by Celia Rees
“That’s all right, Katja.” Elisabeth smiled, putting the nurse at her ease. They all crowded round, peering into the pram.
“Formidable name for a little chap,” Leo remarked.
“It was my father’s name.” Kurt frowned. He never did understand Leo’s sense of humor.
The infant stared back at them with large, milky-blue eyes, the pupils rimmed with indigo. A most unusual color, not like his father or his mother. He was perhaps eighteen months old, Edith thought—she wasn’t very good at guessing the ages of little children—with hair as pale and fine as corn silk. He regarded them with a fixity, a kind of puzzlement as if he felt he should recognize but couldn’t quite place the faces looming over him.
“Irenka, the cook, says he has an old soul.” Despite her laugh, Elisabeth looked faintly uneasy.
As she saw more of little Wolfgang, Edith came to recognize the truth in that observation. It made one almost believe in reincarnation: as though there was an adult consciousness trapped inside an infant body, baffled by this sudden powerless impotence, frustrated, not quite understanding what had happened or how he had come to be here.
“Nonsense! Nothing wrong with him. Is there, little man?”
Kurt seized the boy from his carriage and threw him up into the air, deftly catching him. The child didn’t cry, or chuckle, as other children might. He grunted slightly as Kurt caught him but otherwise remained completely silent, maintaining the same expression of perplexed indifference.
“Not sure he likes that,” Leo observed.
They all laughed, and the infant was returned to his nurse.
They went back into the Garden Room.
“Left or right?” Elisabeth inquired. “East or west?”
They elected to go to the left and were conducted from room to room with Elisabeth putting names to the portraits that stared down at them and describing the history and provenance of the furnishings and ornaments. It was evident that this was her house, her title, her lands.
The final room was a gloomy study with a huge desk. Leather-bound ledgers, studbooks, and farming manuals filled the shelves of high bookcases. The walls bristled with horns, the wide sweep of antlers, and the heads of grinning, snarling animals: bear, wolf, boar. High up above the desk was a portrait of Adolf Hitler.
“This is the Estate Office,” Elisabeth explained. “That door leads to the outside. Tenants and estate workers can enter without coming through the house.” She glanced up at the portrait. “We have to have that here. It is expected.”
Her fine nostrils flared in aristocratic disdain. It was the only sign of the ruling regime anywhere in Schloss Steinhof.
Two smiling maids, dressed alike in blue gingham, their thick hair plaited and coiled tightly around their heads, showed them to their rooms. They were not related, they told her, but they could have been twins. Each a picture of perfect German young womanhood with their wide smiles, blue eyes, flaxen hair, and flawless skin, brown and freckled as a speckled hen’s egg. Gerde laid out Edith’s evening clothes while Beate drew her bath.
Edith had fully expected not to like Elisabeth and was prepared for the antipathy to be mutual. All through the tour of the house they had been weighing each other up. But it hadn’t been like that. She felt something like relief that the flickering flame that she’d nursed for Kurt, glowing like an altar lamp deep in her heart, could finally be allowed to gutter out. Any tears were confined to the privacy of her bath. In any case, she told herself, she was mourning the emotion, not the man. The end of love. She came downstairs bathed, changed, ready to concede the ground.
Dinner was a formal affair with Elisabeth’s mother at the head of the table. She came into the room leaning on an ivory-topped ebony cane. They all stood as she took her place. Her hair was a pure white, intricately dressed and pinned with a small tiara. At her throat, she wore a diamond collar. She exuded the opulent elegance of a long-lost era and made Edith feel distinctly under-dressed. She referred to Leo and Edith as “the English visitors” and more or less dismissed them once she’d ascertained that they had no connections with any of the English families with whom she had been acquainted before the Great War. She was flanked by two elderly ladies, Elisabeth’s aunts. They had their own apartments somewhere in the enormous house and only appeared at mealtimes. They were also dressed in the fashions of forty years previously, ate little, and spoke less. There was a great aunt somewhere, but she was very frail and almost never left her room. “It is common,” Elisabeth told Edith later. “A house like ours is a haven for the unmarried, the widows.”
From the other end of the table, Edith could feel Elisabeth’s cool appraisal, but it didn’t bother her. She knew her own position in love, in life. Kurt was as handsome as ever, but somehow he was diminished. Through a series of evasions, vague exaggerations, truth twisting, and subtle mendacity, he’d pretended that all this was his. Then he’d married to get it, discarding Edith along the way. Not that she blamed him. Elisabeth was rich, charming, and far, far more beautiful, a prize in anybody’s book. She really was exceptionally lovely.
“A bit of a firecracker, isn’t she?” Leo murmured. “But best not to stare . . .”
After dinner, the elderly relatives withdrew. Leo and Kurt went off to play billiards, and the two women were left together on the terrace.
The day was only just fading. The butler brought a tray of decanters and glasses.
“Thank you, Brice. Now, what would you like, Edith? We have whisky, brandy, schnapps?”
Edith decided on schnapps. Williamsbirne. It gave off a sharp, pear-drop smell as Brice poured it. A crescent moon was rising, shining like a tarnished silver brooch pinned to violet velvet. There was a quality to the evening light that lent the memory a luminosity, a pellucid quality, so that Edith was always able to recall the perfumed sharpness of pear schnapps in the waning warmth of the day.
There was still a wariness. Nothing spoken, but it was clear that Elisabeth knew that Edith and Kurt had been lovers. Perhaps he’d told her; perhaps she’d guessed. The reticence was not antipathy. Perhaps the opposite. Women who share a lover can often feel the tug of attraction. Not that Edith had those inclinations, apart from the odd crush at school on an older girl, a fling or two at college, but something made her awkward in the other’s company, even shy. Some of the feelings she’d had when she first arrived were seeping back now. Elisabeth’s wealth, position, her aristocracy. “Alle. Die länder der Gräfin.”
Elisabeth drank her schnapps in one swallow, Brice stepping forward to refill her glass.
“Thank you, Brice. You may leave the tray. Now that we are alone,” she said when the butler had withdrawn, “I’d like to get one thing out of the way. You and Kurt—”
Edith was nonplussed. She hadn’t been expecting that. She groped for an appropriate response, the right words in German, but Elisabeth waved her to silence.
“No need to say anything. I don’t want my feelings colored. I don’t mean toward Kurt. I mean toward you. We would be starting on the wrong foot.” Elisabeth offered her a cigarette.
“I don’t.” Edith touched her chest. “Asthma.”
Elisabeth lit her own and leaned back in her chair, smoking. She stared off into the vista beyond the balcony, the meadows and woods indistinct now in creeping darkness and rising mist.
“Prussia lives in the past,” she said after a while. “We’ve only just given up serfdom, and we still practice dynastic marriage. Kurt’s family can trace their ancestors back to the Teutonic Knights, but in recent times they have not prospered. I grew up here. With all this.” She smiled and stretched her arms out. “He was brought up in a cramped apartment in Konigsberg.” She lapsed into silence. “I knew. I always knew. About you. He said you had a schöne Intelligenz. Very sympathisch. And—there’s a word in German—leidenschaftlich?” Edith translated it as passionate, ardent, fervent. She felt herself blush. “I can see the attraction. He loved his time in England but when he came back, then he w
as mine. It was an understanding. We are different, he and I. He likes to travel, meet people, make new friends. I like to stay here with my dogs.” Her hand strayed to the sleek black head of her Great Dane, Helmar, couchant by her side. “And, of course, my horses.”
Elisabeth’s real love was horses. Her family had been breeding horses for the Prussian cavalry since the eighteenth century. She much preferred them to people, Edith came to realize. She was different when she was around them, more relaxed, happier altogether.
“I like to be among my own folk. In my own country.”
She didn’t mention the child.
“Kurt and I really are just friends now,” Edith said. “Anything . . .” she searched for the right words “. . . otherwise was over a long time ago.” She refilled her glass. Edith did not drink much as a rule but tonight she felt the need to be fortified. “Kurt is a doctor now? Qualified?”
“Oh, yes. He has his licence to practice. He hopes to specialize in Psychiatry, so continues his studies. First, he was in Heidelberg. Under Steiner. Now he is in Berlin with Bonhoeffer. At the Charité Hospital.”
“What kind of work is he doing?”
Elisabeth shrugged as if it didn’t interest her. “When he is here, we do not discuss it.”
“Do you join him in Berlin?”
“Kurt is ambitious. He wants to advance in his profession. Berlin is the place for advancement. There are things he must do there, people with whom he must associate. Sometimes, it is necessary for me to be with him, but I do not like this life. My place is here.”
“When you are apart, you must miss him.”
“Not as much as you might think.” Her smile was tight, guarded. “He comes back when he can. You must know, Edith, we have an understanding.” She paused. “You were part of that understanding. There have been others. Kurt is a passionate man.”
“Don’t you mind?”
“What is the point of minding?” She shrugged again. “He is how he is. I know he will always come back to me. That is all that matters.”
Here, conversation lapsed. They were not at the point in a friendship where deep intimacies were likely to be exchanged. Besides, Elisabeth was not the kind of woman who allowed the doors to her inner feelings to be opened at the least touch. If there were differences between husband and wife, she did not broadcast them. She kept his counsel as well as her own.
How long did they spend there? A week? It seemed longer. They went walking, riding, took picnics in the forest and by the lake. There were excursions: to Könisberg to see Kant’s grave and the great, gothic castle founded by the Teutonic Knights; to the seaside to bathe in the achingly cold Baltic and shelter from wind and sun in wicker Strandkorb set out on the bone-white sands.
At the end of each day, they would retire to their rooms, bathe and change for dinner, then meet for drinks on the terrace. Edith loved this time. She liked to get down before the others and sip her drink, looking out at the soft, amber light rendering the roses gold and ruby against the dark, glowing scarlet of the garden wall. She liked to hear the strange belling song of the frogs just starting up by the lake.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Kurt was standing next to her, holding the balcony, his fingers almost touching hers. Edith could feel the warmth of his arm next to hers; smell his Vetiver cologne. “I so much wanted you to see it. I’m so glad you came, Edith. I saw you come down early each evening. I wanted to speak with you. I so regret that we parted like we did.”
They turned, each at the same time. Edith knew he was going to kiss her, knew she wanted him to. How quickly the flame sparked back to life again. The warmth of his lips, the cool smoothness of his freshly shaved skin, made her limbs loosen with desire.
“No, Kurt,” she said, drawing away. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
He reached to arrange a stray lock of her hair. The intimacy of that gesture, more than the kiss, dissolved the years, taking her back to that summer when she’d been so in love with him.
“I need to speak with you, Edith,” he whispered. “I need you to understand. I will come to your room. Tonight.”
“No, Kurt,” Edith turned her head to avoid his kiss. “I mean it! You’re married with a child!”
She shook her head. It was not to do with Kurt’s wife or his child. It was to save herself. The fire she thought extinquished could burst into life again; the wound, long healed, begin to bleed. She was about to speak again when Leo appeared.
“Thought I heard voices.” His blue eyes were quizzical behind his tortoiseshell glasses. “Not interrupting anything, am I?”
“No, of course not.” Kurt turned to Leo with a smile. “We were just admiring the view.”
“Things a bit tricky out there,” Leo whispered to Edith as they went in to dinner.
“Just a little.”
“Randy bugger! I’ll take care of Kurt, don’t worry. Call him out if need be. Propositioning my woman, how dare he?” The thought of being Leo’s “woman” and him doing any such thing made Edith laugh. “Either that, or I’ll get him so drunk, he won’t be bothering anyone.”
After dinner, the men retired to the library for brandy and cigars. Elisabeth and Edith joined them when it got chilly out on the terrace. Elisabeth didn’t like to talk about politics, but it was difficult to ignore. The swastika was in every town, on every street. Leo questioned and probed, teasing out their opinions, the opinions of others of their class and acquaintance. Elisabeth and her mother regarded Hitler and the Nazis as hopelessly vulgar and mourned the day when Prussia lost its grip on the nation. They still seemed to think that the old families would bring Hitler back into line. What about the annexation of Austria? The trouble brewing in Czechoslovakia? Kurt joined the conversation here. Hitler was merely bringing stability to those areas of Europe that had been destabilized by the Treaty of Versailles. What about the Jews? Wildly exaggerated, falsely reported. There had been no such trouble here. Leo listened, head tilted as the fragrant cigar smoke drifted. “Might there be a war?” he asked, reaching for the decanter. “Oh, no.” Kurt was adamant. “Not between England and Germany.” Russia was the real enemy of both their nations. Leo nodded, pouring more brandy, and changed the subject to sport.
That night, Edith heard the scratch of nails on wood, the signal they’d used at Gorton. She lay still, willing him to go away. She couldn’t risk it. Once kindled, the fire she thought long dead would rage unchecked.
Edith deliberately avoided him, spending time with Elisabeth, going down at dawn to join her as the great barn doors opened and the horses streamed out to the pastures and paddocks. Elisabeth had been shocked that Edith did not ride and was determined to teach her. They went on long excursions into the forest, knees nearly touching as they rode along together. They stopped to collect wild raspberries and hundspflaume, wild plums, Elisabeth reaching up to help Edith down. They gathered fungi: fluted yellow pfifferling, penny-bun steinpilz, schwefelgelber porling, chicken of the woods for Irenka, the cook. Heads together, fingers reaching for the same mushroom, Edith breathing in Elisabeth’s particular scent: horses, gardenia, and light summer sweat.
They would take their haul back to Irenka. In Edith’s memory, they are either in the stables or in the large, tiled kitchen with its wide shallow sinks, marble slabs, and black iron range. They would sit at the long wooden table drinking strong, bitter coffee, nibbling Lebkuchen made by Halina, Irenka’s daughter. They would prepare fruit for jam, mushrooms for drying, working together, hands touching.
By the time she left Schloss Steinhof, Edith was in love with them both.
What had happened to Halina and the rest of them? One had heard the most terrible, shocking stories about those caught up in the Russian advances: the Russians raping every woman they came across, no matter how young or how old. Had that been the fate of the women she had known? No more than they deserved, that’s what people said, but Edith couldn’t quite square that with Irenka singing in her rich voice as she kneaded dough, her
big, strong hands white with flour. Gerde and Beate, laughing as they shook out the feather quilts; the child, Halina, busy working under her mother’s direction, beating, mixing, her light soprano joining her mother’s contralto. Did they really deserve to be brutalized by Russian soldiers? Their young lives blighted before they had properly begun? As for the elderly ladies of the Schloss, it just didn’t bear thinking about. And what about Elisabeth? Was that her fate? Or did she die defending her place and her people, or by her own hand at the sound of the Russian guns?
“Mehr Kaffee, Schnapps?” The slap of the coffeepot on the table brought Edith back to the present.
“Nein danke.”
Edith left the café and walked on. How much had Elisabeth known about Kurt? Was she a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, too? She’d shown no sign of it, but neither had he. How much had she been involved? Would it be right to befriend her now in order to betray? Would Edith be able to do it? Would friendship—love, even—overcome any sense of duty? And what about Kurt? Would she succumb again, whatever he might have done?
Edith stopped. She’d walked farther than she’d intended. Across the lake, the Atlantic shone like a liner in the distance. It was growing dark. The cold had deepened. Her fingers and toes were numb inside her gloves and boots, her breath hung thick and white in the freezing air. As she set off back around the lake, the path was black with ice, the whitened ground iron hard. The cold was of a different order than anything in Britain, a cold that had come to stay and was set to get deeper and deeper, not letting up for months and months.
Back at the hotel, Edith stopped in the foyer, selecting cards from those on display. The Hotel Atlantic, Hamburg: hand-tinted depictions, viewed from various aspects. Prewar stock. She inquired at the desk as to the postal services, the price of stamps to England, and took the cards to her room. Once there, she laid the cards out on the desk by the window, took out her traveling writing case, her fountain pen, and her copy of the Radiation Cookery Book.
“It doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated,” Dori had said. “Messages don’t have to be long missives. Keep them short, chatty, food, recipes, and so on. Postcard length is fine.”