A Lily of the Field

John Lawton

• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781611855913
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611859980
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Written by 'a sublimely elegant historical novelist as addictive as crack' ( Daily Telegraph ), t he Inspector Troy series is perfect for fans of Le Carré, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. Vienna, 1934. Ten-year-old cello prodigy Meret Voytek becomes a pupil of concert pianist Viktor Rosen, a Jew in exile from Germany. The Isle of Man, 1940. An interned Hungarian physicist is recruited for the Manhattan Project in Los Alomos, building the atom bomb for the Americans. Auschwitz, 1944. Meret is imprisoned but is saved from certain death to play the cello in the camp orchestra. She is playing for her life. London, 1948. Viktor Rosen wants to relinquish his Communist Party membership after thirty years. His comrade and friend reminds him that he committed for life... These seemingly unconnected strands all collide forcefully with a brazen murder on a London Underground platform, revealing an intricate web of secrecy and deception which Detective Frederick Troy must untangle.

Contents

Prologue

I

§1

§2

§3

§4

§5

§6

§7

§8

§9

§10

§11

§12

§13

§14

§15

§16

§17

§18

§19

§20

§21

§22

§23

§24

§25

§26

§27

§28

§29

§30

§31

§32

§33

§34

§35

§36

§37

§38

§39

§40

§41

§42

§43

§44

§45

§46

§47

§48

§49

§50

§51

§52

§53

§54

§55

§56

§57

§58

§59

§60

§61

§62

§63

§64

§65

§66

§67

§68

§69

§70

§71

§72

§73

§74

§75

§76

§77

§78

§79

§80

§81

II

§82

§83

§84

§85

§86

§87

§88

§89

§90

§91

§92

§93

§94

§95

§96

§97

§98

§99

§100

§101

§102

§103

§104

§105

§106

§107

§108

§109

§110

§111

§112

§113

§114

§115

§116

§117

§118

§119

§120

§121

§122

§123

§124

§125

§126

§127

§128

§129

§130

§131

§132

§133

§134

§135

§136

§137

§138

§139

§140

§141

§142

§143

§144

§145

§146

§147

§148

§149

§150

§151

§152

§153

§154

§155

§156

§157

§158

§159

Prologue

London: March, or even February, 1948
A Park

It had not been the hardest winter. That had been the previous winter—the deluge that was 1947. London like an iceberg, the Home Counties one vast undulating eiderdown of white, snowbound villages in Derbyshire dug out by German POWs many miles and years from home—a bizarre reminder that we had “won the war.” War. Winter. He had thought he might not live through either. He had. The English, who could talk the smallest of small talk about weather, had deemed 1948 to be “not bad” or, if feeling loquacious, “nowt to write home about.” But now, as the earth cracked with the first green tips of spring, the bold budding of crocus and daffodil that seemed to bring grey-toothed smiles to the grey faces of the downtrodden victors of the World War among whom he lived, he found no joy in it. It had come too late to save him. This winter would not kill him. The last would. And all the others that preceded it.

He took a silver hip flask from his inside pocket and downed a little Armagnac.

“André, I cannot do this anymore.”

Skolnik had been pretending to read the Post, billowing pages spread out in front of him screening his face from the drifting gaze of passersby. He stopped, turned his head to look directly at Viktor.

“What?”

“I have to stop now.”

The newspaper was folded for maximum rustle. It conveyed the emotions André pretended long ago to have disowned in favor of calm, unrufflable detachment.

“Viktor. You cannot just stop. You cannot simply quit. What was it you think you joined all those years ago? A gentleman’s club? As though you can turn in your membership when brandy and billiards begin to bore you?”

Viktor took another sip of Armagnac, then passed the flask to André.

“Nineteen eighteen,” he said softly as Skolnik helped himself to a hefty swig. “Nineteen eighteen.”

“What?’

“Nineteen eighteen—that’s when I joined. Were you even born then?”

“Not that it matters, but I was at school.”

The flask was handed back, the paper slapped down between them.

“You cannot stop just because it suits you to stop.”

Viktor sighed a soft, whispery, “Really,” of exasperation. “Why can I not stop?”

“Because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union simply doesn’t work that way.”

I

Audacity

ƒ

§1

Vienna: February 9, 1934

The war began as a whisper—a creeping sussurus that she came to hear in every corner of her childhood—by the time it finally banged on the door and rattled the windows it had come to seem like nature itself. It had always been there, whispered, hinted, spoken, bawled. It was the inevitable, it was the way things were—like winter or spring.

There was a whisper of war. Even at ten years old Méret could hear it. Her father had come home from the theatre a year ago, slapped the paper down on the dining table, and in his rant against “this buffoon Hitler” had forgotten to kiss her. He always kissed her when he came home from work. The first thing he did, even before he kissed his wife. It coincided with Méret’s getting home from school. Her father was the Herr Direktor of the Artemis Theatre. He would take a couple of hours off midafternoon, before the box office opened for the evening performance, take tea with his wife and daughter in his apartment, return to the theatre and not be home again until hours after Méret had been put to bed.

“How can they let themselves be so deceived? How can Germans be so stupid? It couldn’t happen here. If he’d stayed in Austria we’d have seen through him. Imagine it—a corporal from Linz hijacking an entire country? It couldn’t happen here!”

Now he brought her the consequences of the Nazis seizing power. One year on, and some of those collared in the first roundups, in the wake of the burning of the Reichstag, were being set free. Mostly they were left-wing, intellectual, or both, and the Nazis either regarded a spell in Oranienburg as intellectual rehabilitation or they expected them to leave. Many did leave. Vienna, where most of Austria’s quarter of a million Jews lived, was swelling with an influx of German Jews, German leftwingers, and German intellectuals.

“Darling girl, if I mention the name Viktor Rosen do you know of whom I speak?”

Of course she did. Viktor Rosen might not be the most famous pianist in the German speaking world, but he was close to it.

“He is living in Vienna now. In Berggasse. Close to Professor Freud. He called in at the theatre today. I had the opportunity of a chat with him. He is taking on pupils.”

Imre paused to watch his daughter’s reaction.

She set down her teacup and with the gravitas that only a preadolescent can muster when talking to an exasperating adult, replied, “Papa, Herr Rosen is a pianist.”

“The cello is his second instrument. Just as the piano is yours.”

Now she could see what he was saying. She concealed her joy—it came naturally to her.

“And,” said her father, “he has agreed to take you on for both instruments.”

She wished she could hug him, she wished she could sing her joy. Her father scooped her up and saved her from expressions of love and gratitude that would have been clumsy and embarrassing. He hugged her and spun her around and set her back on the carpet in the middle of the room a little dizzy from the ride. He smiled his pleasure; her mother, gently tearful, wept hers. Méret would repay his joy. Of course she would. She would play for him. Music said it all. She’d never had much need of words. Music was her code.

§2

Vienna: February 11, 1934

Punctuality was her vice. She was early for everything. She had begged her father not to usher her in to her first meeting with Rosen. Instead he had seen her to the door in Berggasse and reluctantly left her to it. She had reassured him—Vienna was home, she had lived here all her life, and Herr Rosen lived but three streets away. What could befall her standing in the street?

Imre had checked his pocket watch, noted that, as ever, she had got him where they needed to be with time in hand, kissed her on her half-turned cheek, walked to the corner, turned for one last look, and left.

Méret sat on a bench, her three-quarter-size cello by Bausch of Leipzig next to her, immaculate in its battered black case, wrapped up in winter black herself—black coat, black hat, black gloves—against the February cold. She was slightly smaller than the cello.

An old man emerged from Number 19, white beard against a black collar, the glowing tip of a cigar, plumes of pungent smoke wafting over her as he passed her way. A slight wincing, a contraction of the skin around one eye, as though his jaw ached or some such.

“Good morning, young lady.”

Méret all but whispered her response. Professor Freud scared her. She had met him many times. At the Artemis Theatre where her father worked, at her home, where Sigmund and Martha Freud were numbered among her father’s guests—and she knew he had treated her cousin Elsa—“difficult cousin Elsa,” as her mother referred to her—but treated for what she did not know, no more than she knew what it was that might be difficult about Elsa. Professor Freud was some kind of doctor. The scary kind.

One minute before her wristwatch told her she was due, she pulled on the bell. The woodland child tapping at the door of the gingerbread house. A maid, skinny and pinch-faced, white upon black, told her to come in. The woman hardly looked at her, as though children were beneath notice. Up a wide staircase, dusty and hollow sounding, to the apartment on the first floor. Into a huge room looking out onto the Berggasse through floor-to-ceiling windows that seemed impossibly high.

“Herr Professor will be with you shortly.”

And with that the door closed behind her and she found herself alone in the room.

It was a room much like the parlour in her grandmother’s apartment. Dark-panelled walls that simply cried out for Empire furniture—for weight and substance and toe-stubbing ugliness, for curtains that cascaded in thick folds like water held in some perpetual slow motion. Once, this room had been like her grandmother’s, she could tell—marks on the boards where some heavy piece had stood for years, horizontal lines of dust along the walls where pictures had hung as long—full of the overstuffed, grandiose furniture of the last century. This room had been stripped. Acres of empty shelving, a chandelier missing half its bulbs. Now the only objects were two small armchairs, sat upon the bare, carpetless boards like perching sparrows, dwarfed by the emptiness surrounding, facing each other—and two musical instruments. A full-size concert grand piano bearing the words “Bechstein, Berlin” on its upturned lid—and a cello, propped on a stand.

She was peering into the cello through the ƒ-holes, curious as to the maker, when she heard footsteps upon the boards behind her.

“It is a Goffriler, from the eighteenth century. Far, far older than my piano.”

Méret straightened up to her full four feet ten, and found herself looking at a tall, elegant, well-dressed man of indeterminate age—older than her father, perhaps, but then how old was her father? Younger than her grandfather, greying hair, lots of fine lines about the eyes, and nicotine on the fingers of his right hand—the hand he now held out, and down, to her.

“Good afternoon, young lady. Viktor Rosen at your service. Musician.”

She shook the hand.

“Méret Voytek. Schoolgirl . . . and musician.”

This brought a smile to his face. Teeth also stained with nicotine.

“You were curious about the cello?”

“I’m sorry. Mama tells me I should not be nosy.”

“Curiosity is not nosiness, my dear. Take a peek. Do you know Latin?”

She nodded.

“There is a large, if fading, label. And while the light is too dim for my old eyes I doubt it will be for yours.”

She bent again, peered into an ƒ-hole. It was like looking into a treasure chest. A flaking paper of history . . . a pirate’s map.

She hadn’t heard of this man. She would have known the name of Stradivari, and perhaps one or two others. Perhaps all the best cello makers were once Italian, just as the English had once made the best pianos. Her cello was German.

“May I see?”

Professor Rosen was gesturing towards her cello case, palm open, not touching without permission. Méret shrugged her coat off onto the back of a chair and took the cello from its case. It was beautiful, not scarred or marked in any way and next to the Goffriler it looked cheap and modern.

Rosen peered at the in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Postscript
• Notes, Anachronisms, Explanations . . . and stuff
• Acknowledgements . . .