The Experimentalist Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Quotes

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  The Wraggle-Taggle Gypsies

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  THE EXPERIMENTALIST

  Nick Salaman

  O Rose thou art sick.

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm:

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  William Blake

  ‘…Of the 100 prisoners you despatched to me, 18 died in transit. Only 12 are in a fit state for my experiments. Therefore I require you to send me a further 100 prisoners between 20 and 40 years old who are in good health and in a state comparable to able-bodied soldiers.

  Heil Hitler.’

  Dr E. Haagen

  15 November 1943

  Prologue

  From the papers of Professor Felix Mittelberg, 29th April 1945

  I found the couple as I made my way out of the battered western edges of Berlin on roads choked with people, traffic and rubble, towards the oncoming American or British armies, whichever came first. I had taken off my SS colonel’s uniform and was wearing the armband of a Reserved Occupation medic. An SS officer would not have been a popular travelling companion at that stage of the war.

  Somewhere, stray remnants of our troops were straggling, sometimes fighting, their way westward to try to reach the Allies before the Russians overtook them. Every now and then detachments of diehard fanatics were firing on them, and on civilians too, trying to stop them.

  I carried papers on which I had not changed my name or qualifications, since it would only arouse suspicion among my captors. I was a professor with various medical (especially psychiatric), psychological and scientific degrees. I was a behaviourist – as you would expect a psychiatrist to be at that time – though recently I had begun to feel that one could not exclude the influences of early childhood. You only had to look at some of our leaders. I was specialising in the new sciences of aviation physiology and psychiatry (survival under extreme stress, high altitude, speed of sound, extremes of uncertainty, heat and cold etc.) in which we had recently achieved significant breakthroughs in research – the development of drugs and strategies through experimentations – some of it dangerous but urgently necessary, at the edge of physical toleration. It was something the Yankees would almost certainly want to hear about. They would not want it to fall into the hands of the Ivans.

  The couple were young and good-looking, dark-haired, possibly Jewish though they had to be the last Jews living in the Third Reich, or what was left of it. What were they doing here? How had they escaped? There was no point in asking questions like that any more. It was now each man for himself.

  They had a baby with them – young, only months old – which they wheeled in a big old-fashioned pram like an antique Daimler. It made me think how lucky I was to have no family. Every so often there would be trouble on the road, a truck blocking the path, a broken down Opel; and now and then a rifle or machine gun would open up. There were still crazed gangs of Hitler Youth about who were fighting beyond the bitter end, and were now infuriated to see the unending stream of Germans leaving the country like rats, to avoid falling into the hands of the Ivans.

  It was in one of these mindless acts of rage that the couple were hit. The man died immediately. The girl, mortally wounded, was still conscious. The baby, however, was gurgling merrily. I did not want to waste time. The Russians were not far away, and the sounds of distant fighting seemed to be gaining on us as we fled. But in all conscience – and I have to admit, curiosity – I could not leave the girl and her child. Even then an idea was flickering through my head. It was quite unbidden; I had never thought of it before. In these dire circumstances – unexpected, unpredictable – all manner of new ideas were flooding in, like particles into a vacuum. The notion vanished as quickly as it had arrived when the girl groaned. She had been shot through the stomach and the lung.

  ‘Please, sir,’ she said, painfully, through a bloody mouth, ‘I am dying, aren’t I?’

  I was moved by the ‘sir’. It would be interesting to do a paper on the habit of formality, even at the extreme edges of life. I suppose I do have a medical look; you take it on with the white coat at university. I felt her pulse and looked at her wounds.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ I said. ‘It does look that way. I am sorry.’

  People jostled and flooded past us as we stopped there, like rocks in a torrent. Behind us, the sounds of warfare were growing.

  ‘Please,’ she said again, speaking with a great effort, but almost sibylline in the way that the imminence of death sometimes promotes, ‘I will bless you and give you good luck in this life if you look after my child. Don’t let her go. Watch over her. Guard her. Make sure she is educated. She will be clever and beautiful. Will you do that for me? Her name is…’

  Her breath failed her and I leant forward to catch a sound softer than a moth’s wing, a name she whispered into my ear. I readily agreed, as one does when faced with someone leaving this world. How could I not? Naturally, I had no idea about babies or how to make them happy, or not unhappy. We have all been babies, but it is one of the few things that personal experience does not teach us.

  I gathered up the baby, and the woman gave me the most beautiful smile you ever saw.

  ‘God bless you,’ she said, and died.

  There was no time to be lost. The baby immediately became a kind of talisman as its mother had predicted. Wherever I went with the child, I seemed to prosper. We hitched a lift on a passing lorry. That in itself, to stop and help a walking refugee, was unheard of, but there it was.

  ‘I thought I’d stop, mate,’ said the driver, a little, wizened fellow in his fifties, ‘seeing as you had a baby with you.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I told him. ‘It’s good to know in this troubled time that someone has a kind heart. You’re a good man. I hope you find what you want when you get out of this.’

  ‘This is my wife Ilse. She was the one who spotted you.’

  He indicated the sad-faced, younger woman who sat next to him. She smiled at me and the baby.

  ‘We lost ours,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What terrible times!’

  Babies had been dying like flies – no, no, not like flies, since flies were thriving in Berlin – like our soldiers on the Russian front, but it was the same problem. Too little food, too little medicine, too few doctors.

  ‘Where’d you get the truck?’ I asked him. ‘They’re like hen’s teeth.’

  ‘I just finished a job, medical supplies, when my boss says turn round and get out. I put my family in the back and we hoofed it. We’re making for the American army ’cos they have more food than anyone else.’

  ‘Good plan,’ I said.

  And in due course I found myself being interviewed by an over-worked American army captain who wanted to know all about me before sending me on to someone else. I was overcome with sudden rage that it had come to this, a rage I was careful to dissemble to the captain, but I cast about in my mind to find something, someone, anything – life itself – from which I could exact compensation. It gets to you in moments like this. Not a quick solution, you understand; it did not appeal to my academic instincts. No, something more like a project that I could still pursue many years from now, its heat not dissipated by time but growing quietly from within like silage, or cancer. A project to make up, in its small way, for everything I had lost.

  The baby started crying. The idea that had cros
sed my mind when I was tending the woman on the road now came back to me. Yes, that might do very well; very well indeed.

  PART ONE

  The little girl had crept up behind the box hedge that ran around the rose garden, so the grown-ups did not see her.

  ‘Such a tragedy for the child, of course. Her mother dying so young…’

  ‘Of shame, they say.’

  ‘Possibly. She was a sickly woman. They gave the cause of death as pneumonia, but I daresay shame came into it. To have a monster as a husband…’

  ‘I’d rather have a monster as a husband than as a father.’

  ‘I’d always be worried about bad blood coming out.’

  The little girl had been meaning to pounce out at her great-aunts, Claire and Bertha, and their friend the Abbess but, hearing the words, she paused and crept away.

  She took the subdued atmosphere of the castle for granted, of course. She could not remember anything different, and she was used to the way the grown-ups lowered their voices when they thought she could hear their conversations, but she had never heard the mention of monsters before. She thought about it all day, and raised the matter with her nurse at bedtime.

  ‘What is a monster, Nanny?’

  ‘Why it’s a bogeyman, a bugaboo, or a troll if you like. A bloody bones. The sort that’ll get you if you don’t clean behind your ears.’

  The nurse gave her a hug to show her she didn’t mean it. The child was short of such affections.

  ‘What do they look like, Nanny?’

  ‘Well, they’re sort of knobbly, with warts and such. They have squashy faces and big, hairy feet. They’ve got teeth like portcullises.’

  The little girl thought about it. She didn’t see how she could be the daughter of a monster because she didn’t have any of those things.

  The nurse saw she was looking thoughtful, and hastened to explain.

  ‘They can’t get in here,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a great big portcullis of our own.’ The little girl sucked her thumb.

  ‘You’re a funny little thing,’ said the nurse. ‘Why d’you ask about monsters?’

  ‘They said I was the child of a monster,’ replied the girl. ‘But I think they may have been wrong because my feet are quite smooth.’

  ‘Who did? Who said that?’ asked the nurse, crossly. ‘Silly duffers. I should like to hear them say it in front of me.’ Some boy about the kitchens, she thought, or gardener’s lad, no doubt. They needed a good drubbing.

  ‘It was the Abbess and Aunt Claire. I heard them in the garden.’

  The nurse was silent. They should be more careful what they said with a child around but it was hardly her place to tell them.

  ‘Why did my mummy have to die?’ asked the little girl.

  ‘She caught a bad cold and couldn’t breathe,’ said the nurse, on safer ground here. ‘She’s with the angels now.’

  ‘Is my daddy with the angels too?’

  ‘It’s all in God’s hands, little one. Don’t you worry your head about it.’

  ‘And what’s bad blood, Nanny?’

  But Nanny had a look on her face that meant the subject was closed.

  ‘Chatter, chatter, chatter. Have you said your prayers yet, that’s what I’d like to know? Let’s have no talk of blood before bedtime, what with your birthday tomorrow and all.’

  ‘Sorry, Nanny.’

  ‘That’s better. Now, what are you going to thank God for today?’

  The little girl slipped into the comforting litany which made sure only nice things could get into the bedroom and had the bogeymen running for cover, tails between their legs, far into the darkness beyond the whispering moat.

  It was the Old Midsummer’s Eve, the 24th of June, 1950.

  ***

  Occasionally, the gardener’s lad would steal across the lawns when his father wasn’t watching, and show her a worm or a grub. One day he even brought her a baby hedgehog which Nanny had allowed her to feed with warm milk and keep in a little box until Aunt Claire discovered it. At which point of course it was returned to its owner because Aunt Claire had a horror of ticks and fleas.

  ‘Hedgehogs are full of fleas,’ she said. ‘And TB.’

  Apart from the boy, and a little snot-nosed girl – who was something to do with one of the kitchen maids and occasionally escaped round to the front, but did little when she got there except stare and eat bogies – she had the choice of her dolls or the grown-ups. Her dolls were on the whole more communicative.

  On Sundays, her aunts took her to church. The service was long and for the most part boring, but she enjoyed it because she could look around at all the people. The trouble was, she had to sit in the family pew which was right up at the front, so it wasn’t so easy to get a good look at everyone. It meant you had to turn right round, which Nanny said was rude.

  ‘But everyone stares back at me, Nanny. They all seem to want a really good peek.’

  ‘I expect they do,’ said Nanny. ‘I expect they’re wondering who that funny little monkey is, sitting in the family pew.’

  Marie giggled. She was a pretty little girl, with pale skin, curly hair and distinctive, very bright, pale-blue eyes. But the looks on the faces weren’t exactly dmiring – it was almost as if they were sorry for her – and a few of them seemed angry or even frightened. She noticed that when she followed her aunts out at the end the other people kept their children well away. She asked her aunts why this should be, and she was told it was because they lived in the castle. It was about this time, around the age of four, she started talking to the Man in the Wall.

  The Man in the Wall was her friend. He was just a face. He had the ability to appear in any wall, outside or in, and had even been known to manifest in trees. Because he was so good at moving around, he became her constant companion and confidant. On the whole, she kept him to herself but Aunt Bertha caught her once, muttering at what appeared to be a blank piece of stonework in the East Wing.

  ‘Come along, Marie. Head up, shoulders back! Mustn’t stand around mumbling at nothing. Hasn’t your governess got any books for you to read?’

  Aunt Bertha was the more masculine of the two old ladies. For some time, when Marie had been little and was first brought to the castle, she had simply caller her ‘Bert’. ‘Bert’ hadn’t stood for it for long.

  ‘I’m not mumbling at nothing, Aunt Bertha. I’m talking to the Man in the Wall.’

  ‘Man in the wall?’

  Aunt Bertha had peered closely at the stone, searching for delineation. Finding none, she had become vexed. The aunts’ father had been a general in the army and Bertha had a soldier’s shortness of temper. She thwacked the wall with her stick.

  ‘Ow,’ said the Man in the Wall.

  ‘You hurt the Man in the Wall,’ said Marie. ‘Horrid Aunt Bertha.’

  ‘There’s no man in the wall,’ cried Aunt Bertha. ‘Look! See? Nothing.’ She jabbed her stick savagely right up the Man in the Wall’s nose. ‘He is a figment of your imagination.’

  ‘There is, there is, there is,’ shouted Marie.

  ‘Insubordination. Truculence. You shall go to your room if you don’t mend your manners. Repeat after me: there is no man in the wall.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Marie.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I’m giving you one last chance.’

  The child hesitated, then made up her mind.

  ‘There is no Man in the Wall.’

  ‘That’s better. Cut along now. No mooning. And do not ever call me horrid again or you’ll go to your room and eat turnips.’

  The Aunt watched Marie run off to the centre of the keep where a sundial stood among the daisies. The little girl started to make a daisy chain.

  ‘The old timekeeper and the child make a charming juxtaposition, do they not, Bertha,’ babbled Claire, advancing paunchily to meet her sister. ‘One could almost make a poem about it.’

  The little girl looked at the Man in the Wall who had taken up hi
s quarters in the pedestal of the dial. She placed her daisy chain carefully over the corner of the dial so it hung over his head like a halo.

  He very slowly closed his left eye and opened it again.

  Later, she told her nanny about the Man in the Wall.

  ‘Aunt Bertha says he is a figment of my imagination but I don’t think he can be because he winked at me. Do you think he can be, Nanny? He wouldn’t wink if he was a figment.’

  ‘Poor little soul,’ said the nanny to her friend the cook afterwards. ‘They don’t give her any friends and they go and take away the one she invents for herself.’

  ‘All the same,’ said the cook, ‘sins of the fathers and such … I hope it’s not one of them departed spirits come to wreak vengeance on the child.’

  ***

  Sometime after her ninth birthday, her aunts sent for her to come to the great dining room. There was a stranger standing behind them when she came in. He was middle-aged with grey-brown hair, a long nose and a look of pained surprise. He had a kind of gloss to him which Marie later learned to associate with great wealth.

  ‘This is Mr Brickville,’ said Bertha. ‘He was your father’s solicitor, and he has been looking after our affairs. He is a very busy man so we are most grateful.’