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Ralph shrugged. Held up both hands. After a while, after she had covered in quite a lot of detail how she felt about the evening, and how she couldn't see why on earth he hadn't told her, he mumbled, impatient, his shoulders hunched. ‘Because you won't let things drop. Because you get like this.'

And she was alone in the room.

Had it been her fault? But how did it happen? How had they got to a place where the more she tried to reach him, the more she pushed, the further Ralph had retreated into himself? When, when did it begin? With a painful longing she thought of the night she had sprinkled the ring of salt round the garden, how they had lain together close as two hands in prayer in the dark.

CHAPTER 21

Holland, 1945

Over the past few weeks the British Second Army and the Canadians had been slowly pushing the German line back across Belgium and Holland inch by bloody inch, and Ralph's Field Security unit followed close behind, their brief being to enter the newly liberated territory and weed out collaborators, restore something like order and justice.

In the bitter cold of a February winter's morning, Ralph fastened the strap of the steel helmet under his chin and pulled on thick, leather gloves. He kicked the motorbike stand away and stamped down on the pedal, glad to hear the engine spluttering into life. He'd had to strip the motor down twice the day before. The first time he'd reassembled it he'd found a mysterious surplus part. The bike still smelled strongly of oil. He checked that the map was there in its canvas holder. No such thing as a signpost left in Europe. The map was printed in pastel blues and greens on a square of silk, flimsy as a scarf he might buy from Liberty for Alice, but it had already saved his life once, when he had strayed into German-held territory, the scrap of silk the only means to find his bearings and return to safety.

He began to pull out, but saw Dusty loping over from the half-ruined farmhouse holding up a letter, a bacon sandwich in the other hand. Ralph killed the motor.

‘Thought you might want this. Though can't think who'd write to you.' At twenty-two Ralph was the youngest in the unit by several
years and came in for plenty of ribbing about his constant letter-writing to Alice.

He smiled broadly. A letter from Alice always made the day better. But taking the envelope he saw that it was Mama's writing on the front and his face froze. Mama's funeral had been a year ago, on a day almost as cold as this. He'd watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. But now here was a letter from her, as if she'd sat down and written it to him just a few days ago. He began to take his gloves off, his hands fumbling to open it.

‘Aren't you gone yet, Colchester?' yelled the commander from the farmhouse door. ‘You've thirteen billets to find. We'll be in Gennep before you are at this rate.' Ralph stuffed the letter inside his jacket, his arms numb and unfamiliar as he held the handlebars. He steered the bike out onto the road, hardly noticing where he was going.

He'd blamed Max Gardiner for Mama's death. After Mama left Spain to join Ralph in England, Max had broken her heart by having an affair with the crass Spanish girl who was their maid. Mama had never been strong. After his betrayal and the humiliation, not to mention all the money worries and the loneliness, she had suffered a stroke and died.

Max had turned up at the funeral. Ralph hadn't seen him by that time for over two years. The man looked ill, his face thinner and sallow. He'd placed a cold hand over Ralph's, the papery skin leaving an unpleasant sensation as Ralph pulled away. A look of hurt in the old man's eyes. Physically being near Max now gave him a feeling of revulsion. But Max had persisted, wouldn't take the hint. At the gloomy little reception after the funeral service he'd suggested they meet up at his club, now that he was back in London for a while, when Ralph next had leave.

‘I don't see what we'd have to discuss,' Ralph told him. Walking away he saw a woman whom Mama had known slightly in Spain and huddled into conversation with her. From the corner of his
eye he could see the old boy standing alone by the buffet table, as if stumped by what to do next. He looked pathetically out of place in his old-fashioned, Spanish-cut suit, but Ralph steeled himself against any pity. He was aware of being unkind, a quality he didn't know he possessed, but it was beyond him to quell it.

And that had been the last time he'd seen Max.

The strange thing was, only two months after Mama passed away, Max had also died. A stab of regret for the Max of his childhood, but that was all Ralph allowed himself. It seemed as though the matter was now closed. No need ever to think of Max again.

But now, a letter from Mama, as if none of the past few months had happened, all the feelings of grief and anger bubbling up again, fresh and new. He tried to concentrate on the road ahead. Winter light flickered through the tree trunks lining each side, a February wind slicing across the claggy flood plain. He pulled his scarf higher over his frozen jaw, swerving round a pothole at the last minute. Dangerous to let your mind wander in a place like this. Safer in the end if he pulled up and read it.

He stopped. Tore open the envelope. Saw the letter had been forwarded by Mama's solicitor.

He read it through twice, utterly floored by the contents, and yet everything finally making sense. All those little things that he knew he shouldn't ask about but that had remained stored at the back of his mind, finally clicking into place.

‘I'm sorry, darling one, so truly sorry,' Mama had written. ‘It was to protect you. No one would have been able to receive us if it was known you were the child of another woman's husband when you were born. I so wanted you to know the truth. And Max has always loved you dearly. In spite of his faults he does care for you deeply. Please try and forgive me. Please believe me, darling one, I so wanted to tell you.'

His father wasn't Robert Colchester.

His father was Max Gardiner. Max was his father.

He crumpled the letter back inside his jacket. Angry. Feeling like he'd been taken for a fool. And so typical of Max that, even at the funeral, he hadn't had the courtesy to mention the small fact that he was his father.

A long line of army trucks passed by, heading towards the Reichswald for the final push across the German border, pulsing waves of grit against the bike. When they'd gone he pulled back onto the road. Made himself focus on the spire of Gennep church in the distance.

A week earlier Gennep would have been a pretty Dutch village of neat cottages and pollarded trees. Now smoke billowed in dirty clouds across mounds of rubble and demolished houses. Railway lines bucked and rose up in the air. A thick, dirty smell of broken buildings and sewage. No sign of anything living.

Tensely listening out he pushed the bike past the half-demolished church and parked it in front of what was once a draper's, filthy shirt collars and ripped sheets scattered across the floor. Upstairs he found a room that you might sleep in at a push, the sky blinking through holes between the rafters, but he'd need more than this.

Down a side street he saw people clearing rubble. Over the entrance to a low building was stencilled the word ‘Café', a smell of chicory coffee coming from the door. A leathery-faced woman who looked as though she might have survived several wars was half heartedly cleaning the bar, behind her a wary blonde woman. He negotiated with the old woman for several more billets and to use the kitchen as the unit's cookhouse. Satisfied that the army was going to pay for the privilege she fetched a glass and a half bottle of brandy.

He asked for a coffee instead, anything made with hot water. Waited to see what she would bring. He'd been assigned to Field
Security partly because he spoke several languages passably well, Spanish of course, French and German from school, but his Dutch was still rudimentary. He pulled off his gloves and sat down at a table, letting his cheeks burn in the warmth. He may as well wait there for the rest of the unit to show up. If you kept quiet, waited, people always had things to tell you. It was the surest way to know where to start looking.

Sipping the ersatz coffee he was aware of the envelope there in his pocket, wanted to get it out and check it through, as if he might have misread it, but there was a growing noise of tramping feet outside. Ralph moved swiftly to the doorway and peered out, his heart beating fast. A double column of German prisoners was shambling along the road, dazed and filthy, Allied soldiers with rifles spaced along them. One of the prisoners, rags tied round his head against the cold, grinned and gave a thumbs-up.

The blonde woman from the back of the cafe had also pressed into the narrow space of the door next to him, a child of about ten clinging to her. The woman let out a stream of Dutch swear words in reply, then shooed the child back inside. Like most children he had seen in Holland the child was horribly thin and etiolated. The Dutch had sabotaged the railways. The Germans had retaliated by imposing a starvation regime throughout Holland. The woman slumped down at the table. She wore a summer frock with two cardigans buttoned across it, her chemically yellow hair too bright against the pallor of her flesh. In spite of the cold she had bare legs; men's socks, wooden clogs. She looked so ill that Ralph pushed the hot drink towards her. She took it in both hands, staring into the steam.

‘Pigs took everything across the border. Every last scrap of food, shoes, the bicycles, even the baby's prams. And the men, all the men were rounded up. Nobody knows where they've been taken. But I can tell you where you can find that pig of a mayor. He knows.'

As soon as the rest of the unit arrived Ralph briefed Dusty on the information about the town's mayor and then helped unload the truck, glad that there was no chance to sit down and try to think about what Mama had asked him to do.

The horn of the jeep sounded. Dusty was calling for him to bring the recce map, Arthur already sitting at the wheel, waiting to go. They drove through a scrubby birch forest rimed wih frost. Ralph thought back to Christmas leave, when Alice had agreed to marry him as they walked through snowy woods, the powdered crystals cold on his face as they brushed under the auburn fronds of birch twigs.

And now? Now that he had been given so much unwanted knowledge, what was he to do with it? And what was he to tell Alice? Was he still the same person that Alice had agreed to marry?

He tamped down his anger as the jeep stopped in the small hamlet. The mayor's building, with its torn red flag, overlooked the deserted square. They found the mayor inside, burning papers in the drawing room fireplace, black ash mounding round the sheaves of paper like a small version of the razed townscapes outside.

He was genial, happy to accompany Dusty and Ralph to the schoolroom in Gennep where Field Security had installed headquarters, ready to be as helpful as possible. He took his place on the chair, sizeable and fleshy; in charge; oozing the lazy softness of a man who might well flare into menace if asked to exert himself beyond a reasonable level. A self-satisfied face you could happily smack with an open palm, but that wasn't the way it was done, Ralph reminded himself, shoving his hands into his pockets.

Dusty led the interview. Where had he learned such fluent German? In another life he was a salesman for a soap company who'd travelled widely in Europe. He had a deferential stoop and untidy hair. A bumbling manner that made people let their guard down before they realised how sharply Dusty had worked them.

The interrogation – that was the word for it now – lasted till two in the morning, with all the usual unpleasantness. After hours of insisting he had no idea what they were talking about – then indignantly explaining he'd had no choice but to round the men up – the mayor indicated on the map the area in the forest where the men might have been taken.

It would take another three days before they were found, each precisely shot in the back of the head.

In the small hours the mayor's secretary was brought in, scared and shaking. She was young and plain. Clearly mesmerised by the mayor. Ralph leaned back against the whitewashed wall as she backtracked on her story, then went off in a different direction, finally confessing her role in organising the round-up of men involved in sabotage. She was crying now, explaining to Dusty that she'd had to follow orders. They had to understand. What was she supposed to do?

Dusty led her away while Arthur typed up the last of the report. How pitifully young and lost she looked.

‘Couldn't we make an exception this time? She's obviously been played by that man,' Ralph heard himself asking Arthur. Just this once, couldn't she be left to go home?

Arthur didn't look up. He had dark, oiled hair. A bland face. He'd never said what it was exactly that he did before the war. A lawyer or an architect perhaps? Hard to say. The war had washed away so much of their old selves, left them like so many brown pebbles turned over on the beach, their features smoothed into something new; army men.