Ned knew where. He had first appeared on the Wednesday after van Dielen’s disappearance, quite late, about nine. Ned was just about to go to bed. A knock on the door and there he stood, a bunch of leeks in his hand, and a large rabbit in a cage.
“I did not ask your uncle’s permission,” he confessed, waving the cage in the air. “But with your mother not being well, he will not disapprove.”
Ned had pulled out one of the last bottles of cider Dad had made, and sat him down. He sat there holding his glass, not saying a word, barely noticing what he was drinking. The crackle of the small fire made him look up.
“Your mother?” he asked suddenly. “She is not here?”
“Upstairs. She goes to bed early. I was just about to follow, before you showed up.” Lentsch half rose out of his chair. “No, no, Major. I didn’t mean that. I’m happy to stay up. Mum has a nasty habit of sleepwalking. I should stay up, to make sure she’s safe.”
Lentsch sighed. “This is what soldiers hope to do. Kill the enemy and keep their mothers safe. You are lucky. Your mother is safe. Mine is not. It is only a matter of time before the bombing in Hamburg starts. I am surprised it has not already happened.”
Ned tried to reassure him. “They’re only going after military targets, railway lines, factories, dockyards. It may not mean much but they’re bloody well trained. They know what they’re doing.”
“That’s what you hear on the radio. It is not the truth. You are bombing the ordinary houses. Germany is like a bonfire. Such terrible fires.”
“I thought your mother lived in the country.”
“We have two places. An apartment in Hamburg and a house in a village, some miles away. My sister is working in Hamburg, in administration. They will not let her go. So my mother stays with her. Once I imagined that I might be able to bring them here! I thought here was safe. I was wrong about that too. No news?”
Ned shook his head. “I’ve only so many men.”
“You think he is alive?”
“I don’t know. He’s either hiding, kidnapped or dead.”
“Half the island thinks he killed her. They think he killed her and that we have spirited him away.” He picked up the paper lying on the floor. “This speaks of him as our ‘trusted friend’, of how ‘impossible’ it would be for him to get to the Continent without our knowledge, when in fact, if he had the use of a boat, it would be quite easy under cover of darkness. It is clear what the writer really thinks.”
“I am surprised Bohde let it pass,” Ned said.
“It reflects badly on me, that is why,” Lentsch admitted. “Bohde is testing his muscles. He wants a fight.” He threw the paper down to the floor. “You see that this is not true, that I would not protect him.”
“You might not. Others would.”
“You are thinking of Major Ernst.”
“I’m thinking of Major Ernst. There’s his headquarters at Saumarez Park. It’s big enough to hide a battleship. He could even be keeping van Dielen there against his will.”
“I have no jurisdiction over Ernst. Neither have you. He can do as he pleases. Despite that I do not think he has anything to do with it. He is too ambitious to scupper his chances over a girl.”
“Ambitieus men overreach themselves, Major, especially ones with a fondness for naked women in their back garden.”
“Perhaps. But Ernst would not do this other thing, put her down a shaft. It is too risky. He would throw her over a cliff, he would blame a couple of foreigns, shoot them before any one could prove otherwise.”
“Unless the father knew.”
“But then he would have told us. Van Dielen is ambitious too, but sacrificing his own daughter?” The Major sat on the edge of the armchair. “Inspector Luscombe?”
“Yes?”
“I cannot call you this,” he confessed, “not if we are to join, you and I. We are both too close to her for this formality, you understand. When there is just the two of us, you will have to be Ned.”
“That as may be, I’m sorry but I can’t call you…” He stopped. He had no idea what Lentsch’s Christian name was.
“Gerhard.”
“I simply can’t.”
“No. I understand. Just Major, then.”
“Just Major, then.”
That was just the beginning. He’d come round most evenings. Ned’s mother started lighting the fire early, wasting their precious supply of fiiel to make the room ‘look cosy when he comes’. He would bring them gifts in return: a packet of rice, a length of smoked sausage, fresh bread. They would sit at the kitchen table and eat from cracked plates, Ned’s mother having to prompt her son to pass the potatoes or to cut the Major another wedge of pie, and Lentsch, conscious of this untutored hospitality, would beckon her gently into conversation, lead her to where her memories of the island’s earlier times lay, offering in return stories of his own domestic past, his mother and father, the sister he missed and the eternal foolish ways of youth. There were no obvious parallels to their lives except those which made them both sigh at what it was that had turned such seeming placidity so awry; parallels of loss, of dashed expectation, of soft memories which made the austerity of the present only more intense.
“You are lucky to have your son to look after you,” he once told her. “All sons wish this. The son that cannot feels that he has betrayed the one person he loves most in the world.”
“Go on with you,” Ned’s mother had retorted. “It’s I who have to look after him,” and as the three of them had laughed Ned had looked at the Major and thanked him by his smile. Ned was amazed at his mother’s transformation, the sudden lightness of her movements round the table as she served the supper, the glow that came to her cheeks as these meals progressed. She had even started to wear the second of her better dresses. If only he could touch her in this way, bring that faraway smile to her face. His mother was not in love with Lentsch, she was in love with being a mother again.
“He’s a good boy,” she said once, waving to him as he closed the garden gate. Ned laughed.
“He’s not a boy, Mum.”
“Yes, he is,” she replied, turning round to ruffle his hair. “You’ve just got to look at the way he holds out his plate or hugs his knees in front of the fire. You’re the same.”
Usually when the meal was over she went upstairs to leave them together, so that they might slowly dismantle the wall that still remained between them. Then the Major would pack his bags and leave home, and travel into the other Germany which had raised him, the one which had sent him here. Ned had never heard a man talk like Lentsch before, about who he was and why he was, and though some of it made no sense to him at all, asides and compliments to a world of which he had but the haziest conception, in Lentsch’s hesitant voice he found the echo of uncertainty of his own.
“I wanted to do so many things with my life,” the Major said one night, nursing one of the beer bottles that Ned had brought up from the Britannia, “to study, to learn about living things, to create some knowledge. And now I do this.”
He looked at his watch. “You have a radio?”
Ned tried to keep his face expressionless.
“It is time for one of our broadcasts to England,” he continued. “You listen, I suppose?” Ned hesitated. “Go on, bring it out from its hiding place. I do not care.”
Ned leant into the fireplace. Small pieces of piaster feil as he pulled the wireless free.
“Plug it in, plug it in!”
“It takes a bit of time to warm up,” Ned said. “But it’s got a nice tone.”
The Major pushed Ned aside and starled to fiddle with the knobs, skipping babbling voices and snatches of blurred tunes until he found the station he wanted.