Read Online The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online

is peppered with Germans and that somehow the
authorities permit it.
    Only
once Elsa and one of her German companions are arrested. A policeman new to
these parts hears the foreign accent and demands their identity cards; he is
not in the least satisfied. Elsa and her German quietly accept his invitation
to the police station. It is a still, sunny afternoon. The sergeant on duty is
vaguely aware that foreigners are locally engaged on secret work, but he is
taking no chances. Elsa gives a telephone number and the sergeant disappears.
She sits quietly with her companion, a middle-aged philosopher from Dresden.
They sit for a while under the eyes of the policeman who has brought them in.
Then the German starts to protest. He is indignant. His nerves have had enough
of policemen, and he has not taken the step of joining with the British in
order to find himself once more in the hands of any police whatsoever. ‘It’s
all right,’ Elsa keeps saying. ‘Don’t worry.’ The sergeant returns, this time
rather embarrassed but still not disposed to commit himself to an apology. The
young policeman stands guard by the door while the sergeant goes behind a
counter and starts writing in a ledger-like book with raised eyebrows to
betoken nonchalance. ‘To be treated like a pissing schoolboy!’ says the German
professor. The sergeant writes on, the policeman stands on, and Elsa continues
to reassure her companion: ‘They’ll come and rescue us in a minute or two.’
The security officer at the Compound turns up by car within twenty minutes,
accompanied by the Chief Constable of the County, formally recognises Elsa and
the prisoner, and whizzes them off in the car while the sergeant is still
saying, ‘We can’t take any chances you know.’ The security officer mutters all
the way to the Compound about what a raspberry the police are going to get
because of this, a raspberry in these days being already an outdated
expression meaning a reprimand. A man less set in his limited ways than the
security officer would call it a rocket in this English spring of 1944 when
rocket missiles are leaping on London and the word is one of such that you either
have to bandy it about as a euphemism or sit down, weep and give up.
    They
are walking along the path at the edge of the wood. Helmut has newly arrived at
the Compound. He is called simply Kiel, where Claus Kiel is always known as
Claus. Not that either name is the man’s own; but both at the beginning, after
they secretly volunteered for separate batches of the German prisoners of war,
and were tested, and vetted, and eavesdropped upon for months on end, opted for
the cover name of Kiel. Claus Kiel is a gentle ill-favoured boy with puny limbs
all at odds with each other, pale, thin and nervous, with a vague and tentative
leaning towards artistic appreciation. In any other fighting nation but Nazi
Germany he would have been rejected for military service, and this is plainly
why, when the opportunity arose, he took refuge with the British cause, lest
he should be sent back to Germany when one of the periodic exchanges of
prisoners should take place, and so be obliged to engage once more in the
physical nightmare of combat.
    Helmut
Kiel is a different concept altogether.
    According
to Allied information gathered in the course of the months preceding his
acceptance for British secret service, he was the wild bad boy of his German
training unit.
    Helmut
Kiel joined the defectors’ Compound a few weeks before Paul Hazlett. They have
a fight. It starts with an argument over their work, something trivial. The
real cause is Elsa. They knock each other about in a field behind the Compound.
Not Kiel, but Paul is rebuked, on the grounds that Paul has the unfair
advantage over Kiel in that he is not a prisoner of war. The affair is passed
off as one of those explosions of nerves that occur in the Compound and in the
billets.
    In the
house where Elsa is quartered she is in trouble. The room she occupies