‘Look a state, don’t I?’ Adeline looked up; her blue eyes, once so sharp, milky with cataracts. They both knew that this could be their last meeting. She’d turned away to hide the tears in her own eyes.
‘’s OK.’ Adeline gave a ghost of her old smile. ‘As long as this still works,’ she tapped her temple, ‘I don’t mind. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” and all that yadayada. Come, come over here where there’s more light.’ She manoeuvred herself through her ‘archive’. Piles of newspapers, files and clippings stretched from floor to ceiling. She halted in front of the brownstone’s tall window that looked out onto the West Village. ‘Something I want you to see.’
In the bay, the heavy wooden table was free of clutter. A Tiffany lamp, balanced by a gold and ivory Favrile vase of canna lilies, stood on a faded green-and-purple velvet runner. In the centre of the table lay a book; the brown cloth cover blotched and stained, the title in faded gilt.
The Radiation
Cookery Book
For use with the ‘New World’
Regulo Controlled Gas Cookers
The inside cover was flecked and rust spotted, there was a name written along with a place and date:
Lübeck, British Zone of Occupation, Germany, January 1946.
The name almost illegible. Time erased.
‘It was on top of a pile of other stuff, as though someone had just put it down. It wasn’t there the day before, I swear … Then I found these,’ Adeline pointed to a folder of photographs. ‘Just spilled across the floor. After all these years. Gotta mean something …’
She opened the folder and felt the same frisson. They both knew that coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, whatever you wanted to call it, was not to be undervalued, that intuition counted for more than cold logic. In her experience, it could be the difference between life and death.
‘I took another look, into what happened, you know?’ Adeline spoke into the gathered silence. ‘I think I’m onto something.’ Her eyes showed a little of their old spark. ‘I’m waiting for confirmation. Now pour us a drink. There’s bourbon over there. Here’s to it!’ Adeline lifted the glass between her two hands. ‘If I’m right, we’ll do it together!’
Adeline hadn’t made it. It was all on her now. She placed the Radiation Cookery Book on the black lacquered desk and opened the brown cloth cover. Such a nondescript exterior blotched and stained with water damage, still smelling faintly of smoke. There were handwritten recipes, clippings from magazines – Stella Snelling’s dozen delicious ways with canapés – menu cards slipped like memories between pages still grainy and pilled with ancient flour. Each one perfectly innocent-seeming but so freighted with other meanings that they might have been scribed in blood. Everything lay between these covers, not least the reason why she was here.
She put the book down, dark drops spotting the cover. Tears came more easily now than they ever had in the past.
Blinking to clear her sight, she shook photographs from a manila envelope, fanning them across the desk, sorting them like a pack of cards.
What she’d found in Germany, how it had unwound, was here to see.
Images of a ruined city: acres upon acres of devastation; tumbled bricks under a dusting of snow; a few distant buildings showing black, fretted against the sky; a house number – 24 – painted on a chunk of fallen masonry. A man stared at tangled twisted steel girders that reached towards him like the arms of some toppled metal monster. Capsized ships lay in a harbour, half-submerged, funnels flush with the water. Snapshots of some terrifying dystopia taken in Germany 1946. A Caspar David Friedrich frozen sea, the Baltic presumably, frost-foamed waves looking uncannily like the snow-covered masonry piled in jagged heaps. Niflheim, the realm of ice and cold.
The photograph of Adeline herself was the one that had accompanied her obituary. Taken by somebody else on some moving battlefield. Adeline with her combat-jacket collar turned up, most of her face obscured by her Leica, blonde curls stuffed under a forage cap, a tank in the background.
Adeline was never without her camera. She had an eye for a picture, was famous for it, but it was more than that with her. It was as though she felt compelled to catch memories in the net of time. Here they all were. Snap. She’d caught them all.
There she was smiling, happy, sitting at a table in a sunlit square, the photograph taken in three-quarter profile, blue-grey eyes looking off to the right, the dappled light catching the planes and shadows of her face and the sun glinting on her golden hair. It was a good picture. The last one taken of her.
And a younger self, looking glamorous in a low cut Schiaparelli she’d bought for a song from a Parisian countess living in a cold-water flat in Maida Vale. New Year’s Eve, 1945.
There was handsome Harry Hirsch at the same New Year’s party. Jewish Brigade and later Mossad, looking boyish, if slightly sunken-eyed, a bit dishevelled, black hair flopping in his eyes, tie loose and shirt sleeves rolled. He had been acting as bartender, dispensing hooch to the spivs, émigrés, service types and general ne’er-do-wells there assembled. Next, the American, Tom McHale, in need of a shave and hungover, the photograph taken the morning after, no less boyish but looking altogether more slippery and deceitful which, of course, he was. Then Leo Chase. Came to a bad end. Dying in some ghastly Moscow flat, liver turned to foie gras. She smiled slightly, proud of the part she’d played in his demise. Adeline was lucky to get him. Leo didn’t like being photographed, now everyone knew why, but here he was, eventual disgrace far in the future, his collar turned up against the New Year’s Eve drizzle, rain drops glistening on his bowler and overcoat collar, photographed coming in to the party, pale eyes shifty, peering sideways behind his glasses, weak mouth caught between a grimace and a smile.
Next, the von Stavenows. Elisabeth in evening dress, head tilted to one side, large eyes gazing off somewhere, as lovely as a Nordic film star. She placed her next to the first photograph and looked from one to the other. Take away Elisabeth’s gloss and glamour and they could have been sisters. Apart from the eyes. Hers were icy; the other’s kind. Below them, came Kurt as Sturmbannführer, handsome as a viper in his black and silver. Underneath this, a much younger Kurt von Stavenow, looking very fetching in a cricket sweater, all blond hair and chiselled cheekbones. No wonder she’d fallen for him. The photo was passport size and had been paperclipped at some time: a long hook of reddish-brown spots marred his white shoulder. Rubbing with a thumb made no difference. Some stains are impossible to erase.
She’d laid out the photographs in a pyramid, like a Tarot Spread. She placed the smiling woman in the sunlit square at the apex, the others ranged below. A reading would be impossible. There were no good cards here.
Oh, my dear girl, what did we do to you?
There was a reckoning to be made. A debt to be paid.
LONDON
1945/6
1
Government Offices, Marylebone
31st December 1945
‘Do you know this man?’
Edith Graham looked back at the implacable black eyes staring into hers, then down at the photograph. A Greek kouros in a cricket sweater. A young man caught in the full beauty of his youth, or so she’d thought when she fell in love with him that very afternoon. She remembered the photo being taken. 1932. The Parks in Oxford. He was standing at the edge of the pitch, hands in pockets, face in profile, fair hair waving back from a high forehead. Shadows showed beneath his brows and defined his high cheekbones. He was frowning slightly, his mouth a straight line.