Wild Lavender (32 page)

‘Hello,’ I said into the mouthpiece.

The person at the other end mumbled something in German.

‘I don’t speak German,’ I said.

‘Ah, you are French,’ the man said. ‘You are beautiful. May I come over to your table?’

‘What?’

‘Wave to me,’ he said. ‘I am over here at Table Number 22.’

I looked up to see a young man with a moustache and a red bow tie waving his fingers at me.

‘I am here with my fiancé,’ I said. ‘But thank you anyway.’

I rehooked the receiver. I didn’t have a fiancé, of course, but I thought it was better to let the man down gently. A few minutes later the telephone rang again but I didn’t pick it up. Eventually it stopped, and then sounded again. I stared at the band and acted as if I couldn’t hear it.

‘Your telephone is ringing,’ the woman at the next table informed me. I gave her a dumbfounded look even though she had spoken to me in French.

A moment later, a boy in a blue uniform and cap made his way to me. ‘A delivery from the Resi Post Office,’ he said, placing a package wrapped in gold paper on the table. I was about to tell him there was a mistake when I
noticed the card was addressed to ‘Fräulein Table Number 14’.

‘Who is this from?’ I asked.

‘The gentleman at Table Number 31,’ he said. ‘Do you have a return message for him?’

I shook my head. What was going on? I glanced around the room, careful to avoid Table Number 31. André and the Count were standing by the bar, looking in my direction and laughing. I waved them over.

‘I am never going to survive your practical jokes,’ I said to them. ‘What kind of place is this?’

‘It’s fun, isn’t it?’ said the Count. ‘No one need ever be alone in Berlin. If you see someone you like, you can call them or send them a gift of perfume, cigars or cocaine.’

It wasn’t at all what I had expected of those stern-faced Berliners. How gay life seemed then. How beautiful and fun.

Mademoiselle Canier returned from the powder room smelling of lilies but otherwise as well-groomed as before. We stayed with the Count at the Resi until it closed, dancing to the jazz music and drinking champagne at prices that would have shocked even Parisians. I forgot about the youth who had shouted threats at me that morning and about what André had said about another war. I let myself slide into the gaiety of it all. I was doing what everyone else at the Resi was doing, losing myself in decadence and trying to forget the real world looming outside.

I
had envisaged my stay in Berlin as a holiday carnival, where I would skip from one amusement to the other, ice-cream in hand. André had other plans. I discovered that for a Frenchman, and a moneyed Parisian at that, he enjoyed working. What was more, he expected me to feel the same way. Of course, I wanted to be a star and was prepared to do what it took to become one, but I had no idea that my days in Berlin were to start so early, end so late and involve such a medley of lessons.

A few days after we had visited the Eldorado and the Resi, André informed me that the Count had secured me a place with Madame Irina Shestova, formerly of the Ballets Russes.

‘Ballet!’ I had no intention of reliving the nightmare lessons I’d had with Madame Baroux at Le Chat Espiègle.

‘Not to dance on points,’ laughed André, ‘but for poise and grace. To make you a blueblood of the stage. Otherwise you will look clumsy when you perform with the chorus girls.’

The next morning, I caught a taxi to Madame Shestova’s studio in Prager Platz, not far from the Kurfürstendamm. To my relief, Madame Shestova wasn’t intent on turning me into a professional ballerina. She helped me improve my posture and balance with exercises at the barre. But her most important mission, it seemed, was to make sure I knew how to take a bow.

‘Like a queen bestowing her munificence upon her cheering subjects,’ she said, demonstrating a graceful bow
with one foot slightly in front of the other and bending from her hips rather than her shoulders. ‘Not like a bobbing child who hopes that if she pleases everyone she won’t be sent to bed!’

After Madame Shestova, I was scheduled for a lesson with Louise Goodman, an American dance teacher who had studied at the Denishawn school in New York. Her style of dance was the one espoused by Isadora Duncan, where movements sprang instinctively from the body as opposed to being forced on it with formal steps. Her studio was larger than Madame Shestova’s, but reeked of paint because she shared it with two artists who worked in the morning when the light was better.

‘I don’t know what I can teach you,’ she said. ‘You’re a natural dancer already.’ In truth she taught me a lot about the balance of opposites in dancing: moving up and down, stretching and relaxing, falling and rising. ‘Yin-yang,’ she called it.

But André’s plans for my education didn’t end there. After leaving Mademoiselle Goodman’s class I would return to the hotel for a light lunch of bread and salad—light because I knew it was not good to sing, or run and jump, on a full stomach. And sing, run and jump were what I did at my voice production classes with Doctor Oskar Daniel, the voice coach of Caruso and Marlene Dietrich.

After making me hurdle over chairs and do cartwheels in succession, he ordered me to sing out a high C. ‘Belt it out!’ he commanded, beating his cane on the floor. ‘Belt it out all the way back to Paris!’

‘I have found you an English teacher,’ announced André, arriving in my room one evening when Mademoiselle Canier was away at her cousin’s ball. I was lying on the sofa with Kira curled up on my stomach, recovering from a session with Doctor Daniel where not only did I have to hurdle chairs and do cartwheels but I had to sing my high C
while
doing them.

‘An English teacher?’ I cried, lifting my head off the
cushion before realising that holding it up took too much effort and dropping it down again. André was in his dinner suit. I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to wear that evening to the Apollo Theatre.

‘For fluency lessons on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘It is not going to stop at Paris, Simone,’ he said. ‘There is London and New York. And don’t forget South America.’

Kira jumped from my stomach and tugged one of my ballet slippers along the carpet by its ribbons. She wasn’t a destructive cat, but silky or shiny things were her weakness. If I didn’t put them away, my underwear and earrings were always going missing, only to be found later in Kira’s food dish.

I turned from Kira back to André and was surprised to see him sitting in a chair with his head clutched in his hands.

‘André?’

For a minute, maybe two, he didn’t move. It was such a sudden change of mood that I wondered what had happened.

‘Simone,’ he said, looking up. ‘Do you ever get nervous before you go on stage?’

His eyes were red-rimmed and sad. I wanted to lean over and touch his beautiful face and tell him that whatever it was that was worrying him, it would be all right. But I couldn’t. Instead, I said, ‘Nervous? Where do I begin?’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘You always look so confident. I can’t imagine anything scaring you.’

Confident? Was that how he saw me? I would never have said that about myself.

‘Are you worried about something?’ I asked.

His gaze fell to the carpet and he nodded. ‘About not being considered good enough.’

‘By whom?’ I asked, but I knew he meant his father. I thought of the other young men of André’s class, like
Antoine and François, and how foppish they were. André was nothing like them. I recalled how, when his friend had been able to locate the starving girl and her family, André had made a sizeable donation to the charity on my behalf.

André looked me straight in the eye for a moment then stood up and walked to the window. ‘I shall never be Laurent,’ he said, leaning against the frame. ‘My brother would have been horrified to think that I live in his shadow, but that is how my father sees me. Sometimes I catch him staring at me and I think he wishes that it was me who died at Verdun, not Laurent.’

I followed André to the window. ‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘Any father would be proud of a son like you.’

André shook his head and smiled sadly. ‘Your success is important to me,’ he said. ‘I am not using you to impress my father. But I wish I could prove to him that I am as good as the son he lost.’

He turned to me, about to say something else, but was cut off by the ring of the telephone. He strode to the bureau and lifted the receiver.

‘It’s the Count,’ he said. ‘He is waiting downstairs in the lobby.’ Then, glancing at his watch, he laughed. ‘What happens to time when I am with you, Simone? There is no need to rush, I will have a drink with the Count. Just come down when you are ready.’

André walked to the door. Before opening it, he smiled at me and said, ‘You know, they will work you harder than I do in New York—when you appear on Broadway.’

‘Good,’ I said, returning his smile. ‘I look forward to it.’

My busy schedule made the rest of 1925 fly by. While André and Mademoiselle Canier made trips back and forth between Paris and Berlin, I performed at the White Horse Cabaret on the Kurfürstendamm. It was a small, smoky theatre but the clientele was chic: actors and actresses, bankers and business tycoons. As the night
wore on, the pieces became raunchier and the dancing more lurid. In Paris, we alluded to sex and teased about it with our innuendos, but the German singers blatantly referred to masturbation and homosexuality. The lyrics to the songs I sang at the White Horse contained the occasional allusion to ‘rubbing the magic lamp’, but Ulla Färber, the raspy-voiced star of the show, belted out a number called ‘
Der Orgasmus
’.

If the Count hadn’t warned me that Berliners were obsessed with sex and death, or I hadn’t seen for myself the rawness of life on Friedrichstrasse, the vulgarity of my fellow performers might have overwhelmed me. Instead, I studied them with the keen eye of a scientist looking down a microscope at a newly discovered protozoan. I noted how the buxom Ada Godard, who wore a monocle and feather boa, dominated her audience with her wit, and how the chorus girls thrust out their naked breasts like weapons rather than objects of desire. Their ability to shock even the most decadent Berliners wouldn’t work for my style. But I did become more confident and learnt to weave the audience into my web from the moment I stepped on stage. I did this by lowering my voice an octave and consciously slowing my speech. It had much more impact than my method at the Casino de Paris, which was to rush out on stage and hope that they liked me.

After the performance, the cabaret transformed into a nightclub. One night when I was out on the floor by myself, dancing the black bottom for the amusement of a table of bankers, I noticed an elegant woman in a white dress with a corsage of violets watching me. I found myself drawn to her like a pin towards a magnet. The band slowed to a tango as if she had willed it do so with her hypnotic eyes.

‘You are beautiful,’ she told me in French, her fingers lingering on her swanlike throat.

The woman took my hand in hers and hooked her other hand around my back. She was smaller than me, but she led me in the tango with the strength of a man.
There was a steely coldness about her that reminded me of Camille, but when she pressed her chest to mine I realised that she wasn’t wearing any undergarments and was taken aback by the softness of female flesh pressed against my own breasts. It was like hugging my mother, and yet not like that at all.

‘You are like a feather,’ she said to me. ‘I could crush you in my fingers.’ The woman was a skilful dancer who interpreted the music well. She seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I had no idea where I might have seen her.

When the dance finished, I thanked the woman and slipped from her arms, secretly wishing André was there to protect me. I did not usually find women approaching me threatening. And if the woman was beautiful, I sometimes even found it flattering. But something about this woman made me uncomfortable. I felt her eyes on my back the entire way to the bar.

‘I see you have escaped the clutches of Marlene Dietrich,’ said Ada, sidling up to me when I ordered some soda water. She laughed bawdily. ‘You would be a marvellous act together, both on and off the stage. Your French charm and vivacity and her blonde aloofness.’

So, I had danced the tango with the famous Marlene Dietrich and not even known it. ‘On the stage, perhaps,’ I replied, glancing over my shoulder. But Marlene was gone.

Count Kessler took me to Ciro’s for dinner one evening, when André was in Paris with Mademoiselle Canier for his mother’s annual charity ball. I enjoyed the Count’s company whenever we went out. Although he was an aristocrat, there was something about him that reminded me of my father. Perhaps it was the curiosity that sparkled in his eyes, as if the wonders of the world could never grow dim in his sight.

After we had ordered our food, the Count turned to me and said, ‘I think André is growing weary of Mademoiselle
Canier, don’t you? Let us hope he doesn’t bring her back with him.’

The Count must have noticed my shocked expression because he let out a hearty laugh. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘admit it. You would rather spend a week in a stalled railcar than an hour with Mademoiselle Canier. I see how you politely suffer her. God, I’ve seen how
André
politely suffers her. She is like one of those stunning pieces of furniture you buy when you are in a foreign country. It has no practical purpose so you put it on display in a corner and after a while you cease to notice it.’

‘But he is in love with her,’ I said, remembering André’s fond glances in Mademoiselle Canier’s direction.

The Count regarded me with amused interest. ‘You think so?’ he said. ‘She is the daughter of one of his mother’s friends. Mind you, she is not any more empty-headed than the other girls in his circle. André probably made the best choice he could have…at the time.’

The Count gave me such a pointed look that I blushed. I sensed that he saw right through me and my feelings for André. ‘You are being callous,’ I protested.

‘Hah!’ he laughed again. ‘Don’t think Mademoiselle Canier’s feelings will be hurt. André is merely at the top of her list of eligible bachelors. She will move on to Antoine Marchais, one of the Michelins or the Bouchayer boy without blinking an eye.’

I wondered if what the Count said was true. He and André were close, so the Count, if anybody, would know what André’s real feelings were.

‘If I ask you something, Count Harry, will you kept it a secret and not make fun of me?’

‘Make fun of you, Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ the Count replied, feigning a scandalised expression. ‘Never!’

‘Do you think…I mean…would it be possible…for two very unlikely…’

I had muddled my beginning and now could not bring myself to finish my sentence. I suddenly realised how ridiculous it would be to declare my feelings. I was a music
hall singer. André was the son of a powerful family. There was no reason why we should not mingle socially, but beyond that…No, anything else was impossible.

‘Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ said the Count, tapping my arm, ‘you haven’t finished your question. You have me in suspense now. Two very unlikely what?’

I had dug myself into a hole and now I was going to have to climb out of it. ‘Two very unlikely…I mean…Germany and France, for instance. Will they always be enemies?’

The Count seemed to find me funny at that moment, but he sat up straight and answered me seriously. ‘The French and Germans have more in common than anybody else,’ he said. ‘During the Great War, the men in the trenches used to throw food to each other when the fighting for the day had ceased. No, the next time Germany decides to cause an international disaster it will be due to self-combustion. The most dangerous enemy is always the enemy within.’

I glanced at him. Why was it whenever anyone spoke about the future of Germany, it was in terms of another war?

‘Now that the middle classes have been turned out of their homes and we have made beggars of small businessmen, who will keep Germany stable?’ the Count asked.

The ominous warning in his words sent a shudder through me. I played with the bread on my plate. I knew that as long as I lived I would never forget that starving girl’s face. Seeing first-hand what humans were capable of doing to each other had changed me. But what could I do about such suffering? The problem seemed overwhelming. I looked at the Count again. He was smiling.

‘In answer to your
other
question, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said, ‘let me say this. You are unusually self-possessed. One rarely sees that in someone your age and even more rarely among entertainers. You would make a more suitable companion for a certain young man than anyone else I know. Why, if I were thirty years younger, I would marry you myself.’