Flight From Berlin: A Novel Read online

  Eleanor strode out of the room, onto the deck, and around the corner to look for the quietest spot she could find, which was in between two lifeboats. She leaned against the rail, hidden from view. Most of the team were training on the sunny side of the ship.

  She wanted to scream. Her father, with his righteous speeches and—once she felt guilty enough—his damned forgiving smile. Now Brundage. She felt whacked between these men like a hockey puck.

  All she wanted to do was dive into that pool and win.

  Two days later the Manhattan docked for a few hours at Cobh in southern Ireland. Team members of Irish descent crowded the ship’s rails to see the colourful terraced streets along the waterfront and the towering cathedral, their young eyes rheumy with nostalgia for a country they’d never set foot in. That evening the ship sailed into the English Channel to dock for the night at Cherbourg.

  ‘Nothing again today, ma’am.’ The radio telegraph operator checked through the telegrams in his in-tray. ‘Sorry. Does your husband have the correct ship’s name and code?’

  Eleanor had called by the small telegraph office on each day of the voyage. She had received messages from well-wishers in New York and one from her parents, expressing a hope that she was behaving, but not a word from Herb, despite her cabling several notes she thought were lighthearted and conciliatory enough not to make him feel upstaged. What a stubborn child he could be.

  Last night and again this evening Mrs Hacker was standing near her at dinner, like a prison warden, the dull gravity of her presence sucking all the fun out of the atmosphere. She wore a black pleated dress with cavalier cuffs and collar. Her hair was scraped back into a knot. Where the hell did they get her? She could be Bela Lugosi’s mother.

  At first Eleanor thought the old crow was simply keeping an eye on her, but tonight the chaperone’s malevolent glances in her direction convinced her she was being goaded. Go ahead, try your luck, my dear, the whiskery smile seemed to be saying. You’ll be expelled from the enchanted kingdom and sent home in a pumpkin.

  A round of applause. Some of her teammates had decided to put on a show, and Eleanor looked over to see Olive taking the stage dressed as Shirley Temple, with a large bow in her hair. She did a childish curtsey and began singing in her squeaky voice ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup.’

  Eleanor closed her eyes. That does it, she thought and threw down her napkin. She got up, walked between the tables to the door, out of the dining room, and onto the deck. It was an overcast night threatening rain. The harbour lights of Cherbourg threw unnatural colours onto the oily seawater, and the port looked grim and unenticing. She wandered along the deck, with snatches of Olive’s whiny song following her on the damp breeze.

  One last time, she thought, and stopped by the door of the telegraph office. What will it be tonight? A telegram from President Roosevelt, but nothing from Herb?

  ‘Oh, Mrs Emerson.’ The radio operator seemed to avoid her eye. He wasn’t supposed to peruse the content of passengers’ telegrams, but he took the messages down. He retrieved an envelope from his tray and handed it to her. She opened it in front of him and knew she had trouble when she saw the sender’s name, Louella Parsons, LA queen of the gossip columnists. The message read:

  ACTRESS VELMA DELMONT PHOTOGRAPHED LEAVING YOUR HUSBANDS HOTEL ROOM SANTA MONICA THIS MORNING STOP PLEASE CABLE REACTION STOP

  The operator had found a hole-puncher to empty.

  ‘Well,’ she said tartly, reading the words a second time, ‘I guess that explains his cable-shyness.’ She crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it into his waste-paper basket. ‘Good night.’

  She strode into the hallway where the main stairs led down to D deck, a fury rising inside her. The lousy, childish, jealous, cheating shuckster. The dirty, worthless, two-faced—

  ‘Eleanor, bed in half an hour, please. It’s nine-thirty.’

  She looked round to see a bald-headed AOC official with a bow tie who had been present during her coffee room encounter with Brundage.

  ‘Oh, take a jump overboard,’ she shouted without stopping.

  She had never heard of Velma Delmont, but the fact that Louella Parsons had seen the need to put ‘actress’ in front of the name meant she was either a showbiz nobody or a streetwalker.

  ‘Herb, my man, I hope you got everything you deserve. Velma Delmont has VD written all over her.’

  In her darkened cabin Eleanor shut the door and slumped against the wall, seeing the faint disc of light from the porthole begin to blur. For a long while she stood there reddening, her teeth bared, her face streaking with tears.

  ‘Damn it,’ she whispered, the breath juddering in her chest.

  In a corner of her heart perhaps she’d known he was no good. Perhaps she’d even known that he didn’t love her. She’d been a fool. His music had captivated her. And that night at Radio City when they’d first met, his pomaded hair a touch too long, his patterned tie with a diamond pin, she’d seen his potential for shocking her parents. She was young and rich, and he’d married her. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to make it work. But the more she’d done to win his affections the worse his behaviour seemed to get. And for the first time in her life she’d been vulnerable.

  Where does it go from here? she thought.

  She wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands and told herself that she refused to cry. She absolutely refused.

  At the end of her corridor she put her head round the steward’s door and found the cabin boy, Hal, dozing with his feet on a stool, a Lone Ranger comic book across his lap. She shook him gently.

  ‘So,’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘we’re alone at last.’

  ‘Kid, do me a favour. Go find out if there’s a return party for Mr and Mrs Charles MacArthur on A deck?’ His eyes bulged when she showed him a silver dollar.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Minutes later she was half changed into a gown when Hal knocked on the door and handed her a note.

  My dear, what’s keeping you? Humdinger of a party up here!! Put your dancing shoes on. Charlie

  Much later, when she tried piecing together the fragmentary memories of the evening, she wasn’t sure if it was Herb’s betrayal or the certain knowledge of consequences from Brundage that made her drink even more than usual. Either way, the champagne flowed and she had raised her glass with no thought for tomorrow. When the band had played ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance,’ she’d heard an omen and a direct appeal.

  She remembered Paul Gallico stepping through the throng to greet her.

  ‘Darling, do you have a match?’ she asked him.

  ‘Have you been crying?’

  She mingled with Charlie, Helen, and John Walsh before dancing with Hearst Jr to ‘Let Yourself Go.’ Throughout the evening Charlie brought over people eager to meet her. It seemed she’d become something of a celebrity for defying Brundage—who, she learned, was unloved among the great and the good—and her exchange with Hacker at the MacArthurs’ party had become the best piece of gossip on A deck. This is probably what had emboldened her to further indiscretion.

  In the final throes of the party, with the few loyal revellers-in-arms still standing, she had a memory of inventing an uproarious new dance called ‘the Avery,’ which involved making jerky, chickenlike steps, arms flapping and rear ends stuck out, in a burlesque parody of the Charleston.

  Sometime in the early hours, Paul Gallico had carried her down to D deck and had found Mrs Hacker blocking the corridor to Eleanor’s cabin. The chaperone, in her bathrobe and hairnet, cocked her head as she saw them approach, relishing the moment of Eleanor’s vanquishing.

  ‘The cabins on this corridor are for females only,’ she said.

  ‘You can carry her yourself if you like,’ Gallico said. At this, Eleanor tried standing but listed towards the corridor wall.

  ‘Are you slithering around after me again?’ she slurred to Hacker, with a dangerous look in her eye.

  ‘I knew you would disob
ey Mr Brundage’s orders to—’

  ‘Why are you still up? Let me ask you that, why are you still up . . . you sneaking, snitching old witch?’ Eleanor staggered backwards, and Gallico caught her.

  ‘Well, I’ve never in my life been spoken to like—’

  ‘You creeping, crawling old spider!’ Eleanor shouted. Doors along the corridor opened, and a number of girls popped their heads out to listen.

  ‘You dried-up fossil cat’s turd . . .’

  ‘I’m going to fetch Mr Brundage this instant,’ the chaperone shrieked, but she seemed rooted to the spot, shrinking before the onslaught of Eleanor’s rage.

  ‘You do that, old girl, you do that,’ Eleanor said, pointing an unsteady finger.

  Then she stumbled into her cabin and passed out on her bed.

  Sometime before breakfast, she heard afterwards, the ship’s medic was called and failed to revive her. He thereupon diagnosed, no doubt at the prompting of Brundage, a condition of ‘acute alcoholism.’ Later that morning she found herself once more summoned to appear in the coffee room before the committee. As she was climbing the stairs to C deck, Gallico stopped her.

  ‘Eleanor, John Walsh and the press boys want a quick word before you see Brundage.’

  Ten minutes later she walked into the coffee room. Brundage was tight-lipped, eyeing her as though she were some repellent specimen pickled in alcohol. The bald-headed committee member with the bow tie who’d told her to go to bed last night was the nominated spokesman, but she already knew what he was going to say. She had no time for bow ties, which she associated vaguely with frivolity and penile inadequacy. Brundage nodded to him.

  ‘Mr Penworth, if you please.’

  The man cleared his throat and began reading from a statement.

  ‘After due deliberation with my colleagues concerning your violation of the AOC training rules in the early hours of this morning and Tuesday last, and after consideration of the various complaints from the team chaperone thereunto pertaining, and of the medical diagnosis of your condition, we regret to inform you that your entry into the Olympic Games is cancelled.’

  He looked up, a sheepish blink behind his eyeglasses.

  ‘Look, gentlemen,’ Eleanor said in a bleary voice, ‘please don’t do this. I know I had a few glasses of champagne, and I’m very sorry about the whole thing, it was wrong of me to—’

  ‘We gave you every chance, Mrs Emerson,’ said Brundage, ‘but you forced our hand. You have not demonstrated the Olympic spirit, nor indeed any team spirit.’ Eleanor had expected him to be angry, but he seemed relaxed, as though vindicated and relieved to be rid of her.

  ‘Please,’ she said, the composure starting to drain from her voice. ‘I’ve spent four years training for these Games. You know I can win the gold. I want to apologise for my—’

  ‘I’m afraid the committee’s mind is definitely made up.’ Brundage snapped his rulebook shut and got up to leave. ‘You will disembark at Hamburg later today and return immediately to New York on board the Bremen. Mr Penworth here will make the arrangements. Goodbye, Mrs Emerson.’

  As the other committee members began to rise, Eleanor felt her face flushing and adrenaline pumping—the instinct that kicked in when she was in danger of being beaten in the pool.

  ‘Now just hold on one minute,’ she said, leaping towards the entrance and barring the men’s way. She was damned if she was going to let them close the door in her face. Avery Brundage, accustomed to having the last word, looked surprised. The committee members stood still.

  ‘Sir, last night my friends in the press corps realised, probably before I did, what my fate would be this morning.’ She stared Brundage full in the face. ‘So they offered me a job.’

  ‘A job?’

  ‘Yes, a job. As a reporter, at the Games. They’re not hiring me for my writing—they’ll do that for me—but for my name. It seems, thanks to you, that I’ve already acquired a certain infamy in the dailies back home.’

  Brundage removed his spectacles, his eyes narrowing with irritation.

  ‘Didn’t I make myself clear? I said you will disembark at Hamburg and return immediately—’

  ‘I heard what you said. If you’ve fired me from the team, that’s my hard luck, but you have no further rights over me.’ Her eyes glistened, but her voice held. ‘I’m from a free country, and if I want to be in Berlin to support my friends, there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me—unless you want to make an ass of yourself in the thirty daily newspapers of William Randolph Hearst.’

  Brundage opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. For a moment he seemed ready to yell something that far exceeded the strict parameters of his own code of conduct.

  Eleanor walked to the door with her back straight and her head held as high as it would go, keeping her hands in her jacket pockets so they would not see her shaking.

  ‘See you at the opening ceremony,’ she said.

  Chapter Six

  Zeppelins had been a part of Denham’s life for as long as he could remember. The serene giants first floated into his imagination in pictures on cigarette cards. Every day after school he’d walk home to Pound Lane, a quiet row of terraced houses along the river in Canterbury, daydreaming of airships—imagining fleets of them in the sky over the cathedral, humming like giant bumblebees. He’d draw them and make models from household litter. He wanted to know everything about them. Luckily his father, Arthur, a mechanical engineer, had caught the Zeppelin bug, too.

  Even in those pioneer days there was no doubt in Arthur Denham’s mind that lighter-than-air ships were the future of long-distance travel. Aeroplanes, he said, were flying hedge-cutters. They’d never be good for anything but deafening, hair-raising hops. ‘Not for sailing through the clouds,’ he’d say with a twinkle in his eye, ‘across continents and oceans.’

  The Great War was into its second year when Denham finally saw a Zeppelin. He was eighteen. He and his younger brother, Sidney, were on a day trip to London with their mother’s sister Joan, a nervous, childless woman who doted on them. Her surprise treat for them at the end of the day was a musical revue at the Strand Theatre.

  Over the years the events of that night would assume a luminous clarity in Denham’s memory. It was a chill evening in October and an air raid blackout was in force. Only the yellow lights of trams and taxis lit the faces of the crowds along the pavements—the theatregoers, the office workers heading home, the soldiers on leave from the Front. Hollow-eyed lads lost in a gloomy limbo. Above the grand buildings of the Aldwych the constellations stood out as keen as diamonds.

  The show was Sunshine Girl, and the audience was encouraged to join in the songs.

  When the final curtain call ended, the audience rose and began making their way along the rows towards the exit. They hadn’t quite reached the auditorium doors when the floor shook and an ominous rumble sounded from outside.

  ‘And here’s us come without a brolly,’ Aunt Joan said.

  The next rumble silenced the crowd and stopped them cold. Fragments of plaster dropped from the ceiling, and the stage curtains swayed. Sidney looked up at him wide-eyed, wanting reassurance.

  When it came, the explosion was almost a direct hit.

  A blast ripped through the foyer, sending rolls of plaster dust into the auditorium. The crowd fell to the floor, clutching their hats to their heads. In the commotion outside a man yelled, ‘It’s a Zepp! It’s a bloody Zepp!’ A woman screamed, and unrestrained panic broke out as the crowd surged towards the exits. Sid began bawling and hid in the folds of his brother’s overcoat.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies—and—gentlemen—please,’ a voice boomed from the stage. Mr George Grossmith, the show’s star, was addressing them. ‘Remain inside until the danger has passed over, I beg of you.’ His peremptory tone seemed to take control of the crowd, making the panic subside somewhat. People hesitated, and one by one, they began to sit. ‘Now, all of you, sing along with me to calm yourselves down.’
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br />   The orchestra played ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,’ and slowly people joined in the singing. Aunt Joan’s voice came in short, rattled breaths, but she persevered, as if fearful of bringing on her asthma if she succumbed to hysteria.

  As the explosions and rumbles outside grew fainter, voices that had sung out of terror sang out of defiance, and by the time the orchestra played ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ the audience was a chorus of patriotic fervour. Soon, a Boy Scout appeared in the emergency exit to call the all-clear, and they ended with ‘God Save the King.’

  When Denham, Sidney, and Aunt Joan followed the crowd in single file through the wreckage of the foyer someone was again screaming. Outside, they stared in disbelief. People bloodied by flying glass were being tended on the steps until ambulances arrived. The grand crescent of the Aldwych, lit by the blazing roof of a building, was strewn with masonry and cobblestones. An acrid stench of cordite hung in the air. In his shock Denham was not certain what he was seeing among the flames and shadows. An omnibus overturned, its axle shattered. A dying horse’s snorting and whinnying. A number of clothed forms, limbs at unfamiliar angles, sprawled over a mosaic of smashed glass.

  ‘Oh, gosh, look,’ said Sidney.

  In the distance to the east were the cigar shapes of four Zeppelins, golden in the lights of the fires, the drone of their propeller engines clear on the night air. Arc lights swept the sky, holding one gleaming ship, then another, in the fingers of their beams. Artillery fire boomed, making chrysanthemum blooms of flame in the sky beneath them, but nothing touched them.

  ‘It’s a battlefield,’ said Aunt Joan, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘London’s a battlefield.’

  Denham continued to stare, after his aunt and Sidney had turned to leave. He could not take his eyes off the four magnificent messengers of death.

  He awoke clammy with sweat. Sheets writhed around his body, leaving striations and gullies across his neck and chest, like an artist’s impression of the canals on Mars. His dream of the Zeppelins had merged—as his dreams often did—into one of the trenches. After a few weeks’ training in the London Rifle Brigade he’d been shipped to France. Only a few days after that he’d seen his first man killed. And then more men killed than he could ever count.