The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  “Expanding production is entirely within our power, but we can’t find enough workers to man a second shift.”

  “We will have to see how we can help you.”

  Ley’s body seemed to strain at his dress uniform, as though the trappings of civilization could only just contain him. Turning to Irene, he smiled. “Your husband’s efficiency level is second to none.”

  Efficiency. The word that surfaced endlessly in Ernst’s discussions about the factory. How efficiency could be increased, how the components could be processed and sorted and classified in record time. Someone pointed out that the Weissmuller workforce was not only efficient, it was obedient too. Whereas the employees of the nearby AEG factory had objected to a voluntary contribution to the Winterhilfswerk being deducted from their wages, no such mutinous behavior had been shown by Ernst’s people. Perhaps because he had responded so rapidly when the Party came to him with a list of politically unacceptable employees to be dismissed.

  “Cigarette, Herr Doktor?”

  Ernst proffered his silver cigarette case. It was an innocuous enough gesture, were it not for the case itself—a handsome piece, adorned with a swastika, a Party badge, and the insignia of the Luftwaffe picked out in gold. The insignia was not lost on Robert Ley, who registered its significance at once.

  “Nice case. Looks like a limited edition.”

  It was—limited to the friends of Hermann Goering, a category that now, plainly, included Ernst.

  “A Christmas gift,” murmured Ernst, stowing the case back in his pocket now that it had done its duty.

  “As I was saying, the Ministry will have to think of other ways to assist you.”

  The talk moved on to rearmament, and plans to join government firms, private companies, and the Labor Service in the construction of a great wall in defense of Reich territory.

  Others chatted about international affairs.

  “What no one’s saying is the Austrians actually want to belong to Germany. Ask anyone. They don’t want independence.”

  “You’re right. Everyone in Austria longs to come home to the Reich.”

  “It’s the same in the Czech Sudetenland. The people there are Volksdeutsche. Ethnically German. They’re only counted as Czech by a political mistake.”

  “The English king assured the Führer that Great Britain stands foursquare behind a Grand Alliance with Germany.”

  Irene drifted away.

  * * *

  —

  THE HOUSE LOOKED BEAUTIFULLY festive. Bach from a distant gramophone floated through the pine-scented air. Biscuity sekt bubbled in tall flutes and candlelight glanced off the silverware. The long drawing room windows glowed, and outside, snow began to fall on the leaden mass of the lake. As she moved from one group to the next, Irene remembered the snow globe of her childhood and suddenly had the sharp sensation of holding it in her hand, staring into its crystalline depths. Why did she feel as if she was still peering into a world from which she was excluded? While Ernst’s universe was widening, her own was turning in on itself, contracting, like a snail in its shell.

  “Ah. The artist!”

  It was Doktor Ley again. His fat face, spattered with broken capillaries, bobbed down to kiss her hand. He had a loose, sensual mouth, and his breath was laced with brandy.

  “Your husband tells me you’re a painter. I myself am a fanatical art lover.”

  Fanatischer. It was a favorite term. You saw it endlessly in newspapers and heard it on the radio: Goering is a fanatical animal lover. The German people are fanatically loyal. To be fanatical, like the hysterical newsreaders on the wireless, or Adolf Hitler, his face a clenched fist of rage, was a mark of everything holy. As though unbridled feelings were the only kind now required.

  “I recently commissioned a portrait of my wife, Inge. It hangs in the entrance hall of our home. Everyone admires it.”

  Irene had heard about this painting. Everyone had. In direct contrast to her husband, Inge Ley was a woman of ravishing beauty, a Swedish ballerina whose morbid depression was attributed to multiple factors, the chief one being that she was married to Robert Ley. The portrait Ley had commissioned was said to be breathtaking, mainly because his wife was naked from the waist up.

  Irene shot a glance at Frau Ley, huddled in conversation with one of her husband’s underlings, slender and immaculate in a black evening dress, its velvet folds gleaming with light. Her blond hair was secured in pin curls round her face, and she had a soft, fluttery voice, like feathers. Compared with her husband, she was a gazelle beside a buffalo.

  “Actually I tend to stick to still lifes and landscapes. Painting the lake’s my favorite occupation. It’s constantly changing.”

  “We shall have to organize an exhibition for you, one of these days.”

  “I’ll need to finish a few more before that.”

  Ley frowned. He was scrutinizing one of Ernst’s proudest acquisitions, a painting of eloquent sensuality featuring two lovers walking along a beach, the line of their bodies extending into the water in a mesmerizing, lyrical flow. Ernst was a passionate connoisseur, and this piece was the pride of his extensive collection.

  “That’s by Liebermann, isn’t it?”

  “One of his last works, actually. He died last year.”

  It was bold of Ernst to have left the Liebermann hanging. Foolhardy even, but Ernst must have assumed that his success and connections insulated him from any suggestion of impropriety. Max Liebermann had been, in his time, one of the most celebrated artists in Germany, until his Jewish heritage saw him banned from the Prussian Academy of Arts and the Reich Chamber of Culture. But Ernst knew that Joseph Goebbels, after all, had watercolors by Emil Nolde on his walls, and Nolde was a similarly suspect artist.

  “He lived just a few doors away from here, as it happens,” Irene continued. “And he also loved painting the lake, though he did it rather better than me.”

  A smile curled under Ley’s nose, dry as a wisp of smoke. “Jew lackeys like Liebermann have a polluting effect. Our culture is cleaner without their Entartete Kunst.”

  Entartete Kunst. Degenerate art.

  “Degenerate?” She smiled up at him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain that to me.”

  “The Führer has designated that term for art that is an act of aesthetic violence against the German spirit.”

  Ley’s speech impediment caused a tide of spittle to collect at the corner of his mouth. It seemed appropriate.

  “Forgive me, Herr Doktor, it must be because I’m English in origin—perhaps it’s a problem with translation—but I don’t see how a painting, any painting, let alone one like this, can be accused of violence.”

  “It is violent in the way that poison is violent. It sickens our Volk. And as you mention it, gnädige Frau, I can tell you that plans are now in place to purge all the Reich museums of degenerate work by Judenlümmel.”

  Jewish louts.

  “All this Objectivist, Cubist, Futurist, Impressionist piffle. There’s no place in the Reich for any nonsense of that kind. It’s an ugly, distorted vision. In fact, there’s to be an exhibition of all of them—Klee, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Gross, Dix, yes, and Liebermann too. We want to hang them together so their warped view of humanity is plain for all to see.”

  Irene maintained a pleasant smile, storing up the conversation to relate to Ernst later.

  Lightly, she replied, “The first thing they taught us when I was a student is that art always sparks disagreements. It’s been that way since the Renaissance. Some people even thought Michelangelo subversive, can you believe?”

  The maid poured more sekt into Ley’s glass. By some good fortune she drained the bottle.

  “Now if you would excuse me, Herr Doktor, I must just check on the wine.”

  * * *

  —

  IRENE MADE HER WAY
to the kitchen to hurry up the supplies of alcohol, but as she passed the library she paused. The library was her favorite room, its walls lined to the ceiling with leather-bound books and deep, comfortable sofas arranged before the fire. A wedge of light spilled out, and the low murmur of conversation could be heard. She pushed the door gently, discreetly, like a latecomer at the theater not wishing to interrupt the play.

  Ernst and a woman were sitting in two armchairs, talking softly. In the fraction of time before they saw her, Irene’s brain noted every element of the scene as if scanning it for a sketch she might later make; the old fireplace, carved with black enamel figures of animals and trees. The antique lamp to one side, enclosing the composition in its own sumptuous golden glow. The posture of the couple with their backs to her but their bodies angled toward each other, heads almost touching. The way her husband’s hand was laid gently on the young woman’s. The claret velvet of her low-cut gown, the shadowy crevasse of cleavage, and the gleam of pearls at her throat.

  Instinctively, Irene took a step back. At the sound the pair registered her presence and moved sharply apart. The young woman’s eyes were wide with shock, but Ernst seemed unruffled, calm even. For a fraction of a second a brittle silence gathered around them, and then he said, “Everything all right, darling?”

  “I’m just checking on the wine.”

  “Good idea.”

  Irene turned and fled to the kitchen in a daze, thoughts whirling. When the maid told her they had run out of smoked salmon canapés she was momentarily paralyzed, unable to distinguish between an annoyance and a catastrophe.

  It should have been obvious. In the past weeks Ernst had been increasingly absent, yet she had accepted his explanations without question. The factories had been working longer hours, production had been stepped up, a night shift had been introduced. He hated spending time away, but it was good for the family, he insisted. Good for the company. Good for her.

  * * *

  —

  SHE DID NOT SLEEP that night. The next morning Ernst entered the bedroom from his dressing room and sat heavily on the side of the bed. Taking a cigarette from a silver box stamped with the Weissmuller monogram, he lit up and inhaled, waiting for her to speak.

  “You’ve been seeing that woman.”

  Irene was sitting up, arms clutched around her knees, shivering slightly in the nightgown made of peach silk that she had bought for her honeymoon only six months ago. Her eyes were puffy, her face blotched with tears. Shock was stabbing at her with an almost visceral ferocity.

  A faint shrug of assent. “I won’t insult you by saying we were discussing work.”

  “Who is she?”

  Yet she had worked it out already. The woman was Lili’s replacement—the wife of one of Ernst’s junior managers. She remembered him saying that the man had petitioned him to give his wife some work—they needed the money and they had no children as yet—and Ernst had agreed to take the young woman on as his secretary, a risky and broad-minded proposition given that Party doctrine required married women to stay home. Irene remembered feeling proud of him.

  “She’s nobody.”

  “Have you…have you shared a bed?”

  Ernst picked a thread of tobacco from his mustache with meticulous care. “I’m a man, Liebchen. What did you imagine?”

  What did she? She was almost ashamed to tell him what she had imagined, so much like a child’s fairy tale it seemed now. The two of them wrapped in each other, night after night. An indissoluble union, like that of Cathy and Heathcliff—I am Heathcliff. He’s always, always in my mind! The years passing, children growing, the travel, the conversation, the devotion. How was it she was unable to see that the unsentimental, lawyerly approach she had so admired during their courtship was not a mere professional attribute but the very essence of his character? Men had mistresses, wives suffered—those were the facts of life according to Ernst. Irene was owned. As much as every monogrammed item of china and linen in the house. Stamped with the Weissmuller name.

  “I didn’t imagine this.”

  He reached out, and she snatched her arm away as if his fingers might scald her.

  “Irene…”

  The gentle tone had frosted over. Even the way he uttered her name was chilly, its edges biting sharp and strange.

  “Darling, let me give you a piece of advice…”

  He grasped her arms and drew her forcefully toward him, tipping up her face to meet his.

  “I am your husband. I’m sorry that you should have seen what you saw. I will always love you above all other women. But sometimes I will travel. All marriages are arrangements, and you’re intelligent enough to understand that. If you keep the cage door open, Liebling, I will always fly back.”

  Irene had heard of these arrangements. She remembered the devastation of her aunt Alice, a glorious, flighty, whimsical woman who was married to her father’s brother David, on discovering that her husband regarded it as his prerogative to have a mistress. Alice grew drab overnight, like a bird whose wings had been clipped, and henceforth dressed in frumpy outfits far too old for her. At the time, Cordelia had been passionately indignant at her uncle’s behavior, yet if Irene had been much moved, she had forgotten it until this moment. She had supposed that, like death and illness and other dreadful events, adultery was something that would never happen to her. Her marriage would be the union of two souls. Cleave only unto thee as long as we both shall live. There was nothing in the wedding service about an arrangement.

  Yet even as these thoughts dragged painfully through her mind, an indignant fervor rose. That same dizzy drunkenness she had felt on Pfaueninsel coursed through her, only this time it was not alcohol but anger running like fire along her veins.

  “I’m going back to England.”

  A slight Prussian arch of Ernst’s back. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “It’s my choice.”

  “You’re overreacting, Irene.”

  “Where’s my passport?”

  “In my safe, of course. Listen…” His hand reached over, imprisoning hers. “You’re young and you’re upset, but there’s no need for impetuous behavior. You’re my wife. This is where you belong.”

  Irene twisted away from him and squinted through her swollen eyes at the lake outside. As she had so often noticed, it was doing everything possible to match her internal weather, the wind crimping the surface and a low haze hanging over it. She had a sense of her life drifting and accumulating like banked snow, day after day, the same quiet, deadly white. What could she do? Where could she go? The thought of friends and family gossiping about her intimate life appalled her. She had made her life, just like she made her paintings. Abandoning it seemed wrong. And the truth was, she couldn’t bear the idea of fleeing back to her parents, after all the trouble and extravagance of the wedding. What would she say? That her husband was not the man she’d imagined? That she had made a terrible mistake? How could she ever admit that to her mother and father? Or—most of all—to Cordelia?

  Besides, what Ernst said was evidently true. In becoming his wife, hadn’t she surrendered a degree of control in her life? What power did she actually have over her own destiny?

  In her sleep-deprived mind these questions revolved in a blur.

  “Let’s talk no more about this. Yes?”

  Ernst rose decisively and left the room as though a matter had been settled and a fresh contract agreed.

  Irene sat motionless for another hour as a grainy light spilled in through the voile curtains and all the pieces of her life fell into new and painful places. Then the harsh cry of a goose shattered the bitter air and, slowly and painfully, she climbed out of bed, unraveled her knotted body, and ran a savage brush through her hair.

  She would stay.

  But there was another thought that burned in her as the crunch of gravel signaled the arriv
al of Ernst’s Mercedes convertible and her husband’s departure for work.

  Thank God she did not have a child.

  * * *

  —

  ERNST WAS AT THE FACTORY all that day and she did not see him in the evening. But the following morning at breakfast he appeared, seeming, if anything, a little shamefaced.

  He sat down, poured his coffee, and then regarded her speculatively.

  “I’ve had an idea.”

  Irene raised her heavy-lidded eyes, violet with fatigue.

  “You know I’ve always thought you the most beautiful of women. I think it’s time that beauty is commemorated.”

  He paused, but she did not respond so he continued. “What I’m saying is, I’d like to have you painted. I think we should have a portrait of you.”

  “By who?”

  He was buttering his roll with deliberation, like a sculptor finishing a bronze. “I thought you might like to choose. You’re the expert. Do you have any thoughts?”

  She shrugged and looked away. She knew this was some kind of gesture. Allowing her to choose her own portraitist. Probably he had got the idea from Robert Ley. But she was far too stunned by her husband’s affair to focus on anything else.

  Ernst drained his coffee. She still found him so good-looking, his features so strong and firmly delineated, as if stamped by his own factory machines, but the mind behind that handsome face was now an utter mystery to her.

  “Have a think and let me know.”

  Rising, he pulled on his expensive hand-stitched gloves and rested one on her shoulder.

  “And thank you, my darling, for understanding.”

  She lifted her face to his and smiled.

  In that moment she knew she had changed. There was a different woman in her now, perhaps she had been there all along, a woman who would present one face to the world while keeping her true thoughts secret.