The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (9 page)

Herr Schmidt returned. ‘Here it is.’ He had in his hands a shoebox, which was held shut by a number of elastic bands. He told me the story of how it came to be in his possession.

‘I was injured at the beginning of the Second World War. I couldn’t go back to the front so I spent the duration of the war here in Berlin, firefighting and clearing the rubble after the Allied air attacks. I found this in the remains of a burnt-out hotel just off the Ku’damm. The Kurfürstendamm, that is.’

He set the box in the centre of the table.

I reached for it.

‘Please, take it up to your room,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see what is inside again. It mocks me after all this time. I shouldn’t have kept it. I think it is self-explanatory. Once you have read it, perhaps you could find a way for it to be returned to the owner. Or to her family, if she is no longer alive. I think you will know better how to find them than I.’

I nodded again. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘It’s getting late. I’m afraid I’m suddenly rather tired,’ said Herr Schmidt.

‘Then I’ll say goodnight.’

I tried not to look too eager to take my new treasure upstairs.

When I got to my room, the Internet connection had still not been restored, so there was nothing to distract me from opening the shoebox Herr Schmidt had rescued from the burnt-out hotel. Why had he picked this up when there must have been so many treasures left in the rubble? I wondered if he had attributed some significance to it precisely because it hadn’t gone up in flames. It wasn’t even slightly singed. But the first thing I noticed – perhaps the thing that had caught Herr Schmidt’s eye too – was that this was an English shoebox. I didn’t recognise the name of the store marked on it, however; it was probably long since defunct.

I was careful as I took off the elastic bands, but they were old and perished and they crumbled in my hands. The box couldn’t have been opened for years. I thought of Herr Schmidt’s words, ‘It mocks me after all this time’, and wondered why he hadn’t tried to find the owner himself. Perhaps he had. It wouldn’t necessarily have been easy before the Internet became part of everyone’s life. Even with the Internet it could sometimes be hard to track someone down. Not many people who’d been alive in the 1930s bothered to have a profile on Facebook.

The box smelled musty and damp, as though it had been kept in an attic or a cellar. As I opened it, I imagined a wisp of long-dead spirit smoking out into the air, filling my lungs with the past. I instinctively held my breath.

Inside the box was a treasure trove. There was a small Steiff teddy bear whose nose was worn bald by kissing. There was a handkerchief embroidered with the initials KH. There were several letters, bundled together with a piece of ribbon in Fortnum and Mason’s distinctive pale green. There were also two diaries, one from 1932 and another from 1933. The diary from 1932 was English. It was made by Smythson, still one of Britain’s best stationers in the twenty-first century. It was bound in red leather and embossed in gold with the same initials as the handkerchief. The 1933 diary was German in make. It was cheaper in construction and had a simple black leather cover. It was not embossed. The writing inside both was English and in the same girlish, neat hand using a fountain pen and blue ink, which had faded over the years.

Feeling a little like a thief, I opened the first diary and began to read.

Chapter 11

Surrey,

Friday 1st January 1932

Dear Diary,

Happy New Year! Ha ha ha! If only this New Year were happy. What a terrible New Year’s Eve I had. I can only hope it doesn’t set the tone for the rest of 1932.

As usual, we were asked to join Bettina and her family at their annual New Year’s party at the Grange. It’s always a fabulous affair. They give their terrible cook a night off, get proper caterers in and hire a band. Everyone in the village is invited. Like me, Mummy always wants to get dressed up and join in the fun. And every year Papa says he can’t stand Bettina’s braying parents and all the nouveau showing off and wouldn’t it be much nicer to stay home instead? Well, I certainly wish he had stayed home last night. I wish we all had.

The party started at seven for the benefit of the old folk who might not make it all the way till midnight. I wore my new dress: the red silk one cut on the bias that Mummy made from a McCall’s pattern. It’s really rather lovely, even if it is home-made. Of course, Bettina’s dress was a Norman Hartnell picked up on a trip to London, but, if you ask me, it made her look a little old. Especially since she has started curling her hair.

Anyway, the moment I walked into the New Year’s party, she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the garden for a gasper. She shoved her lighter and cigarettes in my handbag for safe keeping in case any member of her family should appear.

‘I swear,’ she said, ‘I will not make it to 1932. My mother has been driving me absolutely mad all day long. Until you turned up I was this close to throwing myself out of a window. Or her. I was ready to hoist her over the windowsill to oblivion. One of us has to go.’

Bettina’s mother, Mrs Spencer, always gets rather overwrought in the run-up to the family’s New Year party. Everything has to be perfect. This year, it was truer than ever because Bettina’s brother Matthew was home.

‘Have you seen him?’ Bettina asked. ‘Strutting around like a big fat turkey cock in his uniform? Anyone would think he was back from a year in the trenches instead of twelve months in an office just outside Torquay.’

Matthew was on leave from the army. I hadn’t seen him but I couldn’t wait to. I especially couldn’t wait to see him in his uniform. As Mummy always says, there isn’t a man in the world who doesn’t look better in khaki.

Not that Matthew needs much help to look good. He’s always been horribly handsome. I remember the very first time I met him, when Bettina invited me home to her house for tea. We were nine, which means that Matthew must have been fourteen. He seemed so worldly-wise compared to us girls. He was already six feet tall and played for his school’s first rugby team. I forgot about my crush on Douglas Fairbanks at once.

After that, I would see Matthew just a couple of times a year, when he was home from boarding school or university. He didn’t ever take much notice of me. I was just his sister’s spotty little friend. Until last summer. Last summer he definitely noticed.

Back in June, Bettina had invited me over to swim in the Spencers’ new swimming pool.

‘Terribly naff to have a swimming pool in this climate,’ said Papa.

But I was excited. I rolled up my costume in a stripy towel and walked down the lane to the Grange just after lunchtime. When I arrived, Bettina was already sunning herself, alongside Matthew who was wearing nothing but a pair of tight black bathers. I hadn’t known he’d be there. The sight of him made me quite light-headed.

I didn’t dare disrobe in front of him, so I changed in Bettina’s bedroom and then spent the next hour by the pool sweating in a towelling robe, while claiming I was too cold to strip off. It was sweltering in the sunshine. I was almost relieved when Matthew announced that he had an appointment to keep and was going to leave us girls to it.

Bettina looked immediately suspicious.

‘I know exactly where he’s going,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

Having quickly pulled on some clothes, we left the Spencers’ manicured garden and headed for the farm attached to the house. Bettina bade me stay close to the wall as we entered the farmyard and made for the enormous loft, already full to the rafters with that year’s hay. I was very glad I had my proper clothes on as I followed Bettina up a ladder and we hid with an eye on the doors. Hay is terribly scratchy.

‘This is where he always brings them,’ Bettina said.

‘Brings who?’

‘Ssssh!’

She clamped her hand over my mouth, just as Matthew came in. He was leading a village girl by the hand. I’d seen her before. We were a similar age but we weren’t friends. Mummy and Papa didn’t like me to mix with her sort.

‘You’ll get into all kinds of trouble,’ they said.

The village girl certainly looked ready for trouble right then. She grinned widely as Matthew wrapped his arms round her waist and pulled her close. She protested in a most feeble fashion when he went to kiss her, and soon they were rolling around on the floor with absolute abandon. Matthew had his hands everywhere. Down the front of her dress. Up her skirt. Inside her knickers! And the things she was doing to him!

Both Bettina and I kept our mouths firmly covered and our eyes fixed on the action below. I was completely horrified by what they got up to. This was sex? It was nothing like the scenes I’d read in Mummy’s novels.

In fact, it looked absolutely awful. So very messy and rather painful. And all that grunting too! But Matthew and the village girl seemed to enjoy it. So much so that afterwards, she tried to persuade him to do it all again. That was a bit of a worry for Bettina and me since we were expected for tea at four o’clock and there was no way we could get out of the hayloft without being spotted if Matthew and his girl didn’t leave first.

Fortunately, Matthew claimed that he was having tea at quarter to – the rotten liar. He left the village girl pouting. She spent a couple of moments tidying herself up, then skipped out of the barn.

‘Probably going back to her fiancé,’ said Bettina. The village girl was engaged to be married to one of the farmhands. ‘The slattern.’

It was later that same evening that Matthew caught me alone. I had been invited to stay at the Spencers’ for supper. While I was carrying plates into the kitchen (Cook had the evening off), he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the pantry.

‘I know you were watching,’ he said.

‘Watching what?’

‘Me and that girl. From the hayloft.’

I shook my head and tried to deny it.

‘You can’t fool me, Kitty Hazleton. I heard you. And,’ he reached for something just behind my ear, ‘you’ve still got straw in your hair.’

I blushed furiously.

‘But it’s OK. I don’t mind you watching. I suppose you must be curious, stuck in that boarding school of yours with no man to look at from week to week except that red-nosed bursar. Do you want a closer look at me?’

I’m afraid to say I nodded.

Matthew told Bettina and his parents he was going to walk me home. He did walk me home, but not before he had taken me back to the barn, where he had lain with the village girl only a few hours before. He pulled a blanket out of a secret hiding place – he hadn’t bothered for the village girl – and laid me down upon it.

Matthew was a god to me. I would have done anything he asked. And I did. He opened the front of his trousers and encouraged me to put my hand inside. My eyes widened.

‘What do you think?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t know. It feels . . . What am I supposed to do with it?’

‘Wrap your hand around it? Gently!’ he winced when I held him too tightly. ‘Gently. Hold on. Let’s start again. It will be easier with my trousers down.’

That was the first time I saw a penis up close. What a curious thing it turned out to be. How quickly it grew with a little bit of encouragement. Knowing as I did from biology lessons that all the stiffness was achieved through sheer volume of blood, I looked at Matthew’s enormous piece and began to worry that he’d faint. He didn’t faint. Far from it. He made me tug his foreskin backwards and forwards until my arm ached like I’d played an afternoon’s tennis. When I started to flag, he yelled at me not to stop or he’d kill me. Seconds later, a jet of gluey sperm arced high into the air.

Afterwards, Matthew’s willy lay curled in my hand like a small baby mouse: hairless, pink and blind. I thanked Matthew for having been so kind as to let me see it. I didn’t tell Bettina, of course.

Anyway, last night was the first time I’d seen Matthew since that day in the summer. Of course, I was thinking of him when I put on my red dress and begged my mother to allow me just one swipe of her lipstick. Enough to make me look my sixteen years and remind Matthew that I am quite old enough to be kissed. Heavens, I’m old enough to be married! With my parents’ permission. Gah!

Matthew was in the kitchen when Bettina and I went back inside after our gasper. He sauntered out into the dining room. He was just as handsome as I remembered, especially in his uniform. He looked like such a man compared with the boys from the village who had been invited to swell the party numbers. He seemed even taller than I remembered.

We chatted for a while. He asked me about school. I reminded him that I was nearly finished with all that. I asked him about the army. What exactly was it he was doing? He smiled enigmatically and told me it was top secret. I decided that meant he must be in training to be a spy.

Shortly before ten o’clock, we danced. It was a slow dance. Matthew held me close and whispered in my ear, ‘You’re driving me crazy in that lovely red dress. I’ll meet you in the outhouse in ten minutes. Tell your mother you need to get some air.’

I did exactly as he told me. I was so excited.

It was frigid outside and I wished I had taken my wrap, but I couldn’t go back in to get it – I would risk getting stuck with the other guests – so I crept down the garden path, shivering all the way, taking care not to sink into the mud. I daren’t use Bettina’s lighter as a torch in case it drew attention.