The Viennese Girl

by Jenny Lecoat

  She looked up at Dorothea and forced a smile. ‘You’re welcome. I just hope I do a good enough job.’

  ‘I know you will. And you must come round for supper at the new house. Did I tell you about the place Anton’s found for us on West Park Avenue?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘The rent’s a bit steep, but it’s got the prettiest fireplace in the front room and a sweet little yard at the back.’

  ‘And brass knobs on all the doors,’ Hedy chipped in, hoping she’d take the hint.

  Oblivious, Dorothea slipped her shoes back on and wriggled into her old woollen dress. ‘I can’t wait to be Mrs Anton Weber! Now, here’s your invitation.’ She pulled a homemade card from her bag, cut from some old packaging and painted in what looked like whitewash.

  Hedy read the text, handwritten in pen and ink: Dorothea Le Brocq and Anton Weber request the pleasure of Hedy and Kurt at the States of Jersey Register Office, followed by a reception at 7 West Park Avenue.

  ‘I know how sensitive you are about your relationship,’ Dorothea added, ‘but it would be wonderful if you wanted to bring him.’

  Hedy shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just not possible. Kurt and I can’t be seen together in public.’

  Dorothea reached out for her hand. Her fingers were like ice. ‘But you’ve been courting for months now, and we’ve still not met him! What if he just came to the reception at our place? No one there would judge you.’

  Hedy re-read the card. ‘I thought you wanted the reception at the Pierson pub?’

  Dorothea kept her eyes and fingers on the buttons of her dress, even though it seemed to Hedy that she had already finished buttoning it. ‘We were, but it seemed a waste of money for just five or six of us.’

  ‘Five or six? But what about your family, friends?’

  ‘Well, Nana will come to the ceremony, of course!’ The false brightness splintered in her voice. ‘But she won’t have the stamina for the reception too. And Mr Reis has to run the shop. So it’s just you and Kurt, Doctor Maine if he’s free – and I’m hoping my schoolfriend Sandy will come, if her dad agrees.’

  ‘But your parents?’ Hedy felt a wave of pity.

  ‘We’re honestly happy with a small do. It’ll save us trying to scrape together food for lots of people.’

  Hedy watched Dorothea fold up her wedding dress with ritualistic care, stroking the fabric as if it were a kitten, placing it in a neat bundle on Hedy’s table. She continued to touch it, as if the garment held some magic power she didn’t quite understand, yet believed in utterly. Once more, Hedy wondered what she was really thinking. The woman seemed almost ethereal at times, a spirit from another world. But when she spoke again her voice was stronger. ‘We just want our best friends there, that’s all that matters!’ She patted the bundle down and managed a big, generous grin. ‘So, you see, there’s no reason why Kurt shouldn’t come.’

  Hedy decided the safest course was to let the subject drop. ‘Thank you. I’ll think about it.’

  Dorothea pulled on her coat, arranged her hat and headed for the door. ‘Thanks again for this, Hedy. If there’s ever anything I can do for you in return …’

  Hedy hesitated. She had, in actual fact, been brewing an idea for several weeks, but was still unsure if she wanted to ask such a huge favour of this ditsy girl. Deciding that this was not the right time, she was about to say no, when Dorothea, evidently detecting something in her body language, stopped with her hand still on the door latch. Hedy found herself pinned by those intense eyes glinting from the other side of the room.

  ‘What is it? Tell me?’ said Dorothea.

  ‘It’s nothing. At least, it can wait till after the wedding.’ Hemingway rubbed himself against her leg, as if prompting Hedy to ask the question.

  ‘Please, Hedy. Anything?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that … I’ve heard nothing from my parents in twenty months, nor they from me. They can’t even receive mail in Vienna, being Jewish.’

  Dorothea shook her head. ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘But I have an old schoolfriend, Elke, who I think still lives there. If I use a false name and I’m careful what I say, I think I can slip a letter into the franking pile at work. But what I need is a safe return address …’

  ‘So how can I help?’

  Hedy suppressed a sigh, and reminded herself that Dorothea was doing her best to be helpful. ‘I was wondering if I could write care of your new house?’

  Dorothea blossomed. ‘Oh, of course! Use our address by all means.’

  Hedy nodded. ‘Thank you. It’s a … what is the English phrase? A long shot. But it’s all I have.’ It was Hedy’s turn to pat the wedding dress. ‘I’d better be getting on with this.’

  Dorothea waved goodbye with her fingertips, the way a child waves to its mother, as she let herself out the door, and Hedy heard the fading sound of her feet skipping down the stairs and the humming of the wedding march in her high, frail voice. Hedy picked the dress up from the table to plan her work, wondering, with an unsettled feeling, how long that voice would be a significant sound in her life.

  The day was cold and monochrome, but the wind had dropped and the bulbous flint-coloured clouds were still clinging to their rain. Hedy stepped as lightly as she could across the Royal Square, walking carefully so as not to disturb the ancient glue on the sole of her shoe, and enjoying the sensation of wearing stockings for the first time in months. She had been saving them for weeks, for just such a special occasion. Of course Kurt must have bought them on the black market, and they must have cost him an absurd amount of money, which made her feel both guilty and delighted. She wore the same old crepe dress and the same old cardigan she wore for every event other than work, but the slippery thrill she felt when her legs brushed together did give a sense of occasion to the day.

  She was unsure which door led to the registrar’s office, but as she turned the corner by the town church, the crowd on the steps led her straight to it. Hedy watched as a family party gathered on the steps. The bride was a local lass of no more than seventeen, with an empire line dress that Hedy was pretty sure was designed to hide the middle trimester of pregnancy. Holding her hand, wearing a suit he’d probably had since school and an expression of pure misery, was a spotty youth, hemmed in between a surly, stocky man Hedy took for the bride’s father and his slit-mouthed wife in a tight floral dress. A shotgun wedding if ever Hedy had seen one – yet the steps were crowded with siblings, aunts and cousins, kissing the bride and clucking around, glad of the excuse to break their grim, daily routine with a family celebration.

  Hedy squeezed past them and into the building, following the signs until she found the waiting area. She found herself in a vapid charmless space, despite its gleaming oak floor, and only a stone’s throw away from the Aliens Office where she’d been interviewed by Orange, over a year ago. It had the same smell of wood and musty papers, and oozed municipality, bringing to mind shuffling queues for permits and bored secretaries smashing down on staplers. Two wedding parties sprawled over the plain benches against the wall, laughing and chatting excitedly. On the third bench sat Anton and Doctor Maine, silent and expressionless.

  Hedy stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the two of them. Doctor Maine was in his Sunday best, but she could plainly see the scruffy old shoes beneath his flannel trousers. He looked abandoned, somehow, almost derelict, his skin dry and sallow. She had never found out how old he actually was. Younger than his face suggested, she was sure of that. But they had agreed early on to keep conversations, and especially personal details, to a minimum: it was unwise to be seen chatting together too regularly, and safer to remain in ignorance in case either of them should ever be caught. All Hedy knew from their snippets of conversation was that his wife was effectively an invalid, and that he had very little in his life beyond his work. On several occasions, when Kurt brought Hedy little treats of tobacco or fresh rabbit meat from the German stores, she had passed on what she could to the doct
or, knowing that he had no access to such luxuries. He never asked questions, just smiled with gratitude and tucked the contraband away in his medical bag before hobbling away up the road. She had never heard him complain about anything. Abandoning caution just this once, she leaned across to kiss his cheek.

  ‘How are you, Doctor Maine?’

  ‘I’m well, my dear. And please, call me Oliver.’

  Hedy sat down between them, pulling her coat down over her knees to hide the two moth holes in her dress, and turned to Anton. His suit was oversized, but it was a quality cut in dark charcoal grey, and with the sprig of wild cyclamen in his buttonhole, and his roguish hair beaten down with the last of Mr Reis’s Brylcreem, he looked genuinely handsome. Hedy gave him her broadest grin.

  ‘You look very smart.’ She brushed his shoulders, feeling the subtle padding of his jacket beneath her fingers.

  ‘Thanks. Is Dory here yet?’

  ‘Don’t worry, she’s on her way! Remember she’s bringing her grandmother. I imagine she can’t walk very fast.’ She trawled her mind for a safe topic of conversation. ‘Is Dorothea’s friend coming? Sandy, is it?’

  ‘Apparently not. Will Kurt be joining us later?’

  She opted to keep it simple: ‘I’m afraid he couldn’t get the time off.’

  Anton shrugged. ‘More sherry for us, then.’

  They sat waiting in silence. In the unusual warmth of the crowded room Hedy’s eyelids began to droop, and her mind drifted to the last wedding she’d been to, around five years earlier. Her cousin, draped in white lace over satin, swirling through the local hall; the melodies of the klezmer band; the thunder of three score pairs of feet on the dance floor. Otto had told his favourite joke about the tailor while his wife pretended to scold him, and her parents had danced together as if they were teenagers. Hedy opened her eyes, found herself staring at the lattice windows and the naked branches of the trees in the churchyard, and stifled a sigh.

  Moments later, Dorothea arrived, resplendent in her fitted dress and hat. She was accompanied by her grandmother, a bird of a woman with gnarled arthritic hands, but with the same look of wilful determination that Hedy recognised well. Dorothea’s eyes glistened with excitement behind the birdcage net that hung across her face, painstakingly arranged to look like a casual draping. She hugged her husband-to-be, then took Hedy’s hands in hers and squeezed hard.

  ‘It means everything that you’re here today,’ she whispered.

  A small, neat official approached them with a clipboard. ‘Le Brocq-Weber party?’ His voice was clear and travelled easily, and he pronounced Anton’s surname with an excessive German accent. Hedy glanced around, and saw every pair of eyes across the waiting room slowly turn towards the three of them. Adults pulled children closer, older locals made a clucking sound with their tongues, and heads bowed together, muttering at a volume too low to hear, but Hedy knew what the content was. And without any doubt at all, it contained the word ‘Jerrybag’. She glanced at Dorothea to see if she had noticed, but the bride-to-be was fiddling with the buttons on her gloves and grinning at everyone in her party.

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  The five of them pressed into the little ceremony room, fitted with nothing but a few chairs, a plain blue rug and heavy oak desk. Before the Occupation there would no doubt have been beautiful arrangements of flowers set around the room, and perhaps a musician in the corner playing harp or guitar. Both Dorothea’s grandmother and Doctor Maine hurried towards the seats at the very front, as if to give the impression of an enthusiastic throng. Almost before everyone was settled, the registrar began reading from his book, and Anton and Dorothea were muttering the few essential phrases as instructed. Anton slipped onto her finger a slim gold band – a sacrifice that Hedy knew had cost him his last warm sweater (‘I’ll be in uniform in a few weeks anyway’ he’d pointed out with a shrug). And then it was over. Anton and Dorothea kissed each other self-consciously, and her grandmother applauded the happy couple, though it was barely audible in her soft cotton gloves. The five of them traipsed out of the room and into the street, where the old lady threw some homemade confetti made from the ripped pages of Dorothea’s movie magazines, and everyone laughed for no reason, and stood looking at each other on the chilly grey pavement.

  ‘Well,’ Anton volunteered eventually, ‘I suppose that’s that. Shall we go?’

  Kurt’s feet ached; they filled his boots like throbbing weights as he dragged them up the pathway towards the door of his billet. He could feel each toe, swollen and stinking, in the thick wool of his socks – socks that hadn’t been washed in at least four days. All he wanted in the world at that moment was a bowl of warm water and a chair. He wasn’t even bothered about lunch, or the fact that he’d forgotten to go to the officers’ supply store for more tobacco. Nothing mattered now except to get his damn feet into the open air and give them a good soak.

  For three days solid now he’d been working seventeen-hour days, arriving at the compound at first light and returning to Pontac Common long after the evening meal had been cleared away. Yet still new orders continued to clog up his pigeonhole. In recent weeks the stream of foreign workers had become a flood, causing construction activity around the coast to rocket, and, exponentially, the orders for trucks to more than double. Trucks for material transportation, trucks for moving men from one site to another, trucks for tools and cooking utensils and food supplies – the last of which Kurt suspected was for the OT guards, rather than the poor devils slaving under them. More manpower at the compound had been promised, but had not yet arrived, and last night, sick with exhaustion, Kurt had announced that he would be taking Saturday afternoon and evening off, and if Field Command had anything to say about it they could take it up with him on Monday morning. Now he had one overriding hope – that either the kitchen or his own shared room would be peacefully empty, and that he could spend the next few hours on his backside, feeling water swirl around his toes and reading a trashy novel.

  As he pushed the door of the little house, he knew instantly that his first wish was not to be granted. Loud voices and the smell of French cigarettes poured from the kitchen, where three officers were engaged in a highly competitive game of auction rummy. As he headed for the stairs Kurt shook his head, musing at the odd, pointless ways young soldiers found to fritter away their free time. But of course, he considered, he was hardly planning to use the afternoon any more productively. Remembering where he should have been, he felt a niggle of annoyance. He adored Hedy, no question. But dear Lord, she could be an irritating little tyke at times.

  It had been a fractious, difficult evening at her apartment last week, resulting in the closest they had come to a row since their first date. Kurt had spotted the homemade wedding invitation propped up on Hedy’s dressing table, and questioned her deliberate avoidance of the whole topic. Surely, he argued, this was the ideal day to meet everyone? Wouldn’t it be rude to refuse? Hedy, who was frying up some chicken livers he’d brought her on the little electric ring, and had been in a splendid mood till that moment, immediately went on the defensive. They’d had this discussion a hundred times! Secrecy was paramount, as Kurt knew, so why was he even contemplating the idea? It was such an overreaction that Kurt became instantly irritated, and got hold of the argument like a puppy with a slipper.

  ‘I understand you wouldn’t want me at the ceremony,’ he protested, scattering cutlery on the table with unnecessary force. ‘But if the reception literally consists of the happy couple, you and your doctor friend, in a private house, I really don’t see the problem.’

  ‘Someone might see you coming in.’

  ‘Someone might see me coming here! You know I’m always careful. And Anton will be a Wehrmacht soldier himself in a few weeks’ time.’

  ‘Exactly. They’ve got enough problems with Dorothea’s family boycotting the whole day, without us adding to it.’

  ‘Surely that would make them even keener to see a friendly face! Are you ashamed of me or so
mething?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She sounded genuine, but he noticed she kept her attention on the chicken livers.

  ‘Then what’s this really about?’

  But he never did get a satisfactory answer, and later he’d found the invitation torn up in her rubbish bin. Lying awake later that night, listening to Hedy’s soft snores beside him, Kurt decided that it was some kind of psychological block she had developed. She’d over-thought this meeting with her friends, building it up in her mind until it became an unassailable mountain. As soon as the wedding was over, Kurt decided to confront it. After all, some day in the not-too-distant future, it would be him and Hedy toasting their future together. They’d never actually discussed it, but given their mutual feelings it seemed inevitable. What kind of wedding would they have, if she couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he’d been forcibly conscripted into this damn army?