The house was surrounded with a box hedge but the white wooden gates were open, and I drove up the well-kept gravel path. The main building must have been well over a hundred years old. It wasn’t the grim rectangular shape that northern landowners favoured. This was a house built for the Provençal climate, two storeys with shuttered windows, vines climbing across the façade, some mature palm trees – fronds thrashing in the wind – and a gigantic cactus, pale green and still, like a huge prehensile sea creature waiting to attack.
At the back of the house I could see a cobbled courtyard, swept and scrubbed to a cleanliness that is unusual hereabouts. From the coachhouse jutted the rear ends of a big Mercedes and a pale blue BMW. Behind that there was a large garden with neatly pruned fruit trees espaliered on the walls. I noticed the lawns in particular. In this part of the world – where fierce sunshine parches the land – a well-tended lawn is the sign of eccentric foreign tastes, of a passionate concern for gardens, or wealth.
On the small secluded front terrace there was a selection of garden furniture: some fancy metal chairs arranged around a large glass-topped table and a couple of recliners. But despite the sunshine, it was not really a day for sitting outside. The wind was unrelenting, and here on the hill even the tall conifers whipped with each gust of it. Gloria turned up her collar as we stood waiting for someone to respond to the jangling bell.
The woman who answered the door was about forty years old. She was attractive looking in that honest way that country people sometimes are, a strong big-boned woman with quick intelligent eyes and greying hair that she’d done nothing to darken. ‘Frau Winter?’ I said.
‘My name is Winter,’ she said. ‘But I am Ingrid.’ She opened the door to us and, as if needing something to say, added, ‘It is confusing that I have the same initial as my mother.’ Having noted our cheap rented car, she gave all her attention to Gloria and was no doubt trying to guess our relationship. ‘You want Mama. Are you Mr Samson?’ Her English was excellent, with an edge of accent that was more German than French. Her dress was a green, floral-patterned Liberty fabric cut to an old-fashioned design with lacy white high collar and cuffs. It was hard to know whether she was poor and out of style, or whether she was following the trendy ideas that are de rigueur at smart dinner parties in big towns.
‘That’s right,’ I said. I’d written to say that I was an old friend of Lisl, a writer, researching for a book that was to be set in Berlin before the war. Since I would be in the neighbourhood, I wondered if she would allow me to visit her and perhaps share some of her memories. There had been no reply to the letter. Perhaps they were hoping that I wouldn’t show up.
‘Let me take your coats. It’s so cold today. Usually at this time of year we are lunching outside.’ Her nails were short and cared for but her hands were reddened as if with housework. There was an expensive-looking wristwatch and some gold rings and a bracelet but no wedding ring.
I murmured some banalities about the winters getting colder each year, while she got a better look at us. So there was a daughter. She didn’t look anything like Lisl, but I remembered seeing an old photo of Lisl’s mother in a large hat and a long dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves: she was a big woman too. ‘How is your mother?’ I asked while Gloria took the opportunity to look at herself in the hall mirror and tease her hair out with her fingertips.
‘She goes up and down, Mr Samson. Today is one of her better days. But I must ask you not to stay too long. She gets tired.’
‘Of course.’
We went into the large drawing room. Several big radiators kept the room warm despite large windows that provided a view of the front lawn. The floor was of the red tile that is common in this region; here and there some patterned carpets were arranged. On the wall there was one big painting that dominated the room. It was a typical eighteenth-century battle scene; handsome officers in bright uniforms sat on prancing chargers and waved swords, while far away serried ranks of stunted anonymous figures were killing each other in the smoke. Two white sofas and a couple of matching armchairs were arranged at one end of the room and an old woman in a plain black dress sat in the ugly sort of high chair from which people with stiff joints find it possible to get up.
‘How do you do, Mr Samson?’ she said as her daughter went through the formalities with us, and studied Gloria carefully before nodding to her. Lisl’s sister was not at all like Lisl. She was a slight, shrivelled figure, with skin like speckled yellow parchment and thinning white hair that looked as if it might have been specially washed and set for this visit. I looked at her with interest: she was even older than Lisl, goodness knows how old that would make her. But this was a woman who had come to terms with ageing. She hadn’t dyed her hair or painted her face or stuck on to her eyelids the false lashes that Lisl liked to wear if visitors came. But despite all the differences, there was no mistaking the facial resemblance to her sister. She had the same determined jaw and the large eyes and the mouth that could go so easily from smile to snarl.
‘So you are a friend of my sister?’ Her words were English, her pronunciation stridently American, but her sentences were formed in a mind that thought in German. I moved a little closer to her so she did not have to raise her voice.
‘I’ve known her a long time,’ I said. ‘I saw her only a couple of weeks ago.’
‘She is well?’ She looked up at the daughter and said, ‘Are you bringing tea?’ The younger woman gave a filial smile and went out of the room.
I hesitated about the right way to describe Lisl’s health. I didn’t want to frighten her. ‘She might have had a slight stroke,’ I said tentatively. ‘Very slight. Even the hospital doctors are not sure.’
‘And this is why you have come?’ I noticed her eyes now. They were like the eyes of a cat; green and deep and luminous. Eyes of a sort I’d never seen before.
This old woman certainly didn’t beat about the bush. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But it means she’ll have to give up the hotel. Her doctor insists it’s too much for her.’
‘Of course it is. Everyone is telling her that at some time or other.’
‘It was your father’s house?’ I said.
‘Sure. It has many wonderful memories for me.’
‘It’s a magnificent old place,’ I said. ‘I wish I could have seen it in your father’s time. But the entrance steps make it difficult for Lisl. She needs to live somewhere where everything is on the ground floor.’
‘So. And who is caring for her?’
‘Have you heard of Werner Volkmann?’
‘The Jew?’
‘The boy she brought up.’
‘That Jew family she hid away on the top floor. Yes, my sister was completely crazy. I was living in Berlin until 1945. Even me she never told! Can you believe that from her own sister she’d keep such a thing secret? I visited her there, it was partly my house.’
‘It’s astonishing,’ I said dutifully.
‘So the Jewish kid she raised is looking after her.’ She nodded.
‘He’s not a kid any more,’ I said.
‘I guess not. So what’s he getting out of it?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He feels he owes it to Lisl.’
‘He figures he’s going to inherit the house. Is that it?’ She gave a malicious little chuckle and looked at Gloria. Gloria was sitting on a carved wooden chair: she shifted uncomfortably.
‘Not as far as I know,’ I said defensively. So bang goes the whole purpose of coming all the way here. Did this vituperative old woman deliberately manoeuvre me into that denial? I couldn’t decide. I was still thinking about it when the daughter arrived with tea and that sort of open apple tart in which the thin slices of fruit are carefully arranged in fanlike patterns.
‘Ingrid made that,’ said the old woman when she saw the way I was looking at it.
‘It looks wonderful,’ I said, without adding that after the ‘light meal’ on the plane almost anything would look wonderful. Gloria made appreciative noises too and
the daughter cut us big slices.
During tea I asked the old woman about life in Berlin before the war. She had a good memory and answered clearly and fully but the answers she gave were the standard answers that people who lived under the Third Reich give to foreigners and strangers of any kind.
After forty-five minutes or so I could see she was tiring. I suggested that we should leave. The old woman said she wanted to go on longer but the daughter gave me an almost imperceptible movement of the head and said, ‘They have to go, Mama. They have things to do.’ The daughter could also show a hard edge.
‘Are you just passing through?’ Ingrid asked politely while she was handing our coats.
‘We are booked in to the big hotel on the road this side of Valbonne,’ I said.
‘They say it’s very comfortable,’ she said.
‘I’ll write up my notes tonight,’ I said. ‘Perhaps if I have any supplementary questions, I could phone you?’
‘Mama doesn’t have many visitors,’ she said. It was not meant to sound like an encouragement.
When we reached the hotel it was not the ‘honeymoon hotel’ that I’d described to Gloria. It was at the end of a long winding road – broken surfaced and pot-holed as are all local roads in this region – and behind it there was an abandoned quarry. In a bold spirit of enterprise someone seemed to have fashioned a car park gate from two cartwheels, but on closer inspection it was a prefabricated plastic contraption. A few genuine old wine barrels were arranged across the patio, and in them some rhododendrons and camellias were struggling to stay alive. The hotel was a pink stucco building with shiny plastic tiles.
At the far end of the car park there was an out-building in which some derelict motor vehicles of indeterminate shape and marque were rusting away undisturbed by human hand. We parked beside a new Peugeot station wagon and a van that carried advertisements for a butcher’s shop in Valbonne. A large sign said that all cars were parked at owner’s risk and another pointed the way to an empty swimming pool which was partially repainted in a vivid shade of cerulean blue.
But once inside everything looked up. The dining room was clean and rather elegant, set with starched cloths and shining glass and cutlery. And there was a big log fire in the bar.
Gloria went straight upstairs to bathe and change but I went into the bar and warmed my hands at the fire and tried the Armagnac that the barman said was especially good. Gloria didn’t enjoy alcohol: she preferred orange juice or yogurt or even Seven-Up. It was another manifestation of the generation gap I suppose. Concurring with the barman’s verdict I took a second Armagnac up to our room, where Gloria had just finished taking her bath. ‘The water is hot,’ she called happily. She walked across the room stark naked and said, ‘Have a shower, darling. It will cheer you up.’
‘I’m cheered up already,’ I said, watching her.
All the way from Le Mas des Vignes Blanches to the hotel, she’d kept quiet, giving me time to think about the Winter woman. But when I said, ‘So what did you think of her?’ Gloria was ready to explode with indignation.
‘What a cow!’ said Gloria, dabbing herself with a towel.
‘If I have to be knocked out in the first round it’s a consolation to know it’s done by a world champion,’ I said.
‘She trapped you.’
‘And you have to admire the skill of it,’ I said. ‘She sensed what we’d come for even before we started talking. It was quick and clever. You have to admit that.’
‘What a vicious old moo,’ said Gloria.
‘Are you going to put some clothes on?’
‘Why?’
‘It’s distracting.’
She came and kissed me. ‘You smell of booze,’ she said and I stretched out my arms to embrace her. ‘Well, that’s very reassuring, darling. Sometimes I think I’ve lost the art of being distracting.’
I reached for her.
‘No no no! What time’s dinner? Stop it! There’s no time. I said what time’s dinner.’
‘It’s too late to think of that now,’ I said. And it was. Afterwards, when we were sitting quietly together, she said, ‘What are you, Bernard?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you English, or German, or nothing? I’m a nothing. I used to think I was English but I’m a nothing.’
‘I used to think that I was German,’ I said. ‘At least I used to think that my German friends thought I was a Berliner, which is even better. Then one day I was playing cards with Lisl and an old man named Koch, and they just took it for granted that I was an Englishman and had never been anything else. I was hurt.’
‘But you wanted it both ways, darling. You wanted your English friends to treat you like an Englishman, while your German friends thought of you as one of them.’
‘I suppose I did.’
‘My parents are Hungarian but I’ve never been to Hungary. I grew up in England and always thought of myself as one hundred per cent English. I was a super-patriot. Being English was all I had to hang on to. I learned all those wonderful Shakespeare speeches about England and chided anyone who said a word against the Queen or wouldn’t stand up for the National Anthem. Then one day one of the girls at school told me the truth about myself.’
‘Truth?’
‘You Hungarians, she said. All the other girls were there watching us, I wasn’t going to let it go. She knew that. I told her I was born in England. She said, If you were born in an orange box, would that make you an orange? The other girls laughed. I cried all night.’
‘My poor love.’
‘I’m a nothing. It doesn’t matter. I’m used to the idea now.’
‘Here’s to us nothings,’ I said holding the last of my Armagnac aloft before drinking it.
‘We’ll miss dinner unless you hurry,’ she said. ‘Go and have a shower.’
8
There was no breakfast room of course. In this sort of French hotel there never is. And unlike Gloria I don’t like eating food in bed. Thus she was propped up in bed, the tray balanced on her thighs, and I was halfway through my second cup of coffee, and eating Gloria’s second brioche – ‘You are a fool, darling. You’ve had two already’ – when the phone rang.
I knew it would be the Winter woman. No one else knew where I was. Contrary to regulations I’d not left a contact number at the office. People who left overseas contact numbers were likely to find themselves answering questions about where they’d been and why.
‘This is Ingrid Winter. Mama is feeling rather fit today. She wonders if you’d like to join us for lunch.’
‘Thank you: I would.’ Gloria had used the extra earpiece that all French phones have, and was waving a hand, in case her violently shaking head escaped my attention. ‘But Miss Kent has an appointment in Cannes. She could drop me and pick me up, if you’d suggest convenient times.’
‘Eleven and three,’ said the daughter without hesitation. The Winter family seemed to have answers ready for everything.
Gloria dropped me at the gate a few minutes early. It was better that way when dealing with Germans. ‘So! Exactly on time,’ said Ingrid Winter as she opened the door to me. It was a statement of warm approval. We went through the same formalities as before, talking about the weather as I gave her my coat, but today she proved far more affable. ‘Let me close the door quickly: that yellow dust gets everywhere when the wind is from the south. The Sirocco. It’s hard to believe that the sand could be blown all the way from the Sahara isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
She locked my raincoat away in a closet painted with big orange flowers. ‘My mother is a very old lady, Mr Samson.’ I said yes, of course she was, and then Ingrid Winter looked at me as if to convey some special meaning, apprehension almost. Then she said, ‘A very old lady.’ She paused. ‘Komm!’
With that she turned and walked not into the drawing room we’d used the previous afternoon but along a tiled corridor, hung with old engravings of ancient German cities, to a room at the back.
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It had not always been a bedroom of course. Like Lisl she’d had a downstairs room converted to her use. Few people of Inge Winter’s age wanted to go upstairs to bed.
She was not in bed. She was wearing the sort of grey woollen dress provided to poor patients in State hospitals, and sitting in a large angular armchair with a heavy cashmere shawl draped round her thin shoulders. ‘Sit down,’ she told me. ‘Do you want a drink of any sort?’
‘No thank you,’ I said. Well, now I understood Ingrid’s fears. This wasn’t a bedroom it was a shrine. It wasn’t simply that Inge Winter had surrounded herself with pictures and mementoes of times past – many old people do that – it was the ones she’d chosen that provided the surprise. The top of a large side-table was crowded with framed photos; the sort of collection that actors and actresses seem to need to reassure themselves of the undying affection that their colleagues have promised them. But these were not film stars.
The large silver-framed photo of Adolf Hitler had been carefully placed in a commanding position. I’d seen such photos before: it was one of the sepia-toned official portraits by Hoffmann that Hitler had given to visiting dignitaries or old comrades. But this one was not just perfunctorily signed with the scratchy little abbreviated signature normally seen on such likenesses. This was carefully autographed with greetings to Herr and Frau Winter. It was not the only picture of Hitler. There was a shiny press photo of a handsome middle-aged couple standing with Hitler and a big dog on a terrace, with high snow-capped mountains in the background. Berchtesgaden probably, the Berghof. Prewar because Hitler was not in uniform. He was wearing a light-coloured suit, one hand stretched towards the dog as if about to stroke it. The woman was a rather beautiful Inge Winter, with long shiny hair and wearing the angular padded fashions of the nineteen thirties. The man – presumably Herr Winter – slightly too plump for his dark pinstripe suit, had been caught with his mouth half-open so that he looked surprised and slightly ridiculous. But perhaps that was a small price to pay for being thus recorded consorting with the Führer. I couldn’t bring my eyes away from the collection of pictures. Here were signed photos of Josef Goebbels with his wife and all the children; greetings from a black-uniformed blank-faced Himmler; a broadly smiling, soft focused and carefully retouched Herman Göring; and a flamboyantly inscribed picture of Fritz Esser, with whom Göring faced the judges at Nuremberg. The Winters had found welcome in the very top echelons of Nazi society. So where did that put her sister Lisl?