Hitler's Girls (12 page)

We were to be married. He embraced me at the altar. After I left, he sent flowers. .
.

Now I have a role to play once more. It reminds me of the time he and I made lists from
Tatler
of the lords who would join the Nazi Party… many more these days, of course, and by no means all lords, all walks of life, as my father would have put it, with his little laugh under his white moustache. So many people who want to save our country, save Europe from the rot that threatens on every side
.

I apply the foundation first… thick, white. If I am no longer flaxen-haired, then my flaming mane will return our people to the vision of Nordic goddesses as surely as if I were young
again. And my eyes, so porcelain blue, my skin so pure and white—and a mouth as red as desire: that’s how the Führer put it when we met and kissed on the day I went out in my fighting uniform on the Hesselberg. Where are my gauntlets now? I would never wear gloves to swear allegiance to the party: gloves are for luncheons. Always carry a spare pair of white gloves on the bus and change as you approach the Duchess’s house
.

Hitler would have loved Edward to be King. I went to the gallery, Dadda was a peer after all. I listened to the Abdication speech. So sad, so tragically, unnecessarily sad to lose a King who could have worked with Hitler and brought happiness and unity to us all
.

The worst of it was that the foolish man in charge of foreign press relations—Putzi Hanfstaengl was his name—took out his handkerchief and wiped off all my beautiful make-up
.

Keep in line with the blonde womanhood the Führer expects, Putzi said. He dabbed at my porcelain blue eyes, ringed with pencil and mascara. I hated that man, and I believe he hated women, and so did Heinrich Himmler who burst into my hotel room in the dark and tried to assault me. They wanted to destroy the lovely Englishwoman who brought secrets to Hitler and would one day be his bride
.

But now I have a mission to perform. I left the coast of England behind, and set out for Europe which will be mine
someday. My sister waits anxiously in her house which is like a tower in a fairy tale
.

After Peter telephoned, she helped me go, my faithful sister, and I came over the sea to the land I am now destined once more to bring to sanity, to save
.

“The car will be waiting for you at the port,” my sister said. “And here is the medicine Peter sent to strengthen you in your task.”

And they all stared at me with admiration: I Clemency, who have been hidden away more than half a century, stepping out in my furs ready for the new age
.

I found her at the Hotel in Paris, when the car stopped at the end of the street
.

My dear Leni, what a charming apartment you have... of course, when you heard my voice you had to let me in
.

Don’t change your mind Leni, I said. You are needed now as much as I am. We knew the wish of the Führer, that we would continue with his work after he was gone
.

I have come for the numbers, Leni. You can’t refuse them to me. We used to eat and drink together, you and I, we were photographed together at the Osteria and at the Games. You small and practical-looking: Oh Leni you were never a beauty as I was, but the Führer trusted you and you drew up his will
.

His chief bequest was to our daughter. She vanished. My mother would have preferred her to die. But she did not, and so my mother took the baby, living evidence of all they wanted to forget. She had her adopted
.

They murdered her, searching for the numbers. It was her fault. She should have co-operated with them. I can only repeat my allegiance to my party: I care for no-one, nothing else. The daughter I brought into the world loved all the scum and riffraff… How Herr Hitler would have hated her
.

Herr Hitler. That’s how I addressed him. Always. He called me Lady Clemency. He would have had our daughter destroyed, or better still, sent to an Arbeitslager
.

But Melissa, her granddaughter. Yes, Leni, I see you have her photograph in your apartment in so many poses. Melissa is our hope. They are training her to stand by the Leader as I did, to front our new pan-European movement
.

Melissa, my great-granddaughter, as white-skinned and flaxen-haired as I once was..
.

“Take her back with you,” Leni pleads. I still see her face, so much older and more wrinkled than my own, as she stares up at me from the over-heated hall of her apartment in the Hotel. Her eyes are rheumy. The flat stinks of scent. Leni, I was not sorry to admit the callers when they came
.

“Take the girl back to England.” Those were your last words, Leni
.

You had lost your ‘wits, you had betrayed the memory of the Führer. You deserved to die
.

The TGV from Paris to Marseilles takes four hours, forty-four minutes. The priest left the train at Lyons and the tall, longhaired dark young man has come to take his place.

The giggling schoolgirls, pale with waiting for something exciting to happen, stand in the space at the end of the carriage where a smart Parisian has parked her Burmese and Siamese cats, and the Louis Vuitton luggage is piled too high. Each flick of a cat’s tail as we enter a tunnel or slide through a cutting threatens to bring the whole edifice down.

I am exhausted from long hours spent, half-dozing, waking in terror, in the brasserie close to the station. I know the constriction in my stomach means danger: danger of a mental breakdown rather than physical fear, though it could presage both.

I am being pursued, hunted, followed. I know I am thought to carry the numbers which will gain access to the fortune that would have been Monica’s and now must be Mel’s. And I know myself a godmother who comes into the scene to act as God: I
decree that this fortune shall not be seized and that Mel shall escape the taint of Nazi gold.

The meek shall inherit the earth. I wonder, as the train slows in a landscape tinged with the fiery orange and apricots of the South, whether the priest’s presence opposite me for so many miles has influenced my way of thinking.

But I dismiss this thought: the lurching sensation has returned and this time the Train Grande Vitesse cannot be held to blame, for we are almost motionless now.

I look out of the window. A donkey stands in a field. Olives make a fuzzy line along a lane green with gorse and yellow with their blooms. In the distance, hills painted by Cézanne, obeying his geometrical rules. Blue, purple: the russet orange again, cubes and planes intersecting sternly under a pale azure sky.

The long-haired man’s eyes are on me, and for a second I look straight into eyes I’ve seen somewhere before. Eyes that turn to one side and pretend to take in the landscape of Provence beyond the window.

But then he returns to staring at me. And my heart suddenly executes a perfect somersault in my breast: these are eyes I saw on the ferry on the way here: eyes closed against the brisk northerly winds; eyes lowered in mock humility as my notes blew overboard and fluttered down the steps to the First Class lounge.

I force myself to look again. The mocking, hooded eyes are closed now, as if the effort of gazing out at so much beauty is exhausting. It comes to me, with another sickening lurch, that there is something both odd and familiar about this rubber-faced, effeminate young man. On the boat… the ferry… he was the steward… and then I see the hands.

And then I see the girls. They walk, bunched together, between the sleeping passengers, between the miniature bottles of wine on tables, between the hanging coats, padded, tweedy, obstructive…

The girls. They come like trained animals. The man’s eyes are closed, but he has lifted a finger of one hand to summon them.

I rise, as unostentatiously as possible. The silence and immobility of the train lend an eerie quality to the scene. The gang of girls giggle no longer. Their deathly white faces betray their dependence on the one opposite me, deep in his feigned trance. Before Mel’s army can reach me, I am down the other end of the carriage. The automatic glass door opens for me with a sweet, greased swishing sound, then closes like the gates of the Underworld.

I am inside. A toilet, a basin…and, yes! An emergency chain. I tug at it. Who would pull it when the train is stationary? Will the guard come? I hear the shattering high-pitched electronic scream. Then, slowly, the doorknob begins to turn.

The knife was in the sleeve, above the ancient wrist, imprinted with the brown flowers of death. Its blade was as long and thin as an adder’s tongue, sharp with venom. It makes straight for my neck, whistles past my ear.

I seize the hand: the mask drops, the face riddled and pitted with years. Evil glares out at me.

I understand. The strength of the old woman is unexpected. The girls crowd behind her and push me down.

I crawl, I force my way like a dog through a forest of bare, knobbly knees. I am between carriages when I see a door open: my emergency alarm has brought panic to the train.

There is a poppy field. How red it is, red as the hair of the creature trying to kill me… red as the sleep the evil men sell to the children in return for their unthinking violence.

I jump. I fall. I roll. There are sharp pebbles under the poppies in a field untended and bare in patches. A thin horse stands some way off and turns to stare at me.

I am in a wood. Olive trees mostly, but also scrub left to grow high and then not cut back. The same bright gorse blooms like beacons in a dusty Provencal field.

I run into the scrub—the maquis. It tears at my clothes as I go.

The train starts again as silently and smoothly as it had stopped. Why has no-one from the train followed me?

I am pleasantly impressed by the clientèle attracted to the
Trois Frères
, the first humble auberge I came across in my country walk after leaving the TGV.

It was the headmistress at St Agnes’s in Edinburgh who advised me that the surest path to success in life is to forget the failures. If being attacked in an insalubrious w.c. on a train by an octogenarian British female Nazi disguised as a man can be counted as a failure, that is: it was certainly a failure of perception on my part, for it should have been obvious that she was observing me from the moment I set foot on the train.

So I have taken my usual course in times of uncertainty: step by step, as Miss Cuthbertson used to say. One thing at a time.

First, I have neither money nor a change of clothing. I left my haversack behind in the scramble for the open door, where it now doubtlessly lies in the hands of my attacker. They have my Augustus Hare. My best Fraser tartan skirt and Pringle cashmere sweater from Peebles are also lost to me, as is my
wallet with its sterling content. £500 is all I would permit myself for this particular trip. I do not use credit cards, as they are an invitation to debt and theft. I have no intention of utilising foreign currency, as its fluctuations are too undependable. I shall not handle the euro, and have written to the new Scottish Prime Minister to inform him that I am strongly advising the National Trust to refuse the euro at the gates of famous houses and art galleries. Surely we, of all bodies, may be permitted to pay as we have always done, with the pound? The reply from the English office to my request was nothing short of offensive.

The walk up from the poppy field was a harsh disappointment to a student of the Impressionists (though I have always had a strong preference for the works of Courbet). Both sides of the dusty track were guarded by tall wire fences and by Alsatians which barked ferociously as I went past them. Names of properties,
la Bastide
this and
Closerie
that, gave no indication of the type of building hidden by forbidding umbrella pine forests and by further walls and barricades. I had the undesirable sensation of being in occupied territory; though occupied by whom or what it would be impossible to say.

So the little village about two kilometres up the hill came as a distinct relief. Very quaint; almost a picture book. No dwelling under eighty years old; a charcuterie, boulangerie, boucherie,
and all the rest; even a central plane tree and a game of boules in progress.

I could have wept with relief, but obviously I did not. I paused by the side of the paved area outside the
Trois Frères
, evaluated the handful of people enjoying a pastis or Cinzano at tables there in the warm spring sunshine, and then marched purposefully in.

Despite having tumbled down a railway cutting, disregarding the flinty stones and bruised olives, my Harris Tweed remained as robust as ever. I have also often noted the effect of my personality, and can usually rely upon it with some regularity in the case of an emergency. I had no difficulty persuading the management to allot me the best room in the establishment, and persuading them that my luggage was lost and would arrive in the morning. I was soon settled in, and then led downstairs to enjoy a fine
Tripes à la mode de Caen
(no nonsense about vegetarianism here in France) along with an excellent half bottle of Bandol, an unpretentious but delicious Provencal wine.

Then I called Jennifer Devant, whom I called for the second time after completing this much-needed repast. I learned that she has left the Avondale Club, and is not to be found in Edinburgh either. The news came as something of a blow, I must confess. However, for those who remain calm, as I invariably do, there always comes a solution to the most intractable of problems.

I signed the bill, adding a small but perfectly calculated gratuity, and then I went out into the village and its environs for a short walk.

Surely, if I visited the local chateau, I would find a way to alert the right person of my situation and summon both funds and help.

But who exactly is this right person?

I am in pursuit of a juvenile killer, as the police of many countries must regard poor Mel, and I have no desire to tip off the authorities until Mel is safely in my own keeping and has told me her version of events.