The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  “But here’s what bothers me. If Cordelia had decided to confess, why do it in a novel? Why not call and talk? It’s not as though she had ever written a novel before.”

  “That’s such an interesting question.” John Capel steepled his hands and paused before replying. “And the fact is, Cordelia was known for being direct. Her journalism was celebrated for its ferocious honesty. Yet I always suspected that journalism was a form of escape. A way of distancing herself from the secret at the heart of her own life. Cordelia was always going to be a writer, that was her passion, but she was never able to train that honesty on herself. My guess is she didn’t dare write a novel until then. Because fiction would mean confronting her own truth.”

  Juno sat moored to her seat. The end of all her searches was in front of her, yet still she craved answers.

  “Irene and Cordelia. Did they ever meet again?”

  “They never told me, but there’s a detail that intrigues me: at the end of her life, when I was visiting Cordelia, she had a painting propped up on a gilt easel—a portrait of a teenage girl standing in a garden. I’d never noticed it there before, and yet it was immediately familiar. It was only later that I realized I’d seen the same painting—at the Villa Weissmuller.”

  The phone beside him leaped into life and he glanced at the screen.

  “Ah, I’m sorry. Business calls. I assume, Juno, that you’d like to read the completed novel?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “I fly to London in the morning, but why don’t I have it sent here, to the Adlon, addressed to you? If you promise me faithfully to look after it.”

  “I will.” Juno slid her card across the table to him, and he scrutinized it.

  “So you’ve been photographing Berlin?”

  “For a magazine. I’m trying to give a feel of the city, though it will only ever be a stranger’s eye.”

  “Sometimes a stranger sees things that an insider overlooks. A different perspective. Are you here for long?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Matthias had asked her the same question the previous night, with rather more intensity, and she could give him no answer. They had been for a drink with friends of his—two architects and a sculptor, in a bar off Nollendorfplatz—and afterward they had walked miles through the city, fingers linked, savoring the balmy night air. Then he had stopped and studied her face intently.

  How long will you stay?

  I’ll need to go back to New York. I have work commitments.

  But you will come back?

  I think so.

  If you don’t, I’ll come and find you.

  “This might sound strange…” she confessed now to the man seated opposite her, “but Irene’s story changed me. Life was terribly unfair to her, but she realized that she had to make herself. She had no husband and no child, so she couldn’t let her happiness depend on another person. Her painting—her talent—was all she had.”

  “Exactly!” Animatedly, Capel leaned toward her. “If you don’t mind, I have a suggestion. I wasn’t going to mention it until we’d met—I wanted to get a feel for your interest in Irene—but I can see you and I are going to get on just fine, so let me explain. As well as the Max Liebermann, Irene left me all her own paintings in her will—hundreds of them. I’m planning to put on an exhibition here, in Berlin. Irene deserves it. She was a considerable artist. It’s time her work got some recognition.”

  “Oh, what a fabulous idea!”

  “I’m glad you agree. Maybe it’s my clumsy way of making up to her. A token restitution for the many sacrifices she made. More than anything, though, I’m proud of her. I wonder…would you like to be involved?”

  “Me? How?”

  “What if we exhibit some of your photographs alongside—contrast Irene’s Berlin with the modern city. Both as seen through a stranger’s eyes.”

  “That’s quite a proposition.”

  “It is, but I mean it. Give it some thought.”

  Two weeks later Juno collected a heavy hessian bag containing a package wrapped in brown paper from the reception desk at the Adlon. Leaving the hotel, she crossed Pariser Platz, passed under the Brandenburg Gate, and entered the Tiergarten.

  Autumn was edging into the air; migrating swallows stitching the cobalt sky and russet leaves wheeling down to litter the paths. Ashy-feathered crows, with a plumage not seen in America, hopped between the oaks and beeches, and the breeze sang in the trees. Seventy years ago, for Irene, this place would have been a wasteland, with every winding walkway obliterated, every branch felled, every inch of earth soured by shrapnel. Yet Nature would not be repressed for long. The splintered trees had struggled into leaf, and now it was a mature, verdant wilderness, pulsing with life.

  Finding a bench alongside a bronze statue of Goethe, she sat and unwrapped the parcel. Fingers trembling, she tore off a layer of brown paper and slid out a manuscript. It was identical to the one she had, only thicker, typed in the font she now recognized as that of the Underwood typewriter, and hurriedly she flipped through the pages in an agony of impatience. Skipping to the end, she found, to her surprise, that the last page took the form of a letter.

  Cobble Hill,

  Brooklyn

  November 10, 2012

  Darling Irene,

  For many years you wrote to me and I did not respond. Your letters lay like lead in my heart but still, I never replied. How could I? What could I say? Even though I did answer each letter, over and over in my mind, I never put anything down. For every page you sent, I had a hundred answers, justifications and explanations, but nothing was enough.

  Later you told me that you understood. That you might not have absolved me, but I would always have your love. Even then, it troubled me that I couldn’t explain. How many times, as a journalist, have I asked, “How did it feel?” Yet when it came to myself, words failed me…

  Looking up, Juno glanced around her. On one side, a winding path led toward an ornamental lake, behind her lay the Reichstag, and ahead the stark pillars of the Soviet War Memorial, built with marble taken from the ruins of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. As she sat there in a pool of sunlight, she was suddenly intensely aware of the layers of history beneath her feet; of the parades, the banners, the crowds and the bombs. Of the women and men who had walked on this spot, immersed in their own love affairs, ensnared in their own passions, making their own compromises and choices. The past had soaked through the earth like rain, leaving its mist of ghosts all around, and for a second she could almost see Irene, riding her horse with Martha Dodd, feeling the exultant wind on her face and sending the sandy paths flying, with no idea at all of what might lie ahead.

  Juno rubbed the tears from her eyes and read the final words of Cordelia to her sister.

  Now it’s too late. The shadows that have fallen on you are also encroaching on me. But I remember one day you urged me to write a novel, so who knows? Perhaps in some way this will reach you.

  Here are all the words I never wrote.

  You are, and have always been, the heroine of my life.

  Author’s Note

  The year I began writing this novel, 2016, was a momentous one in politics. The election of a controversial president in America, and in Britain the narrowly contested vote to leave the European Union, provided constant reminders of the power of politics to divide. Every day brought anecdotal news of rows across dinner tables, family schisms, disrupted Christmases, and entrenched bitterness. So the pain caused by family rifts was much in my mind as I wrote about two sisters finding themselves on opposing sides in the devastation of World War II. And while Irene and Cordelia Capel are fictitious, I was fascinated by some of the well-known figures who chose to hide their ideological allegiances.

  Martha Dodd accompanied her father, William E. Dodd, to Berlin, where he served as U.S. ambassador to Ger
many from 1933 to 1937. At first she was attracted to the Nazi regime and in her own words “became temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on.” She admired the Germans’ “glowing and inspiring faith in Hitler, and the good that was being done for the unemployed.” However, within a year of Martha’s arrival, Hitler unleashed the brutal massacre known as the Night of the Long Knives and she became passionately antifascist. She had many relationships with high-level Nazis, but in March 1934, the Soviet NKVD ordered their intelligence officer Boris Vinogradov, who was acting as an embassy attaché in Berlin, to recruit Martha as an agent. Their romantic relationship lasted until Vinogradov was executed in 1938. She continued as a Soviet agent after December 1937, when she returned to America, where she was kept under surveillance by the FBI, and she subsequently lived in Prague, Mexico, and Moscow.

  Kim Philby was one of the Soviet Union’s most successful double agents. He was at the center of the Cambridge spy ring and with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt operated in the highest echelons of British Intelligence. Philby was recruited in 1934 at the age of twenty-two. He remained a Soviet agent for the rest of his career, including while a journalist during the Spanish Civil War and when working as an instructor in the SOE’s “finishing school” at Beaulieu. He fled to Moscow in 1963. Anthony Blunt, once The Spectator’s art critic, made it to the top of the British establishment, becoming head of the Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and being knighted, before his spying career was publicly exposed in 1979.

  The story of Berlin’s Jewish hospital is expertly told in Daniel B. Silver’s Refuge in Hell. The hospital became something of a sanctuary where Jewish doctors and nurses managed to survive and care for Jewish patients throughout World War II. When Soviet troops liberated the hospital, in April 1945, they found eight hundred Jews still on the premises.

  A few years ago I was given a 1931 Underwood typewriter, bought on impulse from a New York store. Though I had learned to touch-type in school on an electric Smith-Corona, everything I ever did as a journalist and novelist was written on a computer. Yet the moment I saw the Underwood, I understood the enthusiasm collectors have for these exquisite vintage machines. And when I opened its roomy leather carry case, not only a typewriter but the germ of a novel emerged.

  In memory of Philip Kerr

  1956–2018

  Acknowledgments

  I cannot overstate my gratitude to Kate Miciak, my skilled, tireless, and legendary editor. From the moment when, in an Italian restaurant in midtown New York, I first outlined a story of two sisters separated by war, she has been a guiding spirit, meticulously shaping and crafting this final work. Her enthusiasm and vision fired me at every stage and I am greatly in her debt. Thanks, too, to my copy editor, Susan M. S. Brown, and all those on the Ballantine team.

  I am grateful to Caradoc King, my indefatigable agent and friend, and to Millie Hoskins, Kat Aitken, and all at United Agents. Joanna Coles has been an incredible cheerleader and wonderful friend, as have Amanda Craig, Kate Saunders, Liz Jensen, Elizabeth Buchan, and Kathy Lette. Huge thanks to Gabriel Fawcett for sharing his awesome knowledge of German history.

  I could not wish for more supportive children than William, Charlie, and Naomi, even if, having two writers as parents, they never want to be novelists.

  My last acknowledgment is for someone who is no longer around to receive it. When I met my husband, Philip Kerr, he had just published his first novel. I was captivated, and from that evening onward we were caught up in a conversation about writing, literature, and history that was to continue for thirty years. He was the most inspirational of fellow writers, masterly at plotting, persistence, and pep talks. He was a superb research companion, astonishingly driven, and a voracious historian. He lived a life that was wholly devoted to writing, so it is entirely appropriate that this novel should be dedicated, with endless love, to his memory.

  BY JANE THYNNE

  THE WORDS I NEVER WROTE

  THE WEIGHING OF THE HEART

  THE SHELL HOUSE

  PATRIMONY

  Clara Vine Series

  SOLITAIRE

  THE PURSUIT OF PEARLS

  THE SCENT OF SECRETS

  WOMAN IN THE SHADOWS

  BLACK ROSES

  About the Author

  JANE THYNNE was born in Venezuela and educated in London. After graduating from Oxford, she worked for the BBC, The Sunday Times, and The Daily Telegraph. She continues to freelance as a journalist while writing her historical fiction. Her novels, including the Clara Vine series, have been published in French, German, Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Romanian. The widow of the author Philip Kerr, she lives with her three children in London, where she is working on her next novel.

  janethynne.com

  Facebook.com/​AuthorJaneThynne

  Twitter: @janethynne

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