Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online

long in those days.’
    â€˜He was executed,’ said this Roper. ‘He died for his beliefs. It was my grandfather who dug up all this, you know. A hobby for his retirement. See, there he is – John Edwin Roper. Died at eighty-three.’
    â€˜One of the first Elizabethan martyrs,’ I said. ‘So you have a martyr in the family.’
    â€˜He was a fool,’ pronounced Roper, sneering. ‘He could have shut up about it.’
    â€˜Like the Germans who saw it through,’ I suggested.
    â€˜My father died,’ said Brigitte. Then she marched out to the kitchen.
    While she was clattering the supper things I had to congratulate Roper and say what a handsome, intelligent, pleasant girl she seemed to me to be. Roper said eagerly: ‘Oh, there’s no doubt about the intelligence’ (as though there might be some doubt about the other qualities). ‘She speaks remarkably good English, doesn’t she? She’s had a rough time, you know, what with the war. And her father was a very early casualty. In Poland it was, ’39. But she’s not a bit reproachful. Towards me, I mean, or towards the British generally.’
    â€˜The British were never in Poland.’
    â€˜Oh, well, you know what I mean, the Allies. It was all one war, wasn’t it? All the Allies were responsible, really.’
    â€˜Look,’ I said, giving him the hard eye, ‘I don’t get all this. You mean that your wife, as a representative of the German nation, very kindly forgives us for Hitler and the Nazis and the bloody awful things they did? Including the war they started?’
    â€˜He didn’t start it, did he?’ said Roper brightly. ‘It was we who declared war on him.’
    â€˜Yes, to stop him taking the whole bloody world over. Damn it, man, you seem to have forgotten what you did six years’ fighting for.’
    â€˜Oh, I didn’t actually fight, did I?’ said literalist Roper. ‘I was there to help save lives.’
    â€˜Allied lives,’ I said. ‘That was a kind of fighting.’
    â€˜It was worth it, whatever it was,’ said Roper. ‘It led me to her. It led me straight to Brigitte.’ And he looked for a moment as though he were listening to Beethoven.
    I didn’t like this one little bit, but I didn’t dare say anything for the moment because Brigitte herself came in with the supper, or with the first instalments of it. It looked as though it was going to be a big cold help-yourself spread. She brought serially to the table smoked salmon (the salty canned kind), cold chicken, a big jellied ham (coffin-shaped from its tin), dishes of gherkins, pumpernickel, butter – a whole slab, not a rationed wisp – and four kinds of cheese. Roper opened bottled beer and made as to pour some for me into a stein. ‘A glass, please,’ I said. ‘I much prefer a glass.’
    â€˜From a stein,’ said Brigitte, ‘it smacks better.’
    â€˜I prefer a glass,’ I smiled. So Roper got me a glass with the name and coat-of-arms of a lager firm gilded on it. ‘Well,’ I said, doing the conventional yum-yum hand-rubbing before falling to, ‘this looks a bit of all right. You’re doing very nicely for yourselves,
nicht wahr
?’ At that time British rations were smaller than they’d been even at the worst point of the war. We now had all the irksome appurtenances of war without any of its glamour. Roper said: ‘It’s from Brigitte’s Uncle Otto. In America. He sends a food parcel every month.’
    â€˜God bless Uncle Otto,’ I said, and, after this grace, I piled smoked salmon on to thickly buttered black bread.
    â€˜And you,’ said Brigitte, with a governess directness, ‘what is it that you do?’ The tones of one who sees a slack lounging youth who has evaded call-up.
    â€˜I’m on a course,’ I said. ‘Slavonic languages and other