A War of Flowers (2014) (51 page)
‘People like me.’
‘Yes. He mentioned you specifically.’
‘Is that why you’re here then? Because Dansey sent you?’
‘It might be why he approached me, but it’s not why I came. I came because war could break out at any time, and I wanted to know what you planned to do.’
‘If that was all, you could have asked Rupert.’
His eyes gleamed. He caught her in his arms again and kissed her, burying his face in her flesh and inhaling the deep warm scent of her.
‘I came, Clara, because every day away from you convinced me that I shouldn’t live a second more of my life without you. When I insisted on you leaving Berlin if we were to be
married, I was a fearful, anxious fool. All I could see was you being arrested, or suffering, and I wanted to save you from that. I thought the prospect of you risking your life was more than I
could bear. But being without you entirely was far, far worse.’
‘What did Dansey want of me?’
‘His idea is to establish an outfit inside Germany who could play an important part when war comes. He’s keen to recruit women because he thinks they have more patience. They pay
closer attention to detail. They can read relationships and human motivations better than men, he believes. I suppose that’s true. I was never good at judging you. He wants to know what you
might do, if war comes. Whether you would agree to stay here.’
‘I see.’
Suddenly she didn’t want to think about the future, or not that part of it. She lay back in his arms, remembering the time they had first met, when he told her about his hobby, translating
classical literature.
‘Are you still doing your translations?’
‘German at the moment. I’m working on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus right now. Rilke has a wonderful way of making the German language sound soft and fluid.’
‘Who was Orpheus? I can’t quite remember.’
‘He was the man who crossed the boundary between life and death to fetch his wife from the underworld. He was a beautiful singer – his music transfixed the whole of nature. Animals
would come and kneel before him when he sang. He could coax the rocks and stones to dance. Ovid wrote about him originally.’
That reminded her. ‘What did you mean when you said you set that piece of Ovid as an exercise? A teaching exercise? You’re not a schoolteacher, are you? I assumed you were working
for the film company.’
‘I am, some of the time.’
‘So what are you teaching?’
‘I’m teaching people how to use codes.’
‘Codes?’
‘Not something you know about right now, but anyone who works with us will need to understand codes, ciphers and all sorts of secret communication techniques. That’s the area
I’m working in. At the moment the outfit I work with is still pretty basic. You won’t find us in the telephone directory.’
‘So what exactly do you do?’
‘I can’t tell you, Clara, not until you need to know. But the fact is, we’re going to need more secure methods of communication. And codes will be an essential part of that. It
seemed important to me that agents had something that would be easily memorized, yet individual. Poems are a common device, but everyone chooses
Ozymandius
, or, I don’t know,
The
Charge of the Light Brigade
– poems that are easily recognized, even by foreigners. We wanted something entirely unpublished, that could never be found in a reference book, so I suggested
my translations of Ovid.’
She made a wry face. ‘Which have still not been published?’
He laughed. ‘Perhaps someday. But they’re serving a more important function right now.’
Leo ran a finger down her slender white neck and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat, breathing in the faint rose, violet and vanilla notes of her perfume, Bourjois’
Soir de
Paris.
He had bought a bottle of it in London, and kept it in his sock drawer. It was an act of foolish weakness, and he had considered giving it away, but never quite got round to it. The
scent of her had hung over his life for five long years.
Clara gazed at him, wondering how it was possible to feel so happy, with all the agony and anxiety that was going on in the city around. War might come soon, and what would that mean for Erich,
who was so keen to fight for his country? And all the friends she had here in Berlin? Five years ago, Leo had wanted her to leave Germany and now, it seemed, he was asking her to stay. Perhaps she
would not, after all, need to choose between love and duty.
‘Your Orpheus. The one who fetched his wife. What happened to her?’
‘She was allowed to leave the underworld, following him, unless he looked back.’
‘What happened if he looked back?’
‘She stayed there.’
He leant over and kissed her again, deep and lingering.
‘It’s a story, Clara.’
She looked out at the dusk. Beyond the window a swirl of migrating birds was massing, wheeling and turning in the darkening sky. A susurration of starlings, that’s what it was called, a
perfect aerial formation, tilting and diving through the early evening mist, changing direction abruptly like the whisk of a living cloak, narrowing to a twisting ribbon then bulging into a cloud.
Gradually more and more birds joined the flock so that eventually a great throng speckled the sky like a single living thing, massing above the city rooftops, scattering and then rejoining, soaring
up into the vault of clouds, preparing to journey to another latitude to seek shelter from the gathering winter storms.
The Oster Conspiracy was a wide-ranging military plot to oust Hitler in September 1938. The planned coup involved senior German military and intelligence leaders, members of
the Berlin police and many other individuals. The plan was to mount a raid on the Reich Chancellery but it failed at the eleventh hour, stymied by Chamberlain’s decision to appease
Hitler.
There has been great dispute about the whereabouts of Eva Braun’s missing diary. While her diary up to 1935 is attested, after that her writing has gone missing, and one
document, published in 1949 purporting to be her diary, has been widely dismissed as a fake.
In 1939,
Time
Magazine published an article about the relationship between Eva Braun and Hitler, saying that Hitler had ‘at least partly supported’ Eva for several years and
that she had confided to intimates that she expected to marry him within a year. Her suicide attempts are well known. Many of the women associated with Hitler attempted or committed suicide and Eva
Braun made her first attempt in 1931 and then another in 1935.
The cruise liner the
Wilhelm Gustloff
may have started out in the service of pleasure, but it became a byword for tragedy in maritime history. When war broke out the
Wilhelm Gustloff
was used by the military as a hospital ship and U-Boat training school until 30th January 1945, when the captain was ordered to evacuate German refugees and military fleeing
from the Red Army from the East Prussian port of Gotenhafen. The ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and more than nine thousand people died in the freezing Baltic waters, making it the worst
shipping disaster in history. The sinking of the pride of the Strength Through Joy programme, exactly twelve years to the day since Hitler seized power, seemed to symbolize the destruction of the
Thousand-Year Reich.
On 9th November 1938, at the goading of Goebbels, a wave of violence against Jews and Jewish property was unleashed throughout Germany in the worst pogrom since the Middle
Ages. It gained the name Kristallnacht from the amount of broken glass that littered the streets the next morning. The violence shocked the world and convinced many who had previously been
complacent of the Nazis’ true intentions towards the Jews. It was said that Goebbels planned the violence in order to regain the Führer’s favour after the disgrace of his
affair.
In writing
A War of Flowers
I am indebted to many people. I would like to thank my agent, Caradoc King, as well as Linda Shaughnessy at AP Watt/United Agents for their
cheering enthusiasm. At Simon & Schuster I am grateful to my editor Suzanne Baboneau for her wise advice and suggestions as well as to Ian Chapman, Clare Hey and Hannah Corbett. In Berlin, the
staff of the Adlon Hotel were superlatively helpful. Above all, thanks to Philip, William, Charlie and Naomi for spending more time discussing the Third Reich than most people would choose.
London, 2014
