Winter of the World

by Ken Follett

  "No," she said. "You go first."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't trust you to keep your promises."

  "All right, then, we'll go together."

  Daisy was not sure why she was bothering. She did not love Boy--had not loved him for a long time. She was in love with Lloyd Williams, still in Spain on a mission he could not say much about. But she was married to Boy. He had been unfaithful to her, of course, with numerous women. But she had committed adultery too, albeit with only one man. She had no moral ground to stand on, and in consequence she was paralyzed. She just felt that if she did her duty as a wife she might retain the last shreds of her self-respect.

  The doctor's office was in Harley Street, not far from their house though in a less expensive neighborhood. Daisy found the examination unpleasant. The doctor was a man, and he was grumpy about her being ten minutes late. He asked her a lot of questions about her general health, her menstrual periods, and what he called her "relations" with her husband, not looking at her but making notes with a fountain pen. Then he put a series of cold metal instruments up her vagina. "I do this every day, so you don't need to worry," he said, then he gave her a grin that told her the opposite.

  When she came out of the doctor's office she half-expected Boy to renege on their deal and refuse to take his turn. He looked sour about it, but he went in.

  While she was waiting, Daisy reread a letter from her half brother, Greg. He had discovered he had a child, from an affair he had with a black girl when he was fifteen. To Daisy's astonishment the playboy Greg was excited about his son and keen to be part of the child's life, albeit as an uncle rather than a father. Even more surprising, Lev had met the child and announced that he was smart.

  It was ironic, she thought, that Greg had a son even though he had never wanted one, and Boy had no son even though he longed for one so badly.

  Boy came out of the doctor's office an hour later. The doctor promised to give them their results in a week. They left at twelve noon.

  "I need a drink after that," Boy said.

  "So do I," said Daisy.

  They looked up and down the street of identical row houses. "This neighborhood is a bloody desert. Not a pub in sight."

  "I'm not going to a pub," said Daisy. "I want a martini, and they don't know how to make them in pubs." She spoke from experience. She had asked for a dry martini at the King's Head in Chelsea and had been served a glass of disgustingly warm vermouth. "Take me to Claridge's hotel, please. It's only five minutes' walk."

  "Now that's a damn good idea."

  The bar at Claridge's was full of people they knew. There were austerity rules about the meals restaurants could sell, but Claridge's had found a loophole: there were no restrictions on giving food away, so they offered a free buffet, charging only their usual high prices for drinks.

  Daisy and Boy sat in art deco splendor and sipped perfect cocktails, and Daisy began to feel better.

  "The doctor asked me if I'd had mumps," Boy said.

  "But you have." It was mainly a childhood illness, but Boy had caught it a couple of years back. He had been briefly billeted at a vicarage in East Anglia, and had picked up the infection from the vicar's three small sons. It had been very painful. "Did he say why?"

  "No. You know what these chaps are like. Never tell you a bloody thing."

  It occurred to Daisy that she was not as happy-go-lucky as she had once been. In the old days she would never have brooded about her marriage this way. She had always liked what Scarlett O'Hara said in Gone with the Wind: "I'll think about that tomorrow." Not anymore. Perhaps she was growing up.

  Boy was ordering a second cocktail when Daisy looked toward the door and saw the Marquis of Lowther walking in, dressed in a creased and stained uniform.

  Daisy disliked him. Ever since he had guessed at her relationship with Lloyd he had treated her with oily familiarity, as if they shared a secret that made them intimates.

  Now he sat at their table uninvited, dropping cigar ash on his khaki trousers, and asked for a Manhattan.

  Daisy knew at once that he was up to no good. There was a look of malignant relish in his eye that could not be explained merely as anticipation of a good cocktail.

  Boy said: "I haven't seen you for a year or so, Lowthie. Where have you been?"

  "Madrid," Lowthie said. "Can't say much about it. Hush-hush, you know. How about you?"

  "I spend a lot of time training pilots, though I've flown a few missions lately, now that we've stepped up the bombing of Germany."

  "Jolly good thing, too. Give the Germans a taste of their own medicine."

  "You may say that, but there's a lot of muttering among the pilots."

  "Really--why?"

  "Because all this stuff about military targets is absolute rubbish. There's no point in bombing German factories, because they just rebuild them. So we're targeting large areas of dense working-class housing. They can't replace the workers so fast."

  Lowther looked shocked. "That would mean it's our policy to kill civilians."

  "Exactly."

  "But the government assures us--"

  "The government lies," Boy said. "And the bomber crews know it. Many of them don't give a damn, of course, but some feel bad. They believe that if we're doing the right thing, then we should say so, and if we're doing the wrong thing we should stop."

  Lowther looked uneasy. "I'm not sure we should be talking like this here."

  "You're probably right," Boy said.

  The second round of cocktails came. Lowther turned to Daisy. "And what about the little woman?" he said. "You must have some war work. The devil finds mischief for idle hands, according to the proverb."

  Daisy replied in a neutral matter-of-fact tone. "Now that the Blitz is over, they don't need women ambulance drivers, so I'm working with the American Red Cross. We have an office in Pall Mall. We do what we can to help American servicemen over here."

  "Men lonely for a bit of feminine company, eh?"

  "Mostly they're just homesick. They like to hear an American accent."

  Lowthie leered. "I expect you're very good at consoling them."

  "I do what I can."

  "I bet you do."

  Boy said: "Look here, Lowthie, are you a bit drunk? Because this sort of talk is awfully bad form, you know."

  Lowther's expression turned spiteful. "Oh, come on, Boy, don't tell me you don't know. What are you, blind?"

  Daisy said: "Take me home, please, Boy."

  He ignored her and spoke to Lowther. "What the devil do you mean?"

  "Ask her about Lloyd Williams."

  Boy said: "Who the hell is Lloyd Williams?"

  Daisy said: "I'm going home alone, if you won't take me."

  "Do you know a Lloyd Williams, Daisy?"

  He's your brother, Daisy thought, and she felt a powerful impulse to reveal the secret, and knock him sideways, but she resisted the temptation. "You know him," she said. "He was up at Cambridge with you. He took us to a music hall in the East End, years ago."

  "Oh!" said Boy, remembering. Then, puzzled, he said to Lowther: "Him?" It was difficult for Boy to see someone such as Lloyd as a rival. With growing incredulity he added: "A man who can't even afford his own dress clothes?"

  Lowther said: "Three years ago he was on my intelligence course down at Ty Gwyn while Daisy was living there. You were risking your life in a Hawker Hurricane over France at the time, I seem to remember. She was dallying with that Welsh weasel--in your family's house!"

  Boy was getting red in the face. "If you're making this up, Lowthie, by God I'll thrash you."

  "Ask your wife!" said Lowther with a confident grin.

  Boy turned to Daisy.

  She had not slept with Lloyd at Ty Gwyn. She had slept with him in his own bed at his mother's house during the Blitz. But she could not explain that to Boy in front of Lowther, and anyway it was a detail. The accusation of adultery was true, and she was not going to deny it. The secret was out. All s
he wanted now was to retain some semblance of dignity.

  She said: "I will tell you everything you want to know, Boy--but not in front of this leering slob."

  Boy raised his voice in astonishment. "So you don't deny it?"

  The people at the next table looked around, seemed embarrassed, and returned their attention to their drinks.

  Daisy raised her own voice. "I refused to be cross-examined in the bar of Claridge's hotel."

  "You admit it, then?" he shouted.

  The room went quiet.

  Daisy stood up. "I don't admit or deny anything here. I'll tell you everything in private at home, which is where civilized couples discuss such matters."

  "My God, you did it, you slept with him!" Boy roared.

  Even the waiters had paused in their work and were standing still, watching the row.

  Daisy walked to the door.

  Boy yelled: "You slut!"

  Daisy was not going to exit on that line. She turned around. "You know about sluts, of course. I had the misfortune to meet two of yours, remember?" She looked around the room. "Joanie and Pearl," she said contemptuously. "How many wives would put up with that?" She went out before he could reply.

  She stepped into a waiting taxi. As it pulled away, she saw Boy emerge from the hotel and get into the next cab in line.

  She gave the driver her address.

  In a way she felt relieved that the truth was out. But she also felt terribly sad. Something had ended, she knew.

  The house was only a quarter of a mile away. As she arrived, Boy's taxi pulled up behind hers.

  He followed her into the hall.

  She could not stay here with him, she realized. That was over. She would never again share his home or his bed. "Bring me a suitcase, please," she said to the butler.

  "Very good, my lady."

  She looked around. It was an eighteenth-century town house of perfect proportions, with an elegantly curving staircase, but she was not really sorry to leave it.

  Boy said: "Where are you going?"

  "To a hotel, I suppose. Probably not Claridge's."

  "To meet your lover!"

  "No, he's overseas. But, yes, I do love him. I'm sorry, Boy. You have no right to judge me--your offenses are worse--but I judge myself."

  "That's it," he said. "I'm going to divorce you."

  Those were the words she had been waiting for, she realized. Now they had been said, and everything was over. Her new life began from this moment.

  She sighed. "Thank God," she said.

  iii

  Daisy rented an apartment in Piccadilly. It had a large American-style bathroom with a shower. There were two separate toilets, one for guests--a ridiculous extravagance in the eyes of most English people.

  Fortunately money was not an issue for Daisy. Her grandfather Vyalov had left her rich, and she had had control of her own fortune since she was twenty-one. And it was all in American dollars.

  New furniture was difficult to buy, so she shopped for antiques, of which there were plenty for sale cheap. She hung modern paintings for a gay, youthful look. She hired an elderly laundress and a girl to clean, and found it was easy to manage the place without a butler or a cook, especially when you did not have a husband to mollycoddle.

  The servants at the Mayfair house packed all her clothes and sent them to her in a pantechnicon. Daisy and the laundress spent an afternoon opening the boxes and putting everything away tidily.

  She had been both humiliated and liberated. On balance, she thought she was better off. The wound of rejection would heal, but she would be free of Boy forever.

  After a week she wondered what had been the results of the medical examination. The doctor would have reported to Boy, of course, as the husband. She did not want to ask him, and anyway it did not seem important any longer, so she forgot about it.

  She enjoyed making a new home. For a couple of weeks she was too busy to socialize. When she had fixed up the apartment she decided to see all the friends she had been ignoring.

  She had a lot of friends in London. She had been there seven years. For the last four years Boy had been away more than he was home, and she had gone to parties and balls on her own, so being without a husband would not make much difference to her life, she figured. No doubt she would be crossed off the Fitzherbert family's invitation lists, but they were not the only people in London society.

  She bought crates of whisky, gin, and champagne, scouring London for what little was available legitimately and buying the rest on the black market. Then she sent out invitations to a flat-warming party.

  The responses came back with ominous promptness, and they were all declines.

  In tears, she phoned Eva Murray. "Why won't anyone come to my party?" she wailed.

  Eva was at her door ten minutes later.

  She arrived with three children and a nanny. Jamie was six, Anna four, and baby Karen two.

  Daisy showed her around the apartment, then ordered tea while Jamie turned the couch into a tank, using his sisters as crew.

  Speaking English with a mixture of German, American, and Scots accents, Eva said: "Daisy, dear, this isn't Rome."

  "I know. Are you sure you're comfortable?"

  Eva was heavily pregnant with her fourth child. "Would you mind if I put my feet up?"

  "Of course not." Daisy fetched a cushion.

  "London society is respectable," Eva went on. "Don't imagine I approve of it. I have been excluded often, and poor Jimmy is snubbed sometimes for having married a half-Jewish German."

  "That's awful."

  "I wouldn't wish it on anyone, whatever the reason."

  "Sometimes I hate the British."

  "You're forgetting what Americans are like. Don't you remember telling me that all the girls in Buffalo were snobs?"

  Daisy laughed. "What a long time ago it seems."

  "You've left your husband," Eva said. "And you did so in undeniably spectacular fashion, hurling insults at him in the bar of Claridge's hotel."

  "And I'd only had one martini!"

  Eva grinned. "How I wish I'd been there!"

  "I kind of wish I hadn't."

  "Needless to say, everyone in London society has talked about little else for the last three weeks."

  "I guess I should have anticipated that."

  "Now, I'm afraid, anyone who appears at your party will be seen as approving of adultery and divorce. Even I wouldn't like my mother-in-law to know I'd come here and had tea with you."

  "But it's so unfair--Boy was unfaithful first!"

  "And you thought women were treated equally?"

  Daisy remembered that Eva had a great deal more to worry about than snobbery. Her family were still in Nazi Germany. Fitz had made inquiries through the Swiss embassy and learned that her doctor father was now in a concentration camp, and her brother, a violin maker, had been beaten up by the police, his hands smashed. "When I think about your troubles, I'm ashamed of myself for complaining," Daisy said.

  "Don't be. But cancel the party."

  Daisy did.

  But it made her miserable. Her work for the Red Cross filled her days, but in the evenings she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. She went to the movies twice a week. She tried to read Moby-Dick but found it tedious. One Sunday she went to church. St. James's, the Wren church opposite her apartment building in Piccadilly, had been bombed, so she went to St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Boy was not there, but Fitz and Bea were, and Daisy spent the service looking at the back of Fitz's head, reflecting that she had fallen in love with two of this man's sons. Boy had his mother's looks and his father's single-minded selfishness. Lloyd had Fitz's good looks and Ethel's big heart. Why did it take me so long to see that? she wondered.

  The church was full of people she knew, and after the service none of them spoke to her. She was lonely and almost friendless in a foreign country in the middle of a war.

  One evening she took a taxi to Aldgate and knocked at the Leckwith house. When Ethel op
ened the door, Daisy said: "I've come to ask for your son's hand in marriage." Ethel let out a peal of laughter and hugged her.

  She had brought a gift, an American tin of ham she had got from a USAF navigator. Such things were luxuries to British families on rations. She sat in the kitchen with Ethel and Bernie, listening to dance tunes on the radio. They all sang along with "Underneath the Arches" by Flanagan and Allen. "Bud Flanagan was born right here in the East End," Bernie said proudly. "Real name Chaim Reuben Weintrop."

  The Leckwiths were excited about the Beveridge Report, a government paper that had become a bestseller. "Commissioned under a Conservative prime minister and written by a Liberal economist," said Bernie. "Yet it proposes what the Labour Party has always wanted! You know you're winning, in politics, when your opponents steal your ideas."

  Ethel said: "The idea is that everyone of working age should pay a weekly insurance premium, then get benefits when they are sick, unemployed, retired, or widowed."

  "A simple proposal, but it will transform our country," Bernie said enthusiastically. "Cradle to grave, no one will ever be destitute again."

  Daisy said: "Has the government accepted it?"

  "No," said Ethel. "Clem Attlee pressed Churchill very hard, but Churchill won't endorse the report. The Treasury thinks it will cost too much."

  Bernie said: "We'll have to win an election before we can implement it."

  Ethel and Bernie's daughter, Millie, dropped in. "I can't stay long," she said. "Abie's watching the children for half an hour." She had lost her job--women were not buying expensive gowns, now, even if they could afford them--but fortunately her husband's leather business was flourishing, and they had two babies, Lennie and Pammie.

  They drank cocoa and talked about the young man they all adored. They had little real news of Lloyd. Every six or eight months Ethel received a letter on the headed paper of the British embassy in Madrid, saying he was safe and well and doing his bit to defeat Fascism. He had been promoted to major. He had never written to Daisy, for fear Boy might see the letters, but he could now. Daisy gave Ethel the address of her new flat, and took down Lloyd's address, which was a British Forces Post Office number.

  They had no idea when he might come home on leave.

  Daisy told them about her half brother, Greg, and his son, Georgy. She knew that the Leckwiths of all people would not be censorious, and would be able to rejoice in such news.