The Berlin Affair Read online

  THE BERLIN AFFAIR

  David Boyle

  © David Boyle 2017

  David Boyle has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Endeavour Quill is an imprint of Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Grace and Tom

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Epilogue

  Historical note

  “Never shall a young man,

  Thrown into despair

  By those great honey-coloured

  Ramparts at your ear,

  Love you for yourself alone

  And not your yellow hair…”

  W. B. Yeats

  Prologue

  Cambridge, February 1939

  Xanthe had always felt a bit of an outsider, especially in England. She never knew which fork she was supposed to use or how to greet people with that very English reserve. But of all the moments where she had struggled as an American in Cambridge, she never felt so out of place as when she walked into a philosophy lecture at King’s College, in the rooms of Dr Wittgenstein himself. It wasn’t just because she was from the Midwest, which she felt had been wearing her like a veil since she had arrived as a very young student the previous Autumn. Or really because she was a woman – that was always a factor, but she recognised it and tried to ignore it. It was being in the secret hiding place of a man who seemed almost as out of place as she felt herself. There he was, sitting in a deckchair next to a huge black stove, with his head in his hands. For one horrible moment, she wondered whether he had been put out by her obvious lateness.

  Xanthe was certainly late. She had been invited by a slight acquaintance and turned up trying to look more than usually demure, only to find that the friend had gone down with a chill – everyone in Cambridge seemed to have one in those dank, dark February teatimes some months before the war broke out.

  There had been no reply when she knocked at the door and absolute silence from inside. She stood there for a moment wondering whether she should just give up, then she thought she would just peer around the door – and then she found she was stuck. They all craned their necks to look at who had arrived, as if she was somehow more interesting than the slight, wizened man thinking before their very eyes. Perhaps they hadn’t seen a woman before in King’s, she wondered. It is quite possible they had never seen a woman at all. They had certainly never seen an American woman. She stood there, frozen to the spot by sheer embarrassment, wondering what faux pas she had committed and desperately checking and rechecking the fifteen wooden chairs to see where she might sit down.

  She could hardly sit on the bed or the floor. Could she? She was about to escape in confusion out into the damp air again, never to return, when a slight voice attracted her attention. She saw that even this bold soul seemed unable to actually look her in the face, and his eyes focused on a spot somewhere near her feet. As he cleared his throat, nervously, she wondered whether he was about to ask her to leave.

  “Here we are,” he said. “Have my chair. I can perch over here.”

  “I am real grateful,” Xanthe whispered as she passed him. He had short brown hair and a round face and what seemed to be a sort of twinkle in his eye. She glanced down and saw his trousers were held up with a bit of string, and gave him as big a smile as she could manage – we do big smiles in Cincinnati, she thought to herself. Then suddenly the professor was off again. “No, no, no,” he said in a heavily Germanic accent. “Words do not stand for themselves. You can only understand them in context. They mean different things to different people. Language is not an objective truth. It is a code and we have to interpret it differently according to who we are… Yes?”

  “Professor, does that apply to mathematical language – I don’t think it does?”

  To Xanthe’s surprise, she realised this was her rescuer. He was not actually uncertain at all – at least not about mathematics and philosophy. He and the professor crossed swords throughout the meeting – more like a dialogue than a lecture. He couldn’t have been shy after all, unless it was perhaps with women. That was not so unusual, after all, and especially somehow in Cambridge.

  She hung around afterwards to thank him for rescuing her, and overheard Dr Wittgenstein asking one of his colleagues out to what he called the ‘flicks’. By the time she had turned around to look for her rescuer again, he had gone. There was something about him she had found fascinating. There were so many pale young English men, nervous perhaps because they all knew war was coming but so innocent of life, it seemed to her – though she realised she was just as innocent in her own way. So awkward in their voluminous Oxford bags. This one had been just as shy – if not more so – but she had sensed something determined in him. He hadn’t cared what anyone had thought of him.

  She described him to her friend afterwards and asked who he was.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I know that one. He’s a real oddball. I should steer clear of him if I were you. He’s called Dr Turing.”

  Only a year later, they would meet again in very different circumstances.

  1

  Bletchley, 22 March 1941

  My baby girl/boy,

  I can feel you kicking inside me, but I still don’t know who you are. I don’t even know if you’re a she or a he yet. But I’m writing to you as if you were already grown up and the war was over, and you’re fully grown and safe. Above all, safe. Mostly I am hoping that I will be there with you, so you won’t have to read this at all – because I will have watched you grow up and can tell you everything myself. But the air-raid siren is sounding, and I am going to take you with me to the basement. It reminds me that none of these hopes can be taken for granted.

  In case I am not there to be with you when you grow up, and that seems to be a strong possibility now, I wanted to let you know something about your mother in my own words. It is hardly as good as hearing it from my own lips, but perhaps you’ll consider it a consolation.

  That is why I am defying all regulations that prevent those of us on active service from keeping diaries. I do what I am told most of the time but, in this case, I am rebelling. I tell myself that it isn’t my war at all – that I don’t know how I became involved in it as an American citizen, and don’t see why I should keep to their rules any more than I keep to their stiff upper lip.

  So I hope you will forgive the informality of this letter. The truth is I am writing this at a time when I feel like I know you very well. I can feel your every move inside me, yet I don’t even know your name (though I have an idea of what it might be). They used to call that a paradox in the days when I studied philosophy at Cambridge before the war. I’ve always liked paradoxes. And you are the greatest paradox of them all.

  But I must stop talking in riddles. If all goes well, you will be twenty-one years old in 1962, so far in the future that I can barely imagine it. But I can imagine you – perhaps a little like myself and so close to the age I am now – holding this letter in your hand, and begging me to get to the point. I suppose I am dodging around because I am trying to avoid the full, unvarnished truth.

  There is no point in this letter unless I tell the whole truth and I have already strayed from the narrow way long enough. I do know how I became involved in their war and how it became my war. Indeed, I understand very well why, even with you to come home to, I will do as I am asked and risk my life again,
as so many others are doing all around me.

  *

  It was Xanthe’s father who first introduced her to crossword puzzles, when she was fourteen, and had entered her – as a joke as much as anything else – into the under-twenty-one crossword championship for Ohio. She had been terrified and practised every evening when she got home from school, a little ashamed of her growing obsession. She certainly told none of her friends. Even so, she was astonished that she not only won, but was hungry for more. There she sat, evening after evening, with her thesaurus and encyclopaedias next to her, solving clues like “Arrange a trunk call to the panel”.

  What can it be, what can it be? “Arrange” implies I need to change the word order or letter order – there are eight spaces for 3 Down. Must be an anagram. She grabbed her pencil and scribbled “the panel”, then a flash of inspiration. Trunks? Could it be? Yes, it’s “elephant”. Yes, the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of an answer, and then the pretence – on no account must her friends know, or she risked, well, ridicule at least.

  So when she won the regional youth heats for the Midwest – Xanthe was born in Ohio – apparently without effort, along with the embarrassment, she gathered an extraordinary reputation for effortless intelligence, which she carried with her in later years. As she discovered, when the boys began to cluster around her a little, blondes were not supposed to be clever. “I’m not clever either!” she would assure her friends when a nervous look crossed the faces of Buck or Brad. “I’ve just got a knack, that’s all.”

  Xanthe had been born in Cincinnati on 2 December 1919. Her father, Douglas Schneider, had been back from the war almost exactly nine months before, with a facility for languages and a smattering of German, and had taken up his job as a sales representative at Procter and Gamble, a middle-sized firm of washing powder manufacturers. Her first memory was sleeping against the comforting tweed of his shoulder.

  “Sleep tight,” he used to say. “Don’t let the mice bite.”

  “What mice?” Xanthe would ask when she was old enough to be worried about it. “Where are the mice?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, my sweetheart. There are mice.”

  There were stages in her life when she lived in such fear of the mice, with their little toes. It was only in her early twenties, in war-torn Europe, that she found there were bigger fears, and more terrifying ones, and she finally stopped worrying about the mice. In fact, there have been times when the thought of the mice in Cincinnati were actually comforting.

  Douglas loved philosophy. He wanted her to study as he never did. He gave her a Greek name in honour of Plato, he said, and also the distinctive colour of her hair. That is why he called her Xanthe. It was to her a blessing as well as a curse: she found that people expected something from her that she feared she was not old or unusual enough to give. The crossword triumphs in her teens continued and she began to fear that, far from extraordinary, she was actually some kind of freak. She would catch herself solving clues on sunny afternoons, or attempting to read Kant in the original German, and tell herself very firmly to get a grip. “I’m a pretty ordinary yellow-haired girl from the Midwest,” she said to herself, “but without a mother.”

  She used to ask her father about her mother, who she knew had been called Daisy and had come from England. One reason for going to study in England was that she hoped, at the back of her mind, that she would run into her one day out shopping in Harrod’s or buying a new hat in one of those London emporiums she had been reading about at home for so many years. Xanthe had a fantasy that Daisy would sweep her up in her arms like a princess.

  Her father always replied to her questions about what happened to her mother the same way. “I don’t know, sweet pea,” he would say. “She just went out one day and never came back.”

  Xanthe’s aunts, her father’s sisters, told her that Daisy never really settled down to bringing up a child. They told her she loved her daughter, but… The sentence was never quite completed. When, some years later, during air raids in the darkest parts of the night, listening for the bombers overhead, she found herself trying to conjure her mother again, as she had done when she was a child, as a talisman that might protect her.

  When she was living in England in those days, writing a letter to her unborn child, waiting for the sirens to sound the All Clear, she struggled to tell the absolute truth. Because, in fact, she did know what had involved her on the British side in a war that was not her own. It was partly that youthful enthusiasm for crossword puzzles, which never quite left her. But it was also a chance encounter at a cocktail party in London in those final weeks of what they called the Phoney War. It was there, fatefully but somehow inevitably, that she met Ralph Lancing-Price and that led to everything else.

  *

  Xanthe had always loved the sheer idea of England when she was young. Her friends aspired to be cheerleaders; she wanted to be a princess and see the Crown Jewels. She wanted to walk down Knightsbridge or live in the Dorchester or, better still, spend the weekend with Ivor Novello or Noel Coward. So when her father came up with the idea that she should study there, it was a source of enormous excitement – not to mention enormous fees. Xanthe was unsure later if he had understood that Simonetta College was really a kind of glorified finishing school, in Cambridge but not really of Cambridge in the way they had both imagined. But for him, as it was for her, it was also an attempt to recapture the elusive spirit of her mother.

  Either way, she crossed the Atlantic in the old liner Aquitania, in August 1938, loosely attached to a number of Cincinnati ladies of a certain age who were acting as kinds of chaperones. Then suddenly, there she was. She had expected England to be a fairy-tale place of royalty and castles, and maybe even knights and ladies. It was something of a shock to find herself at Southampton docks, a transient hole dedicated to efficiency and modernity.

  At first she was obsessed by how differently she made her hair up to all the other girls around her. Xanthe imagined she could see them watching in their powder compact mirrors. She imagined they could see what she saw in herself, an absolute innocent from the world of Little Women, who happened to be good at crossword anagrams. But she did at least know where she was going, via a long, cramped and smutty train and an underground ride to a peculiarly warren-like station called Liverpool Street. From there, she headed out towards the damp of Cambridge and the Fens.

  She had found herself involved with King’s College students through acting and they began to phone her at her college. Every so often she would be studying The Tempest, or something similar. “Come on now girls,” Miss Moorehead used to shout – she had a voice like the Aquitania – say after me: “Full fathom five, thy father lies…” Then, always at inopportune moments like this, there would be a knock on the classroom door and the school secretary would enter.

  “I am so sorry to interrupt, but I’m afraid Miss Schneider is wanted on the phone again.”

  On one occasion, the man on the other end asked her to a party in London. He said he wanted a bit of glamour with him so, rather vainly, she said she would go. She regretted the decision immediately: Jack Blenkinsop had a bulbous nose and a scrawny neck and his English confidence was only skin deep, and sometimes not even that: an undergraduate with a very long woollen scarf and collars that were carefully ironed and clearly fixed in place by someone else. She did not fancy spending a whole evening with him. On the other hand, the war had been going by then for more than six months and she was worrying that she should really go home, despite the closure of the Atlantic because of submarines. And if she was going to need to leave, she should see life a bit. That was how it began, the set of events that culminated in everything else.

  2

  London, April 1940

  Two weeks later and Xanthe was walking down the Strand – her first visit to London in the spring – and looking at the barrage balloons in the distance, and the black-and-white stripes painted along the kerb for the blackout, and watching out to see what else
might have changed since she was there last. It was the weeks before the Dunkirk beaches, during the early days of the German offensive in the west, and she expected to see worried crowds waiting for newspapers, tearful farewells outside Charing Cross Station – but there was little or no sign that London was anything other than a little bored by the whole thing. Some windows were boarded up but the theatres seemed to be open again: she passed Robertson Hare at the Strand Theatre and then crossed the road to find the Savoy Hotel.

  It wasn’t hard to find, with the taxis drawn up outside in the half-light, and the big black curtains being drawn as the blackout began. She had wondered if the Savoy, which seemed to be immune from rationing regulations and the sheer drabness of war, would perhaps be immune from blackout regulations as well. It was a relief to see that the natural order applied even there. She had been staying at the flat of her friend Moira in Maida Vale but a short journey on the Bakerloo Line to Trafalgar Square had delivered her, clutching a gold-edged invitation, to Lady Colefax’s At Home at the hotel. It was cold, but her hand was shaking for a different reason: she had never been to anything of the kind before and her affection for Jack – never exactly strong – was dwindling by the moment. Why on earth had she allowed herself to be partnered at such an event by a dull fish with an “honourable” before his name?

  From the start, the Savoy evening refused to go right.

  Jack was about a quarter hour late as the guests streamed inside, dressed in their pre-war frocks and finery, past the chandeliers and the functionaries who seemed to reach back to a kind of pre-war deference. They barely glanced at Xanthe in the black dress she had borrowed from Moira, who was rather taller. A voice in her head kept struggling to quote the line from the novelist Morgan Forster, who she had met in King’s, about how charm was “just decoration”, and wondering what it meant. She was going to just drift away from the Savoy in shame when a flustered looking Jack appeared looking a little the worse for wear for drink.