Читать книгу Golden Boy - Paula Astridge - Страница 15

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Well? Did you make a good impression?’ Margret asked, handing her husband a late night cup of cocoa. She had not been able to resist waiting up for him. Not on such an important night. Just fancy her own husband meeting Adolf Hitler face to face! Now that she had fallen completely under Hitler’s spell and committed herself to his cause, it was nothing short of a dream come true.

‘Oh, I made an impression all right.’ The sarcastic inflection to his tone had her eye him suspiciously.

‘A good one, I hope?’

‘Let’s just say that I didn’t exactly get off on the right foot.’

‘Oh Albert!’ She put her cup down on the kitchen table and slumped back petulantly in her chair. She was genuinely disappointed. ‘What a wretched shame. I had such hopes for us — I mean — for you.’

It was unlike Margret to wallow in self-pity, but even more unlike Speer to fly into a spontaneous rage over it. For some reason he took exception to her words and she was shocked.

‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ he snapped.

He was fed up. Fed up because he had made a fool of himself in front of Hitler and fed up with the tannin-stained teaspoon on his saucer. In a sudden rage, he hurled it across the room, landing it with a loud metallic clatter in the sink.

‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’

He was tired, that was the matter. Tired, frustrated and annoyed with himself for having failed. It was a rare occurrence in his life, and one that he wasn’t handling well. Burying his face in his hands, he rubbed his eyes. He hated losing his temper. To lose one’s dignity and control, he believed, was a weakness in any man.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed. ‘It’s just that I wonder why nothing is ever what it seems? That nothing ever turns out the way it should? Don’t you think that I had hopes too? That I didn’t exactly want to see them shattered so early in the piece either.’ He lifted his head again to look at her; his normally alert eyes weary and slightly bloodshot.

‘Hitler’s not exactly the man I thought he was,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘My fault. I should have trusted my initial instinct. I mean the more educated one I had before I actually met him.’

‘What’s changed?’ It didn’t give Margret any pleasure to ask the question or to pursue this particular conversation now that she had set her heart on an ideal. Frankly, she did not want to know that the reality of Hitler had fallen short of it.

‘Me,’ he answered simply, putting her immediate fears to rest.

Perhaps it should not have come as such a relief to her to have her husband take the blame, but the truth was that she found more comfort in thinking less of him than of her newfound hero.

‘Hitler’s the same, I suppose, as he ever was,’ he continued, his tone more contemplative as he rubbed his jaw, grazing the palm of his hand on the prickly crop of stubble that had taken root there. Now that his bohemian university days were over, having a five-o’clock shadow went against the grain. These days, as the clean cut, immaculately dressed man he had become, the thought of ‘letting himself go’ was abhorrent to him.

‘Well, don’t go on about it,’ Margret said with a sudden sharp intolerance. ‘You’ve just had a bad day, that’s all.’ Albert’s gloomy mood was beginning to rub off on her. She found introspection of any kind extremely tedious. ‘And to be fair to Hitler. He might have had a bad day too. You shouldn’t judge him too harshly.’

‘What, you mean like the way he judged me?’

To this, Margret did not answer. She’d had quite enough of all this dreary carry on, it being the stuff that Albert revelled in. She should have known that giving him an inch would have him take a mile; that if she didn’t trip him up en route to his search for the truth he would go on and on not knowing when to stop. So she gazed at him as she did so often, with a vacuous, implacable expression. All Margret needed were the facts and nothing but the facts. Give them to her straight and she could deal with them. The most glaring one of which, she was just about to tackle head on: ‘Ah, I see what this is all about,’ she said, making no attempt to wipe the self-satisfied smile from her face. ‘It’s not about you being disappointed in Hitler at all. It’s about your ego. You wanted to dazzle the man and you didn’t. He didn’t even give you a sideways glance, did he?’

As the confident, conceited woman she was, Margret was always quick to recognise vanity in others. The ‘physical’ always mattered most to her because, unlike the more fragile functions of the mind, it was something she could grasp. This time, however, she had grasped at the wrong straw, because Hitler had given him a sideways glance. No, not just sideways, but a full on, intense gaze that had bewildered him and set his adrenaline pumping.

It was an odd reaction for a man as poised as Speer to have had and was made all the more alarming because he didn’t know whether it was fear or exhilaration that made his heart thump so hard and fast in response. Whether it was the stirring of wholesome ideology inside him, or the excited thud of a sycophant’s pulse in the throes of hero worship.

With either of these two options, he could cope. It was the unspeakable third which worried him. The nasty niggling thought that it might be something quite different altogether. Whichever way it was construed, the experience perplexed and humbled him and he was not about to belittle himself any further by staying around to work it out.

‘Come on, we’re leaving right now,’ he said, suddenly up and out of his chair with purpose.

‘Leaving? Why? Where to?’

Margret was lolling back in her rather shabby dressing gown, with her hair in pins. In such a state the idea of leaping up to go anywhere was ridiculous, quite apart from the fact that it was the middle of the night. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she thought.

Her normally restrained, meticulous husband was quite out of control, with an impulsive state of mind and manner that did not suit him. These days she was so used to him running his and her life to schedule, obsessed as he had become with the benefits of time efficiency and strict organisation. Something for which he had proved to have a talent. A great talent. But tonight both this talent and his thoughts were all over the place.

‘Back to Heidelberg to visit your parents. Where do you think?’

‘You can’t be serious Albert; it’s 4.30 in the morning! Besides, they’re not expecting us until Saturday.’

‘You know how much they love surprises. All the more reason they’ll be happy to see us first thing on Thursday. So off you go, get dressed and get the bags packed as quickly as possible. I want to be out of Berlin before daybreak.’

He did not baulk at giving the order. Nor did it cross either his or her mind that he should think to help her pack those bags. It was just the way of their world, where he and almost all other men of his generation were brought up to accept it as being a woman’s place to take care of all such domestic issues. They were menial tasks with which a man should not concern himself. Instead, he looked at his watch.

‘Headquarters opens at six,’ he called out to Margret who was now in the bedroom, hurriedly pulling on her stockings and running a brush through her hair. ‘We’ll have to stop off and let Hanke know we’ll be out of town for a few weeks.’

‘What’s all this about?’ she called back, putting on her lipstick. ‘It’s not like you to run away.’

‘I’m not running away!’ he objected rather too fiercely. Fiercely enough to have her immediately come back on the attack.

‘It’s exactly what you’re doing,’ she said, standing at the bedroom door with arms akimbo. ‘Are you sure it’s not just your ego calling the tune?’

She had never been one to pull her punches, but how did she expect him to tackle such a direct question when he himself was floundering to find an answer? He was confused. His normally razor-sharp mind with its astonishing facility for facts and figures was swamped with stormy emotions. He was struggling to come to terms with an inexplicable, all-encompassing dark mood that defied logic. A mood that disappeared the instant he heard what Karl Hanke had to say.

‘Leaving? There’s no way you can do that now, not after what’s just happened. I’ve been looking all over for you. You left the rally before I got a chance to talk to you.’

‘I couldn’t wait to get out of there,’ Speer replied.

The truth of the matter was that his encounter with Hitler had completely unnerved him. He still wasn’t sure whether he was running from a sense of his own failure or an omen of foreboding in regard to his future. All he knew was that he had to get out while the going was good. But it was too late for that.

‘You’ll change your mind after I offer you this chance of a lifetime.’

Speer gave a short, cynical laugh. ‘You gave me one of those yesterday and I blew it.’

For Hanke, it took a second for the penny to drop. ‘Oh you mean running late for Hitler?’ he acknowledged with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘That’s water under the bridge. Forget it. I’m sure he has.’

Speer was not convinced. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. You weren’t there. He was not happy.’

A slow smile lifted the corners of Hanke’s mouth. A mouth that, despite Speer’s liking for the man, had always struck him as being rather hard and cruel. But who was he to look this particular gift horse in the mouth, let alone think ill of a friend who was obviously about to do him a favour?

‘I can be so sure,’ Hanke replied, with the smug satisfaction of a man in the know, ‘because if you were in the bad books, Hitler would never have approved his right hand man’s proposal. He obviously thought well enough of you to give the go ahead for Dr. Goebbels to offer you your next plum commission.’

In lieu of words, Speer lifted his upturned hands to ask the silent question: ‘Who, what, where?’

And Hanke answered, happily anticipating his friend’s response:

‘If you’re not too busy Herr Speer, the illustrious Dr Joseph Goebbels has requested your architectural expertise to redesign his new District Headquarters. He was extremely impressed with your up-tempo efforts on my office and isn’t the sort of man to be outdone. At least, not by a subordinate like me. He wants you to give him some of the same, or better. Something perhaps a little more sensational that might reflect well on his status. This is a real coup for you Speer, a real slap-bang-up coup. Pull it off and I promise you, you won’t look back. You have no idea where it might take you. And when it does, you better bloody well remember which friend it was who arranged it for you.’

Putting a companionable hand on Speer’s shoulder, Hanke walked him to the door.

‘But I’d better warn you up front,’ he said. ‘Goebbels has an impossible deadline in mind. You won’t be able meet it of course, but don’t worry. The Party always likes to test its ‘new blood’ in this way. They want to know what you’re made of. Just be aware that they’ll be watching you to see how close you get to matching that preposterous completion date of theirs and how you handle the pressure.’

‘Close is not near enough,’ Speer replied. ‘I’ll meet it. Let them watch me.’

And that’s what it took to turn his life around — a few dizzying, short hours that spun him out of his own control and onto a new course, landing him on his feet, fair and square in front of the detour sign that diverted him to a very different and far more dangerous path. At the time, it was all too exciting for him to be concerned about its rugged twists and turns, or to even wonder what lay around the next bend. As far as he could see (which was not, unfortunately, to the horizon and its blazing Holocaust) it was just the luckiest, most fateful break of his life.

And to think if he hadn’t stopped off to say goodbye to Hanke in such a gloomy, defeatist mood, none of it would have happened.