The rain crept south and east into Europe, on the back of a weather system laden with storms. In the rolling hills of the Touraine, with clouds massing over the last of the sunset, Hélène Lafosse decided to skip her nightly rounds with the watering can and save the precious water in the well. At night, in the chateau, she tried to make do with candles, partly because of the shadows they cast, and partly because she hated the thick blackout curtains. Not that anyone important was watching.
She found Malinowski in the kitchen, peeling the last of the potatoes for the evening meal. According to Nathan, who’d known him most of his life, the little clockmaker had been the handsomest man on the Île de la Cité, never appearing in public without a pretty woman on his arm. He was also – and remained – a craftsman of genius, with a repository of skills he’d picked up from his Polish father in Lublin and brought to Paris after the Great War.
Hélène had no doubt that her husband had been right. Even now, in his early seventies, Abel Malinowski retained an aura that could fill any room. He was always direct, always spoke his mind, never backed down in the face of ignorance or intimidation – three reasons why Nathan had spirited him away from Paris and installed him in the chateau just days before he’d made his own exit to Lisbon.
Hélène, who’d got to know Malin well by then, had been both flattered and comforted by his company. He was an excellent houseguest with a fund of stories and cooked far better than she did. He’d also arrived with the pick of his collection of long-case clocks, a handsome Louis XV specimen in hand-crafted fruitwood bought by a wealthy aristocrat and handed down from generation to generation until the family had gone bust and Malin had arrived on the train from Paris to bid for it. The clock now sat at the foot of the stairs to the first floor and at Malin’s insistence it had never been reset to Berlin time. Always an hour behind, you could hear the chimes throughout the house. Time will never be a friend of the Germans, Malin told Hélène. Exactly so.
This morning the party from Paris had arrived late, delayed by a puncture on the road south of Tours. The mare in the horsebox, a beautiful chestnut called Éclairage, with an impressive record of her own in Europe’s top races, was beginning to suffer in the heat and it had taken nearly an hour to settle her down. Only then did the stable boy who was looking after her lead the mare to the cool stone granary which Malin had swept bare the previous day.
Malin had helped Hélène coax Valmy out of his stable and take him across the courtyard to serve the waiting mare. Klimt was there, too, talking to the officer from Abetz’s security staff who’d travelled down from Paris. With the mare in season, the stallion had caught the scent the moment Malin opened the big wooden doors to the granary. The mare was still in the hands of the stable boy and he stood beside her head, gentling her as Valmy bucked and whinnied in the yard outside.
The coupling, as ever, looked perfunctory. The stallion mounted and – with Hélène’s assistance – entered the waiting mare. Less than a minute later it was over. Klimt, who’d been present on previous occasions when Valmy performed, told Hélène that her damned horse had broken all records. He put it down to the weather. She blamed Éclairage. Show any male a body that beautiful, she said, and what do you expect?
Klimt had left within the hour, returning to Paris at the wheel of his gleaming new Mercedes. With the horsebox also gone, Malin had retreated to the cool of the big kitchen and helped himself to a tumbler of water before retiring upstairs for a nap. Now, half a day later, he was back downstairs, the potatoes peeled, nursing his second glass of wine at the long kitchen table. For once, the regular presence of Klimt at the chateau seemed to bother him. He wanted Hélène to tell him what next he might expect.
‘I’m a Jew,’ he reminded her. ‘You want me to end up in Pithiviers?’
Pithiviers was a transit camp where the Germans held Jews before shipping them east. Pithiviers was where you started to disappear.
Hélène shook her head.
‘Klimt’s not interested in you,’ she said. ‘He’s not interested in all the Jewish nonsense, either.’
‘That’s very comforting. But I need to know why. And while we’re on the subject, how about our Spanish friends? And that sulky girl with the wireless who turned up last week? Do they matter? To your gorgeous Oberst?’
‘Our Spanish friends’ were a pair of anarchist refugees who’d fled from Franco after the civil war in Spain. Maria and Pablo had spent years living at a camp down near the Pyrenees and now they occupied a smallish room on the chateau’s top floor, venturing out only for meals in the big kitchen below. They said they were married but no one knew whether it was true or not and in any case it didn’t matter. As for the girl with the radio set, she was Belgian and belonged to a Resistance réseau from Lille. Just now she was on the run from the Germans, which gave a certain edge to Malin’s question.
Hélène was trying to do something ambitious with a leg of lamb she’d had butchered in the village. She could see that Malin was serious but she didn’t know how to respond. What had brought on this anxiety of his? How come a man as tempered by life as Abel Malinowski was suddenly so concerned about the permanence of their lives in the country?
‘Everything’s fine’, she said. ‘Everything’s always the way it was. Since when have I let you down?’
‘You’ve never let me down but that’s not the point. The point is that no one’s bigger than this fucking war. Not even you.’
‘You think Klimt’s going to make trouble? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I’m saying what any sensible man would say. I’m saying I don’t know. Which is the same as asking you for an explanation.’
‘About what?’
‘About Klimt.’
‘You know about Klimt. We’re close. It’s an arrangement.’
‘Of course. But you know the first rule about arrangements? They’re subject to change. You tell me he lives in that apartment of yours. Nathan’s apartment. In the rue de Corneille.’
‘It’s true. Klimt looks after it for me.’
‘They call that requisitioning, don’t they?’
She shook her head, trying to explain. Three long years ago the Germans had occupied Paris. The moment they’d secured the heart of the city they headed out towards the west. They knew exactly what they wanted and they knew exactly where to look. With Nathan already in London, Hélène was living alone in their apartment. The 16th arrondissement was an expensive area, wealthy neighbours, most of them gone. The Germans had moved from street to street, requisitioning entire buildings for senior officers. Hélène was the only owner to have stayed on in her block and she’d met Klimt beside the loge on the ground floor.
‘And?’ Malin wanted to know more.
‘The lift didn’t work. The power kept going off. Klimt fetched some people and fixed everything.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I asked him. Nicely. Firmly, if you will. That’s what Germans like. Respect is a currency, Abel. It works both ways.’
‘And you fucked him? That night?’
‘The night after. Once we’d met properly.’
‘How respectful was that?’
‘On his part, very. This is a man with manners. On mine, the question is immaterial. Paris was in shock. France was in chaos. I suspect I was the first French person Klimt had met who knew how to keep her head.’
‘You mean a woman?’
‘I mean a person. Man? Woman? It made no difference. Back then the French were barnyard animals. There were herds of them, flocks of them, all on the road, all heading south. I’d chosen not to leave. That mattered to people like Klimt. Maybe that’s what I mean by respect.’
Hélène paused. She must have had a million conversations with Abel Malinowski but she’d never let him this close. The sensation, to her surprise, was far from unpleasant.
Malin wanted to know more.
‘About what?’
‘About this relationship of yours. I can see what’s in it for him. You’re a very unusual woman. Men can smell that. We’re all the same. We’re animals. And I can see what’s in it for you, too.’
‘Really?’ She wasn’t smiling anymore. ‘Care to tell me?’
‘He gives you protection. He looks after your apartment. He makes things sweet down here in the country. He looks after you, too. That’s not a bad deal if he has the right friends in the right places.’
‘You make him sound like a concierge.’
‘You’re telling me there’s more?’
‘I’m telling you he’s never let me down. I’m telling you there’s a very large hole in my life and he fits perfectly. Why? Because he’s a decent man, and he makes me laugh, and he knows a great deal about the things I think matter.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as art, and music, such as half-civilised conversation, and just how ridiculous this whole thing is.’
‘This whole thing?’
‘The war. Hitler. The Thousand Year Reich.’
‘He’s not a believer?’
‘Of course he isn’t. So few are, once you get to know them. Their world has been taken over by gangsters but that’s only something you’d say in bed, to someone you think really matters.’
‘Like you.’
‘Like me.’
‘And Nathan?’
‘Put Nathan and Klimt in the same room and they’d be brothers after the first glass. They wouldn’t even need the whole bottle, Abel. Just the one glass.’
‘And does Nathan know?’
‘Know what?’
‘About this German lover of yours?’
‘Of course he does.’
‘How?’
‘I send him letters, through Lisbon. Ask me how. Go on, ask me.’
‘Klimt makes it happen?’
‘You’re right. He has a channel through Lisbon. The British take care of it. They go to London in the diplomatic bag.’
This arrangement sparked a gleam in Malin’s eyes. It might even have come close to approval.
‘And does Klimt read the letters?’
‘Of course he does. He’s Abwehr. They read everything.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘And these are intimate letters? Letters between a man and his wife?’
‘Extremely intimate. But unlike Klimt I have no secrets. He knows I love my husband and he has to make room for that fact. That’s always been the deal. I belong to my husband. I’ve always belonged to my husband. And after the Germans are defeated, we’ll be together again. Klimt understands that. In some ways it probably suits him. Does he strike you as a man I make unhappy?’
‘Not at all. You’ve turned him into a puppy.’
‘Far from it. That would wreck everything.’
‘What then? What does this…’ one hand drew a loose circle in the air, ‘… arrangement say about him? About your Oberst Klimt?’
‘It makes him very clever, and quite complicated, and if you think that’s exciting for a woman, you’d be correct.’
Malin nodded and fell silent for a moment, eyeing his glass. Then his head came up again. The expression on his face – quizzical, slightly confused – suggested he needed to clear something up.
‘You say you both think this war is ridiculous.’
‘I do.’
‘Because…?’
‘Because it’s needless and stupid and brutal and not at all the way we should be with each other. Klimt goes to work every day and fights his little wars, and maybe thinks about the big war beyond the little wars, and at night when we’re together we’re in another space entirely. You want to guess which space, which life, is more agreeable? Or have I got this wrong?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘But you think it matters?’
‘Of course it does. As long as you have the choice.’
‘Otherwise?’
‘Otherwise you’re in the camp at Pithiviers, my child. Wondering what happens next.’