The Iron Necklace

by Giles Waterfield

  She sat with her eyes on the table, playing with her napkin. He took a forkful of food, and stole a look at her. He pushed the plate away from him, frowned at himself in the glass.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know when I will return, or the children.’

  ‘You do not want to be seen weeping, you know. You are a famous person, people will recognise you. Take my arm. Let’s go home.’

  ‘Home?’ After a moment they stood up and made for the door, smiling and looking brightly forwards, greeting one or two friends. The head waiter asked when he would see them again. They shrugged.

  They walked in silence along the hectic Kurfürstendamm. When they turned into a quieter street she stopped. ‘Thomas, what is the architectural practice you’ve joined? Is it very sympathetic to the party? Is that why you’ve told me so little about it?’

  ‘It is sympathetic to the party, and to the ideal of workers’ housing. They have given me a great deal of work, I have never been so happy.’

  ‘Thomas, couldn’t you leave this country when I do? All of us could go back to England, I’m sure you would find work. We would be happy. There’s enough money. . .’

  ‘No. This is my country. This is where my life is, where it must always be.’

  When they were back in the apartment, he asked her, always courteous, whether she wanted him to sleep on the couch in the studio. But she shook her head.

  In bed they exchanged one kiss.

  Tired though he was, he heard her sobbing into her pillow, late into the night.

  As planned, Irene and the children left for England two days later, with no more than the usual amount of luggage. But Irene did take her painting equipment.

  14

  It is Pandora’s last afternoon in New York. The morning has been interrupted by a telephone call from Pandora to Tom, to say she can’t come on a bicycle ride in the park. She does not say she can’t stop looking through the papers in her great-aunt’s apartment. He is very disappointed. But he’ll be driving her to the airport, she looks forward to that in a gloomy way.

  ‘So that was that,’ says Sophia. ‘She left Germany, and she left him, in a way. It wouldn’t be true to say she never went back – in the early years she returned quite often, later not.’

  ‘And he never came to England?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t easy for Germans to travel abroad in the 1930s and he was in a difficult position, he’d been closely associated with the Social Democrats, he had many friends who were anti-Nazi. He was under surveillance, I’d say. So he kept his head down and worked.’

  ‘I suppose that kept him out of trouble.’

  ‘He was very successful, designing housing in the traditional German manner. But Irene told me his early enthusiasm for National Socialism soon evaporated. He remained a party member, he had to. His consolation, apparently, was Salitz. His parents died in the late 1930s but his aunt and uncle lived on in the big house, and he’d go there often to see them. Poor things.’

  Pandora looks at her enquiringly.

  ‘Oh, you don’t know that story? One forgets how much the Germans suffered, it’s not often discussed. The uncle died in 1944. The house was in the path of the Russian invasion, and the Russians were not well disposed towards aristocrats in big houses. When the Russian army was a day away, the aunt fled in an old farm cart with her maid and the gardener, who were as old as she was. But the Russians caught her. For some reason they were quite kind to her, I suppose her face told them she was a good woman. They took her back to her house, which by then was full of refugees, and gave her two little rooms. A day later she drowned herself in the lake – she knew where the water was deep. . . She was the sweetest lady. Oh, my dear, you are reviving so many memories. But if you must. . . well, you’re determined, like your grandmother.’

  Pandora shifts in her seat, and says she can’t understand why Irene never found another man.

  ‘Oh, we talked about that. She always saw herself as married to Thomas, you see. She thought it was her duty to be true to him, she thought she’d betrayed him and that was why. . . I don’t think it made her very happy, but duty doesn’t involve happiness, does it? When Thomas died she married herself to her art – it may sound clichéd but I think it was true. Now, I have something for you.’

  Pandora is excited, speculates about what it could be. It is an unusual thing, she is told, not a present in the normal sense, but important. Sophia takes a black box from a drawer and hands it to Pandora.

  The box contains a necklace, made of iron.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Pandora, mystified.

  ‘That, my dear, is the Prussian necklace Irene was given by her mother-in-law. She wore it to a ball at the Berliner Schloß where she met the Emperor. It had a special meaning for her.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ah, you must decide that.’ She lifts the necklace and holds it between her hands. ‘She asked me to look after this necklace and give it to you one day. She did say, she hoped it might encourage you to go to Germany and look for the lost land of Prussia, where she had been so happy, and so unhappy too.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For reading and commenting on the draft at various stages, I am most grateful to Dietlind Bock, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cassie Nash, Peter Mandler, Paul Ryan and most especially to Kate Hubbard who read it twice and commented expertly.

  I received detailed advice on matters from international diplomacy to photography and women’s dress in the 1910s from Nikolaus Bernau, Denise Bethel, Angela Bohrer, Karl Heinz Bohrer, Oriole Cullen, Peter Damrau, Caroline Evans, Charlotte Gere, Erik Goldstein, Elise Grauer, Irene von Hardenberg, Guido Hinterkeuser, Thomas Kemper, Christine Kitzlinger, Marcus Koehler, Peter Lang, Steffen Løvkjær, Benjamin Moore, Thomas Otte, Judy Pillsbury, Samuel Wittwer and Barnaby Wright. Many thanks to all of them.

  As always I am greatly indebted to my agent Felicity Rubinstein and to her colleague Sarah Lutyens. No writer could ask for better editors than Sam Redman and Clare Drysdale at Allen and Unwin.

  My friends in Germany – mentioned above, and there are others – helped me to improve my knowledge of their language and guided me over many questions. It is hard to do justice to their kindness and the insights they gave me into the richness and strength of German culture.

  GW