The Unfortunate Englishman Read online

  The couple with the bedsheet gathered up their belongings. The man slung the bundle over his shoulder like a tramp with an outsize spotted handkerchief and walked off into the night.

  Nell knew exactly where they’d end up, and where she should be.

  She rode home, locked up her bike and rang for a cab to take her to Marienfelde.

  Khrushchev had murdered sleep.

  §71

  On the fourteenth Harry Kempson of the US Mission, Berlin, sent a note to Marcus Dürer:

  That young woman you set onto me is good. Won’t take no for an answer. I went down to Marienfelde to see for myself. I think she averted a crisis.

  Dürer passed this on to Mayor Willy Brandt, adding a note of his own.

  Soon, if not today, the westward flood of Flüchtlings will become a trickle. It may even stop altogether. At that point there’ll be no need of Marienfelde. If you haven’t yet found a replacement for me when I move to Bonn next month, you might consider Nell Burkhardt. Knows how to deal with the Amis. So few of us do, after all.

  The last line stung. Too true for comfort. All the same Brandt made a mental note of this, left the paper version sitting on his desk for a week. He had to deal with the Amis. And that meant sitting on his hands and biting his tongue as the United States said and did nothing.

  §72

  London: August 18

  Less than a week had passed. Wilderness had been shown none of the official reports from Berlin, nor had he asked to see them. He had relished being a spectator, standing at the touchline, and gathering all he needed to know from the newspapers and the BBC Home Service.

  It was past five on the Friday evening. He had today’s Times open on his desk. He liked The Times, simply because it ignored any sense of priority and gave over its front page to small advertisements tailored to the upper classes . . . Thomas Cook travel, Boon and Port Jaguars, Jack Barclay Bentleys and numberless ads for Rolls-Royces. Those in need of a news fix had to turn to the inner pages. It couldn’t last. The next prominent death . . . Churchill, Mountbatten . . . and The Times would discover headlines and Burne-Jones would read into this the end of an era, not in the passing of statesmen but in The Times dropping its small ads . . . all those Bentleys and Jags. Debutantes were no longer presented at court, Prince Charles was not at Eton, the Queen probably listened to Jimmy Clitheroe over fish fingers and tinned rice pudding at Sunday lunch . . . but The Times hung on grimly. What was a charming anachronism to Wilderness was little short of sacred to Burne-Jones.

  “It’s a pickle.”

  Burne-Jones had appeared almost silently, a finger poking at the page-three news Wilderness had been skimming.

  US 18th Infantry at East German Border—

  Autobahn to Berlin.

  Wilderness folded the paper hoping to kill the subject, but Burne-Jones sat down opposite him and the game was so very clearly afoot.

  He tried again to be dismissive.

  “A predictable pickle. Every political hack in Fleet Street, every Washington pundit, saw this coming.”

  “And now they’re all saying things like ‘a lamentable failure of Intelligence’ . . .”

  “Hold on . . . whose Intelligence?”

  “Ours, theirs, everybody’s I suppose. Next thing Gaitskell will be on his feet in the Commons asking for explanations. ‘Why did no one know?’ and so forth.”

  “But we did know. I just bloody said that. Not the precise what or when, but we most certainly knew the where.”

  “Of course. But we’re not going to admit anything, are we?”

  “And why not?”

  “Because, o son-in-law mine . . . it is far better to say nothing and appear ignorant than to admit we knew and appear futile. We knew what we knew and discretion was the better part of thingy . . . and in the meantime a hundred miles of best British barbed wire has by now surely found its way from darkest Derbyshire to Warsaw and thence to Berlin.”

  Burne-Jones waved a hand in the air. Now he was the one aiming at the dismissive. Wilderness didn’t know how to read it. We should have stopped that shipment or we shouldn’t have? So he tacked away instead. Impossible to change the subject, perhaps possible to move it along.

  “I can hazard a guess at what comes next.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Kennedy jetting in.”

  “Hmm. Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean ‘not exactly’? He is or he isn’t.”

  “He isn’t. He’s sending LBJ to Berlin.”

  “When?”

  “ASAP.”

  “Any point to it? What can he do? Wave to the troops? Look at our rolls of barbed wire and tell them all ‘something will be done!’?”

  “Edward VIII? Right?”

  “Yep. And we both know the hill of beans that amounted to. I just hope the Russians took the labels off the wire before they strung it out in the streets. I doubt we’d survive the diplomatic fallout if LBJ sees the city divided and the barriers labelled ‘Made in Great Britain.’”

  “Ah, Joe. So cynical. Perhaps, the main point might be to get LBJ out of Washington. They have to be the oddest of bedfellows. Odder even than Nixon and Ike, although it might be fair to say that Kennedy fears rather than despises Johnson. To have him fly the Stars and Stripes, hand out a couple of hundred monogrammed biros, glad-hand a few Allied leaders and make speeches that amount to bugger all may well suit both of them. What else does a vice president have to do with his time?”

  “Well . . . technically he’s in charge of the American space programme. NASA answers to him.”

  “Which says very little about either. Vice president of Dogs in Space. Up there with the King of Cornflakes and the Duke of Doughnut, I should imagine.”

  “Actually, the Americans favoured monkeys not dogs for their space missions.”

  “Well . . . this monkey’s going to Berlin. And so are you. LBJ is flying in overnight. Your flight gets in a less than an hour ahead of him.”

  Wilderness said nothing to this. There was no argument he could make that he had not already made. Following the vice president around had to be less interesting, less informative than following the president. And there was no mention of accreditation this time. The most he’d get out of this might be one of the monogrammed pens—an LBJ souvenir, like an Isle of Wight ashtray or a stick of Blackpool rock. The least would be that he was bound for Berlin again, wearing the old ball and chain.

  “It may well be that Berlin is the place to be,” Burne-Jones went on. “There’s even been talk of moving the UN, or part of the UN, to West Berlin.”

  “What’s that supposed to do? Scare Khrushchev? Invoke a visible if silent ‘you wouldn’t dare’ to a man who dares almost anything? A man whose mind is like a dozen weasels in a potato sack. I think prefer the opposite idea.”

  “And that is?”

  “It was a Guardian leader a while back . . .”

  Burne-Jones was not a Guardian reader and still referred to it somewhat scornfully as the Manchester Guardian, implying it was “provincial.”

  “Abandon West Berlin, blow up anything the Russians might value . . . leave them scorched earth . . . and move the entire population to a new site somewhere in West Germany.”

  “And you wonder why I stick with the Telegraph? You’re on the morning flight,” said Burne-Jones with calm finality.

  §73

  He went home to pack for Berlin. He packed and repacked, wondering how short he could make this trip and hence how little he could get away with taking, while Judy fussed around him, saying, “But Pa hasn’t actually asked you to run the Berlin station, has he?” and “You will say no, won’t you?’

  It was her constant refrain throughout the night and cost Wilderness badly needed sleep.

  As Wilderness was knocking back a last cup of coffee at seven th
e next morning—a car waiting in the lane—Judy picked up the pile that was yesterday’s unopened and ignored second post. She clutched half a dozen envelopes to her chest and tossed a lone postcard down on the breakfast table for Wilderness.

  A view of nothing much in shades of green, a landscape somewhere unmemorably nondescript. An American eagle stamp, and a scrawling hand he did not recognise.

  Broke turf on the shelter yesterday. When they drop the big one, I’ll be ready. Saving a place for you.

  Jack

  PS Hold ’em off as long as you can, I can’t get a plumber till September and I figure the survival of civilization rests on me getting the john plumbed in.

  Wilderness thought this might be his mission. So much more specific than anything Burne-Jones had said. No longer the passive observer of Berlin unravelling, of LBJ touring, he was there to fend off World War III till Jack Dashoffy had a working lavatory. And all on Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  Beneath his postscript Dashoffy had drawn a crude Looney Tunes character . . . crude but recognisable, and a dustbin lid, creating the equation: “Daffy + a garbage can lid = ?”

  Wilderness knew the answer. “Duck and cover.”

  §74

  West Berlin

  Wilderness had been in Potsdamer Platz the last time they’d rolled out the wire in 1948. It hadn’t lasted long. All the same he’d not been there to see it rolled up again in 1949. Shot by Yuri Myshkin, thrown a few thousand dollars in consolation by Frank Spoleto and dragged home in disgrace by Burne-Jones—except that the disgrace had been in Burne-Jones’s eyes only. He’d kept it off the record rather than admit to anyone that Berlin’s biggest racket—the smuggling of coffee, sugar, penicillin, morphine, and anything else that could be nicked—was down to one of his own men. He’d made Wilderness a sergeant. He still was a sergeant. He’d never get promoted again.

  At Tempelhof, Radley had met him with, as he had requested, a second car and driver. Radley had a copy of LBJ’s itinerary, from the press office of the US Mission, Berlin. His arrival would be met with a row of tanks and a seven-gun salute—who, Wilderness wondered, decided how many tanks and guns a man was worth? ‘Sorry, Senator Frisbee, you’re only a two-tank man’?—and then go through all the tedious motions of being a semi-head of state on a semi-state visit. The inspection of a guard of honour, which must be close to meaningless to a man who’d spent World War II as an observer in the Reserve. Then, a motorcade to Potsdamer Platz, followed by a public address to anyone who cared to turn up, outside the Rathaus in Schöneberg.

  Any hope that Adenauer might fly in with him from Bonn was dashed by the old man himself, who’d made it perfectly clear that Berlin was not a mess of his making and he’d no intention of helping Brandt out by showing up.

  Wilderness looked at the press release and was succinct.

  “I don’t think the old bastard would so much as piss on the flames if Brandt were on fire. There’s nothing for me here. I’ll get out to Potsdamer Platz.”

  “I thought we were supposed to observe the vice president?” Radley said.

  “You observe him, Tom. I’m nipping out for coffee.”

  What he was reluctant to spell out to Radley was that they were not observing LBJ, but the Berlin reaction to LBJ . . . and if he didn’t get it he didn’t get it. LBJ would say nothing that meant anything. If Wilderness felt wicked he might just jot down his version of Johnson’s speech on the back of a menu while he had coffee and bet anyone a fiver that he’d be proved mostly right.

  “Honour”—LBJ was bound to work in that word somewhere. A touch cynically, Wilderness had always agreed with Joseph Conrad about honour . . . “he made so much of his disgrace, while it is the guilt alone that matters.”

  No one was ever guilty. They were all honourable men or they were not, and when the promises LBJ was about to give Berlin were broken—in a week, a month, however long—it would not be a matter of guilt but only of dishonour.

  He was feeling wicked.

  He sat in the Hotel Esplanade in Bellevuestraße. Sipped coffee and looked out at the square. The Esplanade had been central. A Berlin landmark. A survivor. The RAF had destroyed most of it in ’44. When he first saw it in ’47 only a couple of the public rooms were useable. But Berlin had not wanted to see the Esplanade die, and over the years, while bits of Berlin lay as rot and rubble, something magical arose out the old hotel. More than a hint of its pre-war Weimar glamour. It was central once more. Where the sectors met, where Russians rubbed shoulders with Americans who rubbed shoulders with British. Most of the shady deals he and Yuri had done were set up in bars and clubs not a hundred yards from this spot, and one or two of them in this very room. It was the heart of the party. At the edge. And now, the wire was back, and as the wire became a wall, as it surely would, it looked as though the Esplanade would become peripheral again. It was too close to the new edge. And the new edge was going to be a cul-de-sac, because West Berlin was going to be a cul-de-sac.

  He gave it an hour—skimmed the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and watched the crowd gather. He stepped out among them—a sea of Stars and Stripes, many of them homemade, kids’ wax crayons on lined schoolbook paper.

  There were more than he could ever count and more arriving all the time. As his driver had struggled to find a clear route from Tempelhof to Potsdamer Platz against the tide of people heading the opposite way, he’d taken a guess at the size the reception awaiting LBJ, tanks and all—ten thousand, fifty thousand? Pointless, and just as pointless here. It didn’t matter what LBJ might say, and Wilderness was resolute in his cynicism, it was simply that he said it at all. He could stand up and say “Donald Duck for President,” and they’d probably cheer.

  Another half hour passed. The veep was running late. He looked at his watch. And another half hour. The veep was running later. Berliners were starting to drop their paper flags and drift away. Then he realised.

  The bugger wasn’t coming.

  §75

  East Berlin: August 13

  Eva and Rick had fucked themselves into a stupor on the night of the twelfth. She slept soundly; he slept with one arm around her, one foot dangling off the bed not quite as deeply in oblivion as she. Her gentle snoring penetrated his dreams, and every so often brought him to the surface.

  That wasn’t anyone’s snore; that wasn’t human. It was a sound that pushed every button, jerked every string and dragged him back sixteen years to April 1945—he was fourteen—hiding in a cellar—it was the steel rattle of Russian tank tracks on Berlin cobbles.

  He pulled back the curtain. Nothing. Had he dreamt it? He flicked on the light, looked at his watch: 6 a.m. It had been light for half an hour.

  “What’s wrong? Put the light out.”

  Eva pulled a pillow over her face.

  “Nothing. Just my imagination. Go back to sleep.”

  There it was again, and this time she’d heard it too.

  He went to the other window, the one that looked out in the alley. A T-55 had backed in with inches to spare on either side, killed its engine and sat like a brooding monster.

  “Eva, there’s a Russian tank out there. Put the radio on.”

  “What?”

  “A tank. A Russian tank.”

  “What? Have they invaded?”

  “How should I know? Put the radio on.”

  She fiddled with the dial, coursing through the static.

  “No, forget anything local. Tune to the BBC World Service.”

  And then they knew.

  §76

  Rick would not let her leave.

  They had breakfast and went back to bed.

  Eva was surprised to find that she had slept at all, but Rick woke her in the early afternoon.

  “Tell me it’s a dream.”

  “It isn’t.”

  He
improvised lunch around two, listened to the BBC once more, and said, “What’s the point in you even trying to get home? The streets are full of those Factory-Fuckers and VoPos . . . the tank in the alley is on standby in case things get worse, and your apartment is the front line. If they’ve closed off the Brandenburg Gate, think what’s going on at Bernauer Straße. Besides it’s Sunday. You don’t work on Sundays.”

  “Why, do you think it’ll be different on Monday?”

  It wasn’t.

  On Monday morning more than fifty thousand Grenzgänger did not and could not report for work in the West.

  On Tuesday Rick finally agreed to let her walk around. Manliness and authority were all very well. She would not deny a certain pleasure in being so protected, but it took no account of the need for clean knickers and when he said “I’ll lend you a pair of my underpants,” the silent stare she gave him would have frozen nitrogen.

  It was Wednesday before she got back to Bernauer Straße.

  At the back of the block of flats, there were VoPos and border guards milling around. She got as far as the southern side of the Ackerstraße barrier before one of them shooed her back. She’d had a glimpse of a sizeable crowd in Bernauer Straße. At least they weren’t giving up just yet. But when she tried to enter the building she was refused.

  “You have keys?”

  “Of course I have keys. I live here.”

  “You must hand them over, that is now the law.”

  “Why?”

  “All keys to Bernauer Straße must be handed over.”

  And taking him at his word, she’d given him her front door key, and held on to the back.

  She went back each day. Each day it was worse. On Thursday trucks of sand and cement blocked her way. On Friday a crisis at the front, which she could hear but not see, had thrust the VoPos into panic mode and they’d cleared the southern side with drawn guns.

  “You could stay,” Rick said.

  She hated male sentimentality. The idea that they could nest together like small, furry animals and let the world pass them by.