Winter of the World

Those were the words she had been waiting for, she realized. Now they had been said, and everything was over. Her new life began from this moment.

She sighed. ‘Thank God,’ she said.

(iii)

Daisy rented an apartment in Piccadilly. It had a large American-style bathroom with a shower. There were two separate toilets, one for guests – a ridiculous extravagance in the eyes of most English people.

Fortunately, money was not an issue for Daisy. Her grandfather Vyalov had left her rich, and she had had control of her own fortune since she was twenty-one. And it was all in American dollars.

New furniture was difficult to buy, so she shopped for antiques, of which there were plenty for sale cheap. She hung modern paintings for a gay, youthful look. She hired an elderly laundress and a girl to clean, and found it was easy to manage the place without a butler or a cook, especially when you did not have a husband to mollycoddle.

The servants at the Mayfair house packed all her clothes and sent them to her in a pantechnicon. Daisy and the laundress spent an afternoon opening the boxes and putting everything away tidily.

She had been both humiliated and liberated. On balance, she thought she was better off. The wound of rejection would heal, but she would be free of Boy for ever.

After a week she wondered what had been the results of the medical examination. The doctor would have reported to Boy, of course, as the husband. She did not want to ask him, and, anyway, it did not seem important any longer, so she forgot about it.

She enjoyed making a new home. For a couple of weeks she was too busy to socialize. When she had fixed up the apartment she decided to see all the friends she had been ignoring.

She had a lot of friends in London. She had been here seven years. For the last four years Boy had been away more than he was home, and she had gone to parties and balls on her own, so being without a husband would not make much difference to her life, she figured. No doubt she would be crossed off the Fitzherbert family’s invitation lists, but they were not the only people in London society.

She bought crates of whisky, gin and champagne, scouring London for what little was available legitimately and buying the rest on the black market. Then she sent out invitations to a flatwarming party.

The responses came back with ominous promptness, and they were all declines.

In tears, she phoned Eva Murray. ‘Why won’t anyone come to my party?’ she wailed.

Eva was at her door ten minutes later.

She arrived with three children and a nanny. Jamie was six, Anna four, and baby Karen two.

Daisy showed her around the apartment, then ordered tea while Jamie turned the couch into a tank, using his sisters as crew.

Speaking English with a mixture of German, American and Scots accents, Eva said: ‘Daisy, dear, this isn’t Rome.’

‘I know. Are you sure you’re comfortable?’

Eva was heavily pregnant with her fourth child. ‘Would you mind if I put my feet up?’

‘Of course not.’ Daisy fetched a cushion.

‘London society is respectable,’ Eva went on. ‘Don’t imagine I approve of it. I have been excluded often, and poor Jimmy is snubbed sometimes for having married a half-Jewish German.’

‘That’s awful.’

‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, whatever the reason.’

‘Sometimes I hate the British.’

‘You’re forgetting what Americans are like. Don’t you remember telling me that all the girls in Buffalo were snobs?’

Daisy laughed. ‘What a long time ago it seems.’

‘You’ve left your husband,’ Eva said. ‘And you did so in undeniably spectacular fashion, hurling insults at him in the bar of Claridge’s hotel.’

‘And I’d only had one Martini!’

Eva grinned. ‘How I wish I’d been there!’

‘I kind of wish I hadn’t.’

‘Needless to say, everyone in London society has talked about little else for the last three weeks.’

‘I guess I should have anticipated that.’

‘Now, I’m afraid, anyone who appears at your party will be seen as approving of adultery and divorce. Even I wouldn’t like my mother-in-law to know I’d come here and had tea with you.’

‘But it’s so unfair – Boy was unfaithful first!’

‘And you thought women were treated equally?’

Daisy remembered that Eva had a great deal more to worry about than snobbery. Her family was still in Nazi Germany. Fitz had made inquiries through the Swiss embassy and learned that her doctor father was now in a concentration camp, and her brother, a violin maker, had been beaten up by the police, his hands smashed. ‘When I think about your troubles, I’m ashamed of myself for complaining,’ Daisy said.

‘Don’t be. But cancel the party.’

Daisy did.