The Quality of Mercy Page 6

  ‘The Nazis have decided to expel as many Jews as they can. They can’t fit them all in the camps. The trouble is that not many countries will take them – South America, Palestine of course. Joe says Chamberlain is talking about allowing at least the children into Britain. There are people organizing trains to bring out Jewish children from Berlin and Vienna – the Committee for the Care of Children. We must help.’

  She looked up at Edward with bright eyes, wide with appeal. ‘We must,’ he agreed.

  Verity was too tired to rest so Edward suggested they had dinner at Gennaro’s ‘for old times’ sake’. The restaurant was crowded but Freddy, the head waiter, found them a quiet table and they ordered champagne ‘to buck you up’, as Edward put it. Verity nibbled nervously on a bread roll but said she wasn’t hungry. She had the same look of inexpressible weariness and despair she had when she came back from Spain that last time. There were black stains under her eyes and she looked thin and slightly grubby, as though she needed to soak for an hour in a hot bath. It was a shame, Edward thought, that girls could not go to hammams. Of course, there was always a spa – perhaps Harrogate or Cheltenham.

  He must have smiled at the idea of Verity at Harrogate because she said sharply, ‘Have I got a smudge on my nose?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘You were smiling while I was talking of jackboots . . .’

  ‘Sorry. I was listening, I promise.’

  ‘Well, let’s change the subject. What have you been up to while I’ve been away? Seen anything of Maggie Cardew?’ This was a woman whom Edward had liked but whose brother he had helped prove a murderer.

  ‘No,’ he said, shortly. ‘She won’t see me. I bring more pain than pleasure to my relationships with women, I’ve decided.’

  ‘Poor didums!’ she said, patting his cheek patronizingly. ‘Feeling sorry for ourselves, are we?’ She sighed and played meditatively with her Velouté de tomates. ‘We don’t seem to be very successful with our love affairs, do we?’

  ‘No. Are you going to eat that?’

  ‘What? Oh, this. No, I don’t think I am. Do you think Freddy would mind if I ordered a plain omelette? My stomach’s so . . . so tight, somehow, I can’t seem to digest anything.’

  Edward looked worried. ‘I’m going to make you see my doctor. You need a thorough check-up. You’re much too thin and . . .’

  ‘Stop it. I’ll be all right in a few days. I don’t know . . . I felt so alone in Vienna. I had no friends there and I missed Adam dreadfully.’

  She looked so pathetic that Edward put out a hand and laid it over hers.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked. Reluctantly, because he thought she smoked instead of eating, he proffered his cigarette case and she took one. He leant forward and lit it for her and she took a long drag on it. ‘That’s better,’ she said appreciatively. ‘How’s Basil? I was hoping to see him in Albany.’

  ‘He’s at Mersham. They don’t allow dogs at my place. He lodges with the Hassels when in town. Do you want him back? I hope not. He loves Mersham. Gerald’s rather taken to him. They go on long walks together.’ He saw she wasn’t really listening. She was crumbling a bread roll to pieces with one hand while holding her cigarette in the other. He knew it was pointless but he could not prevent himself saying, ‘You live on your nerves. You smoke too much and eat too little. No wonder you can’t sleep.’

  ‘Distract me then,’ she said with an effort. ‘You still haven’t told me what you’ve been up to. Mixing with the nobs, I’ll be bound – toadying up to Mr Churchill, I expect.’

  Verity had taken a strong dislike to Winston Churchill, whom she had never met, having decided that he was the enemy of the working class. Edward, to her fury, had fallen totally under his thrall and had undertaken a couple of investigations at his bidding.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I have been mingling with the nobs – as you put it – nothing to do with Mr Churchill though.’ He took a deep breath and began to tell her about meeting Sunny, his visit to Broadlands and the boys’ macabre discovery.

  ‘Mountbatten, eh?’ He was glad to see that he had her attention. ‘He’s just a playboy, isn’t he? These minor royals . . . well, they’ll be the first to go in the revolution.’

  ‘I think Mountbatten’s more than that. He’s not a drone. They say he’s a good officer. He’s very ambitious.’

  ‘Huh! So whose was the body Frank found?’

  ‘Well, that’s the odd thing. I telephoned the local chap – a man named Inspector Beeston – rather a dunderhead, I fear. I met him when we found the corpse. Anyway, the dead man turns out to have been an artist – a man called Peter Gray. Adrian Hassel knew him. They were at the Slade together though he was older than Adrian – late forties. He had a show at the Goupil Galleries in 1931 which was judged to have been a success.’

  ‘What was he doing at Broadlands?’

  ‘That’s what no one knows.’

  ‘And he died of a heart attack?’

  ‘That’s what the doctor thought at first but the post-mortem has thrown up a much more exotic cause of death.’

  ‘Which is . . .?’

  ‘Ergot poison.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Nor had I but I did a bit of research. Ergot’s a fungus that lives off rye and other grasses. Apparently it has been used as a country recipe since at least the Middle Ages to combat depression, hasten childbirth and, intriguingly, enhance sexual performance.’

  Verity laughed and it did Edward good to see her. ‘So, what . . .? He went too far and his love life . . .’

  ‘V, please, keep your voice down if you’re going to be mucky. It’s more likely that he was prescribed it for depression. He had had a bad war – shell shock. Adrian said that after the war, he was in and out of hospital but gradually seemed to get over it.’

  ‘So, he was taking ergot and took too much?’

  ‘The problem with ergot is that it’s not very exact in its effects. It’s quite easy to poison yourself.’

  ‘What happens? What are the symptoms?’

  ‘Well, according to the books it can cause gangrene by constricting the blood flow to the extremities – fingers and toes. It’s sometimes called Holy Fire because it feels as if your feet or hands are on fire.’

  ‘How horrible! But does that necessarily kill you?’

  ‘It can do but in this chap’s case, according to the doctor who examined the body – they haven’t yet talked to the doctor who prescribed the ergot – Gray may have taken an overdose. Then he would have been ill – you get vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach cramps – but he might have thought he’d recovered. You start to feel better but later you can suffer kidney or liver failure and die. Oh, and too much ergot can give you hallucinations. ’

  ‘Before you die, presumably. Could it have been murder?’

  ‘Bloodthirsty little thing! It could have been but it’s much more likely to have been an accidental overdose.’

  ‘Has . . . what’s-his-name? . . . Gray, got any relatives?’

  ‘A niece, Adrian says. Apparently she was an orphan he took in when she was a baby.’ Edward saw Verity’s interest flag and hurried on. ‘And another thing – a beautiful film star asked me to save her from her husband.’

  Verity laughed. ‘Tell me another one!’

  ‘No, it’s true, honest Injun.’ He told her all about Joan Miller.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. Nothing, probably. It’s not my business, though she is very beautiful,’ he teased, but Verity was too exhausted to rise.

  When the taxi drew up outside Cranmer Court, Verity was sleepy and rather drunk. He almost had to carry her up to her flat and had to dig around in her handbag to find the door key which was, as he put it to her later, in ‘deep litter’. He was taken aback by how bleak the place looked. Verity had never got round to hanging pictures on the walls. There was a layer of dust on the table and no milk in the refrigerator. He had been thinking
of making a cup of tea to sober her up. She had all but collapsed on the sofa and he wondered if he dared leave her in her present state.

  He decided the best thing he could do was to put her to bed. He carried her into the bedroom, removed her shoes and stockings and then heaved off her dress. He looked at her with compassion. She seemed as vulnerable as a child and he wanted more than anything in the world to have the right to look after her. As he pulled the sheet over her, she half woke and to his alarm started weeping.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Edward,’ she muttered. ‘I’m so cold. Hold me.’ And she put out her arms to him.

  With a sigh, he took off his tie and dinner jacket, lay beside her and held her in his arms. Within a few moments, she began to breathe deeply and regularly. After half an hour he thought he would see if he could disentangle himself and sneak out without waking her but, when he tried to move her arms from round him, she stirred and burrowed her face in his chest. He resigned himself to an uncomfortable night. Her weight on his arms, light as she was, was giving him pins and needles. In the end he did sleep and, though he opened his eyes several times during the night, Verity was still in the deep, unfathomable sleep of the exhausted.

  The next morning Edward woke up early and lay beside Verity, not wanting to wake her, thinking about the tasks Liddell had set him. He had no idea how he was to get to meet ‘Putzi’ – Heinrich Braken – short of turning up at Claridge’s and asking to talk to him. Of the people Liddell had suggested might introduce him, he had met only Harold Nicolson and they had disliked each other on sight. Unity Mitford he had heard was mad and Randolph Churchill . . . well, much as Winston loved his son, Randolph had the alcoholic’s unpredictability and Edward knew enough about him not to want to get involved if he could possibly avoid it.

  In the end, as so often happens, there was no difficulty. He didn’t know whether they had been put up to it by Liddell or, more likely, Mountbatten, but he received an invitation from Joan Miller and her husband to dine at Claridge’s, where they also were staying, to meet Braken.

  Claridge’s was Edward’s favourite of the grand hotels. Charles Malandra, the king of maîtres d’hotel, was an old friend and he was warmly welcomed when he strode into the restaurant. The surroundings were austere but sumptuous, the chairs comfortable and the food excellent, but what Edward particularly liked was the quiet. There was no floor show and Geiger’s Hungarian Orchestra played in the foyer, where guests sipped their aperitifs before going in to dinner, not in the restaurant itself. The atmosphere was, Edward thought, choosing the word after due deliberation, episcopal.

  He had wondered how he could break it to Verity that he was having dinner with a Nazi in preference to her but, before he had to explain anything, she told him that she had been invited to dinner by her boss, Joe Weaver, and he was not to be refused. In any case, there were to be politicians and other influential people whom she wanted to meet and possibly harangue. Verity was never one to pass up an opportunity of making her views known to anyone who would listen and the more important they were the better.

  So it was with a clear conscience that Edward entered the hotel restaurant and looked about him. He saw Mandl at once. He seemed less coarse and objectionable than when he had seen him at Broadlands. Joan still looked melancholy but this was, he thought, something to do with the way her eyes never seemed to light up even when she smiled. As usual, she was smoking a Sobranie in a long white cigarette holder. Putzi appeared to be a classic ‘lounge lizard’ with smooth, brilliantined hair and eyes black as ink. He was a big man with a heavy ‘stupid’ face but he obviously was not stupid if he had first entranced Hitler and then escaped from him.

  It was not the way of diners at Claridge’s to show that they noticed famous guests. It would have been odd if there had been no one in the room who was notorious for one reason or another. However, Joan’s extraordinary beauty – and no doubt her notoriety as the naked star of Last Night in Vienna – meant that she attracted some quick glances and one or two more deliberate stares. Neither of the men rose to greet Edward. A waiter pulled out a chair for him and, as he sat down, Mandl introduced Putzi with a wave of his hand which was almost contemptuous. Putzi smiled half-heartedly, like a schoolboy who knows he’s done wrong but hardly knows how to admit it. Edward guessed Mandl had been doing his best to persuade him to return home. Joan acknowledged him with the slightest of nods. They were drinking champagne and Edward had the feeling they were already on the second bottle. He decided this was not going to be an evening at Claridge’s he would look back on with any pleasure.

  ‘Am I late? You said eight, Herr Mandl.’

  ‘You’re not late, Lord Edward. There were some things I had to talk to Putzi – Herr Braken – about before you came.’

  ‘He was trying to get me to return to Berlin,’ Putzi bleated, sounding already half-drunk. ‘They are putting so much pressure on me. Last week Colonel Bodenschatz – Reichmarschall Goering’s personal adjutant – was trying to make me believe that all was forgotten and forgiven. Isn’t that what you English say?’ He spoke with an American accent the English he had learnt at Harvard and less salubrious institutions where he had played piano. ‘But I don’t believe it. I think I will be walking into a trap. The Führer used to love me. You see, Lord Edward, I knew him before he was . . . before he became our beloved leader. Did you know Herr Himmler’s father was my schoolmaster?’ He giggled. ‘But now . . .’ He shrugged expressively. ‘Bodenschatz threatened that, if I do not return to Germany, my family will suffer but I told him I did not care. My wife does not love me . . . there is only my son Egon, God bless him. Herr Hitler loved my wife. Did you know that, Herr Mandl? She was the first – before Eva or Geli. I played the piano and he danced with my wife.’

  ‘You should not say such things,’ Mandl rebuked him.

  ‘You were responsible for the foreign press?’ Edward asked.

  ‘I knew how to deal with them. I told them what they wanted to hear – Germany rehabilitated, part of the family of nations once again – you understand. The Führer decisive, responsible, a new Bismarck . . .’

  ‘But . . .?’

  ‘But it all went wrong . . . the Jews . . .’

  Mandl tried to hush him. ‘Lord Edward does not want to hear about all that, Putzi.’

  ‘No, I am interested. We cannot make out whether Hitler wants war or . . .’

  Putzi embarked on a long, ill-thought-out monologue on the Führer’s political ambitions at the end of which Edward was beginning to wonder what this wreck of a man had to offer Liddell even if he did decide to remain in England. He drank and smoked cigars while still making time to wolf down caviar, a steak and a very sweet pudding. Edward hoped he was not going to be asked to pay for the meal – Liddell had said nothing about expenses – but in the end Mandl picked up the bill.

  Putzi was lonely, Edward gathered. He wanted to be invited into high society but so far he had received no invitations of any consequence. Unity Mitford had taken him to one or two parties but, reading between the lines, Edward gathered that he had not been a success. He had wanted to meet Unity’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, but, apparently, they did not like the look of him and had refused to invite him to stay for the weekend. Harold Nicolson had taken him to the House of Commons and he had lunched with three or four Members of Parliament on the right of the Conservative party but that wasn’t enough. He seized on Edward as a means of cracking his social isolation and Edward began to realize that he would get nowhere until he procured him an invitation to one of the great country houses. He knew that Gerald would never have him at Mersham and he decided he would get Liddell to put pressure on Mountbatten to invite him to Broadlands.

  It was a considerable relief to Edward when the meal ended. He tried to get away but this proved more difficult than he had imagined. Putzi had been introduced by Harold Nicolson to a cabaret club called Murray’s which Edward had heard of but never visited. It had a dubious reputation but was popular with som
e of the young men about town who liked ‘slumming’. It was in this Soho basement that Edward now found himself about eleven thirty when he would much rather have been at home in bed or, better still, with Verity.

  Putzi – apparently already a temporary member – was made welcome and, to Edward’s embarrassment, they were given a table on the edge of the dance floor. Percival Murray, the owner, whom Putzi addressed as ‘Pops’, was unctuous and signalled two scantily dressed ‘dancers’ to come over to the table. Edward, feeling very out of place, watched as Mandl and Putzi fondled them. Mandl seemed quite unconscious of the impropriety of behaving in such a way with his wife present. It showed a contempt for her which made Edward angry and ashamed.

  He saw him stuff banknotes into the pocket of the waiter who reappeared with what passed for champagne. Edward took one sip and almost choked. It wasn’t long before Joan was recognized as the star of Last Night in Vienna and she was applauded by several of the men sitting with girls at other tables, two or three of whom demanded autographs. She obliged, looking gloomier than ever but this did not seem to bother her admirers. In the end, Joan told Edward they should dance, solely in order to free herself from the mêlée she said, unflatteringly.

  ‘I know this sort of place,’ she growled in his ear. ‘We have them in Vienna. It’s little better than a brothel.’

  ‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ he responded, ungallantly. ‘Would you like me to take you back to Claridge’s?’

  Mandl seemed not to care that Edward was taking his wife back to the hotel and his pride was stung that the possessive husband did not see him as a threat. He hoped it was because Mandl imagined English gentlemen did not behave badly, which he knew to be untrue.

  As they were leaving the stuffy little basement, he caught sight of a face he knew. It was Stuart Rose. He was sitting alone staring at Mandl and Putzi. As Edward started to climb the narrow stairs up to street level, Rose turned and looked at him. He was smiling but it was not a pleasant smile. He raised a glass to his lips as though drinking a toast. Edward nodded but did not feel like making conversation. It had been a long evening and it might not yet be over.