A Season of Secrets (58 page)

‘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.

Together, 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.

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.

At last, knowing he should get as much sleep as possible, Gilbert made his way to his cabin, but his dreams were troubled, full of the images of burning towns and rampant swastikas.

By the time he was on a train, travelling through Belgium into Germany, it was early dawn. He ordered coffee and croissants from the steward and focused his thoughts on Violet.
She was living in Dahlem, an affluent residential district in south-west Berlin. The train he was on terminated at Berlin’s central railway station, and from there it was only a short cab
ride to Dahlem. Only when Violet had packed her bags, closed her apartment and was with him was Gilbert going to head towards Olivia and Dieter’s home in Bellevuestrasse, near the zoo.

That he now knew why Violet had for so long cultivated relationships with members of the Nazi hierarchy was a relief so great that in private he had wept. With the relief had come a terror that
was overwhelming. Reckless and courageous as she was, that her motives for her friendships had gone for so long undiscovered could only have been down to the most phenomenal luck – and it was
luck that could run out at any moment.

If it did, would it have any repercussions for Olivia and Dieter? At the very least it would raise doubts as to their loyalty – and if once there was a sliver of doubt and attention was
focused on Dieter, the result, where he and his fellow plotters were concerned, would be catastrophic.

Snow was falling as the train approached the German border. Gilbert took his passport out of his breast pocket. Violet was a heroine on a mega-scale, but so too, in her own quiet way, was
Olivia. He didn’t, though, want to be the father of heroines – for heroines too often became dead heroines. What he was hoping, on this trip, was that he would be returning to England
not only with Violet, but with Olivia as well.

He didn’t want Olivia trapped in Germany when war was finally declared – and he was as certain as his friends Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden were that the Sudetenland was not
going to be the last of Hitler’s territorial demands and that war with Germany was inevitable.

The train came to a halt. Along with everyone else he disembarked in order to have his passport inspected and stamped, reflecting that if he returned with two out of three of his major anxieties
taken care of, he would be profoundly grateful. It would, though, still leave an anxiety that was growing bigger with every passing day – and that anxiety was Judith Zimmermann.

‘
Danke
,’ he said as his passport was stamped and handed back to him.

It was six months now since his visit to the Home Office. Within twenty-four hours of that visit he had signed legal forms naming him as Judith Zimmermann’s sponsor and guaranteeing that
she would be no financial burden on the state. Copies of his guarantee had been sent to the British Embassy in Vienna. Judith had been notified. All the paperwork that could be done had been done.
And still Judith was without an exit visa.