The Pursuit of Pearls (7 page)

SHE HAD NEVER VISITED
Angela's home in Elizabeth Street, but it was exactly as she expected. Wedding cake white stucco, window boxes trimmed with box and ivy, expensive cars parked outside, and a black door so polished you could see your face in it. It was hard to believe her sister had come so far. In her mind's eye Clara still saw her in an Aertex shirt, cotton skirt, and white leather T-bar shoes, standing in the garden of their Surrey home, arguing over a tennis racquet.

Her heart was thumping as she waited on the step and raised the lion's head knocker, but it was a while before the door opened, and then it was only an indifferent maid who peered out and did not invite her in. Her cap was askew, as if she had only hurriedly fixed it on, and her hair badly pinned beneath.

“Mrs. Mortimer is out. Mr. Mortimer is at the House of Commons.”

“It's Angela I want. When will she be back?”

“I can't say, I'm sure. The mistress left instructions that she's away.”

“Away? Away where?” Emotion made Clara abrupt, but she didn't care.

The maid hesitated, as if deciding whether she needed to elaborate for the sake of this insistent stranger, then resolving that to be on the safe side, she did. She poked a strand of hair defensively beneath her cap.

“She's visiting her sister. She's been gone for days. Would you like to leave a message?”

Visiting her sister?
What was that supposed to mean? Angela only had one sister, and she, Clara, was standing right there on the doorstep. She knew for a fact that Gerald Mortimer had no sisters. Yet it was inconceivable that Angela could have embarked on a trip to Berlin unannounced; her normal traveling requirements made the Queen of Sheba look casual. Angela was the last person to turn up in a foreign country without the most complicated advance arrangements about luggage and hotels, which usually changed several times. She liked to be met at the airport and lunched in the appropriate restaurants, which in Berlin meant the Esplanade and the Kaiserhof, before attending both the theater and the opera. Unlike Clara, Angela never did anything on impulse, so it was unthinkable that she should have packed a suitcase and slipped away to Berlin without a word, as Clara had done all those years ago.

Yet a second before she opened her mouth to protest, some deep, acquired caution prevented Clara from blurting out these objections and she divined a possible explanation. Angela's excuse must have been dreamed up to cover some less innocent activity. The only explanation was that she was indulging in an illicit affair. Further questions would only give this maid something to gossip about.

“Shall I tell her who called, miss?” inquired the maid, offhandedly.

“No. Thank you. It doesn't matter.”

Clara turned and made her way along Elizabeth Street, skirting around the workmen who were removing a set of wrought-iron railings, presumably for airplane manufacture. As she went, Clara tried to see her sister from this new, surprising perspective. Glamorous Angela, modeling Jean Patou in her brief dalliance as a fashion mannequin, had always been elegant and unflappable. She was a Vine to the ends of her racehorse-long legs, and when their mother died, Angela was seamlessly co-opted into the circle of their father's sister, Lady Laura Vine, and an endless round of society parties, tennis matches, and charity events. She enthusiastically participated in their father's Anglo-German Fellowship and, from everything Clara knew, was still fundraising for closer ties between Germany and England.

In every respect Angela's life could not be more different from Clara's own, except one. Neither of them had gotten around to having children. Perhaps that was the reason. Maybe Angela was engaged in an affair because her marriage to Gerald Mortimer, MP, was already crumbling. If so it was sad, but given her brick-faced brother-in-law's manner, not entirely surprising.

Clara progressed up to Knightsbridge, past Harrods, and along Piccadilly until, eventually, her steps took her to a Lyons Corner House on the Strand, where she drank two cups of tea and ate a bun pocked with currants and smeared with a dab of oily margarine. Then she retraced her route, skirted the soot-stained lions of Trafalgar Square, and found herself outside the National Gallery.

It was only when she was sitting on one of the leather benches, surrounded by glimmering gilt frames and blankly studying a painting in front of her, that she gave in to her feelings. Major Grand believed that Leo had died and that Clara should consign his memory to the past.
I should forget Mr. Quinn.
But how did anyone forget? In one way, it was treacherously easy. She thought of Leo's face fading, like a photograph left out in the sun, until no image remained. If it blanked out entirely, she would have nothing but his words to resurrect him; just the letters he had written to her and the book of Rilke's poetry that he gave her. Yet how could Leo be dead when her body still held the memory of him, pressed into every muscle and tendon? A wave of stubborn denial engulfed her. Why should she believe it? Just because someone told you something, didn't mean it was true.

When at last her focus cleared, she saw the painting she had been staring at was Jan van Eyck's
Arnolfini Marriage
. The Bruges merchant in wide-brimmed hat and sable-lined robes clasping hands with his young bride in her sage green gown. Crystalline daylight streamed through the window and glanced off the oranges on the window ledge. The bride, with her little dog at her feet, seemed frozen in reflection, poised at the threshold between concentration and distraction. What was she thinking? Was she happy to be betrothed to this older, wealthy merchant? Or was the ornately opulent room merely a gilded cage? Was the marriage a love match, or an aristocratic contract, so appropriate to the times?
That's the thing about marriage—one can never tell what goes on inside.

Major Grand's request rose in her mind. Might von Ribbentrop really be attempting a pact with the Soviets?
A marriage of convenience,
Grand had called it. It seemed unthinkable, yet hadn't so much of what seemed unthinkable come to pass in Germany in the last six years?

Suddenly, Clara's focus was razor-sharp and she was no longer looking at the tranquil Belgian interior with its subdued and pensive bride but looking through it, to a garishly refurbished German Foreign Ministry and the steely, square-jawed grimace of Frau Annelies von Ribbentrop.

F
ifty young women, outfitted in thigh-skimming white dresses and matching knickers, their hair in coronets of radiant blond braids, filed into the Faith and Beauty canteen for lunch after gymnastics practice. An aroma of sweat mingled with clouds of steam rising from trays of meat, potatoes, and overcooked cabbage as the girls, in their pristine ankle socks, formed a line every bit as precise as a storm troopers' honor guard.

Above them, Hitler hung, brooding eyes inclined downwards to the tanned legs and heaving breasts, and a slogan beneath him blaring, “Future German mothers! Your body belongs to the Führer!” Three passing policemen, part of the investigation into Lottie's death, pointed to the picture, and one made a ribald remark. Although Hedwig couldn't hear what he said, she could guess.

The Faith and Beauty girls had been practicing for a “special event.” No one yet knew what it was, only that it was on the Führer's command, and that the eyes of the world would be on them. Hedwig assumed it would be something complicated involving hoops. Hoops always made her nervous, because of having to throw them in the air and catch them and the terrifying possibility that one's hoop would escape and roll away to the eternal shame of herself, her family, the community, and ultimately the Fatherland itself.

Gym was compulsory here. On their first day the leader of National Socialist Youth, Baldur von Schirach, had turned up in person to address them and told them gymnastics focused “the harmonic cultivation of body, mind, and spirit.” Privately, Hedwig wondered what the point was of learning social graces that expressed their individuality when gymnastic displays made everyone look the same.

Everyone, that is, except Lottie. She had been the star gymnast of them all, lithe and acrobatic, her lissome body curling obligingly into extreme poses with no apparent effort. She claimed gymnasts had better sex because they were more in tune with their bodies. That was the kind of thing Lottie said, and Hedwig had long since gotten used to it.

She rubbed the places beneath her armpits where her outfit chafed and left angry marks on her skin. Being tall meant that from the moment she joined the Jungmädel at ten, followed by the Bund Deutscher Mädel at fourteen, the regulation uniforms had never quite fit. Lottie, even though she was five foot ten with big feet, was as graceful as a cat and could make the frumpiest outfit look like something from
Elegante Welt
. Hedwig's body was always awkward. She sprawled on a chair like a disjointed puppet and stooped to make herself less tall. Watching her one day, wrestling with a blouse, Lottie had joked it was not the clothes but Hedwig herself who didn't fit. It was a light remark, but secretly it terrified Hedwig. It was something she had always feared about herself—that she was different from the others. That everything the Fatherland demanded from a woman—obedience, enthusiasm, and utter loyalty to the Führer—was somehow missing in her. And one day it would be found out.

In a way, it had been found out already.

Jochen was the only son of Eastern immigrants who came over in the years after the war and settled among the grim tenements of Prenzlauer Berg. He was as tough as any Hitler Youth, but his strength came from digging vegetables rather than paramilitary exercises. Often his pockets were filled with dried seeds in mysterious, leathery pods that he was planning to plant in his allotment. Despite the fact that he spent all day painting Hitler, he had never joined the Party or talked excitedly about army service or the chances of war. On the Führer's birthday he had taken the train out to the borders of the city and spent all day harvesting asparagus, while everyone else traveled in the opposite direction.

It was inevitable that when Hedwig's parents met Jochen the encounter would be a disaster. In their cramped parlor, with its dark brown walls and sooty stove, Jochen had sat dumbly, making monosyllabic comments, eyes fixed stubbornly on the tabletop. Hedwig felt her mother wince when he fetched out a rag of a handkerchief to wipe his face and saw her father frown every time he heard Jochen's rough Berliner accent. Herr Holz had fired off questions to Jochen as though conducting one of the questionnaires that every German now completed in the workplace. What were his interests? Botany. What was his ancestry? Polish. What was his Party membership? Nonexistent. The answers could not have been more disappointing, and as Jochen wolfed down the sausage stew as though it might be taken away from him, and wiped his plate round with a piece of bread, Hedwig could read the verdict in her parents' eyes. He had failed the test. This boy was not what their daughter had joined the Faith and Beauty for. Precisely the opposite, in fact. What was she thinking of?

Afterwards, there had been an argument. Frau Holz claimed Jochen would never amount to anything, and if Hedwig stuck with him, the only house she could hope for was a greenhouse. Herr Holz went further, demanding she end the relationship there and then. Hedwig knew that from that moment on her assignations with Jochen would have to remain secret. Which was why, perversely, her staying in the Faith and Beauty Society suited everyone. Her parents wanted her there so she would not see Jochen; she wanted to be there so that she could.

After lunch that day there was Dinner Etiquette, focusing on how to lay the correct knives and forks, fold napkins into swastikas, and use sugar icing in clever ways. The entire topic was fiendishly complex. There were guidelines for which flowers went with different dishes. Roses with beef. Orchids with fish. The Führer's favorite, edelweiss, if you could find it, with anything.

Everything was about rules now. The girls had been given a Rule Book to mark down everything they learned. How to talk, how to look, how to conduct yourself correctly. Girls should always, for example, wait for the men to pick up cutlery and start eating first. Hedwig studiously noted everything she learned, but in truth, it was like taking life lessons from a fairy tale. No one in Berlin would be holding five-course dinners in the near future. You couldn't get sugar icing, and finding a side of beef was about as likely as the Führer himself dropping by to eat it.

Gloomily she selected a hunk of rye bread to accompany the thin gravy. Today's lunch was sauerkraut, bread soup, and fake meat. Everything was fake now; not just the coffee but the rice cooked in mutton fat molded to make artificial chops, rice mixed with onions and oil, which was called fake fish, the nettles in soup, and the horse chestnuts in bread. It reminded her of a joke Lottie had told.
What's the difference between India and Germany? In India one man, Gandhi, starves on behalf of millions. In Germany, millions starve on behalf of one man.

Lottie was the only woman who dared tell jokes in public, with a rich, full-throated, gurgling laugh. That was also against the rules, of course. Laughing was inelegant for women, according to the principal, Frau Mann. It implied criticism and did not befit a German woman. Smiling was a different matter—indeed, Faith and Beauty girls should always smile when a man addressed them—but laughing, well, the way Frau Mann talked, it was as though a healthy dose of female laughter could bring the whole edifice of the National Socialist Party crashing down.

“Are you eating that?”

Hilde Ziegler was eyeing Hedwig's slice of rye bread, and Hedwig shrugged. She used to be hungry all the time. A hunger that filled her dreams with fat pork chops, chocolate, and cake with real cream and pastries made with butter, but since Lottie's death, her appetite had disappeared.

She glanced out of the window to the woods at the far end of the garden. At the place Lottie was found, the police had erected arc lights, the kind you saw in film studios, bathing the area in a dazzling phosphorescent glow. But there was one secret that no amount of police spotlights were going to uncover.

Everyone in Germany kept a place in their mind, like a cellar in a house or an attic concealed by a study door, that nobody knew about. A place where they thought their own thoughts and examined their true feelings. And when Hedwig retreated to this place and shut the door behind her, what she mainly felt was guilt.