Black Roses Read online

  She was running away, no doubt about it. From England, and her family, and from the path that until a few days ago she was all but certain to take. But suddenly it felt as though she was in Berlin because she was meant to be. Besides, she said to herself, what is the worst that could happen?

  Checking her reflection in the bookshop window, she realized that however uncertain she was feeling, nothing about her appearance betrayed it. Her suit was uncreased, despite three days of travel, and her complexion was young and fresh enough to resist the impact of a night’s interrupted sleep. She might be any young professional woman on her way to the office or out for a morning’s shopping. Who could possibly guess, from the look of her, at the turmoil she had left behind? Straightening her hair, whose glossy chestnut wisps had been caught and flattened by the wind, she tucked them back beneath her blue velvet hat, tilted it to an angle and focused on finding her way to Frau Lehmann’s.

  Chapter Two

  Frau Lehmann’s finishing school for young women occupied a large villa in the leafy west end of Berlin. It was a stately, four-storey place with steps leading up to a colonnaded porch and a creamy grey frontage topped with a red mansard roof. The city was tranquil here, with substantial houses set on broad roads that spanned out towards the Grunewald. Hidden behind hedges and railings, each differed subtly from its neighbours in architectural design, from rococo to modern, from Dutch gables and mansard roofs to cool, white cubes, with large gardens thronged with oak, pine and chestnut trees, and the occasional classical statue. Perhaps it was the famous Berliner Luft, the clear breeze that blows across the banks of the Spree, or perhaps it was just the combination of wide streets and stately buildings, but everything about this area felt solid and unchanging.

  On closer inspection, however, the houses bore signs of creeping neglect, like a mature woman whose skilful attention to make-up fails to disguise completely the attrition of age. Since the inflation, which had swept and bankrupted the nation, a seediness had overtaken the respectable elegance of this area. The lawns were mostly unmown and the hedges leant drunkenly into the street. Paint peeled discreetly from the sides of the villa Lehmann, and through the flaking railings of the first-floor balcony a climbing vine twisted, while from below poked emerald-green fronds of potted ferns, as though the unruly forces of nature were too powerful to be confined.

  Frau Lehmann had in the long years of her widowhood become an institution. During the 1920s Frau Lehmann’s had been a destination for well-born girls from English families who wanted their daughters schooled in German, singing, painting and music. Then it had contained a maid, who made the beds and waited at table, and a cook. Now, with things the way they were, there was only Frau Lehmann herself, offering a room with board for sixty marks a month, and an ancient parrot patched with shabby feathers like a moth-eaten fur coat. Clara had sent a letter warning of her arrival, but there had been no time for any kind of reply.

  She pulled the bell and peered nervously through the glass as a shadow loomed up from the dim interior. There was a frenzied yapping, coupled with the sound of bolts rattling and being drawn back, before the door creaked open.

  ‘You must be Clara. Come in. I have coffee waiting.’

  Frau Lehmann was a huge, stocky figure, encased in a black dress that seemed somehow more solid than mere wool and silk, with a lace shawl draped like a tablecloth across the top. Her silver hair was parted with mathematical exactitude and bundled into a tight ball at the back of her head and her black eyes gleamed like currants in the doughy flesh of her face. Her make-up was applied with theatrical generosity, as if she had a stage career of her own. A small hairy dog bounced at ankle height, causing Clara to step inside cautiously. She thought of the recommendation she had been given.

  “Frau Lehmann. I think that’s what she’s called. She’s terribly reliable. Penny Dudley-Ward stayed with her. She teaches singing.”

  This description had a somewhat deflating effect on Clara, conjuring the picture of herself yodelling teutonic tunes with a gaggle of other English girls rather than leading a cosmopolitan existence far from drab London. But she didn’t know another soul in the city, so right now she had no choice.

  With an imperious wave Frau Lehmann directed Clara into a gloomy drawing room exuding a dismal smell of mothballs, dust and ancient boiled food. Clara’s heart sank. All the furniture felt too big, like a giant’s house into which she had mistakenly wandered. There was an enormous, shabby sofa and a couple of armchairs parked like tanks. The walls were papered brown and there was a lamp with a beaded fringe that gave off a gloomy red light.

  ‘I keep photographs of all my young women,’ said Frau Lehmann, sinking effortfully onto a horsehair armchair. ‘They often come back to see me. Do you know the Cavendishes?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Or the Ormsby-Gores?’

  ‘Sorry, but no.’

  There continued a list of families whom Clara didn’t know, until Frau Lehmann relapsed with a sigh, convinced that Clara came from the lowest echelons of London society.

  She handed Clara a slice of poppy-seed cake and a cup of hot, burnt coffee, which she made drinkable by adding three teaspoons of sugar. As she took it, Clara jumped at the sound of a curse, which emanated from behind her head.

  ‘Stop it, Mitzi, you filthy creature.’

  Frau Lehmann grunted and pulled a cover over a parrot’s cage. Clara’s eyes strayed to the mantelpiece, where a photograph of a young man with Frau Lehmann’s moon faced stare was decorated by a red and black enamel Hakenkreuz dangling from the frame.

  ‘Otto, that is. My son. He died at the front in 1917. Nineteen years old.’ Her fingers massaged the greasy hair of the dog which was now lolling beside her on the sofa.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Clara felt somehow she were being held obscurely to blame.

  Frau Lehmann shook her head, as though accepting Clara’s complicity in her son’s death, yet graciously forgiving her. ‘We have lived through terrible times. But we must look to better ones ahead. Now our country is on the up again and our two nations are friends.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Your German seems rather good,’ said Frau Lehmann, with a faintly resentful tone. ‘Will you be wanting lessons? I know a very good gentleman who could bring you up to scratch. Or perhaps a little singing?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I used to offer art appreciation, but my legs are not what they were.’

  Both looked down at the dark, swaddled sausages protruding from her skirt, the stockings concertinaed in wrinkled rings.

  ‘Though you must visit the Pergamon Museum. The head of Nefertiti is there. She is the most magnificent woman.’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’

  ‘And you should meet my lodgers. We have Herr Professor Hahn, who is a very distinguished gentleman. He teaches Ancient Literature at the University. And Fräulein Viktor, a very pleasant lady, secretary to someone high up in the Labour Department.’

  There was a pause. Frau Lehman’s jaw shifted rhythmically as she worked on the poppy-seed cake, like a tortoise eating a lettuce leaf, with about the same amount of urgency.

  ‘So do you have plans to occupy yourself?’ she enquired at last.

  ‘I’m hoping for a part in a film. At Babelsberg.’

  ‘How exciting.’ This had plainly taken her by surprise. Her little eyes fixed on Clara with fresh interest.

  ‘They want multilingual actresses, you see. All the best films have to have French and English versions too, so they need actresses who speak the languages. I have an appointment tomorrow.’

  ‘I see.’ Torn between the prospect of harbouring a potential film star beneath her roof, and dismay at the shortfall in tutoring income, Frau Lehman was evidently reserving judgement.

  ‘Well, you’ll want to rest before dinner. All my residents eat together, so I’ll introduce you later. I’ll show you to your room.’

  She heaved herself to her fee
t and trundled ahead to the bedroom. On the way Clara glimpsed rooms stuffed with unusually hideous furniture of fretted oak, like trees in a gloomy forest. Along the end of the corridor was a bathroom, with chequered black and white tiles and clanking pipes. The bedroom on the top floor was tiny, with a brown carpet, a gigantic wardrobe into which she put her bag, and a window overlooking the conifer-lined street. There was a basin in the corner with a mirror over it, and a card attached to the inside of the door: “Dinner at eight. No hot water before bed.”

  Closing the door behind her, Clara sat on the green counterpane and it sank beneath her as though she were being swallowed up into the earth. She had a fleeting feeling that when she slept, she might disappear into a crevasse and never get up. She thought of all the other girls Frau Lehmann had boasted of, and wondered if they had sat here and cried with homesickness or, more likely, made sure they spent every second of their spare time at concerts and the theatre.

  Then she shook herself. With any luck she wouldn’t be seeing much of Frau Lehmann, or the frightful-sounding lodgers. The next morning she was to present herself at the world-famous Babelsberg Studios, find Mr Max Townsend, film producer, and audition for his new film, Black Roses. Gazing over at the cracked basin, down which an ochre stain snaked from the tap, Clara reflected on what had brought her here.

  When Clara first stated her ambition to go on the stage, she might as well have said she wanted to enter the white slave trade and have done with it. She had ballet lessons, of course, but almost every girl of her family’s acquaintance had ballet lessons as a child, and they didn’t end up in rep at the Eastbourne Pavilion. To her father, the idea was at first preposterous, and then a phase. To her mother, it was simply out of the question. ‘Acting is not the kind of thing I’d want a daughter of mine to do.’ Their own plan for her entry into the adult world had been via an organisation called the Queen’s Secretarial College for Young Gentlewomen in South Kensington. Clara still remembered her dismay on finding the brochure on the table in the hall one day shortly before her sixteenth birthday – duck-egg blue with scrolly silver lettering. Flicking through, she read, ‘Young ladies will find it congenial to learn alongside other gentlewomen in a setting where high standards of etiquette are always maintained.’

  Faced with this level of opposition to her chosen career, Clara started a bit of private study. She sent off for a manual on ‘charm’, which she found advertised in the pages of The Lady, a magazine her mother took for the purpose of hiring servants, and followed its oblique wisdom as closely as she could. ‘When a woman reflects her innate charm, all else of value follows as naturally as flowers turn to the sun.’

  She posed before the mirror and learnt long screeds of Shakespeare by heart, for future auditions. She was Portia, Hermia, Lady Macbeth. She attended Saturday matinées in the West End and sat up in the gods. She wrote to Gerald du Maurier and Constance Cummings, and received a signed photograph from the former with a note wishing her well in her ‘theatrical career’, which she kept like a talisman tucked in the side of her mirror. Then her mother died, and the issue of Clara’s career stopped mattering overnight. Suddenly, nobody really cared what she did.

  The London School of Acting and Musical Theatre, which Clara joined the autumn after leaving school, had its rehearsal rooms in a church hall off Waterloo, where the tang of polish barely masked the smell of unwashed feet left over from dancing lessons, and leaflets for the Mothers’ Coffee Circle fluttered from cork boards. The roof was crisscrossed with red painted iron rafters, and at the end of the hall was a raised platform where Monsieur LeClerc, who took Speech, Voice and Acting, went to elaborate lengths to emphasize correct pronunciation in Shakespeare and to lament the inferiority of the English stage compared to the French.

  The staff were a mixed bunch. There was Miss Stuyveson, who taught deportment. “Don’t slouch, Clara. You’re playing Nora, not one of the three witches. You’ll have a widow’s hump by the time you’re thirty!” Fran Goodbody, an athletic woman with tight red curls, taught fencing and stage technique and Miss Wisznewski, a Polish woman with a starved, ballerina’s body, gave movement classes, for which they wore navy leotards and tights, and had to skip around the stage. But Clara’s favourite teacher was Paul Croker, an intense young man with a patched tweed jacket and goatee beard, who had met Lee Strasberg in New York and was an avid disciple of method acting. ‘You must work from the inside out, Clara. Access your emotional memory. Use everything that has happened in your life to create the character you are working on. It’s not enough to look like Viola, it’s not enough to sound like Viola, you must be Viola.’

  After the academy, however, work had been scarce. Clara garnered one line of praise in the Eastbourne Courier for her “graceful performance” as Sorel Bliss in Hay Fever, and she had merited a minute photograph in The Tatler under the caption “Sir Ronald Vine’s daughter takes to the stage” when she had a few lines at the Hampstead Everyman. There had been several seasons in rep but, at the age of twenty-six, she found herself without anything resembling a career. A grown woman with no job and no husband, still living at home with her father.

  Not that her father seemed to mind. He barely seemed to notice her. As often as not, after a day spent tramping around auditions and rehearsal rooms, she would return to a house full of strangers. Ronald Vine had coped with his wife’s death by focusing on work, and after losing his seat in Parliament he had thrown himself into his special interest: Anglo-German friendship. He formed a society made up of politicians and businessmen, with the odd, fanatical spinster thrown in. They attended rallies and discussed plans to strengthen ties between the two countries. They held meetings at Ponsonby Terrace, a narrow street of Georgian houses in Pimlico, where they would sit and smoke in the drawing room, debating the dangers of Bolshevism. Her sister, Angela, had enthusiastically joined the cause, but Clara couldn’t think of anything worse. When she came home she had got into the habit of opening the door very quietly and listening out for the sound of unfamiliar voices. If she heard them she would take off her shoes, dart silently through the hall and creep up the stairs.

  Things might have stayed pretty much as they were if she had not met Dennis Beaumont.

  Dennis was the kind of man who seemed to be born at the age of forty. He was a balding lawyer with a narrow moustache who had courted her assiduously, taking her out for long evening drives in his Morgan while he discussed his intention to practise at the bar until the time was right to make a bid for a seat in Parliament. Somehow, without knowing how it happened, Clara found herself part of his plan.

  She didn’t realize it properly until the last evening she had seen him. They were at a party in Chelsea, held by one of Dennis’s friends, Gerald Mortimer, a brick-faced barrister who had just returned from a visit to the continent and was talking about the new election in Germany, and the success of the National Socialists.

  ‘Let’s hope they provide a bit of stability after the chaos that’s been going on there,’ said Gerald, waving a flute of champagne. ‘Hitler’s the only thing keeping the Germans from a tide of Communism.’

  ‘But then,’ sighed Dennis, ‘the Communists will be coming here soon, won’t they? All sorts will be flooding here. Jews and bankrupts. We’ll have to put safeguards in place or we’ll be swamped.’

  ‘Swamped is a bit extreme, isn’t it?’ said Clara. She loathed Dennis’s tendency to exaggerate. She supposed it was the aspirant politician in him.

  ‘Not a bit of it. There will be thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. I know you’re half-German, my darling, but I don’t think you understand the implications.’

  ‘As it happens,’ said Gerald importantly, ‘an MP friend of mine, Edward Doran, asked the Home Secretary just today to take measures to prevent any alien Jews entering the country. No one wants to sound heartless, but he thinks an influx of Jewish refugees could threaten our entire civilization.’

  ‘I think what he said was that it would be the End of Brit
ish Civilization if we let them in.’

  The speaker was a handsome, fair-haired man with a cigar. He paused to exhale a thin line of smoke. ‘Whereas I would say it was the End of British Civilization if we didn’t.’

  Dennis made an irritated little gesture. ‘Clara dear, do you know Rupert Allingham?’

  Gerald was annoyed. ‘Come on, Rupert. You have to admit Herr Hitler has a point.’

  ‘Herr Hitler?’ Allingham gave a laconic smile. ‘Let’s just say I’m not entirely seduced by him.’

  ‘Rupert’s a journalist,’ said Dennis to Clara, as if in explanation.

  Allingham gave a little bow and smiled. ‘And you’re the actress,’ he said.

  Though Clara was flattered to be recognized, it felt like false pretences. She’d been out of work for a month. That very afternoon her agent, an ancient man with a dinner-stained cravat and offices in Wardour Street, had said, ‘Nothing doing, ducky,’ when she telephoned about her employment prospects.

  ‘Will you be appearing in anything soon?’

  ‘I’m expecting an audition for the Liverpool Rep,’ she lied smoothly.

  ‘Not,’ said Dennis, giving her a hard squeeze round the waist, ‘that she’ll have any time for acting once we’re married.’

  Before she had a chance to reply, they were interrupted and Clara escaped to the balcony floor. A mixture of anger and surprise cascaded through her. No time for acting! When had anyone ever said anything about that? How could Dennis presume to say such a thing when they had not even discussed it? And as for getting married! They hadn’t ever discussed getting married either. Who said she was going to marry Dennis? Settle down in his home and do what exactly? Have babies and take tea with his dry stick of a mother, an intolerable woman who disliked Clara because she had German blood and had complained to her vicar because he owned a dachshund? Her heart hammering and a flush on her cheeks, Clara stared over the rail at the couples circling awkwardly round the dance floor like pairs of courting crabs.