‘Thursday 22 September 1910, Mommsenstraße 78, Berlin. Dearest Mamma and Papa,’ Irene began. Then she put down her pen. This was her first letter home from Berlin. She felt cheerful, sitting at her new desk in her new sitting room in her new flat. The sun was shining, the air was crisp, the street outside orderly yet bustling.
She was wearing a loosely cut dress, in a soft pale wool. It was the kind of clothing Thomas preferred. His views on clothes were pronounced: they were more than coverings, they were charged with meaning. Women needed to be freed from the elaborate costumes, evidence of the wearer’s uselessness, that they’d worn for too long. He’d not gone quite so far as to buy clothes for her, but he’d bought her a straw sun hat with a bright ribbon round the band. When she saw it on her dressing table, she smiled, remembering discussions with her artist friends over whether hats were symbols of bourgeois convention. What would happen if one went out of doors hatless in London? They’d tried, walking bare-headed down Gower Street, provoking outraged looks which made them cackle with laughter. When she’d described this to Thomas, he’d looked at her with his patient, kindly smile. She would certainly be wearing a hat in Berlin.
Hat or no, she must convey happiness and optimism to her parents.
Here I am in my new home. I mean to write very often, but I hope you will understand if I do not write every single day, as I believe Princess Vicky wrote to Queen Victoria. We arrived yesterday to find Freddy and Thomas’s little sister Puppi at the station. They were so sweet and welcoming. They came back to the house but would not come in, they said we must make our first entrance on our own. I wondered if Thomas was going to carry me over the threshold, but fortunately he’s not given to such gestures!
It is an almost new building, in what they call the Reformed Style. Outside it’s very striking, irregular in design, five storeys high and covered in roughcast painted pale green, adorned with sculpture. It has a charming front door, all black and white squares. You take the lift to the second floor, and that’s us!
Our household was assembled. Imagine, your Irene having her own servants. I have a cook and a maid, and hardly a word can I understand – they’re country girls. I could see at once they’re nice girls, all smiles and as excited as I was, curtseying like billy-o. Gretchen, the cook, proudly showed me the kitchen and the beautiful new range as though they belonged to her, which I suppose they do. We’ll muddle through – or rather, I’ll muddle and they’ll manage. They insisted we eat some belegtes Brot they’d made, though we’d dined on the train.
Gretchen is twenty-six, and Lisa sixteen. Lisa has never met anyone English before and has learnt some words, to make me feel at home. She said, ‘Good evening, madam,’ and looked at me anxiously, and then they both laughed loudly until they remembered to be respectful and stopped laughing. Then Gretchen tried. ‘How does it go?’ she asked. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I like my house.’ At which they laughed a good deal more. Thomas looked on tolerantly, as though at children. He is interested in servants and workers, he thinks that a society can only flourish if all its people lead a full and healthy life. He knows the girls’ parents, and asked how they were.
She’d wanted to say to the maids, ‘There’s no reason for you to treat me so seriously, I’m just Irene.’ But of course, that was no longer true. There would be no more toasting cheese in front of the gas fire or sitting on the floor drinking wine or staying up until one heard the milkman on his round. No, she was a responsible housewife now. She sighed, but the letter must betray no sighs.
The flat has been redesigned by Thomas on the newest principles, appropriate for the best physical and mental development (this is how we speak). Thomas talks often about how the daily objects around us must be practical but graceful. We have a big sitting room onto the street, where I am now, with Thomas’s study next door. Beyond that is the dining room, furnished in the most up-to-date manner. The space between the front rooms and the back is called the Berliner Zimmer, it’s rather dark because the window’s in the corner. Our bedroom is at the back looking onto another courtyard, with a spare bedroom, where I hope you’ll come and stay, and another bedroom. For a child, she supposed.
The passage twiddles round to the bathroom decorated with white and blue tiles with the design of a little house in a garden, which Thomas put in. At the end of the passage is the kitchen. Gretchen has a little room beyond the kitchen, but Lisa sleeps in a cubbyhole under the roof, reached by a ladder. I was shocked, but that is the way here, and Lisa says she finds it much better than at home, where she slept higgledy-piggledy in a great big bed with her brothers and sisters.
Thomas has chosen beautiful colours, with stencilled decorations, and modern rugs and furniture by a designer called Bruno Paul. The curtains are all white and cream with abstract patterns. The furniture is very fine, though we aren’t allowed big armchairs you can sink into as at home as you have in London! No, you sit upright. Actually there’s not very much furniture since everyone is busy escaping from over-stuffed interiors, and enjoying the beauty of function. Thomas says the flat looks like an English house. I can’t see it, but I naturally agree. Anyway, here is a photograph Thomas took. He does it well, don’t you think?
She put down her pen. She did not say she’d been taken aback by the orderliness of the flat, the attention to detail, which left nothing for her to decide. She must never criticise Thomas or her new world to her family or her London friends. She must be loyal.
How distant this new world was from the old one, separated by so many hours in trains and boats, so many tickets and arrangements, such contrasting attitudes.
Thomas had taken on a new personality in Berlin. She thought that, unconsciously, he treated her like a character in a play. When she bought clothes, she was to bear in mind the colours of their rooms, the clothes must not be too high-toned or too dim. He’d suggested he might accompany her on shopping expeditions. When he asked her to sit where the light fell on her to advantage, she felt like Nora in her doll’s house, and refused.
Afterwards, she scolded herself. He wanted her to be happy. Would it be best to consent, to subordinate herself, as women were supposed to do? She tried to imagine doing this.
Thomas has thought so much about my needs. There is a big desk for me at the window of the Wohnzimmer. I shall resume drawing, I might even ask if I can use his study as a studio when he’s not using it. And there are many bookshelves, with space left for my books. Not much, in fact. There is a shelf of books about Berlin and Germany for me to study.
We are so happy in this flat. I realise how fortunate I am, to be living in this city.
She felt achingly homesick, suddenly, in a way she’d not done in Rome. She looked at herself in the mirror, and patted her hair. During the honeymoon she had worn it down first thing in the morning, and sometimes in the evening, as he loved her to do.
I know I am going to be happy here. Thank you for all your loving support, dearest Mamma and Papa.
A tear fell onto her writing paper and smudged the ink, but she suppressed the damage with her charming new blotter with its ivory edges carved into the shape of sunflowers. No more crying, she told herself sternly.
There was a knock. Dabbing her eyes, she cried, ‘Come in!’ It was Gretchen, wanting to know whether she would like some coffee. She seemed excited by the prospect. ‘No,’ said Irene petulantly, as though drinking coffee at a fixed hour every morning was another ritual to be imposed on her, as though her new function was to be the constant genteel consumption of food and drink. Gretchen looked disappointed, and Irene cried, ‘But yes please, it’s just what I would like, how kind.’ Gretchen beamed.
She must finish her letter. That morning Thomas had risen early, eaten a large breakfast, set off for the office. He told her he would be very busy at the office because of his long absence, but would spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday with her. It was all precisely planned. On Saturday they would go for a walk and attend a concert that he had chosen. On Sunday they would lunch with his parents and meet the assembled family. She looked forward to the walk. She dreaded lunch.
This afternoon my mother-in-law is visiting us here. That will be nice.
Nice? She was surprised at her own shyness. In London she’d met all sorts of people and gone to parties and not felt shy at all. But as for meeting all these strangers and being assessed for her looks and manners and knowledge of German and child-bearing abilities. . . It was worse, she thought, because a foreigner had got hold of their adored Thomas.
She wondered at the lameness of her English, already she seemed unable to speak English properly.
Enough for now. I must go out and make myself familiar with the neighbourhood. With dearest love. . .
Would her letter convey the proper level of happiness? Would her father read any doubts into it?
The coffee arrived on a lacquered tray, with little cakes on a plate decorated with a subtle pink and silver pattern, and a linen napkin, and a silver fork, all unfamiliar but clearly hers. It was touching, it was unbearable. ‘Will that be all?’ asked Lisa. Yes, more than all. Irene drank her coffee fast, ate one cake and hid two more behind the books, announced to her startled cook that she would be out to lunch, and fled into the sunny street. Would the servants, she wondered as she ran downstairs pinning on her hat, tell their master – her master? – that she had run out and never eaten the lunch they’d prepared?