A War of Flowers (2014) (3 page)

A passing barrow boy aimed an admiring whistle up at her balcony, forcing Clara’s mind back to the present. Paris had always been one of those big, statement places, like a famous perfume
that everyone knows, burdened with the weight of expectation. The Parisian air was a complex fragrance of baking and drains, a whisper of flowers, undercut with something acrid and rotten. The
leavings of vegetables from the market stalls mingled with the enticing aroma of garlic and coffee. Berlin’s own air, by contrast, carried the grey, metallic edge of wet stone and steel
offset by the tang of pine from the Grunewald.

Much as she relished the prospect of a day in Paris, Clara wished she had someone to share it with. Most of the time she liked her solitude; at the age of thirty-one it was part of her identity
almost, her self-sufficiency a toughened carapace against the barbs of loneliness, and safer too. But solitude seemed wrong in the city of romance. This was Paris after all, whose streets murmured
with the promises of lovers through the ages, and she was alone. Leaning back against the casement, a whirlwind of memories assailed her, like leaves thrown around in a breeze.

She had not seen Ralph Sommers, the man she had met in Berlin the previous year, since the day he left for London. Since then, his work as a British agent had been exposed and now it was too
dangerous for him to return to Germany. He had sent Clara a message saying that so long as she stayed there, she must do her best to forget him. It hurt, but she was trying her hardest.

Then there was Leo Quinn. Leo, who had returned to England after she turned down his proposal of marriage. In her darkest moments Clara questioned if there was something within her that
destroyed her deepest relationships. Did she shy away from intimacy or deliberately reject it? Did she emit some invisible signal that said, ‘Leave me alone’?

The previous evening the director, Willi Forst, had hosted a dinner at Maxim’s for the cast. Maxim’s, just off the Place de la Concorde, was the restaurant of choice for German
visitors to Paris and Willi Forst thought its Art Nouveau opulence perfectly suited to celebrating Maupassant’s story. The group had the best table in the house, the one usually reserved for
the Aga Khan, spread with snowy linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, and they were served platters of oysters with vinegar and shallots,
quenelles de brochet
floating in a rich cream sauce,
and
crème brûlée
to finish. Ice buckets holding bottles of vintage Krug rested to one side, furred with frost. Even though they had had an early start, the actors
indulged themselves loudly, jokes and stories flowing, impressions performed, anecdotes related. The sheer relief of being away from Berlin inspired a feverish jollity, a holiday atmosphere that
had already prompted a couple of romantic liaisons amongst members of the cast and promised more nights of passion ahead. But none of the male actors had propositioned Clara. It was as though they
divined something in her which told them their approaches would be rebuffed. As they revelled in the unaccustomed fine food and called loudly for more wine, Clara felt the restaurant’s other
clientele eyeing the Germans, in their expensive suits and scented furs, with wariness and resentment.

‘To my magnificent cast!’

Willi Forst raised a glass and beamed. Sitting there, Clara thought back to the newspaper pictures in March, when Hitler entered Vienna in his six-wheeled bulletproof Mercedes, striking his
familiar pose, upright, holding on to the windscreen with his left hand while raising the other in the Nazi salute. The crowd erupting in a volcano of feeling and the flowers raining down on him
like ash. Would these Paris streets too be overtaken by tramping boots and thumping drums? Might France go the way of Austria? Austria wasn’t even Austria any more, it was part of Greater
Germany. It seemed countries could end, just as much as relationships.

A knock at her door made her turn. It was the bellboy, wearing a little navy cap and holding out a manila envelope.

‘Pour vous, mademoiselle.’

‘Merci.’ She fished for a coin and opened the envelope curiously. Inside was a cream notecard, heavy and good quality, with a logo of Big Ben and a company name at the top. Beneath
was spiky, academic handwriting.

London Films? Clara frowned. She had heard of it. From what she remembered it had been started by the Hungarian émigré Alexander Korda. It was based at Denham in Buckinghamshire
and had hired Winston Churchill as a screenwriter. Hadn’t they made
The Private Life of Henry VIII
and
Things To Come
and last year’s
Fire Over England
, with
Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh? Clara had taken a special interest in that one because a director had once casually referred to her as ‘the German Vivien Leigh’, so she had attended
the first night at the Ufa Palast and sat in the cinema, closely studying the actress’s classic, porcelain beauty, before concluding that the director, unfortunately, was exaggerating. Clara
might have the same heart-shaped face, clear brow and dark eyebrows, but her cheeks were fuller, her skin more olive and her mouth had a rebellious purse to it which gave her looks a distinctive,
less classic edge.

She checked her watch. It was already 11 a.m. She was suddenly, unaccountably excited. This proposal would almost certainly be the offer of a part – she was gradually becoming better
known, and as many of the German Jewish actors and directors who had been forced to leave Berlin had now relocated to England, it was likely that one of them had mentioned her name. Evidently
someone was looking out for her. And maybe, if this company was offering her a job, she should take it. What might it be like returning to London, picking up the threads of a life she had left five
years ago and doing an ordinary job without risk or subterfuge? Seeing her father, sister and brother and other people who had been consigned firmly to the past?

Clanging the shutters to, she grabbed a short jacket to slip over her dress. Peering in the mirror she applied a thin layer of Elizabeth Arden’s Velvet Red – always her first weapon
of concealment – and gave her reflection an encouraging smile. Dabbing a trace of powder over the freckles that the sun had brought out, she pulled a brush through her hair and pinned it
loosely at the nape of her neck with a diamanté clip. Then she donned her sunglasses. Evidently the idea of a day without business was just a fantasy after all.

The bistro Chez André was a twenty-minute walk away, situated on the other side of the Champs Elysées. Past the Rue de Rivoli, Clara entered the Tuileries Garden,
enjoying the perfect mathematical precision of its gravel and greenery. She had always loved patterns. Her father had noticed, when he still noticed his children, that Clara possessed an unusually
retentive memory and he had done his best to develop it with memory techniques and card games and mathematical exercises. For a short while Clara, the cleverest of the Vine children, had been an
experiment for him, a project almost, to be developed and tested and trialled before, as abruptly as he began, he lost interest. Yet for Clara puzzles remained a lasting passion. She loved word
games and riddles of any kind. She learned how to memorize a deck of cards using images of their old home in Surrey. She liked to work out crosswords in her head, with a stock of the esoteric words
– triptych, orris, eidetic – that compilers tended to favour. Her mind organized the world into patterns quite unconsciously; the number of tiles on a floor, biscuits in a box, the
repetition of trees or flags or lampposts, or, as here, the perfectly mirror-like symmetry of the flowerbeds and paths. By the same token, she noticed anomalies too. Even without knowing she was
doing it her brain sought out anything that was wrong, any asymmetry or deviation from the norm. Difference leapt out at her. The knots in a piece of wood, the fleck in the glass, the flaw in a
Turkish carpet that spoiled the line.

But that morning everything was normal, or as normal as a city could be, perched on the edge of war.

The Champs Elysées was planted with geraniums and begonias, the flowers pushing up in the beds, and bees, like a hundred seamstresses, were nipping and dipping their way through the
blooms. Clara threaded her way through elegant women pulling along children in smocked dresses and dogs on plaited leather leashes. Parisians always made other nationalities feel worse-dressed, she
concluded, even though her own dress flattered her, with its delicate leaf-green cotton cinched at the waist and setting off the colour of her eyes.

From its scarlet awning to its basket-weave chairs and pavement tables, Chez André in the Rue Marbeuf conformed in every respect to an idealized vision of a Parisian
café. Inside, nicotine-stained walls enclosed globe lamps and vinyl banquettes. A poster warned customers to beware of pickpockets. Potted palms and a glass partition separated the smarter
part of the restaurant from the café area, and at the zinc counter the patron was polishing glasses while a waitress in white collar and apron deposited cups of coffee on a table.

As she was early, Clara decided to walk to the end of the street and dawdle, loitering in front of the shops, making the most of the shopping trip she had been obliged to forego. She lingered
outside a chocolaterie whose window was decked with jewel-coloured jellied fruits, sugar almonds, rich dark chocolate, and cakes with labels that made them sound like perfect, individual works of
art –
soleil levant, opéra, charlotte aux fruits exotiques, religieuse
. Her mouth watered and her stomach clenched as the dark waft of chocolate emerged from the shop.

As she gazed in the window Clara noticed something curious reflected behind her. On the other side of the road, a man was slouched with a wide flat cap rammed onto his head, customary cigarette
perched to one side of his mouth, and his hands thrust into his pockets. The archetypal Parisian flâneur. He was leaning against the peeling green paint of an advertisement column, apparently
loitering the day away; yet suddenly, this air of profound relaxation was interrupted by a swift, instinctive look from right to left down the road, before he slumped back into his previous
position. Clara was instantly alert. Even in the hazy grain of a shop window’s reflection, she recognized that look. It was not the glance of a casual bystander, dawdling the day away.
Something was wrong about this situation. The man was a watcher. A tail.

Alarm and astonishment rose in her. Was she really being followed, here in Paris? Could she not manage a brief respite from the all-encompassing surveillance of the Gestapo? Being in France had
encouraged her to relax and let her guard down, yet she had forgotten that foreigners, and Germans in particular, were conspicuous just now.

If the shadow was looking down the road, he must be waiting for someone, probably a colleague, which meant there were two people on her tail. A team. A swift glance confirmed that she was right.
A second man, with dark, brilliantined hair, a copy of
Paris-Soir
under his arm and a smart, velvet-napped felt hat tipped over his face, was strolling in her direction. Unlike his
accomplice, something about this man was adamantly not French. For one thing he was wearing a trench coat, even in the height of summer, over a well-cut suit, and for another, his bearing, the
determined nature of his strut and the touch of arrogance in the tilt of his head, told her in a single glance that he was German.

Even as she registered this information, Clara’s brain began to formulate a plan. Operating on a sharp, inbuilt reflex, and despite her urge to vanish, she remained rooted to the spot
while she worked out her next move. Watching her own ghost in the window, apparently choosing chocolates, she decided her best option would be to enter the shop and spend a long time deliberating
between Montélimar and Noisettes, before slipping out and, instead of returning to her hotel, heading back to the Boulevard Haussmann for one of the large department stores, Galeries
Lafayette or Printemps, and giving her followers the slip from the ladies’ changing rooms. Either that, or disappear into the nearest Métro station and lead them a dance round the
whole of Paris. She had done it before. It was a part she played well.

In the few seconds it took for these thoughts to form in Clara’s mind, the man in the felt hat passed her, and she saw the flâneur swivel and follow suit. Glancing to her right she
realized in a flash that she had made a mistake. The watchers had no interest in her at all. Instead, their attention was fixed on a middle-aged man in horn-rimmed spectacles and a herringbone
suit, who had entered Chez André and was making his way to a seat at the back. The flâneur took up residence in a doorway opposite and the felt hat man kept walking. The pair were
shadows, but Clara was not the target of their surveillance. That target was, quite evidently, the person she had come to meet. She lingered a few moments more in front of the shop, before entering
Chez André and heading for the bar.

The man Clara assumed to be Guy Hamilton was sitting on a red vinyl banquette, extracting a pen from his inside pocket and applying himself to a postcard of the Eiffel Tower with a glass of beer
beside him. He was in his mid-forties and above average height, with tightly cropped sandy hair, a tawny moustache and a face as mild and forgettable as an English summer’s day. If she were
forced to memorize him, Clara would have focused on the dusting of freckles across his sallow complexion or the receding hairline which gave him a faintly donnish air. As it was, there was no time
for analysis because she needed to alert him, as soon as she could, without compromising herself.