A War of Flowers (2014) (13 page)

He looked out of the window to see Clara Vine approaching, head down, glossy, dark hair falling to her shoulders in loose curls. There was a kind of chameleon quality to her. You could pass her
on the street without noticing her, yet when she spoke you saw at once why the camera loved her. She had a way of holding herself that suggested some inner reserve of calm, or so he liked to think.
She reminded him of a girl in a Flemish painting – one that hung in the Allingham family castle in Northumbria, in fact – with her look of resolute serenity concealing a sharp and
lively mind. The high, squarish forehead and those eyes, at once cool and calculating, which made it impossible to guess what she was thinking. He had loved that portrait since he was a boy,
marvelling at the woman’s grace and composure, the subtle beauty of her freckled skin and pursed, preoccupied lips, so unlike the milky, bovine women the Nazis loved.

Clara was a loner, he supposed, like himself. He remembered how much Leo Quinn, his oldest friend, had been in love with her. Indeed Rupert himself had been responsible for introducing them. If
he hadn’t met Clara at that party in London five years ago and suggested casually that she come and try out for the Ufa studios, she would no doubt be buried in Knightsbridge or Kensington by
now, volunteering for the FANY or trying on gas masks in Chelsea town hall, like every other woman he knew back home. She would not have come to Berlin, or met Leo, or broken his heart. For that
reason, Rupert’s feelings about Clara were conflicted, even though he knew pretty much what kept her here. She had never mentioned her intelligence work, nor would he have asked, but he was
able to put two and two together and he respected it. He also kept in touch out of an obscure duty to Leo – one of the few friends of his that Mother really liked, even though she referred to
him as ‘that polite young man’,
polite
being a way of signifying that Leo belonged to a lower class than themselves. Leo never asked after Clara, but Rupert wanted the answers in
case he ever did, so he had resolved to keep in contact with Clara for Leo’s sake, and what had started out as duty had soon become a pleasure.

The door clanged open and Clara slid into the seat next to him with a grimace of amused disgust at his meal – two boiled weisse Wurst coiled around a swamp of congealing vegetables, a dish
of cabbage and a jar of brown sauce.

‘I don’t know how you can eat that.’

‘It’s a Proustian madeleine to me. Reminds me of boarding school. Especially the sawdust in the sausages.’

Clara smiled affectionately at Rupert. Even now, when he was almost perpetually drunk, in a battered tweed suit that had seen better days and two days’ growth of stubble, there was no
disguising his aristocratic good looks. The chiselled, blue-blooded features were blurred by drink, like a decayed seraph, but there was a sceptical intelligence behind those sleepy eyes and the
rhetorical flourishes were undercut by the ironic slant of his smile. When she had first met him, at a grand London party given by a friend of her sister, she had taken Rupert for exactly what he
resembled – a well-born, Oxford-educated, cultural dilettante with absolutely no need to earn a living. The only son of Lady Allingham, heir to a thousand acres of Northumbria and destined
from birth to occupy the most comfortable of berths in the English establishment. Instead of which, Rupert had emerged as a passionate journalistic opponent of the Nazi regime who came regularly
close to being ejected from Germany. It was a difficult balancing act. Every bit of copy he filed had to get by a series of Nazi censors, so often he had to rely on a deep English sense of irony to
convey the opposite of what his Nazi minders would read. He was an embodiment of upper-class charm which simultaneously baffled his Nazi minders and pleased his interviewees.

Yet that same upper-class charm acted like an impenetrable barrier to his private self. Though she had known Rupert for five years, and he took a lively interest in her romantic life, Clara
still had no real idea of his own. She rarely saw him with a woman in tow and his evenings were resolutely male – not the Herrenabends that German men went in for, but endless sessions at the
bar of the Adlon, trading stories with the VIPs of the foreign press, Quentin Reynolds from Hearst, the mild-mannered, pipe-smoking Bill Shirer, Ed Murrow and the
Daily Telegraph
’s
Hugh Carleton Greene. Herbert Melcher of the Associated Press and Chuck Lewis of the
Chicago Herald
. And drinking, of course, which appeared to be Rupert’s principal recreation these
days.

She leant over and flicked some crumbs from his jacket.

‘Had you ever thought of getting this cleaned?’

‘No point. My laundry’s run out of soap. They say it’s harder to get soap than tobacco now.’

He took another bite of his sausage and chewed it.

‘I’ll manage fine so long as Kottler’s never run out of sausage. This Wurst may be an acquired taste, but once one has acquired it one can’t get enough.’

‘I suppose you have to eat it to soak up the alcohol.’

Rupert assumed a hangdog expression.

‘It was a rough night,’ he conceded. ‘But you should eat something too, Clara. You’re getting thin. Those Nazis like their film stars with a bit of meat on
them.’

‘I’m not a star. I don’t even want to be. And I already ate with my godson Erich. I’ll just have a drink.’

Rupert called the waiter for some coffee then turned back to her.

‘How is that lad of yours?’

‘He’s just got back from a KdF cruise.’

‘A National Socialist holiday?’ He swallowed the remainder of his food. ‘I always think that sounds like a contradiction in terms.’

‘It was rather. Not because Erich objects to the Nazis, of course. He’s all in favour. He was upset because a woman fell overboard.’

‘I can understand wanting to get off one of those godawful cruises, but that’s a bit drastic.’

‘Don’t joke. It was a young woman. I think Erich had taken a shine to her.’

She thought of Erich’s face as he told her about it. He was growing so fast. His familiar round features, which she had known and loved since he was ten, were now sharpened with incipient
adulthood. The light in his eyes was becoming guarded – that was when he didn’t avoid her gaze altogether. Clara didn’t blame him. She remembered how secretive adolescence was. A
time when excruciating self-consciousness made contact with other people intense, like rubbing on raw skin. The fact that Erich was an orphan, with only an elderly grandmother to fight his corner,
had made the naturally shy boy even more defensive.

‘It’s a strange story, from what I could get out of him. He was pretty awkward about telling me.’

She recalled the nervous glances he shot at her as he imparted little bits of information, leaving Clara to fill in the gaps.

‘They were on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
.’

Rupert’s eyes widened. ‘The pride of the fleet. Last word in luxury, apparently. How did they get the tickets?’

‘His grandmother’s a nurse at the Charité hospital and she qualified for them through work. From what I could gather, Erich became friendly with this woman who had the cabin
next to his. Her name was Ada and he got in the habit of fetching coffee for her each morning. One day she asked him to look after her bag and she never came back. Erich seems to believe she fell
overboard.’

‘Sounds like a bit of a story. Is he the imaginative kind? You don’t think he made it up, do you?’

That thought had occurred to her. It seemed so unlikely. Erich had a solid, scientific kind of mind, with a liking for facts and figures. He loved quoting to Clara the number of planes in the
Luftwaffe, or the different specifications of every single model of Mercedes-Benz going back to the 1920s. He enjoyed hearing stories, certainly, but he’d never been one for making them up,
and besides, why would he fabricate a tale like that?

‘Why do you ask?’

Rupert shrugged. ‘Simply because I’ve not heard anything about a woman being lost overboard on a KdF cruise. An accident like that would generally make the papers and I do read the
German papers, as you know, courtesy of the Propaganda Ministry. They ensure that the Foreign Press Club is lavishly provided with Berlin’s finest and they like us correspondents to read them
all. Which now that they’ve gone down so much in size doesn’t take long.’

‘The thing is, Erich was so anxious about it, I told him I’d find out about this woman. He seems to feel an obscure loyalty to her and—’ Clara felt a surge of love at the
thought of his face, a mix of bewilderment and hurt pride, ‘I’m determined to look into it.’

‘Clara . . .’

‘I have to. Poor boy. It was his first foreign holiday too.’ She took a sip of the coffee the waiter had brought and put it quickly down again. It tasted of acorns, or what she
imagined acorns must taste like, a bitter mix of wood chippings and grit, with the consistency of sand scraped from the bottom of the Spree.

‘Anyhow, I said I’d ask you.’

‘Me?’ Rupert paused mid-fork and frowned.

‘No not you specifically, of course, but a responsible journalist I happened to know through my work. You are that, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose.’

‘So as a favour to me would you ask around, see if you can find anything about a woman called Ada Freitag, lost on a cruise? You know policemen, don’t you? You must have
contacts.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a rather different kind of foreign travel at the top of the news list right now. Herr Hitler’s
packing his bags for Prague by the look of it.’

Clara leant her arms across the table and plucked at his sleeve. ‘I do understand you’re busy with far more important things, Rupert. I know this is fairly trivial, but it broke my
heart to see Erich so upset. I don’t think he’s ever had a crush on a girl before. You remember what it’s like to be that age, don’t you?’

‘Every day.’

At fifteen Rupert was immured in Winchester, spending his evenings taking sherry with a German master who liked to read Goethe to the more intelligent and appealing of his pupils. It was a time
of intense adolescent ferment but crushes on girls had not been part of the picture.

‘Erich feels it’s his duty to find out, and if he hadn’t told me, he would be pursuing it with the local police, which would lead to all sorts of attention he could do without.
So I have to get him some answers one way or another.’

For some reason, tears glimmered in her eyes. Clara was certainly attached to this lad, Rupert thought. God knows what would happen when war broke out and she had to leave him here. He smiled
and mimed a little courtly bow, then reached for the notebook in his top pocket and scribbled a note.

‘I’ll do what I can. Perhaps it’s understandable it got hushed up. I suppose a tragedy like that’s not exactly great publicity for the Reich. Can’t compete with
this, for example.’

He gestured at the
Berliner Tageblatt
on the table beside him. From an inside page the face of little Hedda, the latest Goebbels daughter, stared out under the headline,
Baby joy for
the Reich Minister’s family
. Evidently, Goebbels was fully obeying his master’s order to produce more copy about the home life of the Reich’s model family.

Clara squinted at it. ‘Magda told me he’s determined to increase coverage of German families. In fact he’s asked me to present a documentary about the work of the Deutsche
Frauenschaft.’

‘I never quite understand what that involves. Is it like the Women’s Institute, but without jam and Jerusalem?’

‘More like the WI run along military lines. It oversees everything to do with women in the Reich. It’s headed by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink.’

‘That horror? I don’t know why they don’t put her in charge of the Wehrmacht. She’s enough to scare any enemy.’

‘Apparently there’s a new initiative for women that Goebbels wants publicized. Something to do with honouring German families.’

‘He is keen on family news at the moment, isn’t he?’ Rupert gestured to the facing page. ‘
In the Sudetenland, Women and Children mown down by Czech armoured
cars
.’ He looked from one headline to the other with bemusement. ‘It’s hard to know what to believe. Goebbels invents these atrocities to arouse fury. All these riots and
shootings by Czech bandits or Bolsheviks in the Sudetenland. Half of them never happened, or if they did, they were staged by German agents themselves.’

‘Is Prague next, do you think?’

‘I think Hitler’s caught between two sides. Goering and Goebbels urge caution, but von Ribbentrop wants him to act aggressively. Ribbentrop seems to be consumed by the desire for
war. The more I meet that man, the more I’m convinced that he has very little between his ears. He loathes the British in particular. He told Churchill that if Germany was allowed a free hand
to take Lebensraum in the East, then he could guarantee Britain’s security.’

‘What did Churchill say?’

‘He said the Royal Navy had been guaranteeing Britain’s security for several centuries and didn’t need Hitler’s help, thank you.’

Clara smiled.

‘It’s a shame Hitler never really sees what the British think of him.’

Rupert gave a delighted laugh. ‘That, my dear Clara, is where you’re wrong. He does, and it drives him crazy! Von Ribbentrop held a special meeting with Lord Halifax this summer to
complain about the
Evening Standard
cartoonist, Low. He said if Germany ever went to war with England, Low is one of the first people Hitler wants shot.’

‘He probably means it too.’

‘Undoubtedly. Von Ribbentrop doesn’t understand humour. Goebbels does, though, and he even took me aside. It was after one of the morning briefings; he came over all confidential and
made a play for sympathy. He said, “Low makes the most offensive and lying cartoons which I am obliged to show the Führer and each time I do he blows up. It absolutely spoils his
day.”’

‘So that’s something.’

‘That’s what I thought. Nice to think the British press can provide a useful service. I only wish my articles had the same effect.’ His face darkened and Clara sensed that she
had touched on some underlying trouble.