Hitler's Girls (5 page)

I lie quite still, feeling a surge of delight, triumph. I am his. He is mine. This night is my bridal night. He is my groom; I am his bride
.

It is as if he is fighting me. His face contorts. And suddenly, it is over. He lies quietly beside me, his head on my breast. “Little darling,” he murmurs. “Husband,” I say quietly. His head turns, upward, his eyes meet mine. “Darling,” he says “Little sweetheart. Little darling.” And then, with a smile “But men must work and women must wait. “He squeezes my breast and leaves the bed. I see him pick up his jacket from the floor. Then he walks away to where he left his other clothes. I hear,
“Thank you, my darling,” above the sounds of his putting on his clothes and shoes. “A thousand thanks, my darling.”

After he has gone I begin to tremble and feel very cold. The darkness seems thick, the air in the room heavy, as if a fog had crept in. I lie, unable to move, feeling his body on mine. I imagine our wedding, as I have so often, but the memory of his body on mine, the feeling between my legs, sometimes a sharp pain, sometimes no more than discomfort, quarrels with my visions of our union, the celebrations to follow, my appearances, on his arm, as bride and consort
.

The abandoned white dress still lies gleaming on the chair. If you sleep with a god, said Magda, you burn. But I am cold, so cold
.

Next day the maid comes in with coffee, and, on her heels, Bauer, secretary, confidant, and guardian of Amadeus. Salt of the earth; loyal as a dog. He apologises, clumsily, for entering my bedroom and informs me that today all the ladies of the party will be leaving. They are to return home. The men must attend to serious affairs of state. My car is waiting below, to take me to Berlin. Then, after more apologies, he stumbles out and immediately the housekeeper comes in with a jug of hot water, “for my ablutions.”

These are orders. One must obey, always. I rise, wash, dress in my blue silk suit, which matches my eyes, put on my
blue hat, which matches my eyes, and go downstairs. I cannot see Amadeus. The door to the study is blocked by his staff. “Matters of grave importance—an emergency—no-one is to enter.” This is to be expected. Men must work; women wait. The future is in his hands
.

In the garden Magda is standing with another lady. Her face is the last I see before I get into the waiting car. She smiles and raises a hand in farewell
.

I travel at speed through the peaceful summertime countryside, passing peasants in the fields cutting hay, a goosegirl with blonde plaits driving her flock. I am Amadeus’s consort now; we have the power of life and death over the men in the fields, the little girl with her geese—over whole countries—over the whole world, that purer, cleaner world he will create
.

I’m back at the Avondale Club and glad of it.

The past twenty-four hours, since finding myself alone in the company of a brooch (badly made; late Victorian, possibly the property of old Lady Amesbury, who guarded her miscreant daughter Clemency all those long years on the island) have been possible to record only because I am here. Holland Park: not so far from Bandesbury Road, but a million miles, as I am beginning to understand, from both the suburban respectability of Monica’s street and the blatant criminality of the surrounding council estates.

I am surrounded by calm, intelligent women. The confusion in Monica’s house, the sense of a low-grade brain trapped in circumstances it cannot understand.

But I must refrain from judging, on grounds of intelligence. Such thoughts lead to—I must be open about this, they lead to Nazi Germany. Elimination of the mentally unfit. Eugenics. Breeding for a perfect race.

Monica stood for compassion, she helped those too poor or “disadvantaged” (how I dislike the New Britain jargon) to help themselves. What can she have thought, when she learned her parentage?

If she did, of course. And if—a big IF here—this lurid tale can possibly be true.

I set myself to find out. There are two priorities, the first being to find Mel—my wronged, misguided goddaughter Melissa Stirling. The second is to discover, once and for all: did Clemency Wilsford have a child?

But first, as I had promised myself, I cleaned Monica’s little house from top to bottom. Mrs. Walker’s eyes were on me as I went out again and again with black bin liners filled with the accumulated rubbish of the past months. I didn’t return her curious gaze. I vacuumed, I scrubbed at the yellowing, unsavoury bath, I beat the kelims and hung them out of Monica’s bedroom window to catch some of the unseasonal hot March sun which has suddenly appeared today (but no harbinger of Spring, I fear: only drought, which affects our damaged globe, even in Bandesbury Road). I showed, I hoped, that I had no intention of being disturbed while I performed these last rites for a friend who had been a proud housewife—and whose mental state had deteriorated rapidly subsequent to the death of her husband and mother.

I made my list as I worked. The sun grew stronger and flooded the semi-detached house with a bright light. A little disorienting, I confess: with the bright carpets and the foreign paints we could have been transported to Morocco. But nothing would stand in my way. When the house was clean, my first port of call was the library. In the Reference section I would find some answers. Then, whether I was welcome or not, I would call once more on the Bandesbury Road police station and ask for news of the search for Mel.

If there was no news—as I suspected—I would go to the school she had attended. The name of the school is known to me—the Isaac Newton—from Monica’s past letters. Difficult to forget—as I thought somewhat grimly to myself while scouring Melissa’s room—for the sad contrast between that time in history when the discoveries of Newton would lead to the great scientific changes in the world’s perception of itself—and now, when science looks principally inwards: to the foetus; to the deranged brain; to the consequences of a dying world.

Enough of this. I am accustomed to long periods of work in isolation and can only conclude that sadness at the death of my childhood friend led to such introspection (for surely, disguised as cosmic anxiety, this is what it is). A night without sleep must also have contributed to an unusual—for me—lowering of the
spirits, where visions of the beautiful but mournful island of St Ronan’s alternated with futile attempts to recall whether Monica had ever confided anything to me about her pre-adoption life, apart from her brooch.

What did come to me was a picnic. On a shore, somewhere: but did I attend it, or did Monica only tell me about it? The latter, I think. There was a birthday cake in the story. A child’s birthday then? I cannot remember—and of course Monica is no longer here to jog my memory.

In the library, I would discover if there was anyone left alive who could answer these questions. And I worked towards this goal with zest. I was proud already of the fact that I now knew there was nothing here which Monica could have been searching for. Or, more likely, she searched in vain. But I had omitted to take into account that a house where a murder has taken place recently is unlikely to be left alone for long.

By nine, the first caller had arrived: a tall, fair-haired young man. I was sure I had seen him somewhere before. He came in the front door as I pulled it open and held out his hand. “Peter Miller of Miller and Brown” was how he introduced himself.

I admit I was, and remain, deeply shocked. An estate agent—for thus his proffered card proclaimed him—when Monica is barely three days dead?

Of course. He was in the video of Monica’s murder. The fair-haired estate agent standing by the house with the “For Sale” board, further down the road.

“You called the police, at the time of… of Mrs. Stirling’s death,” I said.

For a moment young Mr. Miller looked quite startled. I daresay no-one likes to be told they’re on film without knowing about it. Then he smiled.

He seemed a friendly enough type; but for a reason I can’t explain, I didn’t trust him.

“Mrs. Stirling had instructed us to place 109 on the market, Mrs…?”

“Are you sure?” I snapped. I was definitely not going to correct Mr. Miller: he could call me Mrs. indefinitely. Again, I had a strong feeling of distrust—and this was further confirmed by seeing his gaze fix on poor Monica’s brooch. I had just given it a Goddard’s Silver Dip treatment and the setting as well as the little diamonds twinkled in a way that they hadn’t since the piece went with its owner to St Ronan’s—but I didn’t want to think of that.

“Excuse me, Mr. Miller. I’d prefer to see Mrs. Stirling’s instructions in writing,” I said. The brooch was on a small table in the sitting-room (Monica had “opened up” so you could walk straight into the sitting-room from the street) and I went over
to pick it up. Peter Miller looked studiously away as I did so. Surely, with an ornament of such little value, his interest must be rather exaggerated?

“The sale of 109 Bandesbury Road was a verbal arrangement,” came the reply. Peter Miller looked me straight in the eye as he spoke. “I have of course brought with me our estimate of asking price and confirmation that Miller and Brown would be sole agents for the sale. All we ask, Mrs…?”

To avoid the candid look of Mr. Miller I scooped up a bundle of Mel’s messiest clothes and started pushing them into a bin liner. Before I had time to look up, Mr. Miller made for the stairs. “We need a brief inventory, Mrs…” Now the voice was patronising, almost a sneer. “My colleague will come to measure later.”

But of course, I thought, the house was no longer Monica’s. Mr. Miller had no right to be upstairs. As I considered this, the next visitor to 109 Bandesbury Road walked straight in. In the way of estate agents, Mr. Miller had left the front door open. It was then, I think, that I realised he had a key and thus was likely to be telling the truth. Peter Miller—who had spent, I reckon, less than one minute upstairs—came down at a run, glanced at the new caller at his client’s property, and stopped dead. Then, thanking me effusively for my time, he went at speed out of the house. The front door was still open and I saw
him get into a smart black car (a Volvo, I think) and drive off. His mobile phone was in place, clamped between shoulder and head, as he went out of sight.

My visitor was black. He was probably about eighteen years old. He also looked in the direction of Peter Miller and for a moment we were both silent.

“I came lookin’ for Mel,” the young visitor said.

* * * * * *

It is almost too painful for me at this point to try and describe Chris Bradley—for this was his name—as he told me on that bright day in what I now see as the house of ill fortune that is 109 Bandesbury Road.

In my line of business—old houses and their inhabitants, revenants and inheritors—one soon develops a sixth sense. In the Borders of Scotland, as everyone knows, there is scarcely a building left standing that has not witnessed or hosted a murder, a blood duel, or simply the walling-up of an unwanted or disgraced family member.

It’s in the timbers, in the shadow that falls as an innocent visitor comes through the door, to a room where a violent tragedy has played out. Or it’s the quality of the light: I could swear, at Traquair House on the Tweed, that there is a darkness not
entirely attributable to smallness of windows in this oldest inhabited fortified manor house in Scotland. It’s more that a mist, obscuring the present, hovers in the oldest rooms. The mist of history. But this, I know, reveals a fanciful side to my nature—and it was Monica, the most prosaic character I have ever known, who would tease me about what she labelled the Celtic Twilight of Jean Hastie.

The young fellow—and still I cannot bear to describe his features or repeat his name—did, I now feel, look around apprehensively when he crossed the threshold of 109. I am very likely being fanciful again—but, after the horrific sequence to his visit to Monica’s home—she the kind social worker who had in all probability looked after his interests—it is hard not to find a lurking evil wherever one may care to look. Very well, I shall try to speak of him all the same. Chris Bradley was of medium height and light skinned.

I cannot speak of him in the past tense. His promise so great, the hope and love for life in those dark brown eyes…

“Burnside,” Chris said when, at a loss for an opening, I asked the lad where he lived. Burnside must, I imagine, be the estate where he grew up—the place where I might find my goddaughter Mel.

But then, if Mel is there, why does he come looking for her in Bandesbury Road?

Chris replied to my question without meeting my gaze: “No, Mel went—she went after—after they was all up ‘ere, Sat’day. Din’t she?”

“I don’t know, Chris. Did she? Leave, I mean? What were they all doing? Tell me, please!”

My eager air must have put the boy off, because he hung his head and looked as if he were about to leave too, and at speed. “I thought she was here. Her mum lived here, innit?”

“Chris?” I went up to him and held out my hands—an instinctive gesture which could have back-fired. But Chris seemed to see I was sincere and he followed me into the kitchen, sparkling clean now and with a biscuit box (I had cleaned it inside as well and lined it with silver foil, to protect the still-fresh Penguin biscuits, a legacy of Monica’s incurable sweet tooth).

“Have one of these, Chris. And—” I looked around in search of further friendly offerings. “Some ginger beer?” But as I said the words, a too-strong picture of Monica by the side of a loch—or on a shore by the sea somewhere in Scotland—returned to me. A picnic tea. Midges. Bottles of ginger beer with rubber stoppers that were held in place by metal rings hard to pull back: my fingers ached in remembered sympathy.

My eyes must have filled with tears, for I saw suddenly that young Chris Bradley was doing his best not to cry, too.
Very different memories, of course: he thought of Monica as old, while I thought of her as a child. Now he wanted Mel—as I did, but with more reason. They had been friends. I was bitterly aware once more that, all her short life, I had done nothing whatsoever of a godmotherly nature for Mel.