Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  ‘Do you know I have people sending anonymous letters telling me my husband is seeing actresses?’

  ‘People are always ready to say spiteful things. Especially anonymously.’

  ‘Oh, but what they say is true. He betrays me at every turn. The other day I made him swear by the life of our daughter that he hadn’t betrayed me when I knew that very night he planned to meet a woman. It’s so ironic. My husband has very firm views on the role of women, as I’m sure you know. He’s very keen to restore their dignity to them.’

  ‘I heard him talking about that on the wireless.’

  The Doktor’s latest pronouncement had come on Frau Lehmann’s set just the previous evening, while Clara was tackling an overcooked chop with kale and dumplings, one of Frau Lehmann’s spécialités de la maison.

  “The first, best, and most suitable place for the woman is in the family,” came Goebbels’ sharp bark, “and her most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation. This is her highest mission.”

  ‘Today he’s going to open an exhibition on the German Frau. Such firm views on the German Frau, but when it comes to the Fräuleins,’ Magda almost spat. ‘Skinny little foreigners.’

  She slammed the wedding photograph face down and reached for the other, the silver-framed one from which Hitler stared off enigmatically into the distance.

  ‘You know, when this happens I tell myself, “Love is meant for husbands but my love for Hitler is stronger.” It might be hard for you to understand, but it’s true. I would give my life for the Führer. He is a wonderful man. Sometimes, when he has left, you feel a kind of vacuum.’

  ‘But if that was the case then why . . .?’

  ‘Why did I marry Joseph? Hitler told me he can love no woman, only Germany. Perhaps that was why I consented. So I could be close to the Führer.’

  This thought seemed to console her and she blew her nose and looked earnestly at Clara.

  ‘Forgive me for being so emotional, but I feel I can talk to you. It’s hard to talk to people here. Joseph hates me to gossip and everyone here tittle-tattles. They just want political advantage, but that doesn’t really apply to you, does it?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You know, my first husband was jealous. He wanted to know exactly what I was doing every moment of the day, but I thought Joseph might be different.’ She sniffed bitterly. ‘It seems not.’

  ‘But your husband has nothing to be jealous about.’

  Clara noticed the hand holding the photograph was trembling. Magda raised her face in the mirror and there was a flicker of truth in her eyes.

  ‘I wonder, Fräulein . . . there’s something you might help me with. A matter of some delicacy. You see . . .’

  Just then, there was a sharp little cry outside and a bash against the door.

  ‘Gott im Himmel!’

  The maid peered round, holding the baby in her arms. She had a feathery shock of dark hair and chubby limbs encased in an exquisitely stitched, smocked-front white dress.

  ‘I’m sorry, Frau Doktor,’ she stammered, ‘but you said eleven o’clock.’

  When she saw her mother the baby held out her little arms and at the sight of her daughter Magda brightened somewhat, stubbed out her cigarette and took her on her lap.

  ‘Isn’t she lovely? Joseph was so disappointed not to have a boy but now he adores her. He gets her up no matter what time he gets home. It’s not good for her routine, but what can I do? She loves her daddy.’

  She held up her silver hand mirror and the baby reached for it, staring round-eyed at her own face.

  ‘The Führer finds her enchanting. All the senior men play with her.’

  ‘She’s very pretty.’ Clara reached out and stroked the fine downy hair of the child as she sat on her mother’s lap.

  ‘I’ve always loved children. I adore being surrounded by them. I only married my first husband because he had two motherless sons, and then after I had Harald we took in three others, whose mother had died. But now the others are gone, Harald’s with his father and this little one is all I have.’

  She hugged the child to her and said, ‘Forgive me, Fräulein, forget what I said. Perhaps we should try the clothes out another time. On Thursday perhaps? Would that suit you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As she bent over the child, Clara’s silver locket dangled irresistibly and the baby clutched at it.

  ‘What a pretty necklace!’ said Magda.

  ‘My mother gave it to me. At least she bought it for me before she died.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘Just before my sixteenth birthday.’

  A new expression entered Magda’s eyes. ‘I’m so sorry. I always think it must be the hardest thing in the world for a child to be without its mother.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  On the days when Clara was required on set, Herr Lamprecht sent a car to ferry her to Babelsberg. She was glad of it. Not only did the sight of a gleaming Mercedes pulling up at the house visibly impress Frau Lehmann, but it gave Clara an hour each day when she was spared the anxiety of wondering if she was being spied on or followed.

  Since agreeing to Leo’s request, her behaviour had changed at some profound level. She had become as sensitive as if she had shed an entire layer of skin. She didn’t use the telephone because Leo had told her it could be tapped. You could generally tell, he said, because the police were still pretty inept at it and audibility was always affected, but it was better not to risk it. Not that she had anyone to telephone anyway. Yet the very notion of surveillance, that telephones might be tapped or mail intercepted, had opened up a whole new way of seeing the world.

  In turn, she learnt how to notice and recall far more than she had before. She looked at things, not in the clinical, indiscriminate way that a camera might, but scanning for incongruity. Already, as an actress, she was used to observing human tics and behaviours, but now she was being asked to remember aspects that might otherwise have escaped her entirely. She decided to practise. When she walked around the city she searched out other people and tried to memorize the colour of a man’s tie, or the rings on a woman’s hand. She had always had a good memory. As children they had played a game involving ordinary objects on a tray – a box of matches, a corkscrew, a pencil – which increased each time in number until only one person recalled them all, and it was usually her. Now she dug out those old skills and polished them up again. She read car number plates and tried to retain the first three digits. She noted the number of windows in a house, or the number of flags on a shop. She counted railings and associated them with an image in her head, a trick her mother had taught her with a shopping list. She was constantly on alert. It was like looking at a picture where everything was significant, each detail mattered and nothing could be discounted.

  She would wait a second at street corners to see if the people who came after her were the same who had been behind her at the corner before. She would stop just before a road crossing to light a cigarette, obliging anyone coming after her to pass and cross in front of her. She watched out for discrepancies. Why did the old woman who walked into the shop with a stick come out again and appear to manage perfectly well without one? Why were there two men sitting in a parked car? Once, passing a man on a bench in the Tiergarten, she noticed that his newspaper was turned to the same page ten minutes later.

  It was impossible when she did this to forget that her father back in England was being followed too. Perhaps there were shabby men in macs outside Ponsonby Terrace who would trail him every time he left for the Carlton Club, or note down the visitors who came to the door. Maybe they even opened his mail, or employed bright young men to chat to Angela at parties. She wondered what Daddy would say if he knew and it was telling to realize that she had simply no idea. She may have learned to observe the world in detail, but when it came to her own father she had no insight whatsoever. She supposed he would regard her own behaviour as treacherous. Acting against his inte
rests while trading on his reputation with the Nazis. He would probably cut her off entirely for such a betrayal. But finding out about Grandmother Hannah had convinced her more than ever that she was right. She may have nothing of significance to give Leo, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t try. Gradually the nervous tension dissipated and she felt instead very calm.

  On set between takes, Clara spent most of the time chatting to Karin Hardt, the young blonde actress whose role she had to reproduce in English. The script, with its story of a secret agent on the trail of stolen military secrets in Venice, was shambolic, and her character, a flighty love interest whose actions unwittingly helped military intelligence to perpetrate a daring coup, was paper thin, but the actors were friendly and even the grand Olga Chekhova smiled and offered cigarettes. Karin was obsessed with beauty tips and spent her time chewing gum, in the belief that it firmed the jaw. She looked with dismay at the tan that was forming on Clara’s skin as a result of the spring sunshine and advised her to splash her face with ice water and massage sugar and lemon juice into her skin before going to bed.

  ‘She’s a girl, not a pancake!’ said Herr Lampecht who had overheard.

  ‘Besides,’ added Hans Albers gallantly, ‘Clara doesn’t need any help in that department. She’s an English rose.’

  So Clara guessed the face she presented to the world must be convincing enough.

  Privately in the dressing room, amid the pots of scented cream and jars of thick beige make-up, she perfected her new persona in the mirror, emulating the kind of flirtatiousness that Helga practised, with a girlish flippancy and a touch of the scatter-brained actress. She put on the blonde wig she had been given and saw how it transformed her face, spilling light on the skin, evening out the subtleties of expression. Every natural instinct, such as her unfortunate tendency to flush at times of emotion, or to talk too much when nervous, must be suppressed or disguised. Yet the process of erasing her natural self and cultivating a different one had little to do with costumes or wigs. It needed to start from within. She thought back to Paul Croker, her old acting coach. “It is not enough to look like Viola, it is not enough to sound like Viola, you must be Viola.” She must learn her role as though it was written on her skin in invisible ink, until she carried it around with her, like her own shadow.

  She saw Magda only once, when she called in to help send invitations for the celebration of the National Socialist People’s Welfare. Frau Ley was on her way out, her skin as polished as Sèvres china, her fair hair rolled at the nape of her neck.

  Clara found Magda in the drawing room, mournful and depressed. Between signing invitations personally and stuffing envelopes, she told Clara all about the Leys’ luxurious home in Grunewald, with its swimming pool and marble hall, and the gossip that the squat, thick-lipped Ley regularly attacked his wife in an alcoholic rage.

  ‘To think a woman like that is made to suffer by a brute of a husband.’

  Somehow, though, it felt like Magda was not thinking of Frau Ley at all.

  Once she met Clara’s eyes directly and she felt sure that Magda was about to raise the ‘matter of some delicacy’ she had mentioned before. But Goebbels arrived home at that moment and the sight of him passing in the corridor made the hair rise on Clara’s neck, even though he marched straight to his study without a greeting.

  Back at the villa, Frau Lehmann hung a portrait of the Führer in her bedroom. It was colour tinted in an amateurish way, giving his lips and cheeks an odd, rosy glow that suggested he had defied his own strictures on lipstick and rouge. At night Clara turned it to the wall.

  Then one evening about a week later she found an envelope in an unfamiliar hand waiting for her on the hall table.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Leo stood before the landscape, absorbed. A Brueghel, it must be, with peasants battling through a wintry landscape quite unlike the bright spring morning outside. The scurrying figures in the foreground, bent beneath their burdens of logs and herding their geese, seemed entirely unaware that in the far distance, a crucifixion was taking place on a patch of waste ground outside the city walls. How brilliantly, Leo thought, the painter had depicted the ordinary objects: a straw basket, a leather hat, a little dog on a chain. A fashionable woman, in a rich orange gown. Her husband, in a leather hat and cream cotton scarf. All had been rendered with loving faithfulness. The horror of the crucifixion, an event of dreadful cruelty, was taking place to the far right of the frame. A phalanx of soldiers followed the condemned to the gallows. Some watched curiously, mothers sat excited children down to enjoy the procession. Others went about their business entirely unmoved. This spectacle of misery was nothing special. The death that awaited the felons came to everyone sooner or later. In the distance, an exquisite city, like a new Jerusalem, rose with gleaming towers.

  He saw her reflection on the glass of the picture, but did not turn.

  ‘The Crucifixion,’ she said. ‘Brueghel the Younger.’ She fingered the ticket that had arrived the previous evening in a plain envelope with no accompanying note.

  Wednesday 5 April, Alte Nationalgalerie. Admit one.

  ‘At least it’s still here,’ Leo said conversationally, as if engaging in art appreciation with a fellow visitor. ‘I’ve heard Goering has begun helping himself to whatever catches his eye. All the gallery owners are terrified when he comes to visit. He’s already had Rubens’ Diana at the Stag Hunt taken out of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and put up in his own place.’

  ‘Goebbels disapproves of robbing the galleries.’

  ‘As does Hitler, apparently. Mind you, given his taste, it would be a favour to everyone if he did spirit his favourites away.’

  They walked around the gallery like tourists. Part of Leo wished they were. They peered into glass cabinets jumbled with watercolours and gouaches. On the second floor they entered a side room of foreign artists, and found Millet and Corbet, and Constable’s house on Hampstead Heath. They stopped in front of a Degas, flush with the pink and apricot flesh tones of a woman dressing. It reminded Leo a little of Marjorie Simmons, in the deft way she refastened her brassiere after love-making, putting herself firmly out of reach. Repackaging herself. That way women had with their bodies, of controlling them after an ecstasy of release. He wondered about Clara too, whether she loved to watch herself during sex, the way Marjorie did. But then he reproached himself. Today she was wearing a navy suit and a blue hat tipped to one side. From the shadows under her eyes, it seemed she was a little tired.

  ‘How is your acquaintance?’

  ‘Not good. She looks exhausted and she’s constantly on edge . . .’ Clara hesitated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It may be nothing, but I think there’s something wrong.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I can’t work out what it is. I thought she was going to tell me the other day. She said she wanted to talk to me about “a matter of some delicacy.” She started crying.’

  ‘Crying? Why?’

  ‘They’d had a row.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘That’s just it. I’m not certain. Though I’m sure it was serious.’

  ‘Politics perhaps?’

  She gave a short laugh. ‘I shouldn’t think so. She did complain that Joseph is betraying her.’

  ‘He’s a famous womanizer.’

  His eyes were surveying the room while they talked. There was only one other visitor, American it looked like, by the Kodak Brownie he was carrying.

  ‘Yes, and it’s hard for her. Apparently the girls just swarm over him. She has to take such care over her appearance. She obviously feels she needs to keep up.’

  ‘Without the help of cosmetics, one assumes.’

  ‘Not at all. And forget no drinking or smoking either. She changes outfits several times a day. He’s just the same. He takes manicures and he sits under a sun lamp. He thinks it makes him more attractive.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’s the suntan the women are falling for.’

>   ‘It’s strange though, isn’t it?’ she mused. ‘All this talk of making women more simple and natural, when Magda and the other women are doing their level best to be as glamorous as possible.’

  ‘It matters, glamour. People believe that an élite should be glamorous. The Nazis don’t want to actually look like a gang of murderous roughnecks now, do they?’

  A gaggle of schoolchildren, satchels on their backs, entered the room, accompanied by a teacher with a booming voice. The girls, in short white socks and gymslips, stared obediently up at the Brueghel, but the boys at the back glanced at Clara. Leo drifted away into a room of Post Impressionists and she followed him.

  ‘I suppose he’ll end up leaving her,’ she said.

  ‘I doubt it. She reflects well on him. It’s more a case of whether she will stay with him, I’d have thought. I wonder why she stands it.’

  ‘I asked her that. She says he’s a brilliant man. He lives three times as intensively as other men. He can’t be judged by a middle-class moral code. She’s very proud of him. She remembers the days when he would give talks in Communist neighbourhoods and they would throw beer mugs at him, and now he’s the youngest ever minister in Germany.’

  ‘So she does share his politics?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. They argue a lot about women. He thinks that women should concentrate on being mothers. He says he respects them too much to allow them involvement in politics.’

  ‘That’s rich. Without the votes of women, the Nazis wouldn’t be where they are.’

  He stopped to admire a nude, looking closely at the thick, stippled paint of the thighs, marvelling at how a painter could conjure such a convincing illusion of living flesh from oil and greasy pigment.

  ‘She seems to talk quite readily to you.’

  ‘I think she’s lonely. They don’t have many friends in high command. I suppose she just likes having someone to chat to. Someone who’s not going to spread gossip.’