The Girl in Berlin by Elizabeth Wilson Page A

they’d been away together. The only sound, apart from Edith’s breathing, was the sigh of waves against the shingle beyond the front, as if the sea were sleeping too.
    He couldn’t see his watch, but somehow knew it was the dead pit of 2 a.m. He buried his face in the pillow, seized with the insomniac’s terror of unending hours of wakefulness. He turned over, but he was too hot. He turned over again, but found no comfortable position. He lay on his back for a while, rigid as a crusader on a tomb, but his mind had wound itself up and the interview was ticking away remorselessly in his head.
    Konrad Eberhardt had turned out not to be the lofty, serious European scientist and intellectual Alan had expected. The old man had been rude, for a start. He’d agreed to the interview over the telephone, but when Alan arrived on the doorstep the unkempt, grizzly old bear of a man had claimed to remember nothing about the appointment.
    ‘I’ve come to interview you about your work. You were going to talk to us about it.’
    ‘What is that you say? You’re interrupting my work.’
    ‘The BBC, sir. You agreed to talk to us—’
    ‘Agreed to talk to you? Did I? I don’t remember this, I don’t know who you are—’
    Eventually, however, Eberhardt had grudgingly allowed Alan across the threshold and led the way into a cluttered front room, furnished with items that had been modern in the thirties. Alan followed, aware of the old man’s smell, the odour of neglect, a mixture of tobacco, ear wax and even, faintly, urine.
    While Alan had fiddled with his hefty recording machine Eberhardt had watched him. ‘Visitors! I don’t need visitors. I had a visitor … you’ve been to see me already, haven’t you? Didn’t you come here yesterday?’ He peered at Alan, surly and suspicious. ‘Or was it the day before?’
    Alan plugged his machine into a dangerous-looking power point that hung off the wainscot. ‘May I sit down, sir?’
    Eberhardt gestured vaguely at a heavy cubic armchair. He stared bleakly at Alan and then abruptly sat down himself.
    ‘In the current political climate there is a great deal of interest in your scientific work,’ began Alan. ‘And on your philosophical reflections on that work.’
    The old man continued to peer at him suspiciously.
    As the intellectual permafrost of the Cold War settled over public discourse, Eberhardt the physicist had become an obscure, half-forgotten figure in postwar Britain, a semi-recluse since the death of his wife. He was still tenuously attached to a Cambridge laboratory, but was not thought to be doing new scientific work. Then, when his friendship with Klaus Fuchs, the convicted atomic secrets spy, became known, an aura of the vaguely sinister had got attached to him, although he had nothing to do with atomic research. Journalists had tried to interview him about Fuchs and hadn’t been satisfied by Eberhardt’s response. He was tainted by association.
    Eberhardt’s past in Germany was also mysterious. He’d had a reputation as a Marxist, but one too lofty ever actually to have joined the German Communist Party, the KPD. Yet he hadn’tleft Germany until 1938 and hadn’t spoken out against the Nazis, who in turn left him alone, at least to begin with. This was surprising because Alan had discovered that the old man had been a KPD member, but he always denied it and since the war he’d tacked sharply to the right of the political spectrum, swimming bravely, like many others, with the tide.
    Then unexpectedly he’d written a book of essays, part science, part philosophy, in which he’d set out some unusual and controversial – even contradictory – ideas.
    ‘Your recent book of essays aroused a lot of interest.’
    ‘Essays?’ The old man’s eyes seemed to cloud over behind the thick spectacles and he gazed blankly at Alan.
    ‘ The Role of the Scientist: Secrets, Lies and Truth .’ Alan repeated the book’s title gently, but with sinking heart. He hadn’t