Winter of the World (Century Trilogy 2)

by Ken Follett

  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 refuse 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 offences 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 for ever.

  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 here 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 flatwarming 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 was 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 th
em 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 opened 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 now he could. 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.

  She also told the story of Eva’s family in Berlin. Bernie was Jewish, and tears came to his eyes when he heard about Rudi’s broken hands. ‘They should have fought the bastard Fascists on the street, when they had the chance,’ he said. ‘That’s what we did.’

  Millie said: ‘I’ve still got the scars on my back, where the police pushed us through Gardiner’s plate-glass window. I used to be ashamed of them – Abie never saw my back until we’d been married six months – but he says they make him proud of me.’

  ‘It wasn’t pretty, the fighting in Cable Street,’ said Bernie. ‘But we put a stop to their bloody nonsense.’ He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his handkerchief.

  Ethel put her arm around his shoulders. ‘I told people to stay home that day,’ she said. ‘I was wrong, and you were right.’

  He smiled ruefully. ‘Doesn’t happen often.’

  ‘But it was the Public Order Act, brought in after Cable Street, that finished the British Fascists,’ Ethel said. ‘Parliament banned the wearing of political uniforms in public. That finished them. If they couldn’t strut up and down in their black shirts they were nothing. The Conservatives did that – credit where credit’s due.’

  Always a political family, the Leckwiths were planning the post-war reform of Britain by the Labour Party. Their leader, the quietly brilliant Clement Attlee, was now deputy prime minister under Churchill, and union hero Ernie Bevin was Minister of Labour. Their vision made Daisy feel excited about the future.

  Millie left and Bernie went to bed. When they were alone Ethel said to Daisy: ‘Do you really want to marry my Lloyd?’

  ‘More than anything in the world. Do you think it will be all right?’

  ‘I do. Why not?’

  ‘Because we come from such different backgrounds. You’re all such good people. You live for public service.’

  ‘Except for our Millie. She’s like Bernie’s brother – she wants to make money.’

  ‘Even she has scars on her back from Cable Street.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Lloyd is like you. Political work isn’t something extra he does, like a hobby – it’s the centre of his life. And I’m a selfish millionaire.’

  ‘I think there are two kinds of marriage,’ Ethel said thoughtfully. ‘One is a comfortable partnership, where two people share the same hopes and fears, raise children as a team, and give each other comfort and help.’ She was talking about herself and Bernie, Daisy realized. ‘The other is a wild passion, madness and joy and sex, possibly with someone completely unsuitable, maybe someone you don’t admire or don’t even really like.’ She was thinking about her affair with Fitz, Daisy felt sure. She held her breath: she knew Ethel was now telling her the raw truth. ‘I’ve been lucky, I’ve had both,’ Ethel said. ‘And here’s my advice to you. If you get the chance of the mad kind of love, grab it with both hands, and to hell with the consequences.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Daisy.

  She left a few minutes later. She felt privileged that Ethel had given her a glimpse into her soul. But when she got back to her empty apartment she felt depressed. She made a cocktail and poured it away. She put the kettle on and took it off again. The radio went off the air. She lay between cold sheets and wished Lloyd was there.

  She compared Lloyd’s family with her own. Both had troubled histories, but Ethel had forged a strong, supportive family out of unfavourable materials, which Daisy’s own mother had been unable to do – though that was more Lev’s fault than Olga’s. Ethel was a remarkable woman, and Lloyd had many of her qualities.

  Where was he now, and what was he doing? Whatever the answer, he was sure to be in danger. Would he be killed now, when at last she was free to love him without restraint and, eventually, to marry him? What would she do if he died? Her own life would be at an end, she felt: no husband, no lover, no friends, no country. In the early hours of the morning she cried herself to sleep.

  Next day she slept late. At midday she was drinking coffee in her little dining room, dressed in a black silk wrap, when her fifteen-year-old maid came in and said: ‘Major Williams is here, my lady.’

  ‘What?’ she screeched. ‘He can’t be!’

  Then he came through the door with his kitbag over his shoulder.

  He looked tired and had several days’ growth of beard, and he had evidently slept in his uniform.

  She threw her arms around him and kissed his bristly face. He kissed her back, inhibited somewhat by being unable to stop grinning. ‘I must stink,’ he said between kisses. ‘I haven’t changed my clothes for a week.’

  ‘You smell like a cheese factory,’ she said. ‘I love it.’ She pulled him into her bedroom and started to take his clothes off.

  ‘I’ll take a quick shower,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. She pushed him back on the bed. ‘I’m in too much of a hurry.’ Her longing for him was frantic. And the truth was that she relished the strong smell. It should have repelled her, but it had the opposite effect. It was him, the man she had thought might be dead, and he was filling her nostrils and her lungs. She could have wept with joy.

  Taking off his trousers would require removing his boots, and she could see that would be complicated, so she did not bother. She just unbuttoned his fly. She threw off her black silk robe and hiked her n
ightdress up to her waist, all the time staring with happy lust at the white penis sticking up out of the rough khaki cloth. Then she straddled him, easing herself down, and leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve been longing for you.’

  She lay on him, not moving much, kissing him again and again. He held her face in his hands and stared at her. ‘This is real, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Not just another happy dream?’

  ‘It’s real,’ she said.

  ‘Good. I wouldn’t like to wake up now.’

  ‘I want to stay like this for ever.’

  ‘Nice idea, but I can’t keep still much longer.’ He began to move under her.

  ‘If you do that I’ll come,’ she said.

  And she did.

  Afterwards they lay on her bed for a long time, talking.

  He had two weeks’ leave. ‘Live here,’ she said. ‘You can visit your parents every day, but I want you at night.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like you to get a bad reputation.’

  ‘That ship has sailed. I’ve already been shunned by London society.’

  ‘I know.’ He had telephoned Ethel from Waterloo Station, and she had told him about Daisy’s separation from Boy and given him the address of the flat.

  ‘We must do something about contraception,’ he said. ‘I’ll get some rubber johnnies. But you might want to get fixed up with a device. What do you think?’

  ‘You want to make sure I don’t get pregnant?’ she said.

  There was a note of sadness in her voice, she realized; and he heard it. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. He raised himself on his elbow. ‘I’m illegitimate. I was told lies about my parentage, and when I found out the truth it was a terrible shock.’ His voice shook a little with emotion. ‘I’ll never put my children through that. Never.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have to lie to them.’

  ‘Would we tell them that we’re not married? That in fact you’re married to someone else?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Think how they would be teased at school.’

  She was not convinced, but clearly the issue was a profound one for him. ‘So, what’s your plan?’ she said.