4

It was a long time, time enough to forget Uncle Otto's smoked salmon and coffined ham and his niece's unpleasantness, before Roper and I met again. When we did meet again, he was, over-fulfilling his wife's prophecy, a real doctor, not just, like horrible dead Goebbels, a man with a first degree. He rang me up at home, very breathy and very close to the telephone, as though it were an erogenous zone of Brigitte's. Urgent, he said. He needed advice, help. I could guess what it was going to be. Wieder wieder wieder. Ach, the lovely bloody Mondschein. I suggested a Soho restaurant the following evening. A German restaurant, since he liked German things so much. There Doctor Roper, white hope of research in cheap rocket fuel, got very drunk on sparkling hock and moaned and whined. His wife was playing away. And he loved her so much still, he said, and he'd given her everything any decent woman could- 'What exactly has happened?' There was a vinous touch of satisfaction in my voice; I could hear it and it was hard to suppress.

'He was in the house one night when I got back late, a great red German lout, and he had his coat off and his shirt open, a big fair hairy chest, and he was drinking beer out of a can and he had his feet on the settee, and when I walked in he wasn't one bit abashed but just grinned at me. And she grinned too.'

Abashed. "Why didn't you bash him and kick him out?'

'He's a professional wrestler.'

'Oh.' I had a swift vision of Roper on the ropes, neatly cat-cradled in them, a parcelled crucifixion. 'How did all this start?'

'We took this house, you see, and it's in a fairly slummy part of London, because houses are the very devil to get in London but-'

'You've been in London long?'

'Oh yes.' He stared at me as though his coming to London had been headlined in the more reputable newspapers. 'Hard to get, as I say, but the Department helped and we didn't want a flat any more, and Brigitte said that she was to be an Englische Dame with stairs to go up and down-'

'Come to this wrestler.'

'We went into a pub for a drink, you see, in Islington it was, and then there was this big blond man talking bad English with a very strong Germarî accent. She spoke to him, talking about Heimweh – that's homesickness, she was homesick, you see, for somebody to speak German to, and she found that he came from about thirty miles from Elmshorn. So that was it pretty well. He's under contract to wrestle in England or something and he said he was lonely. A very big man and very strong.'

'Wrestlers usually are.'

'And very ugly. But we had him back for supper.' Roper spoke as though ugliness would not normally get you an invitation. 'And very – you know, absolutely no intelligence, with this big grin and his face all shiny.'

'That was after eating, I take it?'

'Oh no, all the time.' Roper was growing as obtuse as his wife to the tones of irony or sarcasm. 'But he did eat like a pig. Brigitte cut him more and more bread.'

'And she's rather taken to him, has she?'

Roper began to tremble. 'Taken to him! That's good, that is. I came home one night, late again, very tired, and you know what I found?'

'You tell me.'

'On the job.' Roper's voice rose. His hands clenched and unclenched. They seized the sparkling hock and poured a sizeable tremulous measure. Then, panting, he said, loudly so that people looked at him, 'On the bloody job. I saw them. His big bloody muscles all working away at it, enjoying it, and she was there underneath him crying out Schnell schnell schnell.' The solitary waiter, a German, took this for a summons and started to come too. I waved him away. To Roper I said: 'Oh no.'

'Oh bloody yes. And even he had the bloody grace to see this was all filthy and wrong and he didn't grin this time, oh no. He slunk out, carrying half his clothes. You know, it was as though he expected me to hit him.'

'You should have knocked the daylights out of him,' I said. An improbable idea. 'And so that's the end of that. I never thought that marriage would work, somehow.'

He looked at me wet-lipped. Part of his dithering now seemed out of shame. 'But it did, you know,' he mumbled. 'It took me a long time to forgive her. But, you see, seeing them like that -1 don't quite know how to put this. Well, it gave us a new lease of life, in a way.'

I understood. Horrible, but life remains life. A new lease of. 'You mean, even though you were tired coming back home at night, you were able to-'

'And she was sort of penitent.'

'So she should be. If I ever caught any wife of mine-'

'You wouldn't understand.' A flash of drunken sweetness peered, then went. 'You're not married.'

'All right. So now what's your trouble?'

'It didn't last all that long,' he mumbled. 'It was working late and not eating enough, I suppose. I've been having this bit of tummy trouble, canteen food.'

'This was all right, though, was it?'

'Oh yes.' We'd had Kalbsbraten followed by Obsttorte. Roper, in a distracted kind of passion, as though waging a secondary war at threshold level, had cleaned my plates as well as his own. 'She's been going on at me as an effete Englander, no ink in my pen, no pen at all, only a little Bleistift. Now I've become one of those who encouraged the Jews to engineer Germany's downfall.'

'Well, you always were, weren't you? As an Englishman, I mean?'

'I'd seen the light,' said Roper in dark gloom. 'That's what she used to say. Now she's brought this bloody big blond beast back again.'

'So there was a sort of interim, was there?'

'He was on the Continent, doing a kind of tour. Now he's in London, wrestling in the suburbs.'

'Has he been back in the house?'

'For a late supper. Not for anything else. But I can't vouch for what happens in the afternoons.'

'You condoned it, you bloody fool. They've both got you now.'

'He's not abashed any more. He grins and goes to the fridge to get more beer. She calls him Willi. But the name he wrestles under is Wurzel. On the posters it says Wurzel der Westdeutsche Teufel.'

'Wurzel the mangle.'

'The West German Devil is what it means.'

'I know, I know. What do you want me to do about it? I can't see that there's anything I can do.' But then-and they should have done this before – my professional ears pricked. 'Tell me,' I said, 'do you discuss your work with her at all? Does she know the sort of thing you're doing?'

'Never.'

'Does she ever ask? '

He thought for a moment. 'Only in the most general terms. She doesn't really understand what sort of work a scientist does. She didn't get much schooling, what with the war.'

'Do you bring papers home?'

'Well-' I'd made him just a little uneasy. 'She wouldn't understand them even if she could get at them. I keep them locked up, you see.'

'Oh, you innocent. Tell me, has she any relatives or friends in East Germany?'

'None that I know of. Look, if you think she's on the spying game you're greatly mistaken. Whatever's going on is sexual, you take my word for it. Sex.' This damnable. His mouth began to collapse. The whine came gargoyling out. 'It's not my fault if I get so tired in the evenings.'

'And on Sunday mornings too?'

'I don't wake early. She's up hours before I am.' Now the tears were ready to flood, and I was ready to get him out of here before the fierce fat manageress came. I grinned to myself, remembering Father Byrne sermonising in the dormitory. I paid the bill, leaving all the change, and said, as we left, me supporting his left elbow: 'I can make a professional job of this, you know. Watching them, I mean. And if you want evidence for a divorce-'

'I don't want a divorce. I want things to be as they used to be. I love her.'

We walked down Dean Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. 'There was a time,' I said, 'when you were always having a jab at authority. Very independent you were, Renaissance man, knocking at all doors. You seem to need to lean on something now. Somebody, I mean.'