Free The Dower House by Malcolm Macdonald Page B

ever meet.’
    â€˜You’ll meet.’
    â€˜So tell me about him. He’s from Berlin?’
    â€˜Vienna – but he was at home in Berlin, too, I’m sure. Until he was nineteen. When he came here in ’thirty-nine he was Wolfgang Vogel – with a V, but after the English released all German Jewish refugees from detention, he changed it to Wolf Fogel – with an F, and pronouncing “Wolf” just like that – the English way. And he had a pretty good war, too. Can you imagine! The British locked up pro-Nazis and escaped Jews in the same camp together!’
    â€˜Naturally.’ Felix shrugged. ‘Why should they understand? How many British can swim twenty-two miles?’
    She took his meaning at once and smiled ruefully. ‘Quite so – we are dreadful.’ But she spoke the word with a hint of pride. And she went on to describe how Fogel was released and went straight into the ministry, working on leaflets to drop over the enemy. That was during the phoney war, when all the RAF ever dropped was leaflets.
    And that led him into publishing – information books . . . keep-your-chin-up books . . . fight-for-our-heritage books – which allowed him to print in colour when others had to make do with black-and-white, and it also gave him entrée to intellectual and cultural circles – all of which he was now parleying into a profitable little peacetime business.
    â€˜But,’ she added, ‘the actual process of writing fills him with a sort of fidgety indignation. Words don’t elude him – words on the air, words that can fade before the breath on them is dry, deniable words. But real words on real paper are like a contract with the truth. They can return to haunt him. Written words, for him, reek with the stench of costly litigation.’
    Felix chuckled. ‘But not for you, I think?’
    â€˜That’s why we complement each other perfectly,’ she replied. ‘He always gets others to do the writing for him. And as for editing, subbing, and problems of layout . . . in between the occasional flashes of his undoubted genius, they just bore him. In short,’ she laughed, ‘Wolf Fogel is a born publisher – not an editor but a born éditeur – he can see the bigger picture that often eludes those who dot eyes and cross tees.’
    â€˜And what is he working on now?’ Felix asked.
    â€˜It’s a project he’s lusted after for the whole of the past year – just waiting for the paper situation to ease – an encyclopedia of European modern art.’ She smiled. ‘Actually, d’you mind if I say no more about it, just for the moment? Meeting you has given me a brilliant idea. Where can I get in touch with you if I need to?’
    â€˜D’you think you might need to? We all have needs, Miss Bullen-ffitch.’
    She took his meaning but not the bait. ‘No promises, mind,’ she said.
    He had applied for a telephone at the Dower House but they had told him it would be at least a six-month wait. He gave her Wilson’s number at the Greater London Plan offices and they arranged to meet, again at the V&A , the following Saturday.
    What had brought their conversation to its sudden conclusion on her part was a memory of a recent conversation with Fogel about the projected encyclopedia of European modern art. The first dummies promised chapters on Cubism, Fauvism, Der Blaue Reiter , Surrealism, Dada . . . and so on. The obvious thing to do was to take a key work of art from each school or movement and use it full-page, facing the introduction to each chapter. But Fogel occasionally hated the obvious.
    â€˜Better,’ he had told her, ‘would be something plastic, changeable . . . an object . . . an art thing that we could adapt in some significant, thought-provoking way for each chapter. Maybe light it