The House at Tyneford

by Natasha Solomons

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Historical Romance

Synopsis

An irresistible World War II story of a forbidden upstairs-downstairs romance in a great English country house

It’s the spring of 1938 and no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna. Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau is forced to leave her glittering life of parties and champagne to become a parlor maid in England. She arrives at Tyneford, the great house on the bay, where servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn. But war is coming, and the world is changing. When Kit, the son of Tyneford’s master, returns home, he and Elise strike up an unlikely friendship that will transform Tyneford—and Elise—forever.

A page-turning tale of family, love, loss, and the power of the human spirit set against the perennially popular backdrop of World War II England, Natasha Solomons’ The House at Tyneford is upmarket romantic fiction at its best.

A Blackstone Audio production.

Release date: December 27, 2011

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 368

Sample

Please treat the church and houses with care;

we have given up our homes where many of us lived for
generations to help win the war to keep men free.

We shall return one day and thank you
for treating the village kindly.

 

—Notice pinned to the door of Tyneford Church
by departing villagers, Christmas Eve, 1941

Chapter One

General Observations on Quadrupeds

When I close my eyes I see Tyneford House. In the darkness as I lay down to sleep, I see the Purbeck stone frontage in the glow of late afternoon. The sunlight glints off the upper windows, and the air is heavy with the scents of magnolia and salt. Ivy clings to the porch archway, and a magpie pecks at the lichen coating a limestone roof tile. Smoke seeps from one of the great chimneystacks, and the leaves on the unfelled lime avenue are May green and cast mottled patterns on the driveway. There are no weeds yet tearing through the lavender and thyme borders, and the lawn is velvet cropped and rolled in verdant stripes. No bullet holes pockmark the ancient garden wall and the drawing room windows are thrown open, the glass not shattered by shellfire. I see the house as it was then, on that first afternoon.

Everyone is just out of sight. I can hear the ring of the drinks tray being prepared; on the terrace a bowl of pink camellias rests on the table. And in the bay, the fishing boats bounce upon the tide, nets cast wide, the slap of water against wood. We have not yet been exiled. The cottages do not lie in pebbled ruins across the strand, with hazel and blackthorn growing through the flagstones of the village houses. We have not surrendered Tyneford to guns and tanks and birds and ghosts.

I find I forget more and more nowadays. Nothing very important, as yet. I was talking to somebody just now on the telephone, and as soon as I had replaced the receiver I realised I’d forgotten who it was and what we said. I shall probably remember later when I’m lying in the bath. I’ve forgotten other things too: the names of the birds are no longer on the tip of my tongue and I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember where I planted the daffodil bulbs for spring. And yet, as the years wash everything else away, Tyneford remains—a smooth pebble of a memory. Tyneford. Tyneford. As though if I say the name enough, I can go back again. Those summers were long and blue and hot. I remember it all, or think I do. It doesn’t seem long ago to me. I have replayed each moment so often in my mind that I hear my own voice in every part. Now, as I write them, they appear fixed, absolute. On the page we live again, young and unknowing, everything yet to happen.

When I received the letter that brought me to Tyneford, I knew nothing about England, except that I wouldn’t like it. That morning I perched on my usual spot beside the draining board in the kitchen as Hildegard bustled around, flour up to her elbows and one eyebrow snowy white. I laughed and she flicked her tea towel at me, knocking the crust out of my hand and onto the floor.

“Gut. Bit less bread and butter won’t do you any harm.”

I scowled and flicked crumbs onto the linoleum. I wished I could be more like my mother, Anna. Worry had made Anna even thinner. Her eyes were huge against her pale skin, so that she looked more than ever like the operatic heroines she played. When she married my father, Anna was already a star—a black-eyed beauty with a voice like cherries and chocolate. She was the real thing; when she opened her mouth and began to sing, time paused just a little and everyone listened, bathing in the sound, unsure if what they heard was real or some perfect imagining. When the trouble began, letters started to arrive from Venice and Paris, from tenors and conductors. There was even one from a double bass. They were all the same: Darling Anna, leave Vienna and come to Paris/London/New York and I shall keep you safe . . . Of course she would not leave without my father. Or me. Or Margot. I would have gone in a flash, packed my ball gowns (if I’d had any) and escaped to sip champagne in the Champs Elysées. But no letters came for me. Not even a note from a second violin. So I ate bread rolls with butter, while Hildegard sewed little pieces of elastic into my waistbands.

“Come.” Hildegard chivvied me off the counter and steered me into the middle of the kitchen, where a large book dusted with flour rested on the table. “You must practise. What shall we make?”

Anna had picked it up at a secondhand bookstore and presented it to me with a flush of pride. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management—a whole kilo of book to teach me how to cook and clean and behave. This was to be my unglamorous fate.

Chewing on my plait, I prodded the tome so that it fell open at the index. “‘General Observations on Quadrupeds . . . Mock Turtle Soup . . . Eel Pie.’”I shuddered. “Here.” I pointed to an entry halfway down the page. “Goose. I should know how to cook goose. I said I knew.”

A month previously, Anna had walked with me to the telegraph offices so that I could wire a “Refugee Advertisement” to the London Times. I’d dragged my feet along the pavement, kicking at the wet piles of blossoms littering the ground.

“I don’t want to go to England. I’ll come to America with you and Papa.”

My parents hoped to escape to New York, where the Metropolitan Opera would help them with a visa, if only Anna would sing.

Anna picked up her pace. “And you will come. But we cannot get an American visa for you now.”

She stopped in the middle of the street and took my face in her hands. “I promise you that before I even take a peek at the shoes in Bergdorf Goodmans, I will see a lawyer about bringing you to New York.”

“Before you see the shoes at Bergdorf’s?”

“I promise.”

Anna had tiny feet and a massive appetite for shoes. Music may have been her first love, but shoes were definitely her second. Her wardrobe was lined with row upon row of dainty high heels in pink, grey, patent leather, calfskin and suede. She made fun of herself to mollify me.

“Please let me at least check your advertisement,” Anna pleaded. Before she’d met my father Anna had sung a season at Covent Garden and her English was almost perfect.

“No.” I snatched the paper away from her. “If my English is so terrible that I can only get a place at a flophouse, then it’s my own fault.”

Anna tried not to laugh. “Darling, do you even know what a flophouse is?”

Of course I had no idea, but I couldn’t tell Anna that. I had visions of refugees like myself, alternately fainting upon overstuffed sofas. Full of indignation at her teasing, I made Anna wait outside the office while I sent the telegram:

 

VIENNESE JEWESS, 19, seeks position as domestic servant. Speaks fluid English. I will cook your goose. Elise Landau. Vienna 4, Dorotheegasse, 30/5.

 

 

Hildegard fixed me with a hard stare. “Elise Rosa Landau, I do not happen to have a goose in my larder this morning, so will you please select something else.”

I was about to choose Parrot Pie, purely to infuriate Hildegard, when Anna and Julian entered the kitchen. He held out a letter. My father, Julian, was a tall man, standing six feet in his socks, with thick black hair with only a splash of grey around his temples, and eyes as blue as a summer sea. My parents proved that beautiful people don’t necessarily produce beautiful children. My mother, with her fragile blond loveliness, and Julian so handsome that he always wore his wire-rimmed spectacles to lessen the effect of those too-blue eyes (I’d tried them on when he was bathing, and discovered that the lenses were so weak as to be almost clear glass). Yet somehow this couple had produced me. For years the great-aunts had cooed, “Ach, just you wait till she blossoms! Twelve years old, mark my words, and she’ll be the spit of her mother.” I could spit, but I was nothing like my mother. Twelve came and went. They held out for sixteen. Still no blossoming. By nineteen even Gabrielle, the most optimistic of the great-aunts, had given up hope. The best they could manage was: “She has her own charm. And character.” Whether this character was good or bad, they never said.

Anna lurked behind Julian, blinking and running a pink tongue-tip across her bottom lip. I stood up straight and concentrated on the letter in Julian’s hand.

“It’s from England,” he said, holding it out to me.

I took it from him and with deliberate slowness, well aware they were all watching me, slid a butter knife under the seal. I drew out a creamy sheet of watermarked paper, unfolded it and smoothed the creases. I read in slow silence. The others bore with me for a minute and then Julian interrupted.

“For God’s sake, Elise. What does it say?”

I fixed him with a glare. I glared a lot back then. He ignored me, and I read aloud.

 

Dear Fräulein Landau,

Mr. Rivers has instructed me to write to you and tell you that the position of house parlour maid at Tyneford House is yours if you want it. He has agreed to sign the necessary visa application statements, providing that you stay at Tyneford for a minimum of a twelvemonth. If you wish to accept the post, please write or wire by return. On your arrival in London, proceed to the Mayfair Agency in Audley St. W1, where ongoing travel arrangements to Tyneford will be made.

Yours sincerely,

Florence Ellsworth

Housekeeper, Tyneford House

 

I lowered the letter.

“But twelve months is too long. I’m to be in New York before then, Papa.”

Julian and Anna exchanged a glance, and it was she who answered.

“Darling Bean, I hope you will be in New York in six months. But for now, you must go where it is safe.”

Julian tugged my plait in a gesture of playful affection. “We can’t go to New York unless we know you’re out of harm’s way. The minute we arrive at the Metropolitan we’ll send for you.”

“I suppose it’s too late for me to take singing lessons?”

Anna only smiled. So it was true, then. I was to leave them. Until this moment it had not been real. I had written the telegram, even sent the wire to London, but it had seemed a game. I knew things were bad for us in Vienna. I heard the stories of old women being pulled out of shops by their hair and forced to scrub the pavements. Frau Goldschmidt had been made to scrape dog feces from the gutter with her mink stole. I overheard her confession to Anna; she had sat hunched on the sofa in the parlour, her porcelain cup clattering in her hands, as she confided her ordeal: “The joke is, I never liked that fur. It was a gift from Herman, and I wore it to please him. It was much too hot and it was his mother’s colour, not mine. He never would learn . . . But to spoil it like that . . .” She’d seemed more upset by the waste than the humiliation. Before she left, I saw Anna quietly stuff an arctic rabbit muffler inside her shopping bag.

The evidence of difficult times was all around our apartment. There were scratch marks on the floor in the large sitting room where Anna’s baby grand used to sit. It was worth nearly two thousand schillings—a gift from one of the conductors at La Scala. It had arrived one spring before Margot and I were born, but we all knew that Julian didn’t like having this former lover’s token cluttering up his home. It had been lifted up on a pulley through the dining room windows, the glass of which had to be specially removed—how Margot and I used to wish that we’d glimpsed the great flying piano spectacle. Occasionally, when Julian and Anna had one of their rare disagreements, he’d mutter, “Why can’t you have a box of love letters or a photograph album like any other woman? Why a bloody great grand piano? A man shouldn’t have to stub his toe on his rival’s passion.” Anna, so gentle in nearly all things, was immovable on matters of music. She would fold her arms and stand up straight, reaching all of five feet nothing, and announce, “Unless you wish to spend two thousand schillings on another piano and demolish the dining room again, it stays.” And stay it did, until one day, when I arrived home from running a spurious errand for Anna to discover it missing. There were gouges all along the parquet floor, and from a neighbouring apartment I could hear the painful clatter of a talentless beginner learning to play. Anna had sold her beloved piano to a woman across the hall, for a fraction of its value. In the evenings at six o’clock, we could hear the rattle of endless clumsy scales as our neighbour’s acne-ridden son was forced to practise. I imagined the piano wanting to sing a lament at its ill treatment and pining for Anna’s touch, but crippled into ugliness. Its rich, dark tones once mingled with Anna’s voice like cream into coffee. After the banishment of the piano, at six every evening Anna always had a reason for leaving the apartment—she’d forgotten to buy potatoes (though the larder was packed with them), there was a letter to post, she’d promised to dress Frau Finkelstein’s corns.

Despite the vanished piano, the spoiled furs, the pictures missing from the walls, Margot’s expulsion from the conservatoire on racial grounds and the slow disappearance of all the younger maids, so that only old Hildegard remained, until this moment I had never really thought that I would have to leave Vienna. I loved the city. She was as much a part of my family as Anna or great-aunts Gretta, Gerda and Gabrielle. It was true, strange things kept happening, but at age nineteen nothing really terrible had ever happened to me before and, blessed with the outlook of the soul-deep optimist, I had truly believed that all would be well. Standing in the kitchen as I looked up into Julian’s face and met his sad half smile, I knew for the first time in my life that everything was not going to be all right, that things would not turn out for the best. I must leave Austria and Anna and the apartment on Dorotheegasse with its tall sash windows looking out onto the poplars that glowed pink fire as the sun crept up behind them and the grocer’s boy who came every Tuesday yelling “Eis! Eis!” And the damask curtains in my bedroom that I never closed so I could see the yellow glow from the streetlamps and the twin lights from the tramcars below. I must leave the crimson tulips in the park in April, and the whirling white dresses at the Opera Ball, and the gloves clapping as Anna sang and Julian wiped away proud tears with his embroidered handkerchief, and midnight ice cream on the balcony on August nights, and Margot and I sunbathing on striped deckchairs in the park as we listened to trumpets on the bandstand, and Margot burning supper, and Robert laughing and saying it doesn’t matter and us eating apples and toasted cheese instead, and Anna showing me how to put on silk stockings without tearing them by wearing kid gloves, and . . . and . . .

“And sit, drink some water.”

Anna thrust a glass in front of me while Julian slid a wooden chair behind me. Even Hildegard looked rattled.

“You have to go,” said Anna.

“I know,” I said, realising as I did so that my luxuriant and prolonged childhood was at an end. I stared at Anna with a shivering sense of time pivoting up and down like a seesaw. I memorised every detail: the tiny crease in the centre of her forehead that appeared when she was worried; Julian beside her, his hand resting on her shoulder; the grey silk of her blouse. The blue tiles behind the sink. Hildegard wringing the dishcloth.

That Elise, the girl I was then, would declare me old, but she is wrong. I am still she. I am still standing in the kitchen holding the letter, watching the others—and waiting—and knowing that everything must change.

Chapter Two

In the Bathtub, Singing

Memories do not exist along a timeline. In my mind everything happens at once. Anna kisses me good night and tucks me into my high-sided cot, while my hair is brushed for Margot’s wedding, which now takes place on the lawn at Tyneford, my feet bare upon the grass. I am in Vienna as I wait for their letters to arrive in Dorset. The chronology laid out upon these pages is not without effort.

I am young in my dreams. The face in the mirror always surprises me. I observe the smart grey hair, nicely set, of course, and the tiredness beneath the eyes that never goes away. I know that it is my face, and yet the next time I glance in the mirror I am surprised all over again. Oh, I think, I forgot that this is me. In those blissful days living in the bel-étage, I was the baby of the family. They all indulged me, Margot, Julian and Anna most of all. I was their pet, their liebling, to be cosseted and adored. I didn’t have remarkable gifts like the rest of them. I couldn’t sing. I could play the piano and viola a little but nothing like Margot, who had inherited all our mother’s talent. Her husband, Robert, had fallen in love before he had even spoken to her, when he listened to her perform viola in Schumann’s ‘Fairytale Pictures.’ He said that her music painted lightning storms, wheat fields rippling in the rain and girls with sea blue hair. He said he’d never seen through someone else’s eyes before. Margot decided to love him back and they were married within six weeks. It was all quite sickening and I should have been unbearably jealous if it hadn’t been for the fact that Robert had no sense of humour. He never once laughed at any of my jokes—not even the one about the rabbi and the dining room chair and the walnut—so clearly he was deficient. The possibility of a man ever being besotted with my musical gifts was highly improbable, but I did need him to laugh.

I entertained the idea of becoming a writer like Julian, but unlike him I’d never written anything other than a list of boys I fancied. Once, watching Hildegard stuff seasoned sausage meat into cabbage leaves with her thick red fingers, I’d decided that this would be a fine subject for a poem. But I’d not progressed any further than this insight. I was plump while the others were slender. I had thick ankles, and they were fine boned and high cheeked, and the only beauty I’d inherited was Julian’s black hair, which hung in a python plait all the way down to my knickers. But they loved me anyway. Anna indulged my babyish ways, and I was allowed to sulk and storm off to my room and sob over fairy stories that I was far too old for. My never-ending childhood made Anna feel young. With a girl-child like me she did not admit her forty-five years, even to herself.

All that changed with the letter. I must go off into the world alone, and I must finally grow up. The others treated me just as before, but there was self-consciousness in their actions, as if they knew I was sick but were being meticulous in giving nothing away in their behaviour. Anna continued to smile benevolently upon my sullen moods and slip me the fattest slice of cake and run my bath with her best lavender-scented salts. Margot picked fights and borrowed books without asking, but I knew it was just for show. Her heart wasn’t in the rowing, and she took books she knew I’d already read. Only Hildegard was different. She stopped chiding me, and even when it was probably most urgent, she no longer pressed Mrs. Beeton upon me. She called me “Fräulein Elise,” when I’d been simple “Elise” or “pain of my existence” since I was two. This sudden formality was not out of respect at some newfound dignity on my part. It was pity. I suspected Hildegard wanted to give me every mark of rank and social status during those last weeks, knowing how I must feel the humiliation in the months to come, but I wished she would call me Elise, box my ears and threaten to pour salt on my supper once more. I left biscuit crumbs on my nightstand in clear contravention of her no-biscuits-in-the-bedroom policy, but she said nothing, only gave me a tiny curtsy (how I crawled inside) and retired into her kitchen with a wounded expression.

The days slid by. I felt them pass faster and faster like painted horses on a carousel. I willed time to slow, concentrating on the tick-tick of the hall clock, trying to draw out the silence between the relentless beats of the second hand. Of course it did not work. My visa arrived in the post. The clock ticked. Anna took me to receive my passport. Tick. Julian went to another office to pay my departure tax and on his return disappeared into his study without a word and with the burgundy decanter. Tick. I packed my travel trunks with wads of silk stockings, while Hildegard stitched hidden pockets into all of my dresses to secrete forbidden valuables and sewed fine gold chains along the seams. Anna and Margot accompanied me on coffee-drinking excursions to the aunts, so we could eat honey cakes and say good-bye and we’ll meet again soon when-all-this-is-over-whenever-that-will-be. Tick. I tried to stay awake all night so that morning would come slower and I would have more precious moments in Vienna. I fell asleep. Tick-tick-tick and another day gone. I took the pictures down from my bedroom wall and slid a knife under the mounting paper, slipping into the lid of my trunk the print of the Belvedere Palace, the signed programs from the Opera Ball and my photographs of Margot’s wedding: me in my muslin dress with the leaf embroidery, Julian in white tie and tails, and Anna in shapeless black so she wouldn’t upstage the bride and still looking prettier than any of us. Tick. My bags lay in the hall. Tick-tick. My last night in Vienna. The hall clock chimed: six o’clock and time to dress for the party.

Rather than going to my bedroom, I drifted into Julian’s study. He was at his desk scribbling away, pen clasped in his left hand. I didn’t know what he was writing; no one in Austria would publish his novels anymore. I wondered if he would write his next novel in American.

“Papa?”

“Yes, Bean.”

“Promise you will send for me the minute you arrive.”

Julian stopped writing and drew back his chair. He pulled me onto his lap, as though I was nine rather than nineteen, and clutched me to him, burying his face in my hair. I could smell the clean scent of his shaving soap and the cigar smoke that always lingered on his skin. As I rested my chin on his shoulder, I saw that the burgundy decanter was on the desk, empty once again.

“I won’t forget you, Bean,” he said, his voice muffled by the tangle of my hair. He clutched me so tightly that my ribs creaked and then, with a small sigh, he released me. “I need you to do something for me, my darling.”

I slid off his lap and watched as he crossed to the corner of the room where a viola case rested, propped against the far wall. He picked it up and set it down on the desk, opening it with a click.

“You remember this viola?”

“Yes, of course.”

I had taken my first music lessons upon this rosewood viola, learning to play before Margot. She took lessons upon the grand piano in the drawing room while I stood in this room (a treat to encourage me to practise) and the viola squealed and scraped. I even enjoyed playing, until the day Margot stole into Julian’s study and picked it up. She drew the bow across the strings and it trembled into life. The rosewood sang for the first time, music rippling from the strings as effortlessly as the wind skimming the Danube. We all drew in to listen, hearing the viola like a siren’s song: Anna clutching Julian’s arm, eyes wet and bright, Hildegard dabbing her eyes with her duster and me lurking in the doorway, awed by my sister and so jealous I felt sick. In a month all the best music masters in Vienna were summoned to teach my sister. I never played again.

“I want you to take it to England with you,” said Julian.

“But I don’t play anymore. And anyway, it’s Margot’s.”

Julian shook his head. “Margot hasn’t used this old thing for years. And besides, it can’t be played.” He smiled at me. “Try.”

I was about to refuse, but there was something odd in his expression, so I picked up the instrument. It felt heavy in my hands, a curious weight in the body. Watching my father, I placed it under my chin and, picking up the bow, drew it slowly across the strings. The sound was muffled and strange, as though I had attached a mute beneath the bridge. I lowered the viola and stared at Julian; a smile twitched upon his lips.

“What’s inside it, Papa?”

“A novel. Well, my novel.”

I peered inside the f-holes carved into the body of the instrument and realised that it was stuffed full of yellow paper.

“How did you manage to get all those pages in there?”

Julian’s smile spread into a grin. “I went to a string maker. He steamed off the front, I placed the novel inside and he glued it shut.”

He spoke with pride, pleased to confide his secret, and then his face became serious once again.

“I want you to take it to England for safekeeping.”

Julian always wrote in duplicate, writing out his work on carbon paper in his tiny curling hand, so that a shadow novel appeared upon the pages underneath. The top layer on watermarked white paper was sent to his publisher, while the carbon copy on flimsy yellow tissue remained locked in his desk drawer. Julian was terrified of losing work and the mahogany desk held a word hoard. He’d never permitted a copy to leave his study before.

“I’ll take the manuscript with me to New York. But I want you to keep this copy in England. Just in case.”

“All right. But I’ll give it back to you in New York and you can lock it inside your desk again.”

The hall clock chimed the half hour.

“You must go and dress, little one,” said Julian, planting a kiss on my forehead. “The guests will be arriving soon.”

It was the first night of Passover and Anna had dictated that it was to be a celebration, a party with champagne and dancing like there used to be before the bad times. Crying was absolutely forbidden. Margot came around early to dress and we sat in our dressing gowns in Anna’s large bathroom, faces flushed with steam. Anna filled the tub with rose petals and propped the dining room candlesticks beside the washbasin mirror, like she did on the evening of the Opera Ball. She lay back in the tub, her hair knotted on the top of her head, fingers trailing patterns in the water. “Ring the bell, Margot. Ask Hilde to bring a bottle of the Laurent-Perrier and three glasses.”

Margot did as she was bidden, and soon we sat sipping champagne, each pretending to be cheerful for the benefit of the others. I took a gulp and felt the tears burn in my throat. No crying, I told myself and swallowed, the bubbles making me choke.

“Be careful there,” said Anna with a giggle, too high pitched, striking a note of false gaiety.

I wondered how many bottles of wine or champagne were left. I knew Julian had sold the good ones. Anything expensive or valuable was liable to be confiscated; better to sell it first. Margot fanned herself with a magazine and, casting it aside, marched to the window, opening the sash to let in a cool breath of night air. I watched the steam trickle outside and the gauze curtain flutter.

“So, tell me about the department in California,” said Anna, lying back and closing her eyes.

Margot flopped into a wicker rocking chair and unfastened her robe to reveal a white lace corset and matching knickers. I wondered what Robert thought of such exciting underwear and was instantly filled with envy. No one had ever shown the slightest interest in seeing me in my underthings. Robert could be quite dashing in the right sort of lighting, although he always got rather too animated when talking about his star projects at the university. I had once grievously offended him when I’d introduced him at a party as “my brother-in-law the astrologer” rather than “the astronomer.” He turned to me with a haughty glare, asking, “Do I wear a blue headscarf and dangling earrings or ask you to cross my palm with silver before I tell you that, with Venus in retrograde, I see a handsome stranger in your future?” “Oh no, but I wish you would!&rdq