A War of Flowers (2014) Read online

  Chapter One

  Paris

  Paris in late August, 1938, was a city living on its nerves.

  Rumours swarmed like rats around the streets, refugees from every corner of Europe brushed shoulders on the boulevards, and the cafés were a babel of foreign languages, Spanish, Italian, Czech and, of course, German, rising and falling in anxious disputation. In the city centre the clatter of cream-topped buses, the blare of taxi horns and the shouts of traffic gendarmes were overlaid with the distant sound of reservists, in hastily assembled khaki, marching along the Champs Elysées. German, Austrian, Polish and Hungarian Jews congregated in the Marais quarter in anxious exile, scraping a living by day, and drinking it by night. Morsels of foreign news were picked up and ravenously chewed on, then discarded as propaganda or lies. Refugees choked the railway stations. Native Parisians were packing up and moving their families to the country. Others spent longer than usual in the churches. A dry summer wind blew around the city, chivvying along the gutters a vortex of leaves and litter and small scraps of newspaper alarm. Hitler was claiming that the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, just south of the German border, desired reunion with the Reich. If the Czech government did not agree then he would march in and take it. France and England seemed certain to reject Germany’s demands. Hitler had set the date of 1st October for military action. The threat of war hung like a distant thunderstorm on a sunny day.

  Clara Vine threw open the tall shutters, leaned over the narrow balcony, and gazed down at the Boulevard de Sébastopol below. She only had three days in Paris and the last two had been spent shooting scenes for her latest film, an adaptation of Maupassant’s Bel Ami, but the third, today, was entirely free. A whole day ahead of her and only an engagement that evening before catching a train at the Gare du Nord early the next morning and heading back home to Berlin. She could visit the Louvre, go shopping, see a concert, or maybe just sit in a square beneath the dusty trees and drink a café crème. An entire day to herself in Paris. No lines to learn, no character to assume. No takes or retakes, no director’s tiff or costume fittings. No delays or disputes. After filming almost non-stop for months, a day off in a foreign location felt like a fantasy. And despite the mood of the city, Clara was determined to make the most of it.

  The Bellevue, where the cast were staying, was not everyone’s idea of Parisian chic. Its forty rooms were squeezed into a narrow, five-storey building and Clara’s bedroom on the top floor was sweltering. The paint on the wrought-iron balconies was flaking, the plaster decayed and the entire building was imbued with the reek of drains. But who cared about that when there was all of Paris to look at?

  The city seemed impossibly beautiful, the elegant precision of its buildings and the classical uniformity of its blocks and streets complemented by a golden light that seemed to saturate the pale stone. Even now, in high summer, when most Parisians were on their August vacation, the pavements were thronged with people. Immediately below Clara’s window, between the patchy trunks of the plane trees, a cart of flowers bulged with red, yellow and pink blooms, like a bright shout of colour in the morning air. Vans making deliveries and a porter hauling a crate of baguettes almost collided with a man bearing a box of oranges on his head. In the fishmonger’s window a chorus line of doomed lobsters waved their limbs helplessly on a tray. Young women with crimson lips and kohl-lined eyes clipped past wearing Breton-necked tops with wide scarves slung diagonally across them, in keeping with the latest fashion, and little felt hats studded with flowers or feathers. Some wore printed summer dresses in ice-cream colours and they even managed to make their heavy wooden-soled shoes look stylish. Men in open-necked shirts and berets swaggered past. Despite the undercurrent of nerves that ran through the city, the citizens on the Boulevard de Sébastopol were doing their best impression of elegant nonchalance.

  What a contrast with Berlin. In Clara’s home city the daily round-up of Jews and the sporadic Gestapo cruelties had worsened throughout the year. That spring Hitler had marched into Austria and found himself greeted not with hostilities but with a carpet of roses; Blumenkrieg, he called it, a war of flowers. The lack of international outcry over the Anschluss had only emboldened him. Hitler was, everyone realized, more confident than ever.

  Unlike Clara herself.

  As an Anglo-German actress, who had grown up in England, Clara Vine had made a successful career for herself since arriving in Berlin five years earlier. She had seven films to her name, and by sheer chance had forged connections with many people in Berlin’s high society. Yet despite her acquaintance with the wives of several politicians, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, had become increasingly suspicious of Clara’s motives. The previous year he had even had her arrested briefly, and interrogated. For Clara, merely thinking of that day in the Gestapo headquarters, and of the tightrope she trod daily in Berlin, brought a chill to the morning’s warmth and a familiar sick twist of nerves. It was as though Goebbels was determined to prove what he suspected – that even though Clara’s father was a British aristocrat and Nazi sympathizer, and she herself was working full-time in the Babelsberg film studios, Clara was an agent of British Intelligence. That she was passing snippets of information and gossip to her contacts in the British Embassy. That she purposefully mingled in Nazi society to observe the private life of the Third Reich.

  It would have been absurd, if it hadn’t also been true.

  What made Clara’s position more perilous was her discovery, when she arrived in Germany, that her own grandmother was a Jew. The document of Aryan heritage Clara carried everywhere was as much a fabrication as the russet highlights in her hair, but infinitely more significant.

  Every day she asked herself why she stayed in Berlin. Every day she came up with the same answer. She would stay in Berlin as long as she could because it meant seeing her godson Erich. He was the only man in her life right now, and for his sake most of all she prayed that war could somehow be averted.

  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 Ar
t 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.

  Dear Miss Vine,

  Please forgive me for approaching you directly, but I noticed from an article in Paris-Soir that you were in Paris and felt compelled to get in touch. We would be very interested in discussing a proposal with you. Would you be free to meet at the café Chez André in the Rue Marbeuf at 12 p.m. today? If you are able to come I shall be looking out for you,

  Sincerely, Guy Hamilton,

  Representative, London Films

  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.

  Chapter Two

  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 inter
rupted 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.