see May later that afternoon? Nat, who, together with his wife and mother-in-law, had an inkling of May’s romantic notions from the blush that crept over her whenever she mentioned Mr. Rupert’s university friend, had just avoided sewing his thumb to a buttonhole before throwing the jacket he was stitching aside and racing home to find May.
Three hours later, back in the pub for the second time that day, May was sitting enthralled at Julian’s tales of Berlin. Lottie’s name had not been mentioned. What was quite apparent was Julian’s ambivalence about the appeal of the German people. On the plus side, the country was so well organised, Julian enthused. There was so little unemployment. Everything in Germany worked. There had been some extraordinary parties.
“Despite not being much of a party person myself, even I confess to having enjoyed some of those Berlin balls,” he told her, lighting a cigarette.
The grandeur and opulence of Berlin had been astonishing. Comparisons had been made with events staged by Nero and Louis VIX. There had been music and dancing and fabulous ballets performed under the light of the moon. There had been caviar and oysters, oceans of champagne and evanescent galaxies of fireworks. Footmen dressed in pink uniforms copied from those worn in the eighteenth century and bearing miniature torches had greeted guests at a banquet at the opera house to which Julian had been invited at the last minute through the exemplary connections of Chips Channon. Julian felt horribly out of place at a table decorated with water lilies, watching obscure members of European royalty mingle with German officers of state as Chips pointed out remote foreign cousins of the British royal family, all descended from old Queen Victoria.
May barely touched her drink as she listened to Julian’s story, inhaling the smell of his cigarette, happier as well as more anxious than she had been at any time since he had left to go to Berlin. She did not know what had happened between him and Lottie in Germany. But she was prepared to wait. At that moment sitting alone with Julian in the pub was all she wanted to think about.
He described how the power-aspirant British had been anxious for their moment with Herr Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister about to take up residence in London’s German embassy.
“Chips thinks that Ribbentrop’s elegant and charming manner is something of a façade and that there is steel under all that suavity,” Julian told May with the air of a privileged insider. He described how one afternoon with a little time to kill, he had explored parts of the city on his own. Something prevented Julian from mentioning how Lottie had been more than willing to stay behind in the hotel with Rupert and how she had announced they were both keen to try the hotel’s special German beer. Lottie had been ill-tempered throughout the holiday, and on one occasion had suggested that Julian might be happier driving around the lanes of Sussex. Her tone had been unequivocally sarcastic. Instead, Julian continued by describing for May how many of the shop fronts had been boarded up and doors had been covered in graffiti. The paint-daubed phrases were often beyond Julian’s knowledge of German, but sometimes a door bore the one word “Jude” meaning “Jew” or just two letters, an image that recurred again and again throughout the Jewish back streets.
“I was told that P. J. stands for ‘Perish the Jews,’” he explained to May, shaking his head in disbelief.
“How truly dreadful,” May said, with an involuntary shiver, “that so much prejudice could be conveyed in just two letters.”
Eventually Julian had become lost in a maze of streets and after asking for directions in hesitant German, had found himself standing among a small crowd of curious onlookers gathered directly opposite Hitler’s house in the Wilhelmstrasse. The house was surrounded by several men in the ubiquitous uniform of black breeches. They all stood to attention as the sound of hooting horns preceded four black cars that drew up simultaneously outside the house. The small figure who emerged from the middle car disappeared inside the house quickly but not before Julian had managed to get a good look at him.
The Olympic Games themselves had been an event Julian would never forget. The opening ceremony had taken place in front of a capacity crowd of a hundred thousand spectators, assembled under heavy-clouded skies. A new spectacle that year, in the form of a flaming torch brought in relay