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Quietly, as if concealing it (from Erich or himself, he wasn’t sure) he had taken the lease on the flat for another six months: so that was that. One decision made; another postponed. He would stay: for a while. He’d mentioned to Biggles at Christmas that he’d been considering it; had slid it gently into the conversation, late one evening, when Biggles had been sitting curled up and self-contained next to the fire, as if slipping him a folded-up note in prep, from one hand to another under the desk without either of them having to look at it. He’d write to confirm that he’d done it. It was cowardice, of course, even though he wasn’t sure which he was afraid of - that Biggles might mind terribly, or that he might not mind at all.
January had been bitterly cold, he’d thought, hardly rising above freezing all month: cold and dry, no snow, clear skies and thick frosts. The lake in the Tiergarten had frozen; they’d gone and walked beside it, watching people skate, feet crunching through the ice-crisp grass, he and Erich on a still Sunday afternoon.
Then came February; and Algy found that January hadn’t been cold at all.
“Is it normally like this?” he asked von Stalhein on the first of the month, as they stood near the hangar at Tempelhof, waiting for the plane to be ready. He was wearing all the layers he normally needed to feel comfortable at ten thousand feet, and still he could feel the chill.
“No,” von Stalhein had replied. “It is not.”
Algy found he had begun to think of the temperature in celsius, like the German newspapers, because it somehow felt less depressing that way than in the familiar fahrenheit. Minus ten celsius by day, minus fifteen by night, and the Havel froze, and the Spree, and the Elbe as far as Hamburg, and the water in the glass on his bedside table overnight. They spent a couple of days flying supplies out to the great commercial ships that were frozen fast in the river, landing on skis on the ice, terrified that there would be branches, tree trunks, frozen into the surface, under the dusting of snow, ready to rip the undercarriage out of the plane or overturn it.
The office, with its thin walls and drafty doors, was miserably cold; so were the trams, and the buses, and Algy took to huddling on the underground as often as he could, relishing the press of bodies as half the population of Berlin seemed to take shelter down there. It was all right if you kept moving, kept the blood flowing, didn’t let yourself pay attention to the sharp scratch of the air; but anywhere that you sat, anywhere you stopped, became purgatorial. His flat was impossibly cold, in a way that sank into the bones; it stole into his sleep, pulling him shivering from his bed in the small hours to walk up and down, pile on extra layers.
He and Erich went to a play, one evening; they kept their overcoats on in the theatre, kept on scarves and gloves, and you could see the plumes of the actors’ breath in the air. Afterwards they walked back through the crystalline streets; and in Algy’s flat there was ice on the inside of the windows, and they hadn’t taken one step inside the door before Erich had on an expression which strongly suggested that a quick tumble on the sofa really wasn’t on the cards, and honestly Algy couldn’t pretend he was surprised.
“No wonder you’ve been looking so tired lately,” Erich had murmured, dryly.
“I don’t begin to understand how people cope in Canada,” Algy said. “Apparently it’s like this half the winter.”
“Perhaps in Canada they don’t have to stuff their window frames with newspaper to stop the drafts.”
Algy shrugged. “Any time you feel like upping my salary so I can afford to rent somewhere the windows fit better, feel free.”
Von Stalhein stopped, one gloved hand on the coal-fired stove, now stone cold. “Why don’t you pack a bag,” he said abruptly. “Three bodies will heat a flat better than two, and our windows fit better than yours.”
And for a moment, Algy could only stand, not knowing what to say. “Oh,” he said, in the end. Then: “Look, Erich, it’s a generous offer - “
“It is practical,” Erich interrupted. “Until the cold weather breaks. But if you would prefer to be here - “
“No, it’s not that,” said Algy, awkwardly. “It’s more - well, I’m just not sure what Lotte would make of it.”
Erich looked at him, then; there was a small, a very small smile on his lips. “Do you think she doesn’t already know?”
There was a wash of warmth that went through him at that, even in the cold room: perhaps embarrassment, that they had been so painfully obvious; but perhaps not. Algy found he was grinning. “All right. Thanks.”
So he went and packed a bag: pyjamas, small kit, warm woolen layers, thick socks, as many jumpers as he could stuff into the holdall; and there was a curious feeling in the pit of his stomach as he did so, as he listened to the sounds of Erich prowling about in the sitting room, picking up books, photographs, shuffling through the handful of records he’d brought with him from home. Something like nerves, something like excitement; something he didn’t want to look at too closely. Better to keep moving.
Erich’s flat was warmer; not comfortable, not by any stretch of the imagination, but not so bitter, with heat trickling from the hot-air system, taking the chill off the air; and in Erich’s bed, in the small hollow under the mound of eiderdowns and blankets, Algy pressed against him, shuddered at the touch of his cold hands, kissed him and kissed him in the winter stillness, in the pocket of warmth they had made between them.
In the days it was better: still cold enough to freeze the breath in your lungs, but at least you could move, could walk, could feel the blood flowing sluggishly through you, and Algy was fervently grateful for a wardrobe which contained as many warm layers as his own did. The coldest winter for three hundred years, they said; the perfect time to move to Berlin. London was cold, apparently; Berlin was ruinous.
Still, in the days they were busy, at least to begin with: all the frozen rivers, the snow-blocked roads across half of Europe, meant planes were in the air for every one of the short hours of daylight and half the dark hours too, carrying mail, medicine, emergency supplies. And in the evening they went back to the flat; and Erich would cook, one of the five cheap hearty meals that Lotte claimed he’d learned to cook when she was thirteen and had been cooking every week since then, and Lotte and Algy would wash up and tidy up, bickering over who got to have their hands in the hot water that evening; and Algy didn’t look at it too closely, resolutely didn’t look. Afterwards he would huddle grumpily up against one side of Erich on the settee, and Lotte would huddle grumpily up against the other, and the three of them would all sit huddled grumpily together, like hedge-sparrows in a blackthorn bush, meshed in dark branches with a roof of snow above them.
The nights were worse. The temperature was still dropping. On the night of the tenth it hit twenty-five below freezing, and it hovered there, more or less, for the next week: too cold to undress, too cold for anything but to wrap himself around Erich and long for the morning. It was like the ice creeping up the window pane: slow and subtle and relentless, freezing the whole of Europe into silence and immobility.
Slowly, the ice crept in; the world receded: first Tempelhof, then the market three streets away, then the front door of the flats, and at last there was only this: these four walls, white and chill. At the worst of it Algy refused to get out of Erich’s bed for the best part of a day, burying his head under layers of down, because only by trapping his breath close by his face to keep the air warm could he stop his head from aching with every inhalation, even inside. He pressed up against Erich’s side, in the dimness and the quiet, oddly chaste: for even lying curled up around each other the cold crept in, deadening desire in layers of heavy wool. What was left - what was left was a curious comradeship: a winter’s truce. They read; talked, a little; silently learned the angles and corners of one another, how they fitted together.
“Here,” said Lotte, a couple of days later, holding out a sheet of thick paper to him. “I’ve called it ‘Landscape with Figures’.”
She had been sketching, these past few days, fumbling with pencils and charcoal in her gloved fingers, chafing at the the loss of liberty, of perspective, finding mountains in the bookshelves and seascapes in the wet draining board. It was one of her sketches that she held out to him now, in the sitting room, as they sat at the table over cups of hot coffee, their breath steaming almost as much as the cups, while Erich braved the street outside for fresh bread. It was a quick and careless thing, a small page, torn at one edge: and at first sight it did look like a landscape, a little. An undulating mass of lines, like hills, like rolling scrub-covered downs, snow-streaked; but it wasn’t hills at all, it was two figures on a settee, and a mound of blankets. One sitting, a straight grey line, dark head bowed over a book in his hand; the other lying, head resting in the first figure’s lap, heaped in blankets to the neck, every line of him a line of sleep. Not enough precision of feature to be able to identify either, not if you didn’t know them; but something so familiar in the shape of them that it made him catch his breath.
“Thank you,” he said, and found his throat tight.
“I wanted - “ she said, and then broke off, uncharacteristically tentative. “Well. I suppose I wanted to say it was all right, but that’s absurd. You don’t need my blessing. But - well, I suppose you have it, all the same. For what it’s worth.”
He found, suddenly, that he was thinking of Cecily: Cecily who used to trail around after him, demanding his time, his attention, his toys, who had always been there whether he wanted her or not, until he went away to school; who he’d last seen three years ago, at her wedding; who was expecting a baby now, or so his mother’s letters said. He wondered what she would have said to all this; and found he couldn’t imagine.
February the fourteenth. Valentine’s day. Twenty below freezing. Algy placed the sketch carefully between two books, so it wouldn’t get bent, or smudged, and put it away in his holdall; he didn’t show it to Erich, just as Lotte hadn’t.
It wasn’t real of course: none of it. It was one of those crystal globes he’d seen in Wertheim’s department store, with an intricately detailed little model of a gingerbread cottage inside, and shreds of snowflake that swirled as you shook it. But while you were inside, while the snow swirled and the crystal shell contained you, it felt terribly real.
When the thaw came - well, you couldn’t exactly call it a thaw, not yet, the air was still somewhere below freezing even at midday - but you could feel the change, all the same, between one day and the next: a wash of dampness in the air that felt mild as springtime by contrast with what had gone before. The whole of Berlin was shifting, restlessly, in its frozen sleep, like the creaking of ice on a river before it cracks. They ventured outside; marvelled at the ice, a shell of diamond around every twig, every branch; bought a sack of oranges, shockingly gold, shockingly green. And then back to work, to Tempelhof, to the city falling away below him and the greening landscape spreading out on every side, and his eyes aching from the brightness and the distance.
On the twenty-third, the frost melted, for the first time in a month: and Algy packed his things.
“Give Lotte my love when she gets in,” he said, standing in the entryway, bag at his feet, coat over his arm, a miracle not to be needing it indoors any longer. “Though I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see the back of me. Three weeks is rather longer than I imagine you were expecting for an impromptu house guest.”
“Lotte will miss having someone around to back up her choices of records,” said Erich, dryly. “And it is not every year one has to endure the worst weather in three centuries.”
“Well, let’s hope not, anyway,” Algy said, and felt the awkwardness, the sudden sense of constraint. It was hard not to feel like some regrettable third-cousin, shuffling off after outstaying their Christmas welcome.
Then Erich stepped forward, into the space Algy had felt around himself; rested one hand on his hip, cupped his cheek with the other; kissed him.
And he could feel it, there, the something different that there was between them now, like - like the tingling as the blood rushes back into numbed fingers: exciting, uncomfortable, urgent and new, clumsy and uncertain, as if they neither of them knew the new shape of things yet. They were neither of them quite as they had been a month ago: in stillness and silence and proximity they had shifted, accommodated themselves one to the other, as they lay together, lapped in midwinter ice; and what they would be when the thaw came Algy didn’t quite know.
He wanted to find out.