Faith and Beauty (3 page)

Not a category that included Clara Vine.

Although her acting contract with Ufa kept her in regular film work, she was far from the heights of stardom that promised a place in the Artists’ Colony. It might have been her half-English heritage, or the rebellious twist to her smile, that prevented directors from casting her in leading roles. Or perhaps it was merely that the preferred template for a Reich film star was blonde and buxom – a pattern fitted perfectly by her friend Ursula Schilling, who had been one of Ufa’s top actresses until the previous year, when she joined stars like Marlene Dietrich and Billy Wilder in the sanctuary of Hollywood. This was Ursula’s house and Clara was only here until Ursula decided when, or if, it was safe to return.

If she didn’t know better, Clara might have wondered how Ursula could bear to leave it. Though small, the house was exquisite in every detail. It had been designed by Mies van der Rohe, with a steep gabled, red-tiled roof, vanilla-painted façade and teal-blue shutters on the windows. Beech, oak and pine trees grew all around, shielding each house from any sight of its neighbour, and giving each dwelling a sense of total, rural isolation.

The front door opened directly into a panelled, open-plan drawing room running the entire length of the house, furnished with bookshelves, and a piano. Expensive rugs covered the polished wooden floor and there was an armchair soft enough to sink in and never get up.

Ursula had been gone for months now, but the way she had left the house, you would think she had taken a shopping trip to the Kurfürstendamm rather than an ocean liner across the Atlantic. Everything was still there – cushions, lampshades, curtains. The rubble of lotions, stubby kohl pencils and cratered powders on the dressing table. She had abandoned all her books and furniture, not to mention crockery in the sink and withered rosebuds in a dry vase. Even Ursula’s clothes were still in the bedroom, draped carelessly across chairs, falling out of drawers and hanging in scented layers of silk and satin like gleaming ghosts.

Fortunately Clara didn’t have much luggage of her own. She had always travelled light, ever since her days in repertory theatre in England. All she had with her was a few changes of clothes, her leather jewellery box, Max Factor make-up, a book of Rilke’s poetry with a duck-egg blue cover, and the sheaf of mail she had grabbed from her apartment just before she left.

Wandering into the kitchen she set down a bag containing black rye bread, eggs, potatoes and an onion. She had stood in line for the eggs and onion and had every intention of enjoying them in an omelette as soon as she had unpacked. As she ran a tap to fill the kettle, she opened a cupboard to rummage for a cup and discovered, with the delight of an archaeologist making an antique find, a jar of real Melitta coffee, almost untouched. The only coffee to be found in Berlin right now, Kaffee-Ersatz, was a gritty concoction of chicory, oats and roasted barley mixed with chemicals from coal, oil and tar; so a jar like this was real treasure. Unscrewing the lid, she inhaled deeply. Everyone in Germany obsessed about food now. They dreamed of potatoes fried in butter, crispy chicken and fragrant roast meat. Of real coffee and cream. Being half English, Clara dreamed of thick wedges of Fuller’s walnut cake and solid chunks of Cadbury’s chocolate, which were even more impossible to find.

Cradling her fragrant, smoky-flavoured coffee – black, no milk – Clara went over to the far window, from where a long sliver of the lake was visible, its hard silver surface marbled by high clouds, and a dark fringe of woods beyond. A narrow jetty protruded into the water, a duck standing upon it frisking a rainbow of water across its back. Shielding her eyes against the dazzle of light, she opened the French windows and stepped outside. She had not had a garden since childhood, when nine acres of Surrey at the foot of the north Downs had formed the limits of her world and where she, her elder sister Angela and brother Kenneth had raced snails, collected tadpoles and played French cricket.

Resting against the sun-warmed brick she breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of narcissus and sweet woodsmoke from a bonfire, letting the smell of nettles and grass float through her. In the city a hundred different noises made up silence, like the colours that together constitute white light; the rumble of traffic, the bang of a shop door, the jangle of a milk cart, the whine of a wireless; but out here the silence had a different texture. It was a deep, ancient quiet, the kind you never found in the city. Thick and tangible, oppressive almost. Clara could see why no one bothered locking their doors. The only sounds were the distant chug of a steam cruiser, squabbling squirrels in the high branches of the pines and her own breathing.

But it was no good. Whenever Clara relaxed, her mind would return to the same matter. The matter that she tried to keep buried, but became increasingly urgent as time passed.

Leo Quinn.

Leo was the British passport control officer who had first suggested her other – and what felt increasingly like her real – role. At his urging, Clara had begun to feed details of the gossip and feuds of the senior Nazi women to British Intelligence. Moving, as she did, in the regime’s high society, Clara had become a spy on the private life of the Third Reich. For years she had formed a link in the shadowy chain that stretched across Europe, passing news of the Nazis to her contacts in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, learning from Leo the tradecraft and secrets of a spy’s life.

And in the process she had fallen in love with him.

At the thought of Leo, sadness swelled and images of their last two weeks together flared in her brain. They had spent the time enveloped in each other, taking a borrowed car out to the lakes and plunging into the crisp water, slippery fronds beneath their feet. Making love in a bedroom, the morning light spangled across his face. Walking in the forest, beneath the shifting leaves. Talking about the future, and Leo’s urging that she should leave Berlin for the safety of England. She thought of his fingertips tracing her face as though committing it to memory. Holding her so tightly she could feel the blood pulse through him, his mouth on hers and his arms encircling her as though he would never let her go.

And yet he had let her go. Without a second’s hesitation.

It happened quite abruptly one morning. He had received a message the previous night, requesting that he return to work in London without delay. Clara didn’t even know what Leo’s job entailed – only that it was something to do with encrypted communications and that he was based in a London office block, somewhere near Oxford Street, but also made frequent sorties abroad. Yet as soon as he had told her his orders, he was knotting his tie and glancing at his watch. Then he pulled on his jacket, gave one last look back, and headed out of the door.

That was six long months ago and she had not heard a word from him since. Not so much as a postcard.

Where are you, Leo?

The questions ran through her head like beads on a rosary.

Most evenings after she had finished at the film studios, she would have a solitary supper and bury herself in the latest novel her sister had sent out from Hatchards bookshop in London. Occasionally she would be dragged out by friends, and other times she took Erich to the cinema or for a meal. At night she might stretch out a hand across the satin counterpane to where Leo had been, but more often she fell asleep the moment she climbed into bed, exhausted by the constant busyness she had adopted to keep thoughts of him at bay.

Yet increasingly a mutinous anxiety arose in her, that she tried and failed to suppress. Why had Leo not been in touch? For someone whose work involved communication, it was ironic that he had failed entirely to communicate with her. Agents learned to compress their words into codes, but what code did silence contain?

On one side of the room a gigantic, rococo mirror was angled to reflect a photograph of Ursula on the opposite wall, an icy peroxide fantasy swathed in fur. Gazing into the mirror, Clara tried to see what Leo saw.

He had always said she had a face that was easily able to conceal her feelings, or to project other emotions entirely. The glossy dark hair with its russet streaks had been cut short for her current film role, and the effect was to frame her face more closely, emphasizing the widely spaced blue eyes with the brows high and thinly plucked, in the current fashion. Her sleek dress, flatteringly nipped in at the waist, gave her an air of self-assurance, even if it was worn in patches and the cuff was starting to fray.

Yet that self-assurance, like her identity itself, was a construct. The document she carried in her bag at all times, certifying that Clara Helene Vine was a full member of the Aryan race, disguised the fact that she was, in Nazi terms, a ‘Mischling’, with a Jewish mother and grandmother, who under the strict race laws now in place could not marry a gentile, work for one or even sleep with one without the threat of imprisonment.

At the thought of it, she pulled out her Max Factor compact, dabbed her nose a little, ran a layer of Elizabeth Arden’s Velvet Red round her lips and gave a defiant smile. If she was going to present a false face to the world, it might as well be an immaculate one.

She turned to her bags, began unpacking and placed three photographs above the fireplace. One of a smiling six-year-old and another of the same boy ten years later, grown dark-eyed and sombre. Her godson, Erich, who was even now burning to join the Luftwaffe and perhaps would soon get his chance. The third photograph was of her mother Helene, throwing her head back in laughter to reveal perfect white teeth. Acting a part, as she had been from the day she arrived as a new bride in England at the age of twenty-two, leaving Germany behind and with it any mention of her Jewish heritage. There was no picture of Leo.

Though Ursula’s house was far more luxurious than anything else Clara had known, that had nothing to do with the actual reason for her move. In recent weeks Clara had been increasingly convinced that her apartment in Winterfeldtstrasse was being watched. Far too frequently there were men around to clean the windows of the block opposite, or to paste new advertisements on the hoarding outside. Clara carried out all her usual precautions. She placed a dish of water for the cat just inside her front door. She didn’t have a cat, but anyone entering the apartment surreptitiously would knock the dish and make a damp mark on the carpet. She left a tube of lipstick balanced on the casement window latch which would be easily upset if the window was opened. Although she was certain there had been no actual intrusion, the previous week she had dashed home in an unexpected shower and almost collided with an unfamiliar figure in the lobby.

‘Can I help you?’

He was a sinewy young man with a lean, evasive face.

‘Just sheltering from the rain.’

But he was bone dry. No pearls of water clung to the fabric of his umbrella or dripped from its spokes, nor was there any drop on his coat, dampening his felt hat or soaking his scuffed leather shoes. He carried a bulky case, and avoided her eye when she addressed him.

That was the moment she decided. Clara was experienced enough to distinguish between the instinctive feeling of being observed – that constant prickle of self-awareness all actresses develop – and the insidious lick of nerves prompted by Gestapo surveillance. She had learned to trust her instincts and at that second they told her it was time to switch locations without delay. She had no desire to check the face of every street sweeper or sneak a glance into every idling car on the kerb. Fortunately, she remembered Ursula’s offer of house-sitting. Out in Griebnitzsee there was very little chance of passing strangers. It was almost too isolated. But then, she might not be spending too much time at home.

She propped an invitation on the mantelpiece. It had arrived two weeks ago at the Babelsberg studios, with no covering note. It was printed on stiff, heavy, ivory card with shiny, engraved lettering and gold edges – the kind that Angela ordered from Smythson’s in Bond Street for her cocktail parties and At Homes. Just the feel of it gave Clara a jolt of nostalgia for Angela’s smart society gatherings, the Mayfair ballrooms filled with actors and politicians, the theatre people and poets. She pressed it to her nose and inhaled the faintest trace of cigarette smoke.

The only difference about this invitation was, Clara did not know any Miles Fitzalan and nor had she heard of the St Ermin’s Hotel. And she guessed, whatever this meeting was about, it would certainly be no party.

Chapter Three

Being seduced by Joseph Goebbels was every starlet’s worst nightmare but for foreign journalists it was a rather pleasanter experience. The Press Club he had established at a cost of half a million marks on Leipziger Platz was a comfortable mansion of gleaming wood and chrome, superbly fitted out with ornate restaurant, reading room, library and bar where journalists were encouraged to congregate in the clubby armchairs and write their stories in luxurious ease. The restaurant served the type of white-fleshed schnitzel, buttery vegetables and rich, flaky pastries that were no longer available elsewhere in Berlin, accompanied by fine wines and the holy grail of Viennese coffee. All the international newspapers were available, a Tannoy system was in place, and journalists could obtain anything from reduced-rate opera tickets to special red identification cards for procuring taxis. They could also write their copy on the typewriters there and have it cabled directly back to their own newspapers, if they didn’t mind the censors crawling over every word.

The club was practically in earshot of the Propaganda Ministry in Wilhelmplatz, but that was irrelevant because beneath every plush leather banquette was a listening device to collate conversations, and anything missed was scooped up by the superbly attentive waiters who doubled as Goebbels’ spies. All the journalists knew the Press Club was an eavesdroppers’ paradise, but the quality of the food and the prices at the bar made it a popular destination, just so long as you didn’t mind your thoughts being shared by a wider audience, which journalists by their very nature generally didn’t. The level of comfort encouraged harmonious conversation and the only permanent disagreements came from the three clocks on the wall, telling the time in Paris, London and Tokyo.