeah, I would have. But eventually I’d have believed her.”

“Believed her completely? Never had the least feather of doubt?”

Wyatt covered his eyes with his hand, muttering hoarsely:

“Get out of my room, Aubrey. Get the hell out!”

After Aubrey closed the door, Wyatt felt the pain stabbing his head and torso in the way that told him the fever had shot up. He pressed the buzzer.

The nurse came, then the doctor.

Sweating, filled with the bitterest of self-reproaches, Wyatt heard whispering: he could have no visitors.

He was grateful.

451

Kathe and Erich’s guard, Corporal Cosway, a recently drafted nineteen-year-old ranch-hand with big ears that stood out, was waiting at the Excelsior. Before Aubrey left the following morning, the corporal had developed a crush on Kathe - his ears turned crimson when she spoke to him and a rapport with Erich. A mercy. The child, viewing Aubrey’s departure as yet one more in a chain of desertions, had become yet more of a handful. He alternated between noisily charging along the hotel corridors and clinging silently to Kathe’s hands or legs. The corporal, without any German and with very little English, taught Erich to play the harmonica.

To the squeaky sounds of

“Shenandoah”

and

“Red River Valley’, Kathe worried about her son and Wyatt.

All week the NO VISITORS sign continued to dangle from Wyatt’s door-knob. Were the nurses lying? Had Wyatt’s sudden fever pushed him back on to the critical list? The new drugs didn’t knock out all infections. Was he dying? When she succeeded in squashing these morbid fears, she would brood that Wyatt himself had ordered the sign to bar his only possible visitor. Her.

She could hardly burden Aubrey with her hair shirt of worries when he called from Hamburg on Friday.

Hamburg was the capital of the British Sector, and he was billeted in ambassadorial splendour at a suite in the Atlantic Hotel.

“I’m flying home next week,”

he said.

“It’s all set for you and Erich to

452

visit. The transport people couldn’t give me an exact date when there’ll be a pair of seats on a plane, but they’re booked up for another fortnight or so.”

There was a long hesitation, then the soft voice blurted:

“Aubrey, you did understand, didn’t you? I’m not ready to get married yet.”

Aubrey gripped tighter on the old-fashioned German instrument.

“We were discussing your travel plans. Or have you had other proposals?”

He intended the remark as humour, but was overly aware of Wyatt. His voice went clipped.

“If you’re thinking of Wyatt,”

she said in a clear formal tone,

“I haven’t seen him. Since his setback he hasn’t had visitors.”

“That’s odd. A few minutes ago I spoke to his doctor, a nice chap called Wertheim. He told me the patient’s doing better than expected.”

The line had cleared suddenly, and he heard Kathe’s sigh. Then she launched rapidly into Erich’s virtuosity on the harmonica.

II

The cloud-mottled sky cast gloom on the orderly queue inching along Schillerstrasse. Ahead of Kathe, a pair of pre-adolescent girls chattered about the parental injustice of despatching them here every Wednesday and Saturday for a paper, opening their darned gloves every once in a while to ensure they still clutched the twenty pfennigs, the price of the Frankfurter Rundschau, the city’s only German newspaper.

Erich, trailed by Corporal Cosway, had wandered over to join the urchins fascinated by the contortions of workmen jostling a great segment of water-pipe into place. EricHfeaid something to a taller, older boy; they both laughed, shoving e i other playfully. As Kathe watched, the conversations around her came to an abrupt halt.

A large hand extended the four-page ink-smeared newspaper with the heavy Gothic headline: PRESIDENT TRUMAN’S NINE STEPS

TO FEED EUROPE.

“Here’s your paper, lady,”

Wyatt said.

His khaki coat hung loose from his wide shoulders, the tan had faded yet his eyes were clear and quizzical.

“Stop gaping,”

he said with a grin.

“You haven’t lost your marbles. It’s me all right. The desk clerk at the Excelsior said you’d be here buying a newspaper.”

“But why aren’t you in hospital? How long have you been out?”

He glanced at his watch.

“Forty-five minutes. Have to check back in tonight. Come on, let’s go sit over there.”

Kathe, slowing her pace to his, moved at his side to the bus-stop shelter that by some miracle had remained intact amidst the ruins. Several other children had joined in Erich’s game, and he

453

cheerfully shouted orders at them. Corporal Cosway was looking towards Wyatt and Kathe. When she caught his eye, his ears reddened. She pointed at the swirling noisy group of children. The corporal ploughed in to get Erich.

As they approached, Wyatt thrust his hands into his pockets, peering at the child with an expression of pain, as if his wound had reopened. Yet when he spoke to Kathe he used an offhand tone.