Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

She may have been delicious, thought Haffner, sadly — with her joyful breasts, her trembling thighs — but her concerns were not his concerns. It was undeniable. The flirting surely could have possessed slightly more elan. But Frau Tummel didn't want sophistication. Frau Tummel's thing was love. She went for the serious. And Haffner was not in the mood for love; or the serious. Or maybe I should say: he didn't go for love now, with her. With Frau Tummel he would have liked, instead, to be delirious with appetite.

The love was all for Zinka.

— Yes, yes, said Haffner. You told me that.

And maybe this was not fair. Maybe this wasn't accurate to the difficulty Frau Tummel was feeling.

Did he know, she asked him, how lucky they were?

— How lucky? queried Haffner.

Yes, how lucky they were, repeated Frau Tummel.

He looked at her. She stepped forward, let the belt of her bathrobe undo itself, pushed it off her shoulders, on to the floor. Then she unbuttoned her nightgown to her breasts, and pulled it down over her shoulders. Now, therefore, she was naked — except, to Haffner's surprise, for her bra. The bra saddened him; it added to her pathos. Like the bathrobe, it was dotted with stitched pink roses.

In this bra, Haffner confronted the problem of love.

Haffner was not all barbarian, not all the time. He was helpful. He tried to please. Weakly, not wanting to sadden her, he wondered if they should order some champagne.

Stricken, he watched Frau Tummel smile.

— Oh, said Frau Tummel, it is a good life, is it not?

Haffner's deepest wish was to possess the total independence of a mad imperator; a classical god. But the stern line of Haffner's cruelty was always complicated by the kink of his kindness.

Frau Tummel leaned across the bed, on to her stomach, and picked up the phone. She talked to reception as she lay there, her legs kicking in the air. It was such a girlish gesture, this kicking in the air.

While somewhere else — but where? Dubrovnik? La Rochelle? — a younger Livia opened the wardrobe in their hotel room so that the mirror reflected the bed on which she flung herself, face down, thus able to be ravaged from behind by her marauder, the angel Raphael, while simultaneously watching her angel rear devastatingly above her.

But where? Dover, in 1949!

Haffner leaned forward, and spread Frau Tummel's legs apart: revealing their symmetrical Rorschach stain — like a picture of a butterfly once solemnly presented to him by his grandson, Benjamin, constructed by pressing one half of the paper over the other — already stained with Benji's idea of a butterfly's smudged if multicoloured pattern. Haffner began to lick her, gently, as she tried to finish the call. And as he licked her, as he parted her, she started to invent more and more food. They would have champagne, she said, yes — and also caviar. And blini. And a Russian salad. And pickled cucumbers. And oh, she said. No, oh, she said. She was fine. She was very well. If they could bring everything in, if they could just come up and put everything in her room. If they could bring it up. If they could bring it up. And put it in. Then she put the phone down, and revelled in the pleasure of Haffner's flesh.

If he was touching her like this, then of course it was love. No one except her husband had ever touched her in this way. Not even her husband had touched her in this way.

Too soon, the room service arrived. She gathered herself back into the bathrobe. Haffner, in his dishevelled tracksuit, tipped the waiter, wondering if he could induce him to stay, deciding that he couldn't.

— You aren't angry with me? she asked.

But why, asked Haffner, would he be angry?

But it was so complicated. She was sorry. She was sorry for being so complicated. But he had to understand. She had a husband.

Haffner understood.

He must think it was like Romeo and Juliet, she said.

Haffner did not reply: he had no idea how he could reply.

— You know, she said, I am not. This is not me. But it is difficult to hide the secrets of the heart.

— Hide what? said Haffner, appalled.

— Raphael! said Frau Tummel. You are too much.

And Haffner considered the extraordinary way in which a life repeated itself. For Livia had used this phrase for him. Just once. Or a phrase resembling this phrase. Maybe he was too much for her, she said. Maybe in the end he was too much even for her. And when he had tried to tell Livia, this was in 1982, the night of his triumphant dinner for the Institute of Bankers, that all he wanted was her, she turned away. They were sitting in the kitchen. She was in a nightgown which Haffner had never liked — being made of a blue towelling, which tended to make her look, he argued, unattractive: he never wanted the cosy, the comfortable, only the erotic. That was one form, he now considered, of his immaturity. So maybe everyone had him right. He could understand it. He was too much for himself.

He put his fingers to Frau Tummel's lips. She began to kiss them. Each finger she curled into her mouth.

What could really go wrong, thought Haffner, in a hotel, in a spa town? It seemed safe enough.

But then he had to correct himself. He allowed his will to follow the wills of women. That was his classical principle. But he knew that this had its problems too. He freely admitted this. When the women were in love with him, then Haffner was no longer safe. This was one aspect of his education. It had happened with Barbra. It had happened before Barbra. And now, he worried, it was happening again.

This was one aspect of his education. But Haffner would never learn.

Haffner acceptingly approached the women who approached him as if they were portents. They were Haffner's irresistible fate.

He didn't, he once said — in a conversation which was now legendary in Haffner's family, when confronted by Esther after Livia's death with accusations of his truly infantile excesses — he didn't want to regret anything. No, he didn't see why he should be left with any regret. He said this without really thinking, as he said so many things. Or so argued Haffner afterwards — after it had become his definition. As if a man's marriage, said Esther, triumphantly, with the absolute agreement of her family, should ever make him regret anything. Esther's husband, Esmond, did not continue the conversation. And although it had passed into the annals of his family as the epitome of Haffner's selfishness, as recounted to me once by Benjamin, I was not so convinced. Awkward he may have been, but Haffner was not malicious. And Benjamin, with his new-found devotion to his religion, his new-found devotion to the family, was not, I thought, a reliable moral guide: he had lost his imagination.

Nor, I tried to say to Benjamin, had Livia ever been public with her disapproval. If she really disapproved. So maybe this should make us pause as well.

One can be so rarely sure, Haffner once said to me, that what one has done is right. So maybe it was possible that in his self-defence Haffner was being truthful, rather than self-deceiving. He was simply being faithful to his refusal of self-denial; his absolute distrust of the philosophy on which it was based, the puritanical certainty.

Which was one reason, surely, why Livia might love him. For Haffner's absolute sense of humour.

Oh the comic pathos of dictators! Haffner's sense of humour!

Maybe they were never really given their moral due. More and more, as Haffner lay beside the swimming pool, or sat on a bench in front of an Alpine view, he approved of the scandalous emperors. He couldn't understand the world's astonishment.

Like Augustus, who had absolute faith, so wrote his historian, in certain premonitory signs. Once, when a palm tree pushed its way between the paving stones in front of his home he had it transplanted to the inner court beside his household gods, and lavished care on it. Just as Haffner found it difficult to reject the women who entered his sphere of orbit. Who could have the hubris to reject the artistry of chance? If Augustus didn't, then why should Haffner? Even if it was unclear how much his meetings with women were to do with chance, rather than the machinations of Haffner's will. But then again, Augustus could be a mentor here as well, since it was Augustus who justified his adulterous affairs as the necessary burden of an emperor — charged with knowing the secrets of his subjects, his closest advisers. Of course an emperor had to sleep with his counsellors' wives! How else would he know what they were thinking? There was nothing in it for Augustus: his sexual life was all in service to the state.