Black Roses (6 page)

‘You want a clean kill,’ she observed coolly, reloading her Purdey. ‘And
you
couldn’t do it, could you?’ He said nothing, but later, as they were walking through the fields back to the house, she had made a remark that was curiously devastating.

‘You know, Leo, however much you look the part, it’s like you’re acting. You don’t actually seem like you belong.’

It stung. Because she was right.

It was dangerous, this sense of not belonging, and it was the kind of thing his own employers looked out for. He wondered how closely they kept a watch on him.

At Balliol Leo had scraped enough money to spend part of every vacation travelling, and after leaving university he worked in Geneva, Munich and Berlin, teaching English. Berlin in the high days of the Weimar Republic was paradise, sitting in cafés talking to adventurous women with short hair and monocles, having rambling discussions about art and savouring the sense that anything daring or decadent was possible.

Eventually, he ran out of money and went back to England. He thought he might go into journalism, and was poised to take a job with Reuters when he received a telephone call from a man he had known at Oxford. Hugo Chambers was an odd sort with a passion for golf, Old Masters and eclectic wildlife. He had travelled the world on natural history expeditions, seeking out creatures that were believed to be extinct. He was a respected naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, and also, Leo discovered, he worked for British Intelligence. He wondered if Leo might like to meet up for a chat.

Tall and thin, dressed in pepper-and-salt tweeds, and with a habit of wild gesticulation, Hugo was exactly as Leo remembered him. They spent a jovial few hours eating beef and oyster pie in Scott’s, and after lengthy tales of Hugo’s recent jaunt to find butterflies in the foothills of the Himalayas, they walked to 54 Broadway, a block opposite St James’s Park tube station with a brass plaque announcing it as the Headquarters of the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company. There on the fourth floor behind a padded door, was a forbidding character with a square jaw and a vigorous handshake, who turned out to be the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. Rear-Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair – or Quex as he was known – offered Leo a cigar from a crocodile-skin case and waved him comfortably to an armchair. He seemed already to know everything about Leo, from his school and family, to the languages he spoke and his financial circumstances. The conversation was pleasant, but there was one exchange that bewildered Leo.

‘An only son, aren’t you Quinn? Close to your parents?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He felt Quex’s gimlet eyes on him.

‘They must be proud of you, getting up to Oxford and taking a first.’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Yet you’ve spent a lot of time abroad.’

‘I’ve travelled around quite a lot.’

‘Did you take an interest in the politics when you were there?’

‘Politics are not really my hobby, sir.’

‘Do you keep in touch with the people you met?’

‘Not at all, I’m afraid.’

‘Just checking you’re not a Red,’ said Hugo cheerfully, as they clattered back down the stairs at the end of the interview.

‘And the only child bit?’

‘Some trick cyclist stuff about dependability and owing allegiance. Forget it. You’re our man.’

Leo agreed to the job. He would be seconded to the Berlin Passport Control Office which was the usual cover for SIS operatives, filtering applications for British visas. He would liaise with the ambassador himself and an attaché at the embassy called Archie Dyson, and he would communicate with Head Office via communiqués carried in the diplomatic bag. He would receive a week’s worth of briefing before he left. That was all, apart from the advice that he should trust no one and avoid sleeping with local women. Or men, of course.

As soon as he arrived back in Berlin it was clear that things had changed dramatically. In the wide streets men were selling matchsticks and women selling themselves. It was impossible to walk out of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof without being accosted by hard-faced prostitutes in high-laced boots, their faces scored by hunger and want, offering to warm your bed for the night, or even for the hour. If you strayed from the main thoroughfares in the evening, bony boys would beckon you up tenement steps where their mothers waited in rooms smelling of rotten herring, ready to sell themselves for a few marks. Old men scoured the gutters for cigarette butts and in the far stretches of the Tiergarten cities of cardboard could be found where the homeless patched together shelters of packing cases and old boxes to create semi-permanent habitations. Even the ranks of the respectable, the war widows and the families, were just getting by, holding together a threadbare gentility, existing on cabbage, turnips and bread. On Fridays Leo would pass an ever-increasing queue of people, women with fur stoles, the men neatly dressed, in suits and hats, waiting patiently outside the local office for the dole.

The current of fear that had once lurked beneath the surface, now ran through everything. In the outer suburbs there were constant battles between Communists and Brown Shirts. They killed each other daily in street brawls, two leftists to every National Socialist. Painting squads would drive in vans through the city daubing swastikas on the property of those they hated. Slogans urging ‘
Deutschland Erwache’
spread like black mildew on the walls of apartment blocks housing Communists or Jews. And since January, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, a sharper edge of terror hung in the air. It drifted through the city like a poisonous gas, seeping through closed doors. There were arrests, often for no apparent reason, and men could be seen stumbling into police cars at dawn dazed with sleep. Leo observed it all with growing despair. It was like being trapped in a paralysing dream where you watched the slow disaster going on around you, but could do nothing to prevent it.

Back at home most people seemed entirely unaware of the atmosphere here, or the menace that the Nazis represented. The
Observer
had called Hitler ‘definitely Christian in his ideals and keen to renew his country’s moral life’. Leo had nearly choked when he saw that. Then there were the others, the pacifists, who said if Germany rearmed perhaps she should just overrun Britain and have done with it.

The Passport Office found itself besieged by streams of people wanting to leave the country. Leo spent his days drowning in paperwork. Under the League of Nations mandate, whereby Britain administered Palestine, anyone wanting to enter that region, or Britain, or anywhere in the British Empire, needed a visa from the British Passport Control Office. Since January they had been queuing in their hundreds to get one. Endless, patient queues of frightened people besieged the office, armed with paperwork, letters and offers of sponsorship, with anxiety in their voices and desperation in their eyes. Visas were what they wanted, to Palestine, Britain, or anywhere that would have them.

Now, on a dead evening in March, with the tree branches making a black scrawl against a blank sky, Leo looked over at his narrow bed and longed for some yielding female body, even if it was Marjorie’s, to wrap his arms around and bury his face in and distract him from the circling savagery.

From the street below music drifted up. It was jazz, the degenerate music of the devil, according to the Nazis. The notes floated like bright balloons on the air, daring, unorthodox, unpredictable. He tried to concentrate for a moment, to isolate the song. Then he shook his head, sighed and closed the window.

Until then, Clara had not unpacked her case. She was superstitious that way. She still didn’t know if she was going to find any acting work, though Albert had promised to ‘put her up for something’, but that afternoon she began taking out the few things she had brought and stowing them away. She was used to travelling light. The years in rep had taught her the futility of carrying around a single thing more than you needed. All she had were three blouses, two spare skirts, a nightdress and underwear. The basic cosmetics, a couple of lipsticks, Helena Rubenstein face cream, Vaseline, a Max Factor powder compact, eye-liner. A blue glass bottle of Bourjois’s Evening in Paris. For evenings she had her red buckled shoes, a fur wrap and a backless scarlet dress, which she had purloined at the last moment from her sister’s wardrobe, just in case she needed to attend something formal. Angela would kill her when she found out. In fact, Clara reflected, she had almost certainly found out already. She pictured her sister’s perfectly proportioned face grimacing in annoyance. Yet another person who would need a proper explanation once everything was sorted out.

She had a few books, a
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
and some novels, which she positioned in front of the crimson-jacketed copy of
Mein Kampf
with gold lettering which had been left on the shelf, right next to the poems of Heinrich Heine, whom Frau Lehmann had plainly not heard was now a despised author of a degenerate race. Beside them Clara propped a letter, addressed and ready for posting.

As she stowed the clothes away in a cavernous Biedermeier wardrobe that could have housed an entire family, a small silver locket fell out of her rolled-up underwear. She picked it up and held it snug in her palm, absorbing the heat of her hand. Apart from a string of pearls and a pair of earrings, this locket was the only real jewellery she possessed. It had an intricate design of entwined leaves and a filigree clasp. She opened it.

When her mother knew she was dying, she had prepared special presents for their father to give to her daughters in the years to come. The silver locket containing a minute photograph of her mother and herself had been a gift for her sixteenth birthday. Their heads were bent together, with the same dark hair, long and gently waved on her mother, cut short to the nape of the neck on Clara, with a clip holding it off her brow. They had the same slightly angular features and pointed chin which, when lifted, expressed the same look of resolute defiance. Whenever she looked at it, all Clara could remember was the day her mother died. Being brought in to say goodbye in the front bedroom, which was flooded with a mellow afternoon sun and stuffy with medicine and disinfectant. Her mother lying immobile on the bed, her hands listless on top of the faded chintz eiderdown. Clara had taken her hand gently. It was the first time she had held her mother’s hand since she was small – the Vine family was not given to overtly physical demonstrations of any kind, except to dogs. She felt the heavy sapphire ring loose on the twig of her finger and looked at the papery skin of her face, creased and dusted with powder like some ancient parchment fading into insignificance. She had great brown bruises under her eyes and her black hair, no longer glossy, was wired with grey.

Clara was the only one of the children who took after their mother. Her brother and Angela were Vines to the tips of their long, sporty limbs. Clara was dark and fine-boned, whereas the others were tall, with tawny hair and the stamina of shire horses. The family of Clara’s mother were bankers in Hamburg, but the Vines could trace their ancestry back to the Norman invasion. They loved the outdoors, long walks and animals, especially shooting them. Perhaps it was this resemblance to her mother that made their father more reserved with Clara than with his other children. Maybe there was something about her he didn’t want to be reminded of.

Yet, Clara reflected, that distance had existed even before their mother died. Her mind went back to a summer holiday in Cornwall, where her paternal grandparents owned a handsome Queen Anne manor house a mile from the sea. They were all on the beach, Clara reading, and Angela lying prone on a picnic rug, trying to improve her tan. A golden skin had become all the rage since Coco Chanel declared it fashionable, and Angela had equipped herself with a bottle of Elizabeth Arden’s Sun Oil in Honey, which caused a layer of gritty sand to stick uncomfortably to her limbs. The longer she spent in the sun, the more her skin glowed strawberry red. Kenneth was the same, though he didn’t care, but Clara turned as brown as a nut after a single morning by the sea’s edge. ‘It’s not fair, Daddy,’ moaned Angela. ‘Why do Clara and Mummy get a tan but never us?’ Clara, looking round curiously for the answer, found her father’s patrician face regarding her speculatively, as if she was entirely unrelated to him. ‘It’s in the blood,’ he said, enigmatically. As though her veins, more than her siblings’, carried some exotic mystery.

After their mother died, the family fell to bits. Outwardly they held together, but they avoided confrontations and wherever possible led separate lives. Kenneth got a job in the city and Angela tried her hand as a fashion mannequin, gathering cupboards full of expensive clothes in the process. Though their mother’s photograph remained on the top of the Bösendorfer piano, they rarely spoke of her. Frequently Clara had trouble even remembering properly what she looked like. Being here now, in the country where her mother grew up, speaking her language, Clara felt closer to her than she had since the day she died. After all, her mother too had left her home for a foreign country. Hellene Vine had been twenty-two when she arrived in England, four years younger than Clara was now. She was Hellene Neumann then, a pianist with the Hamburg City Orchestra. Ronald Vine, a rising politician, had seen her playing Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major and fell instantly in love. After they had married, Hellene had barely seen her German family again. Grandfather Stephan and Grandmother Hannah had visited only twice in Clara’s childhood, and when they died, her mother had not even attended their funerals.

Clara guessed her grandparents disliked her father. It wouldn’t be a surprise; everyone else did. Daddy’s brusque and uncommunicative manner was famous for giving offence. As children the Vines had accepted the state of affairs unthinkingly, their maternal grandparents were little more than mythical figures in a distant land. But being in Berlin had brought all these questions to the forefront of Clara’s mind. Perhaps that was why she had written the letter, which rested addressed and ready for posting on the bookshelf. It might be that Hans Neumann, the cousin she had never met, would be able to explain.