Life After Life (36 page)

‘You want to be a
teacher
?’ Sylvie said.

‘Honestly, if her eyebrows had shot up any further they would have left the atmosphere,’ Ursula said to Millie.

‘But do you really? Want to teach?’ Millie said.

‘Why does every single person I know ask me that question in that same tone of voice?’ Ursula said, rather piqued. ‘Am I so clearly unsuited to the profession?’

‘Yes.’

Millie herself had done a course at a drama academy in London and was now playing in rep in Windsor, in second-rate crowd pleasers and melodramas. ‘Waiting to be discovered,’ she said, striking a theatrical pose. Everyone seems to be waiting for something, Ursula thought. ‘Best not to wait,’ Izzie said. ‘Best to
do
.’ Easier for her to say.

Millie and Ursula were sitting in the wicker chairs on the lawn at Fox Corner, hoping that the foxes would come and play on the grass. A vixen and her litter had been visiting the garden. Sylvie had been putting out scraps and the vixen was half tame now and would sit quite boldly in the middle of the lawn, like a dog waiting for its dinner, while her cubs – already rangy, long-legged things by June – squabbled and somersaulted around her.

‘What am I to do then?’ Ursula said helplessly (hopelessly). Bridget appeared with a tray of tea and cake and placed it on a table between them. ‘Learn shorthand and typing and work in the civil service? That sounds pretty dismal too. I mean what else is there for a woman to
do
if she doesn’t want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between?’

‘An educated woman,’ Millie amended.

‘An educated woman,’ Ursula agreed.

Bridget muttered something incomprehensible and Ursula said, ‘Thank you, Bridget.’

(‘
You
have seen Europe,’ she said, rather accusingly, to Sylvie. ‘When you were younger.’

‘I was not on my own, I was in the company of my father,’ Sylvie said. But surprisingly this argument seemed to have some effect and it was, in the end, Sylvie who championed the trip against Hugh’s objections.)

Before she departed for Germany Izzie took her shopping for silk underwear and scarves, pretty lace-edged handkerchiefs, ‘a really good pair of shoes’, two hats and a new handbag. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ she said.

In Munich she was to lodge with the Brenner family – mother, father and three daughters (Klara, Hildegard and Hannelore) and a son, Helmut, who was away at school, in an apartment on the Elisabethstrasse. Hugh had already had an extensive correspondence with Herr Brenner to assess his suitability as a host. ‘I’ll be a terrible disappointment,’ she said to Millie, ‘Herr Brenner will be expecting the Second Coming, given the preparations that have been made.’ Herr Brenner was himself a teacher at the Deutsche Akademie and had arranged for Ursula to give some classes to beginners in English and had also procured several introductions to people looking for private tuition. This he told her when he met her off the train. She felt rather downcast, she hadn’t set her mind to the idea of work just yet and she was exhausted after a long and decidedly trying rail journey. The
Schnellzug
from the Gare de l’Est in Paris had been anything but
schnell
and she had shared the compartment with, among others, a man who alternated smoking a cigar with eating his way through an entire salami, both actions which made her feel rather discomfited. (‘And all I saw of Paris was a station platform,’ she wrote to Millie.)

The salami-eating man had followed her out into the corridor when she went in search of the Ladies. She thought he was going to the buffet car but then as she reached the lavatory compartment he attempted, to her alarm, to push in after her. He said something to her that she didn’t understand, although its meaning seemed lewd (the cigar and the salami seemed strange preludes). ‘
Lass mich in Ruhe
,’ leave me in peace, she said stoutly but he continued to push her and she continued to push back. She suspected their struggle, polite as opposed to violent, might have looked quite comical to an observer. Ursula wished there was someone in the corridor that she could appeal to. She couldn’t imagine what the man would do to her if he succeeded in confining her in the tiny lavatory compartment. (Afterwards she wondered why she hadn’t simply screamed. What a dunce she was.)

She was ‘saved’ by a pair of officers, smart in their black uniforms and silver insignia, who materialized out of nowhere and took a firm hold of the man. They gave him a stern talking-to, although she couldn’t recognize half the vocabulary, and then very gallantly they found her a different carriage, one where there were only women, which she hadn’t known about. When the officers had gone her fellow female travellers couldn’t stop talking about how handsome the SS officers were. (‘
Schutzstaffel
,’ one of the women murmured admiringly. ‘Not like those louts in brown.’)

The train was late pulling into the station in Munich. There had been some kind of incident, Herr Brenner said, a man had fallen from the train.

‘How awful,’ Ursula said.

Despite it being summer, it was chilly and raining heavily. The gloomy atmosphere didn’t lift with her arrival at the Brenners’ enormous apartment, where no lamps were lit against the evening and where the rain was beating against the lace-curtained windows as if it was determined to break in.

Between them, Ursula and Herr Brenner had lugged her heavy trunk up the stairs, a somewhat farcical procedure. Surely there was someone who could help them, Ursula thought irritably? Hugh would have employed ‘a man’ – or two – and not expected her to manage it herself. She thought of the SS officers on the train, how efficiently and courteously they would have dealt with the trunk.

The female Brenners of the house proved to be absent. ‘Oh, not back yet,’ Herr Brenner said, unconcerned. ‘They went shopping, I think.’ The apartment was full of heavy furniture and shabby rugs and leafy plants that gave the impression of a jungle. She shivered, it seemed inhospitably cold for the time of year.

They manoeuvred the trunk into the room that was to be hers. ‘This used to be my mother’s room,’ Herr Brenner said. ‘This is her furniture. Sadly, she died last year.’ The way that he gazed at the bed – a large, Gothic affair that looked as if it were built specifically to induce nightmares in its occupant – clearly hinted that Frau Brenner senior’s demise had taken place within its downy coverlets. The bed seemed to dominate the room and Ursula felt suddenly nervous. Her experience on the train with the salami-eating man was still embarrassingly vivid and now here she was again alone in a foreign country with a complete stranger. Bridget’s lurid tales of the white slave trade came to mind.

To her relief, they both heard the front door open and a great commotion taking place in the hallway. ‘Ah,’ Herr Brenner said, beaming with delight, ‘they’re back!’

The girls spilled and tumbled into the apartment, all wet from the rain, laughing and carrying parcels. ‘Look who’s arrived,’ Herr Brenner said, inducing much excitement in the youngest two girls. (Hilde and Hanne would prove to be the most excitable girls Ursula had ever encountered.)

‘You’re here!’ Klara said, clasping both her hands in her own cold, damp ones, ‘
Herzlich willkommen in Deutschland
.’

While the younger girls chattered nineteen to the dozen Klara moved quickly round the apartment turning on lamps and the place was suddenly transformed – the rugs were worn but they were figured richly, the old furniture gleamed with polish, the cold jungle of plants turned into a pretty, ferny bower. Herr Brenner lit a big porcelain
Kachelofen
in the living room (‘like having a big warm animal in the room’, she wrote to Pamela) and assured her that tomorrow the weather would be back to normal, warm and sunny.

A table was quickly laid with an embroidered cloth and supper produced – a platter of cheese, salami, sliced sausage, salad and a dark bread that smelt of Mrs Glover’s seed cake as well as a delicious kind of fruit soup that confirmed that she was in a foreign country. (‘Cold fruit soup!’ she wrote to Pamela. ‘What would Mrs Glover have to say about that!’)

Even Herr Brenner’s dead mother’s room was more accommodating now. The bed was soft and inviting, the sheets edged with hand-worked crochet and the bedside lamp had a pretty pink glass shade that cast a warm glow. Someone – Klara, Ursula suspected – had placed a posy of marguerites in a little vase on the dressing table. Ursula was dropping with fatigue by the time she clambered into the bed (it was so high it required a small footstool) and fell gratefully into a deep, dreamless sleep, untroubled by the ghost of the previous occupant.

‘But of course you’re going to have some holiday time,’ Frau Brenner said next morning at breakfast (a meal that was oddly similar to supper the night before). Klara was ‘at a bit of a loose end’. She had finished her art course and didn’t know what to do next. She was chafing at the bit to leave home and ‘be an artist’ but ‘not much money in Germany to spare for art’, she grumbled. Klara kept some of her work in her room, big, harsh abstract canvases that seemed at odds with her kind and temperate nature. Ursula couldn’t imagine she would make a living from them. ‘Perhaps I shall have to teach,’ she said miserably.

‘Fate worse than death,’ Ursula agreed.

Klara occasionally did some framing for a photography studio in Schellingstrasse. The daughter of one of Frau Brenner’s acquaintances worked there and had put in a word for her. Klara and the daughter – Eva – had been in kindergarten together. ‘But framing, it’s hardly art, is it?’ Klara said. The photographer – Hoffmann – was the ‘personal photographer’ of the new Chancellor, ‘so I am intimately acquainted with his features’, she said.

The Brenners didn’t have much money either (Ursula supposed that was why they were renting her a room) and everyone Klara knew was poor, but then in 1933 everyone everywhere was poor.

Despite the lack of funds Klara was determined that they should make the most of the remainder of the summer. They went to the Carlton Teehaus or Café Heck by the Hofgarten and ate
Pfannkuchen
and drank
Schokolade
until they felt sick. They walked for hours in the Englischer Garten and then ate ice-cream or drank beer, their faces pink with the sun. They also spent time boating or swimming with friends of Helmut, Klara’s brother – a revolving carousel of Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards. Helmut himself was in Potsdam, a cadet, a
Jungmann
at a new kind of military school that the Führer had founded. ‘He’s very keen on the Party,’ Klara said, in English. Her English was quite good and she was enjoying practising with Ursula.

‘On parties,’ Ursula corrected her. ‘We would say “he’s very keen on parties”.’ Klara laughed and shook her head, ‘No, no,
the
Party, the Nazis. Don’t you know that since last month it’s the only one that we’re allowed?’

‘When Hitler came to power,’ Pamela wrote didactically to her, ‘he passed the Enabling Act, in Germany it’s called
Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich
which translates as something like the “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”. That’s a fancy title for the overthrow of democracy.’

Ursula wrote blithely back, ‘But democracy will right itself as it always does. This too shall pass.’

‘Not without help,’ Pamela replied.

Pamela was a grouch about Germany and was easy to ignore when you could spend long hot afternoons sunbathing with Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards, lolling lazily by the municipal swimming pool or the river. Ursula was taken aback at how these boys were near enough naked with their short shorts and disconcertingly small swimming trunks. Germans generally, she discovered, were not averse to stripping off in front of others.

Klara also knew a different, more cerebral set – her friends from art school. They tended to prefer the dark, the smoky interiors of cafés or their own scruffy apartments. They drank and smoked a great deal and spoke a lot about art and politics. (‘So by and large,’ she wrote to Millie, ‘between these two groups of people I am getting an all-round education!’) Klara’s art-school friends were a ragged, dissident bunch who all seemed to dislike Munich, which was a seat of ‘petit-bourgeois provincialism’ apparently, and talked all the time about moving to Berlin. They talked a lot about doing things, she noticed, but actually did very little.

Klara was in the grip of a different kind of inertia. Her life had ‘stalled’, she was secretly in love with one of her professors from art school, a sculptor, but he was away in the Black Forest on a family holiday. (Reluctantly, she admitted that the ‘family’ was actually his wife and two children.) She was waiting for her life to resolve itself, she said. More prevarication, Ursula thought. Although she was hardly one to talk.

Ursula was still a virgin, of course, ‘intact’ as Sylvie would have it. Not for any moral reason, simply because she hadn’t yet met anyone that she liked enough. ‘You don’t have to
like
them,’ Klara laughed.

‘Yes, but I want to.’ She seemed instead to be a magnet for unsavoury types – the man on the train, the man in the lane – and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn’t read herself. She felt rather stiff and English compared to Klara and her artist friends or the absent Helmut’s confrères (who were actually terrifically well behaved).

Hanne and Hilde had persuaded Klara and Ursula to accompany them to an event in the local sports stadium. Ursula was under the misapprehension that it was a concert but it turned out to be a rally of Hitler-Jugend. Despite Frau Brenner’s optimism, the BDM had done nothing to counter Hilde and Hanne’s interest in boys.

To Ursula, these ranks of hearty, healthy boys all looked the same but Hilde and Hanne spent a lot of time animatedly pointing out Helmut’s friends, those same Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards who loafed by the swimming pool in next to nothing. Now, squeezed into their immaculate uniforms (more short shorts), they looked like very fierce and upstanding Boy Scouts.