Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook

by Celia Rees

  “Hello? Who’s down there?” Miss Slater’s voice followed by steps on the stairs.

  “Fraulein Slater.” Agnese whispered. She looked alarmed, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  “Just us,” Edith called back. “We’re preparing supper.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  Miss Slater’s platinum head appeared, her thin penciled eyebrows raised, her blue eyes dark with suspicion.

  “Agnese and I.” Edith wiped her hands on a tea towel.

  “Aren’t the girls supposed to do that?”

  “There’s only Agnese here, as you see, and I don’t mind. I like cooking.”

  Miss Slater gave her high-pitched, peeling laugh. “Better you than me. Agnese? I have washing. I’d like you to collect it. If you can be spared, that is.”

  The girl hesitated, looking from one woman to the other, older to younger. Miss Slater drummed her scarlet fingernails.

  “We’ve nearly finished,” Edith said quietly. “There’s only the pancakes, and we can’t do them until the others arrive. You go, Agnese.”

  “What were you doing?” Miss Slater demanded as Agnese followed her.

  “Cooking. Frau Graham helped me.”

  Edith drifted to the foot of the stairs to hear what she could of the conversation.

  “That’d better be all. If I find out different, I’m telling Val.”

  “Miss Graham? Can I have a word, please?” Miss Slater caught her just as she was going up to change.

  “Certainly.”

  Miss Slater paced up and down the hall, arms folded, hands cupped round her elbows.

  “I’ll thank you to stop spying on me.”

  “Spying?” Edith hoped she sounded suitably thunderstruck. “What are you talking about?”

  “Asking questions about my private life. Interrogating Agnese. And, and today, I saw you and that driver chap down on the promenade. If that’s not spying—”

  “Spying? I wasn’t spying! And I wasn’t interrogating Agnese. I was helping her. She’d been left on her own, poor little thing. As for this afternoon, it was a nice day. The first one for ages. The rest of the billet was there, along with half of Lübeck.”

  Miss Slater ignored Edith’s perfectly reasonable explanations.

  “I’m warning you. If you carry on poking your nose in, you’re going to get it put out of joint good and proper.” Her carefully developed accent was slipping into something more demotic. “If you carry on with this, you’ll be sorry, you see if you’re not. You’ll find yourself in a whole lot of trouble. A whole lot,” she repeated for emphasis, in case Edith had not understood.

  “What kind of trouble?” Edith asked casually.

  She didn’t like being threatened and had begun to feel the first stirrings of annoyance but she was careful to keep her expression a suitable blend of puzzlement and innocence. She had triggered something, but it wouldn’t do to get on her high horse just yet.

  “That’d be telling, but you’d be upsetting people a bloody sight more important than you. Keep this out of it.” Miss Slater touched the side of her thin nose. “Mind your own business in the future.”

  She swept past Edith and up the stairs. Edith went into the sitting room and poured herself a whisky, slightly discomforted by Molly’s outrage but more curious to know what had caused it. What exactly did Miss Slater think she could do? As she sipped her drink, Adeline’s drawl came back to her. “Throw a stone in. Count the ripples. Flip a stone. See what crawls out.”

  After dinner, Edith slipped upstairs to compose a message. She took a card from Travemünde.

  A LATVIAN dish (see recipe). Another species of Pancake. German housekeeper (Frau Schmidt) and her husband, Stephan, still very partial to the Traditional German equivalent: Komm Morgen Wieder. Come Back Tomorrow. They live in hope!

  As ever, Edith

  From the card, Dori would construe that something of interest had occurred involving Latvian nationals, her German housekeeper, and her husband. She wrote out the recipe, coded message folded into the list of ingredients for this Latvian recipe: Nazis. SS. Photographs.

  Dori

  Paddington, W2

  This was the first message of any real substance. The first she had really been able to act upon. Frau Schmidt and husband, Stephan, were unrepentant Nazis. He was SS, operational in Latvia presumably. That would make him part of Einsatzgruppe A. Of interest to War Crimes. And to Harry Hirsch.

  Dori opened the front of the Aga and watched the papers burn. Then she went up to the hall, to the telephone. It would take forever, if ever, to contact Harry through Mil. Gov.

  Bulldog in Bad Oeufhausen would be her best bet.

  “War Crimes?” A distant voice crackled on the line.

  “Oh, hello. I’m trying to contact Alex Drummond . . .”

  There was a shout: “Bulldog! Bird on the blower for you.”

  “Drummond here.”

  “Hello, darling. It’s Dori.” She paused to listen. “Edging closer but I’m not calling about that. You couldn’t find me a number for Harry Hirsch, could you?” Dori waited, twisting the cord round her finger. “I’ll just find a pencil.” She wrote the number down on the back of an envelope. “Thank you, darling. Is she? Perhaps she can speed things up for me. This weekend? Tell her I’ll meet her. Usual place. Saturday. Around four? Cheerio!”

  She cut the call. Keep it short and snappy. Bright and chirpy. Better to pass information on to Vera in person over a gin and tonic at the club at the weekend. Dori listened to the dial tone on her phone for a moment. There had been some worrying clicks lately. She’d begun to not quite trust the telephone. She replaced the receiver and tore the envelope into very small pieces. She’d give Harry a call from the club.

  She put on her coat, adjusted the angle of her hat in the hall mirror. She had a small bag with her, going to Lewes to follow up on an old SOE pal who might have news of the missing girls. He was a survivor who had been in Natzweiler, among other hideous places. At first, he’d been unable to recall any women being there. Like many of the men who had been in the camps, his memory had fragmented under the weight of the horrors he’d seen. Then a scene, a face, a voice would surface. Now, he didn’t just recall the women, he could describe their arrival in vivid detail. He’d made sketches. Dori’s hand shook slightly as she applied her lipstick. She looked forward to and at the same time dreaded being able to identify them. These women had been her friends. There was always the tiniest gleam of hope as long as they were missing: where-abouts unknown.

  A figure cast a shadow through the glass of the door. Anton Szulc back from his morning constitutional. She opened the door for him.

  “Thank you, Countess,” he said in Polish. He was the only one who ever called her that.

  He came in shaking drops of rain from his umbrella. Anton was a tall man, rather stooped, with a narrow, hawkish face. He removed his hat, smoothing back his pale hair in the hall mirror. More white than blond now, he wore it combed back, held perfectly in place by lavender-scented pomade. His overcoat was threadbare down the front edge and around the cuffs but always carefully brushed, never a trace of dandruff or dust; his shirts had worn soft but were kept spotless, laundered by the lady around the corner. In his own way, he was as immaculate as Tibor, with his white silk muffler and his black homburg set just so.

  “Anything?” Dori asked in Polish.

  “Umm . . .” Anton made a seesaw motion with his hands. “Could be something. Could be nothing . . . I’ll keep watch.”

  Not much escaped his still-sharp blue eyes. Anton spent a lot of his day in the square. He knew all the regulars: the mothers, the nannies with the children, the men, like him, with nothing to do. When he wasn’t in the square, he was in his little room above the hall with a perfect view from the window.

  He paid no rent for the room. He had no money and, besides, he was useful. Not just keeping watch. In other ways. He might look like a frail old man, but looks were d
eceptive. He was as tough as they came. He’d been an agent, a hard man in the toughest arena of all, Nazi Germany before the war. He’d stayed in post for months after war was declared, been picked up by the Gestapo, sent to a camp, escaped to Denmark and then Britain. He was a tough bird, all right, tough and resourceful.

  Dori gave him ten bob for his trouble.

  “Thank you, Countess.” He glanced down at her bag. “I’ll keep an eye on things until you get back.”

  He took out a worn wallet and carefully tucked the note inside, adjusted his hat in the hall mirror, straightened his muffler, and went back outside. He turned right, narrow shoulders hunched against the raw cold of the afternoon. He would be going to the Polish Club in Princes Gate to eat wiejska, drink vodka, and dream of returning to the home country. It would not be soon. The Soviets were in control, and Anton hated them almost as much as the Nazis. If he went back, he’d be a dead man.

  “I will not go back until my country is free,” he would say, his face bleak with the knowledge that it might not be in his lifetime.

  He held a position in the Polish Government in Exile which operated, unacknowledged and unrecognized, out of the President-in-Exile’s private residence in Eaton Square. They kept the archives there and the spirit of resistance alive as they prepared for their return as the government of a Free Poland. They might as well be preparing for the Second Coming, Dori thought, as she watched him march off with his stiff-legged, straight-backed military gait.

  19

  CCG Mess, Lübeck

  19th February 1946

  Dinner Menu

  If it’s Tuesday, it must be . . .

  Potage St. Germain

  Vienna Steak

  Espagnole Sauce

  Mashed Potatoes

  Tinned Carrots

  Raspberry Cream

  Cheese

  Coffee

  Potage: Pea soup made with dried peas bulked out with onions and potatoes. Nothing fresh or green. No evidence of chervil or lettuce. The steak should be made with minced beef and veal but could be anything. The Sauce? Gravy by any other name. Dessert is a mix of tinned raspberries and synthetic cream--resembles pink zinc ointment. Cheese is mousetrap or American. Coffee usually the best part of the meal.

  Edith had come home early. Someone had been in her room. She knew as soon as she stepped inside. Bedside cabinet left ajar. Traveling alarm folded shut. Someone had been through the chest of drawers and hadn’t even bothered to push them back properly. Clothes at odd angles inside the big armoire.

  On her desk, the letters in the rack were tilted the wrong way. The recipes slotted into the Radiation Cookery Book were misaligned as if someone had flipped through it. There were scratch marks on the brass around the lock of her writing slope.

  There was contempt beneath the carelessness. Whoever this was didn’t care if Edith knew, wanted her to know. The German girls wouldn’t dare. Frau Schmidt would be more careful. Which left Molly Slater. Always the last to leave. Her boss let her come in any time she liked. If this was another warning, it wouldn’t work, and two could play at that game.

  Molly shared with Ginny. Edith knocked lightly then eased the door open. It was clear which girl occupied which side. Ginny’s space was as sparse as a nun’s cell. A small swing mirror on a rickety stand acted as her dressing table. All it held was a soft bristle hairbrush, a pot of cold cream, and a jar of Vicks. Her narrow bed lay under the window. On the sill, a couple of books, a few china ornaments that she must have brought from her bedroom at home. A group of little photographs in silver frames: a couple in a back garden, the man in uniform, must be her mum and dad; Ginny holding the reins of a horse; Ginny kneeling, arms around a spaniel. Still so close to childhood. How young these girls were . . .

  She turned to examine the rest of the room. Molly’s clothes from last night lay on the chair. More spilled from the chest of drawers. The wardrobe was stacked with hatboxes, filled with furs and gowns. The dressing table was strewn with makeup and perfume, the mirror draped with scarves. A carved wooden box held a hoard of gold chains, silver lockets, rings, brooches, and watches. The dressing-table drawer revealed more: necklaces, jade, amethyst, tourmaline. Good stones in nice settings. A string of pearls with the silky sheen and ivory overtones of the genuine thing. Black-market booty, presumably. The bottom drawer held a humbler trove: Cussons talc, Yardley bath cubes, bars of Lux. Edith closed the drawers carefully. Molly felt quite safe. No need to hide anything. None of them would dare to look.

  That evening, Edith announced to Frau Schmidt that her room was to be kept locked at all times, apart from bed changing and cleaning. She would hold the German woman personally responsible if she even suspected that anyone had been in there. Edith then left to dine at the mess, leaving the threat hanging, confident that the message would be passed on to Molly Slater.

  “Hello, there.”

  A voice she knew but couldn’t quite place. She looked up to find Harry Hirsch standing in front of her.

  “I don’t know if you remember.” He smiled down at her. “But we met at Dori’s New Year’s party. Do you mind if I join you?”

  “Of course not! I’d be delighted,” she added, and meant it. She was, in fact, absurdly pleased to see him.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Whisky and soda.”

  Harry Hirsch signaled to the mess waiter to bring drinks over. She remembered him very well. It had been the briefest of encounters, but there had been something there. A hand retained in farewell, a parting New Year’s kiss that had lasted just a moment too long.

  He looked older, thinner, his skin sallow, bruise-colored marks under his large, dark eyes, forehead creased in a permanent frown. His hair grazed his collar and his jaw was shadowed. Slightly worn and disheveled, he looked as if he needed someone to look after him, which only added to his appeal.

  “Forgive my appearance,” he said, rubbing his chin. “I’ve only just come in. I’m starving.” He reached for a menu card. “What’s the food like here?”

  “So-so. A bit boring.”

  “I don’t care. I could eat a horse.”

  Edith glanced at the menu. Vienna Steak. “You probably will be.”

  He laughed.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Interviewing DPs.” He carried on reading the menu. “Balts as they call them here. Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, to give them their nationalities. There’s a team of us. They need people who speak their languages. We wear civvies. They don’t trust uniforms. Had enough of them in the war.” He put the card down and sighed. “It’s hard. What’s happened to them, their stories. Wears you out eventually. Same thing over and over, but it never seems to get less harrowing, and there is so very little I can do. Not my job anyway. My job is to sort through them all, looking for the few bad eggs.”

  “Found any?”

  “One or two.” He sipped his drink. “I had a call from Dori a few days ago.” He put his glass back on the table. “She suggested I look you up.”

  “It’s good to see you . . .” Edith started. Something expectant about his expression, the way he emphasized Dori made her stop what she was saying. She stared at him as the connections clicked into place.

  “Oh, yes. Of course! It could be something or nothing,” she added quickly. What did she have really? Suddenly it all seemed very flimsy. “I hope you didn’t come all this way . . .”

  “I wanted to see you.” He smiled. “This is my excuse.”

  “There’s a young man. They call him Valdis or Val. His full name is Valdema-rs Jansons. I checked. He could be one of your bad eggs.”

  “Dori said you might have photographs?”

  “I keep them in the office. Safer there.” Especially after today. “I could get them.”

  “Good idea.” He looked down at his wrinkled shirt and creased trousers. “What say I make myself presentable and we could dine together?” His expression mixed hope with the smallest dash of appr
ehension. As if there was the slightest chance of her saying no.

  Edith called Jack for a lift then went back to the billet to change.

  She felt a tingle of excitement. This was practically a date. She could be Stella, for one night anyway, rather than dependable Miss Graham. She selected the French navy crepe with red piping and little red cloth buttons, unrolled a pair of carefully hoarded silk stockings, and found her high heels. She dressed her hair, pinning it up in a French braid, and set about applying her makeup. She surveyed herself in the mirror. Not half bad. She smoothed the soft material over her stomach and bottom. The dress fit much better. She chose to walk to and from work most days. The food might be plentiful, but it was bland, stodgy, and in the light of the surrounding deprivation, easy to resist. She applied a few dabs of Blue Grass perfume and undid her top button to reveal a little more décolletage.

  Frau Schmidt took it all in from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Going out again?” she ventured and smiled, a gleam in her eyes. Nothing said. Much implied.

  “Yes.” Edith stepped past her. “And remember what I said.”

  Jack was waiting outside. “Blimey! Look at you all spruced up!” His eyebrows rose. “Going anywhere special? Meeting someone, mebbe?”

  “Just dinner in the mess. Thank you, Jack. Can we drop into the office? I have to pick something up. And no need to wait. I’ll make my own way back.”

  “Right you are, ma’am,” Jack said, his mouth quirking up at the corners as he started the car. “Right you are.”

  Harry was waiting for her in the bar, his black hair wet and slick as if he’d just showered. He was clean-shaven, and his face had more color. The sleeves of his tweed jacket were a little too short, exposing white cuffs and sinewy wrists. The top button of his shirt was undone, his maroon knitted silk tie loosely knotted. He was wearing charcoal-gray slacks and suede boots. Not the normal male attire for a mess dinner. Edith liked him all the more for that.