Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  ‘The thing is, there are so many contradictions about her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She mystifies me.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘She started out a Catholic, you know. She went to convent school. Now she’s actually a Buddhist, at least that’s what she says. She believes strongly in reincarnation.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop her being a Nazi.’

  ‘That’s true. But people can’t always be judged by their labels.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Perhaps, sometimes, wearing a swastika tells you no more about a person than wearing Ferragamo shoes. I suspect she wanted a political philosophy to believe in. It could as well have been Communism. The National Socialists came along at the right time.’

  ‘Are you making apologies for her?’

  ‘No. I’m not defending her. Of course not. It’s just . . .’

  Why were these women so willing to adopt the poisonous politics that their husbands espoused? Why did women always try to smooth things over? Why didn’t they question more? Stand up for themselves?

  ‘Just what?’ he said impatiently.

  Clara cast a glance at Leo. She had felt a thrill of excitement when she saw the ticket on the hall table the previous day. A rush of pure relief. At last she would be able to see him. At last there was someone to confide in. Yet, now it had come to it, Leo seemed even more terse than usual. His face was closed and guarded, his hands rammed in his pockets. He stood at a slight distance from her. Was he impatient because he imagined she sympathized with Magda Goebbels? Or was it something a little more personal? Could it be distaste about her weekend jaunt with Müller? That having asked her to do ‘whatever it takes’ Leo was now appalled she might have done it?

  ‘Nothing. Anyway. Something’s happened.’

  ‘Another squabble is it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What, then?’

  He was so curt and businesslike, as though she had dragged him from his valuable work specifically to waste his time with women’s gossip. As though domestic tittle-tattle was all Clara was good for.

  ‘Forget it.’

  She stalked away, heart thudding with annoyance, into a dazzling room of sun and gold, all panelled with mirrors that reflected back the gleaming parquet floor. It was the Porcelain Room. Each gilded wall was lined by blue and white Chinese porcelain running from floor to ceiling, drawing the eye upwards to a swirl of ethereal clouds. There were vases, with a delicate tracery of indigo, and plates and figurines whose translucent willow patterns seemed to symbolize the very fragility of antiquity. An entire culture, centuries and centuries of it, was hanging precariously there in front of them. In a flash Clara was reminded of Erich on the china stall at Luna Park, hurling his little rubber balls for the pleasure of hearing the crockery smash. Jumping with satisfaction as plates and cups dropped in shards to the ground.

  Leo came up behind her and murmured, ‘If you were trying to draw attention to yourself just then, you succeeded.’

  She braced her shoulders and didn’t reply. He stood rigidly beside her, staring grimly at the chinoiserie, the guidebook clenched in his hand.

  ‘Let’s start again, shall we? You said something’s happened.’

  ‘It has.’

  ‘Is it to do with Müller? You haven’t said anything about him.’

  ‘What would you like me to say?’

  ‘You saw him, didn’t you? How did it go?’

  For a moment she didn’t speak. She couldn’t find the words to tell him. Her exhaustion weighed on her. She looked at the golden walls of china and wondered how something could be simultaneously so precious and so precarious.

  ‘Clara, I asked you . . . what happened with Müller?’

  Something flipped in her. She looked around quickly – the German glance – saw there was no one else in the room, and hissed, ‘You really want me to be sleeping with him, don’t you, Leo? That’s actually what you’d like. And then every little detail of it to be delivered to you afterwards in triplicate. For consideration by Head Office. Time, date, marks out of ten. Perhaps that’s what I should do. I should prepare a report. How Sturmhauptführer Müller performs in bed.’

  He recoiled slightly and she saw herself caught in the green amber of his eyes. Her anger melted into an ache. She wanted to be there, trapped in that small space, enclosed within him. She wanted to tell him that every minute of that Sunday with Müller she had thought of him. For a second he seemed stunned. Then he brought his face closer to hers and spoke in a low voice.

  ‘Sleep with him? Do you think I even want you to see that man? Don’t you think it’s tearing me apart that a woman like you is dallying with a senior Nazi and having to employ every feminine wile she has in order to extract information from him? Is that what you think I want? That every time I meet you I have to encourage you to lead him on a little further. To forego everything you have, your integrity, your innocence and God knows what else, to coax a little more out of him? Can you honestly imagine that’s what I want?’

  It was as if his words had opened a floodgate. Something in his expression released and his eyes shone with a kind of passionate anger. His face was transformed, and it was as though she had never seen him properly before. She reached for his hand and he grasped it.

  He pulled her towards him and said in her ear, ‘Listen carefully. There’s a place we keep. Just a couple of rooms. In Xantener Strasse, a block south of the Ku’damm. One down from the Hotel Rheingold. Third floor next door to a bakery shop, in the name of Zink. We can talk there. Go now. Wait an hour and take a cab to the top of the street. Ring twice.’

  The bakery had shut for the evening by the time she reached the house in Xantener Strasse and it appeared no one was in on any of the other floors. From the plaques and bells beside the front door she divined that most of the apartments were let to corporate concerns, rather than private residents. She found a small ivory bell for Zink and Sons and rang it twice. Eventually she heard his footsteps. It was dark in the hall and she could see his shape behind the frosted glass, but he waited until she had come in and shut the door behind her before switching on the light. In his shirtsleeves and braces, he led the way wordlessly up the creaking wooden stairs.

  The door opened into a narrow room, with a bathroom and a bedroom leading off. Inside he stuffed the keyhole with chewing gum, and unplugged the light from its socket. Then he turned to her. She leant into him and felt the length of his body. His mouth reached for hers and it was surprisingly hard and forceful as he kissed her.

  Clasping her to him, he pulled her jacket off and felt for the buttons on her blouse, but his fingers were trembling and she needed to help. She stepped out of her skirt and stood on the cold floorboards in her heels, stockings, plain cotton underwear and white cotton bra embroidered with pale blue forget-me-nots. She was shivering uncontrollably as his hands ran over her.

  ‘Come here.’

  He pulled her towards the bedroom.

  The bed was uncomfortable and narrow, presumably what His Majesty’s Government considered appropriate to a travelling salesman. Some box-ticker must have decreed it should be three feet wide and not an inch more, and that the mattress should be the precise texture of blancmange with walnuts in it.

  Leo took her face in his hands and kissed her again, all over, on her eyes and cheek and neck. Then he leant down and kissed her nipples and she arched her back beneath him, abandoning all inhibition. She ran her hands over his body, tentatively at first, then with increasing confidence. He was so much bigger than her. He was lean and well defined, with only a smattering of hair on his chest. His shoulders were surprisingly muscled, and when she reached round them she felt the deep groove of his spine and caught the faint, masculine tang of sweat as he rose above her. His movements were practised and careful and she was glad he was not a novice. His assured taking of pleasure absolved her of responsibility for a moment, and allowed he
r to lose herself in the sensation. She hadn’t realized until then what a strain her self-consciousness could be or how thrilling it was to be freed of it. Leo made love with a particular intensity, as if he wanted to claim her as his own and eliminate all memory of Müller. She recognized that, though he need not have worried. Just his touch had erased the print of Müller on her at a stroke.

  Afterwards he lay on one side of her and propped himself up on one elbow. He was unshaven and a haze of golden stubble covered his chin. She saw herself captured in his eyes, the way she had wanted.

  She said, ‘Are you going to stay in Berlin?’

  ‘As long as they need me. If I had children, I wouldn’t want them to be here right now, but as it is, I can do as I please.’

  ‘What about your family?’

  ‘I’m half-Irish. Hence the name. Both parents still living.’

  ‘Do you see much of them?’

  His father missed him, he knew, and he felt a deep weight of guilt there. His mother’s love was silent, in the English way, and Leo took after her in that aspect, but his father, with Irish blood in his veins, never shied from expressing his feelings. Just a few weeks ago he had begun a letter to him, “My dear child,” and then corrected himself. “I know you are a man now, but you will always be my child and I wanted to remind myself of it by using the words.”

  ‘I see them whenever I’m back, of course. But I don’t feel I belong there any more.’

  ‘I know that feeling.’

  After her mother died, Clara’s childhood home in Surrey seemed to sag into gradual decline. The grass grew high on the tennis court. Dust collected on the Bösendorfer. The tall-ceilinged rooms grew shabby and the chintz on the armchairs faded. Eventually, when Kenneth went off to university, father announced that they would ‘shut up shop’ and move to Ponsonby Terrace, which was a handy distance from Parliament. Secretly though, Clara had dreaded leaving the old house. She had leant against the wall as though she could physically embrace it, and wet the wallpaper with her tears.

  ‘I hated leaving our home when we moved to London. The new place was never the same.’

  ‘Why did you come to Berlin?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she reflected. ‘No, it’s not. It’s a short story. There was a man who wanted to marry me. He’s called Dennis Beaumont. My father thinks the world of him. When I discovered that Dennis thought acting was incompatible with marriage, everything else became clear in a second. In a single second. It was like the scales falling from my eyes and seeing things properly for the first time. I was shocked at the misjudgement I’d made. To think it could have spoilt my whole life. So I was running away really. From Dennis, and the terrible marriage I might have had.’

  ‘It’s easy to fall into a terrible marriage.’

  ‘Do you mean . . .?’ Suddenly uncertain, she looked up at him. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No.’ He brushed her hair with his hand. ‘I was thinking of someone else.’ He reached out and freed a cigarette from its packet. ‘Ovid, in fact.’

  ‘Ovid!’ she burst out laughing, then seeing his surprise said, ‘It just sounded so funny. Why Ovid?’

  ‘I’m translating Metamorphoses at the moment. I try to do a little each evening. I find it relaxing. Anyway, Ovid had an ill-advised affair, and it cost him his life.’

  She was still laughing. ‘Sorry. I don’t know anything about Ovid. I hardly know who he is.’

  ‘He was a Roman poet writing at the time of Christ. He wrote a series of poems about the Greek myths. They’re all about human motivations and human delusions. People changing shape and adopting disguises.’

  ‘So what about the terrible affair then?’

  ‘It changed the whole course of his life. He was all set for a brilliant political career, he was going to be a senator, but he got involved in a scandalous love affair. The Emperor Augustus exiled him to Constanţa on the Black Sea. He hated it. The ghastly climate, the bleak terrain, the lack of any civilized company. He described the landscape as a grey sea, patched with wormwood, where there was no birdsong, no vines, and wine was broken off and sold in frozen chunks. He lasted ten years there before he died.’

  Clara liked the rhythm of his voice. It was like being told a story. Thinking of Ovid in exile, isolated among the barbarians, transported her far from Berlin, with its frenetic streets and clanging trams. Perhaps it was the same for Leo. Maybe that was why he spent his evenings immersing himself in poems about transfiguration and disguise.

  ‘The local people were under constant siege from rivals who sent poisoned arrows across the roofs. There was a pitiless local wind which ripped the skin. You can’t help but feel for Ovid, a civilized man, fallen among savages.’

  Clara shifted a little in his arms, pressed herself back into the unfamiliar contours of his body and looked around the room. It was utterly impersonal. There was only the bed with a chair by the side and a chest of drawers. A picture of a German alpine landscape, a worn Persian rug over the floor-boards. Outside, against the tessellated rooftops, lines of pigeons shuffled and puffed their chests like army generals. Clara felt a powerful urge to stay there for as long as possible, shut off from the world of politicians and films, without need of dissembling, without fear, making love with Leo, having him tell her stories. She marvelled at the beauty of his body, the way the muscles moved beneath the skin of his back like the ripple of piano keys. The ridges of his chest, the strong line of his jaw and the dark tufts beneath his arms.

  After a while he climbed out of bed, tied a towel round his waist and went into the kitchen. He returned carrying two white china cups and a bag containing two rolls.

  ‘I got these from the bakery before it shut.’

  They sat up against the pillows, sipping hot tea, and Clara pulled the sheet around her.

  ‘Does anyone live here?’

  ‘No. People stay here occasionally. We could use it.’

  She wondered if they could stay the night. She had no clean clothes, of course, or toothbrush, or anything belonging to the mundane, everyday world. All she had was this burning excitement that came from being with him, and having her feelings reciprocated and despite having just made love, a tingling feeling of anticipation at the pulsing, male nakedness beside her. She was about to ask him what they should do when he put down his cup, drew her back into his arms and kissed her again.

  Later, when the sheets were tangled and the sky was violet and the room lit only by the wash of the streetlight outside, Clara grew suddenly serious.

  ‘On the subject of ill-advised love affairs, that’s what I was going to tell you. Magda is having one too.’

  ‘An affair?’ The information caused Leo to sit up with a start.

  ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you at the Schloss. She wants me to deliver a letter to the man who used to be her lover.’

  ‘Are you serious? Who is he?’

  ‘No one I’d heard of before.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘Victor Arlosoroff.’

  Arlosoroff He knew that name. It was the name Heinz had written on the piece of paper in that same apartment just a few weeks ago. “A big fish is about to swim into your net.” When Leo had briefed Archie Dyson and the others on the meeting, the name of Arlosoroff had caused a palpable ripple of excitement. Even Dyson, who prided himself on his Etonian sang-froid, had uttered an excited curse before explaining the reason.

  Victor Arlosoroff, also known as Chaim Arlosoroff, was already well known to the Foreign Office. A powerful man with a magnetic personality, he was an ardent Zionist, associated with the dominant Jewish political party in Palestine. Though he had held many confidential meetings with British officials, he was also known to bear a special grudge against Britain on account of its Palestine policy. The British, he complained, always sided with the Arabs. There had long been a suspicion, said Dyson, that Arlosoroff might have “something up his sleeve” and recent events seemed to have borne that out. Just a few wee
ks ago a letter had been intercepted from Arlosoroff to Chaim Weizmann, the former president of the Zionist World Congress, suggesting an armed uprising against British authorities in Palestine. Everyone at Head Office was on the alert for his next move.

  As Dyson explained, Arlosoroff was heading up a plan to encourage the Germans to fund Jewish emigration to Palestine. If, as Heinz now claimed, Arlosoroff was also in league with the Reds, it was entirely possible that some of the money funnelled out of Germany might also be going to the Communists. This was something that needed to be conveyed to the highest authorities.

  None of this Leo mentioned to Clara.

  ‘What do you know about this man?’

  ‘He and Magda were engaged, but they broke up because he wanted her to leave with him and settle in Palestine. Now he’s back in Berlin, he’s got in touch again and she wants to respond.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘She’s asked me to deliver a message to him. She’s frightened to meet him herself and she doesn’t trust anyone else.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. She must assume anyone else would be bribed by agents of her husband to give up their information. Or, at the very least, be followed.’

  ‘Would I be followed?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, though I don’t think they have any doubts about you.’

  ‘But I might be?’

  ‘If you are, I’ve told you what to do. You’re observant. You know how to check for surveillance and how to escape it. You know to keep your wits about you. Did you say you’d do it?’

  ‘I haven’t told her yet. I just don’t know.’ Clara bit her thumb and gazed out at the fading sky. ‘Perhaps it’s too risky.’

  ‘It’s your choice.’

  ‘You mean you think I should do it? You think I should see Arlosoroff?’

  He traced a finger down the side of her cheek. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘She wants me to collect the letter next Wednesday and take it the following day.’

  ‘How clever of her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Next Thursday is the 20th. April 20th is Hitler’s birthday. The whole of Berlin will be swarming with devoted followers. You won’t be able to move for screaming citizens waving flags. It’s the ideal distraction. She’s obviously given it some thought.’