Two Brothers

St John’s Wood London, 1956

STONE’S FLAT OVERLOOKED Regent’s Park. He could not have afforded it on his Foreign Office salary but had bought it with the proceeds of the sale of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. The home in which he had grown up, which the Nazis stole in 1942 and which had miraculously survived the Allied bombing.

A final gift from his beloved mum and dad.

As he approached the building from St John’s Wood tube, Stone wondered if Billie would still be there. She only stayed at weekends and always left on Monday morning but never at any particular time. Billie was not the sort of person to pay much attention to regular timetables.

Waiting for the lift Stone was concerned to discover that he was rather hoping she would be there. It would be nice to see her and share a cup of coffee. They might put a record on and continue her jazz education.

Stone tried to dismiss these thoughts from his mind.

He didn’t like attachments. He had avoided them since 1939. Always walking away whenever he sensed himself getting too close to a person. Especially a woman. The very fact that he liked Billie and enjoyed her company made him think that he should stop seeing her.

After all, what right had he to such simple pleasures?

He had survived.

And, anyway, he loved Dagmar. He would always love her. He’d promised her that at the Lehrter Bahnhof.

Billie was a West Indian girl Stone had met during the previous summer at a basement party in Ladbroke Grove. Stone liked to spend time in Notting Hill. He had been an outsider of one sort or another since the age of thirteen and felt great empathy with the immigrants who had recently come to live in West London.

‘Hey, we’re the Jews now,’ Billie had once joked. To which Stone had replied that she’d better hope not.

Stone also liked the music and the easy-going attitude that he found amongst Billie’s crowd. The disrespect for convention and authority. He liked the laughter, though he never laughed, and the dancing, though he never danced. He had also found that smoking marijuana was a pleasant alternative to blotting out the world with scotch as he had done on most evenings since the war.

After long days spent in the stilted dryness of Whitehall, it was a relief to while away his evenings sitting half stoned in a noisy, sweating, crowded room, listening to unfamiliar music and watching couples dancing so close that they might almost have been single creatures. It reminded him of the places his father used to talk about. The tiny late-night clubs pounding with rhythm and sweating with sex where Wolfgang Stengel had worked in the days before the whip came down. When, according to his father, Berlin had been beautiful, wild, irreverent and life-affirming.

Sitting in those little basement clubs the West Indians had established so quickly and with so little regard for the licensing laws, Stone could imagine himself close to his father. Luxuriating in the thought that apart from the colour of the dancers’ skin the scene he saw through his half-closed eyes was not so very different from that which Wolfgang had smiled out at from behind his trumpet on crazy carefree nights long ago and in another world.

Sometimes of course with one puff of smoke too many, or one extra drink, the vision changed, and Stone could not prevent paranoid nightmare fantasies dropping into his addled mind, in which the door burst open and brown-shirted imbeciles with red and black armbands flooded in, flailing about themselves with their truncheons and smashing all the delicate, beautiful young dancers to the ground in a mess of blood, teeth and splintered bone.

Billie said that if he found himself having those thoughts too often he should definitely try putting a higher percentage of tobacco into his reefers.

‘When it makes you paranoid it’s time to slow down,’ she advised.

Billie was still at home.

Across the hallway, the bedroom door was half open and an elegant brown limb was visible, stretched out from under the sheet. The toenails perfectly manicured and painted in rich, deep shining red.

‘Still here, Billie?’ he said. ‘Nice to be a student, eh?’

‘Don’t worry, I got screen printin’ in an hour, baby,’ the cheerful, heavily accented voice replied from the bedroom. ‘No classes dis mornin’ though so I been doin’ some readin’ here in me bed but I’ll be right out of your hair in a jiffy, man.’

Such a wild accent to Stone’s ears. Even when she was talking about studying it sounded like she’d been having a party of sorts. Stone wondered if any variant of his native German could ever sound so carefree and organically cool.

‘Take your time,’ he called out filling a kettle. ‘Really, there’s no rush. Stay in bed if you feel like it.’

He spooned coffee beans into a little electric grinder and whizzed them up. He had to go all the way to a shop in Soho to get those beans. The coffeeless culture was one aspect of his adopted homeland that he never got used to.

‘Hey, baby. I’ve got t’ings to do meself, you know,’ Billie replied from behind the open door where Stone could hear her getting up to get dressed. ‘I wasn’t just sittin’ here waiting t’get laid.’

Stone reddened. ‘I didn’t mean… I mean, I wasn’t saying, stay for… well… what I did mean was, have some breakfast.’

He could hear her laughing at his confusion.

‘No time, baby. No time for breakfast. Or any other mornin’ delights for that matter. Haha! I’ll have some o’ dat coffee though, baby. Fresh ground beans is one smell I never get tired of.’

It was a good relationship. By far the best Stone had ever had. Friendship plus sex. Billie wasn’t looking for anything more serious than Stone was, although for the exactly opposite reason. Her whole life was ahead of her, while Stone’s was behind him.

She was young, free-spirited and ambitious. She could not afford to be wasting her time falling in love. Particularly with a man like Stone who had made the decision that he did not deserve to be happy.

‘You got about a million demons locked up inside you, man,’ she had observed on one of the first nights they had spent together. ‘Do me a favour, don’t let ’em out when I’m around, heh? I got plenty shit of my own.’

‘I never let them out,’ Stone had replied. And he never did.

After a few minutes Billie emerged from the bedroom, hopping into her shoes as she went. He never understood how she could make herself look so immaculate so quickly.

‘Coffee’s coming,’ he said. ‘Two minutes.’

‘Plenty time. I can be at college in fifteen. You know I only like you because of your address anyway,’ she teased, sitting at his little breakfast bench and taking out a tube of lipstick.

Billie was in her third year doing textiles at the polytechnic in Kentish Town. When she spent the night with Stone she was already halfway there.

‘Of course I do. Happy to be useful,’ Stone said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to like me for any other reason. How about you put that stuff on after you have your coffee? It’s hell to get off the rim of the cup.’

‘Too late,’ she replied, pressing a tissue to her scarlet lips and then pushing the tissue into the breast pocket of Stone’s jacket, which was hanging over the back of the high-backed stool on which she was perched. ‘Something to remember me by in the week, eh? Haha!’

Stone would not have blamed her if truly she did only like him for the convenience of his apartment. He certainly did not consider himself much of a catch, fourteen years older than her and in love with a memory. He was aware that women sometimes found him attractive although never understood why, but Billie could do so much better. She was clever and wonderfully stylish, positively lighting up his drab little kitchen in her smart pink woollen two-piece suit with its pencil-line skirt and matching beret perched atop a stiff, jet-black Marilyn Monroe perm. And such a wonderful smile. A huge smile, it seemed almost to sparkle simply with a love of life.

He poured the coffee. Watching her as she busied herself packing her student bag. Pencils, paper, books of photography borrowed from the library and a swatch of fabrics which, even as she put it in her bag, she couldn’t resist caressing, her slim fingers slipping sensually across the fabric, appreciating its qualities.

‘Opposites attract,’ she said suddenly, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I like quiet boys. Means I got no competition bein’ centre of attention.’

Then she drained her coffee, slung her bag over her shoulder and made for the door, the piece of toast with Cooper’s Oxford marmalade Stone had just made for himself clamped firmly between her teeth.

‘So see you next weekend,’ she said through the toast. ‘Maybe come to mine. Mum’s doin’ pork, stir-fried up wi’ ginger an’ spice. You’re welcome if you want.’

‘I don’t really eat pork. Don’t know why. We did when I was a kid.’

‘You’ll eat it when me Ma cooks it.’

‘Yeah. I’ll bet I would. But I’ll be gone at the weekend, I’m afraid. Remember? I told you, I’m going to Berlin.’

‘Oh yeah, dat’s right. The long-lost girlfrien’ eh? Haha! Good luck!’

‘She was my brother’s girlfriend.’

‘Yeah, an’, man, didn’ dat hurt!’

Stone had never told Billie anything about his feelings for Dagmar but he supposed it was pretty obvious. Women tended to know these things.

‘I’ll bring you back some sweet pretzels,’ he said.

‘No t’anks. On a diet. But if you pass a bookshop see if you can find somet’ing on Bauhaus for me. Don’t matter if it’s in German, it’s the photos I love. Give me a call when you get back. That’s unless you’re all tied up wit’ your brudder’s girlfriend.’

‘I’m free tonight,’ Stone said without thinking. ‘We could have dinner.’

‘Can’t. I’m modellin’ for the art students. They love me, let me tell you. They t’ink I’m exotic. I say to ’em, jus’ wait till there’s a few million more of me brothers an’ sisters gettin’ off de boat. We won’ be so damned exotic then. Haha. Dat made ’em t’ink.’

And with a click-clack of stiletto heels, Billie was gone.

Funny how she did life modelling.

Just a coincidence. But it was a nice one. A connection to his mother, like the club in which he had met her was a connection to his father.

Stone took his coffee into the little sitting room of his apartment. The statuette stood on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. He took it up and held it in his hand.

Running his fingers along its smooth, satisfying lines. Was there something slightly wrong about him fondling a likeness of his naked mother? he wondered. Perhaps Freud would have had something to say about it.

A part of Stone hated that figure. He hated it because of who had created it. But he loved it more. Because it was his mother. Frieda, sculpted in the first year of Stone’s life, just before he had become fully conscious of her. Twenty-two years old, naked in the full bloom of youth. His grandfather had bought the piece and it had stood in their apartment all through his childhood and youth. It had still been standing there in 1946 when his German agent had collected up what family possessions were left prior to the sale of the apartment and sent them on to Stone in London.

He wondered how many good Nazis had fondled that statue in the years when some unknown family had squatted like murderous cuckoos in his parents’ home. How shocked those thieves would have been to understand that they were caressing the likeness of a Jew. There had no doubt been a Nuremberg Law against that sort of thing — no pure German will caress the likeness of a Jew as defined by the model having had one or more Jewish grandparents.

His father had hated that statuette.

Stone smiled as he recalled Wolfgang Stengel’s intense, semi-comical exasperation when anyone admired it.

It defied every artistic principle Wolfgang Stengel had possessed. Boring realism, nothing but boring realism, he’d protest. Which was why of course Stone and his brother had loved it then and why Stone loved it still. Precisely because it was boring realism, and skilfully executed too. A passable impression of his beloved mother. Not as beautiful as she had been but beautiful nonetheless.

For a moment Stone held the statue by the head.

Held it as he had held it on that awful night.

Knuckles gripped white round it.

The marble base crimson with blood.

He saw again the water running over it, washing the red away. The blood gurgling down into the sink as he and his brother began frantically to cover up the evidence of what they had done.