The Hothouse by the East River (3 page)

Pierre
looks interested at last, either because he is interested or because he is
intelligent enough to put up a show at this point. He has turned from the
window and has sat in the chair opposite Paul, his left arm so placed on the
arm-rest, perhaps by intention, that he can see the time at a glance.

Pierre
says, ‘She’s more —’ before the doorbell rings. He raises his eyebrows, rises,
and goes to press the button that will release the street door. He returns for
the few moments that it takes for the lift to ascend, now speculating on who
the visitor can be. He lets in a flabby, pale-fleshed man with a crew-cut and
sandy, pink-rimmed eyes, wearing pale-blue trousers and a loose white shirt
hanging over them. Paul cannot decide upon his age, the man’s features being
packed away in flesh.

His
name is Peregrine. Perhaps it is his first or middle name, perhaps his last. ‘Peregrine
— my father. Father — Peregrine,’ Pierre says.

‘I have
to go,’ says Paul.

As
Pierre lets his father out he says, ‘I doubt very much that the man you’ve seen
here in New York is the Kiel you’ve been talking about. I think you’ve made
some mistake.’

II

Three years ago, Elsa
said, ‘Perhaps I’m imagining things, as Caesar said to his wife at dawn on the
Ides of March.’

‘Oh,
come now,’ Paul said. ‘There’s a difference between your case and his.’

On that
occasion Pierre and Katerina had been in the room. Katerina was starting her
last college vacation.

‘Where
did you read that about Caesar?’ Katerina said.

‘Oh, how
you bore me,’ said her mother. ‘So bloody literal.’

Katerina
said, ‘I don’t understand, Mother.’

‘We’re
not all gifted with understanding,’ Elsa said, and fixed her gaze on the
windows.

‘You
used to be different towards us,’ Pierre said. ‘You used to be sweet and
patient. Not that it matters.’

‘There’s
a time for everything. It’s your turn to be sweet and patient,’ Elsa said.

‘They
show a lot of sweetness and a lot of patience, Elsa,’ said Paul. ‘And,’ he
said, ‘I try my best, too.’

‘Where
did you read that about Caesar, Mother?’ Katerina said.

‘I
didn’t read it.’

‘Then
how do you know he said it?’

Elsa
laid her forehead on the window. She started to laugh. The father left the
room; the daughter followed, then the son.

That
was only three years ago. But now it is long years ago, when they are recently
engaged and are working together in England at the Compound, during the second
world war. The Compound is a small outpost of British Intelligence in the heart
of the countryside. Paul says to Elsa, ‘Did you hear what happened to Kiel?’

‘No —
what?’ she says.

‘He’s
been sent back to the prisoner of war camp.’

‘Which
Kiel? You mean Claus Kiel?’ she says.

‘Oh,
him — no, not him, he’s harmless. I mean Helmut.’

‘But I
saw Helmut last night. He was here.’

‘Yes,
well he was sent back this morning.’

‘What
for?’ she says.

‘He
started a fight in his billet, apparently. Smashed a window.’

‘Helmut
smashed a window? Last night? — But that’s not like him, you know. He’s a
serious type, Paul. Someone must have provoked him.’

‘No,’
Paul says, ‘they didn’t.’

‘Well,
why did he start the fight?’ she says.

‘He
must have wanted to be sent back to camp. The bloody fools here don’t see that.
All they care about are the regulations. They’ve got no psychology. The German
workers have got to keep order, so he’s been sent back to the camp for bad
conduct —which is obviously what he wanted.’

‘Why
should he want to go back?’ she says. ‘I don’t know. I thought you might know.’
She starts walking over to the hut where they work and he walks with her. The
spring sun has come out. She pulls the wide belt of her dress tighter into her
waistline and slings the short strap of her bag over her shoulder. She says,
‘There could be a lot of reasons. It isn’t our business, it’s for Security to
find out.’

He
says, ‘They don’t seem to think he had any reason to want to get out of working
for us. They seem to think he just lost control and broke out into violence.’

She
stops at the door of the hut. She looks in the doorway and speaks with her head
still turned away from him.

‘Well
maybe he did just lose control. Prisoners often do,’ she says, ‘for one does
forget sometimes that these German collaborators are still prisoners.’

‘But I
wouldn’t have thought Kiel would lose control as easily as that, would you?’

‘No, I
wouldn’t quite honestly. It’s a shock.’

‘When
did you see him last night?’ Paul says. ‘He was here, working— Where do you
think I saw him? Where else would you think?’

‘I said
“when” not “where”. I’m not suggesting that you’ve broken any rules, Elsa. I’m
not a security officer.’

She
says, ‘He was here till midnight and went home on the bus with the others. He
was perfectly all right, then. Perfectly cheerful. Perfectly… Of course it
must be nerve-racking for them when they know all the time they’ve ratted on
their own country. I don’t know what to think, really. What do you think?’

Paul
looks at the clock on the wall inside the doorway, and says he has to go. He
looks at her as if to ask if she has anything more to say.

She
says, ‘Let me know if you hear anything more, won’t you, Paul?’

‘Are
you having supper in the canteen?’

‘Yes,
but I won’t get away till nine.’

‘I’ll
see you there at nine,’ he says.

The
Compound is hard asphalt in the primrose light, early spring of 1944, England.

‘I’m a
spent volcano. Just a slag-heap with a hole down the middle and a thin wisp of
curly smoke coming up out of my hair.’

So she
drawls, in these days of her languid vigour, while Paul takes off his
sun-glasses, breathes on the lenses, and wipes them with his pocket
handkerchief, one by one; then he puts on the glasses again, but still cannot
understand the girl.

Not
long afterwards, Paul is called in for questioning by a security officer.

This
security officer, Colonel Tylden, has been appointed sagely. He is a military
man with a limited imagination which, even in its limited capacity, he seldom
uses. Consequently he is less like-able, less highly regarded but more just and
more efficient than other, more brilliant and subtle, investigators whose
courteous looks and hysterical hearts combine to put up a brilliant performance
in the course of interrogation, but who probe so often in directions deviating
from facts to which they never return.

‘Sit
down.’

Paul
sits down.

‘Elsa,’
says the man, ‘slept with Kiel.’

Paul
frowns, and, looking out of the upper pane of the window, gives a sigh of
exasperation which is meant to convey the fact that he knows the colonel’s
methods and is not to be impressed.

The
colonel says, ‘Which of course you know.’

‘No,’
says Paul wearily, ‘and neither do you.’

The man
shrugs his eyebrows. He starts afresh:

‘Not
Claus Kiel, of course. Helmut.’

Paul
smiles at this truism within the hypothesis that Elsa has slept with anyone
called Kiel. Paul’s smile is tense, soon ended. But the officer then grants a
long-drawn smile and says, ‘Yes, of course. An unnecessary distinction in this
context. We can hardly suspect little Claus of having a girl in his bunker.’

‘Bunker?
How could they have sex in the bunker, with anyone liable to come in? And those
cots —narrow…’

He is
thinking of the narrow sleeping-berths set up in the small rooms where the
late-duty workers may rest between broadcasts.

‘She
used to go and rest in the bunker, Kiel’s bunker. She admits that. Apparently
she went in frequently between transmissions.’

‘Oh
well, I haven’t been on late duty for months, so I really couldn’t say about
that. I wouldn’t have attached importance to it, anyway. Elsa obviously
doesn’t.’

‘Why
not?’

‘She
hasn’t mentioned to me anything about resting in a bunker, or anything about
Kiel or Kiel’s bunker.’ Paul knows, as soon as he has spoken, the feebleness of
this protest. He looks at the security man, waiting for his gentle smile of
sympathy for one deceived in love.

But the
man behaves well and responds in a serious tone, although, of course he can
only say, ‘It’s understandable that she hasn’t mentioned it.’

‘And
equally,’ says Paul, ‘understandable that she hasn’t mentioned it, if it means
nothing to her, going into Kiel’s bunker for a lie-down.’ He is immediately
aware of his error in uttering that ‘if’. He adds, ‘Since it means nothing to
her.’ And he is about to elaborate further on Elsa’s innocence when he realises
that the interrogator is now waiting for a real outburst of that indignation
which expresses inner doubts. Paul remembers he is a foreigner and decides to
shut up.

The man
waits long enough, hopefully, before speaking again. He states, ‘You and Elsa —
there has been a little estrangement lately.’

‘No,’
says Paul, as if answering a question.

‘You haven’t
been about together so much, lately’.

Paul
looks at him in a puzzled manner.

The man
looks away, and, as if making a rather sad observation, says, ‘You don’t see
much of each other these days.’

‘Very
true,’ says Paul, and is not to be drawn into what the man already knows.
Formerly, Paul was able to go for long daily walks with Elsa in the countryside
surrounding the Compound. Elsa was then on night duty and he on afternoon duty,
so that their free time at the Compound coincided by two busy hours only; but
their leave has always been arranged to coincide, so that they can go up to
London for four days each fortnight, as they do, staying at the Strand Palace
Hotel.

‘I
mean,’ says the man in answer to the silence, ‘that you aren’t seen together as
much as you used to be. Of course, you take your leave together, but I mean to
say, Elsa, of course, went on late duty at her own request.’

‘Not
true,’ Paul says, taking no chances.

The
officer opens a desk and takes out a bunch of keys, then he rises and goes over
to the filing cabinet, where he inserts and turns a key. Paul is not sure if
the cabinet drawer has not opened a little too easily, he is not sure if it was
locked in the first place. The man has removed a blue cardboard file and is
flipping through the papers inside it. He stops at one paper, half-removes it
for a moment and concentrates his eyes upon it. Then he replaces the paper
neatly, replaces the folder, shuts the drawer, locks it, tries it, and returns
to his desk. There, he opens the drawer and replaces the keys.

He
says, ‘She applied for late duty,’ and takes out a pocket notebook in which he
writes something in pencil.

Paul
says nothing. The performance looks unlikely, but it might equally well be
genuine. Elsa had complained to him about being put on night duty, she had said
she was trying to get out of it, and later had told him she had failed; it was
her turn to work for six months on a shift beginning at four in the afternoon
and ending some time between midnight and two o’clock the next morning.

The
officer puts the notebook back in his pocket. He taps the desk with his pencil;
he holds it between his first and middle fingers, and lets it tap lightly,
first with the point and then, turning it, with the blunt end, as if tapping a
cigarette at both ends. Tap, goes the little pencil. He says,

‘Thank
you, Paul.’ He casts the pencil aside, and rises.

‘Not at
all, Colonel.’ Paul gets up to go and, between the chair and the door, is about
to utter a curt request to be addressed more formally, when he decides sharply
that he might sound like a chauffeur, tangled with umbrage, carping that his
name is Mister. He withdraws silently, tangled indeed, but without having
assumed inferiority.

Nor
does he call off work for the rest of the day and go back to flop in his billet
as he longs to do. He takes a bus as far as it can take him towards the
Compound. Then he walks the rest of the distance, straight through two villages
over a distance of four and a half miles. The gate-keeper greets him, ‘Fine day,
sir,’ then looks at his watch as Paul walks past. ‘It’s going to rain, though,’
says Paul, looking up at a collection of white clouds. There is no reason why
the man should not look at his watch, but Paul forbears to look back and see
whether the man is returning to the gatehouse, there perhaps to telephone,
under orders, to report Paul’s arrival, and the time of it. It is just possible,
it is infinitely possible, even probable, that Colonel Tylden, the security
officer, has wanted to find out how far Paul has been put off his stroke.
However, Paul’s jitters are not available to human eyes this afternoon in the
early spring of England, 1944.