Winter of the World (28 page)

After a long moment, he recovered from the shock and grinned.

Thank God, she thought.

He said: ‘I say, that topper does suit you.’

She came closer. ‘I put it on to please you.’

‘Jolly nice of you, I must say.’

She turned her face up invitingly. She liked kissing him. In truth, she liked kissing most men. She was secretly embarrassed by how much she liked it. She had even enjoyed kissing girls, at her
boarding school where they did not see a boy for weeks on end.

He bent his head and touched his lips to hers. Her hat fell off, and they both giggled. Quickly he thrust his tongue into her mouth. She relaxed and enjoyed it. He was enthusiastic about all
sensual pleasures, and she was excited by his eagerness.

She reminded herself that she had a purpose. Things were progressing nicely, but she wanted him to propose. Would he be satisfied with just a kiss? She needed him to want more. Often, if they
had more than a few hasty moments, he would fondle her breasts.

A lot depended on how much wine he had drunk with lunch. He had a large capacity, but there came a point when he lost the urge.

She moved her body, pressing herself to him. He put a hand on her chest, but she was wearing a baggy waistcoat of woollen cloth and he could not find her small breasts. He grunted in
frustration.

Then his hand roamed across her stomach and inside the waistband of the loose-fitting trousers.

She had never before let him touch her down there.

She still had on a silk petticoat and substantial cotton underdrawers, so he surely could not feel much, but his hand went to the fork of her thighs and pressed firmly against her through the
layers. She felt a twinge of pleasure.

She pulled away from him.

Panting, he said: ‘Have I gone too far?’

‘Lock the door,’ she said.

‘Oh, my goodness.’ He went to the door, turned the key in the lock, and came back. They embraced again, and he resumed where he had left off. She touched the front of his trousers,
found his erect penis through the cloth, and grasped it firmly. He groaned with pleasure.

She pulled away again.

The shadow of anger crossed his face. An unpleasant memory came back to her. Once, when she had made a boy called Theo Coffman take his hand off her breasts, he had turned nasty and called her a
prick-teaser. She had never seen that boy again, but the insult had made her feel irrationally ashamed. Momentarily she feared that Boy might be about to make a similar accusation.

Then his face softened and he said: ‘I am dreadfully keen on you, y’know.’

This was her moment. Sink or swim, she told herself. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said with a regret that was not greatly exaggerated.

‘Why not?’

‘We’re not even engaged.’

The word hung in the air for a long moment. For a girl to say that was tantamount to a proposal. She watched his face, terrified that he would take fright, turn away, mumble excuses, and ask her
to leave.

He said nothing.

‘I want to make you happy,’ she said. ‘But . . .’

‘I do love you, Daisy,’ he said.

That was not enough. She smiled at him and said: ‘Do you?’

‘Ever such a lot.’

She said nothing, but looked at him expectantly.

At last he said: ‘Will you marry me?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, and she kissed him again. With her mouth pressed to his she unbuttoned his fly, burrowed through his underclothing, found his penis, and took it out. The skin
was silky and hot. She stroked it, remembering a conversation with the Westhampton twins. ‘You can rub his thing,’ Lindy had said, and Lizzie had added: ‘Until it squirts.’
Daisy was intrigued and excited by the idea of making a man do that. She grasped a bit harder.

Then she remembered Lindy’s next remark. ‘Or you can suck it – they like that best of all.’

She moved her lips away from Boy’s and spoke into his ear. ‘I’ll do anything for my husband,’ she said.

Then she knelt down.

(v)

It was the wedding of the year. Daisy and Boy were married at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on Saturday 3 October 1936. Daisy was disappointed it was not
Westminster Abbey, but she was told that was for the royal family only.

Coco Chanel made her wedding dress. Depression fashion was for simple lines and minimal extravagance. Daisy’s floor-length bias-cut satin gown had pretty butterfly sleeves and a short
train that could be carried by one pageboy.

Her father, Lev Peshkov, came across the Atlantic for the ceremony. Her mother, Olga, agreed for the sake of appearances to sit beside him in church and generally pretend that they were a more
or less happily married couple. Daisy’s nightmare was that at some point Marga would show up with Lev’s illegitimate son Greg on her arm; but it did not happen.

The Westhampton twins and May Murray were bridesmaids, and Eva Murray was matron of honour. Boy had been grumpy about Eva’s being half Jewish – he had not wanted to invite her at all
– but Daisy had insisted.

She stood in the ancient church, conscious that she looked heartbreakingly beautiful, and happily gave herself to Boy Fitzherbert body and soul.

She signed the register ‘Daisy Fitzherbert, Viscountess Aberowen.’ She had been practising that signature for weeks, carefully tearing the paper into unreadable shreds afterwards.
Now she was entitled to it. It was her name.

Processing out of the church, Fitz took Olga’s arm amiably, but Princess Bea put a yard of empty space between herself and Lev.

Princess Bea was not a nice person. She was friendly enough towards Daisy’s mother, and if there was a heavy strain of condescension in her tone, Olga did not notice it, so relations were
amiable. But Bea did not like Lev.

Daisy now realized that Lev lacked the veneer of social respectability. He walked and talked, ate and drank, smoked and laughed and scratched like a gangster, and he did not care what people
thought. He did what he liked because he was an American millionaire, just as Fitz did what he liked because he was an English earl. Daisy had always known this, but it struck her with extra force
when she saw her father with all these upper-class English people, at the wedding breakfast in the grand ballroom of the Dorchester Hotel.

But it did not matter now. She was Lady Aberowen, and that could not be taken away from her.

Nevertheless, Bea’s constant hostility to Lev was an irritant, like a slightly bad smell or a distant buzzing noise, giving Daisy a feeling of dissatisfaction. Sitting beside Lev at the
top table, Bea constantly turned slightly away. When he spoke to her she replied briefly without meeting his eye. He seemed not to notice, smiling and drinking champagne, but Daisy, seated on
Lev’s other side, knew that he had not failed to read the signs. He was uncouth, not stupid.

When the toasts were over and the men began to smoke, Lev, who as the father of the bride was paying the bill, looked along the table and said: ‘Well, Fitz, I hope you enjoyed your meal.
Were the wines up to your standards?’

‘Very good, thank you.’

‘I must say, I thought it was a damn fine spread.’

Bea tutted audibly. Men were not supposed to say ‘damn’ in her hearing.

Lev turned to her. He was smiling, but Daisy knew the dangerous look in his eye. ‘Why, Princess, have I offended you?’

She did not want to reply, but he looked expectantly at her, and did not turn his gaze aside. At last she spoke. ‘I prefer not to hear coarse language,’ she said.

Lev took a cigar from his case. He did not light it at once, but sniffed it and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, and he looked up and down the table
to make sure they were all listening: Fitz, Olga, Boy, Daisy, and Bea. ‘When I was a kid my father was accused of grazing livestock on someone else’s land. No big deal, you might think,
even if he was guilty. But he was arrested, and the land agent built a scaffold in the north meadow. Then the soldiers came and grabbed me and my brother and our mother and took us there. My father
was on the scaffold with a noose around his neck. Then the landlord arrived.’

Daisy had never heard this story. She looked at her mother. Olga seemed equally surprised.

The little group at the table were all silent now.

‘We were forced to watch while my father was hanged,’ Lev said. He turned to Bea. ‘And you know something strange? The landlord’s sister was there as well.’ He put
the cigar in his mouth, wetting the end, and took it out again.

Daisy saw that Bea had turned pale. Was this about her?

‘The sister was about nineteen years old, and she was a princess,’ Lev said, looking at his cigar. Daisy heard Bea let out a small cry, and realized that this story
was
about
her. ‘She stood there and watched the hanging, cold as ice,’ Lev said.

Then he looked directly at Bea. ‘Now that’s what I call coarse,’ he said.

There was a long moment of silence.

Then Lev put the cigar back in his mouth and said: ‘Has anyone got a light?’

(vi)

Lloyd Williams sat at the table in the kitchen of his mother’s house in Aldgate, anxiously studying a map.

It was Sunday 4 October 1936, and today there was going to be a riot.

The old Roman town of London, built on a hill beside the river Thames, was now the financial district, called the City. West of this hill were the palaces of the rich, and the theatres and shops
and cathedrals that catered to them. The house in which Lloyd sat was to the east of the hill, near the docks and the slums. Here, for centuries, waves of immigrants had landed, determined to work
their fingers to the bone so that their grandchildren could one day move from the East End to the West End.

The map Lloyd was looking at so intently was in a special edition of the
Daily Worker
, the Communist Party newspaper, and it showed the route of today’s march by the British Union
of Fascists. They planned to assemble outside the Tower of London, on the border between the City and the East End, then march east.

Straight into the overwhelmingly Jewish borough of Stepney.

Unless Lloyd and people who thought as he did could stop them.

There were 330,000 Jews in Britain, according to the newspaper, and half of them lived in the East End. Most were refugees from Russia, Poland and Germany, where they had lived in fear that on
any day the police, the army or the Cossacks might ride into town, robbing families, beating old men and outraging young women, lining fathers and brothers up against the wall to be shot.

Here in the London slums those Jews had found a place where they had as much right to live as anyone else. How would they feel if they looked out of their windows to see, marching down their own
streets, a gang of uniformed thugs sworn to wipe them all out? Lloyd felt that it just could not be allowed to happen.

The
Worker
pointed out that from the Tower there were really only two routes the marchers could take. One went through Gardiner’s Corner, a five-way junction known as the Gateway to
the East End; the other led along Royal Mint Street and the narrow Cable Street. There were a dozen other routes for an individual using side streets, but not for a march. St George Street led to
Catholic Wapping rather than Jewish Stepney, and was therefore no use to the Fascists.

The
Worker
called for a human wall to block Gardiner’s Corner and Cable Street, and stop the march.

The paper often called for things that did not happen: strikes, revolutions, or – most recently – an alliance of all left parties to form a People’s Front. The human wall might
be just another fantasy. It would take many thousands of people to effectively close off the East End. Lloyd did not know whether enough would show up.

All he knew for sure was that there would be trouble.

At the table with Lloyd were his parents, Bernie and Ethel; his sister, Millie; and sixteen-year-old Lenny Griffiths from Aberowen, in his Sunday suit. Lenny was part of a small army of Welsh
miners who had come to London to join the counter-demonstration.

Bernie looked up from his newspaper and said to Lenny: ‘The Fascists claim that the train fares for all you Welshmen to come to London have been paid by the big Jews.’

Lenny swallowed a mouthful of fried egg. ‘I don’t know any big Jews,’ he said. ‘Unless you count Mrs Levy Sweetshop, she’s quite big. Anyway, I came to London on
the back of a lorry with sixty Welsh lambs going to Smithfield meat market.’

Millie said: ‘That accounts for the smell.’

Ethel said: ‘Millie! How rude.’

Lenny was sharing Lloyd’s bedroom, and he had confided that after the demonstration he was not planning to return to Aberowen. He and Dave Williams were going to Spain to join the
International Brigades being formed to fight the Fascist insurrection.

‘Did you get a passport?’ Lloyd had asked. Getting a passport was not difficult, but the applicant did have to provide a reference from a clergyman, doctor, lawyer, or other person
of status, so a young person could not easily keep it secret.

‘No need,’ Lenny said. ‘We go to Victoria Station and get a weekend return ticket to Paris. You can do that without a passport.’

Lloyd had vaguely known that. It was a loophole intended for the convenience of the prosperous middle class. Now the anti-Fascists were taking advantage of it. ‘How much is the
ticket?’

‘Three pounds fifteen shillings.’

Lloyd had raised his eyebrows. That was more money than an unemployed coal miner was likely to have.

Lenny had added: ‘But the Independent Labour Party is paying for my ticket, and the Communist Party for Dave’s.’

They must have lied about their ages. ‘Then what happens when you get to Paris?’ Lloyd had asked.

‘We’ll be met by the French Communists at the Gare du Nord.’ He pronounced it
gair duh nord.
He did not speak a word of French. ‘From there we’ll be escorted
to the Spanish border.’

Lloyd had delayed his own departure. He told people he wanted to soothe his parents’ worries, but the truth was he could not give up on Daisy. He still dreamed of her throwing Boy over. It
was hopeless – she did not even answer his letters – but he could not forget her.