She had pierced more deeply than perhaps she intended. On the verge. M. Half and Half, Herr Hither and Yon, Mr Neither This Nor That. But, discounting it, she had risen, moving into the bedroom. My nerve trembled, my loins ‘on the verge’, while I fretted, uncertain whether this was her mode of farewell or an invitation to storm her bed. Timing was vital, though the cue was inaudible. Tactlessly, treacherously, a recollection stung me, of dripping with desire for Suzie, on a night of bravado or defeat, penis straining at its moorings.
From within, she was offhand. ‘You can come now.’
Naked, in mild lamplight, against scarlet sheets, she was somehow ritualistic, holding two full glasses, waiting, appreciative but not wholly serious as I rushed at my clothes, fumbling as if in anxiety dream, until at last we could drink, pledging each other before opening arms, not flirtatious but hoping for love.
Her hands scattered over me, my need forced me to spurt prematurely, as it had done years before. She was not angry but laughing. Had not Hephaestus, in similar breach of manners, likewise bespattered Aphrodite’s golden thigh? ‘And, look, Erich… mine is of false gold. Forgive me… sallow!’
Companionable, she fondled me to a wry smile, quiet sigh, then renewal. At morning, she gravely demanded I soon buy her a shoe. ‘One shoe. Difficult. Not impossible.’ Not in allusion to that invisible limp but to the primitive token of fidelity, underlying the Cinderella cycle.
I had grown attentive to women’s bedroom idiosyncrasies. The misleadingly bashful, enticingly demure, the flaunting, businesslike, agitated, exposed by make-believe reluctance, resignation, ways of stripping. Some motioned me to avert my gaze but glowered if I complied. One insisted her peke witnessed the action. Humour could be absurd, incomprehensible, more often absent.
Nadja’s humour was that of understated partnership, sly but affectionate. At the bed, as if unaware of her nakedness, she retained style.
‘Your Nordic smoothness…’ She caressed my flanks as, in an off-moment, she might a cushion. ‘You have kept the lines.’ I felt ennobled.
In lovemaking, she was sturmfreie: coaxing, curious, versatile, quickly discerning my preferences and indicating her own, usually unorthodox, surprising, then rousing me with a small movement, a kiss in an unexpected place. Bed vocabulary – ‘Wait… Please… Don’t… Now’ – familiar but never stale, wedded us. Her depths of excitement had wit.
Little was final. Profounder intimacies were still delayed, beyond words, a nakedness beyond nudity, inaccessible to mere striving, like genius, like grace. A bud slowly unfolding.
We were out of the pram, not fledglings hoping to skate to the Pole or operatic ardents vowing to love for ever, though quarrelling at breakfast. We had both known dangers, had flinched at traffic lights, avoided lifts. A few might remain, though hidden.
I visualized transparent screens between us, successively removed by a confidence, a gift, accident, until almost none remained.
Her serenity, customary though not unfailing, matched her firm bones and mouth; occasional dejection might be symbolized by the never-explained invisible limp. Her reticences might be as much policy as instinct, but I knew better than to attempt mauling her to confess secrets best kept secret. My guesses grew not from cross-examination but from movements across her face, sleeping or awake – troubled, reflective, elegiac, sportive – from half-smiles and broken-off sentences. The deep eyes, now over-bright, now melancholy, about to fade into the dim smudges beneath them, could always be overtaken by scholar’s composure or what the English call glee. Talkative in public, at home she was quiet, absorbed in work, interested in music, planning an expedition in local nonsense and whatever passed.
More rarely, she disturbed me without revealing any obvious cause for alarm. As if to someone else, she wondered, ‘Where does it lead?’ then slipped her hand in mine, soft as a mouse. On the beach, after some laughing exchange, she exclaimed, ‘One thing can make me wretched.’ Showing no emotion, only cool, professional evidence, ‘When someone looks at his watch and says it’s time to go. Go where? These farewells. Something, perhaps inevitably. It is always goodbye.’
We had not married. Clerk’s signature, mayoral sanction, ecclesiastical benisons, guaranteeing little, would tilt the stable and harmonious into the bureaucratic. She laughed that zodiacal discrepancies discouraged such performance.
Growing together, we agreed on a code word, Stendhal, to be uttered if a dispute lost good humour, echoing the silver cock deposited on the dinner table by Herr Max. Stendhal had listed diverse states of love – oriental tyranny, absolute autocracy, disguised oligarchy, constitutional monarchy, revolution – to none of which we aspired.
‘Maybe, Erich, we are a republic, a collection of cantons, autonomous but cohering.’ Looking seaward, tidy Stockholm behind us, she said, ‘Winter’s going. I need South. So, I hope, do you.’
‘I respect rules’
Dick Haylock, white-haired, white-flannelled, in dark blue college blazer, his restless face always seeming in mid-munch, told us yet again. ‘We’re a case in point. We folded our tents to leave behind unpoliced streets, horrible music, mass-kissification, and, lest we forget, the Treasury. We dumped ourselves in this blessed place, by no means perfect. But…’ he tried on the word with stately emphasis, ‘our loyalty to Her Majesty has never faltered.’ It had Agincourt ring, almost a strut, as if we had argued. ‘She deserves her dues. Very tasteworthy, as a Cambridge man might say.’
We were having drinks on the patio of Mon Repos with its dwarf palms and tubs of blue and salmon-pink geraniums, the slack Union Flag giving his claim hangdog support. He always disappointed us by not rising to salute it, remembering a king-emperor, at this hour of the Sundowner, the Peg, the Stiff One. Nadja he usually addressed as ‘Dear Lady’, failing to amuse, though refraining from kissing her hand.
With us were Daisy Haylock and Ray Phelps, another subject of the Queen, in dull grey resembling some movie character so obviously villainous that he cannot be, only the film buff unsurprised that he really is. One side of his mouth was twisted into a permanent grin, the other always rigid, so that the effect was of humour and bitterness ceaselessly jammed together. His vocabulary, though limited, could surprise, now he now said, ‘FDR never understood me.’ His glance conveyed that Nadja and I likewise failed. ‘I like to say that the more you know the better off you are. I’ve a son in the RAF. Or is it the Navy, what’s left of it? Doesn’t matter, we’ll all meet in Samarkand.’ He nodded for Dick to refill his glass, then turned to the Duty Manager, his private term for Daisy, adding, ‘Upright as a lupin.’
We had worse acquaintances than Ray, though not many. Daisy’s glass was also empty, Dick feigning not to notice. She had just mentioned his love of literature, and I thought of the books in what he called his den: Gentleman Jim, The Amateur Gentleman, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She herself preferred chocolate boxes, ribboned, heraldic, golden, depicting ruined castles, ancient villages, lordly gardens and, inevitably, birds.
‘In the last war…’ Dick’s monologue was so well worn that we could prompt him, Nadja sometimes doing so. ‘The Armed Forces of the Crown recommended me elsewhere. I’m still forbidden to disclose where. You’d have seen me in mufti but I could tell you…’ Instead he retreated to parliamentary imprecision. ‘I have declared, in another place…’ His face, browned but desiccated, looked away, reference to the war always inducing a brief awkwardness, because of me, whom he rated as barely forgivable German. At our first meeting he scrutinized me as though taking a risk. ‘There were some tolerable Germans, though on the wrong side.’ With Nadja he was actually more wary, treating her, she said, as if she were his very competent secretary about to give him notice. With me, he was now more at ease, speaking, when we were alone together, in washroom or the den, as though we were fellow seducers with extravagant pasts. ‘Soho ladies who lit your breeches. With them we knew where the wind blew.’