In a lowered voice he said: ‘I just want to say that I think it’s wrong of people to blame you for anything your father might have done.’
‘Especially when they all bought their booze from him!’ she replied.
Then she saw her future mother-in-law, in a ruched pink gown that did nothing for her angular figure. Nora Farquharson was not ecstatic about her son’s choice of bride, but she had accepted Daisy and had been charming to Olga when they had exchanged visits. ‘Mrs Farquharson!’ Daisy said. ‘What a lovely dress!’
Nora Farquharson turned her back and walked away.
Eva gasped.
A feeling of horror came over Daisy. She turned back to Woody. ‘This isn’t about bootlegging, is it?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘You must ask Charlie. Here he comes.’
Charlie was perspiring, though it was not warm. ‘What’s going on?’ Daisy asked him. ‘Everyone’s giving me the cold shoulder!’
He was terribly nervous. ‘People are so angry at your family,’ he said.
‘What for?’ she cried.
Several people nearby heard her raised voice and looked around. She did not care.
Charlie said: ‘Your father ruined Dave Rouzrokh.’
‘Are you talking about that incident in the Ritz-Carlton? What has that got to do with me?’
‘Everyone likes Dave, even though he’s Persian or something. And they don’t believe he would rape anybody.’
‘I never said he did!’
‘I know,’ Charlie said. He was clearly in agony.
People were frankly staring, now: Victor Dixon, Dot Renshaw, Chuck Dewar.
Daisy said to Charlie: ‘But I’m going to be blamed. Is that so?’
‘Your father did a terrible thing.’
Daisy was cold with fear. Surely she could not lose her triumph at the last minute? ‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘What are you telling me? Talk straight, for the love of God.’
Eva put her arm around Daisy’s waist in a gesture of support.
Charlie replied: ‘Mother says it’s unforgivable.’
‘What does that mean, unforgivable?’
He stared miserably at her. He could not bring himself to speak.
But there was no need. She knew what he was going to say. ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’re jilting me.’
He nodded.
Olga said: ‘Daisy, we must leave.’ She was in tears.
Daisy looked around. She tilted her chin as she stared them all down: Dot Renshaw looking maliciously pleased, Victor Dixon admiring, Chuck Dewar with his mouth open in adolescent shock, and his brother Woody looking sympathetic.
‘To hell with you all,’ Daisy said loudly. ‘I’m going to London to dance with the King!’
3
1936
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, 1936, and Lloyd Williams was at the end of his second year at Cambridge, when Fascism reared its vile head among the white stone cloisters of the ancient university.
Lloyd was at Emmanuel College – known as ‘Emma’ – doing Modern Languages. He was studying French and German, but he preferred German. As he immersed himself in the glories of German culture, reading Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Thomas Mann, he looked up occasionally from his desk in the quiet library to watch with sadness as today’s Germany descended into barbarism.
Then the local branch of the British Union of Fascists announced that their leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, would address a meeting in Cambridge. The news took Lloyd back to Berlin three years earlier. He saw again the Brownshirt thugs wrecking Maud von Ulrich’s magazine office; heard again the grating sound of Hitler’s hate-filled voice as he stood in the parliament and poured scorn on democracy; shuddered anew at the memory of the dogs’ bloody muzzles savaging Jorg with a bucket over his head.
Now Lloyd stood on the platform at Cambridge railway station, waiting to meet his mother off the train from London. With him was Ruby Carter, a fellow activist in the local Labour Party. She had helped him organize today’s meeting on the subject of ‘The Truth about Fascism’. Lloyd’s mother, Eth Leckwith,
