‘Me?’ the outraged flower of British womanhood replied.
‘Yes, you.’
Reluctantly, Sylvie raised her arm. Ursula thought that until the day she died she would remember the sight of her mother giving the Nazi salute. Of course, Ursula said to herself afterwards, this was in ’34, back when one’s conscience hadn’t been shrunk and muddled by fear, when she had been blind to what was truly afoot. Blinded by love perhaps, or just dumb stupidity. (Pamela had seen, unblinkered by anything.)
Sylvie had made the journey to Germany so that she could inspect Ursula’s unexpected husband. Ursula wondered what she had planned to do if she hadn’t found Jürgen suitable – drug and kidnap her and haul her on to the Schnellzug? They were still in Munich then, Jürgen hadn’t started working for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin, they hadn’t moved to the Savignyplatz or become parents to Frieda, although Ursula was cumbersome with pregnancy.
‘Fancy you becoming a mother,’ Sylvie said, as if it were something she had never expected. ‘To a German,’ she added thoughtfully.
‘To a baby,’ Ursula said.
‘It’s nice to get away,’ Sylvie said. From what, Ursula wondered?
Klara met them for lunch one day and afterwards said, ‘Your mother is rather chic.’ Ursula had never thought of Sylvie as stylish but she supposed that compared with Klara’s mother, Frau Brenner, as soft and doughy as a loaf of Kartoffelbrot, Sylvie was quite a fashion plate.
On the way back from lunch, Sylvie said she wanted to visit Oberpollingers and buy a present for Hugh. When they reached the department store they found the windows daubed with anti-Jewish slogans and Sylvie said, ‘Gracious, what a mess.’ The shop was open for business but a pair of grinning louts in SA uniform were loitering in front of the doors, putting people off from entering. Not Sylvie, who had marched past the Brownshirts while Ursula reluctantly trailed in her wake into the store and up the thickly carpeted staircase. In the face of the uniforms, Ursula had shrugged a cartoon helplessness and murmured rather shamefacedly, ‘She’s English.’ She thought that Sylvie didn’t understand what it was like living in Germany but in retrospect she thought that perhaps Sylvie had understood very well.
‘Ah, here’s lunch,’ Eva said, putting down the camera and taking Frieda’s hand. She led her to the table and then propped her up on an extra cushion before heaping her plate with food. Chicken, roast potatoes and a salad, all from the Gutshof. How well they ate here. Milchreis for Frieda’s pudding, the milk fresh that morning from the cows of the Gutshof. (A less childish Käsekuchen for Ursula, a cigarette for Eva.) Ursula remembered Mrs Glover’s rice pudding, a creamy, sticky yellow beneath its crisp brown skin. She could smell the nutmeg even though she knew there was none in Frieda’s dish. She couldn’t remember the German for nutmeg and thought it was too difficult to explain to Eva. The food was the only thing that she was going to miss about the Berghof so she might as well enjoy it while she could, she thought, and helped herself to more Käsekuchen.
Lunch was served to them by a small contingent of the army of staff who serviced the Berghof. The Berg was a curious combination of Alpine holiday chalet and military training camp. A small town really with a school, a post office, a theatre, a large SS barracks, a rifle range, a bowling alley, a Wehrmacht hospital and much more, everything but a church really. There were also plenty of young, handsome Wehrmacht officers who would have made better suitors for Eva.
After lunch they walked up to the Teehaus on the Mooslahner Kopf, Eva’s yappy, nippy dogs running along beside them. (If only one of them would fall off the parapet or from the outlook.) Ursula had the beginnings of a headache and sank gratefully into one of the armchairs with green-flowered linen upholstery that she found particularly offensive to the eye. Tea – and cake, naturally – were brought to them from the kitchen. Ursula swallowed a couple of codeine with her tea and said, ‘I think Frieda’s well enough to go home now.’
Ursula went to bed as early as she could, slipping in between the cool white sheets of the guest-room bed she shared with Frieda. Too tired to sleep, she found herself still awake at two in the morning so she put on the bedside light – Frieda slept the deep sleep of children, only illness could wake her – and she got out pen and paper and wrote to Pamela instead.
Of course, none of these letters to Pamela was ever posted. She couldn’t be completely sure that they wouldn’t be read by someone. You just didn’t know, that was the awful thing (how much more awful for others). Now she wished they weren’t in the dog-days of heat when the Kachelofen in the guest room was cold and unlit, as it would have been safer to burn the correspondence. Safer never to have written at all. One could no longer express one’s true thoughts. Truth is truth to the end of reckoning. What was that from? Measure for Measure? But perhaps truth was asleep until the end of reckoning. There was going to be an awful lot of reckoning when the time came.
She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner. She had planned to go back in May but then Frieda had become sick. She’d had it all planned, their suitcases were packed, stored beneath the bed, where they were usually kept empty so Jürgen had no reason to look inside them. She had the train tickets, the onward boat-train tickets, had told no one, not even Klara. She hadn’t wanted to move their passports – Frieda’s luckily still valid from their trip to England in ’35 – from the big porcupine-quill box where all their documents were kept. She had checked they were there almost every day but then the day before they were to go she looked in the box and there was no sign of them. She thought she was mistaken, rifled through birth and death and marriage certificates, through insurance and guarantees, Jürgen’s will (he was a lawyer, after all), all kinds of paperwork except for what mattered. In mounting panic she emptied the lot on to the carpet and went through everything one by one, again and again. No passports, only Jürgen’s. In desperation she went through every drawer in the house, searched inside every shoebox and cupboard, beneath sofa cushions and mattresses. Nothing.
They ate supper as normal. She could barely swallow. ‘Are you feeling ill?’ Jürgen asked, solicitously.
‘No,’ she said. Her voice sounded squeaky. What could she say? He knew, of course, he knew.
‘I thought we might take a holiday,’ he said. ‘On Sylt.’
‘Sylt?’
‘Sylt. We won’t need a passport for there,’ he said. Did he smile? Did he? And then Frieda was ill and nothing else mattered.
‘Er kommt!’ Eva said happily the next morning at breakfast. The Führer was coming.
‘When? Now?’
‘No, this afternoon.’
‘What a shame, we’ll be gone by then,’ Ursula said. Thank God, she thought. ‘Do thank him, won’t you?’
They were taken home in one of the fleet of black Mercedes from the Platterhof garage, driven by the same chauffeur who had brought them to the Berghof.
The next day Germany invaded Poland.
April 1945
THEY HAD LIVED for months in the cellar, like rats. When the British were bombing by day and the Americans by night there was nothing else for it. The cellar beneath the apartment block in the Savignyplatz was dank and disgusting, a small paraffin lamp for light and one bucket for a lavatory, yet the cellar was better than one of the bunkers in town. She had been caught with Frieda near the zoo in a daylight raid and had taken shelter in the Zoo Station flak tower – thousands of people crammed in, the air supply gauged by a candle (as if they were canaries). If the candle goes out, someone told her, everyone has to leave, out into the open even if a raid is in progress. Near to where they were crushed against a wall, a man and a woman were embracing (a polite term for what they were doing) and as they were leaving they had to step over an old man who had died during the raid. The worst thing, even worse than this, was that as well as being a shelter the enormous concrete citadel was a gigantic anti-aircraft battery, several huge guns pounding away on the roof the whole time so that the shelter shook with every recoil. It was the closest to hell that Ursula ever hoped to come.