“I did not know this.”
“Well, he wouldn’t want to bother you I expect, considering.”
“New uniforms!” Lentsch walked to the window again. “I look out here and see the same Guernsey I saw three weeks ago—and yet it is not the same. It is without Isobel. Do you realize this, that she is no longer here? The tides come in and out, the harbour unloads, birds build their nests for the spring, and yet she is not here. How can this be?” He turned back. “It is my fault that she is dead. You believe this too, I think?”
“No, Major, I don’t think that.”
He folded the Captain’s letter back into his pocket, wedging it up against Isobel’s. Of course it’s your fault, he thought, and who knows, maybe more directly than you would have me believe. Why couldn’t Isobel have gone to Lentsch? Because of the Major’s involvement in something?
“There is nothing for me here now,” Lentsch continued flatly. “I hoped that when the war was over I would return here, become one of you, watch the boats and the seasons and be content.”
“It takes a long time to become one of us, Major,” Ned told him. “I’m not sure that I’m one of us yet. My father never thought I was.”
A silence feil.
“I would not have wanted this for the world,” the Major exclaimed, pressing his hands against the glass, “and yet I cannot say that I wish I had not been here. I cannot say that.” He moved across to the desk and turning the picture frame over in his hands, handed it to Ned. “See how happy she looks,” he implored. “See how happy I made her. Teil me I did wrong.”
Ned studied the photograph. It had been taken somewhere along the water lanes, near where he used to meet her. Three perfectly pressed uniformed officers walking along the narrow lane, Zepernick, a shorter man Ned did not recognize and the Major. Captain Zepernick, gloves in his hands, was in the midst of telling a joke, the shorter man was taking a cigarette from his mouth, and on the far side Lentsch was turning to his companions, smiling at what was being said. In between him and the smoker, dressed in a short-sleeved white top and perfectly creased jodhpurs, marched Isobel, riding erop held across her breasts in a rising diagonal from right to the left. She too was turning to Zepernick, she too was smiling, but though it was the Captain’s story that darted in and out between them, it was she who was the centre of their attention. Her hair was brushed back, her body brimming with a confident and irrepressible health. She strode amongst them like a circus trainer surrounded by her favourite lions. How she loved these intelligent and handsome creatures. What tricks they would perform for her! She was not afraid to run with them, to put her head into their mouths, let them prowl and parade in her unprotected company. All she had to do was to crack the whip and they competed for her sport! And in their immense power and beauty they had turned and with one careless swipe had killed her. He felt his stomach wince from a stab of empty pity, though whether for Isobel or himself he could not determine.
“Who took the photograph?” he asked, placing it back on the desk.
“Bohde,” the Major replied. “So. Van Dielen. He made a ruil statement?”
“Mr van Dielen has not yet returned.”
“But it is nearly eighteen hundred already! Six!”
“I know. Still, if wants to be by himself. There’s no law against it.”
He left the Major telephoning Captain Zepernick. The cobbled lanes in the Pollet were cold and empty. If only he had gone to her that night, as soon as he had read the letter! If only the note had been more forthcoming! His feet set a rhythm on the stones. Lentsch, Lentsch, she could not tell Lentsch. If not directly involving Lentsch, then something she dare not tell him? Something to do with an islander, something that would get whoever it was into deep trouble with the Germans. Someone close to her, perhaps. Her father? Her aunt? Molly?
The Britannia was empty save for Albert, sitting in the corner. He beckoned him over.
“Thought you might be in need of some company,” he said.
Ned pulled a chair out. “Trust you to think right, Uncle.”
Albert waved his glass in the air. “We’ll have a couple more here,” he called out, “if you’re not too busy.”
Ned sat down. “Heard from Kitty?” he asked, anxious to keep clear of Isobel.
Albert shook his head.
“Went to the post office yesterday. No joy. I’ll try again Monday. Something might have come in over the weekend.”
Ned tried to reassure him. “It’s just a matter of getting through. She’ll have written, all right.”
“Oh, yes. She’ll have written, all right. Don’t help me none, though, do it?”
He waited while the barman laid the glasses on the table, then leant forward.
“I’ve been thinking, Ned. Did you ever think, you know, to make a run for it?”
“To England, you mean?”
“Why not? Steal a boat one night. You could make it.”
“Don’t know about that. Anyway, what about Mum?”
“I can look after your mother.”
Ned took a sip and looked at him.
“Anyone would think you want to get rid of me.”
“Dead right, I want to get rid of you. This business of Isobel. Could just be the start, to my way of thinking.”
“Start of what?”
Albert lowered his voice. “Vigilantes. A warning to the rest of us. She may not be the last. I mean there’s a lot of cement in one bag.”
“You know about that, then?”
“Wedel,” Albert said, as if the word tasted bad. “More gobble than a turkey, his tongue.”
“Well, I hope you’re wrong,” Ned told him. “Any more trouble like that and we’ll all be in hot water.”
“That’s what I mean. There’s no telling what will happen next, what madmen are stirring the pot. You should have gone with Kitty. Left us old ‘uns to it.”
“And left Mum to bury Dad?”
“I could have buried your father. It’s a brother’s duty just as much as a son’s. He wouldn’t have minded.”
“I’m not sure about that. I’d let him down, going over the water. If I’d buggered off just before his funeral, left Mum in the lurch…”
“Your mum’s known harder times than these,” Albert said. “But she got on with it. We knew how to live then, knew what’s what. All this island can do with a scrap of decency these days is funerals. And there’re plenty of them.”
“Well, there’s another one now.”
“Aye. Mrs H. will be in charge, so I’m told.”
“Oh? She didn’t seem that bothered to me.”
Albert swirled the beer at the bottom of his glass. “You got a lot to learn, Ned. That’s just the way she were brought up. Inside’s a different story. How’s he taking it, her father?”
“He hasn’t been seen all day. Left the house this morning and vanished in a puff of smoke. The Major’s going potty.”
Albert finished his beer.
“Don’t you worry about van Dielen,” he said, signalling for another. “He’ll come back.”
But he had not come back, that strange little man. It was days later, when the hue and cry had been taken up not simply by Ned’s ill-dressed cohorts, but by the whole trembling island, that tales of his sightings were delivered piece by piece to Ned’s office or, when he was not there, to the station below where Tommy bent over the counter like a schoolboy at his desk, placing his arm across the report sheet in a vain attempt to hide his near illegible hand. Many had seen him in his deerstalker hat and his Norfolk jacket, flapping at the sides, standing on the half-finished gun emplacements, climbing down the steep coastal paths, his small figure, dark and bent, as recognizable as that of the stick-twirling Hollywood tramp, gaining attention by his very avoidance of it, seen but not intruded upon; not by the soldiers scanning the horizon standing next to their Flak-30s as he paced the newly dug concrete fields testing their vulnerability with a prod of his gnarled stick, a present it was said from Dr Todt himself; not by the motorcycle patrols brewing up their lunchtime billycans while they watched his silhouette clambering over the lattice work of newly laid reinforcing rods; not by the weary clusters of labourers who leant over their spades, thankful for the brief respite, while he jumped down into the fresh-dug trenches and shored up excavations, inspecting the depth and quality of their exhaustive cultivation; not by the Spanish Republican engine driver, sweating behind his black-belching Henschel which pulled the crates bearing the van Dielen mark from St Sampson’s harbour to the western coast, who raised his cap when he had first seen him at early morning light, down at the docks, looking out to the entrance through which he and his family had first arrived; not by the islanders on their way to morning service, processions of the faithful and the converted, who caught sight of him hurrying down the lanes, and who heard the news walking up those consecrated paths, who took it inside and passed it along in the sideways shuffle of the pews, whispering the deed as they rose from their uncertain prayers, some even scribbling the dread message on the back page of a prayer book before holding it out to their neighbour’s troubled eyes. Murder? Aye, Murder, coughed behind handkerchiefs and sung tunelessly alongside Wesleyan rhymes; murder placed on the horsehair cassocks and proffered wafers and mouthed by silent lips in the hollow echoes of a sermon. Murder half-concealed and half-bred and brought half-awake blinking out into the morning light, to be passed from islander to islander, the word and the wind scattering their faith once more; murder of their own kind buttoned under their coats, murder a street away, hidden under their hats, murder of a young daughter stuffed under the benches of the horse-drawn bus and taken to town to be fed to the seagulls pecking along the promenade or tapped out by faltering fingers on the wrought-iron benches circling the empty bandstand in Candie Gardens, where the day before the band from the Luftwaffe had played tunes that Jack Hilton and Lilly Harvey had made famous all over the cracked continent. All that day did van Dielen trudge, hopping from place to place, as he might on any other normal working day, waving his pass with its picture and his honorary rank and letters of authorization slipped inside, examining pit props in the tunnels over at La Vassalerie, harassing a nervous and flustered George Poidevin in another examination of the yard, stamping along the wide northern bays, looking out to the forbidden coast beyond. He was solicitous to those he did meet, enquiring almost as a matter of politeness as to the set of the concrete or the camber in the excavations, for it was always the materials with which he was concerned, whether the cold or the heat or some other variable had compromised their quality, and when he questioned those responsible he asked them as a visiting doctor might question a patient’s relatives, interpreting their layman’s replies while forgiving them their foolish ignorance. Those he spoke to thought no more of it, for the news of his tragedy had not travelled then, though it seemed to follow him in his wake like the draw of a great ship, churning the settled ground of occupation for the scavengers to wheel about in heady excitement.