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Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Celia Rees 2020
Jacket design by Claire Ward @HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Jacket photographs © Werner Bischof/Magnum Photos (Brandenburg Gate), Magdalena Russocka/Trevillion Images (woman)
Celia Rees asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008347116
Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008347130
Version: 2020-03-25
Dedication
To Nancy Elizabeth Marguerite Goodway
(1 January 1900–4 January 1984)
My ‘Lion Aunt’
Epigraph
What country, friends, is this?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT,
ACT 1, SCENE 2
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne
London: 1945/6
1. Government Offices, Marylebone
2. 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington
3. Cromwell Square, Paddington
4. Savoy Grill, London
5. Cromwell Square, Paddington; Service Women’s Club, Lower Sloane St
Germany: 1946
6. Blue Train, Hook of Holland—Hamburg
7. Hotel Atlantic, Hamburg
8. British Officers’ Club, Hamburg
9. Außenalster Café, Hamburg
Dori: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2
10. CCG Mess, Lübeck
11. CCG Billet, Lübeck
12. CCG Mess, Lübeck
13. CCG Billet, Lübeck
14. Mietshaus Moltkestrasse, Lübeck; British Hospital, Hamburg
15. CCG Billet, Lübeck
Dori: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2
16. Landestrasse Schule, Lübeck
17. CCG Billet, Lübeck, Travemünde
18. CCG Billet, Lübeck
Dori: Paddington, W2
19. CCG Mess, Lübeck
20. Billet, Lübeck
21. CCG Mess, Lübeck
22. 44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck
23. 44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck
24. Atlantic Hotel, Hamburg
25. Langerhorn Sanatorium, Hamburg
26. Fischhaus Restaurant, Blankense, Hamburg
27. Officers’ Club, Hamburg
Dori: Paddington W2
28. Lübeck Billet/Atlantic Hotel, Lübeck/Hamburg
29. Billet, Lübeck
30. Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck
31. Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck
32. Hotel am Zoo, Berlin
33. Russian Sector, Berlin
34. Bauhaus Apartment, Wannsee, Berlin
35. Alte Küche, Berlin
36. Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck
Italy: 1946
37. American military train
38. Hotel Aquila Nera–Schwarzer Adler, Vipiteno Sterzing
39. Hotel Aquila Nera-Schwarzer Adler, Vipitino Sterzing
40. Pensione Sterzberg, Vipiteno Sterzing
41. Verona
42. Grand Hotel Savoia, Genoa
The Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Celia Rees
About the Publisher
Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne
10th November 1989
Fried Fillet of Perch
Perch fillets dipped in egg, then flour, salted and peppered with a hint of paprika, fried in butter … Speciality of the place. A finicky fish – hardly worth eating – bones like needles. Tastes of the riverbed.
She put down her pen and pushed her plate away. She wasn’t here to eat the food or drink the wine. She had no appetite anyway. She’d come by way of Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi camp two hundred miles north of here. A Nacht und Nebel place, Night and Fog. Apt name. Four British girls had died there, forgotten by almost everybody, tucked away in the back pocket of a secret war.
She’d laid four red roses in the black maw of the rusting oven. A pilgrimage of sorts.
If these do not die well, it will be a black matter …
They had not died well.
A ragged cheer burst from the kitchen. Through the flapping doors, she could see white-coated backs in front of a portable television. From the foyer, tinny, muffled commentary, crowd noise, clinking and chanting, mixed with the excited chatter of guests and staff clustered round a larger screen, drawn by the need to witness the drama taking place in Berlin, history erupting into the present, breaking through the muted formality of this grand hotel. An ending? A beginning? Both? Impossible to tell.
Not that it mattered. Very little mattered anymore.
‘Are you finished, Madame?’ The elderly waiter hesitated before taking her plate. ‘The dish not to your liking?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She capped her pen and lit a cigarette.
‘You have been here before?’ He asked as he refilled her glass. A Chasselas. Swiss wine, none the worse for that.
‘Once. A long time ago.’
Just after the war. She doubted he would remember. How many people did he encounter? She’d been here under another name. A different person. A different time. She remembered him, though. His name was Joseph. She had a good memory for faces. She’d needed it in her line of business. A slender, solemn, graceful young man then, dark, thin-faced, with a pencil moustache. His hair silver now, the moustache still there – a thin line sketched in graphite. French, she recalled, and Jewish. He’d found safety here in Switzerland. She wondered if his family had been as lucky.
‘Anything else for you, madame? A little dessert, perhaps? Coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ She knocked the glass, her hand suddenly as useless as a bat. Wine spilled across the table. Joseph sprang forward to repair the damage. ‘No need.’ She shook her head. ‘Clumsy of me.’
She held her hands on her lap and looked around at the immaculately laid tables, the stiff, starched linen, the gleam of the heavy silver cutlery, the glittering glassware, her fellow diners. Some of them frail, in wheelchairs, she noted, the staff must be used to different degrees of infirmity. She pushed herself back from the table. Anticipating that she was about to leave, Joseph was immediately at her side, whisking her chair away, offering her his arm.
She declined his help and made her way slowly, Joseph hurrying in front of her, nodding to two young waiters to open the double doors. He bowed as she left. She smiled her thanks and wished him farewell. This was the last time she would be eating here, or anywhere. In a little less than twenty-four hours, Stella Snelling, restaurant critic and cookery writer, acclaimed and feared in equal measure, would be no more.
She’d taken a suite with a view of the lake. The Art Deco furnishings were just shabby enough to be authentic. She’d had the black lacquer writing desk reversed, so that it faced away from the fussy, fluted fan-shaped mirror. She found her appearance disconcerting. She had never expected to get this old, to live this long. Even with ten years knocked off Stella’s passport, she was looking her true age now. She wore no makeup, her black hair an untidy grey mane; the dark eyes, deep and hooded, had seen too much; the grooved lines etched on the forehead, by the sides of the mouth, carried too much pain. She hardly recognized this person she had become. In her dreams, she was always young.
She opened the overnight bag that she’d brought with her, taking out a small green medical case. She removed the top tray holding the plasters, scissors, antiseptic cream, paracetamol and tablets that any traveller might carry, to reveal a number of disposable hypodermic syringes, ampoules of diamorphine, and more of the drug in capsule form. She placed the drugs in the small refrigerator and took out the Koskenkorva vodka. She poured a glass, lit a cigarette and went out onto the balcony.
The light had almost gone. The lake was a dark pewterish-purple, the mountains opposite lost in a cold, bluish haze. A mist had risen, diffusing the last of the sunset, layering the lake with bloodied gauze.
She sipped her drink, savouring the sharp, clear spirit. There were clinics here in Switzerland that offered a discreet service for the end of life. Such facilities were not openly advertised. She was wealthy, with no living relatives, and believed strongly in a person’s right to choose how he or she wanted to die. Arrangements had been made, monies forwarded (for certain services, the clinic demanded prepayment). Tomorrow at 10.30, she had an appointment. A substantial further donation had guaranteed the director’s personal attention. Nothing would be left to chance. Hence the diamorphine. The lake had turned to glittering blackness, the coloured lights of the quay dancing on its restless surface. Time to go back inside.
She opened a leather attaché case and began to lay out the contents on the desk. A brochure for the Endymion Clinic: situated on the beautiful shores of Lake Geneva, offering proven anti-ageing treatments and unrivalled levels of expertise in the areas of fertility and sexual health. The name of the director had been circled, Other services available on application, doubly underlined. The brochure had arrived at her Paris flat with an accompanying note from Adeline in New York. This is what we’ve been waiting for! in Adeline’s arthritic scrawl, with instructions to go ahead and make arrangements. They would do it together, Adeline had said, but she was doing it alone. Within days, it seemed, she was reading Adeline’s obituary.
ADELINE CURTIS CROFT PARNELL the celebrated female war correspondent, who covered every major conflict from World War II to San Salvador, died on Sunday in her New York West Village apartment aged 79.
Adeline Parnell was one of the first journalists to enter Germany with Allied Forces. She reported honestly and fearlessly about events as they were happening, including the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. She went on to report on the Nuremburg trials and won a Pulitzer for her reporting from Korea. She covered the war in Vietnam and the conflict in San Salvador until ill health forced her retirement. She continued to photograph her home city of New York, which she described as ‘her war zone’.
Born Adeline Curtis Croft in 1910, in Poughkeepsie, New York State, she was educated at Bryn Mawr and Columbia University. She went on to work for various newspapers, including the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, as well as Life magazine. In 1942, she married fellow journalist Sam Parnell who was killed in 1944. She never remarried and leaves no close relatives. Her estate and considerable archive are bequeathed to Columbia University.
It was no surprise. She had last seen Adeline in her New York apartment a month or so before. She had tried not to show her shock at finding her old friend so diminished; slumped and twisted into her wheelchair, so thin that her blue shirt and fawn cord trousers seemed empty, like clothes on a puppet, her thick, blonde curly hair reduced to white wisps, her rings loose on the bird-claw fingers that twisted round the controls of her power chair.
‘Look a state, don’t I?’ Adeline looked up; her blue eyes, once so sharp, milky with cataracts. They both knew that this could be their last meeting. She’d turned away to hide the tears in her own eyes.
‘’s OK.’ Adeline gave a ghost of her old smile. ‘As long as this still works,’ she tapped her temple, ‘I don’t mind. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” and all that yadayada. Come, come over here where there’s more light.’ She manoeuvred herself through her ‘archive’. Piles of newspapers, files and clippings stretched from floor to ceiling. She halted in front of the brownstone’s tall window that looked out onto the West Village. ‘Something I want you to see.’
In the bay, the heavy wooden table was free of clutter. A Tiffany lamp, balanced by a gold and ivory Favrile vase of canna lilies, stood on a faded green-and-purple velvet runner. In the centre of the table lay a book; the brown cloth cover blotched and stained, the title in faded gilt.
The Radiation
Cookery Book
For use with the ‘New World’
Regulo Controlled Gas Cookers
The inside cover was flecked and rust spotted, there was a name written along with a place and date:
Lübeck, British Zone of Occupation, Germany, January 1946.
The name almost illegible. Time erased.
‘It was on top of a pile of other stuff, as though someone had just put it down. It wasn’t there the day before, I swear … Then I found these,’ Adeline pointed to a folder of photographs. ‘Just spilled across the floor. After all these years. Gotta mean something …’
She opened the folder and felt the same frisson. They both knew that coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, whatever you wanted to call it, was not to be undervalued, that intuition counted for more than cold logic. In her experience, it could be the difference between life and death.
‘I took another look, into what happened, you know?’ Adeline spoke into the gathered silence. ‘I think I’m onto something.’ Her eyes showed a little of their old spark. ‘I’m waiting for confirmation. Now pour us a drink. There’s bourbon over there. Here’s to it!’ Adeline lifted the glass between her two hands. ‘If I’m right, we’ll do it together!’
Adeline hadn’t made it. It was all on her now. She placed the Radiation Cookery Book on the black lacquered desk and opened the brown cloth cover. Such a nondescript exterior blotched and stained with water damage, still smelling faintly of smoke. There were handwritten recipes, clippings from magazines – Stella Snelling’s dozen delicious ways with canapés – menu cards slipped like memories between pages still grainy and pilled with ancient flour. Each one perfectly innocent-seeming but so freighted with other meanings that they might have been scribed in blood. Everything lay between these covers, not least the reason why she was here.
She put the book down, dark drops spotting the cover. Tears came more easily now than they ever had in the past.
Blinking to clear her sight, she shook photographs from a manila envelope, fanning them across the desk, sorting them like a pack of cards.
What she’d found in Germany, how it had unwound, was here to see.
Images of a ruined city: acres upon acres of devastation; tumbled bricks under a dusting of snow; a few distant buildings showing black, fretted against the sky; a house number – 24 – painted on a chunk of fallen masonry. A man stared at tangled twisted steel girders that reached towards him like the arms of some toppled metal monster. Capsized ships lay in a harbour, half-submerged, funnels flush with the water. Snapshots of some terrifying dystopia taken in Germany 1946. A Caspar David Friedrich frozen sea, the Baltic presumably, frost-foamed waves looking uncannily like the snow-covered masonry piled in jagged heaps. Niflheim, the realm of ice and cold.
The photograph of Adeline herself was the one that had accompanied her obituary. Taken by somebody else on some moving battlefield. Adeline with her combat-jacket collar turned up, most of her face obscured by her Leica, blonde curls stuffed under a forage cap, a tank in the background.
Adeline was never without her camera. She had an eye for a picture, was famous for it, but it was more than that with her. It was as though she felt compelled to catch memories in the net of time. Here they all were. Snap. She’d caught them all.
There she was smiling, happy, sitting at a table in a sunlit square, the photograph taken in three-quarter profile, blue-grey eyes looking off to the right, the dappled light catching the planes and shadows of her face and the sun glinting on her golden hair. It was a good picture. The last one taken of her.
And a younger self, looking glamorous in a low cut Schiaparelli she’d bought for a song from a Parisian countess living in a cold-water flat in Maida Vale. New Year’s Eve, 1945.
There was handsome Harry Hirsch at the same New Year’s party. Jewish Brigade and later Mossad, looking boyish, if slightly sunken-eyed, a bit dishevelled, black hair flopping in his eyes, tie loose and shirt sleeves rolled. He had been acting as bartender, dispensing hooch to the spivs, émigrés, service types and general ne’er-do-wells there assembled. Next, the American, Tom McHale, in need of a shave and hungover, the photograph taken the morning after, no less boyish but looking altogether more slippery and deceitful which, of course, he was. Then Leo Chase. Came to a bad end. Dying in some ghastly Moscow flat, liver turned to foie gras. She smiled slightly, proud of the part she’d played in his demise. Adeline was lucky to get him. Leo didn’t like being photographed, now everyone knew why, but here he was, eventual disgrace far in the future, his collar turned up against the New Year’s Eve drizzle, rain drops glistening on his bowler and overcoat collar, photographed coming in to the party, pale eyes shifty, peering sideways behind his glasses, weak mouth caught between a grimace and a smile.
Next, the von Stavenows. Elisabeth in evening dress, head tilted to one side, large eyes gazing off somewhere, as lovely as a Nordic film star. She placed her next to the first photograph and looked from one to the other. Take away Elisabeth’s gloss and glamour and they could have been sisters. Apart from the eyes. Hers were icy; the other’s kind. Below them, came Kurt as Sturmbannführer, handsome as a viper in his black and silver. Underneath this, a much younger Kurt von Stavenow, looking very fetching in a cricket sweater, all blond hair and chiselled cheekbones. No wonder she’d fallen for him. The photo was passport size and had been paperclipped at some time: a long hook of reddish-brown spots marred his white shoulder. Rubbing with a thumb made no difference. Some stains are impossible to erase.
She’d laid out the photographs in a pyramid, like a Tarot Spread. She placed the smiling woman in the sunlit square at the apex, the others ranged below. A reading would be impossible. There were no good cards here.
Oh, my dear girl, what did we do to you?
There was a reckoning to be made. A debt to be paid.
1
Government Offices, Marylebone
31st December 1945
‘Do you know this man?’
Edith Graham looked back at the implacable black eyes staring into hers, then down at the photograph. A Greek kouros in a cricket sweater. A young man caught in the full beauty of his youth, or so she’d thought when she fell in love with him that very afternoon. She remembered the photo being taken. 1932. The Parks in Oxford. He was standing at the edge of the pitch, hands in pockets, face in profile, fair hair waving back from a high forehead. Shadows showed beneath his brows and defined his high cheekbones. He was frowning slightly, his mouth a straight line.
‘Why yes, I do know him. That’s Kurt von Stavenow.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh, yes. Quite certain.’
‘And your relationship?’
‘We – we were lovers for a while …’
The woman made a note with her green marbled Schaeffer. Edith left it at that. She wasn’t about to confide in this austere stranger with her cold, appraising eyes.
‘For how long?’ she asked with the air of someone who knew anyway.
‘Not long. A year, if that,’ Edith replied. He’d been her first love, only real love, come to that. Strange to think their time together had been so short. It took a far greater space in her recollected life.
The woman made another note, put down her pen and looked back at Edith, head on one side. She was strikingly good-looking, black hair swept back from a porcelain-pale face, large, dark eyes, slanted and slightly hooded. She wore red lipstick, the sort of shade that Edith’s sister, Louisa, favoured; other than that, very little makeup. The set of her mouth suggested that she rarely smiled. Her dark-grey costume was cut with the severity of a well-tailored uniform. Any suggestion of mannishness was offset by the ivory silk blouse, the Peter Pan collar pinned with a small pearl brooch. Edith admired the subtlety. I’m a woman in a man’s world, the outfit said, in a position of some seniority. The woman put a hand to her throat, an unconscious defence against Edith’s scrutiny.
‘I say,’ Edith broke the silence. ‘What is this all about?’
‘You’re here to answer questions not ask them.’
Edith shifted in her seat. This was beginning to feel less like an interview, more like an interrogation. She had no idea why she was here, or even where ‘here’ was.
She’d been brought from Control Commission, Germany Headquarters in Kensington, pulled out of the final briefing without explanation, and delivered without a word by a young man in a double-breasted suit and a Guards tie. He’d just pointed to a porticoed entrance.
‘First floor. Corridor on the left.’
They were government offices of some type, although the proportions were all wrong for offices: the corridor too wide, the ceilings too high. The room they were in might once have been a grand sitting room. A small gas fire stood dwarfed in a wide fireplace, any heat swallowed by the yawning, cavernous chimney, and the muffled clatter of a typewriter filtered through thin partitioning plywood. No nameplate for the offices, no numbers on the doors. Something to do with cousin Leo. Edith would put money on it. They were second cousins, really, several times removed, but had grown up together, their mothers close. Leo was always vague about his work in the government but everyone knew it was hush-hush.
Edith sat facing a large, plain desk, clear apart from a single pad, fountain pen beside it and two manila files. The woman behind it opened the second folder and Edith caught a glimpse of her own passport photograph.