Black Roses (3 page)

‘I see.’ Torn between the prospect of harbouring a potential film star beneath her roof, and dismay at the shortfall in tutoring income, Frau Lehman was evidently reserving judgement.

‘Well, you’ll want to rest before dinner. All my residents eat together, so I’ll introduce you later. I’ll show you to your room.’

She heaved herself to her feet and trundled ahead to the bedroom. On the way Clara glimpsed rooms stuffed with unusually hideous furniture of fretted oak, like trees in a gloomy forest. Along the end of the corridor was a bathroom, with chequered black and white tiles and clanking pipes. The bedroom on the top floor was tiny, with a brown carpet, a gigantic wardrobe into which she put her bag, and a window overlooking the conifer-lined street. There was a basin in the corner with a mirror over it, and a card attached to the inside of the door: “Dinner at eight. No hot water before bed.”

Closing the door behind her, Clara sat on the green counterpane and it sank beneath her as though she were being swallowed up into the earth. She had a fleeting feeling that when she slept, she might disappear into a crevasse and never get up. She thought of all the other girls Frau Lehmann had boasted of, and wondered if they had sat here and cried with homesickness or, more likely, made sure they spent every second of their spare time at concerts and the theatre.

Then she shook herself. With any luck she wouldn’t be seeing much of Frau Lehmann, or the frightful-sounding lodgers. The next morning she was to present herself at the world-famous Babelsberg Studios, find Mr Max Townsend, film producer, and audition for his new film,
Black Roses.
Gazing over at the cracked basin, down which an ochre stain snaked from the tap, Clara reflected on what had brought her here.

When Clara first stated her ambition to go on the stage, she might as well have said she wanted to enter the white slave trade and have done with it. She had ballet lessons, of course, but almost every girl of her family’s acquaintance had ballet lessons as a child, and they didn’t end up in rep at the Eastbourne Pavilion. To her father, the idea was at first preposterous, and then a phase. To her mother, it was simply out of the question
. ‘Acting is not the kind of thing I’d want a daughter of mine to do.’
Their own plan for her entry into the adult world had been via an organisation called the Queen’s Secretarial College for Young Gentlewomen in South Kensington. Clara still remembered her dismay on finding the brochure on the table in the hall one day shortly before her sixteenth birthday – duck-egg blue with scrolly silver lettering. Flicking through, she read, ‘Young ladies will find it congenial to learn alongside other gentlewomen in a setting where high standards of etiquette are always maintained.’

Faced with this level of opposition to her chosen career, Clara started a bit of private study. She sent off for a manual on ‘charm’, which she found advertised in the pages of
The Lady
, a magazine her mother took for the purpose of hiring servants, and followed its oblique wisdom as closely as she could. ‘When a woman reflects her innate charm, all else of value follows as naturally as flowers turn to the sun.’

She posed before the mirror and learnt long screeds of Shakespeare by heart, for future auditions. She was Portia, Hermia, Lady Macbeth. She attended Saturday matinées in the West End and sat up in the gods. She wrote to Gerald du Maurier and Constance Cummings, and received a signed photograph from the former with a note wishing her well in her ‘theatrical career’, which she kept like a talisman tucked in the side of her mirror. Then her mother died, and the issue of Clara’s career stopped mattering overnight. Suddenly, nobody really cared what she did.

The London School of Acting and Musical Theatre, which Clara joined the autumn after leaving school, had its rehearsal rooms in a church hall off Waterloo, where the tang of polish barely masked the smell of unwashed feet left over from dancing lessons, and leaflets for the Mothers’ Coffee Circle fluttered from cork boards. The roof was crisscrossed with red painted iron rafters, and at the end of the hall was a raised platform where Monsieur LeClerc, who took Speech, Voice and Acting, went to elaborate lengths to emphasize correct pronunciation in Shakespeare and to lament the inferiority of the English stage compared to the French.

The staff were a mixed bunch. There was Miss Stuyveson, who taught deportment
. “Don’t slouch, Clara. You’re playing Nora, not one of the three witches. You’ll have a widow’s hump by the time you’re thirty!”
Fran Goodbody, an athletic woman with tight red curls, taught fencing and stage technique and Miss Wisznewski, a Polish woman with a starved, ballerina’s body, gave movement classes, for which they wore navy leotards and tights, and had to skip around the stage. But Clara’s favourite teacher was Paul Croker, an intense young man with a patched tweed jacket and goatee beard, who had met Lee Strasberg in New York and was an avid disciple of method acting.
‘You must work from the inside out, Clara. Access your emotional memory. Use everything that has happened in your life to create the character you are working on. It’s not enough to look like Viola, it’s not enough to sound like Viola, you must be Viola.’

After the academy, however, work had been scarce. Clara garnered one line of praise in the
Eastbourne Courier
for her “graceful performance” as Sorel Bliss in
Hay Fever,
and she had merited a minute photograph in
The Tatler
under the caption “Sir Ronald Vine’s daughter takes to the stage” when she had a few lines at the Hampstead Everyman. There had been several seasons in rep but, at the age of twenty-six, she found herself without anything resembling a career. A grown woman with no job and no husband, still living at home with her father
.

Not that her father seemed to mind. He barely seemed to notice her. As often as not, after a day spent tramping around auditions and rehearsal rooms, she would return to a house full of strangers. Ronald Vine had coped with his wife’s death by focusing on work, and after losing his seat in Parliament he had thrown himself into his special interest: Anglo-German friendship. He formed a society made up of politicians and businessmen, with the odd, fanatical spinster thrown in. They attended rallies and discussed plans to strengthen ties between the two countries. They held meetings at Ponsonby Terrace, a narrow street of Georgian houses in Pimlico, where they would sit and smoke in the drawing room, debating the dangers of Bolshevism. Her sister, Angela, had enthusiastically joined the cause, but Clara couldn’t think of anything worse. When she came home she had got into the habit of opening the door very quietly and listening out for the sound of unfamiliar voices. If she heard them she would take off her shoes, dart silently through the hall and creep up the stairs.

Things might have stayed pretty much as they were if she had not met Dennis Beaumont.

Dennis was the kind of man who seemed to be born at the age of forty. He was a balding lawyer with a narrow moustache who had courted her assiduously, taking her out for long evening drives in his Morgan while he discussed his intention to practise at the bar until the time was right to make a bid for a seat in Parliament. Somehow, without knowing how it happened, Clara found herself part of his plan.

She didn’t realize it properly until the last evening she had seen him. They were at a party in Chelsea, held by one of Dennis’s friends, Gerald Mortimer, a brick-faced barrister who had just returned from a visit to the continent and was talking about the new election in Germany, and the success of the National Socialists.

‘Let’s hope they provide a bit of stability after the chaos that’s been going on there,’ said Gerald, waving a flute of champagne. ‘Hitler’s the only thing keeping the Germans from a tide of Communism.’

‘But then,’ sighed Dennis, ‘the Communists will be coming here soon, won’t they? All sorts will be flooding here. Jews and bankrupts. We’ll have to put safeguards in place or we’ll be swamped.’

‘Swamped is a bit extreme, isn’t it?’ said Clara. She loathed Dennis’s tendency to exaggerate. She supposed it was the aspirant politician in him.

‘Not a bit of it. There will be thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. I know you’re half-German
,
my darling, but I don’t think you understand the implications.’

‘As it happens,’ said Gerald importantly, ‘an MP friend of mine, Edward Doran, asked the Home Secretary just today to take measures to prevent any alien Jews entering the country. No one wants to sound heartless, but he thinks an influx of Jewish refugees could threaten our entire civilization.’

‘I think what he said was that it would be the End of British Civilization if we let them in.’

The speaker was a handsome, fair-haired man with a cigar. He paused to exhale a thin line of smoke. ‘Whereas I would say it was the End of British Civilization if we didn’t.’

Dennis made an irritated little gesture. ‘Clara dear, do you know Rupert Allingham?’

Gerald was annoyed. ‘Come on, Rupert. You have to admit Herr Hitler has a point.’

‘Herr Hitler?’ Allingham gave a laconic smile. ‘Let’s just say I’m not entirely seduced by him.’

‘Rupert’s a journalist,’ said Dennis to Clara, as if in explanation.

Allingham gave a little bow and smiled. ‘And you’re the actress,’ he said.

Though Clara was flattered to be recognized, it felt like false pretences. She’d been out of work for a month. That very afternoon her agent, an ancient man with a dinner-stained cravat and offices in Wardour Street, had said, ‘Nothing doing, ducky,’ when she telephoned about her employment prospects.

‘Will you be appearing in anything soon?’

‘I’m expecting an audition for the Liverpool Rep,’ she lied smoothly.

‘Not,’ said Dennis, giving her a hard squeeze round the waist, ‘that she’ll have any time for acting once we’re married.’

Before she had a chance to reply, they were interrupted and Clara escaped to the balcony floor. A mixture of anger and surprise cascaded through her. No time for acting! When had anyone ever said anything about that? How could Dennis presume to say such a thing when they had not even discussed it? And as for getting married! They hadn’t ever discussed getting married either. Who said she was going to marry Dennis? Settle down in his home and do what exactly? Have babies and take tea with his dry stick of a mother, an intolerable woman who disliked Clara because she had German blood and had complained to her vicar because he owned a dachshund? Her heart hammering and a flush on her cheeks, Clara stared over the rail at the couples circling awkwardly round the dance floor like pairs of courting crabs.

‘You shouldn’t mind him.’

It was Rupert Allingham again. He leant over the banister at her side.

‘I don’t,’ she said coolly, but the shock of Dennis’s comment still burnt inside her. Looking down she saw he had started dancing with Polly Davies, a woman with a toothy face like a pony, and she could see the thinning strands of hair splayed across his scalp. She thought of all those dinners she had sat through while Dennis talked about tort and precedence and the central importance of English law in upholding the Empire, and how attentively she had listened because she thought it was important. Suddenly she felt a violent revulsion and, in an instant, her admiration turned to disgust. Dennis wasn’t impressive, he was a bully and a bore, and it had taken a split second to see it. Meanwhile Allingham was studying her intently.

‘Ever had a film test?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘You should, you know. You’d be perfect in films. I bet the camera loves you.’

‘Really,’ she muttered, taking a sip of her champagne and concentrating on the floor below.

‘In fact, a friend of mine is working on a picture right now.’

That made her look up. ‘Is he a producer?’

‘Sort of,’ he said languidly. ‘His name’s Max Townsend. He was at the BBC, until he got chucked out. But it was all for the best because he’s written a script. It’s called
Black Roses.
It’s about a Finnish woman who’s in love with a political dissident but has to sleep with the Tsarist governor, a cruel Bolshevik. It’s a love story.’

Clara could barely contain her surprise. ‘And you think he’d offer the role to me?’

‘Well, not the heroine, my dear. He’s got Lilian Harvey for that. But if you were to turn up at Ufa and ask for Max, I’m sure he could sort you out. Say I sent you.’

‘What’s Ufa?’

‘Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft. You must have heard of it! Where Fritz Lang directs and Marlene Dietrich acts. It’s in Berlin.’

‘Berlin!’

‘Well, just outside. At the Babelsberg studios. It’s the nearest you’ll get to Hollywood without being in Hollywood. And they want people who can speak both German and English. Dennis said you speak German.’

‘My mother always spoke to us in German. She was born in Hamburg.’

‘You’ll do brilliantly then. Look, I’m going to be there myself in a few weeks’ time. Why not come out and get in touch? Or, let me give you Max’s number.’

He took out a piece of notepaper, scribbled on it, and pressed it into her hand.

‘You should, you know. Berlin’s terrifically exciting at the moment. That is,’ he added pointedly, ‘if Dennis doesn’t object.’

From somewhere in the house, Frau Lehmann’s dinner gong sounded and the unmistakable smell of cabbage wafted up the stairs. Clara swung her feet round and stood up, bracing herself to meet the other residents. Peering into the spotty mirror, she ran a trace of Vaseline over her eyebrows and patted down her hair.
If Dennis doesn’t object.
Well, he hadn’t had the opportunity to object. She had left the day after the party without mentioning a word of it to him.

The headquarters of Ufa, secluded in the woods south-west of Berlin, looked more like a factory than a film studio. Approached through a set of imposing gates, the sprawling complex of buildings was designed in monumentalist style with its four studios projecting like the arms of a cross. It had been the centre of film making since 1911, and while the rest of the country struggled through the devastating inflation, Ufa was wildly successful, turning out the musicals and sugary love stories that Berliners loved. If it looked like a factory, that’s because it was. The
Traumfabrik
, they called it – the dream factory – a production line for wholesome, rose-tinted fantasies that lightened the heart and took people’s minds off what was happening all around them.