He drained the dregs into his cup. She left him to drink it, grabbed her keys and her bag and left, slamming the front door behind her.

CHAPTER TEN

London: July 1958

Most of the customers were in their twenties, he guessed, Betty’s age. It was always packed and everyone seemed to know each other. Did people look at him, coming alone? Who’s that man? What does he want? He should bring Betty. He wondered if she knew the place. He was sure she’d like it, even if the coffee was undrinkable and the food for the most part weird and inedible. Borscht. What on earth was that? The Partisan Coffee House. He could sit here all day and nobody would care a toss. Goodness knows how it could ever make money. But there was plenty going on, jazz and skiffle, poetry and folk songs, literature and film. Politics, of course. Chess, in the basement. Library on the first floor. And on the top, the editors of Universities and Left Review.

He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. He hadn’t been sleeping. Every noise made him jump, put his teeth on edge – a desktop slammed, a bench pulled. He should go to the doctor, get some barbiturates to calm him down. They’d worked in the past.

His name was Anatoly, or so he’d said. John hadn’t seen him again since that first visit. Sometimes he thought Anatoly was an apparition, a nightmare made flesh. But it wasn’t a ghost that had seeped through John’s skin. It was the essence of him, as if Anatoly lived inside him now.

Kneeling down by her side, staring at the lesions on her neck. Her face. He couldn’t recollect her face, though he knew how cold it felt. In his mind he saw her body, but her features vaporised into the cloud of his memory. He had to remember her, even as she moved away and Betty came closer, became her, like a photograph with a double exposure. A love expanded. No. This was too soon. The shock remained, the touch of her. Dance with me, John. Dance. He’d watched as she disappeared in the dusk, as the torn trees of the Tiergarten became skeletons against the pink eiderdown of an evening sky.

John had no idea what Anatoly wanted with him.

He looked out of the window. The bombed-out house at the corner of the street had scaffolding and hoardings round it to keep the children out. The straggling tip of a buddleia could be seen above them, picking up nutrients from the ash. Were there buddleias in Hiroshima now, pushing through the fractured bricks, gorging on incinerated flesh? There’d been plenty in Berlin.