A Season of Secrets (54 page)

She wanted to meet the woman who, for several years, had been – and still was – Adolf Hitler’s mistress.

She wanted to know what kind of a woman Eva Braun was.

APRIL 1938

It was early evening as Thea walked down La Rambla, Barcelona’s main thoroughfare. She had just finished a long shift at one of the local clinics and was en route to the
small room she rented above a tobacconist’s. Her thoughts were on Hal, who was a hundred miles or so further down the coast, where Franco’s troops had succeeded in driving a wedge
through what had once been Republican-held territory. All the reports reaching Barcelona indicated that the fighting had been desperate, and Thea, who knew Hal would have been in the thick of it,
still had no news of him.

She came to a halt in the middle of the broad pavement, not wanting to reach her room, where she would only have grim thoughts for company. La Rambla was lined with cafes and she sat down at the
first outdoor table she came to.

‘Una cerveza, por favor,
’ she said when a waiter came up to her.

Her grey trousers and grey blouse – the blouse sporting a Red Cross badge on one shoulder – ensured that she was as much a part of the street scene as everyone else. Once,
fashionable clothes were de rigueur in the La Rambla cafes. Now people who possessed fashionable clothes no longer chose to wear them. Barcelona had become a city of workers. The streets were a sea
of proudly worn militia uniforms and blue overalls. And there were other, very obvious signs of the revolution. Nearly all private cars had been commandeered and people got around the city by tram
and taxi. The words ‘
Señor
’ and ‘
Señorita
’ were no longer uttered – everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’. Service workers,
such as her waiter, were no longer deferential, for everyone was equal. Tipping was forbidden by law.

It was the kind of classlessness of which Thea had always dreamed. Nothing else, though, was as either she or Hal had imagined it would be. Within Republican ranks there was unity between
members of the International Brigades, no matter what country they came from, but that was as far as the unity went. Elsewhere in Republican ranks communists, Marxists and anarchists were as deeply
divided between themselves as they were from the Nationalists. The sense of solidarity that she and Hal had believed they would find was totally lacking. Marxists said the anarchists were
undisciplined and would not obey orders. Stalinists refused to supply arms received from Russia to any units but their own. Republican government forces were at loggerheads with voluntary militia
units. Orders were given, countermanded and then given again. Chaos and confusion reigned.

It was a nightmare that both she and Hal fervently hoped would be resolved when Franco and fascism were finally defeated. At the moment, though, it was Franco and his Nationalists who looked to
be winning the war.

She sipped her beer, staring at a wall on the other side of the wide boulevard, on which a giant hammer and sickle had been painted. By driving a wedge between Republican forces on the coast,
General Franco had successfully split Republican Spain in two. There were rumours that the government was trying to sue for peace; that Franco was now turning his attention once more to Madrid and
that the Republican cause was lost. There were further rumours that the International Brigades were about to be recalled, in the hope that this would encourage the Italians and Germans fighting for
the Nationalists to withdraw also.

Thea’s hand tightened around her glass. Many men from Barcelona militias who had fought to try and stop the Nationalist push to the coast had managed to somehow make their way back to the
city – but so far not Hal. As she absolutely refused to consider him either dead or captured, where was he? Was he now fighting somewhere else? Or was he too injured to make the attempt to
return to Barcelona, and was he lying low with fellow Republicans until fit enough to make what would, she knew, be a difficult and dangerous journey through Nationalist-held country?

No answer came to her and, heavy-hearted, she rose to her feet. All she could do was remain where Hal could find her, but inaction had always been difficult for Thea, and never more difficult
than it was now.

The evening was getting into its stride and the pavement cafes were packed with workers relaxing after a long day. The noise level was high, with music from cafe radios vying with loudspeakers
bellowing revolutionary songs. A gale of laughter came from the table she was walking past and, not for the first time, Thea marvelled at the Barcelonians’ ability not to be crushed by the
horrors hurled at them.

Mussolini was Franco’s ally, and only a month ago Italian planes had conducted a non-stop three-day bombing raid on the city. There had been no attempt to single out military targets.
Bombs had been dropped indiscriminately. Whole swathes of working-class areas had been decimated; schools had been hit. The images of the small children she had ferried, screaming and bleeding,
between the schools and the city’s hospitals would, she knew, stay with her for as long as she lived.

She turned off into another busy street, wondering whether to have some fresh sardines for her evening meal or make an onion-and-tomato omelette instead. Of necessity she lived cheaply. It
didn’t trouble her. In comparison to the thousands made homeless and destitute by the war, she knew she lived well.

She bit her lip hard, wondering what Hal would be eating that evening; where he would be eating. Far worse, she wondered
if
he would eating. The light had smoked to a spangled blue dusk.
On a nearby balcony, laundry hung limply. From somewhere close at hand a baby cried.

A tram rattled down the centre of the dusty street. Still deep in thoughts of Hal, she didn’t look towards it, barely registered it.

There came an ear-splitting whistle.

It was a whistle that, in Outhwaite, had called the cows in to be milked and the pigs to be fed. In London it had brought taxis to a screeching kerbside halt.

Her heart slammed so hard in her chest that she thought it was going to stop. Her eyes flew in the direction the whistle had come from. The tram was now twenty yards or so past her and was
travelling further away with every second. He was standing on its platform, a wide grin on a face that was bearded and as grimy as when he’d been tending the pigs and cows. His militia
uniform was filthy and sweat-stained. His hair had grown so long that his thick tangle of curls was anchored at the nape of his neck by a red neckerchief that had originally been around his throat.
A rifle was slung over one shoulder. There were no bandages in sight. No slings. No crutches.

Careless of how fast the tram was moving, he leapt from it.

With blazing joy on her face, she broke into a sprint, dodging around stray dogs and workers enjoying an early evening stroll, hurtling into his arms.

‘Hal!
Hal!
I’ve been worried out of my mind!’

She didn’t get a chance to say any more. His lips came down hard and hot on hers in a fierce, deep kiss. Her arms were as tightly round him as a drowning man’s to a lifebelt. She
never wanted to let him go. Since they had been in Spain every separation had been an agony, but this last one had been by far the worst. As their passionate embrace went on and on, no one stared
at them. In a world where lovers were separated and reunited – often only to be separated again, and for good – such scenes were commonplace.

When finally he raised his head from hers, Hal said thickly, ‘I need a bath and food, Thea love.’

As she looked up into his face she saw how the face-splitting grin that he had shot her from the tram had hidden how truly exhausted he was.

‘Sardines on toast, or an onion-and-tomato omelette?’ she asked, wishing she’d made a stew the previous evening; wishing she’d bought fresh bread that morning.

‘Both,’ he said as, arms around each other’s waists, they turned off the street into the warren of smaller streets that made up the working-class area where, when Hal was in
the city, the two of them lived together and where, when he wasn’t in the city, Thea lived alone.

It was an area that had suffered badly in the March bombing and, with so many houses now uninhabitable, what had once been a bustling area was now near-deserted. The local church still stood,
but as the Catholic Church was fiercely on the side of the Nationalists, it no longer had a congregation. With all priests being viewed as the enemy, it was rare in Barcelona to see one now, but a
little way in front of them an elderly priest was heading towards the church, a shopping bag in either hand.

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!
’

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.