Black Roses (2 page)

But who could blame them? Who could have foreseen how quickly things would change? Even for Clara herself. When she arrived in Berlin she could never have imagined what would happen in such a short space of time. She could never have known how it would transform her. All that mattered now, though, was that no one else should know.

For a wedding, it would have made a good funeral. The bride wore black, a sweeping, lacy gown concealing, either by chance or design, the groom’s deformed foot. It was probably deliberate, given that this was a groom who liked to leave very little to chance. It was a picture of National Socialist joy, if your idea of happiness was ducking through an honour guard of stiff-armed storm troopers with faces like a firing squad. Scraps of winter snow dusted the country churchyard and behind the happy couple trailed a fair-haired boy of about eleven, the bride’s son by her first marriage, dressed in the uniform of the Hitler Jugend, with a look of dazed trepidation. Perhaps he was wondering what his new life would be like, under the steely wing of a stepfather with towering political ambitions, or perhaps he was dreading demotion to the second most important man in his mother’s life. A little further behind, wearing a trilby and an enigmatic smile, came the honoured guest.

The wedding photograph had pride of place in the bookshop window, wrapped in a riot of ribbons, black, white and scarlet, with little twin flags bearing swastikas on each side. But no passers-by stopped to share the nuptial joy. The crowd surged on, intent on business or shopping, hats clamped on their heads and collars raised against a sharp March wind. Their faces were as sober as the grey Prussian façades of the buildings around them. They didn’t give the bookshop a second glance, any more than they did the displays of Messmer Tee and Machwitz Kaffee in the delicatessen, the cakes in the bakery, or the tall blue jars in the apothecary. Two women passed, complaining about their office manager. A woman loudly upbraided her son, ‘Your father will have something to say about that!’ The ground shuddered as a tram thundered past, sending a shower of blue sparks from the cables above it. Standing on the street, Clara Vine wondered if the febrile atmosphere that everyone in London had talked about really was swirling around this city. Because if so, these stolid citizens were doing their best to ignore it.

It had taken her twenty-four hours to reach Berlin. From London she had caught the boat train to the Hook of Holland, toasting her own daring with a glass of Liebfraumilch in the Pullman car as she tried to accept the enormity of what she had just done. Standing on the deck of the ferry from Harwich, staring down at the churning sea, which made her feel slightly sick, tasting the flecks of salt foam on her face, she wondered if anyone was missing her yet. She checked again the scrap of paper in her crocodile-leather purse.

From Holland Clara had changed to the Berlin Express train and watched the low, flat expanse of the Netherlands and Belgium pass through a haze of steam. Children going to school, cows waiting at a gate, villages passing like postcards. She rationed herself to one small square at a time from the bar of Cadbury’s chocolate that she had bought on the platform at Liverpool Street and tried to read the copy of
Dusty Answer
she had brought, but bubbling excitement made it impossible for her to concentrate for long. She kept looking up and losing her place and staring out at the endless, corrugated fields bisected by poplars spiking the immense sky. Everything was coming into leaf, draping the landscape in luminous green. In the end she gave up and focused on an old childhood game, analysing every member of the carriage around her as surreptitiously as possible, committing each detail to memory and constructing a story for them. By dint of peering into the little rectangular mirror above the seat, she fixed on the elderly man opposite in a Loden overcoat. His clothes were quietly expensive and his face was intelligent. Surely he must be a tycoon art dealer off to snap up a Titian. The woman on the seat opposite in hairy purple tweed with a badly mended hare lip, became a governess for some exiled Russian royals. The young man with the greased slick of hair falling forward into his eyes, who kept trying to meet her glance, was clearly, from his sketchbook and metal ruler, an architecture student, off to study in Berlin.

Finally, late afternoon, with the couplings screeching and the whistle sounding up into the cavernous glass vault, they reached the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. In a cloud of steam and banging doors Clara passed along the platform, through the mêlée of porters in green jackets unloading the bags. Her papers were checked at the gate by a policeman in a high hat with a tight chin strap and a gleaming brass badge. Then she stepped onto the street outside.

Friedrichstrasse was busy with big cream buses and the iron clanking of braking trams. Dingy buildings crowded out the sky and the air was full of the noise of construction workers hammering at the façade of a block opposite, punctuated by the shouts of a man with a pretzel cart.

Consulting the pocket map in her
Baedeker
, Clara searched for the spot where Friedrichstrasse intersected with Unter den Linden. A jolt of anxiety assailed her as she realised she was, really, alone in a foreign city. What would her father say when he discovered her note? “
I’ve been offered a part in Berlin . . .”
Berlin! A city she knew absolutely nothing about. Almost her entire image of Berlin came from Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in
Grand Hotel
.

But even as she thought this, another feeling came to her. A strange exhilaration that she had travelled beyond the map of her old world, the safe confines of London squares and streets, of English houses and cups of tea, guttering gas fires and red buses, of telephone boxes and holidays on chilly Cornish beaches. Of pinched faces and pursed lips. She had stepped into a place where she was free to reinvent herself and her entire identity. Here she needn’t any longer be Clara Vine, from 39 Ponsonby Terrace, London SW1, the daughter of Sir Ronald, the sister of Angela and Kenneth, connected by that intricate web of relations and background that meant people could classify you instantly, like an insect or a stamp. The world had widened before her and it was both frightening and intoxicating, like the moment swimming in the sea when the sand shelves beneath your feet and you strike out into fresh, uncharted waters.

She was running away, no doubt about it. From England, and her family, and from the path that until a few days ago she was all but certain to take. But suddenly it felt as though she was in Berlin because she was meant to be. Besides, she said to herself, what is the worst that could happen?

Checking her reflection in the bookshop window, she realized that however uncertain she was feeling, nothing about her appearance betrayed it. Her suit was uncreased, despite three days of travel, and her complexion was young and fresh enough to resist the impact of a night’s interrupted sleep. She might be any young professional woman on her way to the office or out for a morning’s shopping. Who could possibly guess, from the look of her, at the turmoil she had left behind? Straightening her hair, whose glossy chestnut wisps had been caught and flattened by the wind, she tucked them back beneath her blue velvet hat, tilted it to an angle and focused on finding her way to Frau Lehmann’s.

Frau Lehmann’s finishing school for young women occupied a large villa in the leafy west end of Berlin. It was a stately, four-storey place with steps leading up to a colonnaded porch and a creamy grey frontage topped with a red mansard roof. The city was tranquil here, with substantial houses set on broad roads that spanned out towards the Grunewald. Hidden behind hedges and railings, each differed subtly from its neighbours in architectural design, from rococo to modern, from Dutch gables and mansard roofs to cool, white cubes, with large gardens thronged with oak, pine and chestnut trees, and the occasional classical statue. Perhaps it was the famous
Berliner Luft
, the clear breeze that blows across the banks of the Spree, or perhaps it was just the combination of wide streets and stately buildings, but everything about this area felt solid and unchanging.

On closer inspection, however, the houses bore signs of creeping neglect, like a mature woman whose skilful attention to make-up fails to disguise completely the attrition of age. Since the inflation, which had swept and bankrupted the nation, a seediness had overtaken the respectable elegance of this area. The lawns were mostly unmown and the hedges leant drunkenly into the street. Paint peeled discreetly from the sides of the villa Lehmann, and through the flaking railings of the first-floor balcony a climbing vine twisted, while from below poked emerald-green fronds of potted ferns, as though the unruly forces of nature were too powerful to be confined.

Frau Lehmann had in the long years of her widowhood become an institution. During the 1920s Frau Lehmann’s had been a destination for well-born girls from English families who wanted their daughters schooled in German, singing, painting and music. Then it had contained a maid, who made the beds and waited at table, and a cook. Now, with things the way they were, there was only Frau Lehmann herself, offering a room with board for sixty marks a month, and an ancient parrot patched with shabby feathers like a moth-eaten fur coat. Clara had sent a letter warning of her arrival, but there had been no time for any kind of reply.

She pulled the bell and peered nervously through the glass as a shadow loomed up from the dim interior. There was a frenzied yapping, coupled with the sound of bolts rattling and being drawn back, before the door creaked open.

‘You must be Clara. Come in. I have coffee waiting.’

Frau Lehmann was a huge, stocky figure, encased in a black dress that seemed somehow more solid than mere wool and silk, with a lace shawl draped like a tablecloth across the top. Her silver hair was parted with mathematical exactitude and bundled into a tight ball at the back of her head and her black eyes gleamed like currants in the doughy flesh of her face. Her make-up was applied with theatrical generosity, as if she had a stage career of her own. A small hairy dog bounced at ankle height, causing Clara to step inside cautiously. She thought of the recommendation she had been given.

“Frau Lehmann. I think that’s what she’s called. She’s terribly reliable. Penny Dudley-Ward stayed with her. She teaches singing.”

This description had a somewhat deflating effect on Clara, conjuring the picture of herself yodelling teutonic tunes with a gaggle of other English girls rather than leading a cosmopolitan existence far from drab London. But she didn’t know another soul in the city, so right now she had no choice.

With an imperious wave Frau Lehmann directed Clara into a gloomy drawing room exuding a dismal smell of mothballs, dust and ancient boiled food. Clara’s heart sank. All the furniture felt too big, like a giant’s house into which she had mistakenly wandered. There was an enormous, shabby sofa and a couple of armchairs parked like tanks. The walls were papered brown and there was a lamp with a beaded fringe that gave off a gloomy red light.

‘I keep photographs of all my young women,’ said Frau Lehmann, sinking effortfully onto a horsehair armchair. ‘They often come back to see me. Do you know the Cavendishes?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Or the Ormsby-Gores?’

‘Sorry, but no.’

There continued a list of families whom Clara didn’t know, until Frau Lehmann relapsed with a sigh, convinced that Clara came from the lowest echelons of London society.

She handed Clara a slice of poppy-seed cake and a cup of hot, burnt coffee, which she made drinkable by adding three teaspoons of sugar. As she took it, Clara jumped at the sound of a curse, which emanated from behind her head.

‘Stop it, Mitzi, you filthy creature.’

Frau Lehmann grunted and pulled a cover over a parrot’s cage. Clara’s eyes strayed to the mantelpiece, where a photograph of a young man with Frau Lehmann’s moon faced stare was decorated by a red and black enamel
Hakenkreuz
dangling from the frame.

‘Otto, that is. My son. He died at the front in 1917. Nineteen years old.’ Her fingers massaged the greasy hair of the dog which was now lolling beside her on the sofa.

‘I’m sorry.’

Clara felt somehow she were being held obscurely to blame.

Frau Lehmann shook her head, as though accepting Clara’s complicity in her son’s death, yet graciously forgiving her. ‘We have lived through terrible times. But we must look to better ones ahead. Now our country is on the up again and our two nations are friends.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Your German seems rather good,’ said Frau Lehmann, with a faintly resentful tone. ‘Will you be wanting lessons? I know a very good gentleman who could bring you up to scratch. Or perhaps a little singing?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I used to offer art appreciation, but my legs are not what they were.’

Both looked down at the dark, swaddled sausages protruding from her skirt, the stockings concertinaed in wrinkled rings.

‘Though you must visit the Pergamon Museum. The head of Nefertiti is there. She is the most magnificent woman.’

‘Thank you. I will.’

‘And you should meet my lodgers. We have Herr Professor Hahn, who is a very distinguished gentleman. He teaches Ancient Literature at the University. And Fräulein Viktor, a very pleasant lady, secretary to someone high up in the Labour Department.’

There was a pause. Frau Lehman’s jaw shifted rhythmically as she worked on the poppy-seed cake, like a tortoise eating a lettuce leaf, with about the same amount of urgency.

‘So do you have plans to occupy yourself?’ she enquired at last.

‘I’m hoping for a part in a film. At Babelsberg.’

‘How exciting.’ This had plainly taken her by surprise. Her little eyes fixed on Clara with fresh interest.

‘They want multilingual actresses, you see. All the best films have to have French and English versions too, so they need actresses who speak the languages. I have an appointment tomorrow.’