Chapter Three

Berlin, June 1911

Vicky sat on a park bench in the Tiergarten, Max in his perambulator beside her, Paul happily playing with a whip-and-top a few yards away. Other than the children and Wastl, who was sunning himself on the grass at her feet, she was completely on her own.

‘You’ll be mistaken for a nanny,’ Zelda had said tartly when she had first begun taking Max for walks in his pram by herself. ‘Either that or someone embarrassingly middle class.’

She had been uncaring. Now that she was five months pregnant again it was highly unlikely she would be taken for a nanny and besides, unlike Zelda, she enjoyed spending time with her son and didn’t see why Max’s nanny should have all the enjoyment of him when she was perfectly capable of looking after him herself. He was nine months old now and beginning to crawl. Sometimes when they were in the Tiergarten—and she knew this would appal Zelda and horrify his nanny—she laid him on a blanket on the grass. Today he was in his perambulator and, shaded by a parasol, was lying on his back fast asleep.

He looked utterly content. Watching him as he slept she wished that she too were as untroubled. She had tried to be rational about her growing stirrings of unhappiness, telling herself they were due to her constant homesickness for Yorkshire. While this was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. Other, more serious things were causing her disquiet.

There was Josef’s assumption that though Berthold was now head of the House of Remer, he, not Berthold, would be the acting head where administration was concerned. It was an assumption a vastly relieved Berthold had happily gone along with—and the doubts she had expressed when he had done so had perplexed him deeply.

‘But surely that’s what you want, Liebchen?’ he had said to her with a puzzled frown. ‘You’ve always said you didn’t want to be married to a man who thought of nothing but business—and it is impossible to run an industry as vast as the steelworks without giving every second of the day to it, especially when, unlike Josef, I’ve never had personal experience of all the different aspects of steel production.’

Everything he said was true and she should, she knew, have been just as grateful as Berthold that Josef was taking the huge responsibilities of the House of Remer from his shoulders. Perversely, though, she wasn’t.

Among her many muddled feelings was resentment at Josef’s patronizing attitude towards Berthold. She was offended by the inference that it wasn’t so much that Berthold didn’t want to step into his father’s shoes, as that he wasn’t capable of stepping into them. She didn’t like seeing his mild manner mistaken for inadequacy. And if all those troubled emotions weren’t clouds enough, there was also her disappointment at how little time she and Zelda were spending with each other.

Within days of Harald Remer’s funeral Zelda and Josef had announced that in future they would be carrying out all major entertaining at Schloss Niedernhall. ‘Men like shooting and the shooting in Schloss Niedernhall’s woods is excellent,’ Zelda had said when announcing their decision.