Faith and Beauty (7 page)

The Saturday life drawing class had been Lotti’s idea. Hedwig didn’t have an artistic bone in her body and would gladly have signed up for skiing, rowing, even high board diving rather than humiliate herself with Art. Hedwig’s father, a stolid production line manager at the AEG engineering works, thought art training, like everything else on the Faith and Beauty curriculum, was a lot of effete nonsense, but he deferred to her mother, who had ambitions for her only daughter. Privately Herr Holz told Hedwig to concentrate on her job and think about her promotion prospects. If indeed she had time for promotion, before marriage and motherhood came along and put an end to all that.

Hedwig agreed. She had never imagined getting a job as a librarian and she loved it. Although her most taxing duty involved looking interested while doing very little, she enjoyed sitting at her desk, greeting visitors and being the only female in the building. She could think of a thousand better ways of spending her weekends than attending Faith and Beauty art classes, but Lotti had set her heart on it.

It was agonizing to think that Lotti had sat in this class only two weeks ago, sketching costumes, her bold, confident lines delineating impossibly glamorous women, their outfits carefully annotated in her flowing handwriting. Hedwig could picture her now, high eyebrows arched above aquamarine eyes, chin jutted forward as if she was born to it. As if, indeed, it was all slightly beneath her.

Hedwig knew Lotti only wanted company, yet where Lotti was concerned she could never say no. Faith and Beauty girls were encouraged to think of themselves as a spiritual sisterhood, but to her Lotti was more like an ordinary sister. As children their two families had sometimes taken holidays in the countryside outside Berlin together and Hedwig and Lotti shared a room. She recalled Lotti’s grave face, reciting German poetry, or expanding on her ambitions for life, requiring only that Hedwig be a devoted listener. And when Hedwig had confided her most precious memory, of the first time a man kissed her, Lotti had burst into peals of mocking, sisterly laughter.

Sister or not, she was dead now, and Hedwig felt an utter desolation.

The murder had sent shockwaves through the Faith and Beauty community, but although no one could talk of anything else, they were forbidden to talk about it at all. That was useless when it was all over the newspapers and a pair of steel-helmeted soldiers were shuffling their feet on permanent guard outside the front gate. A hasty set of new regulations had been formulated for the girls. Shooting was curtailed so long as the killer was at large and replaced with rowing. No girl was permitted to walk alone the short distance from the Griebnitzsee S-Bahn through the forest, though that was quite unnecessary advice because being alone was frowned on. The Party disapproved of solitude on the grounds that faithful citizens would always prefer communal life and privacy in all its forms was strongly proscribed for Faith and Beauty girls.

Hedwig stared out of the window and wondered if her mother would agree to her leaving now. Etta Holz adored the idea of her only daughter being here. Faith and Beauty training gave German girls such an advantage. No going to the Nuremberg rally and getting pregnant by the first Hitler Youth you encountered. Hedwig would be invited to parties with senior Party members. She would be cultivated and polished and pass into the top echelons of society with ease. ‘Once you’ve finished you’ll hold dinner parties for all the top SS men and you’ll be able to talk about . . .’ Here Frau Holz paused, having no idea what top SS men might possibly talk about.
The Merry Widow
, she finished lamely, recalling the Führer’s favourite operetta. ‘It will pay for itself, you’ll see.’

But the real reason that her mother favoured the Faith and Beauty Society was that it meant her daughter would grow out of Jochen Falke.

Jochen did not have the kind of looks deemed handsome among Hedwig’s friends. His high, Slavic cheekbones and skinny frame were far from the muscular athletes modelled by the Führer’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker. But he had quick, hazel eyes which always seemed to flicker with amusement and a swagger about him that reflected his inner confidence.

He was an artist too – in a way. He worked at an art manufacturing plant in Kreuzberg, a humdrum place that carried out all forms of printing and publishing, as well as commercial artwork, signs and advertising. But the real money-spinner was merchandizing the Führer. Hitler souvenirs were big business. Birthday figurines, postcards, ashtrays, medallions, posters, cocktail forks and bottle stoppers. There was a whole variety of jewellery, and cameo brooches were especially popular because everyone wanted their Führer close to their heart. Jochen’s speciality was pictures. On a good day he could reproduce Adolf Hitler a hundred times over.

‘What takes the Fräulein’s fancy?’ he would laugh, parodying an unctuous shop assistant. ‘We have Hitler in a gilt frame, Hitler with children, Hitler at the Berghof, Hitler with Bismarck, or would Fräulein prefer the Führer’s hands alone?’

He worked with a photograph in front of him, softening the nose and making the eyes larger, adding a tint to the cheeks. ‘Just doing a little cosmetic surgery.’ He brought one back for Hedwig’s mother, who hung it proudly opposite her bed. Hedwig thought seeing the Führer’s scowl like that last thing at night would give her nightmares, but her parents seemed to like it.

She looked up to see Herr Fritzl approaching. He was bound to say something uncomplimentary about her efforts. Last time he claimed Hedwig’s approach smacked dangerously of Degenerate Art, which was tantamount to accusing her of treason. Apparently in the Weimar period Berlin had been a hell-pit of sexual depravity, and obscene nudes by Degenerate painters like Otto Dix corrupted the morals of an entire nation.

The thought of Otto Dix’s nudes only reminded her of Lotti, her graceful gymnast’s limbs askew in the clumsy crush of death. She pictured the diaphanous wings of flies glittering like cut coal in the air above her body. What had Lotti ever done to deserve that fate?

Hedwig picked up her charcoal stick and turned back to the horror on her easel, but found she could no longer see it because of the tears slipping down her face.

Chapter Six

On London’s King’s Road there was a queue to collect gas masks from Chelsea Town Hall. Whole families were waiting, the children jumping up and down, wriggling with excitement, the parents, anxiety etched on their faces, keeping up appearances because they were lining up alongside their cooks and housemaids. One little boy was singing, ‘There’s going to be a war!’ until he was abruptly hushed by his father. Those who were leaving, already issued with masks, were rather more subdued. Having had their first taste of the acrid rubber contraptions with their bleary glass panels at the front and straps fastened behind the head, perhaps the dangers of the future seemed suddenly more real.

Watching from the top deck of the number 11 bus, however, Clara was transported to the past. She had a vision of herself on this same bus with her mother, sitting in exactly the same spot – front row of the top deck – Helene Vine upright and proper, handbag balanced on her knee, and Clara herself, a small simulacrum, pressed warmly against her mother’s side. Angela, meanwhile, sat aloof across the aisle. Clara had always been her mother’s daughter – the only one of them named for a distant German ancestor rather than a resolutely English relation – and the only child who resembled her too. Angela, with her honey-blonde hair and long gangling legs, was already exhibiting the first coltish inklings of the glamorous model she would become.

Now Clara was alone, in a mac and a printed silk scarf and a copy of
Picture Post
unread on her knee.
Miss Penelope Dudley-Ward, the English heroine of the London-Paris-New York hit, French Without Tears, wears a rose, turquoise and gold brocaded lamé jacket and a full satin skirt in a deep rosy red.

The bus halted before a group of men hauling sheets of corrugated iron for bomb shelters. Clara wondered if Angela had a shelter of her own, and if she did, whether she would ever need to use it. It was hard to imagine the elegant Angela shivering in a damp construction of earth and sheet metal that flooded when it rained, or cramped in a basement, with a torch and a book. Angela liked a pink gin and a rubber of bridge in the evenings. Listening to Cole Porter at the Café de Paris or visiting the cellar of the Embassy Club in Bond Street, where until recently the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson had danced the quickstep on the tiny dance floor.

Clara had a sudden, fervent desire to get off the bus and visit her sister, but she knew the prospect was impossible. How would she explain this flying visit to London? What cover could she credibly construct that Angela would not instantly penetrate? Despite her long practice in controlling impulsive urges, it still took an almost physical strength for Clara to stay in her seat and not dash down the winding stairs and jump off the back platform of the bus.

After six years away, she scanned London’s familiar surroundings as though hunting for changes in the face of a long lost friend. There were the same advertisements for Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, Ovaltine and Eno’s Fruit Salts, and Peter Jones had changed its Victorian redbrick frontage to a sleekly modernized tower of glass and steel. But now its windows were pasted with criss-crossed strips of brown paper to protect against potential bomb blast, the kerbstones had been painted white and sandbags, exuding a smell of damp jute, were shored against the side of every building. A giant recruitment advertisement for the RAF,
Salute to Adventure!,
towered beside Sloane Square tube and a group of young men, subjects of the first wave of conscription, sailed past in a National Service truck. Other details, too, Clara could not help noticing. Women wore little hats tipped slightly forward and to one side. Jackets were more boxy and defined, coats had puffed shoulders, shoes were tightly laced and the whole female silhouette had become harder and more definite, as though Fashion itself was braced for what was to come.

Disembarking at Westminster she made her way across Parliament Square, past Methodist Central Hall and along the Georgian terraces of Queen Anne’s Gate. Bright, luminous bursts of laburnum and wisteria blossom hung over sun-warmed walls. Through the pellucid blue sky the bells of Westminster Abbey marked four o’clock. The Abbey’s bone-white frontage of pleated stone was draped with a veil of soot and placards along the railings announced that it was now open day and night as part of a ‘Vigil for Peace’. Passing a film poster for
The Spy In Black
, Clara was startled to see it starred Conrad Veidt. Just a few months ago she had passed the venerable German actor in the corridors of the Ufa studios. Now he was established in a new life and a new career in England.

It could happen to her too.

As she walked, she felt her body tense and her shoulders knot in the familiar brace. It was impossible to shake the tension which clenched her stomach. She thought for a moment it might be the dizzy rush of nostalgia, set off by everything from the pillar boxes and the plane trees to the pennies with the King’s head on them. Even the newspaper seller outside St James’s Park underground station, advertising the first sight of the new pandas at London Zoo, prompted a yearning for the city she had not realized she missed so much. In reality, though, she knew it was only nervous anticipation of what this meeting would bring.

The St Ermin’s Hotel was a shabby, late-Victorian redbrick mansion block in Caxton Street, set back from the road and only a few hundred yards from 54, Broadway, where the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service was based. On a weekday afternoon it was the last place on earth one would associate with espionage. The lobby, all tartan-trimmed upholstery and dusty carpet, was hushed and gloomy. Watercolours of the Lake District hung alongside a painting of the King, and the smell of congealed vegetables and floor polish exuded a distilled essence of Englishness. A couple of ladies in hats and fur capes taking tea at a side table were the only sign of life.

Clara hesitated. It had not occurred to her until then how exactly she would make contact with the mysterious Captain Miles Fitzalan who had invited her to his fictitious ball. She approached a girl reading a copy of
Woman’s Weekly
behind the mahogany reception.

‘Is there a Captain Fitzalan staying here?’

The girl gave an insultingly perfunctory smile.

‘Can I ask who wants him?’

‘Miss Clara Vine.’

Putting down
Woman’s Weekly
the receptionist reached wearily for the telephone.

‘They’re fifth floor.’

‘Thank you.’

‘The lifts only go up to fourth, but if you press the button to the left, it’ll take you all the way up.’

Clara emerged from the lift to find a long, dingy office partitioned by panes of frosted glass and plywood, filled with men in pinstriped suits lounging and chatting at desks. A fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air, lit by broad shafts of sunlight penetrating the murky windows. Though she was dressed quietly enough, in a skirt of hounds-tooth check, a blouse with scalloped collar and a small pearl necklace, curious eyes swivelled immediately towards her. A louche man, with rumpled hair and tie at half mast, one ear pressed to the telephone, gave her a wink but Clara barely had time to look around her before an imposing figure with a scarlet carnation in his buttonhole approached.

‘Miss Vine. So pleased you could come. What do you think of our offices? None too decorative, but very handy for clubs and so on.’ Pumping her hand, he detected her incomprehension and added, ‘I’m sorry. You don’t know me from Adam. I’m Major Grand. Lawrence Grand.’

‘Clara Vine.’

‘Precisely. Please follow me.’

Anyone who did not know that Lawrence Grand had recently been seconded from the Army could have detected it instantly from the ramrod bearing, tanned complexion and the military exactitude of his pencil moustache. Clara recognized his type immediately. He wore his politeness like a uniform, buttoned up against the possibility of revealing the merest snippet of extraneous information.