She should have stayed in England. She should have stayed at Fox Corner, with the meadow and the copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood.
The machinery of war started to roll past. ‘Here come the tanks,’ Jürgen said in English, as the first of the Panzer appeared, carried on the back of lorries. His English was good, he had spent a year at Oxford (hence his knowledge of cricket). Then came the Panzer under their own steam, motorbikes with sidecars, armoured cars, the cavalry trotting smartly along (a particular crowd pleaser – Ursula woke Frieda up for the horses), and then the artillery, from light field guns to massive anti-aircraft guns and huge cannons.
‘K-3s,’ Jürgen said appreciatively, as if that would mean something to her.
The parade showed a love of order and geometry that was incomprehensible to Ursula. In this, it was no different from all the other parades and rallies – all that theatre – but this one seemed so bellicose. So much weaponry was staggering – the country was armed to the teeth! Ursula had had no idea. No wonder there were jobs for everyone. ‘If you want to rescue the economy you need a war, Maurice says,’ Pamela wrote. And what did you need weaponry for if not war?
‘Refitting the military has helped to rescue our psyche,’ Jürgen said, ‘given us back our pride in our country. When in 1918 the generals surrendered …’ Ursula stopped listening, it was an argument she had heard too many times. ‘They started the last war,’ she wrote crossly to Pamela. ‘And honestly, you would think they were the only ones who struggled afterwards, and that no other people were poor or hungry or bereaved.’ Frieda woke up again and was cranky. She fed her chocolate. Ursula was cranky too. Between them they finished the bar.
The finale was actually rather moving. The massed colours of the regiments formed a long file several ranks deep in front of Hitler’s podium – a formation so precise its edges might have been cut with a razor – and then they dipped their colours to the ground in honour of him. The crowd went wild.
‘What did you think?’ Jürgen asked as they shuffled out of the grandstand. He carried Frieda on his shoulders.
‘Magnificent,’ Ursula said. ‘It was magnificent.’ She could feel the beginnings of a headache worming its way into her temple.
Frieda’s illness had begun one morning several weeks ago with a raised temperature. ‘I feel sick,’ Frieda said. When Ursula felt her forehead it was clammy and she said, ‘You don’t have to go to kindergarten, you can stay home with me today.’
‘A summer cold,’ Jürgen said, when he came home. She was always a chesty child (‘Takes after my mother,’ Sylvie said gloomily) and they were accustomed to sniffling colds and sore throats but the cold got worse very quickly and Frieda turned feverish and listless. Her skin felt as though it were ready to catch fire. ‘Keep her cool,’ the doctor said and Ursula laid cold wet cloths on her forehead and read her stories but Frieda, try as she did, could summon no interest in them. Then she grew delirious and the doctor listened to her rattling lungs and said, ‘Bronchitis, you have to wait for it to pass.’
Late that night Frieda grew suddenly, horribly worse and they wrapped the almost inanimate little body in a blanket and rushed in a taxi to the nearest hospital, a Catholic one. Pneumonia was diagnosed. ‘She’s a very sick little girl,’ the doctor said, as if somehow they were to blame.
Ursula didn’t leave Frieda’s bedside for two days and nights, holding on to the little hand to keep her in this world. ‘If only I could have it for her,’ Jürgen whispered across the starchy white sheets that were also helping to pin Frieda to this world. Nuns floated around the ward like galleons in their enormous, complicated wimples. How long, Ursula wondered in an absent moment when all her attention wasn’t focused on Frieda, did it take them to put these contraptions on in the morning? Ursula was sure she would never have managed without making a mess of it. The headdress alone seemed a good enough reason not to be a nun.
They willed Frieda to live and she did. Triumph des Willens. The crisis passed and she started the long road to recovery. Pale and weak, she was going to need to convalesce and one evening when Ursula returned home from the hospital she found an envelope, hand-delivered to their door.
‘From Eva,’ she said to Jürgen, showing him the letter when he returned from work.
‘Who’s Eva?’ he asked.
‘Smile!’ Click, click, click. Anything to help keep Eva amused, she supposed. She didn’t mind. Eva had been very kind to invite them so that Frieda could breathe good mountain air and eat the fresh vegetables and eggs and milk from the Gutshof, the model farm on the slopes beneath the Berghof.
‘Is it a royal command?’ Jürgen asked. ‘Can you say no? Do you want to say no? I hope not. And it will do your headaches good too.’ She’d noticed recently that the more he rose through the echelons in the ministry, the more one-sided their conversations had become. He made statements, raised questions, answered the questions and drew conclusions without ever needing to involve her in the exchange. (A lawyer’s way perhaps.) He didn’t even seem to be aware that he was doing it.
‘The old goat has a woman after all then, does he? Who would have guessed? Did you know? No, you would have said. And to think you know her. It can only be good for us, can’t it? To be so close to the throne. For my career, which is the same thing as us. Liebling,’ he added, rather perfunctorily.
Ursula thought that being close to a throne was a rather dangerous place to be. ‘I don’t know Eva,’ Ursula said. ‘I’ve never met her. It’s Frau Brenner who knows her, knows her mother, Frau Braun. Klara used to work at Hoffmann’s sometimes, with Eva. They were at kindergarten together.’
‘Impressive,’ Jürgen said, ‘from Kaffeeklatsch to the seat of power in three easy moves. Does Fräulein Eva Braun know her old kindergarten pal, Klara, is married to a Jew?’ It was the way he said the word that surprised her. Jude. She’d never heard him say it that way before – sneering and dismissive. It drove a nail into her heart. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I am not part of the Kaffeeklatsch, as you call it.’
The Führer took up so much room in Eva’s life that when he wasn’t here she was an empty vessel. Eva kept nightly telephone vigils when her lover was absent and was like a dog, one ear fretfully cocked every evening for the call that brought her master’s voice to her.
And there was so little to do up here. After a while all the tramping along forest paths and swimming in the (freezing cold) Königsee became enervating rather than invigorating. There were only so many wildflowers you could pick, only so much sunbathing on the loungers on the terrace before you went slightly mad. There were battalions of nursemaids and nannies on the Berg, all eager to be with Frieda, and Ursula found herself with much of the same empty time on her hands as Eva. She had, stupidly, packed only one book, at least it was a long one, Mann’s Der Zauberberg. She hadn’t realized it was on the banned list. A Wehrmacht officer saw her reading it and said, ‘You’re very bold, that’s one of their forbidden books, you know.’ She supposed the way he said ‘their’ implied he wasn’t one of ‘them’. What was the worst they could do? Take the book off her and put it in the kitchen stove?
He was nice, the Wehrmacht officer. His grandmother was Scottish, he said, and he had spent many happy holidays in ‘the Highlands’.