‘Why yes, I do know him. That’s Kurt von Stavenow.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh, yes. Quite certain.’
‘And your relationship?’
‘We – we were lovers for a while …’
The woman made a note with her green marbled Schaeffer. Edith left it at that. She wasn’t about to confide in this austere stranger with her cold, appraising eyes.
‘For how long?’ she asked with the air of someone who knew anyway.
‘Not long. A year, if that,’ Edith replied. He’d been her first love, only real love, come to that. Strange to think their time together had been so short. It took a far greater space in her recollected life.
The woman made another note, put down her pen and looked back at Edith, head on one side. She was strikingly good-looking, black hair swept back from a porcelain-pale face, large, dark eyes, slanted and slightly hooded. She wore red lipstick, the sort of shade that Edith’s sister, Louisa, favoured; other than that, very little makeup. The set of her mouth suggested that she rarely smiled. Her dark-grey costume was cut with the severity of a well-tailored uniform. Any suggestion of mannishness was offset by the ivory silk blouse, the Peter Pan collar pinned with a small pearl brooch. Edith admired the subtlety. I’m a woman in a man’s world, the outfit said, in a position of some seniority. The woman put a hand to her throat, an unconscious defence against Edith’s scrutiny.
‘I say,’ Edith broke the silence. ‘What is this all about?’
‘You’re here to answer questions not ask them.’
Edith shifted in her seat. This was beginning to feel less like an interview, more like an interrogation. She had no idea why she was here, or even where ‘here’ was.
She’d been brought from Control Commission, Germany Headquarters in Kensington, pulled out of the final briefing without explanation, and delivered without a word by a young man in a double-breasted suit and a Guards tie. He’d just pointed to a porticoed entrance.
‘First floor. Corridor on the left.’
They were government offices of some type, although the proportions were all wrong for offices: the corridor too wide, the ceilings too high. The room they were in might once have been a grand sitting room. A small gas fire stood dwarfed in a wide fireplace, any heat swallowed by the yawning, cavernous chimney, and the muffled clatter of a typewriter filtered through thin partitioning plywood. No nameplate for the offices, no numbers on the doors. Something to do with cousin Leo. Edith would put money on it. They were second cousins, really, several times removed, but had grown up together, their mothers close. Leo was always vague about his work in the government but everyone knew it was hush-hush.
Edith sat facing a large, plain desk, clear apart from a single pad, fountain pen beside it and two manila files. The woman behind it opened the second folder and Edith caught a glimpse of her own passport photograph.
‘You are due to leave for Germany soon to take up a position with the Control Commission, Education Branch,’ the woman read from her file. ‘That is correct?’
She spoke in German now. Edith replied in the same language. The interview was taking a different tack.
‘Before that you were working in a girls’ grammar school, teaching Modern Languages?’
Edith agreed again.
‘For how long?’
Edith answered her questions, going through her education: her degree in German from Bedford College, London. Time spent in Germany, dates and places. Finally returning to her application to join Control Commission, Germany.
‘Why?’ the woman asked.
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you apply? It’s a simple question, Miss Graham.’
‘Those are often the hardest to answer,’ she said. Her smile was not returned. ‘I spent the war at home. This is a chance for me to do something. Make a contribution.’
Even to her own ears, her words sounded trite, banal. How could this woman with her important job, involved in goodness knows what, possibly understand the tedium of life as Senior Mistress in a provincial girls’ grammar, with responsibility for Languages, Ancient and Modern, and the lower school? And when she wasn’t doing that, she was looking after her mother while everyone else, it seemed, was off somewhere doing something. Dangerous, maybe, even deadly, but exciting, even so.
Looking back, that time, wartime, seemed melded into one big mass, like the congealed blobs of metal and glass one found after a raid, impossible to see where one thing begins and another ends. So it was with the succession of days. Even raids had a tedious sameness. The dismal wail of the siren, getting Mother up and down to the shelter, listening for the drone of the bombers with that nerve-shredding mix of dread and boredom that came from not knowing when they would come, how long it would last, when it would be over. Then an hour or two of fitful sleep before the exhausting journey across town to work, on foot or by bicycle, with the plaster and brick dust hanging in the air, depositing a fine film everywhere, rendering pointless Mother’s constant dusting and cleaning. Some nights, she would get Mother settled in the shelter and then return to bed, not caring if she was blown to smithereens, in some ways wishing for it. The only relief had been rare escapes to London and Leo.
‘And how did you find out about the Control Commission?’
‘A colleague. Frank Hitchin.’
‘Who is he?’
‘My opposite number in the Languages Department at the boys’ grammar school.’
‘They’re looking for teachers,’ Frank had told her, ‘German speakers, to go there after it’s all over, help sort out the mess it’s bound to be in. I’m going to give it a go. They’ll probably be taking women, too. Spinsters, you know. No ties and nothing to keep ’em. Fancy free.’ He’d winked. ‘Why don’t you apply?’
Fancy free? If only he knew.
She’d pedalled home that evening, parked her bike in the garage with Mother waiting for the click of the garden gate. Tea on the table. Then cocoa and the six o’clock news on the radio. More V2 bombs in London but the Allies were crossing the Rhine; the Russians had reached the Oder. Surely the war was nearly over? ‘Then we can get back to normal’ her mother had announced with some satisfaction as she turned a row in her knitting. By that she meant, how things were before. To Edith, the prospect of peace felt like a closing trap. The Control Commission offered an escape. For a spinster teacher in her thirties, such opportunities did not come often. She was as well-qualified as Frank Hitchin and she’d spent time in Germany before the war, which was more than he had.
She’d said nothing to the family. They’d only try to stop her.
She’d had a reply almost by return, forms to fill, an interview. Nobody at home had the least idea. She didn’t tell them until it was too late and she’d given in her notice.
‘And what will your job entail?’ her interrogator enquired. ‘Teaching?’
‘The teaching will be done by the Germans,’ Edith replied, referring back to that day’s briefing. ‘We are there as administrators. Inspectors. Our job will be to set up schools where there are none, get them up and running. Vet staff. Get the children in.’
‘I see.’ The woman glanced back at the file. ‘And a high position. Senior Officer, equivalent to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.’ She sat back, fingertips together, assessing. Then she smiled. ‘You speak German very well,’ she said in English. ‘Very fluent with a good accent.’