Two Brothers

On the Embankment London, 1956

THERE WAS A decent moon and it cast a long streak of white across the cobalt black ripples of the Thames. A glittering, twinkling silver pathway stretching almost all the way from the Mother of Parliaments to the Royal Festival Hall.

‘Peter Pan could’a danced along dat path,’ Billie observed, ‘on his way from Neverland to Kensington Gardens.’

‘I don’t think even Peter Pan could have survived a dunk in the Thames,’ Stone replied.

They were standing together on Westminster Bridge. Neither of them had wanted to go home after their hurried exit from the pub, but Billie didn’t want to drink any more so instead they had taken the taxi across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall, and now found themselves standing in the moon shadow of Big Ben, staring down into the broad dark river as it hurried beneath them.

‘I always like to t’ink of the Romans when I see the moon on the Thames,’ Billie said.

‘The Romans?’ Stone enquired, somewhat surprised.

‘It’s jus’ dis town’s been here so long,’ she explained. ‘Amazin’ to t’ink that people been lookin’ at that same beautiful light on that same dirty ol’ river for two thousand years.’

Together they made their way down from the bridge and on to the Victoria Embankment. Strolling past the various down-and-outs in search of an unoccupied bench.

‘When I was a little girl in Trinidad,’ Billie went on, ‘me mudder used ta talk about how one day we be goin’ to Englan’ and then we’d have plenty money and anyt’ing we wanted to eat. An’ then we’d take a pleasure trip on de Thames an’ go see where ol’ Henry de Eight be beddin’ all his wives, one after another after another. An’ then we’d go see where he killed a couple o’ dem too. Cut off they heads in da Tower. An’ we’d all be merry in merry ol’ England. We did it too, you know. Me and me mudder. First Sunday we had money to spare for a day out, dat’s what we did.’

‘I wonder what old Henry would have made of that bloody awful Royal Festival Hall,’ Stone said, glancing across the water at the controversial new building on the opposite bank.

‘I like it,’ Billie said. ‘I t’ink it’s very cool. Very satisfyin’ spatially.’

‘Too bloody Soviet if you ask me. Too much concrete.’

‘Let me tell you, Paul. When you was born in a house wit’ a mud floor, you don’ mind a bit o’ concrete. It be clean, it’s cheap an’ it don’ blow down in a storm. That’s a lot o’ positive when you puttin’ up a building.’

‘Well, you’re the design student,’ Stone conceded.

‘You can’t study good taste, baby,’ Billie replied. ‘Nor common sense neither. I jus’ be born wit’ more than my fair share o’ both, tha’s all.’

They found an empty bench and staked their claim, Billie inspecting the seat carefully by the light of her Dunhill lighter before she would entrust her beautiful woollen coat to it. There was a cabbies’ refreshment stall a little further along and Stone went and got them some tea and a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate.

‘You know those Romans who were staring at our moon from their wooden bridge got a nasty surprise,’ Stone said when he returned with the two steaming china mugs. ‘Boudicca and the Iceni turned up and they reckon as many as seventy thousand people died in the fighting and pillaging. Just about around where we’re sitting now.’

‘Well, d’ere’s a gruesome t’ought for a romantic night!’ Billie laughed. ‘You always find a way, don’t you?’

‘But the good part of it is, that was the biggest slaughter that ever happened in the British Isles. No power-mad swine has topped it since in almost two millennia. That’s actually an amazing statistic. How many other countries can say that the bloodiest catastrophe that ever occurred on its soil happened nineteen centuries ago? I’ll tell you now. None. Lucky old Britain eh?’

Billie smiled and sipped her tea.

‘Did you put three in?’

‘Of course.’

‘Don’t t’ink you stirred it then.’

‘Ah.’

Billie took a pencil from her purse and stirred her tea.

‘You really love dis country, don’t you, baby?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ Stone said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not much good at love. But I do respect it, I can tell you that. I respect it deeply. And its people too.’

‘Even after tonight. After you punched de landlord?’

‘That was depressing. Very depressing. But I think in this country people like that are the rotten apples. When I was a boy they were the whole barrel.’

‘Well, maybe.’ Billie shrugged. ‘Except I gots’t tell ya I see a lot o’ dose apples, you know. Teddy boy gangs comin’ down Ladbroke Grove wit dere razors. You know when we first come here we couldn’t even get no rooms because we was Negroes, oftentimes we still can’t. No Dogs. No Blacks. No Irish.’

‘I know, Bill. Of course I’m not saying it’s paradise or anything. But all the same, it’s still the most tolerant country I ever heard of… And the funny thing is they don’t even know it. It makes me laugh sometimes to hear the Reds at work muttering that Britain’s not much better than a Fascist state. I tell them, it may be elitist, snobbish, small-minded and class-obsessed, but in the middle of the nineteenth century they made a Jew Prime Minister. In the middle of the twentieth we murdered all ours.’

‘We?’ Billie said surprised. ‘I never heard you talk about yo’self as German before.’

‘Well, I am, Bill,’ Stone replied. ‘That’s another funny thing. I’ll always be German, or at least a part of me will be. The Germany of my parents and my grandparents. The one they loved. And I loved too. But the thing is, it got stolen. And that didn’t happen here. The Fascists never got anywhere in Britain. We never let them.’

‘We?’ Billie laughed. ‘So now you’re British too?’

‘Yes. I’m both. Or nothing at all, more like. But you know when we drove down Whitehall we passed Downing Street. We could have stopped the cab, got out and walked up to it. There’s one copper outside. That’s it, one cop. There’s never been more than that, even when Britain ruled a quarter of the world. Isn’t that something?’

‘Yeah. I s’pos it is when you put it like that.’

She took his hand and he felt her thumb brush across his knuckles, discovering the scabs that had formed there.

‘Ouch,’ she said.

‘Must have caught his teeth somehow. Didn’t think I had. Thought I popped him clean.’

‘Oh you popped him clean, all right, boy. Don’ you worry ’bout dat.’

‘I had to do it, you know, Billie,’ Stone said.

‘I don’t t’ink you did have to do it. Not on my account anyways. I don’t like violence.’

‘Who does?’

‘I don’t think it helps.’

‘Billie, I have a rule. When you meet that kind of attitude, you always have to fight it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black, Jewish or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, it’s never good enough to walk away. You have to confront it every time you see it. I made that decision twenty-three years ago when I saw a young teenage girl running down the Kurfürstendamm in terror while they made her mum and dad lick the pavement.’

Billie smiled. ‘It’s still all about that girl, isn’t it? Even now, when you’re defending da honour of a Negro student in Soho in 1956, you still be really doing it for dat little German girlie. You hit dat guy for her sake not mine.’

‘No, Billie,’ Stone protested. ‘I did it for you. Really. And for my mum and my dad and Pauly and all the damned millions of others.’

‘And Dagmar.’

‘Yes. Of course. And Dagmar.’

‘Dagmar most.’

Stone laughed. ‘No, not most. You most.’

‘Well, gi’ me some chocolate an’ I’ll believe you.’

Stone took the purple-wrapped bar from his pocket, tore away the paper and ran a thumbnail along the groove in the foil.

‘Wish I had some Lindt for you,’ he said. ‘Now that’s chocolate.’

‘I prefer Cadbury’s,’ Billie said, accepting a whole row of squares. ‘I don’ like posh choccie. Cadbury Dairy Milk an’ a nice cup o’ tea. Dat is livin’, baby.’

Together they ate their chocolate and sipped their tea and watched as a coal barge slipped past in silence, cutting the silver ribbon the moon had draped across the water in two.

‘So you an’ Dagmar ended up goin’ aroun’ together then?’ Billie said, resuming the conversation.

‘Yes, that’s right, we did. Her pretending to be non-Jewish and me pretending to be a good Nazi.’

‘An’ did you get to sleep wit’ her?’

Stone coughed into his mug. ‘Straight to the point, eh?’ he said, wiping tea from his chin.

‘Well, c’mon. It’s the obvious question.’ Billie laughed.

‘Well, no, as it happens. We were only teenagers.’

‘Haha! You was sixteen!’ Billie snorted in amusement. ‘Differen’ times, baby! Differen’ times.’

‘Well, there wasn’t really much opportunity for that sort of thing. Our time together was pretty restricted and we had no place to go to. It was still too dangerous for me to go to her house.’

‘Bet you tried damn hard to find somewhere though.’

‘I suppose in a way we did. We certainly messed around a lot, whenever we could. You know, alleys and park benches.’

‘Oh I know. Been there meself. And she really was your girl? I mean for real? Not just because you could get her into the swimmin’ pool?’

‘Well I thought so. I thought she loved me. She said she did.’

‘But she didn’t?’

‘No,’ Stone replied, with a distant hint of bitterness. ‘In the end it turned out I was just a convenient mate. She loved my brother after all.’