She reached up and touched the corner of her eye with her little finger. It was a delicate gesture with which she tested the adhesion of her large false eyelashes. ‘Werner is like a son to me.’
‘He’s very fond of you, Lisl,’ I said. I suppose I should have told her that Werner loved her, for the sort of sacrifices Werner was making to run this place left no doubt of that.
‘And loves the house,’ said Lisl. She picked up another little piece of apple and crunched it noisily, looking down at her plate again as if not interested in my response.
‘Yes,’ I said. I’d never thought of that before but Werner had been born here during the war. It was the home in which he grew up as a tiny child. The house must have even more sentimental associations for him than it did for me, and yet in all our conversations he’d never expressed any feelings about the place. But how selfish of me not to see what was now so obvious. ‘And you have your niece here too,’ I said.
‘Ingrid.’ Lisl cleared her throat and nodded. ‘She is my niece.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Since Lisl had repeatedly told anyone who would listen that Ingrid was her sister’s illegitimate daughter, and therefore was not her niece, I interpreted this admission as substantial progress for Ingrid.
‘Are you going somewhere?’ she asked truculently. ‘You keep looking at your watch.’
‘I’m going to the bank. There should be money waiting for me and I owe money to Frank.’
‘Frank has plenty of money,’ said Lisl. She shifted about in her chair. It was her way of dismissing both Frank’s generosity as a lender and my integrity in reimbursing him. As I got up to go she said, ‘And I must get you to sort out all that stuff of your father’s some time.’
‘What stuff?’
‘There’s a gun and a uniform full of moth holes – he never wore it except when they ordered him to wear it – and there’s the cot your mother lent to Frau Grieben across the street, and books in English – Dickens, I think – the footstool and a mattress. Then there’s a big bundle of papers: bills and that sort of thing. I would have thrown it all away but I thought you might want to sort through it.’
‘What sort of papers?’
‘They were in that old desk your father used. He forgot to empty it. He left in a hurry. He said he’d be back and collect it but he forgot. You know how absent-minded he could be sometimes. Then I started using that room as storage space and I forgot too.’
‘Where is it all now?’
‘And account books and bundles of correspondence. Nothing important or he would have written and asked me for it. If you don’t want it I’ll just throw it all out, but Werner wants me to clear everything out of the storeroom. It’s going to be made into a bathroom.’
‘I’d like to sort through it.’
‘That’s all he thinks about; bathrooms. You can’t rent a bathroom.’
‘Yes, I’d like to sort through it, Lisl.’
‘He’ll end up with fewer bedrooms. So how will that earn more money?’
‘When can I look at it?’
‘Now don’t be a nuisance, Bernd. It’s locked up and quite safe. That room is crammed full of all sorts of junk and there’s nowhere else to put it. Next week … the week after. I don’t know. I just wanted to know if you wanted it all.’
‘Yes, Lisl,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘And buy me the Guide Michelin for France. The new one! It’s just come out. I don’t want the old one mind.’
‘The Michelin hotel guide to France!’ For years now Lisl had rarely emerged from the hotel except to go to the bank. Since the heart attack she hadn’t even done that. ‘Are you going to France?’ I asked. I wondered if she had some crazy plan to visit her sister Inge who lived there.
‘Why shouldn’t I go to France? Werner’s running things, isn’t he? They keep telling me to go away for a rest.’
Werner was thinking of putting Lisl into a nursing home but I could see no way of explaining that to her. ‘The new Michelin France,’ I said. ‘I’ll get one.’
‘I want to see which are the best restaurants,’ said Lisl blithely. I wondered if she was joking but you couldn’t always be sure.
I spent the rest of the morning strolling along Ku-Damm. The snow had gone and the sunlight was diamond hard. The clouds were torn to shreds to reveal jagged shapes of blue, but under such skies the temperature always remains bitterly cold. Soviet jet fighters were making ear-splitting sonic bangs, part of the systematic harassment that capitalism’s easternmost outpost was subjected to. After a visit to the bank I browsed in the bookshops and looked round Wertheim’s department store. The food counters in the basement sold all sorts of magnificent snacks. I drank a glass of strong German beer and ate a couple of Bismarck herrings. For an hour the prospect of a lunch meeting that would be discordant, if not to say an outright conflict, was forgotten. My problems vanished. Around me there were the ever cheerful voices of Berliners. To my ears their quips and curses were unlike any others, for Berlin was home to me. I was again a child, ready to race back along the Ku-Damm to find my mother at the stove and father at the lunch table waiting for me at the top of that funny old house that we called home.
Time passes quickly when such a mood of content settles the mind. I had to hurry to get back to Lisl’s for noon. When I went into the bar there was no sign of Teacher. I sat down and read the paper. At half past twelve a man came in and looked round to find me, but it was not Teacher: it was the Berlin resident, Frank Harrington. He took off his hat. ‘Bernard! How good to see you.’ His manner and his warm greeting gave no clue to the reason for this change of plan and I immediately decided that his presence was in some way connected with the enigmatic exchange that Ingrid had overheard.
Perhaps it was Frank’s paternal attitude to me that made his behaviour so unvarying. I do believe that if I surprised Frank by landing on his side of the moon unexpectedly he would not be startled. Nonchalantly he’d say, ‘Bernard! How good to see you,’ and offer me a drink or tell me I was not getting enough exercise.
‘I heard you were out of town, Frank.’
‘London overnight. Just one of the chores of the job.’
‘Of course.’ I tried to see in his face what might be in store but Frank’s wrinkled face was as genial as ever. ‘I went to the bank this morning,’ I said. ‘I have a draft to repay the thousand pounds you let me have.’ I gave it to him. He folded it and put it in his wallet without reading it.
He wet his lips and said, ‘Do you think your friend Werner could conjure up a drink?’ His feeling that this might be beyond Werner’s abilities, or that Werner might be disposed to prevent him having a drink, was evident in his voice. Coat still on, hat in hand, he looked round the room in a way that was almost furtive. Frank had never been fond of Lisl or Werner or the hotel. It seemed his unease at being here was increased now that Werner had taken charge.
‘Klara!’ I said. I did not have to speak loudly, for the old woman had positioned herself ready to take Frank’s hat and coat. ‘A double gin and tonic for my guest.’
‘Plymouth gin with Schweppes?’ said Klara, who apparently knew better than I did what Frank drank. She took Frank’s trenchcoat, felt hat and rolled umbrella.
‘Yes, Plymouth with tonic,’ said Frank. ‘No ice.’ He didn’t immediately sit down in the chair I had pulled out for him but stood there, preoccupied, as if unable to remember what he’d come to tell me. He sighed before sinking down on to the newly chintz-covered banquette. ‘Yes, just one of the chores of the job,’ he said. ‘And it’s the sort of task I could be very happy without at this time.’ He looked tired. Frank was somewhere in his middle sixties. Not so old perhaps, but they’d asked him to stay