Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page A

things. I say no more.’
    â€˜It’s for a department of the Foreign Office,’ smiled Roper, looking, with his red round face and short-cropped hair and severely functional spectacles, as German as his wife. It was suddenly like being inside a German primer: Lesson III –
Abendessen
. After food Roper would probably light up a meerschaum.
    â€˜Is it for the Secret Police?’ asked Brigitte, tucking in and already lightly dewed with fierce eater’s sweat. ‘My husband is soon to be a Doktor.’ I didn’t see the connection.
    Roper explained that only in Germany was a doctorate the first degree. And then: ‘We don’t have secret police in England, at least I don’t think so.’
    â€˜We don’t,’ I said. ‘Take it from me.’
    â€˜My husband,’ said Brigitte, ‘studies the sciences.’
    â€˜Your husband,’ I said, ‘will be a very important man.’ Roper was eating too hard to blush with pleasure. ‘Science is going to be very important. The new and terrible weapons that science is capable of making are a great priority in the peaceful work of reconstruction. Rockets, not butter.’
    â€˜There is much butter on the table,’ said Brigitte, stone-facedly chewing. And then: ‘What you say I do not understand.’
    â€˜There’s an Iron Curtain,’ I told her. ‘We’re not too sure of Russia’s intentions. To keep the peace we must watch out for war. We’ve learned a great deal since 1938.’
    â€˜Before you should have learned,’ said Brigitte, now on the cheese course. ‘Before England should this have known.’ Roper kindly unscrambled that for her. ‘It was Russia,’ said Brigitte, ‘that was the fiend.’
    â€˜Enemy?’
    â€˜
Ja
,
ja
,
Feind
. Enemy.’ She tore at a piece of pumpernickel as though it were a transubstantiation of Stalin. ‘This Germany did know. This England did know not.’
    â€˜And that’s why Germany persecuted the Jews?’
    â€˜International
Bolschevismus
,’ said Brigitte with satisfaction. Then Roper started, eloquently, going on at length. Brigitte, his teacher, listened, nodded approval, cued him sometimes, rarely corrected. Roper said: ‘We, that is to say the British, must admit we have nearly everything to blame ourselves for. We were blind to it all. Germany was trying to save Europe, no more. Mussolini had tried once, but with no help from those who should have helped. We had no conception of the power and ambition of the Soviet Union. We’re learning now, but very late. Three men knew it well, but they were all reviled. Now only one of them is living. I refer,’ he said, to enlighten my ignorance, ‘to General Franco in Spain.’
    â€˜I know all about General bloody Franco,’ I said coarsely. ‘I did a year in Gibraltar, remember. Given the chance, he would have whipped through and taken the Rock. You’re talking a lot of balls,’ I added.
    â€˜It is you who talk the balls,’ said Brigitte. She picked up words quickly, that girl. ‘To my husband please listen.’
    Roper talked on, growing more shiny as he talked. There was one thing, I thought in my innocence: here was a man who, when he got down to research, as he would very shortly, would be quite above suspicion – a man who would be susceptible to no blandishments of the one true fiend. What I didn’t like was this business of England’s guilt and need to expiate great wrong done to bloody Deutschland. I took as much as I could stand and then broke in with: ‘Ah God, man, how can you justify all the atrocities, all the suppression of free thought and speech, the great men sent into exile when not clubbed to death – Thomas Mann, Freud –’
    â€˜Only the smutty writers,’ said Brigitte, meaning
schmutzig
.
    â€˜If you’re going to wage war,’ said Roper,