The Good Father (20 page)

Ava said, ‘Major Dunn?'

He made himself smile at her. ‘I was miles away.'

‘Home?'

‘Yes,' he lied.

‘With your wife and family.'

‘My wife is dead.'

‘I'm sorry.'

Because he wanted to sound cheerful for her, he said lightly, ‘I have a son, Guy – he's five.'

‘Oh, you must miss him,' she said. ‘And five is such a nice age.'

He knew nothing about that. He said, ‘Yes, it is,' thinking of Guy, whose face he could barely remember.

A rat climbed through a hole in the floorboards in the corner of the room. It scuttled along the edge of the wall and slipped through another hole beneath the bed. Ava had followed his gaze. As the rat's scaly tail disappeared, she said, ‘There are so many of them, everywhere. My neighbour found one in her baby's crib.'

He hated rats – he remembered too well the tales his father had told about them, how they infested the trenches, making the misery of the Somme that bit worse. He stood up and went to the hole in the floor from where the rat had appeared. He squatted down. ‘Perhaps I could block this up somehow.'

‘There are lots of holes, Major Dunn. And nothing to mend them with. Please, don't worry. They don't harm me.'

Standing up straight, he turned to her. ‘I would like to help.'

‘Thank you. But there's nothing you can do.' She glanced away. It occurred to him that she was ashamed; her expression had become closed again.

Because he was sure she was about to dismiss him, he said hastily, ‘When I write to Guy I'll tell him I've met you – a distant cousin of the Brothers Grimm.'

Her face softened a little. ‘Does he like their stories?'

He nodded, having no idea. ‘Of course.'

‘Hans . . . ' Her fingers went to her mouth as if to stop the words. After a moment she let her hand fall as though she had realised that it no longer mattered what she said. ‘Hans . . . '

She buried her face in her hands and wept.

Harry picked up the glass of Scotch from his desk and downed it in one. He thought how it was that the first time he had touched Ava – when he had sat down next to her on her bed in that slum and put his arm around her shoulders – it was to comfort her over the loss of her brother, to try to ease the pain of this one woman in a world full of pain. He spoke softly, the German endearments coming naturally to him,
There, there, my dear, there, there.
He told her that her brother had been brave, that he had great dignity, and all the time he thought,
But he was a murderer, and so wicked – the cruellest man I've ever met.
And there was another voice in his head, repeating,
Whose side are you on?
– the film of the concentration camps playing before his eyes.

But he told himself that Ava, this woman with whom he had so quickly fallen in love, had nothing to do with her brother's crimes. This was reasonable, rational – an idea that fitted in with the new mood of the times. The German people shouldn't be blamed, as they had been blamed so disastrously after the last war; their country should be rebuilt, friendship should be fostered between the victors and the defeated.

He went back to Ava time and again, taking her tins of bully beef, chocolate when he could get it. She joked, said that had he been American, she would now be living off the fat of the land – or at least, tinned peaches and cream. Then she had touched his face as though she believed she had offended him. ‘Thank you, Harry,' she said, and her voice was so tender, her touch sending shivers of longing through him. They made love on her narrow bed, the rats scrabbling beneath the floor, and he tried not to think about Hans, and how she looked like him when she smiled.

In his study, Harry slumped down at his desk. He remembered how he had brought his German bride home, that when he introduced her to Guy, the little boy had been shy of her, at first. But Ava loved children; she could enter his son's world so completely he often felt excluded. Ava taught Guy her language. He suspected that she also taught him about Hans, who had become – had always been in Ava's mind – a great hero, a dazzling prince riding out from the pages of the fairytales she loved so much. And Guy, who didn't remember his first mother, loved Ava. In time, strangers presumed his son was German as he spoke the language so well, so fluently, and this made Guy seem even less his, the bond between them becoming still weaker.

‘He's a wonderful boy. He understands so much,' Ava told him.

There were secrets between his son and Ava, not just about Hans, but childhood memories she never shared with him, only with Guy. She and Guy talked and laughed a great deal together and Harry should have been pleased and not so childishly, shamefully jealous as he was. And one day, the two of them went walking together, from the holiday cottage he had rented on the Dorset coast, where he had left them, needing to work – there was always so much work to keep up with, so many divorces to arrange. The two of them went walking and the land gave way beneath their feet. The land gave way beneath their feet and they had fallen. He could hardly believe this, the appalling unlikeliness of solid rock becoming rubble and air. He found he couldn't bring himself to look at Guy, who sat up in his hospital bed, pale as the cast on his broken arm; there were too many suspicions in his heart. It seemed to him that Guy killed his mothers, one way or the other, because Ava might just as well have died; she was gone from him just as surely.

Harry got up from his desk and went into the kitchen where Esther was clearing Ava's half-eaten supper away. He said, ‘I'll put Mrs Dunn to bed this evening, Esther.'

Taking Ava's hand, he led her upstairs to her room.

Chapter 23

I walked home through the park. The late evening was warm and the light soft, the sky darkening to purple edged with pink, colours I would be wary of using in my illustrations for their gaudiness. Young couples strolled arm-in-arm, leaning in towards each other, smiling, whispering. Some of them looked at me sideways, a lone man walking in the park at night. Of course I must be  suspicious, an outsider.

I was flown home in 1945. The Army had graded us – I remember being weighed, the grave face of the doctor as he made his decision that I was to be amongst those worst cases that were sent home by plane. My first experience of England after so long away was of a bumpy ride in an Army ambulance to the hospital in London where we special cases would be treated. I was travel sick all over the shoes of the first doctor who saw me. He laughed, told me I would have to learn to keep my food down if I was going to get better. That doctor, I discovered later, had put long odds on my chances of surviving the week. My companion in the ambulance died the next day as though that last leg of our journey had been the final straw.

We were frail, lethargic creatures. I too wanted to close my eyes and not wake up, if only because I just couldn't be bothered any more. I was home – I had achieved my goal. Only a certain amount of curiosity kept me going, wondering what they would do with me next. On that first day in hospital in England, a nurse helped me to bathe. She said she could play chop-sticks on my ribs. I overheard her tell a colleague that we were like those poor Jews they'd filmed in the Nazi camps and wasn't it disgusting – didn't the buggers deserve the Atom Bomb? I'd heard what had been done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how my life had been saved.

I grew stronger, strong enough to be given my demob suit and a train ticket home. Not strong enough to stand up to my father, or to Carol or Jack. Just strong enough to breathe, to eat, to tentatively pick up a pencil again. The man in my ambulance had been called Michael Andrews. For years I dreamed about him. I dreamed that he had got on the train home with me, his head resting on my shoulder because he was so tired. In the dream he followed me to my father's house and I didn't mind, I was glad of the company, only there was no flesh on him, none at all, and when we reached our front door he collapsed, nothing but a skeleton, a pile of bones I had to hide from my father. I was so frantic in that dream – so desperate to find a hiding-place for Michael. I wept with the panic, the guilt of it all, because I knew I should have left him in the hospital. I would wake up weeping, the guilt like a mountain of stones pinning me to the bed.

After the dream, I would be jumpy for days and Carol would sometimes notice and go out of her way to be especially cheerful during her visits, especially talkative, not giving me a chance to get a word in sideways, as though she was terrified I would want to unburden myself, to talk about all that had happened.

Carol didn't know me very well. I sometimes think that she was rather stupid. But her mother and father had brought her up to believe her only role in life was as a wife and mother and she accepted this without question, so perhaps she was merely lazy. Her father adored her – he called her his princess; she was proud of being Daddy's girl, she wanted to make him proud and so of course he had to be proud of the man she chose to marry. Jack fitted the bill perfectly: a hero, one who had never surrendered, never besmirched the idea of England her father carried home from his war in 1918, spent in Whitehall, safe behind a desk. I know how bitter I sound. I know there is too much luck in the world for any of us to judge one another.

She married Jack and she held her bridal bouquet in front of her pregnant belly like a shield. She thought about me. Jack, knowing that he might die any day, didn't think about anything at all except making love to his new wife, their hotel bedroom door shut fast on the world. Perhaps when it was over, when he had spent himself, he felt some twinge – as though he had caught his wife's guilt like a kind of sexually transmitted disease. No, of course, probably not. No doubt he slept, exhausted. He slept and Carol lay awake beside him and I know that she thought about me. She told me years later, when she judged me strong enough to hear, that all through her wedding day and night she thought about me, hating me because I hadn't written.

‘I wrote! Of course I did!'

‘But I never received your letters!'

‘But I wrote to you.'

I held her because she was crying; her tears made a dark patch on my shirt. I held her, and felt only exasperation, bemusement that she should be telling me this now, after so many years when I was beginning to accept that she was married to Jack, beginning to imagine my life with someone else, if only I could find this someone. I held her and thought,
I don't love you any more
, and it was a revelation; I felt my spirits lift a little, free of the weight of regret that had held them down. I stepped away from her, holding her at arms' length.

‘Carol, none of this matters now. You have Jack, and Hope –'

‘Hope!' She laughed hysterically, wiping her eyes; I remember that she stamped her foot in an agony of frustration. ‘Why can't you
see
? Why can't you
recognise
her? Your father did – he saw it!'

The hairs on my arms rose. Hope was playing in the garden, from time to time I could see her as she ran in and out of the Wendy house I'd built; she had made a daisy chain and placed it on her head, the white flowers almost invisible against her pale blonde hair. Pale blonde like my own. When the realisation came, I felt so cold, as though a ghost had walked through me. Carol tried to hold me, but I couldn't stand to be touched.

‘Jack doesn't know,' she said dully. ‘He's as blind as you. But your father knows – he knew from the moment he saw her in her pram. I thought he might tell you. I kept hoping that he'd tell you.'

I sat down, unable to trust my legs. ‘No,' I said, ‘he wouldn't tell me.'

‘Peter.' She knelt, taking my hands. ‘Peter, I had to marry Jack, you must see that now. You must understand that now and forgive me. You have always been such a good man, and you love Hope, don't you? I know you love her! And she loves you . . . '

She was crying again and I wondered if perhaps she was going mad because there seemed no reason for her to have told me when she – and my father – had kept the secret for so long. I thought of Hope outside in the garden and was afraid she might come inside to find her mother in such a state; this was all I could think of, protecting Hope. Nothing else had any meaning.

I said, ‘Get up, Carol, you shouldn't be on your knees to me.'

‘But I should! Because I need you to help me . . .
Help me
!' She laughed, that same hysterical noise. ‘I can't even think of the proper way to ask you.'

It took a long time for her to explain; the words wouldn't come, and each word when it did come was a betrayal of Jack. She called him
inadequate – not a real man
, because she was so desperate. Her desperation was such it seemed that Jack hardly mattered; only her own longing was important, her own all-consuming need. I've mentioned before that Carol was selfish, but I should have said that I am too. How else would I have agreed to her scheme?

After my father had killed her, after the police had begun their clumsy, ultimately useless investigation, when Jack was still in hospital and thought unlikely to survive what my father had done, I went with her father to identify Carol's body. He had asked that I go with him; and at the time, I believed he was afraid that, at the last moment, he wouldn't be able to look as the policeman turned down the sheet covering his daughter's face. As it was, he couldn't take his eyes from her, his face full of a kind of wonder and surprise, as if he was witnessing the accident that had killed her. I was the one who could barely look; I only took a glimpse, enough to prove to myself that she was dead, that there hadn't, as I half believed, been a mistake. In that glimpse she was like every other corpse I've ever seen – a shell that gives only the most pallid impression of the life it once contained.

I took her father's arm and led him away.

Outside the silent, freezing place where we had left her, he jerked away from me. He said, ‘I don't need you. I wish you weren't here.' He looked at me and the hatred in his eyes made me step back from him. ‘If Jack dies,' he said, ‘if he dies, we'll take the children. Don't imagine you'll ever see them again.'

I realised then that he had wanted me there to tell me this, away from the possibility of being overheard. Perhaps he imagined Carol would hear and know at last that he had guessed our secret.