“To the house, yes.”
“You know it?”
“Dad helped build it before he passed away.” She saw the Major’s quickly masked look of incomprehension. “Ned’s father,” she explained.
“Ah.” The Major looked relieved. “He died recently.”
She nodded, wiping her hands on her dress.
“It must be hard for you,” he continued, anxious to win the battle of apologies. “Your bereavement and then us here, the two things so close together.”
“Well, you coming took my mind off Dad going, I must say.” She heard Ned moving about upstairs. “And he’d be back in England now, learning foreign ways. So I’ve got you to thank for that as well.”
Lentsch opened his hands.
“You see. Even the German army has its uses. But I must warn you. He is still learning foreign ways.” She smiled despite herself.
Ned’s clattered down the stairs. They stepped back.
“What?” Ned said, ducking into the conversation. His mother, fussing through her embarrassment, handed him his coat and shooed him out of the door.
“Mind your manners,” she reminded him softly, but he was already out on the path. The Major bowed his head and followed. She stood in the doorway, still wary, shaking her head, remembering not the blank look of sorrow she had seen on her son’s face not five minutes earlier, but that former time, in the coming of the last New Year, when Isobel had given him up, that resolution week Ned had spent drinking, long and deep, behind the closed doors of the Britannia and the rogues’ bar halfway down Hauteville, the same ill-lit, damp back room where he had thrown Veronica over, the product of another imagined slight. She had seen the weakness of the male sex in him that week, for he had done the thing that a thwarted man does, treating the world as if he was its only deserving occupant. Though he had shown an indifferent face to his mates, what a spoilt complexion surfaced when only his mother and father were present! Even at the New Year’s Eve party over at Bernie’s house, it had been Ned’s private bitterness, uttered quickly in his father’s ear, that had soured their celebratory drink, rather than the rattle sounding in Dad’s chest. “Happy New Year, son,” Dad had offered, clinking his ruby glass, a gesture to a continuity he knew to be illusory, and Ned dismissed the attempt with an impatient snort, and, grabbing Bernie by the arm, had declared that the two of them were going out to wash the bastard past away, downing whatever was in his glass, not the muiled beer on offer, but something strong and vicious, in three savage gulps before escaping to a chorus of drunken cheers. He was too busy inhaling that spiteful strength from the room to notice how Dad had flinched, conscious of the gathering speed of his mortality and the burden it placed on them all. A carpenter all his life, clever with his hands, by then he could barely climb the stairs unaided, one of the many handicaps he had tried to keep from their son, not for fear of worrying him, but in an attempt to maintain his own fragile pride. The first full day of Ned’s visit, Dad had woken to bad lungs, hawking bloody lumps into his fisted handkerchief, and as she had helped to dress him, with him sitting on the edge of the bed, an unlit roll-up stuck on his lip, panting as she pulled his trousers over his legs, the bedroom door had swung open. Across the passageway Ned sat on his bed in a cruel parody of their hidden pantomime, and for a moment the two men looked at each other. What an unwelcome mirror they both saw. Then Dad had pushed the door shut, and with his temper let loose from the slam of it, shoved her down onto the floor. From then on, during Ned’s stay, sheer bloody-mindedness had willed his body to confront tasks that had been beyond him the six months previously; carrying potatoes in from the outhouse, gathering fallen logs in the garden, even working the wet sheets through the mangle out in the yard, both of them knowing that when Ned returned to the mainland this need for exertion would pass. And so it proved, but not simply passed, for this impetuous gesture had evaporated what small reserves of energy Dad had left, and with the damp weeks of January seeping in the cold and clammy bedroom walls he took to his bed again. Yes, she would mourn the passing of Isobel, not simply for the brutality of her death, but for what it might do to her son. He had abandoned both family and faith in his careless pursuit of her and with the news he had brought back now, she feared he would never recover. Isobel would be preserved for ever, the ghost of her figure ready to rise up between him and the life he had yet to live.
She watched as Ned climbed into the car, easing back onto the leather upholstery as if he was as familiar with its cushioned panels and pale armrests as he was with the pedalled chair sitting on its polished pedestal in the barber’s shop opposite Underwood’s. Then the Major stepped in, hiding her son from view. He put his hand inside his jacket and drew out a silver case. She saw her son’s hand floating over and, closing her eyes, shut the door fast, thankful that Dad had not been alive to witness such a close and crowning capitulation.
Ned could feel the acid rising in his stomach. He rubbed his chest, then despite the fact that it eased the pain, stopped. Lentsch was looking at him intently. Ned pulled his handkerchief up to his mouth and let the clear bile run.
“Stomach complaint?” Lentsch queried, bringing his voice under control.
Ned nodded.
Lentsch fumbled in his pocket.
“Chalk,” he said, holding out a silver case of small white tablets. “From home.” He patted his stomach. “I too have this malady.”
Ned chewed on the tablet.
“This is a bad business,” Lentsch said. “I have given strict instructions. There will be no reprisals. People must know we believe in the rule of law.”
The calm of Lentsch’s chili reassurance seemed to thaw a shard of frozen recklessness in Ned’s heart.
“Is that why you deported all the British-born last month?” he asked.
Lentsch looked to the floor.
“Has not England interned all Germans, taken them to some place of detention, where they can be watched, kept under guard?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course they have. It is only sense. Even if you believe that they will not plot against you, you must do this. For security. Do not worry about your English friends. They will be looked after.” He took out a chalk pill and popped it into his mouth. “Who knows? They may even get more to eat.”
Ned was annoyed. Even now the ever-present subject of food loomed large.
“But you promised us that no one would be deported. Except…”
He let the word die in the air between them. There had been only three of them, a nurse, a hospital cleaner and the woman who had taken a job on one of the big farms just a few months before the invasion. Ned had seen her once, herding cattle along the back lanes in the summer rain, slapping their backsides in affectionate exasperation, her determined face softened by an unhurried contentment. She’d been studying agriculture at a college in Reading and had come over as soon as she’d heard about the job. Even at the time people said she was being foolish, coming so close to the Continent, but she wouldn’t listen. To work outdoors, to work with animals, that was all she wanted, and Ned supposed that once here it hadn’t seemed possible that it would ever be taken from her, that she could be removed. And with her red hair and fair skin who was going to know? As long as she kept quiet and didn’t show herself, as long as she called the cows, cleaned their stalls, sang to them softly while wiping down their warm pink udders, surely she was safe? And so the days became weeks and the weeks months; the cows were led out in the morning and milked in the afternoon, and in the evening the meal she sat down to was a family affair. But early last year she had been informed upon—that was the whisper, though the unremarkable ratchet of official machinery was Ned’s more tutored guess. Whatever, she was gone by April, despite the farmer’s pleas. The family had held a farewell party for her the night before and still talked of her and her way with his cattle, wondering how she was faring, hoping, as they had all promised themselves that tearful evening, that one day she might return. The Major grunted.