Ursula had, despite Sylvie’s reservations, studied for a degree in Modern Languages – French and German and a little Italian (very little). Recently graduated and failing to think of anything else, she had applied and been given a place on a teacher-training course. She had deferred for a year, saying that she wanted an opportunity to see a little of the world before ‘settling down’ to a lifetime at the blackboard. That was her rationale anyway, the one that she paraded for parental scrutiny, whereas her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take up the place. What that ‘something’ was she had no idea (‘Love perhaps,’ Millie said wistfully). Anything really that would mean she didn’t end up as an embittered spinster in a girls’ grammar school, spooling her way through the conjugation of foreign verbs, chalk dust falling from her clothes like dandruff. (She based this portrait on her own schoolmistresses.) It wasn’t a profession that had garnered much enthusiasm in her immediate circle either.
‘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!’