A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  As they drew a little nearer to him Hal said, holding Thea as close to his side as was possible while still walking, ‘I’ve never missed you as much as I have these last few weeks, Thea love. It’s changed my mind about a lot of things.’

  She leaned her head lovingly on his shoulder. ‘Such as?’

  A lorry full of soldiers wearing anarchist neckerchiefs roared into the street and Hal said, ‘Oh, things like marriage and—’

  He broke off abruptly as in front of them the priest stopped walking, shook his fist at the soldiers and spat at them.

  The lorry skidded to a halt. The soldiers spilled out of it.

  Hal said, ‘Christ Almighty!’ and then dropped his arm from around her waist and broke into a run.

  For a second Thea was too stupefied with horror to react and then, as amid shouts of ‘Cerdo Nacionalista!’ the priest was ringed by eight or ten men and knocked to the ground, she broke into a sprint in Hal’s wake.

  Booted feet kicked the old man; a rifle butt came down on him hard.

  Already in the middle of the melee Hal was yelling at the soldiers to stop.

  For a second Thea thought they were going to, for one of the men hauled the priest to his feet – and then he put a gun to the priest’s head.

  ‘No! No Ya basta!’ Hal shouted, leaping towards him and knocking the gun so that it fired upwards.

  Then, as she saw the reactions of the soldiers, Thea too was within the ring of them, shouting, ‘No! No! NO!’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  JUNE 1938

  Zephiniah stood by one of the full-length windows of her suite at the Dorchester. Her view looked out across Park Lane and into the majestic glory of Hyde Park. If she had wanted to, she could have enjoyed the early summer sunshine by stepping out through the sitting room’s French windows onto a private balcony, only she didn’t want to do so. She didn’t want to be resident at the Dorchester, even though her suite was one of the hotel’s largest and most luxurious. She didn’t want to be in London full stop – and wouldn’t have been, had it not been for the necessity of being in London for her divorce hearing.

  She bit the corner of her lip, knowing that, as usual, she had been her own worst enemy. Her frequent meetings with Roberto at French and Swiss spas had been too flagrantly reckless. A little bit of discretion would have gone a long way and, if she had been discreet, she wouldn’t now be in the process of being divorced.

  That she was being divorced had come as a very nasty shock. She simply hadn’t thought Gilbert would ever go to such lengths.

  ‘Our marriage obviously brings you no happiness, Zephiniah,’ he had said, sadness, resignation and a deep weariness in his voice. ‘As a consequence, apart from the first few months of our marriage – when you weren’t yet bored with it – our marriage has brought me no happiness, either. A divorce is for the best, and at least Señor Di Stéfano hasn’t a wife to be distressed by his being named.’

  She had thrown hysterics, but it had all been in vain. A private detective had followed her on two of her trips to France. Gilbert had all the evidence he needed to divorce her and, despite his position as a government minister, a divorce was what he’d been set on obtaining.

  She hadn’t understood it. Unless they wanted to marry again, members of the peerage usually ignored a wife’s adulteries, got on with committing their own and, even if they spent all their time with a mistress and very little with their wife, behaved publicly as if their marriage was one of perfect probity. Or at least they did so once they had first fathered an heir that was indisputably their child.

  Was that why Gilbert was prepared to be the first Fenton ever to divorce? Was it because, if she became pregnant, he would have no certainty the child was his? She was forty-four, an age when he might have been expected to have no such fears, but even if he had, she could have put his mind at rest. Though she’d seen no need to tell him so, her periods had stopped two years ago.

  When they had, she had thought she was pregnant – and by Roberto – and had immediately sought medical confirmation. The only confirmation she had received was that, like 10 per cent of women, her menopause had begun earlier than might have been expected. It was news she had kept to herself.

  So why was she still keeping it to herself?

  She crossed to a small table and took a cigarette from a silver cigarette-case studded in one corner with a pleasingly large diamond. There was another diamond, albeit a little smaller, in the corner of the lighter she lit the cigarette with.

  The diamonds, and the lifestyle that went with them, would continue after the divorce. Gilbert had assured her of that and, as he was a man whose word could be trusted utterly, she would never have financial worries.

  She blew a plume of smoke into the air. Since Gilbert had dropped his bombshell and put divorce proceedings in hand, she’d had time to reconsider her first hysterical reaction to no longer being Viscountess Fenton. For one thing, her title would change only slightly. Instead of being The Viscountess Fenton (which Gilbert’s third wife would hold, if he were to marry again), she would be Zephiniah, Viscountess Fenton – a courtesy title.

  A further realization, though, had been the clincher.

  As Gilbert’s divorced wife, she would never again have to suffer being bored out of her mind.

  There would be no more interminably tedious stays at Gorton. No more staring out of windows at nothing but sheep and moorland. No more having to face the future that Gilbert was so looking forward to – a future where, after he ceased being active in politics, he would live permanently at Gorton.

  None of the things she had hoped to gain by marrying Gilbert – apart from her title and financial security – had come to pass. Other than with his political friends, he hated socializing. She’d had dreams of becoming part of a glamorous royal circle – as her stepdaughters, each in different ways, had been; and as Olivia, if she lived in London and not Berlin, still would be.

  It had never happened.

  Another thing that had never happened was Gilbert becoming prime minister.

  When she had first met him, the prospect had been spoken of so often, by so many people, that in her naivety she had thought it an event bound to happen.

  It hadn’t.

  The first general election after their marriage had been in 1929 and, to her surprise and intense disappointment, he’d made no attempt to stand for office. Instead of returning a Conservative government, the great British public had voted for Labour in their droves. She had wondered if, anticipating such a result, Gilbert had decided to keep his powder dry until the next general election when the public would, presumably, be disillusioned with Labour and anxious to vote Conservative once again.

  Zephiniah had been right in assuming there would be enough disillusionment with Labour to vote a Conservative government back into office, but that government hadn’t been headed by Gilbert. Instead Stanley Baldwin had bounced back like an indestructible rubber ball and had stayed in office long enough to ensure that, instead of Edward making Wallis his queen, he was doomed to a life of exile as the Duke of Windsor.

  The last general election had been a year ago. By then she’d long ago realized that Gilbert had no desire – and not enough ruthlessness –ever to want to lead his party. More to the point, she’d also learned that British prime ministers led from the Commons, not the House of Lords, and that for him to be prime minister he would have had to renounce his peerage.

  She walked back to the window, aware that her major disappointments with Gilbert wouldn’t have been so impossible to overcome, if it hadn’t been for the shoal of smaller, daily disappointments and irritations.

  Top of her list was that no force on Earth could tempt him into a nightclub. He could dance – in fact he was a very good dancer – but he danced only in the ballrooms of private houses, and then not very often. It was the same with casinos, which were meat and drink to her.

  The excitement and adrenalin-filled rush of gambling was totally lost on
Gilbert. Rather than playing roulette, blackjack and baccarat in Monte Carlo, he preferred being in Yorkshire, tramping the moors with a shotgun under his arm and his spaniels at his heels.

  She couldn’t even enjoy a furious row with him, because he was always so God-damned reasonable and, unless the issues were cruelty and injustice – when he became white-lipped with anger – he rarely lost his temper.

  She, on the other hand, was so mercurial that she lost her temper at the drop of a hat, and enjoyed doing so. Her spectacular and frequent rows with Roberto often progressed into physical fights – and always ended with the two of them making frantic, passionate love.

  She was roused from her thoughts, and her present longing for Roberto, by a knock on her door. She wasn’t expecting a visitor, though it was just possible that her visitor was her lawyer.

  Crushing her cigarette out in the nearest ashtray she walked swiftly across the sitting room and into the small, wood-panelled hall. When she opened the door, it was to a bellboy.

  ‘Post, Lady Fenton,’ he said respectfully.

  Without much interest she took the envelope from the silver salver and walked back into the sitting room. It had been forwarded from Mount Street, as most of her post was these days.

  Without bothering to sit down she opened the envelope. Inside was a short letter and another envelope, one bearing foreign stamps. Stamps that looked to be German. Or Austrian.

  The envelope had been opened and was addressed to the long-dead aunt with whom, a lifetime ago, she had travelled to Vienna.

  Sucking in her breath, Zephiniah’s eyes flew to the accompanying letter. It was short and to the point:

  Dear Lady Fenton (I see no reason to address you as Zephiniah or Cousin, as there has been no family contact since your return from Vienna, with my now-late mother, twenty-six years ago)

  The accompanying letter may, or may not, be of interest to you, but because of its contents it is one that, in all conscience, I have felt obliged to forward. Cynthia Crane

  Slowly Zephiniah sat down, stupefyingly aware that the long-ago past was about to tumble around her. With a fast-beating heart she withdrew a letter from the envelope. A photograph fell out of it onto her lap.

  It was a photograph of a young woman. She was slim and petite and looked very much as Zephiniah herself had looked in her mid-twenties. The photograph had been taken in a park. In the distance she could see Vienna’s famous Ferris wheel.

  She knew without reading the letter that the photograph was of her daughter. It was the first photograph of her she had ever seen.

  She stared down at it for a long time and then, at last, she began to read the letter Judith had written:

  Schülerstrasse 25

  Vienna

  Dear Lady Crane,

  My name is Judith Zimmermann. My adoptive parents were Erwin and Annaliese Zimmermann. My birth mother was the Honourable Zephiniah Colefax. I was born in Vienna on the tenth of April 1911. I write to you because you accompanied my mother to Vienna for my birth and because your address, and not my birth mother’s, was on my adoption papers. I write to you, dear Lady Crane, because I am in most terrible distress. I need very, very badly to leave my country. Since Hitler decreed two months ago that Austria is now part of the German Reich, terrible things have happened to my people. My beloved adoptive parents are dead, executed when they protested at the Gestapo’s confiscation of their property and the appropriation of our home. The doors of the hospital where I was a junior doctor have been closed to me. Jews can no longer work in the professions or study at university. I have no money, as my late parents’ bank accounts, and my own bank account, have been confiscated. I live in a small apartment with friends who are all in the same dreadful position. I cannot emigrate without a sponsor – someone who will vouch that I will not be a burden on the country I am entering. I write in the hope that my British birth family can help me. I am educated, a doctor who is fluent in English. Surely there is room for me in the country of my birth mother? And please assure my mother, dear Lady Crane, that I will never be an embarrassment to her; that though I long to know her, I will respect her wishes whatever they might be.

  Yours, in deepest and most fervent hope,

  Judith Zimmermann

  With a trembling hand Zephiniah laid the letter down even more slowly than she had picked it up, aware that she was experiencing an epiphany. For twenty-seven years she had barely spared the child she had given birth to a thought and, when she had thought about it, it had only been in connection with the way it had ruined not only her debutante year but, in her opinion, her life.

  She had never thought of the baby as being a person. She had never marked the tenth of April in a diary, or been aware each year of how old the child would be. She had never, until now, even thought of the child by the name she had chosen for it.

  Judith.

  She looked down at the photograph. The young woman in it – her daughter – was lovely; and not only lovely, but fiercely intelligent. She had to be fiercely intelligent if, at twenty-seven, she was a qualified doctor.

  She thought of Thea, running off to Spain with the son of one of Gilbert’s tenant farmers; of Olivia, married to a Nazi; of Violet, consorting with the likes of the Nazi hierarchy. And she experienced an emotion she had never felt before. She experienced a deep, overwhelming upsurge of maternal pride.

  Unlike the stepdaughters with whom she had never been able to forge satisfactory relationships, Judith was a daughter to be proud of.

  She looked down at the letter again. How could she not have realized how drastically the German annexation of Austria would affect Judith’s adoptive parents, and Judith herself? What was going on in Austria that people could be executed for objecting to having their property and home taken away from them, for no other reason than that they were Jews?

  Gilbert would know, of course. And Gilbert would know exactly how to go about arranging for Judith’s immigration to Britain.

  An hour later, in the drawing room at Mount Street, Gilbert stared at his estranged wife in stupefaction.

  ‘You have a daughter? God in heaven, Zephiniah! Why did you never tell me? Why was she adopted? Where is she now?’

  ‘I never told you because it was something I never thought about.’ Even though she was about to ask him for a vitally important favour, Zephiniah couldn’t help being short-tempered with him. ‘She was born in 1911, fourteen years before we met. Why would I have told you? As for why she was adopted, I would have thought that was obvious. I was seventeen, unmarried and, as the father had no intention of putting a ring on my finger, adoption was the only viable solution.’

  Gilbert ran a hand over hair that was no longer quite as fierce a red as it had once been. ‘But why are you telling me now, Zephiniah? And where is your daughter? What’s her name?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we both have a strong drink in our hands.’

  A strong drink was exactly what Gilbert was in need of. He crossed the room to the drinks cabinet and poured two generous whiskey and sodas.

  He handed her one of them, saying, ‘I don’t see that where she lives can be more of a shock than the one you’ve already delivered.’

  Zephiniah, certain the shock was going to be a good deal greater, took a sip of her drink and then said, ‘She lives in Vienna. Her name is Judith.’

  ‘Vienna? But why on earth . . . ?’

  ‘She’s Jewish, and so it was thought best that her adopted parents should also be Jewish.’

  Gilbert wondered if he was suffering from the onset of early dementia. Surely what Zephiniah had just said couldn’t be what she’d really said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Zephiniah. I’ve obviously misunderstood you. Who is it that’s Jewish?’

  ‘I am. By right of having a Jewish mother. And if Jewishness is passed down in the female line, then so, I presume, is Judith. Whether I’m right or not, she believes herself to be Jewish. She’s been brought up as a Jew and is being treated by the Nazis as a Jew.�
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  With a kid-gloved hand she held out the letter Judith had sent to her late aunt, the photograph that had accompanied it and the covering letter sent by her cousin.

  Hardly able to believe she’d kept two such major secrets from him, Gilbert took them from her. One glance at the photograph was enough to convince him that Zephiniah was speaking the truth.

  He read the covering letter. Then, his jaw hardening, he read Judith’s letter.

  When he had finished he looked up, his brown-gold eyes holding hers. ‘And so you want me to provide Judith with the written assurance she needs in order to enter Britain?’

  Zephiniah nodded.

  His face was grimmer than she had ever seen it. ‘I wish to God you’d told me about her existence in the months leading up to the Anschluss. You must have realized the kind of treatment she and her adoptive parents would receive when Hitler got his way over Austria?’

  ‘I dare say if I was interested in world events and politics, I would have realized, but I’m not, and I didn’t. As I’ve already made clear, there has never been any contact between me and the Zimmermanns. Everything was all so long ago that there were years and years when I didn’t even remember I’d once had a baby. I’ve never been one to live in the past, and she was way back in my past.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now she isn’t.’

  Their eyes continued to hold, both of them aware it was the frankest, most truthful conversation they’d ever had.

  ‘I will provide the necessary financial guarantee for Judith,’ he said, ‘of course I will, but I have to warn you, Zephiniah, that even though I will put things in hand immediately, her application for admission to Britain will take some time. Thousands of Jews – German and Austrian – are fighting for admission to Britain. There will be a yearly quota, though I don’t know what it is. There will also be different types of entry visas, some of which will be looked on more favourably than others. In Vienna there could well be a long wait for a document approving her departure, and other types of obstructions – obstructions that we in Britain can’t begin to imagine.’