Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  ‘I assure you the government has no desire to control any films being made. Art is free and should remain so. I have always said that.’

  The men around him nodded at these snippets, as though they proceeded from the mouth of Socrates. He was a devoted admirer of the power of film, Goebbels continued. There were certain films that had made an indelible impression on him. Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, for example, and Battleship Potemkin.

  ‘The famously Bolshevik Potemkin,’ muttered Albert. ‘Can he be serious?’

  ‘You wouldn’t think politicians would bother much with movies,’ said Clara, ‘I’m sure they don’t in England.’ It was hard to imagine Mr Baldwin, with his pipe and his poker face, getting excited about Love Me Tonight or Ramsay MacDonald attending Shanghai Express.

  ‘Oh, but Ufa is so important,’ said Albert. ‘If Ufa plays its cards right it can control film making all over Europe.’

  ‘And I hear Dr Goebbels is planning to choose every chorus girl himself, just to ensure that they’re a perfect representation of German womanhood,’ sniggered Helga.

  ‘In which case, Fräulein, you would be the ideal choice.’

  Helga widened her eyes and turned round. The speaker was a short, thickset figure, his beer-barrel body encased in the brown shirt and breeches of the SA. The leer on his face had a message as plain as his swastika armband. Within a split second Helga assessed the situation, and realized she wasn’t going to have to apologize.

  ‘Well, I didn’t know I was being overheard.’ Her eyelids fluttered flirtatiously.

  ‘That’s because your voice is as clear as a bell, Fräulein. You’re an actress, I can tell.’

  Helga’s whole body gave a reflexive wriggle. ‘But of course.’ She stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Helga Schmidt.’

  ‘Walter Bauer.’ He cocked his head at the posters on the walls. ‘I’ve probably seen your face in one of these masterworks. Only it’s not usually the faces I’m looking at.’ He issued a loud guffaw and turned, as if for confirmation, to his companion.

  The other man was wearing a double-breasted suit, with a crest of white handkerchief protruding from the pocket, and a smile of humorous disdain. He had a dense, muscular build and his abundant dark hair was trained with brilliantine into a style of military precision. He raised his eyebrows momentarily at Bauer’s remark but held out a hand to Helga, simultaneously clicking his heels. Clara had never before seen anyone click their heels.

  ‘Klaus Müller.’

  Helga allowed her hand to be kissed, and simpered. As she listed the films she had been in for the Brown Shirt’s benefit, Clara was conscious of Müller’s eyes appraising her.

  ‘And what about you, Fräulein? Have we seen any of your work?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘This is Clara Vine. She’s a big star in England,’ cut in Helga quickly. ‘And she’s in line for a major part in Schwarze Rosen.’

  ‘If the producer chooses to turn up,’ smiled Clara, deprecatingly.

  ‘You speak excellent German for an Englishwoman.’

  ‘My late mother was German. She came from Hamburg.’

  His eyebrows rose in polite surprise. ‘So your father?’

  ‘He’s English. He’s a politician.’

  Clara saw a flicker of interest cross his face.

  ‘Not Sir Ronald Vine?’

  ‘You’ve heard of him?’

  ‘But of course.’

  From across the lobby, the voice of Dr Goebbels rose. ‘The German film has reached the point where it must fulfil its duty to the nation. It must exercise international influence and become a spiritual world power.’

  He seemed likely to go on for some time.

  In a low voice Müller interrupted. ‘I’m afraid, ladies, we have business to get on with. But I wonder whether you two would care to join us this evening. For a drink at the Kaiserhof. Shall we say seven o’clock?’

  Clara was about to refuse politely. Everything she knew about National Socialists suggested they were not the kind of people to sip cocktails with. Besides, in England you would never accept an invitation from a man to whom you had not properly been introduced, even if he did profess to know your father. But before she could say anything Helga had spoken up.

  ‘We’d love to!’

  Chapter Four

  He liked it here. Most of his colleagues had places out in the west of the city, comfortable villas in Dahlem or Wilmersdorf, where they could shield themselves behind high walls from the turbulence around them. But Leo Quinn had looked east and found a place in Oranienburger Strasse, on the top floor of an apartment block. It was only ten minutes’ walk from Unter den Linden, but its proximity to the poorer districts, where the tenements housed families of Jews and immigrants from the east, made it an unusual choice for an employee of His Majesty’s Foreign Office. Day and night there was the smell of frying and the sound of arguments. The back alleys were cobwebbed with clothes lines and the balconies hung with sheets like flags of surrender. Though his street might not be smart, the shabbiness suited the sombre buildings with their subdued stucco and nineteenth-century stolidity. You passed through an arched gateway into a dark, cobbled courtyard where the odd stray cat lurked, probably someone’s pet in better times, and then you walked up three flights of dim stairway to find a room that was big enough only for that same cat to be swung, were it not for the piles of books that stood around the single bed and armchair. There was nowhere to cook, but Leo took his breakfast and supper in the café next door, a place of faded, high-ceilinged splendour. Breakfast was always the same, a roll and coffee, and supper tended towards the unimaginative too: pork of some description, and dumplings, best not described. But the portions were hearty, the waitress was friendly and the café, especially in the bitter winter months, much warmer than his apartment, with its cracked gas fire.

  The saving grace of his room, and the part that allowed his landlady to charge a few marks more a week, was that its tall windows looked out onto the street rather than the dank courtyard, so that in the afternoon the room was saturated with a flood of golden light that lit up every dusty corner. When he returned from work Leo would put a record on his gramophone, smoke one of his Salem Aleikum Turkish cigarettes, look out on the broad street lined with plane trees, and think it was possible to feel at peace. Almost.

  He knew barely anyone here. His neighbours were mostly Jewish, due to the proximity of the grand New Synagogue along the street, a russet brick building with Moorish towers and a fretted golden dome. This gloriously exotic building was flanked on each side by leaden-faced apartment blocks like stolid German sentries in field grey. It was the largest synagogue in Berlin and seated three thousand people in a hall the size of a football pitch, exquisitely decorated with gold patterning. Leo had never set foot in it but peered into the doorway sometimes, and smelt the scent of something mysterious and ancient.

  In the next apartment was a couple whose child’s ragged, asthmatic cough had punctuated most nights that winter. Below him was a Fräulein Lena Goldwasser who had revealed, in their only conversation, that she worked as a nurse in a clinic out in Wannsee. Leo talked to no one in the block apart from a schoolmaster called Martin Rinkel, who would sometimes come and knock at the door with a bottle of bad schnapps and a deck of cards. Other evenings, Leo got on with a translation he was doing of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, something he kidded himself he might have published one day. Not because he thought it would sell, but for the sheer satisfaction of seeing his name in print.

  Solitude suited him fine. As an only child it had been his natural condition, and he was rarely desperate for company. From time to time he had run into a couple of men he’d known at university. They flocked here, the men who liked other men, because that was what Berlin was famous for. They discovered a homosexual freedom they could never find at home, even if that same freedom was laced with terror now as they found themselves liable to arbitrary arrest. If they were foreigners they were dealt with by
the police, but their German friends risked a beating or worse from the storm troopers. The Brown Shirts took pleasure in meting out punishments of an especially perverse and sadistic nature, punishments that cast a savage light on their own benighted souls.

  As for himself, there was a woman back in London, a secretary at the Foreign Office called Marjorie Simmons. Or at least she used to be Marjorie Simmons; she was married now, so not Simmons any more and not working either. She lived in Putney, but her husband was abroad, meaning that she was free to take the bus up to town pretty much whenever she felt like it, on the pretext of visiting a gallery or a day’s shopping in Knightsbridge, and when he was in London she would call him and they would meet in Brown’s Hotel, a place of dingy elegance, in a side street off Piccadilly.

  At the thought of Marjorie’s face, the freckled nose and smile revealing slightly buck teeth, Leo felt a twist either of regret or revulsion inside him. When they first met, it had been nice enough. She was girlishly enthusiastic about the plays they went to and the concerts at the Wigmore Hall, and she had listened to his travel stories with every sign of interest. Then one day, when he had returned from a vacation in Czechoslovakia, she announced blithely, as if to a gossipy girlfriend, that she was getting married, to a man whom Leo had always considered dull and unintelligent. Wrong-footed by this approach, he had congratulated her warmly.

  No sooner had Majorie told him, however, than she gave a secretive little smile, and said, ‘But that doesn’t have to spoil our little arrangement, does it?’

  And like a fool, he had shaken his head and agreed.

  Since then, whenever they met, he had tried to ask about her husband, but she diverted the conversation immediately. She liked to compartmentalize him, he realized. He was part of that ribboned section of her life that was labelled pleasure. He probably had the same status to her as a trip to the theatre. Indeed there was something theatrical about the pleasure she took in lovemaking. It was like a performance in which Marjorie herself was on stage. He had noticed the way she glanced in the triptych mirror while they were in bed or as he tried to read her poetry after sex. The way she observed her magnificent body, the freckled shoulders, the curving slope of her back, the suspenders and silk knickers, as though just the experience itself was not enough. The way she stroked the reddish curls between her legs and the skin of her inner thighs, white as a boiled egg. She needed to be both spectator and performer. And she pleased him in bed, there was no doubt about it. When she undressed she possessed a seductive boldness that vanished entirely when she was clothed in twinset and pearls. She had a kind of feline sensuality that helped him forget that sex with her was at all times separated from emotion. What scared him was her assumption that they could go on like this for ever. Every time they met he rehearsed the words to tell her he was ending it, but every time, after sex, it seemed monstrously impolite. He dreaded the thought that his life could be wasted in a polite, amicable relationship of convenience. The dullness of adultery, rather than the excitement of love.

  His father had been an accountant; a man whose intelligence far outshone the mundane circumstances of his life. They lived in a terraced Victorian house in Clapham, with a red tiled path and a painted porch and a scrap of front garden filled with chrysanthemums. His father would leave for work each day with a packet of sandwiches and a copy of the Daily Herald and when he returned in the evenings he would watch Leo completing his Latin translations on the dining table with pride and sometimes an angry flash of envy, so certain was he that education would be the route for his only son out of their impoverished lower-middle-class existence. As an Irishman he was an outsider himself, with a soft, emotional heart, and the day Leo won a scholarship to Balliol he was stiffly embarrassed to see his father cry.

  Oxford had taught him several things, most notably how to mix in different social spheres with ease. He learnt how to drift on a punt downstream between banks of high yellow irises and trailing willows. He learnt the etiquette required when you were asked back for weekends to houses that possessed tennis courts and ancestral oil paintings. He understood that the English upper classes, just like his other subjects of study, had their irregular grammar and unspoken rules. The fact that they lived in the same Mayfair squares and attended Eton or Harrow or Winchester, shot on the same grouse moors and week-ended in the same country houses, meant they were far too cunning to be hoodwinked by an outsider. The tight little clan of people with money had known each other from birth. They recognized the minute variations of social status the way a birdwatcher knew a woodlark from a skylark and there were any number of subtleties to betray you. Language – not just accents or inflections, but the vocabulary itself, like the wrong word for mirror or notepaper – instantly pinpointed an imposter. Yet they liked Leo. He was good-looking, with his spare frame and high brow, from which slightly curly hair sprang. Even more importantly, he had learnt how not to obtrude.

  Even while he moved among the upper classes, though, he resented them. Was it their easy assurance, or their wilful insouciance? Their carriage, the swing in their shoulders that came from hundreds of years of breeding? Their clothes, their cars, their games, their sheer damn ignorance? Their voices filled with money, their laughter that rattled with cash? Leo wasn’t sure. He remembered one incident that still had the power, years on, to make him shudder.

  He had been invited to a ball and it was the custom for people to be allocated to ‘house parties’, at which families in the nearby countryside would accommodate visiting guests. The house he had been assigned to contained a girl of especial beauty, the honourable someone, with a fine blonde bob that swung like silk, and eyes of deep violet. In the afternoon Leo was invited to take a gun out, shooting rabbits. He had never held a gun before, but when he lifted it and peered through the sites, it reminded him unmistakably of the times as a boy that he would track the elusive frisk of a bird’s feathers through his binoculars. When he saw the rabbit’s beady eye and delicate ears quivering with life, he found he simply couldn’t pull the trigger. What if he missed? What if he merely injured the creature? He lowered it again, only to see the animal fall a second later, blasted by the blonde standing directly behind him.

  ‘You want a clean kill,’ she observed coolly, reloading her Purdey. ‘And you couldn’t do it, could you?’ He said nothing, but later, as they were walking through the fields back to the house, she had made a remark that was curiously devastating.

  ‘You know, Leo, however much you look the part, it’s like you’re acting. You don’t actually seem like you belong.’

  It stung. Because she was right.

  It was dangerous, this sense of not belonging, and it was the kind of thing his own employers looked out for. He wondered how closely they kept a watch on him.

  At Balliol Leo had scraped enough money to spend part of every vacation travelling, and after leaving university he worked in Geneva, Munich and Berlin, teaching English. Berlin in the high days of the Weimar Republic was paradise, sitting in cafés talking to adventurous women with short hair and monocles, having rambling discussions about art and savouring the sense that anything daring or decadent was possible.

  Eventually, he ran out of money and went back to England. He thought he might go into journalism, and was poised to take a job with Reuters when he received a telephone call from a man he had known at Oxford. Hugo Chambers was an odd sort with a passion for golf, Old Masters and eclectic wildlife. He had travelled the world on natural history expeditions, seeking out creatures that were believed to be extinct. He was a respected naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, and also, Leo discovered, he worked for British Intelligence. He wondered if Leo might like to meet up for a chat.

  Tall and thin, dressed in pepper-and-salt tweeds, and with a habit of wild gesticulation, Hugo was exactly as Leo remembered him. They spent a jovial few hours eating beef and oyster pie in Scott’s, and after lengthy tales of Hugo’s recent jaunt to find butterflies in the foothills of the Himalayas, they wa
lked to 54 Broadway, a block opposite St James’s Park tube station with a brass plaque announcing it as the Headquarters of the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company. There on the fourth floor behind a padded door, was a forbidding character with a square jaw and a vigorous handshake, who turned out to be the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. Rear-Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair – or Quex as he was known – offered Leo a cigar from a crocodile-skin case and waved him comfortably to an armchair. He seemed already to know everything about Leo, from his school and family, to the languages he spoke and his financial circumstances. The conversation was pleasant, but there was one exchange that bewildered Leo.

  ‘An only son, aren’t you Quinn? Close to your parents?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He felt Quex’s gimlet eyes on him.

  ‘They must be proud of you, getting up to Oxford and taking a first.’

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘Yet you’ve spent a lot of time abroad.’

  ‘I’ve travelled around quite a lot.’

  ‘Did you take an interest in the politics when you were there?’

  ‘Politics are not really my hobby, sir.’

  ‘Do you keep in touch with the people you met?’

  ‘Not at all, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Just checking you’re not a Red,’ said Hugo cheerfully, as they clattered back down the stairs at the end of the interview.

  ‘And the only child bit?’

  ‘Some trick cyclist stuff about dependability and owing allegiance. Forget it. You’re our man.’

  Leo agreed to the job. He would be seconded to the Berlin Passport Control Office which was the usual cover for SIS operatives, filtering applications for British visas. He would liaise with the ambassador himself and an attaché at the embassy called Archie Dyson, and he would communicate with Head Office via communiqués carried in the diplomatic bag. He would receive a week’s worth of briefing before he left. That was all, apart from the advice that he should trust no one and avoid sleeping with local women. Or men, of course.