Gifts of War (27 page)

I took Sam’s hand and led both her and Will to a quiet patch of ground away from the main walkway.

“Look,” I said, brushing her cheek with my fingers. “The problem is with you, in your head, here.” I tapped her temple with my finger. “Maybe you’ve still got some loyalty to Wilhelm—I don’t know. Something that stops you from moving forward. But you’re wrong to let Faye’s behavior shape your life and Will’s happiness. I don’t know if you love me any more than you did when we left Middle Hill—I’ve deliberately not asked, so as not to burden you, as you say.”

I touched her face again.

“But
my
feelings about
you
haven’t changed, not one bit. If anything, they have grown. When you are ready, all we need to do is get married, quietly, and have Will christened; then you can change to another school, where you can tell everyone that I am Will’s father.”

“You’d still do that?”

“You know I would.”

“But even at a new school I’d still overhear those conversations … I’d
still feel
the burden.”

I let a short silence elapse. “Then it seems to me that you still can’t let go of Wilhelm.”

We walked home in silence.

In Middle Hill, that evening in the cricket field, the next morning at the railway station, it hadn’t mattered that Sam didn’t love me. If I was really honest with myself, that was no longer true. I still couldn’t hate Wilhelm, but how convenient it would be if he were dead.

My new team at work consisted of Alan Brewster, a mathematician, brilliant but nearsighted, which banned him from active duty; Eve Palmer, an attractive (if vampish) forty-year-old actress who had worked in Munich—in a variety of cabaret roles—and had escaped
just in time; and Genevieve Afton, the shy, blue-stockinged daughter of an earl.

At first, this new group was sticky. The relationship between the two women on the team—one flashy and worldly (and a little sarcastic), the other shy and academic—was tense, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it, for Genevieve straightaway came up with something that kept us occupied.

She spotted that—on successive days, but in different newspapers— something interesting had got through the censors, because it was indirect and didn’t immediately relate to the war effort. She didn’t think anything of it until she came across the
second
reference that intrigued her. Then she sought me out.

“Look,” she said, showing me an account of a brawl at a dance hall in a place called Bautzen. It was between some soldiers and the local men.

“Yes?” I said.

“I know Bautzen,” she replied quietly. “I was taken there a couple of years ago, just before the war, when my father was invited to shoot by the local
Freiherr
, or count. It’s not a military town.”

“There’s a war on, Genevieve. Everywhere has been militarized.”

She shook her head. “Look at this.”

It was a page of small ads from an edition of the same paper two days earlier. There was about half a page of notices, many for lodging houses advertising rooms, in several of which the wording specified that soldiers were welcome.

I got the picture.

“You think there is a military buildup in Bautzen, yes?”

She made a face. “I’m new at this. You decide. It’s possible.”

“Hmm. I’m skeptical.” The reality is that I thought the two references too thin to support Genevieve’s interpretation. I had to be careful, though. Bautzen was only thirty miles from the Polish border and
if there
was
a military buildup there, it could signify the beginnings of a major push to the east, an important development in Germany’s war strategy.

To be on the safe side, I shared Genevieve’s ideas with Tom Black, who at that time ran the military table. A small man with a deep, plummy voice, he was incapable of whispering. He heard Genevieve out—and then whistled.

“Jesus, Gen!” he said, showing an informality that I found difficult. “If you’re right, this is big—vee big.” He talked like that.

“Is she right, though?” I still had my doubts.

“Hal, don’t get me wrong, but this is too big for you and me. We’re talking here about a major change in the enemy’s war strategy. It’s your show but if you want my advice, you’ve got to go to Pritchard—and you’ve got to go
now
. Get this one wrong and we would be letting the side down in a major—a massive—way.”

So we went to Pritchard, all three of us—Genevieve, Tom, and me.

Pritchard was—surprisingly, perhaps—unsympathetic, and he took it out on me.

“Look, Hal, I expect more from you. You are a senior figure here now, and I expect better judgment. These are straws in the wind. You know what it takes for me to pull our people out of somewhere and deploy them someplace else. Yes, I can see that there are more soldiers in Bautzen than before. And maybe Bautzen
is
a strategically important location—but all that does
not
mean that the war is about to change course. Now, go away and do some more work and don’t come back until you are convinced you can convince me.” He smiled grimly, tapping his pipe on his desk. “I shall take some convincing.”

Chastened, and in my case not a little irritated that I had let Tom get the better of my better judgment, we returned to our desks. For the next twenty-four hours, Genevieve was shier than ever but, as the days passed, more evidence began to build up. A small ad in the
Süd-deutsche
Zeítung
, the South German Times, announced that a Major Ritter of the Fourth Mecklenburg Field Corps would address the Bautzen (Obergurig) Boys Club. A butcher’s shop announced that the meat ration was being cut—again—this time because bulk supplies were being directed to Camp Briesen, which we found was in a suburb of Bautzen. An ad in the Bautzen paper, for the local theater, suddenly announced that soldiers in uniform would be allowed in at half price. The same local newspaper started to print the emblem of the Fourth Mecklenburg Field Corps alongside its masthead. A school notice announced that the Field Corps Regimental Band would be playing at its concert.

I couldn’t sit on this intelligence any longer.

This second time Pritchard was—to give him credit—more accommodating. But we had lost days without acting. Pritchard said he would see to it that the top brass were informed and that our people on the ground were moved into Bautzen to flesh out the picture.

Progress at last.

There weren’t many similarities between Middle Hill or Warwickshire and London but, as it turned out, canals formed part of the landscape
—our
landscape—in both places. Because they were largely neglected in London, the canal banks were overgrown with grass and weeds and bushes—even a few trees—which at least made them oases of green and a refuge from the concrete and brick that otherwise dominated the cityscape of the capital. Not many people seemed to share our enthusiasm and, usually, we had the towpath to ourselves.

Will also liked canals. They were different from roads and there was always some sort of wildlife to be seen, as well as barges with interesting loads. Mostly, we saw water rats and moorhens, but there was the occasional duck or otter, sleek in the water but ungainly on land, with large hindquarters.

On one occasion there was particular excitement when we disturbed a family of rabbits who had quietly been munching on something or other until we came along. Will pointed, gabbled away, and would have given chase had he not been strapped into his pushchair.

“Remember how the children in Middle Hill hated it when you killed those rabbits at the Front?” Sam said, grinning. “I thought some of them were going to cry, right in the middle of your talk.”

“I know,” I said, grinning back. “I think some of them would have lynched me, given half a chance. Better to lose a war than kill some rabbits.”

“Everyone should be so naïve,” said Sam. “Though the children I teach now are not like that. They’ve seen too much…” She sighed. “So many fathers aren’t coming back.”

Silence for a while.

We both knew whom she was thinking of.

“That officer you met, in the Christmas truce… do you ever think of him? Do you ever wonder what has happened to him, where he is now, if he is still alive?”

What was she getting at? Did she suspect? Had she always suspected?

“Yes, I suppose I do think about him, from time to time.” I tried to remain calm, not to make too much of it. “But only in a very general way. Our meeting only lasted a few minutes.”

“Did you like him?”

“Oh, I can’t say, Sam. It was an odd situation—intense, tense— you can see that. We’d been shooting at each other hours before, and would be again, very soon. No one acted normally.”

“Didn’t you swap anything, like others did? I’ve read all about it… buttons, cigarettes …”

What did she know? I was sweating. “We were officers, Sam. To an extent we had to set an example. So cigarettes, yes; buttons no.”

“Where was he from? Remind me.”

What
was
this, a test? Was she testing me deliberately?

“I can’t remember. Hamburg, I think.”

She shook her head. “Now I remember. You said Berlin last time.”

I was still sweating. “Berlin, that’s right. I forgot. I can’t remember too much about the whole thing.”

“I would never forget an encounter like that. It will be remembered, and recorded in the history books, forever.”

She was right. Of course, she was right.

“And he had a brother, you said?”

Careful. “Did I? I can’t remember. I remember we had a boy in our platoon who sang beautifully… he sang an aria from a Handel opera, accompanied by a mouth organ. Did I tell you that? Can you imagine a beautiful, crystal-clear boy’s pure voice, in the cold night air, accompanied by a mouth organ. The Germans had nothing like that boy. I wonder what’s happened to
him
.”

That had moved the conversation on.

No, it hadn’t.

“Wilhelm and his brother sang in a choir as boys. Dieter still did, when Wilhelm came to England, but he himself had ruined his voice— by smoking. He loved cigars but they played havoc with his voice. He was upset about it, but was hooked—he smoked one big cigar every day. I wonder if he can get them in wartime?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I said. “The powers that be on our side send around cigarettes, but not cigars. Still, if the only hardship Wilhelm faces is a shortage of cigars, he won’t be doing too badly.”

I sounded reasonably calm, sane, or I hoped that I did. But as I said this, I was thinking—again—how convenient it would be if Wilhelm were dead.

A couple of nights later Sam and I went to the theater and Lottie babysat as usual with Will. When we came home, quite late, she was fast asleep in front of the fire, a book open on her lap. I gently picked it up, while Sam went to check that Will was still sleeping.

The book Lottie was reading was her usual fare—the doings of the “bright young things,” good-looking aristocratic nobodies, so far as I was concerned, with more money than sense. Sam poured me a whisky, as she always did when we got in late, while I flipped through Lottie’s book. And there, in the photographic section, was a picture of the Earl of Afton, Genevieve’s father, taken at the gaming tables at a casino in the south of France.

“Not your cup of tea,” murmured Lottie stirring. “How was the play?”

“It was American,
Mr. Manhattan
. Too unremittingly cheerful for most of the audience, unrealistic in wartime. But the songs were good. As it happens, this man”—I tapped the page with the photograph of the Earl of Afton—“interests me. His daughter works for us.”

“Does she, poor girl?”

“Poor girl? She’s an earl’s daughter.”

“But her father’s a vegetable. Had a stroke four years ago, leaving massive gambling debts—”

Sam came in just then. Will was sleeping soundly, she said, handing me my whisky. Then the three of us did what we always did on theater nights: we had a bully beef sandwich with whisky nightcaps, before going to bed.

I woke at four-thirty A.M. This, in itself, was unusual, for I have always slept well, ever since I was a boy (save for that night in the tent, in the garden, with the owls, with Izzy). And I awoke vaguely troubled. Something that Lottie had said didn’t add up. At first I couldn’t work out what it was but after about an hour of twisting and turning, so that Sam once or twice gave me a shove, I finally nailed it.

Lottie had said that the Earl of Afton was a vegetable, having had a stroke four years before. But Genevieve had told me she had been taken shooting with her father—the earl—in Germany “a couple of years” ago, before the war. By “a couple” did Genevieve mean “a few,” “several,” or, more conventionally, two? If she meant the latter, how did that square with what Lottie had said? If the two accounts didn’t square, what did it mean, what was I getting at? Come to that, why did I have a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach?

I got up and went for a walk along the Embankment. My bad leg was always stiffer early on in the day but exercise helped. The Thames, at five forty-five A.M. on a September morning, was misty, a perfect indistinct cityscape for a painter like James McNeil Whistler, or this Frenchman, Monet. The waters were sludge-colored, yellowy even. Black barges slid in and out of the mist like great beasts lurking in the jungle.