The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) Read Online Free

stupid two days later when her mother still hadn’t written with money and what little cash she had was almost run through. Perhaps it had been a mistake to pretend that Cord was planning to marry her. Perhaps the truth would have elicited a quicker response. The Adlon was terribly expensive and the manager flatly refused to give her credit, no matter who her father was. After three nights, Kitty moved out of the hotel and went to look for cheaper lodgings. She had to look for a very long time; the best parts of Berlin were suddenly closed to her. In the end, after a horrible day, dragging her suitcase for what felt like fifty miles, she checked into an absolute fleapit at the wrong end of the Kurfürstendamm – the legendary Ku’damm spoken of by the finishing school’s more experienced girls. It was awful. The only running water was coming down the inside of the walls. There was no fiancé, no bilingual office job and definitely no cultural evenings at the Opera. Kitty was all alone and absolutely skint.
    But she still had her inner fire, is what she told herself as she gingerly lifted a grey blanket to check for bedbugs. Surviving in Berlin should be no problem at all. So what if she wasn’t in the best part of town? She had her street smarts and her savvy and she had just enough German to get by.
    And to get into trouble, as it happened.
    When Kitty booked into the Hotel Frankfort in the late afternoon, she found the neighbourhood shabby but otherwise unremarkable. As soon as night fell, however, the street outside was transformed. During the day, the locals shuffled grey-faced about their errands. In the evenings, everybody perked up and the street was transformed into a market, though not a market selling anything that Kitty would have wanted to buy.
    But she had to go out. She was hungry and even the food her horrid hotel offered at a discount for residents was way beyond her budget. She put on her boots – the green boots her mother had bought for her on their last trip to London – and strode out onto the street. It was important, she told herself, to convey an air of confidence. When you tried to make yourself inconspicuous, that was when you marked yourself out as a victim. If you walked tall and with a purpose, no one would bother you. That was the theory. Alas, Kitty’s theory was wrong.
    It started within a few feet of the hotel door. The catcalling and the whispers. One ruffian even went so far as to grab her arm and ask her, with incredible impudence, ‘How much?’
    ‘Unhand me,’ she told him, speaking English loudly and slowly, in the way that had won and was losing an empire. She shook him off and continued on her way. He followed her halfway down the street, making terrible kissing noises as he stuck close like a dog at her heels.
    At last Kitty spotted a respectable-looking restaurant and quickly slipped inside. But while she was reading the menu, an elderly man came and sat right opposite her and made no bones at all about his desires. He called her ‘mistress’. She told him to leave her in peace. She wasn’t interested in having any company that night.
    Perhaps he didn’t understand Kitty’s accent. Far from leaving her alone, the old man reached for her hand and pleaded. She must let him sit with her. He had been waiting his whole life for someone so lovely. He would spend the rest of his days in her service if she’d only say ‘yes’ to him. When should he start?
    ‘If you want to be of service to me,’ she told him in her best schoolgirl German, ‘you can tell that waiter to come over here and take my order. I’ve been waiting far too long.’
    To Kitty’s astonishment, the old man scuttled off and the waiter duly appeared, with the old man right behind him. Kitty gave her order and closed the menu with an irritated snap.
    ‘I still don’t want any company,’ she told the old man, who was about to sit down opposite her again. She only wanted to fill in her diary. She had