What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Read online

  What Only We Know

  A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel

  Catherine Hokin

  Books by Catherine Hokin

  The Fortunate Ones

  What Only We Know

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part IV

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  The Fortunate Ones

  Hear More From Catherine

  Books by Catherine Hokin

  A Letter From Catherine

  Acknowledgements

  For my family, here and gone

  Prologue

  10 July, 1971

  Salt danced through the breeze, tingling at her lips. Dawn was breaking. Clouds trailed in chiffon streaks across the sky, rose gold and candyfloss pink. The promise of a heat-soaked day to come.

  She stepped onto the beach and let her feet find the rhythm of the sharp incline. One step and then another, the shingle crunching, until the ground became softer, the stones giving way to sand and ripples that lapped round her ankles like a kiss.

  The sun was coming up, floating over the horizon like an escaped balloon. She moved towards it, slipping through the water as sleek as a ship. Knee-deep, fingers trailing. Chest-deep, feet on tiptoes. The waves whispered at her shoulders, their pull stronger here than at the stony edge. She let them lift her, let her eyelids drop. The seagulls fell silent. There was nothing in her ears but a gurgle as pure as Lottie’s giggle.

  As she floated, the sea’s gentle tempo picked up a deeper swell. The water thickened. It settled in her hair, collected heavy in her cardigan’s bell sleeves. She sensed the shore slipping away. Felt sudden cold eddies pricking at her skin, telling her that, if she chose to take it, this was the moment to turn.

  She opened her eyes.

  Cornflowers bloomed across the sky. Soon, the hotel would rouse itself. There would be discoveries, questions. After that… well, she had little say in what happened after that. All she had was a wish: that he would read what she had written; that he would do what she asked.

  The swell grew hungry, sucked up stronger currents. It tugged at her arms, added weights to her fingers, wrapped itself like blankets round her legs.

  One has paid for my mistakes; the other will not.

  She dropped her head back; let the sky disappear. The world had been out of balance for far too long. It was time, at last, to level the scales.

  Part One

  One

  Liese

  Berlin, September 1936

  There wasn’t a finger’s breadth between them. Paul’s eyes were closed, his chin resting on Margarethe’s black curls; Margarethe’s head was tucked into his chest, her arms draped round his shoulders.

  Liese imagined her father choreographing the pose and spinning its caption: Paul and Margarethe Elfmann – the fashion genius and his beautiful muse. Two perfectly still figures forming one complete whole.

  You’re a lucky girl to live with so much love. To have such a perfect family. They all said it – the dreamy-eyed seamstresses coveting Margarethe’s velvet-bowed shoes. Sometimes Liese considered puncturing their visions, pointing out how awkward it was to always be cast in the spectator’s role. It was easier, in the end, to stay silent.

  The seconds dragged; the stillness grew stifling. Liese peeped at her watch: almost three o’clock. She willed the hands to hurry. Finally, the tiny gold pointer clicked into place and, exactly on cue, there it came: a knock on the door that pulled the Elfmanns apart like a knot unravelling. Whatever they whispered to each other was too soft to hear.

  Margarethe was the first to untangle, her body reforming into a model’s precisely cut lines. She tripped past Liese without looking at her daughter; Liese let her go. Margarethe was never cruel to her daughter or, at least, not intentionally so – she was as perfectly pleasant to Liese when she noticed her as she was to anyone else. Margarethe’s life always had, and always would, revolve around herself and, since her marriage, it had also revolved around Paul; the rest of the world hovered somewhere on the edge of her attention. For years, Liese had refused to accept that. She had held fast to the belief that, one day, when she was older, she would finally achieve the close bond with her mother she longed for. She had spent hours as a child drawing pictures of the two of them, sipping coffee on the Kurfürstendamm or gliding into fashion shows; giggling together like the arm-locked mothers and daughters who visited Haus Elfmann. She had presented each carefully crafted scene, hoping, at the least, for a smile. Margarethe, however, had shown no interest in the sketches, or in the excursions their pencil lines imagined.

  After a succession of blank stares, Liese had given up drawing them, and then given up trying at all. When Margarethe had forgotten her daughter’s fifteenth birthday as easily as she had forgotten her fifth, Liese decided it was time to be done with the hope that her mother might change her distant ways. Now, at sixteen, she finally understood Margarethe’s narrow limits: a child tidied away in a nursery, grateful for a kiss was one thing; a daughter whose height and curves made a lie of ‘she can’t be a day over thirty’ was quite another.

  I’ll be a better kind of mother when it’s my turn. I’ll be everything my daughter wants me to be.

  Liese watched Margarethe slink away and turned back to her father.

  Paul’s eyes were wistful, his hand deliberately suspended where his wife had left it, the script of their encounter still running in his head.

  Liese waited.

  Paul blinked; he sighed; he snapped into action. The showroom shivered as he surveyed its details, smoothing a curtain’s immaculate fringe, adjusting a spray of lilac into a more elegant plume. His body was bowstring taut; his fingers tapped a rhythm against his thumb. Countdown. One hour before the salon opened its canopied doors and the 1936 Autumn/Winter collection was deemed a triumph. Or not.

  As always, the flurry of preparations before the show had been fraught, the fear of failure tangible, despite the years of success that had gone before. Liese fancied she could see the thoughts tumbling round Paul’s head like a deck of cards falling. Would the shapes surprise? Would the colours dazzle? Was Haus Elfmann still ahead of the game? Every season, the same worries and now a new layer added.

  Liese studied the names pinned to the spindly chairs. Helena Stahl, the fashion house’s Amazonian Head of Publicity, was right: the seats were labelled with some out-of-place and unwelcome faces. Allotting the place to Liese’s left had unleashed language that was ripe even by Helena’s colourfully low standards.

  Agnes Gerlach, the self-appointed mouthpiece of the Party-run German Women’s Culture Association (an organisation Helena dismissed as ‘beige-clad frumps with no concept of style’), had spent two years begging for an invitation to an Elfmann show. Helena had spent two years delightedly ignoring her. Paul had no more time for Agnes than Helena did: he took her loudly voiced opinions on the ‘vulgarity’ of Germans who insisted on ‘aping French fas
hion’ personally. Now, however, even the German Fashion Institute was subject to the beck and call of its new Party masters. That meant that, whether Paul liked it or not, the country’s fashion houses, who all operated under the GFI umbrella, had to sing to the Party’s tune. The frumps were in the ascendant, vulgarity the charge every salon feared. Agnes had claimed a front-row seat. Paul’s sulk had verged on Shakespearean.

  Liese scanned the rest of the names while she waited for her father to stop fussing.

  Agnes had been placed next to Frau Goebbels. That the Third Reich’s First Lady was allotted a VIP spot was nothing unusual, given how many pieces she normally bought. It was her request for a second seat that had caused the problems. This time, Frau Goebbels had her angry little husband in tow. What the Reich’s Minister for Propaganda wanted with a fashion show, Liese couldn’t imagine. Other than the buyers from the major department stores and the financiers, men rarely attended. Today, however, the stiff cream cards revealed a heavy number of Ober-this and Gruppen-that. Men who, Helena complained, would come in their black uniforms and stop everyone smiling. Liese had never known a show where the guest list was so out of Haus Elfmann’s control. And not only the list.

  She picked up a programme as Paul flicked imaginary dust motes from the candlelit mirrors. The Party had put its stamp on the language the salon could use as strongly as it had dictated who sat in the audience. The new directives, which detailed how German collections could be described, had sent Helena into as much of a fury as the seat allocations. Berlin, not Paris, was now considered the centre of the fashion-world – in the Party’s eyes, at least. Hauptmode was therefore the mandated phrase, not haute couture; schick not chic the stamp of approval. Nobody could fit the clumsy terms comfortably across their tongues, but there they were in the programme, exactly as ordered. New faces and new words: small changes, but enough to trip them. Tension trickled through the building like sand through an hourglass.

  Paul had finally stopped pacing. He stood in the centre of the room, his hands raised. Liese craned forward, her neck prickling, as he clapped three times in quick succession. No matter how many times she played a part in them, the show-day rituals had never lost their magic. On his final clap, the door reopened. Two of the youngest seamstresses scurried in, wrapped in white coveralls like Christmas sugar mice. They paused, one to the left of Paul, one to the right, crystal atomisers wobbling. Liese’s nose twitched. A finger click and they were off, releasing the scent from the bottles in precision-timed bursts. The perfume puffed out in a fragrant mist which hung in the air like chiffon. Her father’s eyes darted after the girls as they hopped from corner to corner. Even when he was silent, Liese could hear him declaiming.

  Only fools think what we do is make dresses. This is fashion, this is a feast for the senses: it demands far more from the audience than their eyes.

  One of his best-loved pronouncements, reserved for the journalists and the would-be designers trying to winkle out his secrets. Paul wove impossible mysteries for them, but never for his daughter. With no son to succeed him, Liese was the salon’s heir. Her birthday, her age, what she cared about, or feared, might pass Paul by, but not her fashion education.

  Each collection forms like a rose: each petal, no matter how tiny, is an essential part of the mix.

  Liese had trotted behind him, hanging on his every syllable, since she was eight years old. Watching and listening; soaking up his smiles and his pats when she asked the right questions. As she grew older, taking note of everything that made sense, and everything that didn’t, and practising her sewing skills until her fingers bled, not caring as long as she impressed him. Liese was a model pupil, a ‘little sponge’ as Paul called her. Drinking in every detail during the day and then, as she sat alone in her room night after night while her parents ran round Berlin’s glittering parties, refashioning her father’s lessons until she had caught Haus Elfmann down to its essence.

  Everything danced to the rhythm of the salon’s two annual collections. The rites the Haus observed reached their peak on the day each of those was launched. Whether it was the length of the owners’ silent embrace, or the number of flowers allotted to a vase, or the order the outfits appeared in, every decision and every moment held weight. And not only did each show have its own carefully calibrated theme, each show carried its own unique scent. The curtain-opener, Paul called it, the palate-tease. There were certain constants: Spring and Summer should be sweet with flowers or citrus-sharp; Autumn and Winter heavy with spices. Beyond that, no one but Paul and the perfumiers knew. Now, this show’s fragrance filled the room and Liese’s test was coming.

  She let the scent swirl. As she breathed it in, she walked her mind back to the workrooms where the costumes had blossomed, floating from the flat planes of a pinboard onto a dummy’s soft contours. She pulled up the colours and the tightly coiled fabrics, whose details she had memorised for just such a moment. Berry red and deep mossy green, old gold and royal purple; satin and velvet, stiff guipure lace and fur soft as a kitten’s. She ran through the names pinned to each dress, the countries and stories their pleats and drapes sprang from. Now was the moment to make sense of it all.

  Paul turned to her, his foot tapping. Liese wasn’t quite ready to surrender her thoughts: once this task was done, he could easily forget her until the next cycle started.

  ‘Do the audience understand it, Papa? How the perfume talks to the clothes?’

  ‘Not like we do.’

  We. Liese’s skin fizzed.

  ‘But if we missed this step out? Then they would feel the lack. The lighting would grow harsh, the flower arrangements dull. The clothes would enter to coughs not gasps and the models would falter, even your mother. Our scene would not set, Liese. Why?’

  ‘Because this is theatre.’

  A nod; he was too tightly wound to smile. Besides, how else would she answer? Other children grew up stuffed with fairy tales and nursery rhymes: Liese’s magic kingdoms were fashioned in the workrooms and showrooms she had learned to toddle and speak in.

  You said the words ‘satin’ and ‘silk’ before Mother and Father. Delightful, but hardly a surprise. Minnie Elfmann, her much-missed grandmother, had woven that anecdote into family lore and never heard the sadness in it that Liese did. Minnie had been Liese’s shining light, a vision in feather-trimmed wraps and waist-length pearls; adored and never remote. And never Grandma.

  ‘Minnie, my sweet – nothing but Minnie. So much kinder for little mouths.’

  ‘And for old faces.’ Margarethe’s stage whispers had always been carefully pitched.

  Mother and wife had circled each other since Paul had spotted Margarethe commanding the audience at a Paris salon and whisked her back to Berlin. Any kindness between the two women had been reserved for public use.

  ‘She’s as jealous as a cat!’

  They both had hissed it.

  As Liese grew older and more tuned to the spats, the root of their competition became clear: her father and his constant need to stand centre stage. Not that it mattered anymore who had scratched first at who. Minnie had blazed out four years ago, dying before anything as dull as old age could catch her, and left a hole Liese had struggled to climb out of. Now, there was no more Minnie to cover her with kisses, and no one else inclined to. There was no more Grandpa Nathan either, although he was so stern it was hard to miss his presence. Since Minnie’s death, he had shrivelled away like a hermit into his shuttered mansion, unable to step inside the fashion house that her flair had helped him found. One set of grandparents gone and neither Paul nor Margarethe had any brothers or sisters to offer. As for Margarethe’s parents – they were lost somewhere in the rural corners of Alsace on the French–German border, their country ways long cast aside by their elegant daughter.

  ‘So, our clan is a small one – what does it matter? Everyone in Berlin knows who we are.’

  Another of Paul’s pronouncements. As if the public’s admiring gaze could make their sprawling
mansion in Bergmannkiez any less echoing or empty.

  Such a perfect family. Liese wished she could see it, or find it.

  She had haunted friends’ noisier houses when she could. She had devoured books that described what she longed for. Stories filled with sisters who shared secrets, whose passionate squabbles collapsed into tearfully ecstatic declarations. Whose pretty heads were watched over by mothers with wide hearts and wide laps and spoiled by fathers whose pockets bulged with candy.

  Not one of those stories resembled her own life. A mother and father wrapped up in themselves, aware of their daughter only as a part of the business. Uncle Otto, who was the salon’s Technical Director and not really an uncle at all. And Michael, Otto’s son, who was two years older than her and hovered somewhere between brother, friend and serious annoyance. As soon as she could toddle, Liese had stuck herself firmly to Michael. She had adored him, he had adored her and their business-breathing parents had been very grateful for the bond. Michael’s hand holding hers had been Liese’s anchor on the world; his grin a promise of adventure. They had built dens together, raided the kitchens together, dug up the gardens in search of buried treasure together. The Michael she had grown up with could collapse her into giggles with a look and spin a story out of thin air. His ‘just imagine if…’ had become her childhood’s favourite words. At twelve, even at fourteen, Liese would have said that the two of them knew each other inside out and everything was brighter when they shared it between them. Now, his life was outrunning hers, leading him to places she wasn’t ready to follow. There were days when loneliness sat on her like a second skin.