Therefore Choose (14 page)

She wrote:

I knew I could commit myself to you, and to a
certain kind of life together, writing and publishing.
You talked about it, we talked about it together.
I wanted to know if you wanted to make that
choice. You were not of that mind.

George stared at the letter, folded it, and put it back in the envelope, which he placed upside down on the desk so that he could no longer see that handwriting. Should he tear it up? He closed his eyes. He placed his hand over his mouth. Werner! She's married Werner.

She had committed herself to Werner. Could he blame her? He had not been able to choose when she'd asked.

But the wrenching feeling … he wondered whether he was going to cry, but he did not. His mind seemed stuck in something that wouldn't move, that he couldn't move. What was it, coming to him, indistinct but strong, taking hold of him? Betrayal — is that what he felt? Stupidity, his own stupidity, leading him along a path he hadn't really wanted to take.

“Married,” he whispered into the hand that he still held over his mouth.

Three months before Anna's letter came, with its announcement of her marriage, German forces had marched into Czechoslovakia. Hitler went immediately to Prague to proclaim that Bohemia and Moravia were German protectorates. He said nothing now about reuniting German-speaking peoples. It was an invasion.

It was just a few weeks later that Anna had written to George to tell him her mother had died. He had replied immediately, full of condolences, which he knew were inadequate.

And here he was now, sitting with a letter in front of him that announced that his life was over, the life he had been living, the life into which he'd thought himself.

He got up from his chair, went into his bedroom, and threw himself onto the bed that he and Anna had shared. He wept, knowing it would do no good at all.

A chance for happiness, he thought as his sobs subsided. Is that the way to think about it? He had picked up the chance, turned it over, looked at it from every side, and thrown it away.

How could he have thrown it away? He'd thought she would have been reasonable and come to live in England. That would have been sensible. It would have been more normal. England seemed the right place to be. Far more right than among the senseless political extravagances of Germany, which everyone could see were senseless so that everyone with any sense was leaving. Why did she not see that? Particularly after the Nazis closed her magazine. Why couldn't she have left? It was women, was it not, who were supposed to move to where their men were?

Now there was this, with Werner. George was too numb to grasp it.

Was it revenge on Werner's part…or envy? Anna had said there had been nothing between them. Perhaps when Werner had seen him with her, when he'd seen them happy, that had started something in him.

Anna had said that Werner was unsure of himself with women. She implied that he would not have started anything with her if left to himself. Seeing that his friend could enter such a relationship had given him the idea. Perhaps, thought George, I made Werner become interested in her.

George had thought he could just continue with his medical studies, just follow along, although the reasons were not entirely clear to him. He had thought that getting trained and continuing with Anna would turn out all right. Doing medicine. Getting along somehow.

George was angry, less at Werner than at Anna. By her he felt betrayed. He suddenly knew that, when he'd visited her at Christmas, she had already started to sleep with Werner. She didn't tell him. And neither, of course, did Werner tell him by letter. That was why Werner didn't come to Berlin in December. For how long had Anna been with Werner? Before the summer? He didn't think so. In the summer he and she had seemed close. That autumn, then? In November. When the magazine was closed, George had written to say he couldn't go to Berlin because of his exams. Werner must have jumped on a train and gone to be with her. That must be when it happened.

More than angry, George was abject, humiliated. Had there been the possibility of pleading, he would have done so, gone immediately to Berlin and pleaded with her. But how could he? He had made the critical mistake when she asked him to choose. He'd not seen the pattern developing. Now he stared at it. He was at fault. He wanted to say he was sorry. There was no one to say it to.

What could he write to Anna, in reply to her letter? He decided not to answer it. She would know why, and she would feel guilty.

George did not understand Anna when she had asked him to stay in Berlin in 1936. He still did not understand her when he read her letter about marrying Werner. Her idea of choosing to become the person one wants to be was too strange. He didn't think he had ever decided anything in his life. Now he knew the consequence of not choosing.

By the time George felt able to write to Anna, the war had started, and no more letters could be sent.

When Anna's letter came
, George had just finished his stint as house physician in the hospital. As he'd walked from the tube towards the Leytonstone house that Friday evening, he had thought about his coming trip to Berlin, in only a month's time.

George had been assigned to work that month in a general practice in one of London's most seedy areas, the Caledonian Road. The job started immediately after the weekend of the terrible letter.

The general practitioner for whom George worked was a man of blinkered views who, in a scullery behind his consulting room, did his own dispensing. Among George's responsibilities was washing medicine bottles and sticking labels on them. There were two large glass containers, which stood on a rough bench. Each had a tap that protruded over the side of the bench. With this equipment the doctor could fill bottles that he would hand to his patients. One of the containers held a pink liquid, slightly viscous, intended for ailments above the waist. The other had in it a pale green liquid, intended for ailments below the waist. Modern medicine. This was what George had exchanged for being with Anna.

George was low, bitter about how Anna and Werner had got together, anxious about his work as a doctor, which seemed impossible, too tedious, too raw. Patients whose lives were desperate wanted him to make things all right for them. They didn't seem to know that what medicine could provide was so limited. He could not be what they wanted. He could not even be what he wanted.

A week after George had started work at the dismal general practice, he was in his attic room staring at the ceiling when his mother called from downstairs to say that Peter was on the phone.

“D'you want to get together?” said Peter.

“It would be nice … certainly.”

“Tell you what. Come with me tomorrow morning,” Peter said. “I've got a car. I've got to go to the docks, and we could chat. Have you ever seen the docks? They're quite interesting. Could you skip off for a couple of hours?”

“I'd like to see the docks. It depends when. I'm working in a general practice in the Caledonian Road.”

“You're on the Central Line, right? I'll pick you up in front of Mile End station at a quarter to seven tomorrow. I know it's a bit early for a self-respecting medical man, but I can drop you off at your practice afterwards. You can be listening down your stethoscope by nine.”

“That would work.”

George was standing outside Mile End station at 6:45 a.m. when Peter arrived.

“It's a huge area, the docks,” said Peter as they drove down Burdett Road. “You'll see. But how are you?”

“I'm a bit down at the moment. That woman I told you about, in Berlin. She just got married … to someone I know. To Werner Vodn. You remember, I talked to you about him. He went to Freiburg.”

“Painful,” said Peter. “I'm sorry.”

The traffic at this time in the morning was busy but not impossible. For a while they drove without talking.

“How are you managing?” said Peter.

“I'm managing,” said George. “What about you? And what about the civil service?”

“You need to believe in the ministry you're working in. There's something not right about the Board of Trade. I'm thinking of switching to Housing or something.”

When they reached the docks, Peter stopped to have a gate opened for him, and they drove in.

“These are the Royal Docks,” he said. “Still crowded, even after the Depression.”

“It is big,” said George. “I had no idea.”

Peter parked the car. They got out in front of a huge lock and watched a ship move majestically out of the lock and into the dock.

“This stretch of the river here is Gallions Reach. If you're a ship that comes up like this one, you can go through towards the city, several miles, then back into the river. You could think of it as a shortcut, though the locks slow you down a bit.”

The dock they were in, the Royal Albert Dock, seemed almost as wide as the river itself. There were seagoing ships, tugs, lighters, barges.

When Peter was finished he drove to the East India Docks.

“These are smaller,” said Peter. “But they're old, used to be able to get a couple of hundred East-Indiamen in here — sailing ships. It went on from there, sucking goods into London from all over the world.”

“And this is where everything comes from,” George said.

“The slave trade operated through London … Bristol and Liverpool were big too, but London was the biggest.”

“I didn't know.”

“The ships worked in a triangle. Clothes and firearms to West Africa. Slaves from there to America and the West Indies. That was called the middle passage. Then back here, to the London Docks, with cotton or sugar. A big profit at each point in the triangle.”

“You look at those portraits of Queen Victoria, and at school you're told it is something to be rather proud of.”

“It was millions of people, the slaves. On some voyages, more than half died, locked in manacles.”

“What we're told is ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume.'”

Peter parked the car and pulled on the handbrake. “Do you mind hanging on here for a bit?” he said. “I shouldn't be long.”

“I'm fine,” said George. “I'll look at the ships.”

George got out, walked to the edge of the quay. He looked down at the water and then at a small boat chugging up the dock. But it wasn't dockyard life that filled his mind. It wasn't slavery. It was Anna, and then Anna and Werner in bed together.

Before he knew about Anna and Werner, when she was apart from him, he had worried that he found it difficult to imagine her clearly. Now her image was all too clear, doing things in bed with Werner. An image with a background of dull pain. But if he didn't concentrate on it too much, he could prevent himself from dissolving into tears.

What is it that does this? he thought. Are we so incomplete in ourselves that we need another person? And why a particular one, rather than some other one? And why such pain? And why such impossible decisions?

Cranes were hoisting goods from the holds of ships. Men were going about their work. Stop thinking about Anna, he said to himself. Think of the docks. The London Docks, the horrible slave trade, why not think about that? What's the pain of one person? Love affairs end. I should be thinking about the Empire. Now it's the German Empire on the go, troops marching into other countries. All that triumphalism? And Werner, part of that army.

Again George thought of Anna and Werner, together.

Peter returned. “That's fine,” he said.

“Everything's all right?”

“Fine, fine, fine. You know I was saying about the Empire.”

“The British Empire.”

“You walk along any street in London,” said Peter. “Solid houses, three or four or five storeys, all based on the Empire. Raw materials come in here. Manufactured goods go out. These docks are a big part of the engine that makes all that wealth…a lot of it stays right here in London.”