Punishments

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  Contents

  Francis King

  1981

  1948

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  1981

  Francis King

  Punishments

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  1981

  If the ramshackle bus had a driver, I didn’t see him. Stinking of petrol fumes and the acrid smoke of black-market cigarettes, it bucked and lurched down a long, straight road. The road, pitted with bomb-craters inadequately packed with soil and rubble, bisected a landscape eerie in its total lack of trees. Jürgen and I were alone, sitting side by side on the hard, dusty seat at the rear, his left hand gripping my right.

  ‘Is Rosenheim beautiful?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s one of the most beautiful towns in Germany. Even more beautiful than Hildingen.’

  But in my dream I already knew, as I hadn’t known those thirty-three years ago, the truth about Rosenheim, so that I cried out in mingled rage and anguish: ‘Why do you have to tell me these lies?’

  Jürgen laughed. ‘A joke. A joke! Where is the famous English sense of humour?’

  It is then that I awake, to yet another dawn of this long, hot summer, as the birds begin to twitter in the sycamore at the far end of the garden, and a breeze through the wide-open window plucks at the sheet thrown back from my naked body. Beside me, an arm trailing over the bed and the sheet drawn up to her chin, Sally sleeps on. I feel a sudden resentment against her, sunk in an oblivion denied to me.

  In the pearly light of not yet six o’clock, I walk down the narrow garden, the dew on the uncut grass – yes, yes, Sally, this evening or tomorrow evening I’ll cut it – making my slippers soggy. I place myself in one of the garden chairs and rest an arm along the chill metal top of the table beside it. I listen to the racket of the birds, as I think again of that dream. Having dreamed less and less of Jürgen through all these years, why do I now, this summer, so often dream of him? There is a rustle in the herbaceous border and then, with a plaintive squawk – but it only sounds plaintive, really she’s overjoyed to see me – Princess, my Siamese, our Siamese, Sally’s and my Siamese, leaps into my lap. She presses herself against me, her purr as loud as the racket of the birds – which, of course, she’s been stalking. I stroke her, then I tug at the burrs in her coat. Docilely, she allows me to tug and tug again. Perhaps, since she goes on purring, she even enjoys the tugging.

  Now it is no longer that dream of a journey I recall, but the reality of another journey. The start of a journey into a knowledge of others – and, more important, into a knowledge of myself? Yes, one could call it that. Indeed, that is how I myself have often called it, exclaiming to myself, ‘Oh, how innocent I was!’ At eighteen, in the immediate aftermath of the war, it was possible to be so innocent. Such innocence was impossible for my children. It will be even more impossible for my grandchildren. Infant hands reach out for the forbidden fruit. Milk-teeth, small, sharp and greedy, close on it. I had no idea of what was happening and Sally had even less. When at last we bit into the flesh, it was like that of some sleepy pear, soft, flavourless, vaguely nauseating. We might have been biting into a ball of wool.

  1948

  Chapter One

  There was the leaden sky and there was the flat, interminable plain with its ruined houses and factories and its fractured trees and stunted bushes, all looking as though they’d been drawn in smudged sepia with a clumsy brush. The train halted, it was shunted back and forth into sidings, it chugged on for a while. At first the eleven of us, crowded into a carriage for eight – a girl sat on a boy’s lap until, impatiently, he pushed her off, another boy crouched on the floor, hands clasped round knees – had chatted excitedly. Then, one by one, we’d all fallen silent, reading books, or dozing, or going out into the corridor to stand gazing in melancholy awe at the people-less desolation.

  A Cambridge undergraduate called Harry, sturdily handsome despite the acne that had pitted his cheeks and the back of his neck as though with shrapnel, suddenly jerked down the window, leaned far out and vomited. With a combination of distaste and curiosity, I watched his shoulders heaving, his fingers whitening on the sill as he gripped it tightly. Then he turned back into the carriage, raised the window once more, and drew a crumpled ball of handkerchief out of his no less crumpled flannels. Saliva glistened on his chin. ‘Christ! I feel better for that. To think that my father commanded a corvette and a train makes me sick!’ No one said anything. He grunted, sighed and squeezed himself back between his girl-friend, Jessica, and another boy from Cambridge. Jessica put a hand on his knee, a gesture of sympathy, protection, perhaps even love.

  I wondered if it was indeed the train that had made him sick or one of the thick sandwiches that we’d been given at the Hook for the journey, some made of Spam and some of eggs the yolks of which had a greenish tinge, similar to that of the leaden sky under which we were now crawling. I glanced sideways at Mervyn. He looked so clean, neat and composed, in his white shirt and brown woollen tie, his carefully pressed flannels, his dark-green Harris tweed sports jacket and his suede shoes. He also looked so young, like a precocious schoolboy, that it was difficult to believe that, three years before, he’d won a DSO for gallantry at Anzio. ‘What are you reading?’ I’d asked him on board the bucking ship, to receive the smiling answer. ‘Nothing you’d understand.’ Later, when he’d gone below to the lavatory, I’d picked up the book from his deckchair and found it to be the Oxford Book of Greek Verse. Well, yes, I knew no Greek, since even as a child I’d wanted to be a doctor. But why that contempt? After all, I didn’t despise him for his ignorance of biology or anatomy.

  Sally was crushed against my other side. But I have no memory of her – how she looked, what she was doing. Mervyn, though five years my senior, was then my closest friend. Sally was also a friend. But if anyone had, at that moment, told me that eventually I’d marry her, I’d have burst into embarrassed, incredulous laughter. Like all women then, she was for me vaguely seductive, vaguely mysterious, va
guely disturbing.

  … I slept. When I awoke, the train had once again halted and Harry was in the corridor, this time opening not the window but the door. I assumed he was again going to be sick. Then I saw that, in joke, he was pretending to get out of the train and that Jessica, clutching hold of his baggy trousers by the seat, was pulling him back. Both of them were laughing. ‘But I must have a drink, must, must, must!’ he was protesting. At the top of an otherwise bare hill, I could see the bombed remains of a building, with ‘Bierkeller’ written across it on a board that had slipped from horizontal to diagonal. ‘Idiot!’ Jessica cried out. ‘ Oh, idiot!’ He turned round to her now, putting hands on either side of her cheeks, preparatory to kissing her. But she gave him a shove away from her.

  I watched them closely. My female relatives apart, I’d never kissed a woman.

  Again I slept.

  The next time I awoke, it was to rub a hand over the grime obscuring the window beside me. I could taste that same grime, metallic and thick, on my tongue and at the back of my throat. Yet again I peered out at the grey, grim landscape from the stationary train. Then I said: ‘How hideous it is. One thought that what they’d suffered from the raids was no worse than what we suffered.’

  Mervyn lowered his book on to his knees, leaned forward and gazed at me ruminatively. ‘Did one?’

  ‘Well, I did.’

  ‘Then you’re in for a lot of surprises.’

  Sally stirred. Then she said in her soft, drawling voice, ‘I think that I came here to be surprised. I want surprises.’

  Chapter Two

  Mervyn’s tone was vaguely puzzled, as though he’d just made the discovery of something that he should have known long before. ‘I don’t mind discomfort. But I do hate a lack of privacy.’

  It was our first morning in Hildingen, and the three of us sat at a grease-smeared table, gulping coffee – ‘Made from acorns, of course,’ Mervyn had grumbled – and tearing voraciously with our teeth at rolls stuffed with pork luncheon meat of the consistency of rubber.

  ‘Oh, I was so tired I hardly noticed all the people around me,’ Sally said. On our arrival the sexes had been separated, each of us to lay out a sleeping bag on a hard truckle bed in the dormitories, one for girls and one for boys, to which a hard-faced, sharp-voiced ATS officer had conducted us.

  ‘And I was so tired that I just couldn’t sleep. It was as though a dog were chasing its tail round and round and round in my brain.’

  ‘Poor Mervyn.’ Briefly Sally put a hand over his. That was a period when everyone, except Mervyn himself, thought of Sally as Mervyn’s girl.

  ‘That man from King’s – Henry, Harry – vomited again. Twice. Into his po. He couldn’t even be bothered to go along to the bog. Disgusting! But come the morning, he was as hearty as ever. Singing while he shaved!’

  ‘Singing?’ Sally gave her loud, clear laugh, so unlike her soft, veiled voice. In those days she still had a Yorkshire accent, which cruelly Mervyn would take off. ‘I thought I heard “Funiculi, funicula” coming down the passage as I was waiting for a shower.’

  ‘Hideously out of tune.’

  I knew how much Mervyn, with his perfect sense of pitch, must have suffered from that out-of-tune singing. That it was out-of-tune I myself hadn’t realised.

  Sally tipped back her head, to drain the dregs of coffee in her thick, white cup. ‘What’s this morning’s programme then? Has either of you any idea? If they tell us one thing, they tell us something different a few minutes later.’ All her life Sally has wanted to work to a programme. She hates my kind of carefree improvisation.

  Mervyn wriggled in his chair. ‘Well, what I gather is that that cocky little man who met us last night – Major or was it Colonel Thwaites? – will come by to fetch us. And then we’ll walk over to the university Aula. And then we’ll be put on offer, like slaves. Non angeli, sed Angli.’

  ‘On offer? What on earth do you mean!’ I asked.

  Mervyn explained irritably, as though it were only stupidity that had prevented Sally and me from knowing about it already. The German students taking part in this Anglo-German summer school had been asked to put up the English visitors in their homes or their lodgings. There probably wouldn’t be enough places for all the English, and those not invited would continue to stay in the dormitories. ‘One really doesn’t know whether one would rather be chosen or remain here,’ Mervyn concluded. ‘ Neither prospect seems particularly enticing, does it?’

  Not for the first time, I wondered why he’d joined our party. Could it have been in order to spend the summer vac with Sally even though she seemed so often to irritate or bore him? Or had he felt drawn, against his will, to this race to which he so often referred as Krauts or Huns – admittedly putting each of those pejoratives into ironic inverted commas, so that they seemed to express contempt as much for the sort of people who habitually used them as for those to whom they were applied?

  He stooped, opened the rucksack at his feet and pulled out from it what looked like a substantial school exercise book. He opened the book on a corner of the table, as far away from us as possible, and then took a fountain-pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Your diary?’ I asked, knowing already that it was.

  ‘My diary. I must remember to record every horror in it. Like putting amputated toes and fingers into a jar of formaldehyde.’

  ‘I wish I could read it,’ Sally said.

  ‘Not a chance. Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Perhaps I should keep a diary too.’

  He shook his head. ‘You haven’t got it in you.’

  ‘What haven’t I got in me?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, the persistence.’

  With a smile, Sally nodded, pleased, rather than offended, by the verdict.

  Chapter Three

  Small, pink-faced, wide-bottomed, a swagger stick under an arm, Colonel Thwaites barked out his instructions, like a drill instructor, before leading us off to the Aula. Then he trotted over to attach himself to me as we descended a narrow alley. This attention did not embarrass me; it did not even strike me as odd. At that period, with my regular features, my wavy black hair, and my slender but athletic build, I was used to being noticed. In fact, it annoyed me if I was not. In my quiet, self-effacing way, I was vain, terribly vain.

  ‘So what d’you make of Hildingen?’

  ‘Arriving here was rather like waking from a nightmare.’

  ‘I’d have thought it was more like entering one.’ As Thwaites looked across at me, I noticed, with distaste, that nicotine had given his straggly moustache the yellow-brown tints of an autumn leaf.

  ‘I mean, the war might never have taken place to judge from Hildingen. But that journey – horrific,’ Where the hell were Mervyn and Sally? Why had they abandoned me to this ghastly little man?

  ‘Yes, they were lucky here – bloody lucky, with the luck of the devil. And now we’re lucky – to be here instead of in some outsize bomb-crater like Hanover. This is one of the great universities of the world, you know. Famous for its physics,’ I hadn’t known. ‘Heine said the two things he’d always remember about Hildingen were the excellence of its sausages and the ugliness of its women. Nothing about the physics of course. He was rusticated from here.’

  Still wondering what had happened to the other two, I’d been repeatedly looking over my shoulder. Now I said: ‘You’re not a regular soldier, are you?’

  ‘Good God, no. Schoolmaster. That’s why I was chucked into the education corps and not into something more exciting.’

  ‘And dangerous.’ If that sounded snide, I’d wanted it to do so. Thwaites blushed. Then, a moment later, with some inaudible excuse, he trotted off to join a group of three girls ahead of us.

  In the assembly hall, Mervyn suddenly materialised, to stand close to me, as though for our mutual protection. ‘ Did I say a slave market? I should have said a marriage market.’

  The Germans were self-consciously ranged around the walls, whil
e we English stood even more self-consciously huddled in the middle, sipping at the cups of weak tea or bitter coffee handed to us on our entry and, in many cases, also puffing at the cigarettes that we’d been able to buy at the Naafi at the Hook.

  ‘Give me a fag.’ Mervyn didn’t usually smoke.

  ‘I haven’t got one. I’m giving up. I told you.’

  ‘Oh, blast! … Sally? Have you got a fag?’ She’d now appeared beside us.

  That was when I’d first seen Jürgen, becoming aware that a handsome German, in open-necked, shirt and extraordinarily short shorts that revealed extraordinarily long, muscular legs, was pushing his way through the crowds in our direction. When he reached us, he was smiling with none of the nervous wariness of his fellow students as they approached their future guests. ‘Excuse me,’ It was Mervyn on whom his eyes had been fixed while crossing the room, and it was to Mervyn that he now gave a little bow and held out his hand. ‘Jürgen Koesten.’ It was only after he had greeted Sally in similar fashion that, as though as an afterthought, he turned at last to me.

  ‘Your name, please?’ he demanded, as our hands touched. Then, when I told him, he repeated it twice, ‘Michael Gregg, Michael Gregg,’ as though incredulous that anyone could be called anything so absurd. Mervyn and Sally had already mumbled their names, as though ashamed of them, when they had shaken hands.

  At that, as though he had no further interest in me, Jürgen turned back to Mervyn. ‘Would you like to stay with me? We must share a bedroom, but the bedroom is big. But not very comfortable,’ he added with a smile.

  ‘Well… that’s very kind of you …’ Mervyn sounded reluctant, ungracious. As so often on such occasions, I felt ashamed for him. I also felt angry that he should have received an invitation that I had expected to be mine. Would I, uninvited by any of the German students, have to continue to stay in that doss-house of a hostel?