The Other Side of Love Read Free Page A

one welcome guests?”
     
    “My dear,”
    Alfred interposed,
    “this is a special evening for the child. Possibly after a respectable time the young people may be excused?”
    His words ended on a questioning note.
     
    Clothilde drew her lips together. Once having determined a course of action, she found change all but impossible.
    “We shall see,”
    she said. At a chime, she glanced at the wall-clock.
    “Eight. Where is Siegfried?”
     
    Til see if he’s in his room,”
    Kathe said, darting up the overcarved staircase.
     
    As she neared the corner room, she heard the radio playing a waltz. Sigi’s door was ajar.
     
    Lieutenant Siegfried von Hohenau wore trousers with the deep red stripe of the High Command of the Army, yet in no way did he present the picture of a smartly turned out career officer. Comfortably slouched in an armchair, ashes from his pipe salting his tunic, circling a pawn back and forth above the chessboard in time to the waltz, he looked amiably content, a family man at home - which he was. Though he ha left for a military gymnasium in Potsdam when he was fourteWi and thereafter had slept infrequently in this large room with the twin gable peaks, he considered the Griinewald house as his true anchor-place. With much the same affable contentment, he viewed his mother’s English husband as his father.
     
    Kathe’s glance was drawn to the left wall, which was adorned with a tapestry so ancient that the picture had faded to scarcely differentiated browns. Once this tapestry had graced the stone castle whose original tower had been raised by Erhart von Graetz. Above the pair of dimly seen, badly fraying knights was woven the von Graetz family motto: Liebe zum Vaterland, Treue zumEid. From earliest childhood, Kathe had been drawn to the frayed must-odoured cloth with its inscription. Loyalty to country, fidelity to oath …
     
    Sigi, seeing his half-sister at the door, gave her a smile of remarkable sweetness. Despite the gulf of over eleven years and paternal bloodlines from opposing sides of the trenches, Sigi and Kathe were close.
    “A day to remember,”
    he said.
     
    17
     
    ‘My main worry was that I’d trip and fall.”
    She sank to the patterned carpet near his chair, clasping her hands around her upraised knees.
    “Sigi, I’ll get killed in the first qualifying heats.”
     
    “Stop fishing for compliments. We both know how fast you run.”
    The waltz stopped. An announcer began his excited description of the firework display over the Olympic Stadium. Sigi reached to turn off the radio.
     
    “I finally met my American cousin,”
    Kathe said.
     
    “Oh? He introduced himself?”
     
    “Vice versa. Then he glowered.”
     
    “At my little sister? I’ll challenge him to pistols at dawn!”
     
    “He thinks we all have swastika-shaped hearts and pray every morning and every night to the Fuhrer.”
     
    “Hitler!”
    Sigi snorted. Though not remotely military in his attitude (he had entered the Army only because he was too soft-hearted to deny the wishes of his dying paternal grandfather), he wholeheartedly shared one tenet of the Prussian officers”
    creed: LanceCorporal Hitler was a jumped-up politician.
    “Americans aren’t all for their president’s New Deal. Why should they assume we’re a hundred per cent behind the Nazi hero?”
     
    She shrugged, showing her own bafflement.
    “He’s not coming tonight. He said their coach won’t let them gad around. In the next breath he was telling me that tomorrow he’s visiting his parents and the British side at the Adlon.”
     
    Sigi tumbled chess pieces into the box.
    “Is that a note of disappointment?”
     
    “The party’s to honour him.”
     
    “What’s he like, this American cousin? No, don’t tell me. I can see by your eyes. He’s a handsome brute, a Hollywood film star.”
     
    “Oh, stop it, Sigi. You know I can’t bear teasing.”
     
    Car doors slammed outside. English voices.
     
    Kathe pushed to her