A Season of Secrets (37 page)

In the end the race was between Edward and Dickie in one boat, and Edwina and Nada in the other. Everyone else lounged on the banks, alternately cheering and booing, depending on whose boat was
ahead.

In the evening Edward appeared for dinner in full Highland rig: bonnet, jacket, kilt, sporran, silver-buckled shoes and with a small dirk tucked into the hose of his right leg. After dinner the
evening became even more Scottish as, with two pipers in attendance, he marched around the table enthusiastically playing the bagpipes.

Later there was dancing to gramophone records, and then there were some not very strenuous paper games, with one, suggested by Edward, reducing them to hoots of laughter.

‘Every time the King has a rant about my continuing bachelorhood he says there is a score of European princesses I could be choosing a bride from. I can only think of three, so what say
you all have a go and see who comes up with the longest list?’

The winner by a long way, with a list of seventeen names, was Dickie.

‘And that,’ Dieter said as he began undressing for bed in the second-floor bedroom they were always allotted at the Fort, ‘is because he’s linked ancestrally some way or
other with nearly every royal house in Europe, and because genealogy is his passion.’

Pink-shaded lamps gave the room a sensuous glow, and Olivia, in a nightdress that was a mere wisp of oyster silk, lace and satin, was already in bed. ‘It seems to me the difficulty
isn’t the number of eligible princesses,’ she said, impatient for him to join her, ‘the real problem is their ages. David is thirty-seven, and any princess still single is either
a nun or years and years younger than him. Elizabeth said the princess Bertie suggested, Princess Thyra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was a mere child.’

Dieter chuckled at the thought of Edward, who never showed interest in any woman not already married and vastly experienced, becoming betrothed to a princess who, even in a couple of
years’ time, would still be a virginal seventeen. However much King George wanted such an outcome, it was Dieter’s opinion that it was never going to happen.

Edward’s problems about a future heir were, however, not his problems. As his eyes held Olivia’s, darkening with heat, he knew she was hoping what he was hoping – that tonight,
at the Fort, she would conceive the child they both so desperately wanted.

As he moved towards the bed, the glow of the lamps gave his firmly muscled suntanned flesh a honeyed sheen. His stomach was as flat as a board, his sex firm and big and in a state of
erection.

A valet had laid black silk pyjamas out for him.

Dieter ignored them.

Dizzy with desire, Olivia opened her arms to him and pulled him down towards her. Kissing her with deep passion, he removed the nonsense of a nightdress with expert ease and slid her body
beneath his. She lifted her legs high, linking her arms and ankles behind him, her silent prayer, as he entered her and they began moving together towards an explosive, cataclysmic climax:
‘Please let there be a baby this time, God! Please!
Please!
’

AUGUST 1932

With one arm pressed hard across her waist in a fierce
noli me tángere
kind of way, the other holding a long jade cigarette-holder and lighted cigarette,
Zephiniah stared flinty-eyed through a French window streaked with heavy rain.

On the terrace late-summer roses in antique pedestal urns shed sodden petals. The copper beech in the centre of the lawn was so wet that its leaves had a metallic sheen. The lawn was saturated.
Beyond the river, where the ground rose up and merged into moorland, sheep huddled grimly together, seeking what protection they could.

Zephiniah didn’t envy them, and nor did she envy herself.

Why was it that things never turned out as she’d thought they were going to? When she’d been seventeen – in what seemed a lifetime ago – she had been certain she was on
the threshold of a glorious year as a debutante and that, at the end of it, she would be engaged to a member of the peerage – or at least to the son of a member of the peerage.

Instead, one little slip and what had followed had been the nightmare banishment to Vienna in the company of an unsympathetic aunt.

When she’d returned and found herself, in her mother’s words, ‘damaged goods’, she’d thought she’d found salvation when Reggie proposed marriage and whisked
her off to Argentina.

Argentina!

She blew a plume of blue smoke through her nose. Argentina hadn’t turned out as she had thought it would, but at least – unlike Yorkshire – there had been sun and heat and the
excitement of racetracks and casinos. She tapped the end of her cigarette, letting the ash fall carelessly to the Aubusson carpet.

Of all the disappointments, of all the times when she’d thought things were going to turn out well and they hadn’t, the biggest disappointment was the one she was now enduring.
Nothing in her marriage to Gilbert had turned out as she had thought it was going to. She had believed her marriage would bring a dizzying social life in its wake; that her long-held dream of being
part of the small and elite circle of people who were personal friends of the royals would, at last, be realized.

It had been a shattering blow to discover that Gilbert actively disliked socializing unless it was with fellow members of the government, all of whom had wives who were, in Zephiniah’s by
now vast experience, frumpy and tediously boring.

What made the lack of her own and Gilbert’s social life even harder to bear was Thea and Olivia’s close friendship with the Prince of Wales and with his brother and his
sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of York.

She removed the cigarette from the jade holder and crushed it out in a nearby ashtray and then, folding her arms and hugging them tight against her chest, continued to mull over the things that
were so different from the way she’d thought they would be.

She had been looking forward to having three stepdaughters, not because she was maternal, but because where Thea and Olivia were concerned, she had imagined photographs of herself with them in
the
Tatler
, carrying captions such as:
The scintillating and beautiful Lady Fenton seen at the opening of this year’s Royal Academy Exhibition with her stepdaughters, the Honourable
Thea Fenton and the Honourable Olivia Fenton.

Reality had ensured there’d been fat chance of any such photographs or mentions. She chewed the corner of her lip until she tasted blood. If Thea and Olivia had wanted, they could have
engineered situations and invitations where she would have become as familiar with Prince Edward and the Yorks as they were. They hadn’t done so and, to her fury, Gilbert had been equally
obstructive, refusing to patronize the nightclubs Edward patronized – where, if Edward had seen them, he might have invited them to join his table.

‘The Embassy Club and the Kit-Kat Club are far too noisy to be relaxing,’ he said in a voice of sweet reason every time she suggested they go. ‘It’s not only non-stop
dancing these days, it’s non-stop jazz as well.’

Gilbert’s reluctance to draw attention to his disabled arm meant that dancing of any kind played little part in their social life. He was, she’d discovered within weeks of their
marriage, a quiet man who preferred the company of a few tried and tested friends to raucous partying. The bottom line was that his idea of a good time was not hers.

Not only their social life, but their sex life too, was nothing like she had thought it would be. Gilbert was a tender, considerate lover. But after nineteen years of extra-marital Latin lovers
in Argentina, tender consideration didn’t fire Zephiniah. Stormy, passionate, jealousy-fuelled relationships were what thrilled her; fighting and shouting and then falling into bed for
glorious, uninhibited reconciliations. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she realized now how much she needed the heightened emotions of excitement and drama.

There was precious little excitement and drama at Gorton.

She stared with loathing at the view of sodden lawn, sodden moorland and sodden sheep. On the evening she had met Gilbert, her cousin had told her that, as well as being spoken of as a future
prime minister, he owned a divine country estate in Yorkshire. The vision those words had conjured up hadn’t proved to be the reality. Though other people – Winston Churchill and the
prime minister, for instance – rhapsodized about Gorton, she thought it mediocre. Its ballroom was small compared to what she had expected. It wasn’t – as she felt she’d
been wrongly led to believe – a stately home on a par with Chatsworth or Knole, both of which had more than a hundred rooms. It wasn’t even an historical jewel, such as Hever. It was
simply an unpretentious Georgian mansion in what most people – though not her – deemed to be an idyllic setting.

It was the tedium of her marriage, and the tedium of every parliamentary recess being spent at Gorton, that had driven her into taking trips abroad. She said these were for the good of her
health – which in a way they were, for if she hadn’t taken them she was convinced she would have lost her reason. Fortunately most spa towns boasted casinos, and in the racy,
adrenalin-fuelled atmosphere of a casino she no longer felt half-alive. A lucky and a habitual gambler, she felt like her old self.

She put another of her favourite Camel cigarettes in her holder and lit it. Until the beginning of summer her system of maintaining her sanity had worked wonderfully well. Then, in June, in the
Casino Grand Cercle, in Aix-les-Bains, she had run into Roberto Di Stéfano, a lover from her Buenos Aires days, and her trips had taken on a new, dangerous dimension.

Extramarital affairs in British aristocratic circles were just as common as they were in Argentina. The rules were, though, that a woman didn’t indulge in one until she had given her
husband a son and heir. Then, duty done, she could look elsewhere for entertainment, as her husband was no doubt already doing. The rule wasn’t, of course, universal. Winston and Clementine
Churchill were renowned for their faithfulness to each other, and Gilbert had the same reputation as Winston for fidelity. Which meant that even if she had already given Gilbert a son and heir, the
usual modus operandi would not have been acceptable to him and, knowing Gilbert as she did, she knew it never would be. All of which ensured that her revived affair with Roberto was a secret that
was going to have to be very carefully kept.

She blew a jet of smoke towards the ceiling irritably. She was good at keeping secrets. It was something at which she’d had an awful lot of experience. As a child the big secret had been
her mother’s Jewishness. She had grown up knowing it was never to be referred to. Not until she was in her twenties had she realized that, as Jewishness was passed down in the female line,
she was also Jewish.

It wasn’t something that had ever troubled her. Her father’s family had seen to it that she had been christened an Anglican, and though she only ever stepped inside a church at
society weddings and funerals, that was most definitely how she thought of herself. Only in Vienna, when it had been cautiously mentioned to her that perhaps the arranged adoptive parents
weren’t so suitable after all, being Jewish, had she been reminded of it.

‘The Zimmermann family are a respectable family, aren’t they?’ she’d said waspishly to her aunt, wanting to have the matter done and dealt with, so that she could return
hot-foot to London. ‘What the devil does it matter whether they are Jewish or not?’

‘Then the Zimmermanns would like the baby given a suitably Jewish name,’ her aunt had said, thin-lipped at the distastefulness of it all. ‘Something on the lines of Sarah or
Miriam.’

‘Judith,’ she had said. It had been her mother’s second name and, as far as Zephiniah was concerned, was as good a name as any.

Ever since then she had barely given Vienna – or the daughter she had given birth to there – a thought. It was in the past, and simply another secret that had to be kept.

Only when she had acquired three stepdaughters had she sometimes wondered about Judith. She would be twenty-one now, three years younger than Violet, though Zephiniah rather thought a Jewish
upbringing would have resulted in Judith being far different from Violet in both personality and behaviour.

The rain had begun to ease and, as a glimmer of sun touched the tops of the hills, three shooting brakes could be seen in the distance, coming down from the moor and heading towards the
bridge.

She knew who was in them. It was mid-August and three days earlier the grouse-shooting season had opened. Gilbert and a group of male friends were returning from a shoot – and were no
doubt just as sodden as the sheep.

She turned away from the window, knowing that all the evening ahead held was conversation about who had performed best with a shotgun that day and, when that palled, that it would be politics,
politics, politics.

‘This recent election victory of Hitler’s means his National Socialist Party is now the biggest in the Reichstag.’

They were in their bedroom and Gilbert was tying his bow-tie. There was concern in his voice, and Zephiniah, mindful of how she needed Gilbert to be in a good mood for when she told him she was
leaving again soon for Aix-les-Bains, said, ‘And is that so very bad, darling? I was always under the impression you thought the National Socialists could be a good thing for
Germany.’