by Thynne, Jane
‘I saw them together, actually, last time I went back. Winstanley was giving a talk to the Anglo-German alliance at the Grosvenor House Hotel.’
‘So you want me to intercede with my father?’
‘If the occasion arises.’
‘If that’s what you’d like.’
He caught the wistfulness in her eyes. ‘Do you miss England?’ Spending time with Rupert, speaking English, always awoke a stab of yearning for her birthplace. London in all its sooty glory, the museums, the National Gallery, Hyde Park, the Thames. The stucco terraces, cracked like brittle icing on a cake, the crowds on the Underground. English gardens with their blowsy pink roses and tidy lawns. The BBC, her old theatrical friends, even her family. Though Clara was only half English, that Englishness was profound – the Vines had come over with the Conqueror and they had been based in the West Country for hundreds of years – yet still, England felt forbidden to her. Was it because she had insisted to her family that she loved life in Berlin? Or was it because England contained a piece of her past that she could never revisit?
‘A little.’
‘Nothing stopping you making a short trip.’
There was nothing. But there was also everything. The thought of her mission in Munich rose vividly to her mind.
‘I think we have company.’
They had been talking in English and Clara noticed that a party of men at the table next to them had dropped their voices and were eavesdropping. Rupert gave a quick, redundant dab of his mouth with his napkin and stood up.
‘If I really can’t tempt you to sample this delicious food, perhaps we should take a walk.’
They strolled west along the street towards Viktoria-Luise-Platz where a fountain provided a cooling mist in the sultry heat. It was a popular place for an evening drink and the pavement was crowded with café customers, but these were no relaxed, late summer evening meetings, full of laughter and beer. Instead, a subdued mood prevailed. People seemed jittery, exchanging information and whispers.
‘You won’t forget, will you, to ask about that girl on the cruise?’
‘Sure. I’ll ask, of course.’ Already Rupert could envisage the moment at the daily press conference when he interrupted Doktor Goebbels’ daily drone about Jewish affairs with a query about something extraordinary, a girl falling into the sea. On a KdF cruise, too.
‘You didn’t tell me about Paris. It’s a while since I’ve been there. Is it lovely as ever? Did you enjoy yourself? Meet anyone nice?’
The image of Max Brandt came into her mind. The saturnine face growing slightly fleshy about the jaw, the smudge of grey beneath the eyes. The receding hair and the air of impatient physicality about him, like a wild animal confined by convention and society. His unconcealed astonishment when she said she needed to leave, and his slow, seductive smile when he cornered her in the alley. The extraordinary presumption of his remark.
If you won’t come to bed with me, perhaps you’ll come to dinner.
Did people really behave like that? Did the urgency of the times mean traditional conventions could be overlooked? Something about Max Brandt provoked images she had never thought about before, forbidden images of hotel beds with rumpled sheets and glasses of champagne on the bedside tables, and clothes cast carelessly on the floor.
Rupert observed the flicker of thought that passed across her eyes and laughed.
‘You did enjoy yourself! Tell me everything. Was it a seductive Frenchman? You want to watch out for those.’
Clara pushed him away playfully. ‘It wasn’t anyone, Rupert. It was work.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you, but if so, what a waste. Never mind. You’ll have to make do with me. There’s a party coming up for the foreign press. Perhaps you’d like to accompany me.’
It was risky for her to be seen with an English journalist, so she said,
‘I may still be in Munich. I’m off the day after tomorrow. ’
‘Munich?’
Even though Rupert must have some idea of her double life, Clara was careful never to share any more information than she needed to. Generally, he understood this and refrained from asking any questions, but he was a journalist all the same, and he had curiosity in his veins where other people had blood.
‘I’m up for a part in a film at the Bavarian Film studios. It’s called Good King George. It’s a historical picture about the Hanoverian dynasty taking over the throne of England.’
He gave a dry laugh. ‘Let’s hope it’s historical. These days the idea of Germans seizing the throne of England might count as current affairs.’
Chapter Ten
For a government department dedicated to the domestic arts, the headquarters of the National Socialist Frauenschaft in Derfflinger Strasse, Tiergarten district, bore few signs of homeliness. The entrance opened to a parquet hall painted institutional green and scented with carbolic bleach and the faint tang of infant vomit. Famous faces of the regime – all men – hung along a corridor interspersed with cork boards fluttering with instructions on infant care, hygiene, nursing the sick at home, children’s education, cooking and sewing. Glass-panelled doors led off to a series of offices and conference rooms and at the far end was the library, which was more like a vast collection of filing cabinets than a conventional library, containing every letter, pronouncement and pamphlet ever issued concerning the NS Frauenschaft, sparsely leavened with volumes on maternal health and childcare and a few government-sanctioned children’s books. Needless to say, no one went in the library looking for light entertainment.
Next to the library was the domestic science room, where a couple of aproned women were that morning completing a demonstration of nutritious national recipes – pig cheek’s broth and pickled herring rolled in breadcrumbs – whose unappetizing smells snaked out into the surrounding corridor, and into the conference room, where an instructor from the Reichsmütterdienst, the Mother Service, could be heard holding forth. The subject of that morning’s talk was Love and Marriage and forty hausfraus were obediently ranked in semi-circles.
‘What are the Ten Commandments for the German Woman?’ barked the instructor.
The audience must have assumed the question was rhetorical because the instructor supplied the answers herself.
‘Remember you are a German! Remain pure in mind and spirit! Keep your body pure! Do not remain single! Choose a spouse of similar blood! Hope for as many children as possible! Anyone else know one?’
The housewife representatives wore the official Frauenschaft uniform of blue-black jacket, with matching pleated skirt and grey blouse buttoned to the neck, their faces unblemished by lipstick and their hair braided as precisely as steel cables. Most bore expressions of slavish interest as they listened, but a few had an air of absent anxiety, as though trying to recall if they had left the cooker on.
When she had first heard the Love and Marriage talk, Rosa Winter had listened incredulously. Now, sitting in the adjacent office and hearing it for the tenth time, she merely zoned out and tried to focus on that morning’s task – completing data on the names and addresses of mothers in Berlin who had not yet applied for membership of the network of schools run by the Reichsmütterdienst. Membership was not compulsory, but if a woman didn’t join then she would get a visit from a Nazi official wondering why, and if she still delayed joining she might find herself guilty of failing in her duty to the Reich, which was in itself illegal. The lessons of the four-month mother-training courses were pretty basic – thrifty shopping, mending, gardening, handicraft, avoiding foreign goods, making meals from leftovers – but all instruction was underpinned by the rationale underlying the regime. A mother should avoid buying imported food, if possible, to support the national welfare, but if absolutely necessary she should select goods from a country friendly to the Reich. The shortages in the shops had provided the opportunity for another brilliant example of the Führerin’s ingenuity. Disturbed by stories of fighting and unpatriotic squabbling between housewives as the
y queued for their daily groceries, she had decided to create a whole new division called the Market Police, a crack troop of women trained up to serve on the shopping front line who would shepherd the queues and adjudicate on disputes between shoppers and shopkeepers which might otherwise turn nasty. One of Rosa’s jobs was to collate the names of those whom the Führerin had chosen to volunteer and organize training sessions in cooperation with the Berlin traffic police. You had to hand it to the Führerin. She really did think of everything.
The Love and Marriage session was concluding and Rosa flinched as the roomful of women launched into the obligatory hymn to Hitler, bellowed with especial passion because everyone knew the words.
‘Yet as once you loyally struggled for us,
Now we are yours with every breath we draw
You suffered alone for us so long
The strongest heart that ever was on earth.’
The only wedding Rosa had ever attended was her sister Susi’s and that union was as far from the Love and Marriage talk as was possible to imagine. Pauly Kramer was a middle-ranking official in the Reich Labour Front, a thickset man with a scalp like the pink, bristled skin of a pig who regarded Rosa with a look that seemed to combine simultaneously lust and disgust. Susi and Pauly’s marriage was not so much a meeting of minds as a careful demarcation of duties, seemingly arranged so that they met as little as possible. They had one son, Hans-Otto, a slow child who at the age of five had still not learned to button his coat or lisp his numbers from one to ten.
Rosa adored Hans-Otto. She loved his wide, dreamy eyes, and the way he sucked his thumb when she hauled him on her lap to read to him. He barely spoke and knew far fewer words than most children his age, but the emotions moved on his baby face like the clouds passing across the sky as he listened to Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella, or the king who turned everything to gold. He loved animals too, and there was nothing he liked better than to visit the zoo and watch the lion cubs writhing and squealing in their cage or run his hands through the rough hair of the goats in the petting enclosure.
Hans-Otto’s dreaminess, however, was not universally admired. Recently there had been letters from the headmaster at school concerning the child’s inability to tie his shoelaces and demanding an improvement. More worryingly, in the past few weeks, Hans-Otto had suffered a number of convulsions which left his little face more washed out and vacant than ever.
No wonder Susi showed little inclination to increase the Reich birth rate with a second child. Hans-Otto’s inadequacies seemed to compound her general bitterness about her circumstances, which she never hesitated to express whenever she saw her sister. ‘We can’t all spend our lives on luxury cruises,’ she had remarked resentfully when Rosa returned from her trip.
That comment caused the image to resurface in Rosa’s mind, though in truth it had scarcely been out of her thoughts for weeks. She returned to it again and again, as though revisiting the scene of a crime.
The picture was frozen in her head like a still from a film set. She was standing in the gloom of the rain-lashed deck, watching the thrilling progress of the storm. A mist of spray rolled across the sea, obscuring the middle distance, but she could just see the water boiling up beneath the prow of the ship every time it veered and listed in the wind, and a mountain of violet clouds banked on the horizon. Suddenly, away to her left, came the gleam of something white, sprawled at the feet of a group of sailors. Looking closer she saw it was a young woman, hauled clumsily onto the deck like a fish. Rosa felt again the shock of seeing that delicate face, its beautifully curved lips bleached of colour like a marble Madonna, and the soaked tendrils of hair splayed across it like seaweed. The girl’s sodden dress, flattened against her breasts, and the crumpled mess at the back of her skull. The sailors staring at her, agog.
She couldn’t get that picture out of her mind. Why had the captain instructed her not to mention it? Why should such a tragic thing be hushed up? The fact that she had exchanged a few words with the girl gave her a sense of personal responsibility, as though she was actually involved in the death, which was plainly absurd. Surely just being a witness to a crime, if indeed it was a crime, didn’t make you a participant? She, Rosa, was not responsible for what she had seen. Yet the disquiet lingered and she knew it was not going away.
Her first thought was to confide in the Führerin – that would be the proper thing to do. After all, her entire purpose on the cruise had been to assess the suitability of the Wilhelm Gustloff as a VIP venue and details like passengers falling overboard must surely reflect on the ship’s safety record. Not mentioning what she had seen was a direct violation of her duty, and yet . . . it was hard to imagine confiding anything in the Führerin. Besides, it would only spoil the glow of approval that Rosa was enjoying just then. The Führerin was already talking about sending her on another trip, this time to explore the Prora complex, a vast holiday camp on the Baltic coast which was being built by the KdF. The place was a hulking, blank-faced high-rise almost three miles long with ten thousand rooms. It looked like Rosa’s idea of hell but grandiose constructions were essential to convey the epic status of the Reich and someone needed to reconnoitre the complex for the forthcoming conference on Women and Domesticity. If Rosa confided her discovery to the Führerin it would only mar this pleasant glow of approbation. She would be bound to question why Rosa had left the incident out of her original, post-cruise report and would immediately take it up with the ship’s captain, who would be likely to contradict Rosa directly, meaning that it would be the word of a secretary against that of a decorated captain of the German navy. Rosa might lose her job. Weakly, too, she remembered the words of Captain Bertram warning her that any mention of the incident would mean neither she nor her family would ever again attend a KdF holiday. Her mother would be heartbroken if her daughter’s actions meant she was barred from KdF cruises for life.
Yet at the heart of Rosa Winter was an unorthodox spirit. She knew there was something wrong about what she had seen and there must be somebody she should tell. The girl’s face seemed to float before her, like a photographic negative developing in its solution, standing out sharp from its blurred surroundings. The bloodless face and the empty blue eyes that just a few hours earlier on the sun deck had been looking around with a panicky air. Is anything the matter? No. Why should it be? Other than the few words they had exchanged, Rosa had no idea who she was. Somebody’s daughter or someone’s mother even. It might be that the girl’s own family had no idea what had become of her, and they never would, unless someone disobeyed the ship’s captain and revealed what really happened.
Chapter Eleven
The Elizabeth Arden Red Door salon on the Kurfürstendamm was the haunt of Berlin’s most fashionable women. Its perfumes and potions escaped the general disapproval of foreign cosmetics because Miss Arden herself, despite being American, was a personal friend of Reich Minister Hermann Goering, and the Nazis’ favourite beautician. She was the only person who had ever been brave enough to offer the gargantuan minister some useful diet and exercise tips, and he had indeed gone so far as to buy an exercise horse on her recommendation, even if he never used it. Every Christmas Goering would buy up dozens of boxed sets of cosmetics to distribute to the wives of his officers, whose photographs hung on the salon walls, alongside famous clients like Leni Riefenstahl, Olga Chekhova, Zarah Leander and Marlene Dietrich and, in their midst, Miss Arden herself, swathed in white mink and shot by Cecil Beaton. Also dotting the walls were pictures of the Arden spa, with its hooded sun loungers and Riviera striped canvas awnings, and a framed advertisement for the famous Eight Hour Cream. Neither wind nor sunrays will alter the purity and brilliance of your complexion. It might have been the photographs of the actresses, or the expectation of glamorous transformation, but the whole salon had the air of a movie set, from its dove grey walls and silver drapes to the gleaming marble floor and crystal chandeliers. There were French chairs, upholstered in rose velvet and flatteringly lit mirrors surrou
nded by pink and blue bottles of ‘Venetian Cream’, cosmetics, oils and treatments. Only the white leather treatment chairs added a slightly clinical touch, suggesting that beauty was essentially a science and its effects could be scientifically obtained.
At ten in the morning the salon was almost empty, except for a single elderly woman attempting in vain to stave off the ravages of time with a bottle of Ardena Skin Tonic and a cloud of scented steam. With the temperature already rising on the street, Clara pushed through the door, relishing the cool air against her face, tinged with the scent of pine and eucalyptus, and a faint trace of Blue Grass.
Sabine Friedmann had started out as a make-up assistant at the Ufa studios, where she and Clara had first met, but her flair and personal charm had attracted the attention of Elizabeth Arden herself and Sabine was offered a job at the salon, followed within a few years by a promotion to manager. Now she was a walking advertisement for the products she promoted. Tall and striking with suitably Aryan blonde hair, she made it her business to adopt the Arden ‘Total Look’, which entailed lip, cheek and fingernail colours coordinated with military precision. That day her face was a porcelain mask and her mouth a cupid’s bow of signature salmon pink. Her usual effusive greetings, however, were muted. Instead she gave Clara a quick kiss, then walked over to the door, turning around the sign to read ‘Geschlossen’ and with a quick glance round the salon ushered her to an alcove at the back, where a chair was spread with a spotless white towel.
‘We keep this seat for our special customers. They like a little privacy.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘It’s less obtrusive.’
Clara cast her a quizzical glance in the mirror.
‘I thought you had come by some new samples, Sabine. They must be pretty hush-hush!’
‘It’s not about that exactly.’ Sabine’s china-blue eyes met Clara’s soberly in the mirror. ‘It could be nothing, but I thought I should let you know. Why don’t I give you a facial?’