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Consommé
Steak Diane
Noisettes d’Agneau, Pommes Duchesses,
Carottes Juliennes
Glacés
Tergoule de Normandie
One for Louisa!
‘The steak, I think,’ Leo announced. ‘How about you?’
‘The lamb.’
Leo nodded, engrossed in the wine menu. ‘A Reisling, since you’re going to Germany. Then a Duhart-Milon Rothschild, ’34.’ He snapped the menu shut. ‘Had it the other night. Not bad.’
The Savoy Grill was crowded. Leo acknowledged people on nearby tables. There were people here whose fame gave their faces a vague familiarity. Edith tried not to stare. Leo would introduce her as his cousin, if he introduced her at all.
‘Thin stuff,’ Leo announced after two spoonfuls of consommé. ‘I prefer a proper soup.’
‘I was just thinking how different it was from soup,’ Edith looked up. ‘As different as the names. Soup sounds opaque. Thick.’
‘Hmm. That’s how I like it.’
‘What’s this about, Leo?’ Edith said as she finished her consommé.
Leo put up his hand to silence her as a waiter arrived to clear the table and another approached with a trolley.
‘Ah, the Diane! Best way to eat it. You can see what the buggers are doing.’
Leo sat back to enjoy the drama as the deft young waiter fried the steak in butter, executing the flaming with the flourish of a stage magician before transferring the dish to the plate and completing the sauce with efficiency.
‘How is it?’ Edith asked, once they had been served.
‘Not too bad.’ Leo chewed. ‘Better than the one I had at the Club last week – you could have soled shoes with that. How’s the lamb?’
‘Fine.’
It was still pink. At home, the sight of blood brought on universal shudders.
Leo reloaded his fork. ‘Mash a bit fancy for my liking. Club does it better.’
Edith took a forkful of the duchesse potatoes, smooth and rich under a thin golden crust. Trust Leo to prefer lumps. Enough prevarication.
‘So, are you going to tell me?’
‘Not here!’ Leo looked to the nearby tables. ‘You never know who’s about. Let’s just enjoy this, shall we? It’s a bad business.’ He added, sweeping slivers of carrot aside, he was never one for vegetables. ‘Not something to talk about while one’s eating. It’s all in the file back at the flat.’
By the time they got to the flat, Leo had other things on his mind. His attentions started in the cab and their lovemaking was quick with the ease of long familiarity. They had been lovers, off and on, since fumbling adolescence. They were comfortable with each other and the arrangement suited both of them. Edith enjoyed her escapes to London and Leo liked the diversion. He had his life nicely organized in compartments: Sybil in the country, the boys at boarding school, flat in Marylebone for his week in London, mistress up in Hampstead and Edith when she was in town. Edith knew Sybil, of course. They met at family occasions, weddings and funerals, which diverted Leo even more.
Edith left him snoring, wrapped herself in his dressing gown, poured herself a glass of champagne, then turned on the desk light and opened the file marked ‘Kurt von Stavenow’.
She held the photograph of Kurt in a cricket sweater close to her eyes so that she could study it with an intensity that had been impossible before. She’d gone to Oxford on the train to visit Leo. Kurt had been in the Parks watching cricket. Leo took a photograph. The snap was in black and white but Edith’s memory was in vivid colour: blue sky, green grass, the cream of the sweater, Kurt’s hair shining a soft, deep yellow like old gold. When he turned and smiled, the world seemed to stop and start again. Edith couldn’t quite look at him; it was like staring into the sun.
He had begun studying Anthropology at Heidelberg University, he told her in his careful English, but had changed his course of study to Medicine. ‘I want to find ways to bring the two disciplines together,’ he said, interlacing his fingers. ‘To help people, you know? Make them better.’ He’d smiled again. Perfect teeth and dimples. Edith had never thought that a man could be so beautiful. She was scarcely listening as he went on to explain that he was in Oxford to perfect his English and to study his other love, Anglo-Saxon. He talked excitedly about Old English, Norse myths and his new obsession: Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
‘He wants to find the Holy Grail!’ Leo roared with laughter.
Kurt’s brows furrowed, his answering smile uncertain, as if he couldn’t see the joke.
That was the moment Edith fell in love with him.
‘Leo has promised to show me the important places,’ he said, looking down at her. The focus of his attention melted whatever was left inside her. ‘Perhaps if you are also interested, you might like to come along.’
That’s how it started. In the long vacation, Kurt stayed with Leo at Gorton, Leo’s family home. Edith often stayed overnight. Their excursions demanded an early start. They visited the Rollright Stones, Wayland’s Smithy, the White Horse at Uffington, then further afield to Stonehenge, Avebury, Templar churches in the Marches. Kurt took these expeditions very seriously, delving into his haversack for binoculars, maps, ruler and compass to work out alignments, notebook and camera for sketches and photographs. Leo took less of an interest, installing himself at a local pub, leaving Kurt and Edith to explore by themselves.
They would return to Gorton for supper. The house was enchanting, Kurt announced. Ein nette kleine Haus. The remark stung with Leo. He didn’t think it at all small, although Gorton had gardens rather than grounds; it was large, but not remotely stately; looked old but was relatively new. Leo was annoyed, as if he’d been found out in some way. Kurt belonged to a fearfully aristocratic and ancient Prussian family and talked of house parties and hunting parties in great castles. Leo became increasingly huffy. Kurt wasn’t aware of it, but his remarks struck at deeper insecurities: Leo’s father was a Brummy, a generation away from the bacon counter. Leo had begun to move in circles where such things mattered.
‘I’m letting him have the run of the place,’ he’d muttered to Edith, ‘taking him all over the country and the little blighter insults me! Boasting about his bloody schlosses.’
One particular evening, things got so tense that even Kurt noticed. Later, he came to Edith’s room and sat on her bed. It was a hot night and his pyjama top was open. The moon was full, cutting through gaps in the curtains, casting bars of silver over the smooth skin of his bare chest.
‘I upset Leo in some way,’ he said, frowning. ‘This evening, he was off hand with me. That is the right phrase?’ He looked up for confirmation. Edith nodded. ‘I don’t know why he is angry.’
Edith tried to explain. She didn’t think any slight had been intended, but she feared that he, Kurt, might have given the impression that Leo’s house, the way of life here didn’t quite, well, measure up.
‘Nothing could be further from my thought!’ Kurt looked stricken. ‘It is my English. I only say these things because I’m proud to be Prussian. I would love so much for you to come and visit me there. My two best friends.’ He drew closer, taking her hands in his. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘I thought he was cross with me because of you.’
‘Because of me?’
‘Yes. I thought you and he were, you know, and I’d come between you.’
‘Oh, no!’ Edith had to stop herself from laughing. ‘We were, have been, but …’
She let her words peter out. It was difficult to explain. They’d been very young. It had all been Leo’s idea and she hadn’t liked it very much. Since Leo had gone up to Oxford, he’d been less attentive, pursuing something else Edith suspected, although didn’t really care to ask.
‘But not now?’
‘Not now,’ Edith confirmed. ‘I think he has,’ she hesitated. ‘Other interests.’
Kurt had nodded. ‘I understand. Many of the fellows in the college are, ah …’ it was his turn to pause, ‘of similar inclination. Is that correct?’
‘Completely.’
‘I’m glad Leo is, too,’ he leaned towards her and they were kissing.
‘Let’s go out.’ He took both her hands in his. ‘Let’s go outside.’
They walked barefoot in the moonlight, across the silvered lawn to the lake which lay as still as mercury. ‘Let’s go in,’ he whispered. They kept on walking, the water soft as silk on the skin. The next night they swam to the island. They made love on an old picnic blanket that Kurt had brought out earlier in the day. He was so very different from Leo …
They tried to be discreet but Leo knew right away. He didn’t seem to mind at all. He was glad to have Kurt off his hands. He’s all yours, old girl.
Kurt came to see her in Coventry on an old motorbike that he’d found in the stables. If Gorton had seemed small, Edith’s house must have been sehr klein indeed, but Kurt seemed to enjoy his visits. He’d spend ages working on the bike with her brothers, Ron and Gordon. They were mad about engines. ‘I like your father and brothers,’ he told her. ‘They are workers.’ He held up his hands. ‘They make things.’ He liked talking to them about cars and the motor industry. In a city famous for car manufacture, the boys had followed their father into the works. Gordon to the Standard and then to Whitley. Ron had an engineering apprenticeship with a firm in Rugby making turbines. They were proud of what they did. Keen to show Kurt. He followed with his haversack, making notes, taking photographs, as interested in the factories as he had been in Avebury.
Now she knew why.
There were maps in his file. Coventry and surrounding towns, the factories marked for the Luftwaffe. The Lockheed in Leamington Spa, BTH in Rugby. Her family had liked Kurt, made him welcome. He had a way with him: flirting with Louisa, complimenting her mother on her cooking. He knew how to get along with men and how to please women. They had been kind to him yet her father, her brothers could have been in those factories when the bombs rained down.
How naïve she’d been. How impossibly stupid. It was all here.
von Stavenow, Kurt Wolfgang
1931 – Joined National Socialist German Workers’ Party
1937 – University of Heidelberg – Doctor of Medicine
1936 – Member of the Schutzstaffel (SS)
1937 – SS Ahnenerbe (and a helpful addition in pencil: pseudo-scientific institute founded by Himmler to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan Race)
Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Ausland-SD) (another addition: Foreign Intelligence – see over)
It had been lies from start to finish. For each action, an equal and opposite motivation: Principia Mathematica of the human heart. The shock of it jarred; old fracture lines started to crack open until she was fighting back tears.
At the end of the summer, Kurt had had to go back to Germany, departing with unexplained suddenness and abundant promises. He would write. She would come to see him. They would walk by the Rhine and the Neckar, hike in the Odenwald. He would recite eddic poems, heroic lays, stories from the Nibelung. They would sleep in little lodges smelling of pine and resin. They would go to the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains, camp on the Brocken, climb to greet the May Day dawn.
Before he left, they agreed she was to go out the following year. She remembered the fierce excitement she’d felt anticipating their meeting. They would be able to spend all the time they wanted together. The rest of their lives.
It didn’t work out like that. What in life ever did?
She blinked to clear her sight and focused on the next file, hardly noticing the peal of nearby church bells, silenced by long years of war, ringing out the old year, ringing in the new.
She detached the photograph of Kurt as an SS officer and read through his war career.
1939-45 – Sturmbannführer Kurt Wolfgang von Stavenow
What rank was Sturmbannführer? She had no idea.
1939-40 – Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin. Psychiatry/Neurology
1939-41 – SS Special Purpose Corps. Aktion T4
1941-43 – Medical Officer with Special Responsibilities
1943-45 – Assistant Director to the Medical Superintendent. Charité Hospital, Berlin.
April 1945 – Last seen Berlin, present whereabouts unknown.
Underneath lay closely typed papers, some stamped with the Reichsadler, spread eagle and swastika, the lower half of some of the pages discoloured, rucked and crisp, as though the paper had been in contact with water then dried, rendering the typing even harder to read. Supporting evidence. She read what she could, the typing blurring still further as she scanned the pages, flipping back and forth.
She rubbed her arms at the bone-deep chill spreading through her. It either made no sense, or it made the most dreadful sense of all …
She didn’t know how long Leo had been standing in the doorway watching her expression changing from puzzled to incredulous, finally settling into frozen horror.
‘Make sense now?’ He poured two whiskies. ‘Here, drink this. You look as though you need it.’
‘You never suspected?’ Her voice sounded thick, distant. ‘That he was a Nazi?’
‘Did you?’
Edith shook her head slowly.
‘He played us for fools, old girl. Pulling the wool. Acting like butter wouldn’t melt. I suppose we should have known. His interest in the occult and Aleister Crowley – well known bad hat. When I look back on that summer – King Arthur, the Templars, Druids – it all fits. Remember the arguments?’ Edith nodded, she and Leo insisting that it was myth and legend, Kurt replying that, on the contrary, it was history, a shared history. The history of the Aryan peoples. ‘He was deadly serious. We couldn’t see it the time, why would we? We didn’t realize the reasons for his interest. He was a member of the Thule Society. Did you know that?’
‘I’ve never even heard of it.’
‘Exactly. He kept it secret. The Study Group for Germanic Antiquity. All those ridiculous theories.’ He paused. ‘Remember those trips he made us go on, haring all over the country …’
Edith closed her eyes. Yes, she remembered, standing at the very top of Glastonbury Tor as Kurt wove a net of romance and mystery around the death of Arthur. With the sweep of his arm and the passion of his words, the world transformed. The land before them became a vast mere spreading from horizon to horizon, still as a mirror. The only sound, the slow, soft, muffled plash of the oars on the dark funeral barge bearing the mortally wounded king. Two heavily veiled queens sitting at prow and stern, motionless as tableaus, while another stepped with bare white feet onto the stony shore to welcome the King to the Lake Isle of Avalon … They’d stood together, hands linked, as the sun fell towards the west. Shafts of light shone through the lens of the clouds and she’d experienced a moment of transcending wonder, caught in the pure magic of the place, the time, and him.
‘… turns out it’s just an excuse to spout theories of Aryan supremacy,’ Leo was saying, ‘and indulge in anti-Semitism of the most unpleasant and virulent kind. Joined the Nazi Party in ’31. Plenty there of similar mind, including Heinrich Himmler. Every one of them firm believers in the Master Race, and all that. Tommyrot, of course, but dangerous tommyrot. Tommyrot that would cause the deaths of millions of people …’
‘But he was training to become a doctor.’ Edith shook her head quickly, denying the thought even as it was forming. Another came instead. Her mother burning herself on a tin from the oven, hiding the injury, making light of it.
‘It’s nothing, really,’ she’d said.
‘Let me see.’ Kurt insisting, high, broad brow creasing with concern as he took her mother’s hand with his slender fingers to see the burn. Edith remembered being proud of his patient skill, his confident, gentle touch as he applied salve and carefully bandaged the hand.
‘You’ll make a wonderful doctor, Kurt,’ her mother had said, as she turned her wrist this way and that to admire his neat work.
‘His chosen vocation had very little to do with the Hippocratic Oath.’ Leo was pointing at the notes in front of her. ‘The clue is in his specialism.’
Edith glanced down, frowning. ‘Psychiatry? I don’t follow …’
‘Why would you? No right-minded person would make sense of it. Kurt was involved in something called Aktion T4, before the war and during.’
‘I saw that in the notes.’ Her frown deepened. ‘What does it stand for?’
‘It’s an address in Berlin: Tiergartenstraße 4, sounds innocent, neutral. Headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege.’
‘The Charitable Foundation for Medicinal and Institutional Care?’
‘They were good at that kind of thing, the Nazis, inventing euphemisms to hide their filthy business. They called it the Euthanasia Programme. The taking of life on an industrial scale based on ideas about who should live and who shouldn’t. They had a term for it: Lebensunwertes Leben: Life unworthy of Life. It’s all there in black and white. It all makes sense now. It all fits.’
Life unworthy of life. Edith rubbed at her temples, trying to massage the words away, her eyes closed against the dreadful realization that the words meant exactly what they said.
‘I’ll admit, it beggars belief. It began in the Mental Institutions with the mentally deficient, adults and children with disabilities. Enforced sterilization. All to do with the purity of the race. Doctors have walked some very dark corridors, in the name of research, in pursuit of knowledge, trying to prove some misguided ideology. Our friend Kurt among them.’
‘Medicine and Anthropology, melded together.’ Edith looked up at Leo. ‘He told us the first time I met him.’ A memory, his long fingers folded together. I want to bring the two together. How could she have missed the darkness within him? He’d told her himself.
‘Mixed up with Eugenics. And those other cock-eyed theories.’
‘I suppose that’s all we thought they were …’
‘Indeed. We didn’t think that they were about to put theory into practice. And we were in good company. Nobody did. Although it’s all there, in Mein Kampf. Sterilization and the rest of it. And then even that wasn’t good enough, they might not be able to breed, but they were still a burden on their families and the state. So they decided to kill them.’
‘Who? Who decided this?’
‘Well, Hitler gave the order, but it couldn’t have been carried out without the co-operation of the doctors and nurses in the institutions.’
‘They killed their own patients? How?’
‘Starvation. And if that didn’t work, lethal injection. And gas.’
‘How … how many?’
‘Tens of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands probably, we don’t know, and goodness knows how many in the wider Reich.’
Edith stared at him, incredulous. ‘I didn’t know about any of this.’
‘Few did. They kept it all well hidden, even from their own people. It gets worse.’
Edith looked down, slowly moving her head. How much worse could it get?
‘Easy to see how it spread to other “undesireables”,’ Leo went on. ‘Untermenschen: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs. They moved the whole thing to the east, lock stock and barrel, used the techniques, the equipment, the personnel, to set up Extermination Camps for the Jews.’
Edith leaned forward, forehead in her hands, fingers tugging at the roots of her hair, knowing, dreading, what he was going to say next.
‘And Kurt was involved.’ He tapped the file. ‘We’ve got chapter and verse.’
She knew what Leo was talking about. She’d seen the newsreels. Had been moved to tears by Richard Dimbleby reporting from Bergen-Belsen. Shock, anger and indignation shaking his voice as he described the horrors that he had witnessed.
It wasn’t cold in the room, but Edith could not control her shivering. The evidence was in front of her. There could be no possible doubt. And yet. And yet. To have been responsible, directly, or indirectly, for the deaths of millions, how could she believe that of anyone, let alone the man she had loved? She swallowed hard to keep down the whisky burning up into her throat.
‘Where do I come into this?’ she asked when she could trust her voice.
‘Keep your eyes and ears open when you get to Germany. Put out feelers, see what people know. Softly, softly. You know? Shouldn’t be too difficult. Most of them would sell their own mother for a tin of bully beef.’
‘And if I do find anything?’
‘Adams is your contact. Captain Adams. He’ll be in touch. Oh, and keep a look-out for Elisabeth.’
‘Elisabeth?’ Edith had not been expecting that.
‘His wife. You remember her?’
‘Of course I remember. I just wasn’t expecting her name to come up.’
‘She had a cousin, or something, lived near Lübeck. She could well be in the area, since they’ve all been booted out of East Prussia. That’s if …’
‘She survived?’
‘Well, yes. Obviously. The Fraus are turning out to be quite an asset. Find the Frau, find the Mann.’
‘Do you think she was involved?’
‘Not directly. Lots of the wives preferred to turn a blind eye. She struck me as very much the Juncker. Thought Hitler hopelessly vulgar and nothing existed outside of Prussia. All she cared about was her estate and her horses. She probably stayed up there looking after them until the Red Army arrived at her gates. Can’t know for sure, of course.’ Leo shrugged. ‘When you find her, it’ll be up to you to judge.’ He refilled their glasses. ‘Happy New Year, by the way. And happy birthday.’