Chapter Four
Doris
The sound soaked through the walls of her apartment, in through the bricks and plaster in a way that was, Doris thought, determined.
As determined as the heavy hand of the person who held the violin bow.
Whoever it was, was picking their way through a piece by Dvo?ák that Doris half-remembered.
She followed it in her mind, let it lead her from one sleepy, long-gone image to another; half-remembered, isolated pictures: the dim light of the music room at Miss Potts’, Honor on the piano, diligent and stiff, the sound of the girls in the rec room next door, the smell of chalk and beeswax and the unwashed hair of the music tutor.
Things she had thought forgotten, and that added up not to a recollection so much as fragments.
She stretched her arms above her head and flexed her shoulders.
The practiser was early this morning, she thought.
She reached for the tiny gold clock beside her bed.
No, it was later than she had expected. They were right on time.
Outside, she heard a tram rumble past on Leipziger Strasse.
She was four floors up, only one side of her corner flat looked onto the busy road, yet the regular rising-falling-rising whirr of the tram, the soft metallic squeal of wheels, was the sound that accompanied all her days, marking them and ticking them off.
The tram passed and she listened again to the scrape, scrape, scrape of the bow against string.
Whoever it was had clearly learnt the order of things, the sequence of the piece they practised, but goodness, how badly they played.
She had studied violin at Miss Potts’ – had shown the same aptitude for that as for so much else – and she had learned to make her hands quick and light, so that the bow almost flew across the strings.
She had understood that her hands must be ‘almost not-there’, as she had explained it once to Honor.
‘They are the medium the music must flow through, but they must not get in the way.’
This person played, she thought with a sudden laugh, like someone running to catch a bus: grimly certain that it must not escape them.
She tried to go back to sleep – how late she had been the night before!
– but it was useless. Once awake, she never could drift off again.
In any case, she had lunch at Horcher’s.
She was lunching with von Arent, film director and designer, the man who brought Hitler’s vision to life in street decorations and monumental stage tableaux that were drearily realist. A boring man, but a vain one, who liked a great show of attention. She sighed.
The sound of heavy scraping had stopped. Dvo?ák and the violin were put away.
She decided she would get up and go out early.
She could walk about, and try to enjoy knowing that she did not for a while have to turn her feet in any particular direction.
Did not, that day, have to encounter a particular person, be somewhere at a particular time, so that she might say a few words under her breath while pretending to stare in a shop window, or listen while a few words were spoken to her by a stranger who seemed to admire the same statue in the Tiergarten but in fact looked at nothing except who was around them to overhear.
A day she did not need to look over her shoulder as she crossed roads and changed direction, to see did anyone behind her do the same.
And wonder, if someone did, were they following her, or simply going the same way as her.
It was better to go out early, she had learned.
To swap her apartment – where she felt safe – for the city’s streets and hotels and restaurants, where she did not.
Because if she left it too long, the fear that edged forward constantly, stalking her from some unseen place, might grow too much.
She needed to stay in motion, to keep playing the part that was set for her so as to hold the fear at bay.
Keep moving, she had learned. Keep doing and being what she was here to be: the English girl with such excellent German – thanks to her mother who had come from Berlin to Dorset to marry Doris’ father all those years ago, but insisted on speaking to her children in the language of her childhood – the journalist who wrote amusing pieces about daily life in Germany for newspapers in England: gay reports of sports days and festivals and race meetings, so that the wholesome leisure of the Reich was conveyed back to be admired.
Who said yes to every party, was always charming and beautifully dressed.
A dear friend of Herr Channon and his wife, the best kinds of English people, who had visited Germany for the Olympics two years ago and been so delighted with everything they saw.
It still gave her a small thrill – that Chips, whom she disliked, should have all unwittingly provided her cover and her camouflage.
Because of him, she could be Doris-the-frivolous-girl-about-town, so that no one saw beyond that creature in her elegant silks and smart heels to Doris the anxious listener.
Doris the careful memoriser of names and snippets of news.
Doris the spy. Although really, she thought as she waited for the bath to fill, that was a silly and dramatic word.
She did far more listening than looking.
She pulled open the windows, throwing them wide.
This too was part of the preparing. Let the city in, with its smells of baking and coffee lying lightly over the traffic and the dusty smell of trees that reach for water.
The outside noises submerged the scraping of the violin.
In any case, she knew, the scraping would not resume.
Whoever it was who practised so diligently left off at the same time every day. Perhaps they went to work, she thought.
It was her second summer here. She knew by now the way the heat built, sending those who could afford it to the lakes every Friday afternoon, to swim and sail boats for a few days.
She dressed carefully and pulled the heavy wooden door with its square and shiny brass knob closed behind her, forcing herself not to imagine what it would be like to stay there, inside, safe and cool and quiet.
She walked briskly down the dark corridor and got into the lift, then made space for the people who came after her.
A woman and a girl of maybe eleven with soft brown hair and a round face.
When Doris had closed the grille, then pulled the hinged door across, she pushed the last-but-one of the big white buttons. ‘Ground floor?’ she asked politely.
‘Yes, thank you,’ the woman said.
The mother nudged her daughter, who studied the grille in front of her. The mother nudged again. At that, the girl looked up at Doris and said clearly, ‘I am to apologise.’
‘Apologise for what?’ Doris asked.
The girl looked at her mother, a little bit uncertain. ‘I think my violin practice …’ she said, with another look at her mother.
‘My daughter wishes to apologise for the noise,’ the mother said then, leaning over a little so she was almost touching Doris in the cramped space. ‘She tries to improve, and so she practises every morning, but I’m afraid the noise must be an inconvenience.’
‘Not at all,’ Doris said. ‘Hard to improve without practice,’ she continued sympathetically, looking at the girl. ‘And you seem very determined.’ She said it with a grin, but the girl nodded seriously at her.
‘I am,’ she said, nodding her head up and down as she stared at Doris.
‘Well, you mustn’t mind about me.’ She smiled at the girl and reached out to gently touch her shoulder, where the brown hair met the pale blue of her button-down shirt and turned up in a wave. ‘I shan’t be in the least disturbed. I am a champion sleeper, you know.’
The girl looked back at her, then held out a hand to shake. ‘Hannah.’
‘Doris.’ She shook the hand solemnly, then did the same with Hannah’s mother.
‘Beatrice,’ the woman said.
‘You know, I studied violin for a time. When I was a little older than you. There is a particular trick for holding the bow that I learned. Perhaps I could show it to you?’ She said it idly, thinking of this only as a puzzle – could Hannah’s technique be improved?
Would the trick Doris had taught herself be something she could teach?
– but the eagerness with which Hannah said ‘Yes please’ made her glad.
‘Are you sure …?’ her mother began.
‘Absolutely,’ Doris said. Perhaps, she thought with a grin as she stood politely back to let them out of the lift, she could teach her something that would make the early-morning sounds more bearable.