‘My God, you can sleep,’ he said. ‘I went out to a street stall to buy these.’ He held up a large bunch of glistening purple grapes.
‘Well?’ His green eyes looked straight into hers. ‘How are you this morning? Obviously you slept well. I couldn’t… I was too excited.’
‘I still feel sleepy,’ she murmured, making a small performance of rubbing her eyes. ‘I take a while to wake up. I never know how I feel until I’ve had my first coffee.’
‘Have a grape then,’ he said, breaking off a small bunch and dangling them over her mouth. ‘Lord Byron ate exactly this variety of grape for breakfast every morning when he stayed in Lisbon.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’ He smiled down at her. ‘But my very German, very efficient guidebook said that he stayed in Lisbon. And how would he have been able to resist grapes like these?’
Caroline raised herself up on one elbow. Her Byron book hadn’t mentioned Portugal, but she was less than halfway through it. Karl’s interest in Byron was a pleasant surprise. Most of the English men she knew seemed to be uninterested in the poetry of their own culture. And here was someone who wasn’t even a native speaker of English. The usual unkind thought popped into her head. Perhaps he had seen her Byron book and was manufacturing another of the many coincidences in reading taste that they had discovered on their day together in Mykonos. But that wasn’t possible. Her new book was still in her handbag, which was back in her own room. And on the beach he had also claimed some enthusiasm for Jane Austen, a most impressive confession for a man. In her experience male readers tended to view Austen as too domestic, too apolitical and just too feminine to attract the interest of a serious red-blooded male, no matter how literary.
‘Maybe Byron only went there for a day.’ Karl picked up a solid-looking, red book from the floor. ‘German travel book writers are very thorough. Even if Byron just got off the boat for 10 minutes and walked around, they would have felt obliged to mention it.’
‘I haven’t read enough of my book to be sure.’ Caroline picked a plump grape off the plate Karl was holding and bit into it, savouring the sensation as it burst, filling her mouth with sweet cool liquid.
‘Byron would never have eaten these,’ she said, taking a small bunch. ‘He was always fussing about his weight. He’d get a paunch and then go on a diet of dry biscuits and vinegar to slim down.’
Karl smiled and looked down at his own lean brown midriff.
‘Poor Byron. I suppose he thought his girlfriends wouldn’t love him any more if he was fat.’
Caroline tried not to stare at the smooth ridges of muscle beneath the skin of Karl’s stomach.
‘More likely he wouldn’t have loved himself any more.’
‘You are a cynic, Caroline,’ said Karl. ‘Despite his great success as a poet, he must have remained vulnerable. He had a… Klumpfuss… how do you say it in English…’
‘A club foot,’ said Caroline. ‘And I’m not cynical, I’m realistic.’ She looked down at Karl’s long bony feet with their neatly trimmed toenails.
‘Anyway forget Byron’s feet. What about his stomach? Does this very efficient, very German book of yours mention important things like the name of Byron’s favourite Lisbon restaurant?’
Karl took the book back. ‘No. But it says that he went to the town of Sintra. That’s only an hour’s drive from here. And he said it was as beautiful as the Garden of Eden. I think we should go there.’
‘I think we should too,’ said Caroline, stretching her arms and legs beneath the covers. ‘But where do you think Lord Byron would have taken his first cafe com leite of the day?’
Karl smiled.
‘If he was anything like you, Lady Caroline, I suppose he would have gone to the nearest place he could find.’
‘OK.’ Caroline sat up to get out of bed. ‘Then that’s where we’ll go.’
Karl caught her wrist as she swung her legs to the floor. ‘Are you glad you came?’
Caroline paused. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘You don’t sound very convinced.’
She looked down at the Stuttgart Football Club T-shirt that Karl had given her to sleep in and smoothed out some imaginary wrinkles.
‘I’m just not good in the morning,’ she lied. ‘Let me just have a quick shower and we’ll go.’
Caroline leant her forehead against the cool tiles of the shower recess and sighed as the warm water rushed over her head. ‘Oh well, you’re here now,’ she lectured herself in the mirror as she brushed her hair. ‘You’ve made a mistake but he’s nice – and he actually reads books. And you don’t have to marry him. Just enjoy the travelling.’
They walked in silence to a dusty little cafe in a street around the corner from their hotel.
‘Has this place been cleaned since Byron’s time?’ Karl flicked imaginary dust from the chair he had just pulled out for her.
Caroline didn’t answer. Were all Germans obsessed with cleanliness? Part of the work in her German linguistics course at university had involved a comparison of Roget’s Thesaurus with the German equivalent. How many different German words for ‘dirt’ had there been? Scores, she seemed to recall.
‘Well, I just associate it with this exaggerated love of order. You know. Signs everywhere telling people to keep off the grass, and everybody obeying them.’
‘Ordung muss sein.’ Karl lit a cigarette. ‘We must have order.’
That sounds like something that should have been written over the gate of a concentration camp,’ she snapped back, suddenly irritated with him.
‘Arbeit macht frei. Ordung muss sein.’
Karl bit his lip and looked at the floor and Caroline felt herself blushing. What a predictable insult that had been. And mean-spirited.
Even Zosia, in her more rational moments, knew that it wasn’t fair to blame all Germans for what had happened during the war. And Caroline had studied so many periods of German history at university that she didn’t automatically think ‘Nazi’ the moment someone said ‘German’.
For all she knew Karl’s parents might have been resistance fighters, or concentration camp inmates themselves. She doubted that, however. He seemed too conventional.
She glanced across at his clear-skinned, untroubled face. He looked solid. Middle class stock. Father in the army? Maybe even low ranks of the SS. She tried imagining Karl’s broad-shouldered trim-waisted figure in a well-cut SS uniform, a sharp-peaked cap shading his chiselled features. It worked. But his father would have done something clean – requisitions, perhaps. There was no sense of inherited family angst about Karl. No guilt, no troubles.
‘I didn’t notice too much Ordnung in your room in the hotel.’ She picked up his cigarette packet. Low tar, low nicotine. Very careful smoking.
Karl laughed. ‘That’s because I’m a German on holidays.’ He flicked his ash into the ashtray.
‘There’s a difference?’
He nodded.
‘I couldn’t possibly explain it. You’d have to observe me in my home environment to see. Why don’t you come back with me and have a look around?’ He smiled. ‘No strings attached. You’ll be allowed to leave the country.’
Caroline shrugged. ‘I told you. I’ve been there. I studied there for two months when I was a student.’
‘I remember.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘But I also remember hearing that