A War of Flowers (2014) (14 page)

‘Has something happened?’

Rupert drained another glass. An alcoholic flush was beginning to develop on his face and the laughter drained from his eyes.

‘You could say that. There’s a new editor at the
Chronicle
. Reginald Winstanley. He couldn’t be more different from the previous chap. He hates anything critical of the
regime here. Believes Herr Hitler is much misunderstood. Britain’s place is on the sidelines, etcetera.’

‘Surely he must see what you write?’

‘If so, he seems determined to ensure that no one else does. He thinks I should be more conciliatory to the regime. He says, “Ward Price of the
Daily Mail
gets to visit Herr
Hitler at the Berghof. Why are you never invited?”’

‘To the Berghof? I can’t think of anything worse.’

‘I’ve heard the view is spectacular.’

‘Oh, Rupert. What are you going to do?’

He wiped his mouth and cast the napkin carelessly aside.

‘God knows. On top of it all my office assistant quit. She got married and says the place of a German wife is in the home. Apparently keeping my office in order is incompatible with
keeping her husband in hot meals. The place is a frightful mess.’

‘I’m surprised you can tell.’

‘Now then. I may never have maintained Nazi levels of order, but it’s come to something when you need to mount a search and rescue operation for the telephone every time your editor
rings.’ He drained his drink and added, ‘Winstanley’s a good friend of your father’s, as it happens.’

Clara looked swiftly away. She hated any mention of her father.

Sir Ronald Vine, a former Conservative MP, had formed a group of aristocrats and senior politicians active in the cause of Anglo-German friendship. But in recent years, their cause had gone
beyond friendship to appeasement of Hitler, and their powerful, covert coterie did everything it could to advocate the National Socialist cause to the English government.

‘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.’

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 they 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.

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.