Free The Winter Garden (2014) by Jane Thynne Page A

opened French windows of the Goebbels’ drawing room, but more likely it was the company that was gathered around
her.
    The furniture had been cleared to make way for a crowd of women in bright sheath dresses, the glint of their jewellery competing with the gleam of silver death’s heads on black SS dress
uniforms. As always, it was an unnerving experience being in close proximity to a bunch of SS officers. The bark of German conversation was interspersed with the familiar bray of the English upper
classes, but so far no one had taken up the offer of Clara’s translation. The Germans pretended they already understood, and the English assumed that speaking their own tongue both louder and
slower would make them perfectly comprehensible.
    ‘It’s a lovely spot, you have here, Frau Doktor,’ said one. ‘I hear the Führer sometimes prefers Schwanenwerder to Berchtesgaden.’
    ‘Nothing could be better than Berchtesgaden!’ interceded a gawky Englishwoman with a straw-coloured bob. ‘Berchtesgaden is the nearest you can get to heaven.’
    Unity Valkyrie Mitford had a stolid, impassive look, which reminded Clara of the stone women on the theatre façade on Nollendorfplatz. Her face with its high, plucked eyebrows, was like a
blank pool into which you longed to throw a pebble. The girl who had asked a German newspaper to let everyone know she was a ‘Jew-hater’ had a sullen air, like a cow that has been
thwarted at a gate. Though she was only twenty-three, she had left England and relocated to Germany to be as close to Hitler as possible, basing herself in Munich and hoping each day for an
invitation from the Führer to lunch, or the opera, or just to take tea at his apartment. Occasionally she was asked to make speeches or write newspaper articles, in which event she would turn
out a tirade against the Jews as dull and plodding as a twelve-year-old schoolgirl’s essay.
    Unity’s awkward woodenness only served to emphasize the beauty of her sister Diana, who was four years older, smaller by a head and exquisitely dressed in cream Dior, with milky blonde
hair and eyes of bright, hostile blue. The two had the same broad brow and high cheekbones, but the features which produced Diana’s loveliness were cast more coarsely in Unity. Looking at the
two sisters together made one wonder how birth could fashion such different outcomes from identical raw materials. The same thought must have occurred to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal
photographer, who was circling the guests with surprising nimbleness armed with a Leica.
    ‘Don’t mind me. Please don’t let me disturb you!’
    Hoffmann was a dapper character with the practised charm and ingratiating smile of the professional hotel manager. His hair was slicked with pungent pomade and a silk handkerchief bloomed
extravagantly from his top pocket. The fact that he had for many years been the only photographer permitted to take official portraits of the Führer meant he was the VIP photographer of choice
at gatherings of senior party figures. That evening he had abandoned lights and tripod in favour of a handheld camera, but his efforts to remain unobtrusive were quite unnecessary because the
Mitfords ignored him entirely. Being photographed was, for them, entirely routine.
    ‘The Berghof is terrifically homely,’ agreed Diana, who had just returned from a break at the Führer’s hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. ‘The view is glorious, though
it is just the teensiest bit like staying in a bed and breakfast in Bournemouth. The cushions have little slogans embroidered on them, can you believe?’ She had a sharp, tinkling laugh, like
a champagne glass being smashed. ‘There was even one that said,
The German Woman is knitting again!
And the cushion was knitted itself! Isn’t that funny! If there hadn’t
been so many great big guards around I would have popped it in my bag and taken it home.’
    ‘That’s a terrible thing to suggest,’ objected