Golden Boy. Paula Astridge
gave them the physical ability and moral fibre to do so. Albert believed the remedy lay in the infusion of quiet, stable stock like the Weber’s. He could feel it in his bones. That was the strategy for the Speer family’s survival.
Marrying Margret was a bold investment in the Speers’ Aryan future, which might have made his parents proud had they known he was making his unusual choice of a partner with his family’s welfare at heart, not its destruction. But where Albert was concerned they never even came close to touching on his altruistic reasoning and visions of the future. Neither of them dared nor cared to delve more deeply into this intrinsic part of his nature that made him more like them than anyone realised.
These visions of the future guided Albert’s decision to make a pragmatic beeline for a girl like Margret rather than one like Rachel, whose serious surplus of passion and devotion threatened to invade his space and make his cup of repressed emotions go into overflow.
Having learned to bottle up emotions, he had grown used to living in isolation and was now a little frightened of uncapping the genie. He had come to realise that emotional involvement made him vulnerable and felt it was a thing to be avoided at all costs.
He had spent many years building a wall around himself as protection against heartbreak. It was an impregnable fortress that his parents and brothers had helped him erect, their neglect to love and support him being the bricks and mortar foundation that held it together. Now, with his wall finished and standing impervious to invaders he wasn’t about to let anyone holding ‘love’ up as their cause break it down to find their way in. Not now, not when he had dedicated himself to life behind a cold, soulless façade. Albert felt safe in the knowledge that Margret had neither the instinct nor inclination to fight her way in and was, in fact, far happier to live outside it.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said Albert Speer Senior. ‘Can you imagine yourself teaching in some backwater university? You’d end up cramming a pack of snotty-nosed little morons. Is that the kind of life you want?’
Well yes, it was! But his father’s dismissive reaction to Albert’s plan to study mathematics at university put paid to that. So where else could he fall but back to Plan B, which had him follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a degree in architecture? Albert’s father was tickled pink and that was enough for Albert. It was worth every bit of the sacrifice he had just made to get this stamp of approval and to hear the sound of his Papa’s voice singing his praises.
However, this noble renunciation came at the cost of the thing Albert loved best: mathematics. Odd as it was that he should feel this way about such an austere ambition in life, he had to admit that it was his only true passion. The prospect of becoming a professor of mathematics was all he had ever dreamed of, providing him with something that nothing else on earth could — pure, unadulterated joy.
Using mathematics to test himself and play at problems was his way of tasting triumph at no one else’s expense or envy. And that was a most satisfying feeling, with a thrill factor second to none.
He had experienced this joy only the other day when sitting for his final school examination. It was a comprehensive paper that he finished very quickly. Very quickly. So fast that he had plenty of time to loll back in his chair and look around at the furrowed foreheads of the students who were still hard at it. However, not wanting to show off and draw attention to himself and his genius, he decided to put his head down and do the whole paper over again, three times in fact, coming at the problems from a different angle to arrive at the same solution.
This, he considered to be the ultimate stimulus, which didn’t say much for his love life at the time. But that was something which, by mutual agreement, had been put on hold while Albert turned his energies to university, a deprivation which both he and Margret found easy to bear given that both of them had more pragmatic passions to embrace.
In between his drafting and engineering basics, however, Albert did actually manage to scribble a letter or two to Margret expressing his views on university life:
‘I hate it! The professors are boring, the curriculum inane. There’s no-one here to teach me how to draw. It’s nothing but a ghastly provincial nest.’
At this point he stopped short and jerked his pen away from the paper. He’d given himself a shock. He sounded just like his mother.
Well, so what? He couldn’t help himself. He did hate it, not only the university to which he had been sent, but the fact that he had no faith in himself as a prospective architect. Although he had a talent for facts, figures and measurement, he had no talent whatsoever for drawing. This had been established earlier in his childhood when he had failed to impress his father with his sketching ability. Without such a skill, one so imperative to his chosen field of endeavour, how on earth was he supposed to be successful?
Not that this lack of natural ability broke his heart. As far as architecture was concerned he could take it or leave it. It was just that he loathed and resented being involved with anything of an academic nature in which he was not outstanding, anything that might suggest some deficiency in his character or capacity.
He began to feel a little less belligerent about his studies after he transferred to the Institute of Technology in Munich. He put up with his studies by spending as little time as possible on campus and investing only enough energy in study to make sure that he dredged up a pass on his examinations. His academic policy for the duration: scrape through and go skiing.
He did so with his friends as often as possible, living for nothing else but his holidays when he could hike and row and ski to his heart’s content. Margret usually went with him, bringing along the strict time restraints her job at the Municipal Library imposed. Those nine-to-five, four weeks’ annual leave stipulations, which to Margret, always took precedence because she was not and would never be one to neglect her duty.
This only gave them two heady weeks of her annual leave to camp out under the stars. Not exchanging many words, but watching each other across the campfire and wondering whether they could hold out until marriage. Doing everything they could to suppress their smouldering sexual desires until Albert built up the guts to put a gold ring on her finger.
‘Better sooner than later,’ he sighed as he rolled over in his sleeping bag and turned his back to her.
He had to marry her if he were to be saved from the temptation of making love to her on the spot. A temptation that had taken on biblical proportions now that his pretty, indomitable Margret had reached her prime. At the age of 18 Margret possessed a taut, tanned body, cascading blonde hair and a come-hither expression that urged him to forget convention, give in to the inevitable and abandon all thoughts of propriety. Those cool blue, supposedly innocent eyes of hers were throwing more heat on the situation than the redhot flames of their campfireand telling him that he had better organise their wedding and fast.
So exercising that latent talent of his as a master of organisation, he did so at all speed. He wiped from the program all baby’s-breath-bound-bouquets, white frilly dresses and wedding marches so that he could whisk her off to the local registry office and seal the deal. There was simply no time for anything else. Not even time enough to let his parents know he was doing it. Not that it mattered when they had already made their feelings quite clear as far as his possible marriage to Margret was concerned.
‘We will never recognise the marriage,’ was his father’s ultimatum when Albert first ran the idea by them, three weeks after the deed was done.
‘Your feelings on the matter are now immaterial,’ Albert replied. ‘At the very least you should be grateful to me for having married in secret and spared you the humiliation of having to attend the ceremony.’
With this his parents had to agree, because even if they had managed to recover from their blind fury over their son’s defiance, they would never have lowered themselves to mingle with the masses; to stand back and watch their son sign the papers that legalised their lifetime link to the lower-middle class. What Albert had done to them was appalling. They would never forgive him.
‘And furthermore,’