There were so many gaps. Long hours she must have spent alone, punctured by a hazy week Mrs Hubbard filled with ceaseless chatter and uneaten baking. And the day Father took her back to the base – Karen couldn’t forget that, although she had tried her best. Father talking about moving away, how life among the other army families might prove easier to manage than staying on in the village. Showing her the shoebox of a house he thought would best replace the cottage where, if she tried hard enough, she still might be able to conjure up her mother. Karen had run away from him and she had screamed. So loudly a white-coated medic came running. That was awful. But Father wasn’t. He hadn’t shouted the way she had expected. He had held her and tried to calm her and mopped up her tears. That was the bit she needed to hold on to. Not the noise and the fuss and everyone’s embarrassment, but Father’s gentleness as he carried her to bed and stayed till she slept and answered, without blinking, to Daddy.
Karen cradled that memory and then she shoved it aside. What was the point of holding on to it when she wasn’t even sure anymore that it had happened? The next day, Father was back and moving wasn’t mentioned again. Nothing was ever mentioned again.
Father went back to drilling his recruits, or whatever it was he did that seemed to involve long hours away and paperwork that kept him busy into the night. Karen spent her days with Mrs Hubbard and the parade of grandchildren who trooped in and out and were nice to her ‘because your mum’s dead’. When Father was home and not at his desk in the back room, they manoeuvred around each other, him hiding behind a book, Karen taking refuge in front of the television. Whatever barrier they could find to kill the slightest threat of conversation.
The bottom stair creaked, breaking the flow of memories.
‘I’m coming.’
Karen grabbed her creaky new satchel and headed down before Father could come up or call out again, before his voice could tighten. She paused for a moment on the landing, checking her reflection in the hallway mirror. Pale face but no redness. Neat hair, box-fresh blazer. Ordinary.
Miss Larkin, her old junior school teacher, who wore tie-dye tops and mirror-studded skirts, said that ordinary was the same as dull, which was the worst thing to be. Karen didn’t agree with that at all. Staring at herself in the mirror, she realised that ordinary sounded perfect, sounded exactly what she wanted. An ordinary girl going to a new school filled with other ordinary girls, who didn’t know her. New faces who would believe in the mother Karen wanted to remember. The kind one, the gentle one; the one who was always present. New faces who hadn’t watched her mother shy away from the other mums gathered at the school gates. Who hadn’t giggled later on when her mother was there like clockwork every morning and every afternoon, reaching out for Karen’s hand long after the other children had declared their independence. Who didn’t know that Karen’s mother had ‘funny turns’. That Karen was the odd one, the unpopular one, the one who never had, so never went to, birthday parties.
Or, better still, new faces who wouldn’t ask her anything personal at all. Who would let her forget, for eight glorious hours every day, the impossible, unthinkable fact that her beautiful mother wasn’t silent, or absent; she was dead.
Three
Liese
Berlin, October 1936
‘Why is that boy never where he’s meant to be?’ Otto paced the pavement as the chauffeur hovered.
‘The traffic is building, sir. If you want to be on time…’
‘Uncle Otto? It’s freezing in here. Can I at least close the door?’
‘Fine, fine. I’m coming. I’ll deal with him later.’
Otto scrambled into the back of the Mercedes, cursing as he caught his foot on the running board. The seats were wide, but he still managed to crowd Liese into the corner. Middle age and a comfortable life had curled rolls of fat over his collar and wrapped bracelets round his wrists. He was a ferocious fighter in the war, completely fearless. Far braver than me – one cognac too many and Paul became a storyteller.
Watching Otto now, splayed out and puffing against the sand-coloured leather, all Liese could see was Lewis Carroll’s Walrus, drooling at the oysters.
‘Did you remind him what time we were leaving?’
Yes, and he reminded me he had a KPD meeting which was far more important than ‘the nonsense of fashion’ so that was another conversation that made us both cross. The same as every attempt at conversation in the four weeks since he called me stupid has made us both cross.
‘I couldn’t find him. And maybe it’s for the best he doesn’t come, given the way he’s been behaving lately.’
Liese kept her tone light, but she was deadly serious. Taking Michael to any of their stockists was a risk: he didn’t know when to leave his politics behind. He had already insulted the Wertheim department store’s buying team by calling their shoppers ‘blind and bourgeois’. Liese knew Haus Elfmann’s reputation wouldn’t survive the same behaviour at Hermann Tietz.
Otto sighed, but he couldn’t argue.
‘You two shadowing me was meant to be a simple exercise and all he does is cause chaos. I’m starting to think he’s not cut out for this business. Not like you, missy.’
Otto tapped on the partition for the driver to start moving and resettled his bulk.
‘Perhaps I should be concerned for my job, not Michael’s? If you carry on learning the ropes at the pace you’re going, Paul will soon have you running the place.’
‘As if Haus Elfmann could manage without its Fixer.’
Liese crinkled her nose the way her father did when he used the nickname that had followed the two men out of the mud-soaked trenches where they had met and into the business they now ran side by side. Whatever we needed – food or wine or a cart when our feet were too broken to walk – Otto the Fixer would produce it faster than a magician. Now Otto worked his magic on late-running suppliers and overstretched workrooms, and when Paul declared, with more than a touch of theatricality, ‘all my ideas would come to nothing without him’, no one disagreed.
‘Besides, you know I don’t want to direct the salon. I want to be its chief designer.’
Otto’s newly recovered smile disappeared again.
‘Which, with your talent, I don’t doubt you’ll be. And Michael was meant to stand in my position at your side, but the way that boy is going… To think I once harboured hopes that you and he wouldn’t only be business partners but—’
‘Uncle Otto, please!’
Her horror stopped the sentence finishing.
Bubbles of sweat popped out across Otto’s pink forehead; Liese refused to meet his eye as he fumbled for his handkerchief. How could he possibly think such a thing, when she and Michael had been brought up so closely they were practically related? Besides, Michael had a girlfriend, a cigarette-smoking redhead he slobbered over like she was carved out of candy. And as for her own fledgling love life… A sudden memory of André Bardou’s smiling mouth and stolen kisses at the salon reception, and the secret, so-romantic snatched meetings that had followed, burned her scarlet.
Otto collapsed into a pile of apologies.