The Winter Garden (2014) (11 page)

‘Sure he does. He’s great pals with Goering. I’m certain it was Goering who had my visa approved. Anyhow, the
Post
were ecstatic when I offered them my Lindbergh
interview, and the result was they agreed to take me on at the Berlin bureau again for sixty dollars a week.’

‘Sixty dollars! You’ll live like royalty here on that.’

‘That’s the easy bit. Now I just have to find some stories. It’s harder than before. Restrictions on foreign journalists are tighter. I just want a good story. Something meaty,
that gets my by-line above the fold.’

‘There is something,’ Clara hesitated. ‘I heard about it the other day, but there’s been nothing in the papers here.’

The death at the Reich Bride School had been preoccupying her. Not that violent crime was unusual in Berlin. It was more of a daily occurrence. The fact that the girl’s shooting had gone
unremarked was hardly surprising. Why bother to report on a murder in a city where sudden death was the prime instrument of law and order? It was just that the woman was called Anna Hansen. It
couldn’t be the same Anna . . . could it?

‘There was a woman shot last week at the Schwanenwerder Bride School. They think . . .’

‘Hold on right there.’ Mary cocked her head. ‘Did you say Bride School?’

‘There are Bride Schools all around Germany. They’re Himmler’s brainchild. You need to attend one if you’re going to marry into the SS.’

‘What do they teach? Which flowers go well with roses? Where to seat a bishop at dinner, that sort of thing? How to use an oyster fork?’

Clara laughed. ‘More like herring recipes and how to hem curtains. Whatever it takes, in the National Socialist mind, to be a good wife.’

Mary rolled her eyes. ‘Presumably this girl wasn’t shot for her cooking skills?’

‘That’s just it. We don’t know. There’s been nothing about it in any of the papers, I’ve looked. And I wouldn’t be interested, only the dead woman was called
Anna Hansen, and I used to know a girl called that. I wondered if it could be the same one.’

‘Sounds like a pretty common name to me.’

‘I suppose. It was just a thought. The woman I knew came from Munich and she was the least likely candidate for an SS Bride School I can imagine. She was a model for Bruno Weiss. My artist
friend. I don’t think you ever met him but he knew Helga Schmidt.’

Helga Schmidt
. The actress whose death had brought Mary and Clara together. Mary was shaking her head in disbelief.

‘Whoever the girl was, this Bride School sounds like a story in itself. I’m sure my editor would adore the idea. I’ll get onto it first thing.’

Clara stifled a yawn.

‘Sorry, it’s been quite an evening.’

‘So which room’s mine?’

Mary gazed innocently at Clara, then burst out laughing.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not moving in. It would be far too compromising for you to share an apartment with a journalist. I’ll just need to stay a night until I find somewhere
else. I’ll bunk up on your sofa. You’ll never know I’m here.’

Clara felt a guilty twinge of relief.

‘Of course. Stay as long as you need. Whatever you want.’

‘What I really want is a drink. Where shall we go?’

‘Now?’

‘Why not? Unless Berlin nightlife has changed out of all recognition, things are only just getting started at eleven o’clock.’

At the prospect of an evening out with Mary Harker, Clara’s fatigue evaporated. Mary’s enthusiasm was like a transfusion of something life-giving. The kind of substance you
couldn’t get in one of Magda Goebbels’ clinics.

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Do you know anywhere a couple of women on their own could drink a Martini without being bothered?’

‘I think so. Why?’

‘That’s exactly the kind of place I want to avoid.’

Given they had spent such a raucous evening, it was strange that Clara should wake so early. The pearly morning light was beginning to penetrate the curtains’ edge like a
negative developing in its chemical bath, seeping into the room and transforming the solid black shapes of furniture to watery textures of grey. Clara lay for a while in bed in a state of exhausted
clarity. Even though, for the first time in ages, there was another person sleeping in the apartment, she had never felt so alone. Her solitude seemed to envelop her in an invisible cocoon as she
lay listening to Berlin waking up, car horns, the rumbling of trams on Nollendorfplatz and the metallic screech of the S-Bahn trains on the high stilts of their elevated tracks.

Mary had been full of questions last night.
How long can you stay here? Are you happy? Is there a man on the horizon?
Clara had smiled and shaken her head at that. The truth was that
despite the odd flings of the past few years, she had never met anyone she was deeply attracted to. There had been love in her life once, but since Leo’s departure, no man had managed to
penetrate her defences. She could laugh with them and sleep with them, but she would leave in the morning without a backward glance. Perhaps it was testimony to the strength of the carapace she had
erected around herself, but no one had ever had the effect on Clara that meeting Leo had. The frisson she had felt from the very moment she met him. No one, until perhaps Captain Ralph Sommers.

What about your private life?
Mary wanted to know. Clara couldn’t tell her that there was no such thing as a private life for someone in her position. Her private life was where
her professional life, her unofficial professional life, took place. At parties and premieres she was always on the alert, always attentive for useful pieces of information. Any snippets of gossip
that the women let drop about the Führer’s thoughts, or the feuds between their husbands, or the grumbles about the Reich’s intensifying military preparations, would be memorized
until she could feed them back to Archie Dyson. Yet although Clara batted away Mary’s questions, it was increasingly difficult to silence the clamour of questions in her own head. Which,
thanks to a succession of gin Martinis in a West End bar, was feeling distinctly muzzy.

Her eye fell, as it always did, on the Bruno Weiss painting on the opposite wall.
What happened to you, Bruno?
When she got to know him, after Helga died, she had grown to love his
mordant, Berliner humour, and his brave decision, as a Jew, to turn down a visa for England. That kind of decision was absolutely typical of Bruno. It was simultaneously bold and foolhardy, because
life for a German Jew, let alone a former Communist agitator who had already been arrested for pamphleteering and whose paintings were everything the National Socialists considered degenerate, was
a perilous one in the Third Reich. Other artists, like Bruno’s friend Georg Grosz, had already emigrated. Otto Dix had been forced to join Goebbels’ Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, but as a
Jew, Bruno couldn’t follow his example and retire to the country to paint inoffensive landscapes. Under Reich law, Bruno couldn’t even paint, so how was he earning a living? Was he
living a life in the shadows somewhere, trying to get by? Sleeping on the street and in shop doorways, risking a beating from any passing Nazi? Or had he been captured, imprisoned and sent to a
camp? Bruno was the only German Clara had ever trusted to know what she did and what she was. It was impossible not to conclude that it must have been Bruno, under interrogation in some police
cellar, who had aroused the suspicions of the men in Prinz Albrecht Strasse.

Clara stretched and reached a foot out of bed. Her head pounded like a marching band. She needed coffee, then aspirin, then more coffee. She should never have drunk so many Martinis, not with
her low tolerance for alcohol. She stood up unsteadily, as though on the deck of a yacht, and felt the ground settle beneath her. She would make breakfast for Mary. That was the plan. Get up, find
herself an aspirin and make Mary some breakfast. Then she remembered there was no breakfast.

They could have found coffee anywhere. Berlin was a whole city of cafés. Cafés were where the citizens met, disputed, wrangled and, more recently, since it had
become so hard to heat a home, huddled in the warmth that the price of a cup of coffee could bring them. It was coffee that flowed through the veins of Berlin and kept the city on its feet, even
now, when the stuff was more likely to be chicory or acorns or some other ersatz concoction. And Clara was longing for coffee. But Mary insisted they walk all the way to Olivaerplatz, a good twenty
minutes away, to see if a bar owned by a friend of hers was still going strong.

‘There’s no hurry, Clara. You’re not on set today and a foreign correspondent’s day doesn’t start until lunchtime. New York is hours behind us, remember. I
don’t even start sending wires until late afternoon.’

As they walked through the streets, Clara tried to see Berlin through Mary’s eyes. It was true, the changes wrought by the new regime were not always immediately apparent. The flower women
were still selling their little bunches of violets and roses. Berlin shop owners were still not inclined to give the Nazi salute and usually contented themselves with a straight ‘
Guten
Morgen
’. Even when they did, Clara, like many other Berliners, had discovered that you could avoid returning a salute with the simple precaution of carrying a briefcase in one hand and a
bag in the other.

Yet there were truckloads of soldiers in the streets, pennants and banners hanging from every building. The sombre edifices of Berlin blazed with scarlet, as though someone had spilt a jar of
red ink across the city. And everywhere there was Hitler’s face, in shops and on placards, and piled in postcard form on racks by the U-Bahn entrance. The liquorice loop of hair across his
forehead, the pasty cheeks, the studied frown. Mary squinted at them and pulled a face.

‘He’s like a sunset, isn’t he? People never get bored of looking at him. That same view, in a thousand slightly different versions. Arm up, arm down, full face, half
profile.’

‘Shh.’ Foreigners’ voices, Clara had noticed, always seemed unnaturally loud. ‘Haven’t you heard that phrase everyone uses?
Speak through a
flower
?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You hear it all the time now. It means say only positive things about the Nazis in public.’

‘You won’t catch me mumbling through my bouquet. I couldn’t care less if people hear what I have to say. And I think it’s strange they like Hitler so much here,
considering he doesn’t much care for Berlin. He calls it a Trümmerfeld – a field of rubble.’

‘Well, he’s the one we have to thank for that. You must have noticed the construction going on everywhere.’

Even as she spoke they walked past a building site, where clouds of dust rose like incense in the morning air, and a couple of workers, their moustaches matted with dirt, hacked at rocks. One of
them, with braces and shirtsleeves and a glint in his eye, paused to call out a greeting in a thick country accent.

‘Why do Hitler’s buildings have to be so big?’

‘He needs size. He thinks it enhances his own stature. Apparently he asked Speer to copy Mussolini’s idea of having a gargantuan study so that visitors have to walk a long way across
the floor to reach him. He thinks it makes him more intimidating.’

‘God, and that’s a man who needs to work on his softer side.’

‘Speer is only allowing stone, marble and bricks to be used,’ said Clara, ‘He has a theory. Because the Reich is going to last a thousand years, one day all these buildings
will resemble the ruins of ancient Greece.’

‘What does it say if your architect is talking about ruins before the thing is even built?’ said Mary, pushing open a café door. ‘Thankfully Stefan’s still here,
at least.’

Stefan Hirsch, a lean man in his early sixties, welcomed Mary as effusively as was possible for a habitually gruff Berliner. His smile was like a crack in gnarled oak and his voice was as gritty
as the Berlin earth itself.

‘So you came back. What happened? Some other café forgot your order?’

‘Oh, you know. I felt like a change. How are you doing?’

‘Lucky for you I’m still in business. You want your usual?’ said Stefan, turning to the shining coffee machine and clattering the cups.

‘With whipped cream on top!’

‘Shows how long you’ve been away. You won’t find whipped cream in any café in Berlin now, Fräulein.’

‘I’m so pleased he remembered me!’ hissed Mary, as they ensconced themselves in a window table over steaming cups of coffee.

‘To be honest, it would be hard to forget you.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? No, don’t say.’

On the railings outside Stefan’s café, swastika flags fluttered in the breeze, alternating with the banner with the bear of Berlin, the city’s heraldic animal, raised on its
rear legs.

‘Don’t think I put them there,’ Stefan growled, delivering thick slices of freshly baked Streuselkuchen to the table. ‘It’s the city’s seven hundredth
anniversary. A lot of fuss about nothing, I’d say. All these flags and marches and live bears.’

‘Live bears?’

‘The city of Bern donated them. They’re building a pit for the wretched beasts in Köllnischer Park.’

‘A bear pit? In the middle of the city? Erich would like that,’ said Clara, biting into the rich, cinnamon-spiced dough. ‘Perhaps you should cover it, Mary.’

But Mary was absorbed in a copy of the
Berliner Illustrierte
, whose front page bore a photograph of a large Mercedes, with two SS guards in the front seat, others on the running boards
and behind them a small man with a dark-haired woman by his side.

‘Look at this! Seems your Duke of Windsor finally arrived.’

Clara thought back to December last year, the high, surprisingly reedy voice on the wireless:
‘I, Edward the Eighth of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the sea,
King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare my irrevocable decision to renounce the throne.’

The abdication had transfixed Britain and sharpened the already deepening social divisions. There were people in pubs and working men’s clubs across England who hoped it would mean the end
of the monarchy and others, in smarter circles, who feared the same thing. Angela wrote that the whole household had sat in the Ponsonby Terrace drawing room, servants too, listening to the
broadcast in silence, and the cook had cried.