WELCOME STRANGER Read online

  ‘You’re not staying overnight?’

  ‘Yes, but in town. With a friend of Peter’s – Ivor Ritchie. Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘The man who was with you and Peter and Louise when that café was bombed? Wasn’t he badly injured on D-Day?’

  ‘Yes, he had to have a leg amputated. But he’s one of those people who, the more you take from them, the more they put into life. Unlike my father.’

  ‘That’s hardly a fair comparison.’

  ‘I don’t try to make fair comparisons.’

  Kelleher said in reply to Angus, ‘I’m a fairly solitary individual, so I don’t talk much with anyone other than Daphne – certainly not about the war.’

  ‘The war is still going on in my mind, I’m afraid.’

  Daphne, who had glanced back at her parents, said, ‘Where are we going now? My mother is looking uncommonly purposeful.’

  The answer soon became apparent. Mrs Drummond was heading for the hothouses.

  ‘Bunny feels the cold so now,’ she called cheerfully over her shoulder. ‘And this is one way of keeping warm.’

  She proceeded to bump the wheelchair backwards up steps towards the house where the larger tropical plants and trees could be seen through a blur of steam. Cecily tried to come to her aid, but she refused help. ‘I have to do this on my own most of the time, so I mustn’t rely on anyone else.’ Commander Drummond bellowed navigational instructions as if he imagined himself on the bridge of a ship, as well he might as he pitched and tossed. ‘One more heave and we’re there! Hang on tight. Bunny,’ Mrs Drummond cried. ‘We don’t want you overboard.’

  ‘I abhor hothouses,’ Kelleher said to Daphne. ‘When we travel I shall show you all this in its natural setting.’ He called to Angus, ‘We’ll wait here for you.’ He and Daphne sat on a seat, and Irene, who found humidity tiring and felt it would ruin her dress, joined them. Cecily said she had a headache and went to look at the pond.

  Angus, following his mother and father into the hothouse, wondered why hell was not depicted like this, instead of with flames so Pentecostally bright.

  His mother read all the labels on the plants, as if his father had lost his sight as well as the use of his legs. She was as impervious to abuse as to protest. Yet, throughout his childhood, she had suffered from migraines which could be brought on at the first sign of her husband’s displeasure. Angus could remember hurrying home from prep school, terrified of what might have happened to her in his absence. As far as he knew, his father had never attacked her physically. But he had often hit Cecily, and had devised tests of Daphne’s spirit which were usually carried out in the privacy of her bedroom. Throughout all this, Angus had tried to comfort and protect his mother, who constantly proclaimed her dependence on him. Now, she behaved as though he had ceased to exist. She was totally absorbed in her husband. ‘She has been waiting all this time to be needed,’ Cecily had explained to him. ‘It has all been dammed up inside her, and now it just pours out over him.’ Angus, watching his mother pushing his sweating father further into the jungle plants, felt she had become infected by his father’s malignity.

  On the pretext of examining a rapacious creeper, Angus let his mother go ahead. By the time he caught up with her, she had succeeded, with remarkable dexterity, in ramming the wheelchair between a palm tree and a plant of hideous fecundity.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed this, ma’am,’ an attendant remarked, with what Angus thought was considerable forbearance.

  ‘She does it because she is a fool,’ Commander Drummond told him, ‘And my son is too useless to lift a finger.’

  ‘We’ll soon have you free, sir,’ the attendant said, pulling ineffectively. ‘What goes in must come out.’

  ‘As Antony said to Cleopatra.’

  ‘Oh Bunny, don’t be fractious.’

  Angus said to his mother, ‘How could you do this?’ Sweat was pouring down his body, he felt he was made of wax which someone was mercilessly melting.

  ‘I think I probably pulled a little too hard to starboard – or is it port, I never can remember.’ She had always prided herself on her vagueness; practicality was something shown by servants.

  The attendant’s efforts had only served to push the wheelchair further into the plant, so that the leaves now folded themselves about Commander Drummond’s chest.

  ‘This plant has prickles the size of a marlin spike,’ Commander Drummond roared.

  Peter Kelleher had come in to see what was happening. ‘The simplest thing would be to shift you,’ he said to Drummond. ‘Then we can tilt the chair and get it out.’

  ‘He’s a dead weight, I’m afraid.’ Mrs Drummond seemed resentful at having the problem so quickly resolved.

  ‘I’m not going to be handled about like a parcel,’ Drummond grumbled.

  ‘Just for a moment, you are.’ Kelleher parted the leaves of the plant in which Drummond was embedded and put his hands under Drummond’s armpits. He said to Angus, ‘You take his feet.’

  Angus was sickened by the prospect of touching his father’s flabby, helpless flesh. But by now a small, interested crowd had collected. He bent forward and lifted. It was Kelleher who bore the greatest weight, but Angus was shaking all over when they put his father back in the wheelchair.

  When they had wheeled Drummond into the open. Daphne forced herself to come to her father. ‘Are you all right?’

  He looked at her. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s all that matters? No pity to spare for me?’ She met his eyes steadily. ‘There isn’t a grain of hypocrisy in you, is there? Not a single, snivelling, sentimental impulse. Well, you can thank me for that, at least.’

  Back at the Drummonds’ house in Shepherd’s Bush, they talked politics while Cecily prepared tea. Cook had gone during the war, and the one elderly servant who did the household cleaning had been forbidden to prepare food since the day that Commander Drummond threw her offering across the room.

  ‘Blow them all up,’ Drummond advised Irene, on being informed that she worked in the Cabinet Office. ‘Or lock ’em up and set fire to the place. Let ’em roast slowly.’

  Commander Drummond was a man who had a particularly strong need to express his feelings physically. His confinement had resulted in a concentrated verbal ferocity which was not always a true representation of his views. When he spoke of shooting all the members of the Cabinet, or bombing the Lefties out of their lairs, he was concerned more with his own problems of execution than with actual shootings and bombings.

  ‘And half of them are perverts,’ he said, renewing his attack on the Cabinet. ‘Any man who isn’t whole, put him up against a wall and shoot him.’ He glared, daring them to make the connection.

  Angus made other connections. At the Nuremberg trials a grim description had been given of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Every block had been set on fire and when the Jews emerged from their hiding places and dug-outs they were shot. Those who preferred to stay in the burning buildings until heat made them desperate had jumped from upper storeys into the street, where, their bones broken, they had tried to crawl into blocks of buildings which were only partly in flames . . . As Commander Drummond spoke, Angus remembered that Stroop, the SS Commander in Warsaw, had praised his officers as people who excelled by their dashing spirit. He imagined his father would approve of Stroop.

  ‘But in a confident, positive society, there wouldn’t be any need for that, surely,’ Irene was saying. She was a tiny creature, and looked, as she sat opposing Drummond, a miniature of grace and elegance. But any illusion of fragility was shattered by the enormous eyes which seemed to fizz with intelligence. ‘It’s only in a sick society that such people would ever gain a hold over the nation. Don’t you agree?’

  Drummond, who did not favour young women popping off like tonic water on his hearth, said, ‘Go out into the garden, my dear. You’ll see how quickly a weed chokes healthy growth if it isn’t plucked out.’

 
Irene appeared to reflect on this objectively, while seething inwardly at the contemptuous manner in which he had called her ‘my dear’. ‘I suppose it all depends on what one regards as a weed,’ she conceded. ‘Mostly, it’s something that we didn’t plant, so it spoils the neat little patterns we make. I think every good gardener should be able to tolerate a few weeds. One doesn’t want to become obsessive.’

  Kelleher, who did not regard the extermination of weeds as symbolic of other ills, said, ‘Our obsession for interfering with nature will eventually destroy our universe.’

  ‘I thought the atom bomb was going to do that, according to some of our Leftist friends,’ Drummond sneered.

  ‘General Marshall said atomic energy could be man’s greatest benefit or it could destroy him,’ Irene said. ‘You can hardly call a United States general a Leftist.’

  Kelleher shook his head. ‘Man has no need of the bomb to destroy himself. He can do it with his own hands if he has a mind to.’

  Mrs Drummond said, ‘Really, what talk for the drawing-room!’ She looked sadly out of the french windows, regretting a world now past, which she had not, in fact, found halcyon.

  After this, they sat in silence, listening hopefully for the rattle of crockery which would herald Cecily’s arrival with tea. Kelleher had introduced a theme which none of them wished to pursue.

  ‘What an afternoon!’ Irené exclaimed to Angus as they walked towards Holland Park afterwards. ‘Poor you, if you have to put up with that very often.’

  ‘We all live on the edge of chaos,’ he said.

  The trees were in tender leaf in the broad avenue and Irene found it impossible to be unhopeful. ‘I suppose we always have,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Perhaps we need to be reminded of it from time to time?’

  ‘I can’t accept confusion.’ He looked without any lifting of the spirit at a laburnum spilling like scrambled egg over a brick wall. ‘I need things to be capable of solution – that’s what attracted me to cypher.’

  ‘And to communism?’

  ‘It has an appeal, I must admit.’ He sounded as if he was idly considering its possibilities. ‘A definite, clearly defined ideal – whereas all we have is half-truths.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have so much as a half-truth. Cherish it!’

  But this involved an acceptance of the incompleteness of life which he could not contemplate.

  They came to Norland Square where she lived. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, and paused, as if he would say something more. He had, at this moment, a look which always turned her heart. At one time, it had seemed to be the look of the deprived, staring at all the bright objects in shop windows which they know they can never own; now, momentarily, it was the look of the damned.

  ‘Angus . . .’ She shook his sleeve. ‘You know, don’t you?’ Her eyes told him, without equivocation, that she would give him anything he wanted. But it was too big a thing for her to make the offer lightly; and he was daunted by the timidity he must overcome if he was to possess her.

  ‘I’m a hopeless creature,’ he said. ‘You’d be better off without me.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ she challenged.

  ‘Of course not. I’d be devastated.’ He bent and kissed her. There was no excitement in his embrace, that would come later when, in recollection, her own body would stimulate emotions he had not aroused but which she would gratefully attribute to him.

  He stood at the corner of the street, watching as she went up the steps to her front door. He looked more sad and deprived than ever, but in fact walked quite briskly along the street once she had gone into the house.

  By the time he reached home, it was of his father that he was thinking. His father and Stroop had now become one and the same person, a person who represented the corruption of the Western world.

  Chapter Five

  Heather Mason was in London on leave. Although Londoners might think that life was not easy, Heather was impressed by the absence of any sign of real hardship. She was working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and had recently been at a camp for displaced persons in Austria. Yes, she thought, looking around Leicester Square, dingy and gap-toothed with bomb craters, but with cinemas still open and people sitting over tea in cafes, Londoners were not doing so badly.

  She made her way to the public telephone box where she consulted the directory and then dialled a number. ‘Is that Louise? Remember me? Heather Mason, Claire’s friend.’ It was surprising how the hurt of that friendship came back now that she was speaking to Claire’s sister.

  Louise, generous as ever, said that Heather must come to supper. ‘Come now. We’d love to see you.’

  ‘I only got back from Austria yesterday, so I’ve got one or two things I must do. But I’d love to see you all later. The reason I telephoned is that I want to get in touch with Jacov Vaseyelin. Nothing personal, just that I have a . . . well, a message . . . for him. He isn’t in the ‘phone book and I wondered whether you would know where I can reach him.’

  ‘He’s not easy to get on the ‘phone. But he’s directing a play that is due to open at the Players next week. So you might find him at the theatre.’

  The pips went and Heather shouted that she would get in touch again – she was not used to the telephone and always shouted in the hope of confounding the pips.

  She looked up the Players Theatre in the directory. It was quite near, just off the Embankment. She had an idea that actors only rehearsed in the mornings, but perhaps, so near the opening night . . .? She hesitated, willing to be convinced that it would be a wasted journey. I have to do this sometime or other, she told herself. Action did not usually daunt Heather, Her whirlwind entry into the Winifred Clough Day School for Girls typified her approach to problems; she regarded them as hurdles to be jumped. Tall, gangling, gawky, she had long legs and what she described as vaulting ambition. She was one of the few scholars from a working-class family who took full advantage of what the school had to offer while making only those minor modifications in her own personality which can be expected of most growing girls. More recently, in UNRRA she had worked in camps where other resources than high spirits and Cockney grit were required – and found. So why should she feel so daunted by the prospect of this encounter with Jacov Vaseyelin?

  She turned in the direction of the Embankment. It was after five when she reached the theatre, but they were still rehearsing. In reply to her enquiry as to whether she could go into the auditorium, a harassed electrician said sourly, ‘Do what you like. You can get up on stage and join in the mumbo-jumbo for all I care.’

  They were coming to the end of the rehearsal and the cast showed signs of wilting. Not so the director. A frenzied puppet, mass of dark curly hair bobbing over forehead, Jacov waggled his head this way and that, imitating, mocking, eyes bright with derision. As he contrived to inject life into a play which struck Heather as a rather static affair, he coaxed, wheedled, was sarcastic, and briefly delighted. On several occasions he leapt with balletic grace onto the stage to demonstrate how he wanted an emotion expressed, a movement executed, shoulders hunched, a hand stretched out, fingers widespread. ‘Remember,’ he exhorted, ‘This has nothing to do with real life. You are here to act, act, act.’ Someone named Stanislavski and Jacov said, ‘Very boring!’ And to illustrate his boredom, he leant back in his seat, staring up at the ceiling as though his attention had become transfixed by something much more interesting which was happening in that shadowy area. The actors drooped until, refreshed by his vision, he condescended to give them his attention once more, hands clasped at nape of neck, rocking gently to and fro.

  When it was over, he sent them on their way with an artful mixture of praise ‘. . . taking shape splendidly now . . .’ and threat ‘. . . can’t afford to slacken . . .’

  The last member of the cast departed. Jacov remained sitting in the fifth row, bending over his notes. Heather walked up the aisle and sat beside him. He looked at her without surprise, perhaps think
ing she was a member of the backstage staff.

  She said, ‘I’m Heather Mason. You probably don’t remember me, but I was a friend of the Fairleys.’

  He said, ‘Ah yes, yes!’ She could imagine him saying this to small-part actresses, the same false light of recognition in his eyes.

  To spare them both further embarrassment, she said more directly than she had intended. ‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but I couldn’t find your ‘phone number. I work with UNRRA, and I’m just back from Austria.’ She stopped. Perhaps it was because of his restless activity that, while directing, he had given the illusion of a big man, filling the rumpled pullover with ample flesh. Now, he had become a thin creature which had crawled inside it for shelter. Heather had the sense of this creature crouched somewhere in its woolly depths, only the eyes giving its live presence away. Its terror was unmistakable.

  ‘Katia?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing definite,’ she said quickly.

  There was a dim blue light in the wings, and somewhere out of sight the stage carpenter was at work, monotonously banging nails. Empty cups and overflowing ash trays had been left on the edge of the stage, presumably for the cleaner to attend to. A hollow rumbling like an approaching tumbril echoed round the auditorium. The tiny theatre was under a railway arch. Heather imagined the train carrying people home to Shepherd’s Bush and wished she was one of them.

  She knew now why she had felt so daunted at the prospect of this encounter. She needed challenges and there was no challenge to answer here. Jacov Vaseyelin threw down no gauntlet. He is frightened of me, she marvelled; and it is not only because he fears what I may tell him. A fear that was centuries old looked out from Jacov’s eyes. It was no use to say, ‘I am Heather Mason. I’ve had an uphill fight, too. You have no reason to fear me.’ Reason had no place in this. She was guilty because she bore no brand.

  One of us has to begin, she thought, and said, ‘Tell me what news you have had of Katia.’

  At first it seemed he would not go even this far with her. Then he said tonelessly, ‘I have found out that in 1941 she was at Buchenwald.’