A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  As he spoke he was tearing off his jacket, wrenching his shirt over his head.

  She nodded, and as he pressed his shirt to the side of her head to soak up the blood, she took hold of the bunched-up linen herself, holding it in place.

  ‘Let’s get you out of here!’ He yanked his jacket back on over his singlet, his face contorted with rage and fear: rage at what had been done to her, and fear at how bad her head wound might prove to be.

  As he took hold of her, about to lift her into his arms so that he could carry her, she said thickly, ‘Not me, Hal. Ted’s unconscious. We have to get him out of here before he’s trampled to death.’

  Hal took one look at the man on the ground – at his closed eyes and deathly skin colour – and knew it wasn’t a time for argument.

  With Thea unsteadily on her feet, her face a mask of blood, he hauled Ted Finch upright. Then, as the battle between policemen and Hunger Marchers continued all around them, Hal heaved Ted over his shoulder so that Ted’s head, arms and upper body were hanging down his back. Gripping a tight hold of Ted’s legs, he put his free arm around Thea’s waist and, taking nearly all of her weight and overcoming all obstacles, proceeded to make a beeline towards the top north-west corner of the square.

  The outer edges of the square were coming under the control of the police, but with a senseless man slung over his shoulder and a bloodied girl leaning heavily against him, the police left Hal alone. As they reached the top of the steps near the National Gallery, Ted Finch made a noise deep in his throat and stirred.

  ‘He’s coming round!’ Thea’s relief was vast. Then, in sudden alarm she said, ‘And when he does, he’ll think you’re a policeman carrying him off to a Black Maria and he’ll start struggling.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll reassure him.’ There were beads of perspiration on Hal’s forehead. ‘I don’t want to put him down till we’re clear of the police, otherwise the next thing he’ll know, he’ll be in a cell and then up before a magistrate. How’s the bleeding? Is it easing off, or can’t you tell?’

  ‘I can’t tell.’ Her voice was weak, but not as faint and dazed as it had been.

  ‘My flat’s in Orange Street, at the back of the Gallery. Once there I’ll be able to take a proper look at what’s been done to you – and we’ll be able to see how badly your friend’s been hurt. Heading straight for a hospital is useless. Every hospital within reach will be overrun with casualties. There must be hundreds of people injured – policemen as well as marchers.’

  Thea didn’t reply. Despite the strength of his arm around her waist and the weight he was taking as she leaned hard against him, just remaining on her feet was taking all her strength.

  Even once they had left the square and were in Whitcomb Street there were still mounted policemen milling around.

  ‘What the bugger . . . ?’ Ted mumbled, his eyes opening.

  ‘You’ve been hurt, pal,’ Hal said swiftly, ‘but there are still bobbies everywhere and, if I put you down now, it’s likely you’ll be arrested. Another couple of minutes and we’ll be free of ’em.’

  Recognizing Hal’s accent as being that of a northerner, Ted did as he was told.

  After only another few yards they turned a corner out of Whitcomb Street into Orange Street. Apart from a couple of placards lying on the ground and a policeman’s helmet in the gutter, the street was blessedly empty.

  ‘Thank God!’ Hal said devoutly, stopping at a doorway and sliding Ted off his shoulder and onto the pavement.

  Ted slumped down against the wall, his legs splayed out in front of him.

  ‘I feel as if I’ve been ’it by a tank,’ he said as Hal, still with one arm supporting Thea, slid a key into the door’s Yale lock.

  ‘Aye, well. It’s same difference, if you get set on by baton-wielding bobbies with their blood up.’ He pushed the door open. ‘Can you get inside by yourself or do you need help?’

  ‘I’ll be fine in a minute or two and, if it’s all the same to you, now I can feel the use of my legs returning I’ll be off. I want to find the mates I walked down from Doncaster with. We got separated in Piccadilly Circus and I need to find ’em again.’

  Hal swung Thea up into his arms. ‘You took quite a hammering, to be unconscious for so long,’ he said, looking down at Ted in concern. ‘I reckon you should come in and have a pint of strong tea before you go anywhere.’

  Ted struggled to his feet. ‘Nah. I’ll be fine. You just look after this young lady. She’s a right grand lass and she needs that bleeding stopped. I’m very grateful to you, mate, but I’m going to be on my way.’ And without more ado he turned his back on them and began walking unsteadily back down the street.

  ‘Shouldn’t you go after him?’ Thea asked, alarmed.

  ‘Nope. He’s a Yorkshireman. Arguing with him would be like arguing with a brick wall. Besides, it’s not him I’m concerned about. It’s you.’

  He carried her into a narrow hallway, up a steep flight of stairs and then into a small room modestly but adequately furnished.

  ‘I thought you lived in Deptford?’ she said as he lowered her gently onto a moquette-covered sofa.

  ‘I did, but I needed to be nearer to Fleet Street.’

  Their intimate closeness, after eight years of agonizingly avoiding any such situation, was almost more than he could handle. Hal gritted his teeth, fighting down the overpowering emotion that only she ever aroused in him.

  ‘Stay still.’ His voice was raw. ‘Keep holding the shirt to your head till I’ve run a bowl of warm water.’

  Seconds later she could hear the sound of a tap opening in what was presumably his kitchen, and of water being run into a bowl. Then there was the sound of cupboard doors being opened and slammed shut.

  ‘I’ve found some hydrogen peroxide,’ he said, coming back into the room carrying the bowl, a towel, a facecloth, the bottle of peroxide and a newspaper.

  Kneeling beside her, he put everything within reach, saying gently, ‘Lie still, Thea love, while I get rid of this sodden shirt.’

  Fearful of what the blood-soaked shirt was going to reveal, he carefully lifted it away from her head and dropped it on the newspaper. Her hair was matted with blood, but it was blood that was beginning to congeal.

  Still unable to see just how deep and wide the wound was, he plunged the facecloth into the water to which he’d added the hydrogen peroxide.

  ‘This is going to sting like the very devil,’ he warned.

  She knew it would, and she didn’t care. They were together again in a way she’d almost given up hope of ever happening. The love he felt for her was in his eyes, his voice and – as with infinite tenderness he cleaned the wound in her scalp – in his hands.

  If she’d known who the policeman was who had wielded the baton that had injured her, she would have thanked him from the bottom of her heart. After this, Hal couldn’t possibly deny his feelings for her. After this, everything was going to be all right. His face was barely inches from hers and she feasted her eyes on it, loving the way his unruly hair fell low over his brow; loving the gold fecks in his dark-brown eyes; the strong line of his jaw and the slight cleft in his chin.

  ‘How does it look?’ she asked huskily as he squeezed out the flannel and reopened the bottle of peroxide.

  ‘It looks better than I’d hoped it would. I’m going to swab it with neat peroxide, so take a deep breath.’

  She did so, her eyes watering as the peroxide fizzed and foamed into the cut.

  ‘It needs stitching,’ he said tautly. ‘The hospitals will still be run off their feet, but the minute you get home, call your doctor. He’ll stitch it for you.’ He leaned back on his heels, his eyes holding hers. ‘It’s the best I can do, love. How do you feel?’

  Her head was pounding so hard she thought it was going to leave her shoulders. The peroxide was stinging like a million tiny knives. She said with a heart bursting with joy at his nearness, ‘I feel wonderful!’

  He didn’t attempt to misunderst
and her. His eyes dark with emotion that he could no longer control, he knelt forward again, taking hold of her hands, gripping them tightly. ‘I’d already seen you before you were hit, and I was on my way to get you out of the thick of things when the baton came down on your head.’ His voice broke. ‘Dear God, Thea. When I saw you keel over, I thought you were dead!’

  ‘I probably soon would have been, if you hadn’t got me out of there.’

  He was still shirtless and the powerful muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged with tension. In singlet and trousers he looked more like a professional boxer than he did a journalist. Knowing how much she and Ted Finch owed to his physical strength, she said, ‘I don’t know how you did it, Hal. I don’t know how you managed to carry Ted Finch, and half-carry me, all the way from the square to here.’

  Despite the overwhelming temptation he was fighting, a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘It was nothing compared to the weight of the injured calves I had to carry when I was a lad.’

  She giggled and suddenly it was just as it had always been between them.

  From the moment his arm had encircled her waist and, with Ted Finch on his back, he’d begun battling a way out of the chaos of the square, he’d sworn that whatever the outcome he wasn’t going to kiss her; that he was not going to break the vow he’d kept for eight agonizingly long years.

  Now, with her giggle, the vow he’d taken for both their sakes went whistling down the wind. One minute he was kneeling on the floor beside her, and the next he was on the sofa with her, pulling her hard against him, as her arms slid with the speed of quicksilver up and around his neck.

  His mouth crushed hers, his hand cupping her breast over the silk of her blouse. She moved a hand from around his neck, feverishly undoing mother-of-pearl buttons, and as she did so he pushed her skirt high, sliding her with hungry impatience beneath him.

  It was a movement that ended everything. Blood began streaming from her head again, trickling down her face and dripping onto her breasts and the backs of his hands. The sight of it brought Hal to his senses in a way nothing else could have.

  Instantly he released his hold of her, horrified that he’d been about to make love to her when she was so injured, his only concern being to stop the bleeding.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said urgently, springing to his feet and wringing the flannel out in water that was now cold. He pressed it to the side of her head. ‘Hold it in place while I get some clean warm water.’

  Sitting upright, her feet on the floor, she did as he told her.

  When he came back in the room, she said wryly, ‘I’ve never hated the sight of blood more. Next time we start to make love there won’t be any such hiccup.’

  He put the bowl of water down, a pulse pounding at the corner of his jawline.

  Oblivious of the change in his manner and his extreme tension, she said with happy confidence, ‘I’ll never forget today, because it’s shown us we still love each other – that we’ve always loved each other.’

  ‘Aye, we love each other, but loving each other isn’t always enough.’

  Her eyes widened as she realized something was wrong.

  Squatting down in front of her, he took hold of her free hand. ‘I shouldn’t have behaved as I did, Thea. I shouldn’t have confused you.’

  ‘Confused me?’ There was no confidence in her voice now, only apprehension. ‘How could you have confused me, Hal?’

  ‘I’ve confused you because nothing’s changed between us. I’m still never going to marry into a class I despise – and before you start trying to change my mind again on that, there’s another, even sounder reason for nothing having changed. I know in my gut that, try as I might, I wouldn’t make you happy, and that the man who will make you happy is Kyle.’

  ‘Kyle?’ She stared at him, saying the name as if she’d never heard it before.

  ‘Kyle,’ he said again. ‘So there’s an end to it, Thea love. Things are just as they’ve been for eight years. Nothing’s changed.’

  She tried to speak and couldn’t. The plunge from joy to despair was so total, so cataclysmic, that she could hardly breathe. Sobs rose in her throat and she fought them down, determined she’d burn in hell for a hundred years before giving way to them in front of him.

  ‘Okay.’ As she fought to keep her dignity, her voice was so brittle she barely recognized it. ‘Nothing’s changed. Stupid of me to have thought it had. If you aren’t going to marry me, then who are you going to marry? Carrie?’

  It was said without thinking – a jibe to get her through a nightmare moment. The last thing she expected was his serious, measured response.

  ‘Yes,’ Hal said, his eyes just as full of pain as hers were. ‘I think so. I’ve been thinking so for a long time.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  SEPTEMBER 1933

  Rozalind stepped out of her agent’s office and onto a crowded Manhattan sidewalk, her Leica slung over her shoulder, a small-brimmed white hat worn at an angle on jet-black, glossily straight, jaw-length hair. For the last couple of years she had spent almost as much time in London and Berlin as she had in New York, but New York was special, not because it was where she had been born and brought up, but because it was the place where – every couple of months or so, and for as much as a few days at a time – she and Max were able to enjoy the kind of domesticity that married couples enjoyed.

  The apartment Max had leased near Washington Square wasn’t glaringly fashionable, which meant that so far they had never run into anyone they knew when going in and out of it. That, because of Max’s position as a Congressman, such care had to be taken was an inconvenience that often infuriated her, but she wasn’t letting it infuriate her today. Today was a good day. Max had been in town for two days and would be in town until tomorrow morning, when he would leave for Washington and she would move into her apartment on the Upper East Side until, on Saturday, she left for England aboard the liner they had met on, the SS Aquitania.

  She flagged a cab down, already thinking of what she hoped to achieve in London. So far, despite many near-misses, she had never achieved her ambition of taking private photographs of the Prince of Wales, or of the Duke and Duchess of York and their two little princesses. It was an ambition she was determined to achieve this trip.

  A cab screeched to a halt and she darted into it. ‘West Ninth Street,’ she said, her thoughts still on the kind of photographs she wanted to take of Edward and the Yorks. She didn’t want to take shots that were stilted and formal. She wanted shots that would reveal her sitters’ personalities; shots that other photographers wouldn’t think of taking, or have the opportunity of taking.

  As they approached Fifth Avenue’s intersection with 49th Street the traffic was so heavy the cab was reduced to a near-standstill. Curbing her frustration, Rozalind pondered on the best locations for the shots she wanted to take. She knew from both Thea and Olivia that Fort Belvedere was where Edward was at his most relaxed. She also knew that at the Fort he would have his two cairn terriers, Cora and Jaggs, with him.

  Traffic had begun moving again, but Roz, whose thoughts had flicked to Edward’s father, was oblivious to it. King George was sixty-eight years old. It wasn’t a vast age, but his health was poor and people in the know, such as her Uncle Gilbert, were convinced he was likely to die at any time. When he did, Edward would not only be King of the United Kingdom and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, but Emperor of India as well.

  The burdens he carried now would be nothing compared to the burdens he would carry then, and she liked the idea of capturing Edward playing with his dogs at the Fort in the days just before his life changed forever.

  She grinned to herself, knowing it was highly unlikely King George was going to die just as doing so would add resonance to the photographs she hoped to take. As well as being imaginative, though, she was also pragmatic, and one of her favourite mottos was her old Girl Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared’.

  Rozalind liked to think
she always was.

  The cab drew up outside her apartment block and she paid off the driver, having made up her mind that when it came to photographing the Duke and Duchess of York and their children she would ask to do so at Royal Lodge, their country retreat in Windsor Great Park.

  With her decisions made, and determined that on her upcoming trip to England she would achieve the aim that had so long eluded her, she ran into the entrance hall and then, not wanting to spend a second longer out of Max’s company than was absolutely necessary, didn’t wait for the lift, but ran with ease up the stairs to their second-floor apartment.

  He was out on the balcony, sitting at a wrought-iron table drinking coffee and reading the Chicago Tribune. She dropped her Leica on the nearest available surface and ran across to him, standing behind him and sliding her arms around his neck.

  ‘What’s the latest with Chicago’s new mayor?’ she asked, reading the headlines over his shoulder. ‘Is he still firing on all cylinders?’

  ‘Unfortunately.’ Ed Kelly, the new mayor, was a Democrat and Max wasn’t a fan. He put the newspaper down and covered her hand with his. ‘Have you noticed that ever since Roosevelt replaced Hoover in the White House, Republicans have dropped out of sight – and even those who have been left behind seem to have changed political colour from red to blue.’

  Rozalind laughed, ‘But not you, sweetheart.’

  ‘No,’ he said with feeling. ‘Not me.’

  Wishing she hadn’t brought up the subject of American politics, she withdrew her arms from around his neck and pulled up a chair at the other side of the small table on which, next to his newspaper, a coffee pot stood.

  Changing the subject to Germany, she said, ‘What fresh outrage is Hitler up to?’

  His face hardened. ‘What fresh outrage isn’t he up to? The latest is official confirmation of the way he’s rounding up large numbers of Jews and sending them to makeshift prisons. The Chicago Tribune quotes Germany’s outlawed Socialist Party as saying forty-five thousand prisoners are being held at scores of different locations.’