Dreams of Innocence Read online

  Lisa Appignanesi

  DREAMS

  OF

  INNOCENCE

  DREAMS OF INNOCENCE

  A novel of dangerous passions and dangerous purities…

  Max Bergman, charismatic leader of the environmental movement, has vanished without trace. His acolyte, campaigning journalist, Helena Latimer, sets out to find him. What she finds instead of the man who has embodied her dreams is a turbulent history which draws her present into the vortex of the Great War and the excesses of a Germany where Nazism is on the rise. This is an epic story of dangerous passions and equally dangerous purities, of male fantasies, of fathers and fatherlands, where Mother Nature wears as many faces as her children wish of her.

  ©Lisa Appignanesi

  First Published in the UK by Harper Collins 1995

  ________________________________________________

  PRAISE FOR LISA APPIGNANESI

  ‘Her novels are high-profile psychological thrillers…gripping reads, but also deeply reflective.’

  Independent

  ‘It is the process of investigation and of excavating the past that appeals to her sensibility… those pockets of time in which the boundary between sanity and insanity is broken down.’

  Guardian

  ‘If you’re searching for that ultimate treat, an enthralling novel that won’t insult your intelligence, then Lisa Appignanesi should be just the ticket.’

  Kate Saunders

  ‘An erotic, deeply intelligent novel.’

  Rosie Thomas

  ‘A saga of passion and heartbreat that will keep you guessing…superbly plotted.’

  Cosmopolitan

  ‘A lush novel of erotic obsession.’

  San Francisco Chronicle

  Other Books by Lisa Appignanesi

  Novels

  _______

  Memory and Desire

  A Good Woman

  The Things We Do for Love

  The Dead of Winter

  Sanctuary

  Paris Requiem

  Unholy Loves

  Kicking Fifty

  The Memory Man

  Non-Fiction

  ____________

  All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

  Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800

  Freud’s Women (With John Forrester)

  Losing the Dead

  Simone de Beauvoir

  The Cabaret

  Femininity and the Creative Imagination: Proust, James and Musil

  Edited Volumes

  _______________

  Free Expression is No Offence

  The Rushdie File (with Sarah Maitland)

  Dismantling Truth (with Hilary Lawson)

  Postmodernism

  Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory

  For John

  Who Still Does

  And

  For Tilman Spengler

  Who Helped

  Nature is always valueless, but has been given value at some time, as a present – and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns humans!

  - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887)

  Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

  - D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  PART II

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  About the Author

  Prologue

  1985

  For the living, death is always an unfinished business. Like a telephone conversation cut off in mid-sentence. Or a lovers’ parting of the ways.

  Anger and longing follow, a gritty residue of frustration and sorrow. Not to mention a labyrinth of imaginings.

  When Helena Latimer found herself falling prey to these excesses, she was quick to chastise herself. She was neither a widow nor a bereft child - nor even an abandoned lover. She was, in fact, wonderfully fortunate: a young woman in her prime, with good friends and a profession she was committed to.

  Yet since Max Bergmann had slipped from her life, she had begun to understand why Orpheus had dared to traverse the shades of memory to rescue his lost one. Any action, it seemed, was preferable to the raging and tearful impotence - the howling why? - of mourning.

  Perhaps her condition was made worse by the fact that she wasn’t even certain of the death.

  The letter with the tell-tale script had arrived that very morning. Its presence, so casual amongst the bills and junk mail, had filled her with disbelief. She had an uncanny sense that a dead man had just stepped over the threshold.

  It was the letter which had propelled her so quickly to this city she had never before visited.

  ‘Helena, my dear,

  The whiteness here is a glare inviting shadows. The hills have the plump smoothness of down, but the mountains betray their crags and crevices…’

  So it had begun. And so it had gone on for three pages dense with description of awesome mountains and lofty woods, of pure rushing streams and icy skies, of a village, a house. But that was all.

  There had been no hard news, no address, not even a signature. There had been no explanation of why Max Bergmann had vanished without trace some two months back, no indication of his state or what might have led to his death.

  It was in fact only when Helena examined the blurred stamp on the envelope that she realised it postdated the press announcement that had flung her into despair: the notice of Max’s presumed death.

  Thoughts as frenzied as circus acrobats had tumbled through her.

  Max was alive. That date proved he was alive. The man, whose disappearance had thrown her into such tumult that she was forced to acknowledge he was the single most important being in her life, was alive. She must go to him, find him. He had written to her at last. She had felt so lost without him. But where was she to go? The letter must be in some kind of code. And Max was in trouble. He needed her. At least there was the postmark, the minute detail of a landscape to go by. She would trace him. What was one part of the skill of an investigative journalist but the ability to follow up clues? She was, at least, good at that.

  And so she had picked up the telephone in the kitchen of the Kensington house and made the first in the series of calls which had landed her here.

  MUNCHEN 8km - the autobahn sign announced and already the lights of the city played through the misty darkness.

  Helena sat back in the seat of the cab and looked out the window. A domed elephantine building loomed pale against the sooty night.

  ‘Was ist?’ she queried the driver.

  ‘Garching. The Max Planck Gesellschaft nuclear trial plant. They’re testing thermo-nuclear fusion.’

  Helena stored the facts for future use. She had rung the Green Headquarters in Munich before leaving to get a sense of what, if any, actions w
ere being planned, to see if anything might tally with Max Bergmann’s presence in the area. She knew it was a long shot. If Max was covering his tracks, then it would take more than a telephone conversation to discover why, let alone to find him. Yet find him she must. If he had written to her, then it was because he needed finding. By her. On the flight from London she had had wild visions of him held hostage in some dank room, his letter screened so that he could write only the most innocuous of messages.

  She had long suspected that aside from his management of Orion Farm, aside from his writing and ecological campaigning, Max Bergmann had a secret life of covert action in the Green cause. He always knew the smallest detail about any radical venture in America - whether it was to do with liberating laboratory animals or perching atop a crane about to start digging a dam which would pervert the natural course of a river.

  Then about eighteen months ago, without Max admitting it in so many words, she had had her proof. He had asked her whether in the course of her research on toxic waste, she might sniff out a little information for him - to do with the relocation of a plant. She had done so and a few weeks later she had read of an action at the plant’s proposed site.

  After that, at irregular intervals Max had given her little tasks to perform, never directly implicating her in any resulting action, never making anything quite explicit since that would have jeopardized her position. But Helena had known, and had been happy at their unspoken complicity.

  It was because of Max’s involvement in covert action, she sensed, that his deputy at Orion Farm had only made discreet enquiries of the police when Max had gone missing.

  Yet when she had spoken to James Whitaker this afternoon and read him Max’s letter, he had said without the least trace of irony, ‘It sounds as if the great man has taken himself on an extended solitary holiday.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that - without alerting you.’

  ‘No, perhaps not. But then again…’ She could almost hear James shrug. ‘Well, let me know what you find.’

  ‘I’ll find him,’ Helena had put more certainty in her voice than she felt.

  ‘Yes, if anyone can, you will,’ he paused. ‘You know, Helena, someone else could have posted the letter for him, after… after…’

  ‘His death,’ she had finished for him, adding quickly, ‘I don’t, won’t believe that.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  James had sounded strained, strange. But then she felt strained as well, abandoned; had felt strange ever since Max’s disappearance, as if gaping cracks had opened in the solid ground beneath her feet. With the notice of his presumed death, they threatened to swallow her. It was only with a great effort of the will that she could maintain even a precarious balance.

  The cab driver was chatting away, giving her a guided tour of the Munich sights now that she had prodded him. Her German was rusty, but she could understand him well enough.

  She had Emily to thank for that as for so much else. Emily with her old-fashioned button-up dresses and hand-knitted woollies; Emily the headmistress with her kind eyes and understanding smile. Emily who had taken her in, adopted her when she was a miserable twelve-year-old, saved her from the chaos of the foster family she never liked to think about. Emily who had given her everything, - languages, an education, a sense of her own beauty, the book-lined house with too many rooms in a Kensington that was far too good for the likes of a Helena. And love.

  Sometimes she thought it was for the love of Emily that she had done everything that she had done.

  But Emily was dead now, had died five years ago. It was soon after her death that Helena had met Max Bergmann, had written the profile of him which had been instrumental in her getting a job with the paper. In a sense Max had replaced Emily as the stable, guiding force of her life. And that was the horror of it all. Without Max she felt utterly alone.

  They had reached the town centre now. Elegant facades shone pale in the lamplight. Despite the lateness of the hour, the wide avenue swarmed with people. In the labyrinth of narrower streets into which they turned, the taxi could only inch its way forward.

  It was just as Helena noticed that the crowds were in part composed of masked revellers, that the driver announced,’Fasching. Carnival.’

  A white faced Pierrot arm in arm with a scarlet Colombine came towards them. She could see from their mouths that they were singing, but the noise of the streets transformed song to grimace.

  A rap on the window opposite startled her. Helena turned, only to see a leering death’s head.

  She started back, terrified of the apparition, as if it were an omen.

  ‘Your hotel is only two streets away.’ the driver looked round at her. ‘It’ll be quicker for you to walk, if your case isn’t too heavy.’ He pointed beyond a tall gaily striped Maypole, across a teaming market square.

  ‘Yes, alright,’ Helena felt a little unsure. But she paid him, hoicked her bag over her shoulder, felt herself propelled by the noisy crowd.

  An arm groped its way round her back, prodding her to one side, moving her towards a door. She found herself in a huge bierkeller, throbbing with sound.

  ‘Nein,’ she protested, to the Harlequin at her side. ‘I need to go the other way.’

  ‘A drink first,’ he didn’t seem to hear her and that arm still gripped.

  She struggled away, dropping her bag in the process. Someone tumbled over it. There was a huge raucous laugh from the crowd, as if some deliberate trick had been performed. She felt utterly unnerved. And then someone planted a beery kiss on her lips.

  ‘Eine süsse Ausländerin,’ the figure grinned grotesquely from a pink-painted face crowned by a plaited peasant-girl wig.

  Without thinking, Helena slapped the man fiercely across the face.

  For the briefest moment, there was silence around her as the man glowered.

  ‘Here, let me help you,’ a tall figure in motley emerged from the crowd, picked up her bag and manoeuvered her swiftly back out through the door.

  ‘Where are you trying to get to?’

  Helena suddenly felt limp. ‘Falkenturmstrasse, Hotel An der Oper,’ she mumbled, registered that she was looking into the masked face of a fool, a veritable medieval fool with cap and bells.

  ‘If I take your arm, will you bite?’

  She shook her head, felt shamefacedly grateful to be able to lean against his bulk. He led her through cracks in the crowd, moved with the surge of it and then at last turned into a quieter street, opened a door to the relative stillness of a lobby.

  ‘It’s carnival, you know, a pagan free for all. No good trying to fight it.’

  He bowed slightly, the bells on his cap tinkling, and before she could thank him or protest that she had merely been taken by surprise, he disappeared through the doors and was lost in the crowd.

  Helena looked after him for a moment. Then with a shrug, she proceeded to the desk. She was she realised exceptionally, unusually tired. The strain of these last months had certainly taken its toll if she couldn’t even negotiate her way through a boisterous crowd. Her friend Claire had been right to intimate that this whole matter of Max’s disappearance had exerted a disproportionate hold on her. It was the passive waiting, that was the worst.

  Tomorrow things would be better, Helena consoled herself. Action at last. But first bed. And some food. She hadn’t eaten since that morning. In fact a snack in bed with the television flickering her to sleep would be ideal.

  The bed was deliciously cool, crisply white. Helena stretched out on it with a sigh, before forcing herself to sit up and munch at the salad, pick at the cheese, the thick hunk of dark bread. She sipped the fragrant white wine and watched the images on the screen. But she couldn’t focus on them. Instead the lines of Max’s letter, all but memorized now, replayed themselves in her mind together with the progress of their relationship. Trying to penetrate the mystery of the first had in the course of the day become fused for her with understanding the second.

  Despite the
state that had taken her over since Max’s disappearance, Helena was not by instinct or inclination a navel-gazer. In fact her one, longer-term relationship with a man had teetered on that very fact. She didn’t particularly want to know the why’s and the wherefore’s of her own choices and movements nor those of any other. There was far too much to accomplish in the world: endless interrogation of the psyche’s meanderings was an idle luxury, a waste of valuable time and energy. Either one knew things instantly or one didn’t. In the first case, one acted. In the second case as well, though momentary confusion might entail a slightly more rigorous pulling up of the proverbial socks.

  She had known about Max instantly, had recognized that he was someone special as soon as she had heard him speak at that environmental congress she had attended in New York all those years ago when she was just a stripling of a girl struggling to find a voice and a job. Max had stood tall behind the podium, a big man with a noble white head and austere features. His eyes beneath the shock of white hair were fiery, his spare movements tautly athletic. But it was the vibrancy of his voice, the authority behind his words, as if they had emerged from a deep well of silent reflection, which had made her suddenly think that she was in the presence of that rare being, a sage.

  He had evoked the fragility of a planet subjected to rapacious marauders, an ancient precious earth, vastly rich in the variety of its species. And now it was being despoiled, transformed into a dusty desert. At the end of the speech, it was as if she had experienced a revelation - her hands were trembling, her mouth dry.

  She had managed to persuade him into an interview, had travelled with him to the farm in the hills of New Hampshire, the first of many subsequent visits, and had interviewed him there. She was tongue-tied, shy, in awe of his presence, but in the course of the two days she had spent there, he had filled her with confidence. It was as if his own zeal, his own absolute integrity flowed into her, making her strong, aware.