The garden was more overgrown than he remembered, a tumble of weeds and grass. Last night’s clouds had hidden the worst. Lentsch moved forward.
“I tried to persuade her to do some gardening,” he told Ned, brushing aside a drooping bramble. “I even sent Albert over for a couple of hours, but like her father, she showed no real interest.” He held the offshoot back for Ned to pass. “A garden should not be like this,” he called out after him. “It does not speak well of the home.”
Ned stood before the door and reached for the knocker. Thinking better of it, he laid it gently back against the brass fitting.
“It’s just possible,” he said, “that there may be something he would not want to tell me in your presence. Perhaps it would help if halfway through you took yourself into the garden, or went off and read a magazine. Improved your English.”
“My English is not good?”
“It was a joke, Major.”
Before he could grasp the heavy ring again, the door swung open. Ned could not be sure but it seemed to him that when van Dielen saw who it was the slightest trace of a smile played across his small and careful face. Ned swallowed. He felt as if his voice were trapped inside, ashamed to show itself. Isobel’s father swung the door wide. He spoke in that clear, lilting voice which seemed to mock everyone but himself.
“Here you are at last, Mr Luscombe. Uninvited as always, but this time I will concur that I cannot deny you. And the Major too. A very particular delegation, if you’ll excuse the observation.”
“This is a bad business, Mr van Dielen.” Ned looked sideways at the Major, conscious of his echoing of Lentsch’s earlier remark.
“A bad business.” Now it was van Dielen’s turn to repeat it, and he elongated the phrase, accentuating its awkward banality. “Is this what you’ve come to tell me?”
He said nothing more but stepped back, flinging his arm out in an exaggerated gesture of hospitality. Ned and Lentsch walked in. There was no hall to speak of. The front door opened on to a set of tall French windows and beyond a large drawing room. Nothing had changed. It was still as bare a room as Ned had ever seen, with glass at the back and glass at the front, with rugs and strange furniture scattered across the wooden floor. “As friendly as a barred cage,” Isobel used to say. At the back, slowly rising to the balcony, rose the tubular staircase with its polished steel handrail. Ned could hear the fall of discarded shoes as she moved towards it, hear the soft swish of her dress against the balustrade, her bare feet squeaking on the polished wood as she climbed above. His eyes rose involuntary to the corridor and her closed bedroom door. Van Dielen gestured to the steps leading down to the bar.
“Come and join me, why don’t you? My first guests of the new year.”
He led them down to where a half-empty bottle of brandy stood. Van Dielen poured himself another glass.
“A dreadful extravagance, I’ll admit, but under the circumstances.” He waved it at the two uncomfortable men. “Will you not join me, gentlemen? It is of the highest quality.”
Ned looked to the floor. The Major was unfailingly polite.
“Some other time, perhaps,” he said.
Van Dielen was in the mood for repeating awkward phrases.
“Some other time. Now there’s a thing to conjure with. From which would you have me choose? The future or the past?”
Ned tried to break in. “Mr van Dielen…”
“I favour the past, though whether the present past or the faraway half-remembered past, I am in something of a quandary. Perhaps that infamous bicycle ride of yours, Mr Luscombe. I should have not treated you so harshly. I can see that now.”
“Mr van Dielen, there’s no call to—”
“Had I known then what I know now, I would have invited you in and given you the run of the house. Brandy, cognac, rum, they’re all stocked here. You could have helped yourself to anything you liked. Asked me for a cocktail. I make very good cocktails. They all said that in the East.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And as for that bicycle. I have nothing against the bicycle so long as it is maintained in good working order. I would have bought her one in due course. It was only a matter of time. Do you still have your bicycle, Mr Luscombe?”
“I sold it.”
“We saw a tandem in the desert once. A tourer. The woman was riding in front, straining hard, pulling all manner of panniers and rucksacks strapped to the sides and back, while her man was seated behind, feet up on his handlebars, reading a newspaper. How we laughed! ‘What a very naughty fellow,’ I said, ‘for not doing his fair share.’”
“‘No, no, Daddy. That’s not the point,’ she said. ‘It should be the other way around.’ She was only nine then and already conversant with the uses of men. Pigtails on such an old head. Do you like pigtails on a girl, Mr Luscombe?”
“Pigtails?”
“On a girl they are correct, but not on a woman, I think. On the Continent, in Germany and Austria, my own country too, they are fond of pigtails on both girls and women. Why is that, I wonder?”
“I have never given it much thought.”
“No. Well, you wouldn’t, would you. But is that not true, Major?”
“Indeed.”
“The young girls that took your fancy, they had pigtails, did they not?”
“Some of them, yes, I am sure. And my sister too.”
“Your sister?”
“Yes.” The Major tapped his top pocket. “I showed you a photograph of her once, when I came here.”
“And she wore pigtails in both childhood and…?” He let the word fall.
“For a time.”
“There you are, then. And Isobel, did you ever wish that she might gather her locks and wear them in plaits, like your lady-friends back home?”
Now it was Lentsch’s turn to falter.
“I never imagined such a thing,” he stammered.
“You see! It’s true! You would have preferred pigtails! She was too knowing for you, was that it? Was that what brought her down? That she was too knowing. And here we are the three of us, who brought her such a treacherous gift.”
He took another gulp, choking as he swallowed hard.
“Forgive me. I am not a great conversationalist. I know how to talk, indeed in English and in German and my own native tongue I am somewhat gifted in mastering the technical differences of vocabulary and regulations, you understand. Where I fall down is in the thing that counts, the art of conversation. The words I produce, the manner in which they are delivered, their overall intent and appearance seem to demand the immediate cessation of that of which they seek to be a part, although I find myself unable to understand why.”
“No.”
“I am doing it now, in this very modern and open design, blocking off all avenues of conversation even as I speak.”
“This is not a time for conversation, Mr van Dielen.”
“No. You are right, Mr Luscombe. Ned. May I call you Ned? It is what she called you, after all. I am her father, am I not? Have I not that right too, even though I have been unpardonably rude to you in the past?”
“Thinknothingofit.”
“You said that last night, did you not? When I met you by our front gate?”