David John - Flight from Berlin

Iceberg Eyes asked if he’d like a drink. He winked at her and asked for a triple whisky, neat, and some aspirin.

‘I’ll have the same,’ said an American voice. ‘Without the aspirin.’

Eleanor stood in the aisle, smiling at the man seated next to him, asking if he wouldn’t mind swapping seats. Denham had never seen her look so lovely. She was in a navy suit with a marocain blouse and had her hair held up by a black felt band with a ribbon.

He blinked, fearing another hallucination like the ones that had haunted his cell. Maybe in truth he was still there, doped on morphine and comatose, incapable of breaking through the surface to reality, and not wanting to.

‘You sure took your time,’ she said, sitting down next to him.

He touched her forehead with his finger.

‘It’s me, Richard. I’m real. This is real.’ She kissed him gently on his swollen lips.

‘How did you…?’

But it didn’t matter for now. He put his arms around her, and pressed his face to hers, ignoring the agony in his hand, cheek, and ribs. He began to cry.

‘I don’t look too grand, do I?’

She took his bandaged hand and kissed it. ‘I think you’re the grandest person on earth.’

They downed their drinks, and Eleanor said, ‘Sleep for a while. Then we’ll talk.’

Denham drifted off to the hum of the propellers and the stewardess announcing, ‘Our flight time over the Reich is one and a half hours; we land at Croydon Airfield, London, in four hours…’

He awoke with the word ‘home’ on his lips and realised that Tom had been swimming through his dream. The cabin lights were off, and he looked out of the window at great ranges of clouds, towering white in the moonlight and plunging into silvery canyons and crevasses. Where are you hiding, son?

‘The stars look like ice crystals, don’t they?’ Eleanor said softly. She was curled sideways into her seat, watching him, a blanket wrapped around her.

‘Did you get me released?’ he asked.

‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded with a sleepy smile.

‘Did they really kill Roland?’

Her face fell. ‘You know about that?’

‘I heard the broadcast.’

She sat up and began to tell him what had happened. The murder of Roland at Haeckel’s hands. Hannah’s victory and the broadcast.

She explained how Sir Eric Phipps approached no less a person than Heydrich himself, sitting behind Hitler at the Olympic stadium, and demanded Denham’s release, or to see him the same day.

‘Some people in high places like you, buddy. This SS big shot Heydrich told him there was an espionage charge against you, but it sounded so vague that Sir Eric asked if it wasn’t really a crock o’ shit-but in diplomatic language, of course. Meanwhile your old friend Rex Palmer-Ward and others in the press corps put pressure on that prize asshole Greiser to confirm what I’d told them about you being held in the Gestapo cells for talking to Liebermann… The Germans panicked, afraid of another scandal hot on the heels of Liebermann while the Games were still on. But it seems they were also worried about upsetting you Brits. Eric Phipps is the brother-in-law of Sir Fancy-Tart…’

‘Sir Robert Vansittart?’

‘Yeah, tall fellow, talks with a potato in his throat. Apparently he has a hell of a sway over your foreign policy. So the krauts made a snap decision to deport you, and I got on the same flight.’

‘I’m nothing but trouble.’

‘Hey…,’ she whispered, smoothing his hair.

‘And Tom…’

‘We’ll find him.’

They sat, holding each other’s hands for a while in silence, before Denham said, ‘Did anyone mention a dossier?’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘A dossier?’

He peered out into the darkness, but could see nothing but the reflection of his own face in the glass.

It was after midnight when their taxi arrived at Primrose Hill. That had been a problem: where to go. He hadn’t lived in London for nearly six years, and he doubted that Anna would open her house to a neglectful former husband and his much-younger American companion.

‘How are your breaking-and-entering skills?’ he’d asked.

‘I can smash a window with a brick.’

A light rain fell as he looked up at the three-storey terrace house on Chamberlain Street, reminding him that he had no coat or, indeed, any luggage. With luck there would be some clothes in the house, albeit superannuated by moths and fashion.

‘Who lives here?’ Eleanor said, looking up at the peeling gloss and the pale-brick walls overgrown with Virginia creeper and wisteria. The windows were dark and sightless, with heavy wooden shutters behind the glass.

‘It’s been closed up since my father died. Couldn’t bring myself to sell it.’

The front door was too sturdy an obstacle to break without waking the street, so Denham carefully descended the narrow steps that led to the basement door. At the foot of the steps he trod on a piece of buttered bread lying on the gravel. It was dusted with splinters of glass that glittered in the light from the streetlamp, and he saw that it had been employed, recently it seemed, to break the glass of the basement door noiselessly.

‘We’ve been burgled,’ he called up. Gingerly he put his hand through the broken glass and opened the door, his shoe crunching on the shards that lay on the floor inside. ‘Have you got a match?’

Together they crept into the basement. Years ago his father had used it as a workshop. Now it resembled some long-ransacked tomb. The detritus of small motors covered the table, ghostly in the match light, and the air smelled musty with damp and diesel oil. Technical drawings furred in dust were scattered over the floor.

‘Holy crap,’ Eleanor cried, startled when Denham kicked a fuse box in the dark, sending it thumping across the floor.

In the hall Denham lit another match and entered the kitchen. Silhouettes played behind the old iron stove and the rows of enamelled plates. It was like having the pages of a half-remembered childhood book opened for him again.

‘I think our burglar stayed for dinner,’ Eleanor whispered, pointing to a plate with crumbs and smeared butter. On the table were two curling crusts of brown bread, some sour-looking green apples, and an empty tin of corned beef. On a chair was a purple kite Denham recognised, and a comic book opened to a strip featuring Corky the Cat.

‘I think I know who came calling,’ he said. He lit another match, walked across the hall, and, putting two fingers in his mouth, made a loud whistle up the stairs.

Silence for a few seconds, then a thudding commotion from somewhere at the top of the house, as if someone were erecting a barricade of chairs and mattresses.

A boy’s voice, terrified. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Come and say hello to your dad.’

Another moment’s silence, then the sudden sound of running feet, and Tom came bounding down the two flights into his father’s arms. He was clasped so tightly against Denham’s wounds that the pain shot orange stars through his eyes. He didn’t care.

‘Oh, Tom.’

The match went out, and in the darkness Denham smelled earth and bark and liquorice in his son’s hair, and when his small voice spoke it was with a soft whistle. He had lost his two front teeth, like the apparition in the cell. Maybe it was Tom’s spirit that had come to him after all.

‘Are you going to stay this time?’

‘Yes,’ said Denham, struggling under the emotion in his voice. ‘Daddy’s not leaving again.’

Tom’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘Who’s in there?’

It was easier to see in the kitchen, where the city glow of the clouds shone through a window over the sink. Beyond it was a garden, dark and overgrown. Eleanor stood tall and graceful in the spectral light. A figure from a dream.