The Quality of Mercy Read online

  ‘I see. But when you cross the border with the children . . .?’

  ‘We do not cross the border. We go to the frontier and then, when the children are safely in Switzerland, we return to Vienna.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because they have told us that if we do not return – the escorts – no further trains will be allowed to leave.’

  ‘But . . .’ Edward was at a loss for words.

  ‘Please understand, Lord Edward, that once we knew Georg was safe in England . . . or so we thought, we made the decision to stay. We are old. We would find it difficult to settle in a foreign country at our time of life. We can do something useful here. To be in London and know that so many of our friends and families were . . . not so fortunate – that we could not bear. The guilt would destroy us.’ He held up his hand. ‘Please do not try and persuade us to come with you. You will not succeed. If you wish to be of service, you will make sure there are homes for these children. The Nazis say that only those with addresses to go to in England will be allowed to leave. It will not be long before they prevent any of our people emigrating.’

  Edward left, impressed with their fortitude but, when he reached the door of the apartment building, he heard a high-pitched wail from above. The Dreisers’ world had been shattered and there was nothing anyone could do about it. His duty was clear: to find Georg’s killer and do what he could to bring as many Jewish children as was possible out of Vienna.

  Distressed by his visit but grateful that it was over, he felt the need for fresh air and exercise. He strode off, not knowing where he was heading. After twenty minutes, he found himself in what Verity had told him was the Jewish area of Vienna – Leopoldstadt, near the Carl-Theater. Many of the Jewish-owned shops had been broken into and daubed with swastikas. He saw the still-smoking ruin of what had once been a synagogue. He suddenly felt nervous and walked more quickly.

  Ever since leaving the Imperial he had sensed that he was being followed. He assumed someone among Austria’s new rulers thought he was worth keeping tabs on but he had no fears for himself. He was, however, concerned not to bring further trouble on the Dreisers so he did what he could to throw his pursuer off his trail and thought he had succeeded.

  He found himself at the Café Zentral on the corner of Herrengasse and Strauchgasse and remembered Verity telling him about the waxwork of Trotsky which stood in a corner. He went in and was delighted to find that the Nazis had not got round to destroying it. He nodded his head to it and sat down at a nearby table. He ordered an Einspanner – one of those coffees the Viennese love so much served in a glass topped with Schlagobers, whipped cream – and waited to see who would appear at his elbow. He picked up a newspaper attached to a wooden stick from a rack by the door. It was slow work translating the German and he soon put it down. A young man who had been watching him furtively from a neighbouring table caught his eye and he nodded politely. Seeming to take this as an invitation, he came over and said, ‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte, Herr Corinth, störe ich Sie?’

  ‘Verzeihung, ich spreche nicht Deutsch. Or at least not well enough to carry on a conversation.’

  The young man looked relieved, perhaps because Edward was who he thought he was, and replied that he spoke some English.

  ‘Who are you?’ Edward asked, rather puzzled. It seemed unlikely that this inoffensive boy could be a secret policeman.

  ‘Ich bin . . . I’m a friend of Georg’s. He is safe in England?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Edward volunteered, not wishing to give anything away to a complete stranger. ‘How did you know my name?’

  ‘Georg told me you were the gentleman who Fraulein Browne was . . . who would guarantee his visa. I guessed it must be you when I saw you enter the Dreisers’ apartment.’

  ‘And your name is . . . ?’

  ‘My name is Gustav.’ The young man obviously thought that now they had introduced themselves, they should shake hands, which they did with some solemnity.

  ‘And what can I do for you, Gustav?’

  ‘It is all right. I am not going to ask you for help to leave the country. I am not Jewish.’ A charming smile lit up his sallow, melancholy face.

  ‘But you were . . . are a friend of Georg’s?’

  ‘He has many friends who are not Jews. So have his parents. That is why Herr Dreiser was released from prison. We have urged him to leave the country but he will not.’

  ‘I know. I, too, offered to help him emigrate but, as you say, he refuses to go,’ Edward said shortly. He thought this young man with the sad eyes was honest but he would take no chances. Nothing he said must get the Dreisers into trouble with the authorities.

  ‘So what do you want of me, Gustav?’ he repeated.

  ‘Come with me to the university. I have a friend – a scientist – who wishes to . . . who wants to talk to you.’

  Edward found that his heart was beating faster than normal. ‘It is safe for your friend to be seen with me?’ he asked as a little test.

  ‘No one will see you. Shall we go?’

  Edward looked at him and tried to gauge whether he was being led into a trap. It was a risk but one he knew he must take. He threw a few Schillinge on the table and got up. ‘Let us go, Gustav.’

  The young man smiled reassuringly. ‘Machen Sie sich keine Sorgen. Alles ist in Ordnung . . . alles ist in Ordnung.’ ‘Don’t worry, everything is all right.’ But of course, it wasn’t.

  Verity and Vera had taken to one another when they had met before and, when she explained on the telephone that Edward had to go to Vienna so she would come in his place, Vera was rather relieved. She found Lord Edward Corinth a touch intimidating. They agreed to meet at Peter Gray’s flat in Mornington Crescent. Verity was late – she had got rather lost in Camden, an area she did not know well and did not like. It looked dirty and rundown. Most of the buildings in Camden High Street had been miserable enough when they had been run up in the 1820s and were now little more than slums. As a good Communist, she ought to have been angry at the poverty she saw all around her – and she was angry – but that did not make her want to stay there any longer than she had to.

  She found herself standing by a statue of Richard Cobden, the radical economist and MP, and she stopped to examine it. As she stooped to read the inscription, she was accosted by several children who eyed her rather as jackals eye their prey and demanded money. It occurred to her that she did look too smart for the neighbourhood and was attracting attention. Perhaps she ought to have brought Adrian with her as Edward had suggested. She definitely wished she had not chosen the hat with the feather in it – altogether too jaunty.

  She surrendered a sixpence and asked directions to Mornington Crescent but the children, pretending they did not understand her, ran off – she hoped not to bring their older siblings to complete her humiliation. Just as she was becoming rather desperate she saw a constable. He advised her that Mornington Crescent was only a few hundred yards away behind the huge, recently built tobacco factory. It was with relief that she identified the house, dilapidated and crumbling at the edges, at the far end of the crescent. She peered at the little tower of bells, each with its own grimy label. The topmost was inscribed Gray so she pressed the bell beside it. Nothing happened though she thought she heard a bell ringing inside the house. After a minute or two she rang again and, just as she was about to give up and go home, she heard the clatter of shoes on uncarpeted stairs.

  Vera opened the door looking as though she had been crying – red-eyed and with a smudge on her cheek.

  ‘Oh, there you are. I thought you’d forgotten,’ she said crossly.

  Verity apologized meekly and explained that she had got lost.

  ‘You didn’t take a cab?’

  ‘No, I knew it was near the underground station but I turned the wrong way when I came out.’

  ‘Well, come up then. I was just trying to clear the flat up a bit but I got stuck. I know he’d hate me messing around with his things.’

 
; As she entered the flat, Verity looked around her and tried to catch the personality of the man. In the first place, he seemed to have been both messy and organized. There were paint stains everywhere – on the floor, on the easel, on the few pieces of furniture, even on the ceiling. However, she had the feeling that he would have been able to put his finger on any tube of paint, brush or knife without having to think about it. It obviously upset Vera to be there. Her uncle’s presence was almost palpable in the artist’s clutter, as though he had only popped out to buy a packet of cigarettes and his footsteps would soon be heard on the stairs. He had already selected some of the paintings for his – now posthumous – show and these were stacked against the walls in neat piles.

  ‘What are you going to do? Move into the flat or sell it?’ she asked Vera.

  ‘I haven’t quite decided. There’s no studio at Lawn Road and it would be lovely to have a place of my own instead of having to go to the Slade but I don’t know if I could afford it. Anyway, I’ve only recently moved into my flat and I like it. There’s a community of painters there – quite a few refugees from Germany who we support while they find their feet.’

  Vera was not a Communist but she was an active member of the Hampstead Artists’ Council which helped bring refugees to London from Nazi Germany. When Verity told her about Georg’s death she was horrified.

  ‘To have come so far and to die just when he had reached a safe haven . . .! My uncle would have felt it . . . He hated to hear of violent death. It reminded him of the war. After it ended, he was plagued by depression – well, you already know about that,’ she said, rubbing her forehead and wiping more dust into her face as she did so. ‘Bad dreams and worse – there were days . . . weeks . . . when I expected him to try and kill himself.’

  Verity wondered what it must have been like for her to grow up constantly fearing for her uncle’s mental stability. It must, she thought, prematurely age a child.

  ‘Was he ill-treated in those hospitals?’ She didn’t want to say lunatic asylums.

  ‘Not ill-treated – not deliberately, anyway. They used drugs to quieten him but . . . but they didn’t make him better. I think they used patients like guinea-pigs to try out new treatments. You can’t blame them, I suppose.’ Despite her forgiving words, she sounded bitter.

  ‘But he did get better?’

  ‘Yes, that was odd. Of course, it was partly that time is – how does it go? – “the great healer”. But, as this new war loomed, it seemed to change his mood.’

  ‘It made him fearful that history would repeat itself?’

  ‘He certainly hated the idea of another war, as every sane person does. He said he was glad he only had me and that I was a girl not a boy. But . . . I don’t know – with something definite . . . something outside himself to fear, he seemed . . . not more cheerful exactly but more determined, less introspective.’

  ‘In what way determined? He was too old to fight in the army.’

  ‘It wasn’t that. He always said he wished he had been a conscientious objector. At the outbreak of war, he had been as patriotic as anyone. He joined up expecting to be home . . . if not by Christmas at least in a few months. He despised “conchies”. It was only later that he understood their point of view and what they had to face . . . how brave many of them were in the face of so much hostility. Women would hand out white feathers to men not in uniform and “conchies” were thought to be little better than traitors.’

  ‘Even though many became stretcher-bearers and medical orderlies?’

  ‘I wish I could explain what I mean. He felt that he and millions of others had been tricked into fighting in 1914 but that Hitler was absolutely evil and had to be fought.’

  ‘May I see the picture he was working on when he died?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry for talking so much but there are so few people I can talk to about him. And with your experience of being in battle . . . you know about nerves and all that.’

  ‘I do,’ Verity said with a shiver. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I felt when my boss said I wasn’t to go back to Spain. I wasn’t sure I could face it but at least I wouldn’t have been court-martialled if I had refused to go. For soldiers like your uncle . . . they risked being shot.’

  Vera brought out from underneath a sheet a canvas of startling beauty. It was a landscape – the view from Tarn Hill he always painted – but it had a freshness which even Verity, who did not know much about art, could appreciate. It was as though the artist was seeing the rolling hills and river valley for the first time but, of course, it was because he knew it so well that he could record it so accurately and with such loving care. It was unfinished and that too helped make it seem a living work – as though the artist was only waiting for the light to improve before setting up his easel again and mixing his oils on the palette with his knife.

  ‘I like it. I really do,’ Verity said, feeling inadequate. ‘I wish I was knowledgeable about art like Edward and knew what to say.’

  ‘I like it too. I’ve decided not to sell it. I shall keep it to remember him by. I thought it might make me sad as it was the last thing he did but it doesn’t. It makes me remember him being happy which is the way I want to remember him.’

  Verity peered at the top right-hand corner where Gray had scribbled his notes.

  ‘See?’ Vera pointed. ‘He used Red Windsor. Here’s the tube.’

  ‘M – I think it’s an M – Tarn Hill – Sat.’ Verity read aloud. ‘Have you got a magnifying glass by any chance? I can’t make it out. Is it an M or an R? I’m not sure.’

  ‘Yes, there’s one here somewhere. Uncle Peter’s sight wasn’t as good as it used to be and he used a magnifying glass to read small print. Hold on – it should be here.’ She rifled around in a paint-stained chest of drawers. ‘Ah! Here we are!’ She waved it triumphantly. ‘He was a very methodical man. He said a painter had to be like a surgeon. He had to have all the tools of his trade to hand so that, when things were going well, he didn’t need to break his rhythm searching for a tube of paint or knife.’

  Verity took the magnifying glass close to the corner of the canvas. ‘You know, I do believe . . .’ she said slowly, ‘that it isn’t a letter of the alphabet at all. I think it is an emblem – I don’t know – a flower perhaps. It’s just a squiggle. He wouldn’t need to be reminded what it was. It was just an aide-mémoire. You look.’

  Vera took her place. ‘I do believe you are right. I think it is a flower – a rose perhaps . . .? I suppose I just thought it would be the initial of the person he was meeting.’

  ‘Well, let’s say it is a rose. Maybe it stands for a name. Rose is quite a common name. Did he know anyone called Rose?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Vera said, furrowing her brow.

  ‘There was a man staying with Lord Louis Mountbatten . . . Stuart Rose – an American. He’s something to do with painting – a critic or a dealer. I was introduced to him but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t take much notice. I just remember feeling I didn’t like him.’

  ‘I can ask Uncle Peter’s friend – Reg Harman. He might know.’

  Verity looked round the room. ‘There’s nothing missing – nothing unusual?’

  ‘You really think my uncle might have been murdered?’ Vera asked suddenly.

  Verity was immediately apologetic. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. Why would he have been murdered? But I can’t help wondering why he took that ergot when you say he no longer needed it. And then – dying like he did . . . I’m probably just imagining things but it seems . . . not right somehow. I can’t explain. Woman’s instinct?’ she offered weakly.

  ‘Does Lord Edward have doubts too?’

  ‘He does . . . just doubts – there’s no evidence, you understand.’

  ‘Woman’s instinct?’ Vera inquired wryly.

  ‘Not in his case. Look, shall I just go away? I’d hate you to think I was poking my nose into your affairs to satisfy my curiosity and for no good reason
.’

  ‘No. I need to find out the truth. Just like you need to find out who killed Mr Dreiser. Ask me anything you like.’ She sounded almost defiant. Looking around her, she continued, ‘I don’t think there’s anything missing.’

  Verity had a thought. ‘Might I look at the case he carried his paints and brushes in? I mean, I suppose when he went to Tarn Hill or wherever, he took his stuff with him in some sort of case.’

  ‘Yes. The police found it and gave it back to me.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Verity pointed at a dirty wooden case.

  ‘Yes.’ Vera opened it and looked inside. ‘It was a Christmas present from my mother I don’t know how many years ago. He always used it.’

  ‘It’s beautifully made.’ Verity was looking at the dozen or so different-sized partitions in which paints and brushes could be safely stored and carried without rattling around.

  ‘You said your uncle was very methodical? Can you see if there is anything missing?’

  Vera pulled open a layer of drawers to reveal another beneath it. ‘I can’t see anything . . . wait a moment. Where’s his palette knife? He always used a palette knife. It was one I gave him about ten years ago when the handle of his old one broke.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s still on Tarn Hill.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ Vera said doubtfully, ‘but the police said they had cleared everything up very carefully. I’m sure they would have seen it.’

  ‘It’s definitely not in the flat?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He always kept it in this box.’ She lifted a few objects listlessly.

  ‘Is that it – under the table?’ Verity knelt down and picked up a battered-looking knife.

  ‘Fancy that! That’s it all right. How could it have got there, I wonder?’

  ‘It must have fallen out of the box.’

  ‘But I haven’t opened it since it was brought back from Tarn Hill.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure!’

  ‘So he went to paint on Tarn Hill and forgot to take his knife.’

  ‘He was getting rather confused . . .’ she began and then stopped. She looked at Verity uncertainly.