The Pursuit of Pearls

by Jane Thynne

  Grand slid a newspaper photograph out of a manila file on his desk, and craning across, Clara saw with astonishment that it was a yellowing page from the B.Z. am Mittag showing herself talking to Annelies von Ribbentrop at the launch of the Reich Fashion Bureau in 1933. The passage of six years had done nothing to soften the rigid composure of the foreign minister’s wife, the iron set of her jaw, or the dyspeptic smile that could so easily be mistaken for a grimace.

  “What do you make of her?”

  Clara thought back to the first time she’d met Frau von Ribbentrop, just after the regime came to power. Then the woman was an arriviste, desperate to impress with dinner parties at her Dahlem home, and now she was half of one of the most powerful couples in Europe. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers came to her parties. She was a far more ardent Nazi than her husband, yet their marriage could not be more different from the marital catfight the Goebbelses waged. The von Ribbentrops were said to share everything, especially political plans.

  “She’s a formidable woman,” Clara remarked carefully.

  “Indeed. A couple of chaps here met her when von Ribbentrop was ambassador to Great Britain, and they were frankly terrified. She was always cornering them to complain about the weather—as though they could do anything about it—and insanely jealous about her husband’s behavior with the ladies. He was said to send a daily bunch of red carnations to Wallis Simpson, and his wife couldn’t tolerate it. She was a bit of a laughingstock actually. She brought over a marching squad of SS guards, who created the most frightful atmosphere, and above all she had the most dreadful nouveau riche taste. Decked out the whole of Carlton House Terrace in marble cladding. It looks like a public lavatory. It’s going to take years to unpick.”

  Clara finished her tea and returned the saucer to the table. “I take it, Major, it’s not her artistic tastes you’re concerned about here.”

  “Precisely. More her knowledge of diplomatic maneuvers. To what extent she influences the husband’s decisions.”

  “Goebbels always says von Ribbentrop bought his title, married his money, and got all his political views from his wife. They say even Hitler is wary of her.”

  A flicker of a smile. “I suppose that’s the thing about marriage—one can never tell what goes on inside. Do you see much of her?”

  “Hardly. Last year she tried to have me arrested as a spy.”

  Clara hesitated. Something Mary Harker had mentioned came to mind.

  “But she is holding a press reception to show off the refurbishment of the new Foreign Ministry building. The Reich Chamber of Culture always likes actresses to attend these events if possible.”

  “To supply a touch of glamour.”

  “That’s the idea. But even if I went, I can’t imagine she would give me the time of day, let alone confide any military secrets.”

  “I’m sure she’ll come round,” declared Grand, as though Clara’s objections were negligible. “Find a way to get closer to her. From what we’ve heard, Frau von Ribbentrop frequently formulates political policy, which is later passed off as her husband’s.”

  “She’s not like him, though. Not the kind to be easily taken in.”

  “Then you’ll need to find another way in. Any way we have into the Foreign Office. It’s urgent, I don’t need to remind you. If the German Foreign Ministry is contemplating a marriage of convenience with the Soviet Union, it’s vital we know as soon as possible.”

  Grand paced across the room, thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets.

  “The Soviet Union is the key to everything, Miss Vine. It’s a complicated dance. If Germany attacks Poland and the Red Army joins in on Poland’s side, and Britain and France come to her aid, then Germany would be in a parlous position. They would never choose to fight on two fronts. But if the Nazis are making advances to the Russians, it’s essential that we uncover every piece of information that we can. And we have only a matter of months to do it.”

  “Months? How can you be so sure?”

  “If Hitler’s set on war, he won’t attack before harvesttime. But he’ll want to make a move before winter. It’s a tight window.”

  He slid his cuffs and checked his watch, as though setting a deadline.

  “If you decide to stay in Germany, we’ll need to brief you. We’ll set up another meeting. Shall we say a fortnight’s time? In Paris?”

  Clara laughed. “That’s impossible. I already had to plead a family emergency to come to London. I couldn’t make a trip to Paris without Goebbels finding out.”

  “Then tell him.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” she said, as patiently as she could. “Travel is severely restricted for members of the Reich Chamber of Culture. You need permission to go abroad, and nowadays it’s not often given. Certainly not without a plausible explanation.”

  For a second, Grand steepled his fingers in thought, then he aimed them towards her in the shape of a gun.

  “How about if you were to feature in French Vogue?”

  “Vogue?”

  “You know, the fashion magazine.”

  “I know what Vogue is, Major Grand. But why would they want to feature me?”

  “Well, it’s not a magazine I’m intensely familiar with—Horse and Hound is about my limit where periodicals are concerned—but we have a friend who works as a photographer there, and I daresay a spread on European cinema might be the kind of thing he does. My sources tell me you’ve done some modeling in the past.”

  Clara nodded, suddenly realizing how much detail about her lay in that manila file in front of her interviewer. In 1933, shortly after her arrival in Berlin, she had been invited to model outfits for the Reich Fashion Bureau, an establishment set up by Hitler. That was how she had first come into contact with Magda Goebbels, Emmy Goering, and the other senior Nazi wives.

  “Excellent then. Our friend’s name is Thomas Epstein. He occupies apartment four, number eleven Rue Léopold-Robert in the Fourteenth Arrondissement of Paris. Can you remember that?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll tell him to expect you. Shall we say two weeks today? And we’ll need to have whatever information you can obtain within the month.”

  “A month! But, you see, I don’t actually think…”

  “I hope I did impress on you, Miss Vine, that time is very much of the essence.”

  Grand walked briskly to the door, as though Clara’s objections, let alone any further pleasantries, were a dangerous waste of time. Suddenly she sensed her chance slipping away. She couldn’t leave without asking the question that was tearing her apart.

  “Major Grand, do you know Leo Quinn?”

  Outwardly, his genial expression remained intact, but minute study of his face revealed that her question had disturbed him. A muscle tensed in his jaw; he gave the barest nod of assent.

  “Would you have any idea where I could contact him?”

  “Contact Mr. Quinn? Now why would you want to do that?”

  Clara hesitated, wondering if Grand knew the truth. He knew so much else about her, there was every reason he would. Every reason except Leo’s careful, meticulous attempts to keep their love affair secret.

  “He’s an old friend of mine. He’s the one who got me into all this in the first place when he was a passport control officer in Berlin.”

  Grand paused with his hand on the doorknob. “If I were you, my dear, I should forget Mr. Quinn.”

  It took everything Clara had to prevent the alarm that arose in her showing on her face. Blindly she trained her eyes on Major Grand’s mustache and gripped the cotton handkerchief inside her pocket.

  “Forget him? What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I say.”

  “Is it bad news?”

  “Need-to-know basis, I’m afraid.”

  “But I do need to know.” She clenched her teeth. “Has something happened to him?”

  Grand gave another businesslike smile, but his voice was softer. “I don’t like
telling you this, my dear. I shouldn’t be telling you this, frankly. But our networks in Europe have taken a bad hit. We lost a couple of agents in Austria, and Mr. Quinn was involved. Our network there was blown.”

  “In Austria? I thought…” What did she think? She had no idea what Leo did, where he went, or what his job really was.

  Grand stared beyond her, a pained expression on his face, his mouth grim as though fighting to contain emotion. “There’s a break in the chain somewhere. An informer somewhere on the continent. I can’t be any more precise than that, but it behooves all our people to be doubly, triply cautious about who they trust.”

  “But Leo—you don’t know what’s happened to him? Not for sure?”

  Grand touched a hand to her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Your friend was a brave man, my dear. You should be proud of him.”

  “He was?”

  He imprisoned her hand momentarily in a tight clasp. “Thanks once again for coming. Can I take it you remember the way to the lift?”

  Numbly, Clara retraced her steps along the corridor. Tears welled in her eyes, blurring the partitioned offices and the men on telephones. She was barely aware of the clack of typewriters and the chatter of secretaries carrying files clipping alongside her. A tall, tawny-haired man with a narrow toothbrush mustache glanced quizzically at her, as though about to inquire if she was all right. As their eyes met she noticed that he had irises of two different colors, one blue and one brown, and the irrelevant thought went through her head that such a distinguishing feature would make undercover work impossible; this agent must be office based. Ducking her head, she walked on to the lift.

  She did not look back. If she had, she would have seen Major Grand poised at the entrance to his office, an unusually sympathetic look replacing his rigid military demeanor.

  —

  IN CAXTON STREET A brisk wind rose, rustling the leaves on the plane trees and causing women at the bus stop opposite to clutch their hats. In a breeze like that, it was unsurprising that anyone should have tears in their eyes, and no one gave Clara the slightest attention apart from a grinning bus conductor, sailing past on the platform of his bus, who called, “Penny for your thoughts, darling!”

  She walked like someone dazed by an explosion, the exterior world locked off behind an invisible wall. The bomb that had gone off inside her had caused everything around to resettle in unrecognizable disarray.

  She progressed blindly, wondering what to do in the hours before heading for Liverpool Street station and the boat train. Suddenly, the shock she had received overcame her instincts. Turning impulsively on her heel, she caught up with the bus that had just passed and jumped aboard, heading for Elizabeth Street.

  She sat numbly on the lurching bus. If I were you, my dear, I should forget Mr. Quinn. It was as though all the ballast was knocked out of her and she might simply collapse without the coarse red and blue backing of the seat beneath her. All she could think was of knocking on Angela’s door and feeling her elder sister’s sinewy arms enfolding her in a stiff but heartfelt embrace. She was aching to breathe in Angela’s trademark perfume and bury her face in soft, sensible cashmere. She had not seen her sister for two years. They may disagree politically; they may have avoided any intimate exchanges for a decade, but Angela was, after all, her only sister. And at a time when she felt desolately alone, Clara yearned for the visceral comfort of flesh and blood.

  —

  SHE HAD NEVER VISITED Angela’s home in Elizabeth Street, but it was exactly as she expected. Wedding cake white stucco, window boxes trimmed with box and ivy, expensive cars parked outside, and a black door so polished you could see your face in it. It was hard to believe her sister had come so far. In her mind’s eye Clara still saw her in an Aertex shirt, cotton skirt, and white leather T-bar shoes, standing in the garden of their Surrey home, arguing over a tennis racquet.

  Her heart was thumping as she waited on the step and raised the lion’s head knocker, but it was a while before the door opened, and then it was only an indifferent maid who peered out and did not invite her in. Her cap was askew, as if she had only hurriedly fixed it on, and her hair badly pinned beneath.

  “Mrs. Mortimer is out. Mr. Mortimer is at the House of Commons.”

  “It’s Angela I want. When will she be back?”

  “I can’t say, I’m sure. The mistress left instructions that she’s away.”

  “Away? Away where?” Emotion made Clara abrupt, but she didn’t care.

  The maid hesitated, as if deciding whether she needed to elaborate for the sake of this insistent stranger, then resolving that to be on the safe side, she did. She poked a strand of hair defensively beneath her cap.

  “She’s visiting her sister. She’s been gone for days. Would you like to leave a message?”

  Visiting her sister? What was that supposed to mean? Angela only had one sister, and she, Clara, was standing right there on the doorstep. She knew for a fact that Gerald Mortimer had no sisters. Yet it was inconceivable that Angela could have embarked on a trip to Berlin unannounced; her normal traveling requirements made the Queen of Sheba look casual. Angela was the last person to turn up in a foreign country without the most complicated advance arrangements about luggage and hotels, which usually changed several times. She liked to be met at the airport and lunched in the appropriate restaurants, which in Berlin meant the Esplanade and the Kaiserhof, before attending both the theater and the opera. Unlike Clara, Angela never did anything on impulse, so it was unthinkable that she should have packed a suitcase and slipped away to Berlin without a word, as Clara had done all those years ago.

  Yet a second before she opened her mouth to protest, some deep, acquired caution prevented Clara from blurting out these objections and she divined a possible explanation. Angela’s excuse must have been dreamed up to cover some less innocent activity. The only explanation was that she was indulging in an illicit affair. Further questions would only give this maid something to gossip about.

  “Shall I tell her who called, miss?” inquired the maid, offhandedly.

  “No. Thank you. It doesn’t matter.”

  Clara turned and made her way along Elizabeth Street, skirting around the workmen who were removing a set of wrought-iron railings, presumably for airplane manufacture. As she went, Clara tried to see her sister from this new, surprising perspective. Glamorous Angela, modeling Jean Patou in her brief dalliance as a fashion mannequin, had always been elegant and unflappable. She was a Vine to the ends of her racehorse-long legs, and when their mother died, Angela was seamlessly co-opted into the circle of their father’s sister, Lady Laura Vine, and an endless round of society parties, tennis matches, and charity events. She enthusiastically participated in their father’s Anglo-German Fellowship and, from everything Clara knew, was still fundraising for closer ties between Germany and England.

  In every respect Angela’s life could not be more different from Clara’s own, except one. Neither of them had gotten around to having children. Perhaps that was the reason. Maybe Angela was engaged in an affair because her marriage to Gerald Mortimer, MP, was already crumbling. If so it was sad, but given her brick-faced brother-in-law’s manner, not entirely surprising.

  Clara progressed up to Knightsbridge, past Harrods, and along Piccadilly until, eventually, her steps took her to a Lyons Corner House on the Strand, where she drank two cups of tea and ate a bun pocked with currants and smeared with a dab of oily margarine. Then she retraced her route, skirted the soot-stained lions of Trafalgar Square, and found herself outside the National Gallery.

  It was only when she was sitting on one of the leather benches, surrounded by glimmering gilt frames and blankly studying a painting in front of her, that she gave in to her feelings. Major Grand believed that Leo had died and that Clara should consign his memory to the past. I should forget Mr. Quinn. But how did anyone forget? In one way, it was treacherously easy. She thought of Leo’s face fading, like a photograph left out in the sun, until no image remaine
d. If it blanked out entirely, she would have nothing but his words to resurrect him; just the letters he had written to her and the book of Rilke’s poetry that he gave her. Yet how could Leo be dead when her body still held the memory of him, pressed into every muscle and tendon? A wave of stubborn denial engulfed her. Why should she believe it? Just because someone told you something, didn’t mean it was true.

  When at last her focus cleared, she saw the painting she had been staring at was Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage. The Bruges merchant in wide-brimmed hat and sable-lined robes clasping hands with his young bride in her sage green gown. Crystalline daylight streamed through the window and glanced off the oranges on the window ledge. The bride, with her little dog at her feet, seemed frozen in reflection, poised at the threshold between concentration and distraction. What was she thinking? Was she happy to be betrothed to this older, wealthy merchant? Or was the ornately opulent room merely a gilded cage? Was the marriage a love match, or an aristocratic contract, so appropriate to the times? That’s the thing about marriage—one can never tell what goes on inside.

  Major Grand’s request rose in her mind. Might von Ribbentrop really be attempting a pact with the Soviets? A marriage of convenience, Grand had called it. It seemed unthinkable, yet hadn’t so much of what seemed unthinkable come to pass in Germany in the last six years?

  Suddenly, Clara’s focus was razor-sharp and she was no longer looking at the tranquil Belgian interior with its subdued and pensive bride but looking through it, to a garishly refurbished German Foreign Ministry and the steely, square-jawed grimace of Frau Annelies von Ribbentrop.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Fifty young women, outfitted in thigh-skimming white dresses and matching knickers, their hair in coronets of radiant blond braids, filed into the Faith and Beauty canteen for lunch after gymnastics practice. An aroma of sweat mingled with clouds of steam rising from trays of meat, potatoes, and overcooked cabbage as the girls, in their pristine ankle socks, formed a line every bit as precise as a storm troopers’ honor guard.