A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  That Dieter was sometimes unfaithful was something she had suspected for a long time. It was something she had closed her heart and mind to. However, thanks to Connie Foxton, she could do so no longer.

  Reni Tillich was one of the first friends she had made when she and Dieter had returned to Berlin. Only five days ago Reni had rung Olivia, asking if she would like to see a film with her. They had gone to a cinema in the Ku’damm to see Das Mädchen Johanna, a film about Joan of Arc. Afterwards they’d had tea and cakes at Cafe Kranzler.

  Countess Marianne Thimm was married to one of Dieter’s fellow diplomats at the Foreign Office. Though she wasn’t as close a friend as Reni, she was still a friend. They met on almost a weekly basis at various embassy parties. They dined regularly at the Thimms’, and the Thimms dined regularly at 9 Bellevuestrasse.

  Clarita von Strempel was an older woman, somewhere in her mid- to late thirties, very beautiful, very elegant. In Olivia’s first few weeks in Berlin as a diplomat’s wife, Clarita had taken her under her wing, steering her through a minefield of strict Prussian etiquette.

  The knowledge that all three women had betrayed her in such a way was almost more than Olivia could comprehend. She was in such pain that she was blind, deaf and dumb with it.

  Violet’s betrayal was, though, by far the worst. Violet’s behaviour was monstrous – was beyond being monstrous.

  ‘Olivia!’ Dieter was on the other side of the door, twisting the crystal door knob violently. ‘Olivia, meine Liebe! For the love of God, unlock the door! I have to speak to you. I have to explain!’

  ‘There can’t be any explanation!’ Hot, scalding tears poured down her cheeks. ‘You slept with women I thought were my friends! You slept with my sister! Or are you still sleeping with her? Is that why Violet came to work at Babelsberg? So that the two of you could see each other more easily?’

  ‘Lieber Gott in Himmel!’ Dieter was almost out of his mind with distress.

  What was happening to his marriage now was something he had thought would never happen. Though he’d been unfaithful to Olivia several times, he had never indulged in a full-scale, full-on love affair. He’d never had any desire to, because when it came to loving someone, he loved Olivia. In his own mind, all he had been doing was having a little bit of harmless fun – the kind of fun all red-blooded men occasionally indulged in.

  As for Violet . . . He felt violently ill. He’d certainly never had any desire to leave Olivia for Violet. The very thought brought him out in a cold sweat. And since Violet had begun living and working in Berlin, he hadn’t even met up with her for drinks. Violet had other, far more important fish to fry. Gossip was that she’d become Goebbels’ mistress almost from her first week at Babelsberg – and when she wasn’t being squired around by Goebbels, she was being squired by the second most important man in Germany, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring.

  ‘Violet was . . . was an aberration, Olivia,’ he said through the still-locked door. ‘It happened years ago, when she was filming at Beaconsfield. It meant nothing, Olivia darling. You know how Violet is . . .’

  ‘I’m leaving you. I’m going home to Gorton, and I’m going to file for divorce on the grounds of your adultery with my sister.’

  Dieter thought of the scandal. He thought of how he would be regarded by the family he had married into – the family that meant so much to him. He thought of the expression he would meet in the eyes of his father-in-law and Thea and Rozalind.

  His hands were slippery on the knob of the door as he tried vainly to force the lock.

  ‘I love you, Olivia darling,’ he said, knowing that what he said now would affect the rest of his life. ‘I’ve never loved anyone else. I never will love anyone else. I don’t know why I behaved as I did, except that men don’t think the same way about things as women do. Please believe me when I say it will never happen again.’

  ‘How can I believe you?’ The tears coursing down her face dripped onto her hands and the skirt of her gown. ‘Reni, Marianne, Clarita, the Foxton woman and Violet – oh God, most of all Violet – know things about you that no one should know but me.’ Her words came between heart-racked sobs. ‘They know what you look like naked. They know how you kiss. They know how you make love.’

  She was crying so hard she couldn’t continue.

  Dieter gave up the fruitless effort of trying to open a locked door. Ashen-faced, he leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. Then, in a quiet, flat, defeated voice, he said, ‘I don’t want you to go back to Gorton. I don’t want you to leave me. Despite the way I’ve behaved, you are my life, Olivia. You must believe me. I love you, and I need you. Please, meine Liebe, give me another chance.’

  Olivia’s sobs gave way to shuddering, gasping breaths of air.

  She was visualizing her life at Gorton without him. Who else would she ever find to love, the way she loved Dieter? Who else would there be who, just by looking at him, would make her heart leap for joy? Dieter hadn’t loved, as he loved her, any of the women he’d been unfaithful with. He’d promised it would never happen again.

  She supposed that all faithless men, when caught out by their wives, promised the same thing. But Dieter wasn’t all men; his total panic at the prospect of her leaving him and returning to Gorton was real. He’d played fast and loose with something infinitely precious – their trust and total commitment to each other – but now he had been brought face-to-face with the consequences of doing so she doubted that he would ever do so again.

  He needed her, just as she needed him.

  To punish him, by leaving him, would only make her own grief and pain more unendurable.

  She leaned her head against the back of the door and knuckled the remaining tears from her eyes.

  ‘Do you promise, utterly promise me,’ she said unsteadily, ‘that you will never again be unfaithful to me?’

  ‘I promise you, Olivia darling.’ His relief was so vast that there was a sob in his throat. ‘Unlock the door, meine Liebe. I’ve been such a fool – and I’m never going to be foolish again. Please believe me. Please tell me you still love me.’

  On legs that were weak, she rose to her feet and unlocked and opened the door.

  His handsome face was so anguished that, as he took her in his arms, she went into them without a moment’s hesitation. Their marriage had been within a hair’s breadth of foundering, but it hadn’t done so.

  As his mouth came down on hers, she knew their marriage would never fail; that she was strong enough never to allow it to.

  She knew something else as well. She would never speak to Violet – or willingly see her – ever again.

  And she would never again smell the scent of Mitsouko without her stomach heaving.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  SEPTEMBER 1937

  Rozalind was in Berlin again. It was a city she would no longer have gone anywhere near, had it not been for the exceptional photographs she could take – photographs that her press agency was always hungry for.

  In two days’ time Mussolini and Hitler, who, after an agreement signed in October the previous year, were now in a formal military and political alliance with each other, were to appear together before massed crowds in the Field of May, the setting of the 1936 Olympic Games.

  It was a photographic opportunity Rozalind had no intention of missing.

  Having emerged from the Friedrichstrasse station, she was walking down the street of the same name, with a large bag holding the essential clothing and toilet items she travelled with over one shoulder, her up-to-the-minute Leica over the other shoulder. Friedrichstrasse was a major thoroughfare and, like all Berlin’s major streets, its entire length was hung with immense scarlet banners bearing giant black swastikas on circles of white. They fluttered in the breeze from every public building, allowing no one to forget that Berlin – just like every other city, town and village in Germany – was Hitler’s fiefdom.

  Roz gritted her teeth. Every time she returned to Berlin the
atmosphere was darker, more oppressive, more hysterically fevered – and it was this atmosphere that she constantly tried to capture on film, in the hope of bringing home to newspaper readers in Britain and America the nature of the time-bomb ticking away in Berlin’s Reichstag: the time-bomb that was Adolf Hitler.

  Her difficulty was in maintaining relationships with Violet, Olivia and Dieter which ensured that she had access to the kind of events denied other foreign press photographers. It helped that she viewed Violet and Olivia more as her sisters than as cousins and that, like Gilbert, she was certain Dieter’s admiration for Hitler would eventually turn into something very different; and that when it did, Olivia, too, would cease singing from the Nazi song-sheet. Her cousins were important to her, far too important to let political differences – no matter how extreme – spoil her relationship with them.

  It was Violet, not Thea or Olivia, who was a constant mystery to her. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why Violet – who had never previously been seen with any man not handsome enough to commit suicide for – was allowing herself to be squired around by a man as ox-like as General Göring, and by Joseph Goebbels, who had a club foot, walked with a limp and was so slightly built that he looked as if a puff of wind would blow him over.

  Though she was staying, as she always did, with Olivia and Dieter, Roz was first meeting up with Violet in a cafe close to Friedrichstrasse’s junction with Unter den Linden.

  Violet was there before her, her torrent of fox-red hair tamed into an upswept chignon beneath a white cap worn at a jaunty angle. She was wearing white bell-bottomed trousers, a white and navy striped sweater, and there was a white blazer slung carelessly around her shoulders.

  ‘You’re looking very nautical, Violet,’ she said in amusement. ‘Where is the yacht to go with the clothes?’

  ‘Kiel,’ Violet said deadpan, her tawny eyes full of delight at catching up with Roz once again. ‘How long are you going to be in Berlin – and are you still after an introduction to Goebbels and Göring?’

  ‘The answer to the first question is for as long as it’s worth my while.’ Rozalind swung her bag to the floor and slid onto a seat on the opposite side of the table from Violet. ‘My answer to the second question is yes – but only in the hope of the kind of photographs that other foreign press photographers can’t get. Why on earth are you still in Berlin, Violet? More to the point, why are you allowing yourself to be romanced by men as slimy and obscene as Goebbels and Göring?’

  Violet shrugged. ‘They’re very powerful men, Roz.’

  A waiter came up and Rozalind ordered a Martini.

  Violet, already drinking a Martini, took a sip of it and tilted her head to one side, ‘What is the latest news from home?’

  ‘From Outhwaite? Charlie and Hermione’s little boy is six and a little imp who is running them both ragged. Not that they mind. Their sun rises and sets around him. Jim Crosby has got the latest Pig and Whistle barmaid in the family way, and the pressure is on for him to do the right thing and put a ring on her finger. Miss Calvert has found a new project: a young boy from the other side of Outhwaite who has university ambitions and needs all the extra coaching he can get.’

  ‘And do you have news of Thea and Hal?’

  Rozalind’s natural exuberance ebbed. ‘Only via the occasional letters that get through to your father, and which he then shares with me.’

  She thought of the little information the family had had of Thea and Hal since their arrival in Spain a little over a year ago. Hal had obtained press accreditation immediately, and Thea’s visa had been granted under the belief that she was his secretary. At first they had been in the north-west of the country, in Corunna and Vigo, both Nationalist strongholds. At the beginning of the current year they’d managed to make their way further east, into Republican-held Basque country. In the last letter Gilbert had received – which had been at the beginning of July –Thea had written that with the International Brigades now in Spain, they had joined a British unit that was heading towards Madrid to help in the defence of the city.

  ‘And that was the latest news,’ she said now to Violet, ‘but the long silence is not as sinister as it may seem – not considering the way the country is being torn apart.’

  ‘And all with the help of German planes and German pilots.’ Violet’s distinctive amber eyes narrowed. ‘Without Hitler’s help, Guernica could never have happened.’

  The comment, and the way it was said – coming from a woman who was so frequently seen in the company of the man who commanded the pilots and planes that had pounded Guernica with explosives, set it alight with incendiary bombs and strafed it with machine-gun fire – was breathtaking.

  Roz said slowly, ‘I don’t understand you, Violet. Unlike Olivia, you’re not married to a Berliner and you don’t have to be in Berlin, and unlike me you don’t have a professional reason for appearing to condone the terrible things happening here so that the world outside Germany can see what is going on inside it. So why are you still at Babelsberg when you could be in Hollywood, or in London, filming at Elstree or Pinewood?’

  ‘I have a reason, but it’s my secret. One day I’ll tell you.’

  ‘And is the reason why Olivia’s no longer having anything to do with you a secret as well?’

  ‘No. Thanks to Connie Foxton, half of Berlin knows why Olivia isn’t having anything to do with me.’

  ‘Which is?

  Violet gave a Gallic, dismissive shrug of her shoulders, ‘Because of a little naughtiness I indulged in years ago with Dieter. It was nothing important, and I can’t imagine why Olivia is making such a fuss about it.’

  ‘I can,’ Roz said drily, imagining only a heavy flirtation.

  Violet shrugged and shot her one of her dazzling smiles. ‘Let’s have another Martini while you tell me all the latest gossip about Max. Is it true that since the Republicans did so badly in last year’s presidential election he’s said he won’t be a contender next time around?’

  ‘That was the quote printed in the Washington Post – and presumably you read it in the International Herald. That being the case, it must be true.’

  ‘And is it true he’s getting a divorce?’

  Feigning an indifference she was far from feeling, Roz said, ‘As several newspapers have printed in their gossip columns the news that he and Myrtle are divorcing, I’m assuming that’s true also.’

  ‘And?’ Violet said impatiently. ‘Come on, Roz. Don’t keep secrets from me. Are the two of you back together again? Are you the reason for the divorce?’

  ‘Absolutely not. No. Zippo. Zilch.’ Roz was beginning to regret arranging to meet up with Violet. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about Max. ‘I haven’t seen or spoken to him since I decided our affair was going nowhere and broke things off with him.’

  Her fingers tightened around the stem of her Martini glass – the tension not because it was still difficult for her to give a false account of why she had broken off her affair with Max, but because she knew exactly how long it was since she had last seen him. In two weeks’ time it would have been exactly four years. If anyone had asked, she would probably have been able to give them the days and hours as well.

  Four years in which no one had replaced him in her life, though heaven knows she’d tried hard enough. She’d had so many brief affairs – and even briefer flings – that she hadn’t fingers enough to count them. The only constant in her life had been Barty, but in the end even Barty had realized he was wasting his time and had become engaged to a debutante whose father not only owned 1,000 acres of Perthshire, but a Scottish island as well.

  Violet was now chattering about the film she was presently making. Every now and then Roz made a polite, interested noise, but her thoughts were on Max. Why was he risking potential harm to his political career by divorcing Myrtle? She could think of only one possible reason, and the reason made her feel physically ill. It had to be that he wanted to remarry. It had to be that he was having an aff
air, and that the new woman he was in love with was so important to him, so utterly necessary to him, that he wanted to make her his wife.

  As she continued feigning interest in what it was Violet was telling her, she didn’t know which emotion she was battling the hardest: a searing, crucifying hurt or rampant, raging jealousy.

  Later that day, after dinner and when she was sitting with Olivia and Dieter in the library of their Bellevuestrasse home, Max’s name was again brought into the conversation.

  ‘It’s a shame Max didn’t make it to the White House,’ Dieter said, one leg across the other, his right ankle resting on his left knee, a glass of grape-brandy in his hand. ‘His disappointment must have been colossal.’

  Roz thought of the way she had sacrificed her own and Max’s happiness so that Max could enter the running for the presidency and knew that, if Max’s disappointment had been colossal, then her own had been – and still was – off the Richter scale.

  Struggling to keep the strain from her voice, and aware that some response was needed, she said, ‘I’m sure you’re right, Dieter. But it was all over for Max quite early on. Governor Landon pipped him to the post in the primaries and then was unable to make inroads into Roosevelt’s popularity. A sitting president nearly always has an advantage, and Roosevelt’s New Deal policies ensured he had enormous overall support. Every rancher and farmer in the country was totally behind him. Big-city political machines were behind him, as were the Labour unions. I doubt if Max being the Republican nominee would have made any difference to the final outcome.’

  American politics didn’t interest Olivia and she changed the subject. ‘You must have been hugely disappointed Thea wasn’t around last November, Roz, when all the drama of the abdication was going on.’

  Roz, grateful the conversation had been steered away from Max, smiled wryly. ‘I don’t think even Thea’s long-standing friendship with Edward would have been enough to have given me special access to him, Olivia. I was in London on the off-chance of getting something emotive, but the entire thing was announced, over and done with so quickly that all I managed was a couple of shots taken when Edward’s car was speeding between 10 Downing Street and the Palace.’