Im Grunde hat es eine merkwürdige Bewandtnis mit diesem Sicheinleben an fremdem Orte, dieser – sei es auch – mühseligen Anpassung und Umgewöhnung, she read and translated laboriously and rather badly – ‘There is something strange about getting this settling in to a new place, the laborious adaptation and familiarization …’ How true, she thought. Mann was hard work. She would have preferred a boxload of Bridget’s gothic romances. She was sure they wouldn’t be verboten.
The mountain air had done her headaches no good at all (nor had Thomas Mann). They were, if anything, worse. Kopfschmerzen, the very word made her head sore. ‘I can’t find anything wrong with you,’ the doctor at the hospital told her. ‘It must be your nerves.’ He gave her a prescription for veronal.
Eva herself had no intellect to sustain her but then the Berg wasn’t exactly the court of an intelligentsia. The only person whom you might have called a thinker was Speer. It wasn’t that Eva led an un-examined life, far from it, Ursula suspected. You could sense the depression and neuroses hidden beneath all that Lebenslust, but anxiety wasn’t what a man looked for in a mistress.
Ursula supposed that to be a successful mistress (although she had never been one herself, either successful or unsuccessful) a woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head. Gemütlichkeit. Eva was amiable, she chatted about inconsequential things and made no attempt to be brainy or astute. Powerful men needed their women to be unchallenging, the home should not be an arena for intellectual debate. ‘My own husband told me this so it must be true!’ she wrote to Pamela. He hadn’t meant it in the context of himself – he was not a powerful man. ‘Not yet, anyway,’ he laughed.
The political world was of concern only in that it took the object of Eva’s devotion away from her. She was shunted rudely out of the public eye, allowed no official status, allowed no status at all, as loyal as a dog but with less recognition than a dog. Blondi was higher in the hierarchy than Eva. Her greatest regret, Eva said, was not being allowed to meet the duchess when the Windsors visited the Berghof.
Ursula frowned on hearing this. ‘But she’s a Nazi, you know,’ she said unthinkingly. (‘I suppose I should be more careful in what I say!’ she wrote to Pamela.) Eva had merely replied, ‘Yes, of course, she is,’ as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the consort of the once and never again King of England to be a Hitlerite.
The Führer must be seen to tread a noble, solitary path of chastity, he couldn’t marry because he was wedded to Germany. He had sacrificed himself to his country’s destiny – at least that was the gist of it, Ursula thought she might have discreetly nodded off at this point. (It was one of his endless after-dinner monologues.) Like our own Virgin Queen, she thought, but didn’t say so, as she expected the Führer would not like to be compared to a woman, even an English aristocratic one with the heart and stomach of a king. At school, Ursula had had a history teacher who had been particularly fond of quoting Elizabeth I. Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
Eva would have been happier back in Munich, in the little bourgeois house that the Führer had bought for her, where she could lead a normal social life. Here, in her gilded cage, she had to amuse herself, flicking through magazines, discussing the latest hairstyles and love lives of film stars (as if Ursula knew anything on the subject), and parading one outfit after another like a quick-change artist. Ursula had been in her bedroom several times, a pretty, feminine boudoir quite different from the heavy-handed décor of the rest of the Berghof, spoilt only by the portrait of the Führer that was given pride of place on the wall. Her hero. The Führer had not hung a reciprocal portrait of his mistress in his rooms. Instead of Eva’s face smiling at him from the wall he was challenged by the stern features of his own beloved hero, Frederick the Great. Friedrich der Grosse.
‘I always mishear “grocer” for “great”,’ she wrote to Pamela. Grocers were not, generally speaking, warmongers and conquerors. What had the Führer’s apprenticeship for greatness been? Eva shrugged, she didn’t know. ‘He’s always been a politician. He was born a politician.’ No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.
The Führer’s bedroom, adjoining Eva’s bathroom, was out of bounds. Ursula had seen him sleeping though, not in that sacrosanct bedroom but in the warm post-prandial sunshine on the Berghof’s terrace, the great warrior’s mouth slackly open in lèse-majesté. He looked vulnerable but there were no assassins on the Berg. Plenty of guns, thought Ursula, easy enough to get hold of a Luger and shoot him through the heart or the head. But then what would happen to her? Worse, what would happen to Frieda?
Eva sat next to him, watching fondly as one might a child. In sleep he belonged to no one but her.
She was, fundamentally, nothing more nor less than a nice young woman. You couldn’t necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?)
Eva had a wonderful athletic figure, one that Ursula felt quite envious of. She was a healthy, physical girl – a swimmer, a skier, a skater, a dancer, a gymnast – who loved the outdoors, who loved movement. And yet she had attached herself like a limpet to an indolent middle-aged man, a creature of the night, literally, who didn’t rise from his bed before midday (and yet who could still take an afternoon nap), who didn’t smoke or drink or dance or overindulge – spartan in his habits although not his vigour. A man who had never been seen stripped off further than his Lederhosen (comically un-attractive to the non-Bavarian eye), whose halitosis had repelled Ursula on first meeting and who swallowed tablets like sweets for his ‘gas problem’ (‘I hear he farts,’ Jürgen said, ‘be warned. Must be all those vegetables’). He was concerned for his dignity but he wasn’t really vain, as such. ‘Merely a megalomaniac,’ she wrote to Pamela.
A car and a driver had been sent for them and when they arrived at the Berghof the Führer himself had greeted them – on the great steps, where he welcomed dignitaries, where he had welcomed Chamberlain last year. When Chamberlain returned to Britain he said that he ‘now knew what was in Herr Hitler’s mind’. Ursula doubted that anyone knew that, not even Eva. Particularly not Eva.
‘You’re very welcome here, gnädiges Frau,’ he said. ‘You should stay until the liebe Kleine is better.’
‘He likes women, children, dogs, really what can you fault?’ Pamela wrote. ‘It’s just a shame he’s a dictator with no respect for the law or common humanity.’ Pamela had quite a few friends in Germany from her university days, many of them Jewish. She had a full house (well, three of a kind) of boisterous boys (quiet little Frieda would be quite overwhelmed in Finchley) and now wrote that she was pregnant again, ‘fingers crossed for a girl’. Ursula missed Pammy.
Pamela would not fare well under this regime. Her sense of moral outrage would be too great for her to remain silent. She wouldn’t be able to bite her tongue like Ursula did (a scold’s bridle). They also serve who only stand and wait. Did that apply to one’s ethics? Is this my defence, Ursula wondered? It might be better to misquote Edmund Burke rather than Milton. All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.
The day after they arrived there had been a children’s tea-party for someone’s birthday, a little Goebbels or Bormann, Ursula wasn’t sure – there were so many of them and they were so similar. She was reminded of the ranks of the military at the Führer’s birthday parade. Scrubbed and polished, each one had a special word from Uncle Wolf before they were allowed to indulge in the cake that was set out on a long table. Poor sweet-toothed Frieda (who undoubtedly took after her mother in this respect) was too heavy-lidded with fatigue to eat any. There was always cake on the Berghof, poppyseed Streusel and cinnamon and plum Tortes, puff pastries filled with cream, chocolate cake – great domes of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – Ursula wondered who ate all this cake. She herself certainly did her best to get through it.