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 on at a time when he’d got all ready to retire. From that time onwards some of the zeal had gone out of him.
Or perhaps that was just my fancy, for today Frank had the sort of appearance that almost restored my faith in the British public school system. He radiated fidelity, trustworthiness and good breeding. His hair was wavy and greying, but not so wavy that he looked like a ladies’ man and not so grey that he looked like he couldn’t be. Even the wrinkles in his face were the sort of wrinkles that made him look like a good-natured outdoors man. And of course Frank had a valet to press his Savile Row suits and polish his hand-sewn shoes and make sure his Jermyn Street shirts had exactly the right amount of starch in the collars.
‘You heard about my son?’ He was rummaging through his pockets. The question was put in that casual manner and tone of voice that, with a certain sort of Englishman, indicates a matter of vital importance.
‘No,’ I said. ‘What about him?’ Frank had never made any secret of his hope that his son would find a place in the Diplomatic Service. He’d prepared the ground well in advance. So when the boy came down from Cambridge with the declared intention of getting a commercial pilot’s licence, Frank still didn’t take it too seriously. It was only after he’d seen him flying the routes for a few years that Frank reluctantly faced the fact that his son was going to live a life of his own.
‘Failed his medical.’
‘Frank, I’m so sorry.’
‘Yes, for an airline pilot that’s a sentence of death. He said that to me on the phone. “It’s a sentence of death, Dad.” Until that very moment I don’t think I understood what that damned flying job meant to him.’ Frank wet his lips nervously; I knew that I was the first person to whom he’d confided his true feelings. ‘Flying. It must be so boring. So repetitious.’ This was of course exactly the superior attitude that his son had so resented, and which had created the unsurmountable barrier between them. ‘Not much of a job for a fellow with a good degree, I would have thought.’ He looked at me quizzically and then realized that I didn’t have a college degree of any kind.
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