‘It means I’ll be in the running for the post of deputy chief of mission in London when von Neurath is moved on,’ he’d said to her. ‘With personal contacts such as I now have in Britain, how could I not be?’
The prospect of such an appointment when Dieter would be only in his thirties was dizzying – but, like Dieter, Olivia couldn’t see why it shouldn’t happen.
She put on a pair of sunglasses and, wondering who the other guests at the Fort would be, settled back to enjoy the fifty-minute journey out of the London suburbs and into Surrey. There was always a possibility that Elizabeth and Bertie would be there, for as well as their home in London, they had a country retreat at nearby Royal Lodge. But it was more likely that another of Edward’s brothers, Prince George, would be there. Unknown to the British public, George’s life was scandalously bohemian, and Edward far preferred his company to that of Bertie, whose life was – in Edward’s eyes – one of dull propriety. Thelma Furness, Edward’s mistress, would certainly be there. Like Edward’s previous long-standing mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, Thelma was married and sparky and full of fun.
People who knew Freda well – which Olivia didn’t – said Thelma wasn’t as good for the Prince as Freda had been, in that Freda had always encouraged him to be conscientious about his royal duties, something Thelma had no interest in. Olivia, who had long ago tired of hearing from Thea of Edward’s visits to impoverished industrial cities in northern England, or coalmining communities in Wales, had no interest in that side of his life either, and it gave them something in common.
‘Penny for them,’ Dieter said as they began heading southwest on the A30.
‘I was just wondering who else will be at the Fort this weekend.’
‘With luck, Georgie Milford-Haven and Nada.’
George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, was a first cousin of Prince Edward, and he and his exotic Russian-born wife were regular guests at the Fort.
Olivia didn’t say anything in return. Nada was famously promiscuous – with both sexes – and she knew that Nada’s lesbianism fascinated Dieter, as it did most men.
Anxiety flickered in her heart. She was too fiercely in love with Dieter to want him to be fascinated with anyone other than herself. Over the last couple of years she had discovered that the downside of being married to a man of such startlingly blond good looks was that other women constantly showed improper interest in him. She had never seen him respond in like manner – and never wanted to. Though marital unfaithfulness was rampant in aristocratic circles, she had no desire to be unfaithful herself – and she knew that if Dieter was unfaithful it would utterly destroy her happiness.
She put a hand out and rested it on his thigh. He made a small noise of appreciation and her smile deepened. She was lucky, lucky, lucky, and all that was now needed was that her luck held and she finally fell pregnant.
Until this last year she had never realized how difficult conceiving a baby could be: month after month brought disappointment. Her heart began to race as she thought of how wonderful it would be if she conceived over the weekend, while they were at the Fort. If she did, and the baby was a boy, perhaps Dieter would agree to naming him Edward? Whatever the sex of the baby, perhaps, under the circumstances, he or she would have a royal godfather?
Her daydreams of the family they would one day have occupied her for the rest of the journey. Dieter had told her he wanted them to have the same kind of family as the exiled Kaiser – six sons and a daughter. They had even, in bed and tipsy on champagne cocktails, given their hoped-for children-to-be names.
Their firstborn was to be named Dieter Heinrich, after Dieter and his father, though she was sure that would change, if the baby was conceived while they were Edward’s guests. Their second son was to be named Gilbert Günther, after her father and Dieter’s favourite uncle. As the name Gilbert was German in origin it caused Dieter no problems, but erotically running his forefinger slowly down the length of her naked back, he had told her that he would like more obvious German first names for their next four sons. Together they had agreed on Bruno, Karl, Lukas and Christian, names that although popular in Germany were only a smidgen away from being traditional English names as well.
Their only brief moment of disagreement had been over what they would name their hoped-for future daughter. ‘Blanche,’ Olivia had said, her voice husky with desire as he began caressingly paying attention to a more intimate part of her body. ‘I couldn’t possibly have a daughter and not name her after my mother.’
To her disappointment, his hand stopped moving. ‘Blanche is neither English nor German,’ he had protested. ‘It’s French.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ she had said. ‘You can have any German name you like for a second name, no matter how ghastly. Walburga or Edeltraud, I don’t care. Only our daughter has to go through life with a pretty first name – and a name that has deep meaning for me.’
‘In Ordnung, Liebling,’ he had said, giving in. ‘Okay. Blanche it is.’
And then he had begun making love to her, just the way she liked it.
Her happy reverie ended as the car swung into the approach to the Fort. A gravel drive wound through woodland and then, on the last turn, the Fort came into sight, looking so much like a toy that one guest in Olivia’s hearing had said with vast amusement that all it lacked were tin soldiers on its battlements.
From its tower flew not the Prince of Wales’s standard, as might have been expected, but the flag of the Duchy of Cornwall.
‘To David, the Fort is a private house, not a royal residence,’ Thea had said to her when she had mentioned this anomaly. ‘When he’s here he likes to forget his royal position.’
Even before the car ground to a halt in front of the main entrance a skinny, tousle-headed figure, wearing nothing but a pair of baggy shorts and sandals and carrying a billhook, hurried to greet them from the direction of the gardens, a small dog at his heels.
‘Jolly good, you two!’ Prince Edward called out cheerily and then, to Dieter, ‘You’re just in time to help with digging out a damnable fir that blocks the light and spoils the view. Dickie and Georgie are down there now, struggling like the very devil with it. I’ve come up to the house to grab a couple of extra hatchets.’
To Olivia he said, ‘You’re looking stunning as usual, Olivia. Thelma, Edwina and Nada are by the pool, sunbathing. Elizabeth and Bertie will be here any minute. Only ten of us this weekend. Very nice and intimate.’ Then, to Dieter in fluent German, ‘Bist du bereit für ein wenig harte Arbeit, meine Freund?’
‘Ich kann es kaum erwarten loszulegen,’ Dieter responded with a grin.
Olivia knew enough German to know that Edward had asked Dieter if he was ready for some heavy work, and that Dieter had said he was more than ready. It fascinated her that Edward so enjoyed lapsing into German whenever Dieter was with him.
‘Why shouldn’t he?’ Dieter had said when she had remarked on it. ‘He’s almost as German as I am.’
Staff came out, removing their suitcase from the car’s boot and taking it into the Fort and up to their room. Dieter disappeared with Edward in search of extra hatchets and Olivia made her way to the swimming pool to join Thelma, Edwina and Nada, feeling euphoric at the realization that – other than Thelma – she and Dieter were the only non-royals Edward had invited.
‘Dahlink! How splendid to see you again.’ Nada was on a sun-lounger and was wearing a wine-red bathing-suit. ‘Where is your delicious husband? Already wielding a machete with David?’
‘Probably. Though when I left Dieter and David, they’d gone off in search of hatchets.’
Referring to Prince Edward as David still felt strange to her. Thea, of course, had been invited to do so years ago, but to Olivia the privilege was still a novelty. Thea rarely accepted weekend invitations to the Fort.
‘And I’m not about to change the habit,’ she’d said, when Olivia had asked her why this was. ‘An entire weekend chatting with Thelma and her friends about n
othing more stimulating than fashion and who is sleeping with whom and, if Nada is present, avoiding her sexual overtures is more than I can stand. If you enjoy the mindlessness of it all, good luck to you!’
Olivia, who did enjoy the mindlessness of it all, seated herself in a deckchair next to a table laden with drinks and cigarettes. Her bathing suit was still in her suitcase and she was relieved to see that although Edwina, as well as Nada, was wearing one, Thelma was, like her, wearing a sundress.
Edwina rose to her feet and walked over to the pool’s springboard, saying as she put on a white swimming helmet, ‘I saw your stepmother in Deauville’s casino last weekend, Olivia. Not to speak to. She was far too busy playing blackjack.’
Barely causing a ripple, she dived into the pool, lithe, streamlined and athletic.
Olivia tried to keep her face expressionless, but it was difficult. Zephiniah’s frequent absences from Gorton Hall and Mount Street were always accounted for by what she said was a need to visit spas regularly for her health. Gilbert only ever spoke with stoical resignation about the loneliness her absences caused him, but that his second marriage hadn’t turned out to be the kind of marriage he had hoped for was clear to everyone who knew him. Whether he was aware that Zephiniah didn’t always arrive at the destination she said she was leaving for, or that when there she visited places far racier than health spas, was impossible to tell, but that she was so obviously making her father unhappy was something Olivia found impossible to forgive.
‘Edwina and I are planning a trip,’ Nada said, as Thelma closed her eyes and raised her face to the sun.
Unsurprised, Olivia poured herself a glass of lemonade from an iced thermos. Edwina was always either planning a trip or away on one. She moved around Europe faster than anyone else she knew, her travelling companion always another woman – never Dickie.
‘Where to this time?’ she asked idly as, with the speed and grace of a seal, Edwina did a flip-turn at the end of the pool.
‘Arabia. Why don’t you come with us?’ Nada regarded her with slumberous, speculative eyes. ‘Sometimes, as guests of a king, a sheik or a sultan, we’ll sleep in a palace. Sometimes we’ll camp in the desert, beneath the stars. We’re going to visit Jerusalem and Damascus and drive six hundred miles across the desert from Damascus to Baghdad and then on to Teheran.’
‘From Mesopotamia to Persia? By car?’
‘But of course. What could be more delightful?’
Olivia could think of a lot of things more delightful.
Edwina climbed up the steps out of the pool and, aware of Olivia’s reaction, said in her distinctively staccato voice, ‘Where is your spirit of adventure, Olivia?’
She took off her swimming helmet, shaking her gleaming dark hair back into shape. ‘Don’t you ever yearn for a little danger and discomfort?’
‘No,’ Olivia said with utter truthfulness. ‘Never.’
Still with her eyes closed, Thelma giggled.
Edwina made herself comfortable on a sun-lounger and lit a cigarette. ‘Last year I went to the wilds of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras with a cousin. We trekked through jungles, climbed mountains and ate whatever the natives ate.’
Olivia shuddered.
‘And Arabia will be even more extreme,’ Nada said languidly. ‘There will be warring tribes, the danger of dying of sunstroke, the risk of death from a scorpion bite.’
At this, Thelma opened her eyes, paling a little. ‘Doesn’t Dickie mind you taking off into the blue to places you may never come back from?’
Edwina gave a careless shrug of gleaming wet shoulders. ‘Dickie and I understand each other. His life is the Royal Navy. Mine isn’t. It’s as simple as that.’
As she watched footmen begin to set a table for lunch at the far end of the pool, it occurred to Olivia that Edwina, Thelma and Nada were not only alike in looks – Edwina’s Jewish ancestry, Thelma’s Chilean ancestry and a dash of Abyssinian in Nada’s Russian ancestry meant they were all dark-haired and dark-eyed – but that all three of them arranged their lives so that they spent the greater part of it with people other than their husbands.
Thelma and her husband, Lord Furness, were rarely seen together, the general opinion being that he bored her and she exasperated him. Certainly he never seemed to give a damn that she was the Prince of Wales’s mistress.
Nada, too, was only seen with her husband at events such as Wimbledon or Ascot. As promiscuous as Edwina, she was also – like Edwina – restless in a way that Olivia couldn’t understand.
It was a relief to hear the sound of heeled sandals approaching the pool from behind her and to hear Elizabeth’s clipped, light voice say, ‘So sorry to be late. Bertie couldn’t tear himself away from baby.’
The baby in question, Princess Margaret, had been born the previous year, and Olivia knew that for a while at least the conversation would revolve around the kind of subjects she was happiest with: babies and domesticity.
A little later, over lunch, with Edward wearing a shirt and a sprucely pressed clean pair of shorts, the conversation turned to Hollywood and Violet.
‘Is it t-true she’s being romanced by Ch-Charlie Chaplin?’ Bertie asked, his stammer just as much in evidence with friends as when – as rarely as he could manage – he spoke in public.
Olivia laughed. She’d always had more time for Violet than Thea, and she enjoyed it that Samson and Delilah had made her little sister a household name.
‘According to the gossip columns she is, but then, every time I see a photograph of Violet she’s with a different Hollywood star. Last month she was draped in white fox and on John Gilbert’s arm. There’s no telling whose arm she’ll be on by next month.’
‘Or what she will be draped in,’ Dieter said to general amusement, wondering what excuse he could make for a trip to Hollywood in order to give Violet something else to think about other than Chaplin.
Dickie Mountbatten speared a tomato with his fork. ‘Edwina and I had a marvellous time in Hollywood with Charlie when we were on our honeymoon, didn’t we, darling?’
‘Marvellous,’ Edwina said, in the voice of a wife who knows she is about to hear, yet again, the retelling of one of her husband’s favourite anecdotes.
‘Charlie shot a short movie for us,’ Dickie said. ‘We starred in it. The storyline is that Edwina has a pearl necklace that a gang of crooks wants to steal. Charlie – in his tramp costume – is called in to hunt down the crooks, armed with a wooden hammer. There are lots of chases until, at the end, all the crooks are laid out flat by Charlie and lined up on the lawn next to his great friend Jackie Coogan, who for some reason that I can never remember is lying there hidden under a blanket.’
‘Charlie gave the movie to us as a wedding present,’ Edwina said to Olivia. ‘And he made a pass at me.’
‘Of course he did, darling.’ Dickie beamed across the table at her. ‘And now he’s made a more successful pass at Violet!’
Edwina gave Olivia a wink to indicate that Charlie’s pass at her had also been successful and said, changing the subject, ‘Does anyone fancy a stroll down the hill to Virginia Water after lunch? We could take row-boats out and have a race: chaps against girls.’
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!’
A Season of Secrets Page 27