A waiter came in with the tea and coffee.
Gilbert waited until both had been poured and then, adding a slice of lemon to his tea, he said, ‘She’s well. In fact she’s arriving on the Aquitania at Southampton tomorrow morning and intends remaining in England until after Christmas – which she will be spending at Gorton. As will Thea and Carrie.’
‘Carrie?’ Even though Max had long ago accustomed himself to Fenton family eccentricities, Carrie spending time at Gorton over Christmas sounded a little odd. The last Max had heard of her, she was a housekeeper at a stately home just outside Richmond. ‘Won’t Carrie be needed at her place of work?’
‘Lydia Markham is spending Christmas in Madeira.’
Gilbert interlinked his fingers and stared down at them, sorely tempted to say more. And why not? There was very little age difference between himself and Max – and Max knew better than most what it was like to be in love with someone a couple of decades younger than himself. If he was ever going to unburden himself of his inner conflict, then Max was probably the best possible choice to unburden himself to.
He said, ‘I see as much of Carrie as I can, Max. She’s been the only person I’ve been able to speak to with regard to my many family anxieties – and I like being in her company. I always have.’
Max, immediately sensing all that Gilbert wasn’t saying but wanted to say, commented encouragingly, ‘Knowing Carrie, I find that perfectly understandable, Max. When does your divorce from Zephiniah become final?’
‘In a month’s time.’
‘Then in a month’s time you have no problem.’
Gilbert gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Only an American would think there was no problem in a peer of the realm – and a government minister into the bargain – wanting to marry a woman who is his late nanny’s granddaughter and the housekeeper to a friend of his first wife, a situation without problems.’
‘Marry?’ It wasn’t often Max was almost robbed of speech.
‘Well, of course marry! Where a young woman like Carrie is concerned, how could any honourable man consider anything else?’
Max thought of what he knew of Carrie, and what he knew of Gilbert, and could see the problem.
He said tentatively, ‘What are Carrie’s thoughts, where you and she are concerned?’
Gilbert looked at him as if he was mad.
‘She doesn’t have any thoughts, because she doesn’t know how I feel! Dear God, Max. If she knew, she’d probably be appalled. To Carrie, I’m Lord Fenton. I’m someone she’s known all her life and whom she thinks of much as she would a well-respected uncle who has always had her welfare at heart. Why should she feel any differently? I’m twenty-two years older than she is. I have – or soon will have had – two previous wives. Of course she doesn’t know how I feel!’
Max, remembering how happy he and Roz had once been, despite a similar age difference, said, ‘I think you’re a fool for not giving her some indication. What harm can it do? And you might find you get a very nice surprise.’
‘And if I did?’ Gilbert’s blue eyes blazed with frustration. ‘This is England, not America. Class divides are written in stone.’
‘Do you care?’
‘I care, if it means Carrie not fitting in anywhere and being unhappy!’
‘Britain’s class system may have been written in stone up to now, but if you’re right in predicting that Britain will soon be at war with Germany – and I think you are – then it won’t be long before people will have more on their minds than class. If I were in your shoes, Gilbert, I’d make sure Carrie knew the nature of my feelings. Life is too short to miss out on happiness that could well be within your grasp.’
There was such naked feeling in his voice that Gilbert momentarily forgot about his own situation and thought of Max’s.
‘You’re thinking of Roz,’ he said perceptively.
Max nodded. ‘I never have understood why she ended our relationship as abruptly and inexplicably as she did, and as she isn’t married or engaged, it’s about time I took the advice I’ve just given you and found out. The minute I leave here I’m heading off to Waterloo station. No matter what the outcome of my doing so, when Roz disembarks tomorrow at Southampton, I’m going to be there to meet her.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
There was a lump in Max’s throat as he watched the Aquitania dock the next morning. The ship had played such an initial part in his and Roz’s love story that he couldn’t help hoping that Roz having sailed on it was a good omen. Since the day he had received her letter, posted from England and categorically breaking off her relationship with him, there had been no contact between them. His assumption at the time had been that she had met someone else: someone younger; someone who was free to marry her.
She hadn’t married, though. She hadn’t even become engaged. She was still living as she had lived when they had been lovers. She was still an independent spirit, travelling the world with her Leica and beholden to no one.
As the gangplanks were lowered and disembarkation began, he felt a rising tension in his chest. He was taking a huge gamble. What if she walked off the ship arm-in-am with someone? Someone Gilbert knew nothing about and hadn’t been able to forewarn him about? What if, even if she wasn’t with someone, Roz didn’t want to have anything to do to with him? How was he going to deal with that situation?
He had secured himself a place in the arrivals hall where, hopefully, he wouldn’t be able to miss her when she entered it. All around him were joyful greetings, as other passengers rushed eagerly into the arms of family and friends.
There was such a crush that he began to feel an edge of panic. What if he missed her? What if his journey had been all for nothing? Then, with a stab of relief, he saw her – and wondered how he’d ever thought it possible Roz could have been lost in a crowd.
She was head and shoulders taller than most of the women stepping into the arrivals hall – and three times as distinctive. Beneath a trilby worn at a provocative angle, her night-black hair swung sleekly forward at cheekbone level. A cherry-red, square-shouldered clutch coat was slung carelessly around her shoulders and beneath it she was wearing a grey grosgrain suit. Her heels were high and she was carrying just two items of luggage: a small suitcase and the camera-case she never travelled without.
In that moment he knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that all his life his priorities had been wrong. He’d been single when he had met Roz. He could have married her, and he hadn’t. Instead, because Myrtle possessed qualities making her the ideal wife for an ambitious Congressman, he had married Myrtle.
It was no wonder Roz had finally broken all ties between them and that, when his presidential ambitions had ended in failure, so had his marriage.
He didn’t blame Roz for her actions, or a disillusioned Myrtle for hers.
The mistakes he had made were huge, but given another chance they were mistakes he would never make again. He knew now what mattered most in his life, and it wasn’t what he had always thought.
It wasn’t the greasy pole of Washington politics.
It was Roz.
With his heart in his mouth he moved swiftly, manoeuvring a way through the crowd so that, though still some distance from her, he was standing directly in her line of sight.
She saw him almost immediately – and stopped dead.
Feeling as if he was taking his life in his hands, Max walked towards her, came to a halt and said, ‘Gilbert told me you were arriving this morning. I hope you don’t mind my coming to meet you?’
‘No.’ Her eyes held his, wide with shock.
He took the suitcase from her hand. ‘I’ve a lot I want to say to you, Roz, and the arrivals hall isn’t the place for it. How about we go over to the Grand Hotel for breakfast?’
‘I’ve had breakfast. It was served on the ship.’
‘Elevenses then.’
She nodded, and he still couldn’t tell whether she was pleased to see him or appalled.
Togeth
er, side by side, but not touching, just as they had so often walked after their first meeting on the Aquitania, they walked out of the arrivals hall.
When they were in a taxi, he said, ‘Gilbert tells me you will be spending Christmas at Gorton.’
‘Yes.’ Roz felt sick with nerves and bewilderment. After five years of absolutely no contact at all, surely Max had more important things to say to her than merely to comment on her Christmas holiday arrangements. She went on, ‘I’m sorry you were knocked out of the presidential race so early on.’
Her throat was so tight the words came out stiffly and politely formal.
He said, still not able to gauge her reaction to him, ‘So was I. I’m not sorry now, though. Roosevelt is going to have a nightmare of a time keeping America out of a war, if Hitler continues unchecked for much longer. The scenario in 1935 was a lot different from the scenario now’
Roz could easily have got into a heated debate as to whether America’s isolationist policy was the one the country should be pursuing, but she didn’t want to talk politics. She wanted to know why Max hadn’t engineered a meeting with her when his divorce from Myrtle had become final; she wanted to know if he knew the reason she had broken off their affair; and, most of all, she wanted to know if he still loved her.
She said, unable to bear the stilted, awkward conversation a moment longer, and her voice no longer stiff and polite, but throbbing with emotion, ‘Why didn’t you get in touch after you were knocked out of the running for president, and after you and Myrtle divorced?’
He turned towards her on the taxi’s shabby leather seat. ‘It never in a million years occurred to me that you would want me to.’ He took her hands in his. ‘Your letter to me was so utterly final. The only thing I could assume was that you’d met someone else and – for all I knew, until I accidentally met up with Gilbert yesterday – that you were still with the person you’d left me for.’
‘There was never anyone else. There never has been anyone else.’
‘Then for the love of God, Roz! Why did you do what you did?’
The taxi had come to a halt outside the hotel. Neither of them was aware of it. Neither of them moved.
She said, knowing the answer to her question even as she asked it, ‘Myrtle didn’t tell you, then?’
The atmosphere in the taxi was now so charged that the driver made no attempt to remind them they were at their destination. Without turning his head, he put his meter onto extra waiting time.
With blood thudding in his ears, Max said, ‘Myrtle didn’t tell me what, Roz?’
‘The last day we were together – at the apartment in New York – Myrtle came to see me. She told me you had been asked to stand as a nominee in the primaries. She said that accepting the nomination would mean you ending your affair with me and that, because you weren’t prepared to do that, you had turned the invitation down. And she begged me to do what you wouldn’t: to end our affair, so that you could fulfil your life’s ambition of having a shot at running for the presidency.’
His hands crushed hers so tightly she thought her fingers were going to break. ‘I didn’t know, Roz. Please believe me when I say I didn’t know.’
‘When I read that you and Myrtle were divorcing, I was sure she would tell you, and when I still didn’t hear from you . . .’ The memory of the pain was so great, she flinched. ‘When I still didn’t hear from you I thought it was because you didn’t want to step back into the past. That you’d moved on and there was someone else – someone new – in your life.’
‘There isn’t.’ His voice cracked and broke. ‘There never will be anyone new. The only person I want in my life, Roz, is you.’
The taxi driver coughed.
They both ignored him.
Roz said carefully, ‘Before this goes any further, Max, you have to know that for me nothing has changed. I wasn’t Washington political-wife material when you opted to marry Myrtle, and I’m still not Washington political-wife material. I do what I do. I’m a news photographer, and I’m vain enough to think that my work is important – that it brings the brutal truth of situations home to people in a way more vivid than words alone. A month ago I was in Berlin, photographing fashionably dressed Berliners on the Ku’damm, screaming with laughter as Stormtroopers beat Jews senseless. In October I was in Czechoslovakia, photographing Sudeten Germans welcoming the monster that is Hitler as if he were the Messiah. Next month I don’t know where I’ll be. Probably Spain, because General Franco looks set to gain control of both Barcelona and Madrid and, when he’s done that, it will be endgame for the Republicans. I’m nearly always going to be somewhere other than where you are – and I don’t want the solution to the problem being the same as last time. I don’t want there to be anyone else in your life but me.’
‘It’s not going to be like last time, Roz.’
Her hands were still trapped in his, his thigh was hard against hers and her mouth was a tantalizing few inches away.
He said fiercely, ‘There’s not going to be anyone else in my life, because I’m not going to marry anyone else. I’m going to marry you. You’re right, in that you don’t have one single good qualification for being the wife of a Congressman, but that doesn’t matter any more. It doesn’t matter because I’m not going to stand for re-election. I’m going to work in a new intelligence section that’s being set up – and I don’t have to be a Congressman to be an intelligence officer.’
It had started to rain. Roz could hear the raindrops pattering down on the taxi’s roof. It was a sound she knew she would remember forever.
She said unsteadily, ‘If you’re going to marry me, you have to propose to me.’
‘In a taxicab?’ There was amusement, monumental relief and bone-deep thankfulness in his voice. For every minute of his journey down to Southampton he had been terrified that Roz would want nothing to do with him; that she would regard him as being history, and would want him to stay history.
Now, in a few cataclysmic moments, he knew she loved him still, just as he still loved her. The fact that his life was back on track, though in a far different and better way than it had ever previously been, was a miracle he found almost too great to grasp.
Uncaring of how undignified it was for a man of his age to drop to one knee in the cramped back of a taxi, he did so.
‘Dearest, darling Roz, will you marry me?’ he asked. ‘Will you marry me in the very soonest time possible?’
‘Yes.’ There wasn’t the slightest hesitation in Roz’s voice. Almost from the first moment they had met, she had known Max was the only man she was ever going to love. Though outwardly she had never let it show, the years without him had been an agony. She’d had affairs and had ended all of them without the least pang of regret. Now, coming completely out of the blue and in the space of half an hour, everything had changed. She was dazzled by happiness. And she knew exactly what kind of a wedding she wanted.
Because of his being divorced it would have to be at a register office – and she wanted it to be just the two of them, and two witnesses. That way it wouldn’t matter that Violet and Olivia were in Berlin, and it would spare Thea from attending a wedding when she was still in such deep grief over Hal’s death.
‘I think sixteen days’ notice is necessary for a register-office wedding,’ she said huskily, as he sat back on the seat and took her in his arms. ‘That means it will be a Christmas wedding.’
It was the last thing she said for quite a while, for his kiss was deep and passionate and lasted a long, long time.
When at last he raised his head from hers, the taxi driver cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me for interrupting the two of you,’ he said, ‘but I have a living to earn. So if you don’t mind . . .’
Still with an arm around Roz, Max reached into an inside pocket for money and the driver jumped out of the taxi and opened the nearside rear door, saying as they stepped onto the pavement, ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you both – and if you want a wedding car on the big day,
I could put silver ribbons on the bonnet and do the job for half-price.’
Max gave a shout of laughter.
Still laughing and giggling – and with their arms round each other’s waist – they ran in the rain up the steps of Southampton’s Grand Hotel, the world a very different place for both of them from the one they had woken up to only a few hours earlier.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
It was a bitterly cold night as the last ferry of the day left Dover for Ostend, and only a few passengers were on deck as the ship slid out into the English Channel. Gilbert was one of them. With the collar of his overcoat pulled up high, a homburg crammed hard down on his head and gloved hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, he watched as beneath a star-studded sky Dover’s cliffs faded ghost-like into the darkness.
Ever since 1066 the white cliffs that he could no longer see had stood inviolate. No foreign invader – not the Spanish in the sixteenth century, or the French in the eighteenth century – had succeeded in landing an army and storming inland. England’s moat had been her protection.
But that had been before the days of air power. He thought of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, brought into being against the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and of the way, as an ally of General Franco, it had flexed its muscles by bombing the little Basque town of Guernica into extinction.
At the thought of towns in Britain suffering a similar fate, fear squeezed his heart. He crushed the sensation. If Hitler created a situation in which Britain had no option but to go to war, it wasn’t fear that would be needed. It was courage.
The kind of courage that Violet had, unknown to him, been displaying for more than four years. The kind of courage Dieter and Olivia maintained on a daily basis, as they networked with others who wanted to see a return to sanity for Germany and an end to Hitler. The kind of courage Judith would be having to find, in a city that no longer respected the life of anyone Jewish, or believed to be Jewish.
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