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It was the shortest letter he had ever written to her and he was exhausted – exhausted by all the things he had not written.

From the very start, that first evening walking side by side through the orchards of Yarnton Manor with the stars clear overhead, they had talked and talked about everything and anything, a conversation that had flowed unimpeded through all their time together, through his home leaves and their letters. But now, what would be the good in going on about Mama's indiscretion? Mama was, as everyone knew, sweet and good and so kind. Was it fair to now trumpet that she had borne an illegitimate child while still married? Illegitimacy, that louche indicator of suspect character and bad blood; such things did matter, like it or not, and especially back then.

Of course, it went on all the time. No great surprise there. But one did penance. One covered it up. The far greater sin was to flaunt it in people's faces shamelessly; that was what people simply couldn't tolerate. Really, what would be the good in raking it all up now and scattering every sordid bit of underwear over the Hanburys' lawns?
The truth was he had no intention of thinking about Max again, certainly not as a father. Max had given up that right long ago.

He stared at Mama's letter lying there next to Alice's photograph. It wasn't so much a thought as a gathering realisation in his solar plexus; a sensation that his body knew what he should do. For Mama's sake, for Alice's sake. The common-sense thing. There was no good in looking back, nothing to be gained.

He picked up the letter and held it away from the bed. Flicking open his lighter he set the flame against the bottom corner of the paper. Dusty moved in his sleep but did not wake. Turning the letter slowly Ralph watched a wavering red line move over the paper. The black ash followed behind quickly, lifted, disintegrated, and there was nothing left but a lingering smell of smoke.

For the next two weeks they were unable to move beyond Goch, even though the guns continued to sound relentlessly along the Rhine, day and night.

Ralph and Dusty were sent out in the fifteen-ton truck to process a list of Nazi officers who had surrendered in a small village some ten miles north and left the problem of where to put them. They drove through a wilderness of blasted farmland, the fields pitted with gun dugouts like giant lumps of turf kicked up on a rugby field.

The German officers were loaded up in the truck under armed guard and taken to the vast holding pen that was little more than a field surrounded by a wire mesh fence, thousands of German prisoners milling around in droves. But returning that evening Ralph and Dusty got hopelessly lost. The headlights of the truck had been smeared with mud to dampen down the brightness and gave little clue as to what lay before them in the fading light. The truck hit a crater and veered into a ditch. They began to dig it out, the guns
booming in the fields either side of the road, hurrying now, as night was closing in fast.

‘Better hole up here,' said Dusty, spotting the shape of a ruined farmhouse. As they took their packs in, there was a shuddering boom and the building jumped. Ralph wondered if they had taken a hit. The house shuddered a second time, then a third. It was right next to a massive gun firing towards the east. Nothing they could do about it now.

They opened ration tins and ate in the darkness, the gun next to them one voice in a deep cacophony of explosions and noise.

Covering his head with his army blanket Ralph put his hands over his ears and hoped for sleep. He made himself concentrate on lists of German vocabulary. He would need those subtleties of the language to unpick the Nazi command from the fabric of the small German towns. It turned out that his odd, nomadic upbringing had been just the thing intelligence was looking for. Living in Spain as a child, with long holidays in Nice with Mama's friends from the French Embassy, he had spoken Spanish fluently and French passably. He'd also gained a pretty good grasp of schoolboy German, courtesy of a German tutor in Spain – an ardent admirer of a certain Adolf and his party.

Once Ralph got his call-up papers at Oxford he had found himself sent to an army base stranded out in the foggy sandbanks of Anglesey Island. It was a holding camp where men were being constantly assessed, observed, scrutinised and studied for character faults. He found out that a fair few of the men were there for potential rehabilitation following theft, fraud, or illicit contact with other men. Everyone seemed pleasant enough, ordinary or cultured even, but you could never be sure of the person you were talking to in the mess in the evening; you wondered if there was a story they didn't want to tell. Disquieting to know that he was included among them.

He'd passed all the tests and interviews and was assigned to the Intelligence Unit. He was the youngest in his cohort by a good ten years. He was known as the one with all the languages. Dutch had been a problem of course; mistakes sometimes occurred – the cafe in Gennep with the rooms of half-starved girls.

At first dawn he awoke from a drowse and realised that the blasts had stopped. The sudden benison of silence. His whole body loosened. Then he heard a scuffling in the loft overhead. Suddenly fully awake he listened out intently. There it was again, a faint shuffling above them. He shook Dusty, signalling for him to be quiet, and pointed overhead.

The entrance to the loft was in the adjoining barn where a ladder led up to the granary. His heart beating a retreat Ralph climbed up the ladder, cursing each creak, the safety catch of his pistol off. He called out in German, then Dutch, but there was no reply. He slowly inched his head up above the granary floor.

A small whimpering sound. Someone crying. Sounded like a girl or a child. Ralph glanced back at Dusty and they made their way over the granary boards to a wooden partition. Behind a stack of straw bales a small boy was pressed up against the granary wall. From the rings of dried urine on the mattress it seemed that he had been hiding there for some time.

A sigh whistled out of Dusty's lungs. He put his pistol away. Ralph crouched down. ‘Hello, old thing. Hungry?' He tried phrases in German, Dutch, Flemish, but the boy kept the same grimace of distress.

After a scuffling chase Ralph managed to catch hold of him and carried the child's hollow weight down the ladder, pressing his legs against his chest to stop them from kicking. In the light their catch looked even less viable, smeared with dirt, smelling of wee. The guns started up again and the child failed to respond, a dull glaze over his eyes.

‘Perhaps he's deaf,' said Dusty. ‘Or gone stark raving mad. Who wouldn't with that thing going?'

‘Doesn't look good for the little chap,' said Ralph, glancing around at the cold mist lifting from the fields. No sign of any family in any of the farm buildings.

The child ate half a bar of ration chocolate. He retched and then finished the bar. Greedy for water he drained the cup filled from the tap twice. He had dark, curly hair, shaggy and uncut, sallow olive skin. There was nothing to do but put him alongside them in the front seat of the truck and take him back to Goch. From there he could be transported on to the displaced persons' camp. Ralph would ask Peggy, the unit's Dutch interpreter, if she could get something out of him before they dropped the child off. He wanted to pin some details to the child; he was aware of the chaos that ruled in the rapidly filling camp, a Babel of languages and dazed people fleeing the bombardment: French, Poles, Belgians and Dutch trying to return home from forced labour or prison camps, a whole continent of people trying to remember who they had once been, holding out photos of a son, a wife.

Towards the end of the day Peggy was able to give them some details while the child, now washed and fed, slept on Ralph's bedroll in the cellar.

‘Says he's been in that loft for a couple of years. The farmer's family hardly spoke to him, but they left him food every day. After the guns started they all disappeared. He won't tell me his name, says he's not supposed to tell anyone that. So it looks to me like a Jewish couple must have asked the farmer to hide him before they were deported.' She shook her head.

‘Poor little bugger,' said Dusty.

‘I'll take him back with me to Gennep,' Peggy offered. ‘I'm closer to the refugee camp; they can pick him up in the morning.'

The sleeping child was wrapped up in his blanket and carried to the jeep. For some reason, hearing the child moan as he was lifted
and carried up from the cellar into the cold afternoon light, Ralph thought of coming home from a picnic at the beach, the feeling of being carried into the house half asleep, years ago, as a child in Valencia. More came back to him with a stab of longing: an afternoon as he sat with Mr Gardiner at a cafe table outdoors, the scent of oranges, the sun through the leaves of a tree, the sparrows darting for the crumbs in the dusty, straw-coloured earth. Mr Gardiner was drinking coffee, immaculate in a cream linen suit and a white panama. He had a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, his gold wristwatch catching the sun as he lifted the tiny coffee cup.

With his beautiful enunciation and manners Mr Gardiner was the epitome of a perfect English gentleman abroad. Everything about him was correct and to be emulated, and Ralph was his pupil. Ralph liked to walk around Mr Gardiner's dressing room when he was away from the house. On the dressing table was a chest containing rows of bottles with lotions and pomade. It had drawers with ivory-handled implements: nail buffers, cuticle pushers, silver scissors, tweezers. There was a chrome rack of pressed linen suits and white shirts. In the carved Spanish dresser the drawers were neatly packed with boxes of collars and collar studs, with braces and sock garters with gold suspender clasps.

As they sat together in a cafe at the end of a walk, Mr Gardiner would sometimes tell Ralph a story about a person he knew; usually there was a lesson in there to be noted, about the way people were. He thought back to that afternoon in Valencia, how Mr Gardiner had looked around the square, leaned in closer and started to tell a story about his mother. Russian soldiers on horseback had swept through her town one night with their cudgels, leaving lines and lines of Jewish families laid out on the cobblestones, wrapped in sheets. She was the only one of her family to escape the pogroms. Fleeing to London at sixteen, she had married an English baker
and slipped out of her Jewish identity to become entirely English.

‘Technically you see, old boy, that makes me Jewish.' Mr Gardiner had held his finger to his lips. He explained it was a secret kind of story, only for Ralph to know. He had never understood why Mr Gardiner had burdened him with his secret. Ralph hadn't even understood then why it was a secret. He was keen to leave the cafe and walk home past the toyshop and its magnificent Meccano display.

But now, as he watched the sleeping child being carried away, and as the news of the systematic destruction of Europe's Jewry was becoming unbelievably and horribly clear, Ralph was beginning to understand that behind Mr Gardiner's English perfection and his secretive nature lay something urgent and anxious. There was a danger in being other, in being outside the fold.

He remembered then how the swallows had shrieked like wet fingers on glass, how the frozen lemon sorbet had been so cold that it hurt his hand as he held the bowl and listened to Max. For the first time it came home to him that that family lined up on the cobblestones, wrapped in sheets for shrouds, they were his family too.

The sleeping child was laid along the back seat of the jeep, and Peggy tucked the army blanket round him. He slammed the door, gave her a wave, and watched the jeep disappear into the evening gloom. Feeling heavy and weary he turned back to go underground into the cellar. When all this was over they'd make a better world. The fear and the bombs and all the terrible things he had seen would be gone. He would stand and look up at the clear night sky, nothing but stars and the moon, peace and silence soaking into his soul.