Millie had been King Rat, a bravura performance, and Sylvie said, ‘Those Shawcross girls thrive on attention, don’t they?’ There was something of Millie in Eva – a restless, empty gaiety that needed continual feeding. But then Eva was an actress too, playing the greatest part of her life. In fact her life was her part, there was no difference.
Frieda, lovely little Frieda, just five years old, with her blue eyes and stubby blonde plaits. Frieda’s complexion, so pale and wan when she had first arrived, now pink and gold from all the Alpine sunshine. When the Führer saw Frieda, Ursula caught the zealot gleam in his own blue eyes, as cold as the Königsee down below, and knew he was seeing the future of the Tausendjähriges Reich rolling out in front of him, Mädchen after Mädchen. (‘She doesn’t take after you, does she?’ Eva said, without malice, she had no malice.)
When she was a child – a period in her life that Ursula seemed to find herself returning to almost compulsively these days – she had read fairy tales of wronged princesses who saved themselves from lustful fathers and jealous stepmothers by smearing their fair faces with walnut juice and rubbing ashes in their hair to disguise themselves – as the gypsy, the outsider, the shunned. Ursula wondered how one obtained walnut juice, it didn’t seem the kind of thing you could just walk into a shop and buy. And it was no longer safe to be the nut-brown outsider, much better if one wanted to survive to be here, on Obersalzberg – Der Zauberberg – in the kingdom of make-believe, ‘the Berg’, as they called it with the intimacy of the elect.
What on earth was she doing here, Ursula wondered, and when could she leave? Frieda was well enough now, her convalescence drawing to a close. Ursula determined to say something to Eva today. After all, they weren’t prisoners, they could leave any time they chose.
Eva lit a cigarette. The Führer was away and the mouse was being naughty. He didn’t like her to smoke or drink, or wear make-up. Ursula rather admired Eva’s small acts of defiance. The Führer had come and gone twice since Ursula first arrived at the Berghof with Frieda two weeks ago, his arrivals and departures moments of heightened drama for Eva, for everyone. The Reich, Ursula had concluded a long time ago, was all pantomime and spectacle, ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,’ she wrote to Pamela. ‘But unfortunately not signifying nothing.’
Frieda, on a prompt from Eva, did a twirl and laughed. She was the molten core at the centre of Ursula’s heart, she was the better part of everything she did or thought. Ursula would be willing to walk on knives for the rest of her life if it would protect Frieda. Burn in the flames of hell to save her. Drown in the deepest of waters if it would buoy her up. (She had explored many extreme scenarios. Best to be prepared.) She had had no idea (Sylvie gave little indication) that maternal love could be so gut-achingly, painfully physical.
‘Oh, yes,’ Pamela said, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, ‘it turns you into a regular she-wolf.’ Ursula didn’t think of herself as a she-wolf, she was, after all, a bear.
There were real she-wolves prowling everywhere on the Berg – Magda, Emmy, Margarete, Gerda – the brood-wives of the senior party officials, all jostling for a little power of their own, producing endless babies from their fecund loins, for the Reich, for the Führer. These she-wolves were dangerous, predatory animals and they hated Eva, the ‘silly cow’ – die blöde Kuh – who somehow or other had managed to trump them all.
They, surely, would have given anything to be the mate of the glorious leader rather than insignificant Eva. Wasn’t a man of his stature worthy of a Brünnhilde – or at the very least a Magda or a Leni? Or perhaps the Valkyrie herself, ‘the Mitford woman’, das Fräulein Mitford, as Eva referred to her. The Führer admired England, especially aristocratic, imperial England, although Ursula doubted that his admiration would stop him from trying to destroy it if the time came.
Eva disliked all the Valkyries who might be a rival for the Führer’s attentions, her strongest emotions conceived in fear. Her greatest antipathy was reserved for Bormann, the éminence grise of the Berg. It was he who held the purse strings, he who shopped for Eva’s gifts from the Führer and who doled out the money for all those fur coats and Ferragamo shoes, reminding her in many subtle ways that she was merely a courtesan. Ursula wondered where the fur coats came from, most of the furriers she had seen in Berlin were Jewish.
How it must stick in the collective craw of the she-wolves that the Führer’s consort was a shop girl. When she first met him, Eva told Ursula, when she was working in Hoffmann’s Photohaus, she had addressed him as Herr Wolf. ‘Adolf means noble wolf in German,’ she said. How he must like that, Ursula thought. She had never heard anyone call him Adolf. (Did Eva call him mein Führer even in bed? It seemed perfectly possible.) ‘And do you know that his favourite song,’ Eva laughed, ‘is “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?”’
‘From the Disney film Three Little Pigs?’ Ursula said, incredulous.
‘Yes!’
Oh, thought Ursula, I cannot wait to tell that to Pamela.
‘And now one with Mutti,’ Eva said. ‘Hold her in your arms. Sehr schön. Smile!’ Ursula had watched Eva gleefully stalking the Führer with her camera, hunting down a photograph of him where he hadn’t turned away from the lens or pulled the brim of his hat down comically low, like a spy in poor disguise. He disliked having his photograph taken by her, preferring flattering studio lighting or a more heroic pose than the snaps Eva liked of him. Eva, on the other hand, loved being photographed. She didn’t just want to be in photographs, she wanted to be in a film. ‘Ein movie.’ She was going to go to Hollywood (‘one day’) and play herself, ‘the story of my life’, she said. (The camera made everything real somehow for Eva.) The Führer had promised, apparently. Of course, the Führer promised a lot of things. It was what had got him where he was today.
Eva refocused the Rolleiflex. Ursula was glad she hadn’t brought her old Kodak, it would hardly have stood up to comparison. ‘I’ll have copies made for you,’ Eva said. ‘You can send them to England, to your parents. It looks very pretty with the mountains in the background. Now give me a big smile. Jetzt lach doch mal richtig!’
The mountain panorama was the backdrop to every photo taken here, the backdrop to everything. At first Ursula had thought it beautiful, now she was beginning to find its magnificence oppressive. The great icy crags and the rushing waterfalls, the endless pine trees – nature and myth fused to form the Germanic sublimated soul. German Romanticism, it seemed to Ursula, was writ large and mystical, the English Lakes seemed tame by comparison. And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden – a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.
She should go home. Not to Berlin, to Savignyplatz, but to England. To Fox Corner.