Prologue
10 July, 1971
Salt danced through the breeze, tingling at her lips. Dawn was breaking. Clouds trailed in chiffon streaks across the sky, rose gold and candyfloss pink. The promise of a heat-soaked day to come.
She stepped onto the beach and let her feet find the rhythm of the sharp incline. One step and then another, the shingle crunching, until the ground became softer, the stones giving way to sand and ripples that lapped round her ankles like a kiss.
The sun was coming up, floating over the horizon like an escaped balloon. She moved towards it, slipping through the water as sleek as a ship. Knee-deep, fingers trailing. Chest-deep, feet on tiptoes. The waves whispered at her shoulders, their pull stronger here than at the stony edge. She let them lift her, let her eyelids drop. The seagulls fell silent. There was nothing in her ears but a gurgle as pure as Lottie’s giggle.
As she floated, the sea’s gentle tempo picked up a deeper swell. The water thickened. It settled in her hair, collected heavy in her cardigan’s bell sleeves. She sensed the shore slipping away. Felt sudden cold eddies pricking at her skin, telling her that, if she chose to take it, this was the moment to turn.
She opened her eyes.
Cornflowers bloomed across the sky. Soon, the hotel would rouse itself. There would be discoveries, questions. After that… well, she had little say in what happened after that. All she had was a wish: that he would read what she had written; that he would do what she asked.
The swell grew hungry, sucked up stronger currents. It tugged at her arms, added weights to her fingers, wrapped itself like blankets round her legs.
One has paid for my mistakes; the other will not.
She dropped her head back; let the sky disappear. The world had been out of balance for far too long. It was time, at last, to level the scales.
Part One
One
Liese
Berlin, September 1936
There wasn’t a finger’s breadth between them. Paul’s eyes were closed, his chin resting on Margarethe’s black curls; Margarethe’s head was tucked into his chest, her arms draped round his shoulders.
Liese imagined her father choreographing the pose and spinning its caption: Paul and Margarethe Elfmann – the fashion genius and his beautiful muse. Two perfectly still figures forming one complete whole.
You’re a lucky girl to live with so much love. To have such a perfect family. They all said it – the dreamy-eyed seamstresses coveting Margarethe’s velvet-bowed shoes. Sometimes Liese considered puncturing their visions, pointing out how awkward it was to always be cast in the spectator’s role. It was easier, in the end, to stay silent.
The seconds dragged; the stillness grew stifling. Liese peeped at her watch: almost three o’clock. She willed the hands to hurry. Finally, the tiny gold pointer clicked into place and, exactly on cue, there it came: a knock on the door that pulled the Elfmanns apart like a knot unravelling. Whatever they whispered to each other was too soft to hear.
Margarethe was the first to untangle, her body reforming into a model’s precisely cut lines. She tripped past Liese without looking at her daughter; Liese let her go. Margarethe was never cruel to her daughter or, at least, not intentionally so – she was as perfectly pleasant to Liese when she noticed her as she was to anyone else. Margarethe’s life always had, and always would, revolve around herself and, since her marriage, it had also revolved around Paul; the rest of the world hovered somewhere on the edge of her attention. For years, Liese had refused to accept that. She had held fast to the belief that, one day, when she was older, she would finally achieve the close bond with her mother she longed for. She had spent hours as a child drawing pictures of the two of them, sipping coffee on the Kurfürstendamm or gliding into fashion shows; giggling together like the arm-locked mothers and daughters who visited Haus Elfmann. She had presented each carefully crafted scene, hoping, at the least, for a smile. Margarethe, however, had shown no interest in the sketches, or in the excursions their pencil lines imagined.
After a succession of blank stares, Liese had given up drawing them, and then given up trying at all. When Margarethe had forgotten her daughter’s fifteenth birthday as easily as she had forgotten her fifth, Liese decided it was time to be done with the hope that her mother might change her distant ways. Now, at sixteen, she finally understood Margarethe’s narrow limits: a child tidied away in a nursery, grateful for a kiss was one thing; a daughter whose height and curves made a lie of ‘she can’t be a day over thirty’ was quite another.
I’ll be a better kind of mother when it’s my turn. I’ll be everything my daughter wants me to be.
Liese watched Margarethe slink away and turned back to her father.
Paul’s eyes were wistful, his hand deliberately suspended where his wife had left it, the script of their encounter still running in his head.
Liese waited.
Paul blinked; he sighed; he snapped into action. The showroom shivered as he surveyed its details, smoothing a curtain’s immaculate fringe, adjusting a spray of lilac into a more elegant plume. His body was bowstring taut; his fingers tapped a rhythm against his thumb. Countdown. One hour before the salon opened its canopied doors and the 1936 Autumn/Winter collection was deemed a triumph. Or not.
As always, the flurry of preparations before the show had been fraught, the fear of failure tangible, despite the years of success that had gone before. Liese fancied she could see the thoughts tumbling round Paul’s head like a deck of cards falling. Would the shapes surprise? Would the colours dazzle? Was Haus Elfmann still ahead of the game? Every season, the same worries and now a new layer added.
Liese studied the names pinned to the spindly chairs. Helena Stahl, the fashion house’s Amazonian Head of Publicity, was right: the seats were labelled with some out-of-place and unwelcome faces. Allotting the place to Liese’s left had unleashed language that was ripe even by Helena’s colourfully low standards.
Agnes Gerlach, the self-appointed mouthpiece of the Party-run German Women’s Culture Association (an organisation Helena dismissed as ‘beige-clad frumps with no concept of style’), had spent two years begging for an invitation to an Elfmann show. Helena had spent two years delightedly ignoring her. Paul had no more time for Agnes than Helena did: he took her loudly voiced opinions on the ‘vulgarity’ of Germans who insisted on ‘aping French fashion’ personally. Now, however, even the German Fashion Institute was subject to the beck and call of its new Party masters. That meant that, whether Paul liked it or not, the country’s fashion houses, who all operated under the GFI umbrella, had to sing to the Party’s tune. The frumps were in the ascendant, vulgarity the charge every salon feared. Agnes had claimed a front-row seat. Paul’s sulk had verged on Shakespearean.
Liese scanned the rest of the names while she waited for her father to stop fussing.
Agnes had been placed next to Frau Goebbels. That the Third Reich’s First Lady was allotted a VIP spot was nothing unusual, given how many pieces she normally bought. It was her request for a second seat that had caused the problems. This time, Frau Goebbels had her angry little husband in tow. What the Reich’s Minister for Propaganda wanted with a fashion show, Liese couldn’t imagine. Other than the buyers from the major department stores and the financiers, men rarely attended. Today, however, the stiff cream cards revealed a heavy number of Ober-this and Gruppen-that. Men who, Helena complained, would come in their black uniforms and stop everyone smiling. Liese had never known a show where the guest list was so out of Haus Elfmann’s control. And not only the list.