The Words I Never Wrote Read online

  Juno made herself coffee in her favorite mug, picked up the manuscript, and started to read.

  Chapter Three

  ENGLAND, 1936

  There was something tragically sad about weddings, Cordelia decided. It wasn’t for nothing that they came at the ends of stories, rather than the beginnings. And as for the final flourish—a woman losing her name—well, it seemed plain wrong that a single ceremony should be enough to change your entire identity. Yet that was what had happened at five o’clock on June 25, 1936, when Miss Irene Elizabeth Capel became Frau Irene Weissmuller, and for some reason Cordelia was supposed to look cheerful at the idea and toast it with champagne.

  If Irene thought she had lost her identity, she wasn’t showing it. She looked perfectly serene alongside the six-foot-three figure of her new husband, who with his classic good looks and muscular solidity might have been a statue from the British Museum come alive. Beside him Irene seemed ethereal, gold hair twined into a chignon that left the back of her neck exposed, and her face, framed in a halo of light by the chandelier, tilted up to Ernst, eyes fixed in an uncharacteristically dreamy demeanor that most people took for wedded bliss.

  That was the thing about Irene, Cordelia decided; you never knew what she was really thinking. She had been the same all day, throughout the service at Netherfield Church and then the reception and dinner at Birnham Park—orange soup and quenelles of plaice—and the dance afterward. Removed, serene, almost absent from the occasion, gliding through the scene with an indifferent grace as if she were merely acting the persona of the blushing bride. The wedding guests were impervious to these minute observations and kept saying how beautiful she was. People always said that about Irene, like she was a rose or a sunset.

  Critically studying her sister, Cordelia had to agree. Saying Irene was beautiful was as reflexive as saying the sky was blue, but that evening the ivory lace and the candlelight combined to create a luminous haze, and her high cheekbones and slender waist drew every eye like an invisible tide. Cordelia had long since given up wondering how the same cocktail of parental genes could produce such different outcomes. Both sisters had similar figures and matching dark honey hair, but Cordelia was always described as “intelligent” rather than “pretty,” and her face bore a despised constellation of freckles across the nose, whereas Irene’s complexion was so unblemished it was almost translucent. Cordelia’s hair was blunt and short, with bangs that emphasized the set of her eyes; Irene’s a sleek rivulet of blond. And while Irene’s deportment had the languorous insouciance of a swan, Cordelia’s demeanor was intense and usually torn with emotion, whether blazing passion, furious frustration, or helpless laughter.

  That difference was something their grandfather Sir Hugh Capel might have explained. He was a geneticist, a friend of Huxley and Darwin, and it was he who had bought Birnham Park in the nineteenth century and set about restoring its beauties. When it was built it was little more than a square Georgian box, small, but beautifully proportioned, a mere six bedrooms with neatly mullioned windows and a sweep of low stone steps, set at the end of a featureless drive in parkland that belonged to someone else. Later residents had affronted the perfect symmetry of the original by adding wings to each side, of a lighter stone and slightly mismatched, one with a wide bay window, the other with a balustrade. Another contributed an ill-judged pair of turrets. It was Hugh Capel in the eighteen sixties who had created the oak-paneled hall, nickel-plated baths, and willow-pattern basins. He had replanted the kitchen garden, created a walk of espaliered fruit trees, and brought Italian statues to stand in the niches of the yew hedge. The view from the terrace ran past vivid herbaceous beds and a shrubbery that concealed a privy for the male gardeners, to the glass houses, full of green tomato tang and zucchini flowers pushing up garishly against the windows. Beyond, at the far end of the garden, the eye tunneled down to the honeysuckle wall. That, at least, was what the children called it; a place where the grass was allowed to run wild as it banked up a mossy wall, over which a torrent of deliciously scented honeysuckle clambered.

  Hugh’s son, John, however, was far too languid for any more additions. All he had managed was the girls: Irene, born there in 1914, and Cordelia, two years later.

  John Capel reveled in his wealth and leisure. Although his wife was an invalid who spent much of her time in her bedroom, draped in shadow, John’s sunny optimism shielded him from life’s hardships, and his rosy, childlike face mirrored his approach to the world. I am a friend to all nations! he liked to proclaim. He collected people like stamps, a wide-ranging assembly of journalists, artists, and politicians, prized for their idiosyncrasies, rarity, or celebrity. Thus the fact that his elder daughter was marrying a German was positively welcomed in the spirit of international friendship and as a blow against narrow-minded prejudice. Besides, Ernst Weissmuller was a man of taste. He had met Irene at her own graduating art exhibition, held in a tiny gallery in Cork Street, and flatteringly reviewed by Mr. Anthony Blunt, The Spectator’s art correspondent, for its “shades of Expressionism” and “glimmers of a new reality through the kinetic energy of its internal forms.” The most thrilling part of the review had been the final sentence: Miss Capel, I suspect, has the capacity to surprise us. Cordelia had chanted it over and over, first reverently, then laughingly, and then in a variety of ridiculous accents, until Irene begged her to stop.

  Ernst was the first person to buy a painting, and he chose a portrait of Cordelia in the garden, painted on an unbearably hot summer’s day. His choice annoyed Cordelia, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was part of her general puzzlement about Ernst and his arrival in their lives. He was a good decade older than Irene, but he did speak fluent English and his family were wealthy Prussians, so even if Irene had to take German citizenship and move to Berlin, at least it would be to a charming lakeside villa generously donated by her future in-laws.

  The Weissmuller family had not made it over from Germany for the wedding, on account of a surge in demand at the steelworks Herr Weissmuller Senior owned, but frankly it was just as well, Cordelia thought. Irene was going to see plenty of the Weissmullers once she arrived, and judging by the photographs they didn’t look enthralling company. The mother-in-law’s pudgy bulk was trussed in black satin, and Ernst’s sister, Gretl, was a giraffe-size version of her mother, with a pinched, disapproving face. Not that Irene would be intimidated by them. She was made of her own kind of steel, Cordelia decided, not rigid, but flexible, coiled and sprung. Even being hundreds of miles from her friends and family would not change that.

  Dad was calling for a toast. He was quite drunk now and waving his champagne, as the waiters circled, topping up glasses.

  “While I am sorry to bid farewell to my daughter…”

  Sorry. What was he talking about? It wasn’t so much sad as impossible to think of Irene leaving. What would it be like here, with no one to confide in? No one to share jokes about their parents’ more eccentric friends? What would she do?

  Even now, two years after leaving school, that question remained. Cordelia had just returned from Lyons, where she had spent six months teaching English to the bored children of a family friend, and before that she had followed Irene’s footsteps to Munich, learning German and singing at the home of Frau Elsa Klein, a plump, kindhearted widow. The result was that she now possessed two foreign languages and not the faintest idea what to do with her life.

  “So this is a happy day.”

  One of her father’s friends, Henry Franklin, had sidled up alongside Cordelia. The fact that he was a journalist probably explained why he had eschewed morning dress in favor of a mustard-colored, checked three-piece suit and clashing crimson cravat. He was a handsome man in his forties, with hair slightly longer than was fashionable, Floris eau de cologne, and a sandy mustache darkly patched with nicotine. He looked out at the throng with no visible sign of joy.

  “I suppose,” Cordelia rep
lied, disconsolately.

  Detecting a note of ambiguity, Franklin cocked an eyebrow. “You’re going to miss her, I expect. I heard you two are as thick as thieves.”

  As thick as thieves. Exactly the expression their parents used—as though the sisters’ conspiratorial intimacy must have some immoral element. It was true, she and Irene were close, but it was more complicated than that. Competitiveness was twined into that tight bond. An unspoken rivalry. But these were feelings she would not acknowledge, especially not on a day like this.

  “Just back from Italy, aren’t you?” Franklin asked.

  “France, actually. I was teaching there.”

  “Speak much French?”

  “I’m pretty fluent.”

  “Are you now?”

  “Sure. I know the slang and everything.”

  “Not been to Spain, have you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Civil war going on there. Quite a lot of interest. Plenty of different issues. Democracy versus Fascism, Republic versus Aristocracy, and so on. Which is more important, the Communist menace or the Fascist menace?”

  As she had no earthly idea, Cordelia decided it was safer to direct the question back at Franklin. “What’s your view?”

  “I’m more focused on the Germans right now. The Nazis are quite clearly assembling a large army and mobilizing their entire youth. Whereas our own young people seem interested only in cricket and the winner of the two-thirty at Sandown Park. Still…”

  His gaze alighted on the groom, whose height was emphasized by his military bearing, and whose head was harshly shaven at the sides in the way Germans favored. Toasts over, conversation had broken out again, and Ernst was gesturing in a manner that looked unnecessarily aggressive, even if there was a smile on his handsome face.

  “We can’t accuse your new brother-in-law of that. He’s quite the politician, isn’t he? He was just telling me all about Hermann Goering’s wedding. Grandest event Berlin has ever seen, apparently. Every worker in the city had their wages docked to pay for it. Hitler was best man.”

  “Surely Ernst didn’t go?”

  From what Cordelia had gathered, Ernst and his friends were opposed to the Nazis, and conveyed the impression that Hitler’s followers were lowborn thugs who would need to be reined in by more serious people, lawyers and bankers and academics such as themselves.

  “He had a good seat in the stalls. Seems the family are in with the bigwigs. They’re steelmakers, remember, so National Socialism’s been good to them. Goering’s got a four-year rearmament plan. Trouble is, people like that think they can use Herr Hitler for their own ends, but he may well end up using them.” Franklin tapped out a Player’s and offered it to her, and she accepted. “How’d they meet?” he asked, his eyes on the bride, who was laughing loyally at her new husband’s joke.

  “At Irene’s graduation exhibition from the Slade. Ernst was visiting to deliver a lecture on German law, and quite by chance he attended Irene’s exhibition and fell in love. It was a coup de foudre.”

  Cordelia used the phrase with a French flourish. That love might arrive from some higher agency like a bolt from the blue was a concept she admired, even if some marriages she had seen would require the help of a supernatural power to keep them going.

  “Coup de foudre, eh? I’ve often wondered at that term. Rather older than your sister, isn’t he?”

  “He’s thirty-five. Ernst says it’s the right time for a man to marry.”

  “Does he indeed? But is it the right time for Irene?”

  Cordelia squinted up at him. “How do you mean?”

  “To be going to Germany. What with the Rhineland.”

  Cordelia knew that some weeks earlier the German army had entered the Rhineland, contrary to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war, and that this was regarded as a dangerous buildup of German power. But she had paid little attention because the wedding preparations were in full swing and there had been endless trips to Beauchamp Place to fit her apricot silk bridesmaid dress, which was being made by a lady sent over from Worth in Paris.

  “Surely quite a few people are going right now?” She frowned. “The Olympic Games are in Berlin this year, aren’t they?”

  “True. I’m sending some men myself. On strict condition they don’t waste any of their time watching sport.”

  “Isn’t that rather the point?”

  “Not for me. My point’s the politics. I want them to examine the real Berlin under all that bunting. Take a good look at Herr Hitler’s government.”

  “German politics is very changeable, though. No government survives in Germany for very long.” Or that was what her father had said just that morning.

  Franklin paused and scrutinized her afresh. “Sure that’s not just wishful thinking?”

  Cordelia hadn’t the faintest idea. She had no thinking about international affairs, wishful or otherwise. No one had ever asked her for a political opinion, and the only ones she had encountered came from her father or Uncle David. Their uncle tended to the view that “the only good German is a dead German,” whereas Cordelia’s father maintained that war was the enemy, not the inhabitants of a great civilization. Everything, he insisted, could be solved through pacifism and international friendship.

  “I think I’d like to know more,” she replied evasively.

  Franklin nodded sagely, as if she had made a profound and perceptive remark. “And what does the future hold for you? Unless you’re getting married yourself?” His eyes darted around, as if she were concealing a fiancé among the tipsy wedding guests.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “So what are you going to do then?”

  His manner was so direct it was almost rude. That must be what it took to be a journalist. No one else had asked Cordelia about her plans. Her mother had floated the idea of a Cordon Bleu cookery course, and her father had suggested she move into Irene’s bedroom, which had more space and overlooked the garden, but otherwise the future stretched blankly ahead. Yet there was something about Henry Franklin, or perhaps his assumption that Cordelia would have well-formed opinions about everything, that induced a flash of boldness.

  “I want to write.”

  She had never said it aloud before. Perhaps the thought had never even formed fully in her head until that moment, yet she knew instantly it was true. Irene lived for painting and drawing, but words were the world Cordelia longed to move in. She liked to capture a snatch of language, a phrase that enchanted her, or a juxtaposition of two words that appealed, and jot it down. A choice metaphor or an apt description was something to savor. Up until then, playing with words had been a random process without meaning, like picking wildflowers from a meadow or rearranging buttons in a box. Her thoughts were too slippery to be molded into any kind of writing and the net of language too loose to capture her ideas. She had not learned to describe what she saw around her and make sentences sing. She knew there were tools you used—metaphor, caesura, ellipsis—but she had not fathomed how to handle them. Only the impulse was there. At school there had been an English master, Mr. Richardson, a war veteran whose leg had been withered in some unspeakable way, along with a dent in his skull where shrapnel had caught it and an ear as pink and flattened as a veal escalope. His wounds made the girls giggle and squirm, but Cordelia couldn’t help remembering how, when he began to recite poetry, Mr. Richardson was transformed. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Yeats, Browning, Shakespeare’s sonnets. He did Latin too, parts of the Aeneid, unintelligible, incantory, and almost hypnotic in its grandeur. “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.” He had reams of verse by heart that he had learned in the trenches. Though he had a sonorous delivery and would direct his milky gaze through the window when he spoke, the power of the words and the emotion they expressed transported all of them, master and girls alike, out of their dusty classroom into anot
her realm.

  “What would you write?”

  She might have guessed Henry Franklin would ask that. The truth was, she had no idea. Novels, she supposed. She had read all the novels in the house—her favorite being David Copperfield, whose opening sentence often resounded in her head.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

  But novels needed a plot and a story, as well as the requisite hero, and hours of sitting on one’s own in oppressive silence. Cordelia was far too restless to wall herself up in a study with a blank page. Her whole life was a blank page, so she was going to need to fill it first.

  “I’ve not quite decided.”

  She was itching to escape. She glanced across to Irene, who immediately caught her eye and smiled in sympathy. Communication between the sisters had always been instant. They possessed a sibling signaling no outsider could unscramble. A scarcely perceptible code of single words or phrases, quick movements of the eyes or lips. Still on Ernst’s arm, Irene shot her a look that was both apologetic and reassuring. It said, Don’t miss me too much. We’ll always share everything. I promise.