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 Jörg 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, was to speak. Her book about Germany had been a big success; she had stood for Parliament again in the 1935 election; and she was once again the Member for Aldgate.