Books & Poetry

Last week, Peter Beverly continued our London chain story. Here is the third chapter, written by Time Out reader Mark T Kelly. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Chapter Three by Mark T Kelly

The school toilets were full on Friday afternoon. Betsy and her schoolmates shared gossip and jostled for mirror space as they picked at split ends left brittle from cheap dye. Betsy slid into her new Zara dress and admired her slender body. ‘You look wicked,’ giggled Caroline. ‘Your Mr Professor’s not gonna know you.’

Betsy laughed. ‘Jesus, Caroline. I look like Mo but five years older!’

Betsy had met her handsome ‘professor’ two months previously in the King’s College Starbucks, a week after her fifteenth birthday. She’d been with her father. They had argued, loudly, and he had stormed out – back to his office to brood. Franz’s voice had interrupted her thoughts. ‘Hello, may I join you? I saw you in heated debate with the famous Otto Fleischer. Are you a philosopher?’
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‘Of sorts,’ she said.

Franz introduced himself as the visiting Radcliffe Lecturer at University College, Oxford, a post her father had once held. Betsy smiled at the coincidence.

Over the following months Betsy and Franz met for coffee on Upper Street, whenever he was in town. They would discuss everything and Franz called her his ‘Rose Philosopher’. ‘Ah,’ he would say, ‘so Otto’s daughter doesn’t agree that Heidegger’s “Being and Time” is the great philosophical work of the twentieth century?’

‘I’m an ignorant undergraduate,’ she’d lie. ‘To me it’s bombastic nonsense.’ And they would both laugh.

The similarities between Franz and her father were startling. Betsy was her father’s star pupil; she was intelligent, precise and logical, and she loved to poke fun at his philosophies. To him, she was everything Mo was not; but he struggled with her teenage ambitions. Franz, however, treated her as an adult and as an equal.

He was intelligent and charming, and eventually he asked her to dinner.

Three days had passed since Betsy’s ‘date’ with Franz. She could recall only vague hints of her 72 hours of darkness; the pungent smell of disinfectant; the deep, droning voices and nausea.

She shifted nervously in the back seat of the car like a restless child. Franz was talking as he drove. ‘And let me tell you, my Rose Philosopher, your Father is not the only one to know of Heidegger’s war-time secret. But he is the only one to know of its location. You are an intelligent little treasure. We simply intend to swap one treasure for another…’

His phone rang. Betsy could make out a heavy Russian accent. ‘Where the hell are you?’ asked the voice. ‘We cannot be late for the flight.’
It was dark and they’d hit the rush-hour traffic, but Franz didn’t offer an explanation. ‘I’ll be there soon,’ he said.