Free The Good Liar by Nicholas Searle Page B

smile.
    Stephen pushes the trolley while Roy examines the plants
    expertly, pondering the labels carefully, feeling leaves, fingering soil.
    They move together from stand to stand, Roy peering while Ste-
    phen looks on, waiting for conversation that does not come.
    Eventually Roy, maintaining his equable tone, says, ‘Why don’t
    you clear off and let me get on with this? I can manage on my own.
    I can see you’re bored and you’re as much use to me as a chocolate
    teapot.’
    Stephen goes inside to contemplate uncomprehendingly twine,
    slug pellets, multicoloured reels of hose and garden lights, while
    Roy continues with his task, examining plants intently before selecting one in particular, transporting it in a shuffle to the trolley that is filling, and moving to the next stand. Stephen will be summoned
    eventually to wheel the teetering mass of greenery to the tills and then to load the car.
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Chapter Five
Berlin Alexanderplatz
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    ‘A holiday,’ exclaims Betty.
    ‘Oh yes,’ replies Roy with enthusiasm. ‘I could do with a bit of
    sun on my back. Spain? Portugal?’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ she says, ‘I need something to stimulate my
    brain. I thought a city break. And I’m paying, I insist.’
    ‘We’ll see about that,’ says Roy, not entirely convincingly. ‘New
    York, then. The Big Apple. All those museums. A Broadway show.’
    She laughs. ‘I may be a woman of means, Roy, but I don’t think
    my budget will stretch that far. Not if we’re to do it in style.’
    ‘Very well, then. Barcelona.’
    ‘I was thinking more central Europe. Prague, Budapest, Vienna
    perhaps.’
    ‘All right, then.’
    It is not what he would necessarily wish for, but she who pays the
    piper . . . And a break will set him up nicely for the summer. There is a chance that there may even be a spot of spring sun. She browses the internet while he sits with his paper and gives his monosyllabic responses to her bright suggestions.
    In the end, it is Berlin. He makes a late counter- bid for Rome, or Venice, or even Bruges. But Berlin it is to be. The city of the
    thousand- year Reich, of Kristallnacht, Frederick the Great, Check-
    point Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate. There’ll be enough history
    there to last them a lifetime.
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    On a blissful spring morning they walk out of their smart, ultra-
    modern hotel and into the middle of it all. Unter den Linden rolls
    away before them towards the Brandenburg Gate, if they can ignore
    the sundry hawkers and beggars jabbering at them desperately in
    various forms of German. Roy, despite his years, is still imposing
    and a glare is all it takes. He wraps his big arm protectively around Betty’s shoulder and she smiles.
    ‘It’s all here,’ he says, waving his other arm expansively.
    It is Berlin as imagined, constructed on a heroic scale to convey
    the new national confidence of the late nineteenth century, broad,
    masculine, frightening, in grey stone. The street, however, is gashed along its sternum as the U- Bahn line is brought to this part of what was once East Berlin. Berlin is being rebuilt and the horizon is dominated by cranes. A new paradigm of German confidence is being
    constructed here, the technocratic new alongside the imperial old.
    They spend three hours in the Deutsches Historisches Museum,
    which is not exactly how Roy had envisaged it: Betty peering at each exhibit with exaggerated interest while he tags along with an
    ill- disguised bored impatience to which she seems happily oblivi-
    ous. Well, she used to an academic, he reflects as he looks at his
    watch, and he will shortly be able to sit down to a decent beer.
    But no: after a lunch of greasy bratwurst, smeared in garish mus-
    tard, bought from a street seller – a surprise, this, for Roy, given Betty’s dainty elegance – they are off again. They take the S- Bahn train and the bus to