Mama looked like a princess. My mother leaned forward to kiss me, and I stretched on tiptoe to touch the tip of the diamond drop gleaming against her bare neck. Her perfume filled my nostrils as she whispered in my ear, “This necklace will belong to you one day, my little Ingy.”
‘So you can imagine, the thought of some loud American woman, strutting around in a seventeenth-century Von Trellenberg heirloom, made me feel physically sick. But Freda merely pooh-poohed my protests, insisting that desperate means required desperate measures, and that if we were to go forward we had to forget the past. Then Freda got sick, and as usual got lucky, meeting your father like she did during her stay in hospital.’
Ingrid felt the old familiar stab of jealousy as she recalled her elder sister’s excitement at falling in love with the handsome English doctor, Richard de Moubray, who had asked her to marry him.
‘I begged Freda to take me with her to England, to a new life, but she was so full of herself and so madly in love with your father that the last thing she wanted was a sister to worry about. She thought I would be a burden.’ Pausing for a moment, eyes beginning to dart from side to side as if searching for something she had lost, Ingrid’s voice became ragged and disjointed as she muttered incoherently under her breath in German.
Kathryn watched the old woman in morbid fascination as she resumed her account. ‘I was wretched after the war, a helpless young girl, barely sixteen, a child. I had lost my family, and everything I held dear. For a while I hated my mother for committing suicide, I was very angry and I blamed her for leaving me. Only later, after I had found and read her letters, did I realize how desperate and how very sick she was in the last months of her life. Her adored son Joachim had died of gunshot wounds in a French field hospital in 1944, two weeks before his twenty-first birthday. Four months later her beloved Klaus suddenly stopped writing, and in the ensuing weeks all contact between them ceased. She tried without success to locate him. She was certain that he had deserted Germany, and his family, for ever – afraid of recriminations because of his Nazi connections. The vast country estate was requisitioned by the government, a fortune in antiques and art were looted by the Russians, I believe she even sold her priceless Fabergé egg collection. We lost everything.’
Ingrid’s lids fluttered then closed as if to shut out the memory. She began to pick manically at the tattered remains of a fringed cushion near her lap, a dark blue tangle of veins clearly visible under her papery skin. ‘Freda left not long after that and I was left stranded in that huge empty house. I hid most of the time, afraid to go out; the Russians were everywhere. I had no money or food, I was alone, except for the ghosts. At one point, I thought I was going insane, and if I hadn’t met Karl Lang when I did, I might have done so. Or joined my poor mother. I must admit, in the long, dark nights, I thought about ending it many times, anything would have been preferable to that terrible fear.’
A lump formed in the back of Kathryn’s throat and she swallowed with difficulty. The face next to her, loose and dulled with age, had suddenly reverted to that of a frightened young girl, alone in Berlin amidst the chaos of defeat. It filled her with an unexpected sympathy for this desolate old woman, who had lost her entire family in the space of a few months. It also confirmed what she had always suspected about her own mother. Freda had been a cold, callous creature, unable to love, or even show compassion to her own sister.
‘I’m sorry.’ Kathryn said kindly. She knew it sounded lame, but could think of nothing else to offer. Gently she placed a hand on Ingrid’s lap, but the old woman pulled back from her touch.
‘It’s over now, thank God; all over a long, long time ago, so long I sometimes imagine that none of it ever really happened or that I dreamt it all.’
A snuffling, followed by a scratching noise, momentarily distracted them both; they looked towards the sound, made by a West Highland Terrier, pushing his wet nose around the door.
‘Come, Sasha!’ Ingrid called affectionately. The dog’s ears pricked up instantly and he trotted towards her, leaping on to the sofa to settle in her lap. Ingrid patted the dog’s head, brightening a little. ‘Well, I have a new life now,’ waving a hand around the shabby room. ‘My pretty cottage, and my garden.’
‘Are you sure my father never knew the truth?’ Kathryn asked.
Ingrid shook her head. ‘As far as I know, Freda told him the same as she told you, and everyone else: that she was Freda Hessler, born in Cologne, you know the rest.’
Kathryn took a deep breath, knowing how important the next question was. ‘OK, now about my grandfather …’ She was surprised her voice sounded so calm. ‘Was Klaus Von Trellenberg one of those despicable Nazi monsters?’ Kathryn felt her mouth dry up, as she watched a muscle in Ingrid’s jaw twitch uncontrollably.
The old woman began to shake and Sasha growled softly. ‘My father was an officer, an SS Oberführer. He was an aristocrat, a highly respected man and a good German, who served his leader and his country with loyalty and integrity.’
Kathryn persisted, her sense of outrage and shock spurring her to confront the question uppermost in her mind. ‘You haven’t answered my question, Aunt Ingrid. Was he guilty of war crimes? I need to know.’ Kathryn was almost shouting. She was also tempted to grab her aunt by the scruff of her slack neck, and wring the truth out of her. Shit, the old witch is so controlled, she thought, and in that instant was reminded of her own mother Freda, always calm in crisis, so damn cool, when all around were reeling.
‘Ingrid, look at me please.’ Kathryn ordered.
Her aunt obliged, but her eyes were dead.
‘I accept that this man, this Nazi, Von Trellenberg, was my maternal grandfather. If he was a war criminal, I have to come to terms with that.’ She spat the words out as if eager to be free of them. ‘For God’s sake, Ingrid, I deserve to know; because if he was, it would help explain a lot of things I never understood about my mother.’
Ingrid stood up. She was a few inches shorter than Kathryn, but her back was ram-rod straight, and her thick hair rising from the top of her head like a white busby brought her almost level with her niece. She faced Kathryn, her eyes openly hostile. ‘I want you to go now, please, I’ve got a lot to do.’
Kathryn was furious. ‘That’s great, Ingrid, thanks a lot! I don’t see you for countless years, then my mother dies, and you drag me down here to tell me all about her secret past. Well, I’ve listened to your revelations patiently, and I don’t mind admitting I’m deeply shocked. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a lot to take in all at once.’ Bright spots danced at the corner of Kathryn’s eyes, and she was vaguely aware of a dull ache in her left temple.
When her aunt did not answer, Kathryn added, ‘Listen, I can easily find out the truth by researching the archives in Washington or Germany, so don’t lie to me, Ingrid.’
Screwing her eyes tightly shut, Ingrid dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘I refuse to discuss my father further. Klaus Von Trellenberg is dead; let him rest in peace.’
The hot sun streaming through the car window was very warm, heating her bare arms, but it couldn’t penetrate the cold numbing horror inside. The letters ‘SS’ and all the horror they conveyed kept leaping into her head, accompanied by a multitude of images from films: jackbooted Nazis, with merciless eyes and arrogant poise, wretched hordes of men, women and children herded on to trains for their journey to genocide.
Holding the wheel very tight, her knuckles bone white, she forced herself to erase the picture of a Jewish child in a red coat. It was a scene from Schindler’s List; the child’s face had remained with her for weeks after she had seen the film, and now it returned to haunt her once more.
Turning left off the main road, she drove up a narrow dirt track stopping at Northfields Farm. Kathryn read the name on the gate several times in an attempt to calm her nerves; then, letting her head drop on to the back of the driver’s seat, she began to shake, an uncontrollable quaking that terrified her. She stumbled out of her car, walked up to the gate and, leaning against it, gazed across a deep meadow where cows were grazing. From a clump of trees to the left she