'Can I kiss you?'
She formally closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I said, _Ich Liebe dich, and du schlдfst.'_
'What's that mean?' I translated. 'Please, Jim, don't start getting pompous,' she protested, much as Gerda had.
'But you're quite aware that I do love you.'
'Don't be serious, darling. You know how being serious spoils everything.'
We lay back in our separate corners of the taxi. 'You're lucky that I'm-well, not frightened of women, but frightened of making a fool of myself over them. That happened once.'
After a moment's puzzlement, she said, 'Oh, Rosie,' rather bleakly.
'And of course, as far as you're concerned, Elizabeth, I'm still the butler's boy.'
'Why must you keep bringing that up?' she asked crossly. 'It's awfully unfair. You're like Archie, trying to make us all feel utterly ashamed of ourselves because people in Bermondsey have got less to eat for dinner than we have. Wasn't that chicken ghastly?'_
'How long are you staying with your father?'
'I don't know. Mummy may remain in Monte Carlo, though of course it's dreadfully unfashionable after Easter.'
We arrived at the newly-built block of flats in Mayfair, where Sir Edward Tiplady now lived alone. Lady Tip had walked out about the same time as King Edward the Eighth abdicated. As I reached to open the cab door, she adopted again the ceremonial expression indicating that she would allow herself to be kissed.
'Come and see _Design for Living_ tomorrow,' I asked temptingly. 'Diana Wynyard and Rex Harrison.'
'Darling, there's simply no time for going to the theatre. Tomorrow I absolutely must go to a party with Hugo Mottram.'
'Who's Hugo Mottram?'
'He's frightfully rich on the Stock Exchange. I'm having an utterly passionate affair with him. Daddy's so pleased.'
'Good night.'
'Good night, darling. You're really the most wonderfully saint-like man, and of course I completely adore you.'
The taxi drove back to Archie's. Unrequited love is painful enough, love shrivelled by frivolity can be suicidal.
20
'Jim, it was awfully good of you to waste your time with Elizabeth last night.'
Sir Edward Tiplady came hurrying into my laboratory. I had risen in the Harley Street house from basement to attic. After Lady Tip bolted he had turned the whole place into consulting rooms, which he let profitably. It was simply a doctors' shop. Our basement was now full of files and rubbish, I tested blood and urine samples in the room where I had fathered Clare. My mother had gone as cook to a small hotel in Eastbourne. My father had died shortly after the old King, knocked down by a taxi outside a pub. The house itself then had barely eighteen months to live, before being blown to bits early in the blitz
'I know that underneath she's terribly impressed meeting someone like Lord Meddish,' he continued. 'Who's always getting himself into the newspapers.'
'We were delighted to see her. She livens us all up.' Sir Edward always placed me in an avuncular relationship to Elizabeth. It seemed sage not to rectify his impression.
'I'm sure she didn't. She bored you terribly, I expect.' He was moving restlessly as ever round the white-painted, sloping-roofed room. He was growing grey, but his figure was still spare and the lines round his blue eyes no deeper. His happiness had much improved since shedding his wife. 'I really do find it hard work, chatting to bright young things these days. They don't even call themselves "bright young things" any more, do they? There seems such an enormous gap in our ideas, in the way we look at the world. And of course, Elizabeth is really very naughty, playing the _enfant terrible._ She's really too old for that sort of prankish behaviour. Have you done Mrs Cockburn's blood urea?'
'Yes, it's normal.'
'Good, the old thing's kidneys are all right after all. But I think I'll play her along. She needs a doctor to relieve her inner tensions by listening to her troubles. Her family got sick to death of them years ago. And she always pays on the nail.'
Encouraged and financed by Sir Edward, I had started a one-man biochemical and bacteriological service for neighbouring consulting rooms and the private nursing homes and clinics then multiplying in London. Mine were the coming sciences. There had been little point in identifying the germs infecting the patient, or the deficiencies of his blood and other body fluids, when the doctor could do little to rectify either misfortune. I was doing prosperously. I dressed better, I wore bow ties like Alexander Fleming. Much of my work-like Mrs Cockburn's blood urea-was to save the doctor's conscience rather than the patient's life. Cronin's _The Citadel_ had been published a couple of years, and there were still plenty of physicians in Harley Street unscrupulous about treating an imaginary illness or overrating a real one, and plenty of zealous surgeons who had to cut to earn their living. It was Domagk's sulphonamide which opened an age when so many diseases thankfully became treatable that it was no longer necessary for the doctors to invent others
'I really came up with a complaint,' He stood smiling, hands characteristically on loins, black formal jacket tucked back, monocle in eye. 'You ruined my last night's sleep. At the perfectly ungodly hour of six-forty-five somebody telephoned trying to trace you urgently. An American, of course.' I frowned, puzzled. 'He called my number, because he remembered me as the chap who'd originally introduced you.'
'Not Jeff Beckerman?' I exclaimed.
Sir Edward nodded. 'He's at the Savoy-naturally. Apparently, he got into Southampton from New York late last night. He wants to see you as soon as possible. I'd get him to stand a good dinner, if I were you.'
I had heard not a word from Jeff, nor about him, since leaving Wuppertal. Naturally, I was excited and intrigued by the summons, and telephoned the Savoy at once. Jeff sounded exactly the same. He spoke heartily but briefly, apparently distracted during his stay in London by business as multifarious as usual. He invited me for cocktail time. This apparently meant five in the afternoon, when I usually took a cup of tea.
He had a suite. It was on an upper floor, overlooking the river. He was redder in the face, his dark hair had been allowed to grow, and from my first impression he seemed twice the size. He still wore beautifully-tailored English tweeds. There was a good deal of slapping, hugging and kidding. 'Married yet?' I asked.
'Yeah, but it didn't work out. How about you, old man.'
'Yes, but she died.'
'Oh, how terrible.'
'I've got over it now.' Rosie had gone to wherever the damp souls of housemaids went. I consoled myself that her continued existence would have meant misery for three. 'Have you been back to Wuppertal?' I asked, to keep off the subject.
'Sure, I have. Before Christmas. And I'm on my way back. _Ich bin ein Wuppertaler, nicht wahr?_ The Red Crown Brewery remains a monument to American enterprise and capitalism, though the Nazis can hardly keep their hands off it. That cosmetics company in Berlin has turned out a headache. The Nazis don't care for powder and scent, _natьrlich. _They put the girls in calf-length uniforms and awful shoes and march them all over the country. They regard women as inferior beings, only necessary for breeding. The whole of Germany's got like one big stud farm. What'll you have to drink?'
'Sherry.'
Try a martini. Mind, I quit living there about the time old man Hindenburg died, in the July of '34. It was after Hitler had his bloodbath at Munich. I guessed it was the hour to go. I got to hear the details-say, do you know they took Rцhm to Stadelheim jail, and a couple of SS men shot him in his cell? The guy in charge was Sepp Dietrich, who ran Hitler's personal bodyguard. I've seen the guy in Berlin, he's got big ears and a little moustache, he looks as though Frankenstein the monster-maker was trying to construct Clark Gable. He'll come to a bad end-I hope.' Jeff busied himself with the cocktail shaker. 'Do you know, absolutely no one in the States would touch our fine, pure spirits after they repealed the Eighteenth Amendment. The whole country had got the taste for bathtub gin.'