Tremor of Intent

'Not race,' said Brigitte, whose eye on me had been, since my entry, a somewhat cold one. 'Family-proud.' For that matter, I hadn't taken to her at all.

'Brigitte's family goes back a long way,' said Roper. 'The Nazis did some people a sort of service in a ma

'Good healthy blood,' smirked Roper.

'And in my family no Jewish,' said Brigitte aggressively.

'Of course not,' I said, gri

He was executed,' said this Roper. 'He died for his beliefs. It was my grandfather who dug up all this, you know. A hobby for his retirement. See, there he is – John Edwin Roper. Died at eighty-three.'

'One of the first Elizabethan martyrs,' I said. 'So you have a martyr in the family.'

He was a fool,' pronounced Roper, sneering. 'He could have shut up about it.'

'Like the Germans who saw it through,' I suggested.

'My father died,' said Brigitte. Then she marched out to the kitchen.

While she was clattering the supper things I had to congratulate Roper and say what a handsome, intelligent, pleasant girl she seemed to me to be. Roper said eagerly: 'Oh, there's no doubt about the intelligence' (as though there might be some doubt about the other qualities). 'She speaks remarkably good English, doesn't she? She's had a rough time, you know, what with the war. And her father was a very early casualty. In Poland it was, '39. But she's not a bit reproachful. Towards me, I mean, or towards the British generally.'

'The British were never in Poland.'

'Oh, well, you know what I mean, the Allies. It was all one war, wasn't it? All the Allies were responsible, really.'

'Look,' I said, giving him the hard eye, 'I don't get all this. You mean that your wife, as a representative of the German nation, very kindly forgives us for Hitler and the Nazis and the bloody awful things they did? Including the war they started?'

'He didn't start it, did he?' said Roper brightly. 'It was we who declared war on him.'

'Yes, to stop him taking the whole bloody world over. Damn it, man, you seem to have forgotten what you did six years' fighting for.'

'Oh, I didn't actually fight, did I?' said literalist Roper. 'I was there to help save lives.'

'Allied lives,' I said. 'That was a kind of fighting.'

'It was worth it, whatever it was,' said Roper. 'It led me to her. It led me straight to Brigitte.' And he looked for a moment as though he were listening to Beethoven.

I didn't like this one little bit, but I didn't dare say any- thing for the moment because Brigitte herself came in with the supper, or with the first instalments of it. It looked as though it was going to be a big cold help-your-self spread. She brought serially to the table smoked salmon (the salty ca

'From a stein,' said Brigitte, 'it smacks better.'

'I prefer a glass,' I smiled. So Roper got me a glass with the name and coat-of-arms of a lager firm gilded on it. 'Well,' I said, doing the conventional yum-yum hand-rubbing before falling to, 'this looks a bit of all right. You're doing very nicely for yourselves, nicht wahr}' At that time British rations were smaller than they'd been even at the worst point of the war. We now had all the irksome appurtenances of war without any of its glamour. Roper said: 'It's from Brigitte's Uncle Otto. In America. He sends a food parcel every month.'

'God bless Uncle Otto,' I said, and, after this grace, I piled smoked salmon on to thickly buttered black bread.

'And you,' said Brigitte, with a governess directness, 'what is it that you do?' The tones of one who sees a slack lounging youth who has evaded call-up.

'I'm on a course,' I said. 'Slavonic languages and other things. I say no more.'

'It's for a department of the Foreign Office,' smiled Roper, looking, with his red round face and short-cropped hair and severely functional spectacles, as German as his wife. It was suddenly like being inside a German primer: Lesson III -Abendessen. After food Roper would probably light up a meerschaum.

'Is it for the Secret Police?' asked Brigitte, tucking in and already lightly dewed with fierce eater's sweat. 'My husband is soon to be a Doktor.' I didn't see the co

Roper explained that only in Germany was a doctorate the first degree. And then: 'We don't have secret police in England, at least I don't think so.'

'We don't,' I said. 'Take it from me.'

'My husband,' said Brigitte, 'studies the sciences.'

'Your husband,' I said, 'will be a very important man.' Roper was eating too hard to blush with pleasure. 'Science is going to be very important. The new and terrible weapons that science is capable of making are a great priority in the peaceful work of reconstruction. Rockets, not butter.'

'There is much butter on the table,' said Brigitte, stone-facedly chewing. And then: 'What you say I do not understand.'

'There's an Iron Curtain,' I told her. 'We're not too sure of Russia's intentions. To keep the peace we must watch out for war. We've learned a great deal since 1938.'

'Before you should have learned,' said Brigitte, now on the cheese course. 'Before England should this have known.' Roper kindly unscrambled that for her. 'It was Russia,' said Brigitte, 'that was the fiend.'

'Enemy?'

'Ja, ja, Feind. Enemy.' She tore at a piece of pumpernickel as though it were a transubstantiation of Stalin. 'This Germany did know. This England did know not.'

'And that's why Germany persecuted the Jews?'

'International Bolschevismus,' said Brigitte with satisfaction. Then Roper started, eloquently, going on at length. Brigitte, his teacher, listened, nodded approval, cued him sometimes, rarely corrected. Roper said: 'We, that is to say the British, must admit we have nearly everything to blame ourselves for. We were blind to it all.

Germany was trying to save Europe, no more. Mussolini had tried once, but with no help from those who should have helped. We had no conception of the power and ambition of the Soviet Union. We're learning now, but very late. Three men knew it well, but they were all reviled. Now only one of them is living. I refer,' he said, to enlighten my ignorance, 'to General Franco in Spain.'

'I know all about General bloody Franco,' I said coarsely. 'I did a year in Gibraltar, remember. Given the chance, he would have whipped through and taken the Rock. You're talking a lot of balls,' I added.

'It is you who talk the balls,' said Brigitte. She picked up words quickly, that girl. 'To my husband please listen.'

Roper talked on, growing more shiny as he talked. There was one thing, I thought in my i