by Jane Thynne
This moment of reminiscence had changed the atmosphere between them. Ralph pulled off his jacket and removed his bow tie, loosening his shirt collar. “What about you, Clara? I’m guessing you had an idyllic childhood in the home counties.”
Clara paused. His suspicion was right, but only half right. Her childhood was like a tapestry with a rent through the middle of it, happiness followed by awfulness. When she thought about the past, a series of disconnected images flashed before her. Angela teaching her to pick out “Für Elise” on the piano. Their old home with its mossy stone covered in blowsy roses, its alley of espaliered fruit trees and topiary through which the children would play hide-and-seek. Her mother gardening in a straw hat and linen apron. Chilly holidays on British beaches where the sand got into their picnics and their father organized games.
“It was pretty idyllic, I suppose, up to the point that my mother died. It changed a lot after that.”
It had changed, and grown sadder and more constrained. The family navigated their wounds warily, as if afraid of reopening them. The two sisters talked less frequently to each other, and their brother immersed himself in sports. Their father retreated to a world of his own, and everyone trod on eggshells around him. When she first came to Berlin, Clara had experienced a sudden rush of liberty, as though she was at last free from her family and her social status and all her past. As it turned out, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Ralph was leaning forward, gazing at her intently, waiting for her to go on, and suddenly Clara longed to reveal more. She had an urge to reach beneath her carefully constructed surface to the self that she always concealed. Telling him was a risk, but hadn’t she already gone too far to worry about that?
“When I came here I discovered something else. My grandmother Hannah was a Jew, but my mother had always hidden it from us. I think my father was ashamed.”
Ralph cocked his head, curious. “You’re a quarter Jewish? So how did you get to work at Ufa? Aren’t quarter Jews excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture? I know there are still some who’ve managed to hang on there, but only through forging their documents.”
Clara thought back to the day Leo Quinn left. The final envelope he had left for her, hand-delivered and addressed simply with her name. It was a gift. The work of a master craftsman, as expertly created and exquisitely precise as any necklace or precious ring. Only it wasn’t jewelry but a complete set of ancestry documents, the kind you bought at stationery shops, tracing your genealogy back three generations. It was filled out in her name, yet her grandmother had been transformed into an Aryan. Clara’s Jewish blood had been diverted into different channels. The document had been stamped by the official race office—or rather a contact of Leo’s whose expert forgeries were much treasured by the British Secret Service.
“Someone got me the right papers.”
“Someone must have thought very highly of you.”
“I suppose he did.”
Ralph rose and stood before her, then reached down to her hand, turning it over to reveal the bluish white, unsunned flesh of her wrist as if examining the newly christened blood in her veins. His touch was electrifying. She felt exposed, as if he were peeling back her skin.
“I can understand why.”
He pulled her to her feet and moved his hand upward to the pearls at her throat, feeling their warmth; then he reached over to the shoulder of her dress and pushed it a fraction, exposing the strap of her pale pink crepe de chine slip. She edged towards him so that they were separated only by inches of trembling air. Lifting her face, she saw his eyes cloud with desire. The image of him kissing her, running his hands over the tight satin of her dress, the weight of his body pulling her to him in a tight embrace, was already running through her mind. Her senses filled with the warm scent of limes and tobacco, mixed with the starched cotton of his shirt. Every particle of her flesh was attuned to him like a physical force. But despite the current of attraction between them, she sensed resistance, too. Ralph reached down and touched the tips of her fingers, then his fingers pushed hers gently away.
“Sorry. That was unforgivable.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“I should have stopped myself.”
“Did you see me object?”
“All the same. That mustn’t happen.”
“Why?”
“It’s not something I can easily explain.”
She remained as she was, her blood racing, her breath caught in her throat. She felt dazed, all the atoms inside her still vibrating for his touch. He had stirred an ache in her that clamored to be fulfilled.
He turned away, thrusting his hands in his pockets.
“So…do you want me to leave?”
“I think it would be for the best.” He kept his back turned, his shoulder blades tensed.
“All right then. I’ll go.”
Summoning a strength she did not know she possessed, she turned, picked up her coat, and walked out the door.
CHAPTER
24
Dr. Theo Morell was the doctor to the stars. A stout, balding dermatologist with an expensive practice on the Ku’damm, he had married the actress Hanni Moller, who opened the doors to a long list of actors who wanted moles and warts removed and other unphotogenic blemishes remedied. As a sideline he specialized in “vitamin injections,” which were said to provide instant vitality, perhaps because their principal ingredients were amphetamines. One of Morell’s early patients was Heinrich Hoffmann, and it was through the photographer that Morell had been taken up by Hitler as his personal physician and had somehow managed to cure the stomach cramps that plagued the Führer. As a result of this triumph, Morell’s waiting room was now crowded with senior Nazis. He was the most famous doctor in the Third Reich, and that day he was at the Ufa studios to administer a course of injections to Doktor Goebbels, who was, for all purposes, in perfectly robust health.
Clara sat outside Goebbels’s office disguising her trepidation by flipping through the latest edition of Filmwoche. There was a photograph of a rising actress, one of the many whom Goebbels had put through nose surgery to correct an over-Semitic appearance. Cosmetic surgery was one of several perks Goebbels was known to offer his protégées, and most of them found the offers impossible to refuse. “Be careful,” Albert, her producer, had quipped as Clara left for the meeting that morning. “Don’t let Joey get his hands on your lovely face.” Yet in the case of the girl in the magazine, the surgery had paid off. She had just won a leading role in a prestigious new biopic of Frederick the Great.
That morning a scrap of chilling news had fluttered along the Babelsberg corridors like a newspaper in the breeze. The actress Gisela Wessel had, following her arrest, been sent to the Moringen concentration camp, the women’s camp in Lower Saxony. She had been taken from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where she had apparently confessed to making a drop into the mailbox of the Soviet trade envoy on the evidence of two secret policemen who had observed her passing information. Clara shuddered to think how Gisela’s confession had been obtained. She thought again of Ralph’s comment last night:
You must know that there is a whole apparatus of horror out there that would have no compunction in locking you up? Or sending you to a camp so you would never see the light of day again.
The ache that he’d instilled in her the previous evening had lingered through a long night. Their contact had been fleeting, but the exhilarating shiver that his touch had stirred surprised her and left her longing to see him again.
The unexpected call from Goebbels’s office at seven o’clock that morning, however, had succeeded in banishing Ralph entirely from her mind. The Propaganda Minister was visiting Babelsberg that day, a cool secretarial voice informed her, and he hoped Fräulein Vine would be able to see him at eleven o’clock. Hastily Clara went to her drawer and unearthed a diamond swastika. Goebbels himself had given it to her, because he trusted her to supply him with the gossip she heard from Nazi women. She stabbed it i
nto her lapel.
Dr. Morell emerged from the door, and Goebbels followed him, rubbing his hands vigorously, as though washing off invisible blood.
“Morell was just telling me he’s up to his eyes in work. He was saying that most of our top men now require his services. My God, what an unhealthy bunch they are!”
Goebbels himself looked sleek, despite his deformity, and full of health. He was wearing a beautifully tailored dove-gray suit and bespoke patent leather shoes. He moved with a malign vigor in his trim frame, trailing a miasma of Scherk’s Tarr aftershave.
“Come in, Fräulein Vine.” He waved her to a chair and pointed to the smoking set of matching silver cigarette box and lighter on the enormous desk. “The Führer sent me such a lovely gift for my birthday, I’ve been hard put to think how I can repay him. But I’ve decided to give him a set of Mickey Mouse cartoons for Christmas. What do you think? I know he loves Mickey Mouse.”
Was this a joke? Did Goebbels know that his nickname was Mickey Mouse? Clara decided that it was probably not a joke. Goebbels’s jokes were rarely self-referential.
“It’s an inspired idea.”
“Thank you.” He folded himself into a chair and crossed his legs in a way that concealed the deformed right foot. Goebbels relished being at the studios. It enabled him to adopt the persona of the cultured arbiter, the role he had longed for since he began writing his interminable novels back in his hometown of Rheydt, submitting them endlessly to publishing houses and receiving repeated barbs of rejection. Invariably they had been Jewish publishing firms, who had since been made to pay for the errors of their literary judgment.
Clara glanced around her. Among a number of framed posters for Ufa movies like The Blue Light, Hitler Youth Quex, and Black Roses, was a poster for Patriots, the latest big-budget film to star Lida Baarová. It was a thriller about a brave German soldier shot down by the French and befriended by a rebel French girl. The poster featured Baarová in a clinch with the heroic soldier, played by the handsome Mathias Wieman. What kind of masochism did it require to spend all day looking at the girl you loved being kissed by another man? But there was no accounting for the strange tastes of Nazi men. Alongside the posters was the usual selection of Reich-approved art, dull Teutonic nudes covered in appropriately gauzy veils and robust peasants gathering in the corn. Goebbels could not possibly have chosen them himself. He had been a connoisseur of the Expressionist Emil Nolde until it was decided that Nolde must qualify as degenerate.
Goebbels followed Clara’s gaze. “I know what you’re thinking. I should get Herr Speer to redesign this place, but he’s very busy right now. As a matter of fact I’ve just commissioned him to make a film about the racial aspects of architecture. You probably didn’t realize architecture had a racial aspect, did you?” He smiled to show that his question was rhetorical. “Anyhow, Fräulein, I wanted to tell you, I’ve been asked to send a selection of films to Obersalzberg. The Führer enjoys seeing all the latest movies in a relaxed setting, and I’ve decided to include Madame Bovary.”
“Thank you, Herr Reichsminister.” Clara was surprised. Rumors were already starting to surface about the film’s star, Pola Negri. She had only reluctantly returned from America because she lost a fortune in the Wall Street crash, but now there was gossip about her Jewish blood. It wouldn’t be long before she left again, people said.
“I like Madame Bovary,” Goebbels told her. “It’s an interesting story, I think, and morally sound. Unfaithfulness in women is never attractive. I’m sure the Führer will enjoy it. He has a weakness for love stories. Just look at all those operettas he sees.”
“They’re a slightly different thing.”
Goebbels laughed, as though she had made a daring joke. “I share your distaste, Fräulein, of course. Operetta has never been an art form I enjoy. But the fact is, whereas you see naked girls flaunting themselves at the Wintergarten as vulgar Jewish sensuality, I see it as healthy exuberance likely to stimulate the birth rate! It’s all a question of perspective.”
Clara knew Goebbels was deliberately entrusting her with this display of cynicism, enticing her to relax her guard. To make comments that might be used against her at a later date.
“Anyhow, it’s not the Führer’s taste in operettas that concerns me this morning. It was another matter.”
The main matter.
“I wanted to ask you about our friends the Mitfords. Fräulein Mitford and Frau Mosley, I should say. Delightful girls, but I wonder…” He waved a cigarette in the air, as if contemplating how to frame his question. “I wonder myself if they really spring from the soul of the English people. What do you think?”
“Undoubtedly.”
Clara knew the Mitford girls’ father was a cousin of Winston Churchill’s wife. Hitler must be aware of that connection, too, and must have assumed that the women had the power to sway opinion in the upper echelons of the English establishment. Goebbels, however, was more astute.
“Unity is unusual, isn’t she? She has sent me a copy of an English magazine, The Tatler, with circles around the photographs of people who might be sympathetic to our cause.”
“How efficient of her.”
“Magda says she keeps a live rat in her handbag.”
“The English are great animal lovers,” said Clara blandly. “Unity used to take her pet sheep in the second-class carriage from Oxford to London. She has a snake too, I believe. It’s called Enid.”
“A snake?” He winced. “I hope she keeps it locked up. We’ve known Unity for some years, of course, and my wife is much closer to her than I am, but she appears a most…emotional…young woman. Her attachment to the Führer is as passionate as any German’s.”
“More so, if possible. Unity said the greatest moment of her life was sitting at the Führer’s feet, having him stroke her hair.”
Goebbels seemed startled. “Did she really?”
There was a small triumph in being privy to information that had escaped Goebbels’s all-encompassing net. But Clara knew she needed to tread carefully. The Propaganda Minister trusted her to supply gossip that he might miss, but it had to be innocuous gossip. Nothing that really mattered.
“Unity’s intensely enthusiastic. Back in England she gives the Hitler salute to shopkeepers.”
“That shows an unusual degree of loyalty.”
“The shopkeepers certainly think so. Unity says following the Führer is her destiny because she was conceived in Swastika, Ontario.”
Goebbels raised his eyebrows. “Well, I must admit the Führer is much taken with her. He ferries her all over the place, wherever she wants to go. He has provided her with a personal driver in Berlin, and he takes her to Munich on his own train. More important, they discuss England frequently, he tells me. Fräulein Mitford has given him to understand that the British are foursquare behind an alliance with Germany against the Bolshevik threat. She insists that England will never take up arms against Germany.”
Goebbels paused here, thoughtfully. Was he waiting for Clara to confirm Unity’s assessment, or was he asking her to point out the truth—that Germany had access to a huge range of newspapers, embassy staff and contacts, and transcripts of political speeches, not to mention an intelligence agency, that could keep the Führer better informed of English attitudes than a twenty-three-year-old girl with distinctly eccentric habits?
“I think Unity’s opinions are as individual as her choice of pets.”
He smiled. “The Führer spends much time with Frau Mosley too. He confided in me that he finds Diana tremendously intelligent. She has told him there are only three anti-aircraft guns in England. Does she know, do you think?”
“You mean, does she know how many guns the English have, or does she know what an anti-aircraft gun actually is?”
His smile dropped like an iron shutter. “My thoughts exactly.”
Plainly Goebbels felt reassured in his own assessment of the Mitfords. They were eccentric young women whose opinions were no more seri
ous than their party games. Still, he must have been concerned about their influence on Hitler. The Führer was more susceptible to the charms of the aristocracy than Goebbels, more prone to assuming that their opinions were representative.
“Now, Fräulein Vine, I understand you are attending the reception for the Duke of Windsor at Reichsminister Goering’s lodge.”
“Yes, Herr Minister.”
“I unfortunately will be unable to attend. I have business elsewhere, but I shall be most interested to hear about it.”
“Of course.”
“In particular…I believe our friends the Mitfords will also be attending.” He gave her a smile that didn’t meet his eyes. “I will be interested to hear more of their views. I think we should have another chat when you return.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Herr Doktor.”
Clara couldn’t help reflecting on the irony of the situation. How extraordinary it was that having offered to observe the Mitfords for British intelligence and been rebuffed, she should be asked to perform the same service for Goebbels himself. He sprang up, signaling the meeting was over.
“I myself am planning something a little more stimulating than a bunch of tipsy Luftwaffe officers to entertain the duke, delightful though that sort of thing may be. I have a cultural treat in store that I believe he will appreciate. The duke’s an intelligent man—I would go so far as to say a great man. He’s farsighted, modern, clever. Perhaps he was too clever, too sophisticated to remain in Britain.” He limped swiftly across the room and opened the door. “I daresay you sympathize with him in that regard.”
Clara walked away, wondering how Goebbels had known that she would be attending the Goerings’ reception. The rivalry between the two men would ensure that the Goerings did not discuss their guest lists with him. But of course: an event like that was simply too important for Goebbels not to find out.