The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  “You ought to try and get him out more often, Cordelia. He might enjoy himself.”

  “How would I persuade him?”

  Gregory smiled, enigmatically.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m sure you could.”

  * * *

  —

  CORDELIA LEFT THE RECEPTION tingling with excitement. Instead of heading home, she went impetuously to the office. It was midevening, but she longed to get to work on what she had just seen while it was still fresh in her mind. Yet once she had climbed the stairs she found, to her surprise, a light burning behind the frosted-glass door. Torin sat at his desk, a demitasse of cold coffee beside him, concentration chiseled into his brow. He glanced up, scowling.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I had something to write. How about you?”

  “Spain,” he said, tersely.

  “Oh. I see.”

  It was always Spain. The country had slid into civil war. The Republican government was in conflict with the Nationalists of Franco, who had proclaimed himself Generalissimo and claimed he alone could forcibly unify the royalist and other elements of the Nationalist cause.

  “Franco’s won an important victory at Toledo,” Torin added. “The fear is, he’s on the brink of taking Madrid. He’s increasingly brutal. There’s clear evidence that both the Nazis and Fascist Italy have come in on his side…” He broke off, as though only then registering the time. “What’s so urgent it can’t wait, anyhow?”

  Her feeling just moments earlier—that Paris was some glorious party—had evaporated.

  “I was at Schiaparelli’s.”

  If the name meant anything to him, it was obscured by the fog of war. “Remind me.”

  “She dresses Marlene Dietrich. And the Duchess of Windsor.”

  “Does she.”

  “She’s an amazing woman, Torin. She came over here, a poor Italian from New York with no husband and a little daughter to support, and now she’s collaborating with Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. This was an important show. I need to file it as soon as possible, while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

  She saw him flinch at the word important, but she didn’t care. She bent over the Underwood, reeled in a piece of paper and a carbon, and started to type. Her typing had improved rapidly in the past two months, and her fingers now skimmed the keys efficiently, the words pouring onto the page.

  After several minutes, Torin rose and came over to stand beside her. For some reason her flesh tingled and she wondered if he might see the microscopic movement, as though her entire body was trembling.

  “Want me to take a look?”

  She pulled the sheet out of the typewriter, and he stood for a moment, scanning the piece. Then he reached for a pencil and proceeded to slash through it, his face focused and unsmiling. Cordelia could bear it for only around thirty seconds before bursting out, “What’s wrong with it? Is it so bad?”

  “Not bad exactly. But good prose is like a windowpane. It should be as clear as glass and as natural as breathing. This has far too many adjectives.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, what’s more, if you’re going to be a journalist, you’ll need to tell the truth. Halfway down this piece you mention that a model is wearing a hat in the shape of a lamb chop. You’ve described it as ‘pretty,’ or at least you did before I struck it out. What did it really look like?”

  She met his intent brown gaze. “Ridiculous. Mad. But also exciting.”

  “Why exciting?” He frowned.

  “Because it seemed to say that a hat was more than just something to be worn. That it was Art. That even a piece of clothing can convey an idea, a feeling, or be a form of self-expression. Schiaparelli’s clothes are full of drama and humor and, I don’t know, a sort of crossing of boundaries. I know one shouldn’t be thinking about fashion when there’s the political situation to consider, Torin, really I do, but this seemed to be speaking about what we’re capable of in a good way. It was exhilarating.”

  “Then say so. You need to see what’s in front of your eyes and put it down on the page. Tell the truth. Write what you mean even when other people don’t want you to. That’s journalism, Cordelia. Everything else is propaganda.”

  Chapter Ten

  Villa Weissmuller,

  Am Grossen Wannsee,

  Berlin

  October 11, 1936

  Dearest Cordelia,

  We’re just back from a hunting weekend at the Weissmuller estate with Ernst’s cousins, Volker and Sabina. Picture a bank manager in lederhosen married to a Valkyrie with a face that could split wood. And their children are equally daunting. Gerda, who’s fifteen, is out every night at gymnastics or political culture or visiting the sick. She showed me her songbook from the Bund deutscher Mädel and I almost burst out laughing to see a hymn to the Führer in it. Can you imagine us singing hymns about old Stanley Baldwin in his bowler hat? The little boy is just as fervent. He’s only ten but he spends every weekend digging ditches with the Hitler Youth.

  Anyhow, the whole effect was to make one feel frightfully indolent. In German families every little moment is accounted for. When I think of all the time we spent lounging around, reading and arguing, I feel for any children Ernst and I may have. Their lives won’t be their own. You must promise you will do your auntly duty by showing them the true joy of childhood. Not like Aunt Alice taking us to the ballet, I mean real fun. I have a sinking feeling that fun in Germany might soon be verboten.

  As if I hadn’t seen enough of the family, tomorrow Gretl is taking me to one of her ladies’ luncheons…

  The Reichsbund der Kinderreichen, the Reich Union of Large Families, was informally known as the RDK, but that was the only informal thing about it. It was harder to join than the Wannsee Golf Club, and the rigorous membership requirements laid down by the Nazi Office of Racial Policy were a lengthy tick box exercise encompassing birth records of great-grandparents and measurements of height and weight and eye color, not to mention a bare minimum of four children. Gretl had put her name down the second she knew she was pregnant with her fourth, and now that little Helmut was a year old, a whole new world had opened up. Starting with the acquisition of a red and black enamel badge, membership of RDK came with a raft of social evenings, classes, free theater tickets, a newsletter, and prestigious events, such as the lunchtime talk at the Grand Hotel Esplanade to which Gretl had kindly invited Irene.

  The hotel, on Potsdamer Platz, had a Belle Epoque sandstone façade and a ballroom decorated in a riot of sugared almond rococo curls. One of its more famous residents was Greta Garbo, but the celebrated actress, now fled abroad, had very little in common with that day’s guests. Garbo, after all, was childless and wanted to be alone, whereas the members of the RDK were ostentatiously fertile and unlikely to experience a solitary second. Nor was film star glamour especially prevalent among the women converging hungrily on the buffet. Most had hair braided into earmuffs and figures compressed in the dour, military-style worsted jackets of the National Socialist Women’s Service. Several wore ties.

  Gretl elbowed her way assertively through the scrum. “Let’s get some food. I’m starving. I could eat a horse.”

  Gretl shared many characteristics with her elder brother, being extremely tall and not suffering fools gladly. From the few visits she had paid to the Weissmuller villa, Irene guessed that she and her sister-in-law were never going to be close. Ernst, however, was keen for Irene to spend a lot more time with his sister, whose company was infinitely more improving than that of women like Martha Dodd, and although the notion of getting a medal and joining a club simply for producing a quartet of brats seemed ridiculous to Irene, she tried not to be judgmental. She guessed she had a lot to learn.

  Gretl’s husband was a functionary in the Ministry of Propaganda, but she might have been an employee herself judging by her
broadsides on essential matters, or rather the only essential female matter, which was children.

  “You’ll be wanting to start a family soon,” she observed bluntly, plowing her way through a plate piled with herring and sauerkraut.

  “Perhaps.” Irene exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke to signal her indifference to this idea. Smoking, combined with her blatant childlessness, made her a transgressive guest at this event, and she wondered if she had been asked only on Ernst’s orders.

  “The Führer wants a mothers’ army. He says it’s just as important as the Wehrmacht.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. And there’s a fascinating article by Reichsführer SS Himmler in the Schwarze Korps…”

  Gretl rarely lost an opportunity to broadcast the fact that Fritz had joined Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, the SS. The Schwarze Korps was the organization’s newspaper, where Himmler frequently opined on the importance of childbearing, and the lavish inducements that women were being offered to procreate.

  “I’ll lend it to you, Irene. The Reichsführer believes a marriage without children should have inferior status in law. That’s if it’s legal at all.”

  Gretl paused for a brief pat of her fifth child, currently padding out her tea dress.

  “So you’re saying your brother and I might not be legally married?” Irene widened her eyes. “Ernst is going to be alarmed when he hears about this.”

  “Not exactly,” Gretl backtracked, with a prim dab of her napkin. “I just thought you should know.” A gracious smile. “Minister Goebbels shows the way.” Gretl always insinuated some personal connection with Joseph Goebbels, even though her husband worked in a distant office and had probably met him twice. “His children are charming. They come into the office sometimes.”

  Everyone knew about the Goebbels children. They were always turning up in the newspapers, spotless in white smocks, lined up in order of height like panpipes. So different, Irene thought, from herself and Cordelia as children, in grubby Aertex shirts and bare feet.

  At the far end of the room the speaker was rising to take his place behind a lectern with a sign announcing WALTER GROSS, HEAD OF THE OFFICE OF RACIAL POLICY. Perhaps because he was nervous at being the sole man in such a formidable female gathering, Herr Gross’s chubby face, indented by wire-rimmed glasses, was covered with a thin sheen of perspiration. He began with aggressive zeal, as if defying anyone to disagree, though there was not much chance of that, given the volume of adoring applause that greeted him. According to the program, the theme of the speech was “The Ethnic Consciousness of the Nordic Aryan Master Race,” but as soon as he had started on the difference between the Aryan type and subhumans, Irene’s attention wandered.

  Behind Herr Gross’s head a banner proclaiming THE MOST BEAUTIFUL NAME IN THE WORLD IS MOTHER was strung between the light fittings. How incredible that this venue had once hosted stars like Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. That the most elegant people in Berlin had waltzed beneath these spectacular chandeliers. The vanished glamour seemed to dance at the edge of Irene’s consciousness, its whirling figures just beyond vision and its music and laughter a ghostly counterpoint to Herr Gross’s machine-gun drone. The lavish sophistication of the Esplanade’s neo-baroque interior seemed an outright mockery of these women, with their drab outfits and doughy upturned faces. Only the milky moldings of cherubs on the ceiling, their plaster flesh as plump as Nazi babies, looked appropriate.

  Herr Gross was claiming that the trend toward two-child families would result in the death not only of Germany but of the entire Aryan race.

  “Those who believe that they can give their children a happy and peaceful future by reducing the number of children err deeply. They give the children only the promise of a hard and bitter struggle for Germany’s existence as a state and as an idea.”

  Gretl leaned over with a sharp nudge. “Ernst told me he can’t wait to welcome your first little one.”

  “Did he?”

  Irene cringed. Why must her husband discuss such intimate matters with his sister? True, Ernst made no secret of his desire for a large family. He had even mentioned that Heinrich Himmler was favorable to requests to become godfather to the children of high-ranking Party members. In bed, he would run his hand along the curve of her waist and the flat of her belly, as if imagining it quickening and expanding with child. At first she had found it erotic. But lately it irked her and she turned over quickly to avoid it.

  She liked children, and never doubted she would love any that came her way, but the reality was daunting. Every child was an individual, surely, yet the women here produced babies in batches, like buns. Watching them now, eyes obediently trained on the speaker, she was inescapably reminded of the cattle on the farm at Birnham Park, lining up for milking at the gate. Yet babies were what Ernst wanted, and what Irene wanted most was to please him.

  There was no need for Gretl to know that.

  “To be honest, I’m not in a hurry.”

  Gretl’s mouth clenched like a purse. Taking up her monocle, she squinted at the program of future events. The next treat, Irene noted, was a speech by the female Führer, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, titled “The Place of the Woman in a National Socialist State,” on November 25.

  She made a mental note to be busy that day.

  Five minutes later Herr Gross was urging the audience to think of themselves not as individuals but as each “a drop in the great bloodstream of the German people,” and the women were eyeing the food trolley. Waitresses had brought out a selection of cakes, cream buns, ices, and sandwiches, but before the women could set on it there was an enforced pause while everyone turned and raised their glasses to the Führer, or at least to the oil painting of him propped on an easel by the coffee urn. Some people saluted it.

  Irene tried to memorize the scene for Cordelia. Her sister was the person she thought of always in these lonely days, the one with whom she held a constant dialogue in her mind. Frankly, most of the pleasure of Irene’s day lay in collecting sights up mentally, ready to send them off in a jokey, descriptive letter.

  As though reading her mind, Gretl asked, “How’s Cordelia getting on? We’re all dying to meet her. When are you going to invite her over here?”

  “She’s busy in Paris right now,” murmured Irene noncommittally. “And you must be so hungry, Gretl, eating for two. Shall we get some of that Apfelkuchen?”

  Chapter Eleven

  If Paris was the City of Lights, then in Pigalle those lights were uniformly red. The streets were filthy and ill-kempt, the shutters of the buildings hung drunkenly, and the Place Blanche was patrolled by hard-faced cocottes who worked at the surrounding brothels and bôites. The area was seething with hôtels de passe, low-rent places of prostitution that were far removed from the more expensive bordellos and maisons closes elsewhere in the city. Yet despite Torin’s misgivings, the Hotel Britannia was not a brothel in the strictest sense. Most of Cordelia’s fellow residents were dancers who spent their evenings performing in floor shows in the surrounding clubs, cabarets, and bars. They wore tight, glossy bobs with hard red lipstick, and their bodies were sleek with muscle. Often the girls didn’t wake until noon, after which they flitted between each other’s rooms, lavishly made up and chattering like magpies. One had a poodle that she combed devotedly and accessorized with a jeweled collar. Another kept a parrot that was liable to call out Vive la France! at awkward moments, causing male guests to curse with alarm. The women lounged in the corridors smoking and laughing, sometimes in spangly costumes that barely covered their flesh, stretching their T-bar shoes up against the wall to practice their high kicks or turning their feet out in ballet positions with an elegance that transcended their circumstances. One of the girls, Violette, had recently given birth at a clinic in the Rue des Martyrs and returned with a tiny child bundled against her blue-veined breast who found himself cooed over by a ready-made coterie of flam
boyant babysitters.

  In her lunch hours Cordelia would cross the Seine to the Left Bank and wander through Montparnasse and Saint Germain, voraciously inhaling the mingled scents of fresh bread, coffee, cheese, spices, herbs, and petrol fumes. She favored a café on the Place Saint Michel—an anonymous place with a checkered tiled floor, a blackboard with the plat du jour chalked up, and frilly half curtains across the lower end of the windows. There customers would come to get warm, snatch a café crème at the zinc bar, or sip a digestif. Her meals were simple, a plate of sausage on a bed of potato, or bread, cheese, and pâté, but unlike in England, where lunch might involve a slab of fat-flecked corned beef followed by a dish of stewed prunes, here the humblest of meals was regarded with reverence. A mere bar snack of artichokes and a potato gratin with creamed spinach, or a croque-monsieur, was a feast of rich and complex flavors.

  She missed Irene intensely. In the spacious isolation of Birnham Park, the two sisters had grown up as each other’s chief companions; eating together, reading together, sleeping together, and playing together. Their favorite game was to invent a country with its own labyrinthine system of rules, and its history shamelessly cherry-picked from Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, and Greek myth. The Kingdom of Birnham was one such place, Cordelia remembered, featuring two warring princesses separated at birth. The inspiration had mostly been hers. But it was Irene who had made it real, by sketching the characters and their costumes in painstaking detail.

  Now, as the sights and sounds of Paris washed over Cordelia, she found herself storytelling again. She found herself storing up the events of each day to retell them, embroidering and crafting them together into a narrative to share with her sister. If she could shape and reshape her experience vividly enough, perhaps Irene wouldn’t seem so very far away. With her last letter she had even sent a bottle of her new favorite perfume—Worth’s Je Reviens—so they might both be wrapped in its mingled notes of orange blossom, jasmine, and rose.