Winter of the World

She thought of the Yacht Club Ball of 1935 in Buffalo, the event that she imagined, at the time, had ruined her life. The White House was obviously a lot more prestigious, but she knew that nothing that happened tonight could ruin her life. She reflected on that while Lloyd helped her put on her mother’s necklace of rose-coloured diamonds with matching earrings. At the age of nineteen she had desperately wanted high-status people to accept her. Now she could hardly imagine worrying about such a thing. As long as Lloyd said she looked fabulous, she did not care what anyone else thought. The only other person whose approval she might seek was her mother-in-law, Eth Leckwith, who had little social status and had certainly never worn a Paris gown.

Did every woman look back and think how foolish she had been when young? Daisy thought again about Ethel, who had certainly behaved foolishly – getting pregnant by her married employer – but never spoke regretfully about it. Maybe that was the right attitude. Daisy contemplated her own mistakes: becoming engaged to Charlie Farquharson, rejecting Lloyd, marrying Boy Fitzherbert. She was not quite able to look back and think about the good that had come of those choices. It was really not until she had been decisively rejected by high society, and had found consolation at Ethel’s kitchen in Aldgate, that her life had taken a turn for the better. She had stopped yearning for social status and had learned what real friendship was, and she had been happy ever since.

Now that she no longer cared, she enjoyed parties even more.

‘Ready?’ said Lloyd.

She was ready. She put on the matching evening coat that Dior had made to go with the dress. They went down in the elevator, left the hotel, and stepped into the waiting limousine.

(iv)

Carla persuaded her mother to play the piano on Christmas Eve.

Maud had not played for years. Perhaps it saddened her by bringing back memories of Walter: they had always played and sung together, and she had often told the children how she had tried, and failed, to teach him to play ragtime. But she no longer told that story, and Carla suspected that nowadays the piano made Maud think of Joachim Koch, the young officer who had come to her for piano lessons, whom she had deceived and seduced, and whom Carla and Ada had killed in the kitchen. Carla herself was not able to shut out the recollection of that nightmare evening, especially getting rid of the body. She did not regret it – they had done the right thing – but, all the same, she would have preferred to forget it.

However, Maud at last agreed to play ‘Silent Night’ for them all to sing along. Werner, Ada, Erik, and the three children, Rebecca, Walli, and the new baby, Lili, gathered around the old Steinway in the drawing room. Carla put a candle on the piano, and studied the faces of her family in its moving shadows as they sang the familiar German carol.

Walli, in Werner’s arms, would be four years old in a few weeks’ time, and he tried to sing along, alertly guessing the words and the melody. He had the Oriental eyes of his rapist father: Carla had decided that her revenge would be to raise a son who treated women with tenderness and respect.

Erik sang the words of the hymn sincerely. He supported the Soviet regime as blindly as he had supported the Nazis. Carla had at first been baffled and infuriated, but now she saw a sad logic to it. Erik was one of those inadequate people who were so scared by life that they preferred to live under harsh authority, to be told what to do and what to think by a government that allowed no dissent. They were foolish and dangerous, but there were an awful lot of them.

Carla gazed fondly at her husband, still handsome at thirty. She recalled kissing him, and more, in the front of his sexy car, parked in the Grunewald, when she was nineteen. She still liked kissing him.

When she thought over the time that had passed since then, she had a thousand regrets, but the biggest was her father’s death. She missed him constantly and still cried when she remembered him lying in the hall, beaten so cruelly that he did not live until the doctor arrived.

But everyone had to die, and Father had given his life for the sake of a better world. If more Germans had had his courage the Nazis would not have triumphed. She wanted to do all the things he had done: to raise her children well, to make a difference to her country’s politics, to love and be loved. Most of all, when she died, she wanted her children to be able to say, as she said of her father, that her life had meant something, and that the world was a better place for it.

The carol came to an end; Maud held the final chord; and little Walli leaned forward and blew the candle out.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS