The Winter Garden (2014) (7 page)

Dyson gave a little smile.

‘So you did know.’

‘I imagine the German authorities know too.’

‘Why are they coming over then, Archie?’

‘I may be many things, but I’m not a clairvoyant, Clara. Ask them yourself. That’s not why I asked you about going home.’

‘Why then?’

Dyson fiddled with his glass for a moment, as if weighing his words. The hesitation made Clara’s heart pound. Something had happened. She forced herself to wait for him to explain.

‘Actually, it’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It might be nothing.’

Dyson’s mouth twisted unhappily, reluctant to impart the news. It may be nothing, but Clara knew from the gravity of his expression that it almost certainly wasn’t. She kept her face
composed, despite the small detonations of panic inside her.

‘We had a hint that you might have aroused suspicions. I just wanted to say . . . don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Tread carefully.’

‘I always do. Where did this hint come from?’

‘A friend. He let us know that in the past couple of days your name had come up in conversation.’

‘Whose conversation? Where?’

‘At Prinz Albrecht Strasse.’

Though Dyson uttered it without flinching, this address more than any other had the power to strike terror into a citizen of Berlin. The blank Prussian façade of the former Arts museum at
Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 gave no clue to the horrors within. Since 1933 it had been the headquarters of the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, who had the power, without the intervention of the
courts, to arrest, interrogate and send prisoners to SS concentration camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Lichtenburg. Beyond its austere, vaulted entrance hall hundreds of bureaucrats
spent their days combing files and reports on citizens. Beneath them, in the basement, lay the interrogation rooms, a warren of white-tiled cells where information could be extracted in a more
direct manner. Once you arrived in Prinz Albrecht Strasse, no amount of acting talent could save you from what they had in store.

A wave of fright hit her, like a blast of icy air. Deliberately she hesitated, taking out a cigarette, fixing it in a holder and inhaling.

‘Who exactly is this friend?’ He had to be either a policeman or a Gestapo member if he had access to Prinz Albrecht Strasse.

‘He works for them. He says an informer passed on your name.’

An informer. That could be anyone. All Gestapo agents had their own network of informers, fanning out through every layer of society like a malign web enmeshing anyone who crossed its path. The
service depended on them heavily for denunciations of suspect or illegal activity. They were not always the obvious candidates. An informer could be a quiet neighbour, or a friendly butcher.
Postmen, shop owners, even children. Anyone with a secret to keep or who might be susceptible to blackmail. In one way or another the Gestapo viewed the whole population as an amateur police force
to assist in enforcing control. The idea was that nothing should escape the Gestapo’s net.

Dyson was uttering calming words, like a doctor who had just delivered terminal news.

‘Look, we’re not worried. Nobody has talked about an arrest order. You speak German like a native. In their eyes you’re no different from an actress like Lilian Harvey –
she was born in Muswell Hill, wasn’t she? And, most importantly, they know your father . . .’

They knew her father. It seemed incredible that the same nepotistic class structure which had governed Britain for hundreds of years might also hold sway among the Gestapo agents of Nazi
Germany.

‘And you take routine precautions?’ Dyson was saying. ‘You don’t talk on the phone? You vary your routine, you write nothing down. Don’t drink in doubtful
company.’

‘I take precautions, Archie.’

‘Fine. It may be nothing. But I would say you’re almost certainly being tailed. So I wanted to warn you to keep your guard up. And more importantly still, to lie low.’

Lie low?

‘So should I attend the Goebbels’ party?’

‘You’ll have to go because you’ve been invited, and not to turn up might attract attention. But don’t do anything more at the moment. Do nothing. Enjoy your
filming.’

‘There’s a break in filming. I’ve finished my last film and we don’t start rehearsals for another few weeks.’

‘Enjoy your break then. Remember what I said.’

While Dyson got up and went over to the bar to pay the bill and engage in some finely judged conversation with Herr Koch, Clara drank the syrupy remnants of her Weisse and tried to collect her
teeming thoughts. An informer had passed her name to the Gestapo. Who could it be? A lowly staffer at the studios, perhaps, or someone closer to home? How bizarre it was that just as she had
received an invitation to the Propaganda Minister’s home, another part of the regime was thinking of inviting her to Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Clara’s previous sense of security, the
confidence that had grown and developed over her time in Berlin, was badly rocked. She felt the clench in her stomach that always came with anxiety, like a tight belt squeezed around her middle.
She scanned the bar quickly, as though the informer might be watching her right now, but saw only the regular customers, slumped at their Stammtisches, their regular tables, growling in
Berlinerische, the thick local dialect, and Archie telling Fritz Koch about the delights of Brighton Pier.

Lie low
, Archie said.
Do nothing
.

Dyson returned and picked his hat up from the table.

‘On the subject of breaks, Fritz is talking about taking a holiday in Brighton, going over to see his daughter. I told him it’s restorative at this time of year. Sea air can be very
bracing. My sailing hol was immensely good fun. If I were you, Clara, I’d give it some thought.’

Photography was the ultimate art of the Reich. Joseph Goebbels said if you told a lie big enough for long enough people would believe it, so he must have reckoned if you showed
them enough pictures they would believe those even more. Because whatever the occasion, be it a quiet lunch on Hitler’s terrace at the Berghof, a military march, a rally, or even a routine
health and fitness session with a hundred fresh-faced BDM girls in the park, a camera would be right there too. Several cameras usually, straining against the official cordons, unleashing a
dazzling fusillade of flash. All kinds of cameras: cumbersome official equipment with tripods and lights, or the Speed Graphics which the press men used, or the new roll film cameras from Leica and
Zeiss. These days in the Reich there was always a lens poised to capture a fleeting image. To smooth rough reality with a soft focus and a monochrome glow. To fix the whole of Germany, like a film
actress, in a glamorous quicksilver glare.

That bright Thursday morning Goebbels was posing by the monumental gates of the Ufa film studios for a newspaper feature in honour of his approaching fortieth birthday. He had ordered the
photographer to shoot from street level, ostensibly to include the whole of the overarching gates in his picture, but actually so that his five-foot-four frame with its withered foot should seem as
imposing as possible.

‘He’s very particular about the way he’s photographed, isn’t he?’

‘Wouldn’t you be? If he had more sense he’d keep out of shot altogether.’

Clara was gazing from the window of a production office in the Babelsberg studio lot, a sprawling assembly of halls and editing rooms and carpenters’ warehouses and sets tucked in the
thick pine woods outside Potsdam, ten miles from Berlin. The office belonged to Albert Lindemann, an executive producer she had known since her first week in Germany. Back then Albert had been a
harried junior producer, with sparse hair and even sparser promotion prospects. Now he was a sleek and powerful man, his wiry form encased in a silk shirt and purple bowtie with cream suede shoes
stretched out before him on the desk. Since the Aryanization, when anyone of Jewish extraction was barred from working in the Ufa studios, Albert’s career had flourished. He had been given
increasingly important projects to produce. He had a flashy new car and an apartment in Schöneberg which was dripping with chrome furniture, blond wood, big mirrors and thick white carpets.
Albert loved gossip, possessed an acid humour and a highly developed sense of the absurd. He had no interest in women whatsoever, yet he was never seen out without a young actress on his arm. Much
as she might want to, Clara refrained from asking questions about Albert’s private life. It was safer that way. Except for casual badinage about Nazi officials, they avoided politics. When
news came that an actor had disappeared from the studios, as often happened, or a director had been taken for interrogation, their eyes would meet, but they rarely discussed it. Just that week, an
actress both had worked with, Gisela Wessel, had been arrested for ‘organized activities and Communist demoralization’ and taken in for questioning. Albert had merely raised his
eyebrows and murmured, ‘Gisela’s gone.’ He didn’t need to say any more. He was the closest thing Clara had to a friend in Berlin and they understood each other
perfectly.

‘Thanks for lending me the car.’

It was Albert who had taught her to drive the year before, sitting beside her nervously as she swerved her way around the streets of Berlin, cursing theatrically as she slammed on the brakes,
relaxing only when they reached the empty vistas of autobahn stretching into the countryside. She passed him the keys but he waved them away.

‘Keep it for a while, darling. I’m not using it at the moment and your life is so much more glamorous than my own. I imagine a car comes in handy.’

Albert always tried to balance his raging appetite for gossip with the discretion that politics demanded. On the subject of Clara’s encounters with the Goebbels, he accepted that the less
he knew the better.

‘I just hope your trip to Schwanenwerder was successful.’

‘I don’t know about successful. It was interesting.’

Albert stretched out and helped himself to a bottle of schnapps which rested in the bottom drawer of his desk. He knew Clara far too well to worry about drinking in front of her, though she
noticed that the bottle had taken quite a hit since she last saw it. Everyone had their own ways of coping with the atmosphere at the studios. Albert took a deep swig and surveyed her, his eyes
crinkled in concern.

‘You seem a bit jumpy this morning, darling. And rather pale. Not in any kind of trouble, are you?’

‘Trouble?’ Clara gave a light laugh. ‘Quite the opposite. I’m getting plenty of work, aren’t I?’

It was true. Clara had been in almost continuous demand since her arrival in Germany. The advent of the talkies meant actors were discovering that their voices mattered just as much as their
looks. Some stars dropped out of fashion overnight, because their voices were too high, or their accents too comical. Others complained that they couldn’t party at night any more, because of
all the lines they had to learn. Clara’s first film,
Black Roses
, had been one of the innovative, tri-lingual talkies shot in German, French and English, but that experiment
didn’t last long. Foreigners lost their appetite for the films being shot in the new Germany. Especially now that war films, starring brave German soldiers ready to die for their country,
dominated the screens.

Albert abandoned attempts to probe her mood. ‘Did you hear our Master’s latest theory?’ He waved the latest issue of
Filmwoche
, compulsory reading for everyone in the
industry, which contained a lavish profile of Goebbels. ‘He says in here that the ideal woman should be composed of the three Ms – the Mother, the Madonna and the Mistress.’

‘I thought he preferred to keep them separate.’

‘So did I. But if what I’m hearing about Lída Baarová is true, he’s thinking she might like to combine two roles.’

Lída Baarová was Goebbels’ latest girlfriend. A sultry Czech actress with stunning Slavic cheekbones, she had been propelled to stardom by her devoted admirer. Her new film,
Patriots
, about a brave German soldier befriended by a French girl, was to be the subject of a lavish premiere later that month at the city’s plushest cinema, the Ufa Palast am
Zoo.

‘So it’s serious this time?’

‘He’s really smitten. Obsessed. He vets all her leading men. I’ve heard he makes her leave her phone line open so that when he’s at his desk he can pick up the earpiece
just to hear her breathing.’

‘Her breathing!’

‘Romantic, isn’t it? Or perhaps he wants to hear if she’s packing her bags for Hollywood like everyone else. They say he’s so desperate to keep her he’s going to
ask Magda for a divorce.’

‘I thought Lída was already married.’

‘What’s marriage? A piece of paper. Goebbels is good at fixing paperwork.’

Clara moved away from the window. Even though he was a hundred metres away at the studio gate, she had the sudden feeling that Goebbels might have eyes in the back of his head. Albert
laughed.

‘You don’t need to worry, darling. You’re obviously doing something right. Looking forward to your first title role?’

The part in the new film,
The Pilot’s Bride
, was technically Clara’s first major role. She was playing Gretchen, the young wife of a Luftwaffe flying ace, known for his
heroics in the sky, until he was tragically shot down. The story was a simple one. Gretchen alone refused to believe her husband was dead and daringly, she learned to fly so that she could seek him
out and bring him home. Evading enemy guns she landed on hostile territory and found her husband injured but alive. So far, so standard. Brave Luffwaffe, long-suffering heroine, happy ending. There
were any number of films that like being made right now, but this one would be a sure-fire, cast-iron, guaranteed success. Because of Ernst Udet.

She smiled. ‘We all know who the real star is.’

She moved over to Albert’s desk and flipped through a stack of postcards featuring Udet’s beaming figure in a variety of poses. Udet was a born celebrity. During his time in
Hollywood, he liked to perform his stunts in a full dress suit and top hat. One of his favourites was to fly at zero height scooping objects from the ground. The press had been ecstatic when he won
a bet with Mary Pickford to pick her handkerchief off the grass with his wing tip as he flew past.