Peacetime (12 page)

But it was not what he was truly saying, and Mercer understood this. He understood, too, how accomplished the man had become at drawing the sudden tensions out of the room and of diverting their course, of turning a single straight path into a dozen meandering tracks.

Mercer stayed in that overheated room above the cold forge for a further hour. He drank four more small glasses of the spirit, and when he finally rose to leave, he felt himself momentarily unsteady on his feet.

Jacob laughed at this. ‘I personally', he said, ‘will not be making the effort to rise.' He poured himself another glass. As Mercer opened the door, Jacob said, ‘I do appreciate you coming here. I wish I had more to offer you.'

‘I'll come again,' Mercer said.

‘Mathias will come later. I'll tell him you were here.' Mercer left the room and waited on the high metal platform until his eyes became accustomed to the darkness beneath him.

‘Five days,' Mary said to him as he sat on the grass bank beside her.

‘Five days what?'

‘Until he's coming home.'

The news surprised him. He had seen her on each of the previous few days and there had been no mention then of her father's return.

‘She got a telegram this morning. She didn't open it for an hour, just left it sitting there, like somebody had died. I opened it in the end. It just said that he'd already been released and that he'd be here on such and such a date. Five days.'

‘And is everything ready for him?'

‘What do you mean?'

He had almost asked her if her mother was looking forward to her husband's home-coming.

‘I mean is she prepared. The house.'

She looked at him puzzled. ‘What about the house? You make it sound as though there was anything she could do about it. He's coming home and that's it.'

‘Was the telegram from him?'

‘From someone in the Army. He wouldn't write.'

‘Something to look forward to,' he said.

She turned away from him and looked along the beach to where the other children played in the distance.

She had sought him out the previous day and offered to do some housework for him in the tower. He had accepted her offer and then paid her for the work. She told him not to tell anyone of their arrangement. ‘Is that what it is?' he had asked her, amused by the intrigue she had so easily created around the occasion. She had accused him of making fun of her, and had then left him before he could deny this. It was why he had come to her upon seeing her sitting alone on the bank.

‘Will she go to meet him somewhere?' The nearest branch-line station was twelve miles away.

‘I doubt it. He'll come here. She said they'll probably bring him.'

‘I doubt that very much,' he told her. ‘Not if he's already been released.' The man would have been given travel passes.

‘I told her they'd probably let him out early because he'd been – I don't know what the word is—'

‘A model prisoner? Well-behaved?'

‘Something like that.'

‘And what did she think?'

‘She just laughed. “Him?” she said. “Him?”'

It had been almost four years since she had seen the man. She had been only eleven at his arrest, her young brother little more than a baby. He wondered how much she knew, and how much she now expected of him. There was something guarded about everything she said to Mercer concerning the man: as though she wanted to share her excitement with him, but at the
same time was conscious of her own uncertainty in the matter; conscious, too, of not wanting to appear disloyal or dismissive of the man to whom she had been such an ally before his arrest.

‘I suppose everybody else knows about his return,' he said.

‘Most of them were there when the telegram came. Mrs Armstrong crossed herself and stood as though she was praying all the time the man was looking for it in his bag.'

‘Perhaps she thought it was for her.'

‘I doubt it. She's had hers. The man asked me where my mother lived. He made her sound like somebody else completely.'

‘It's how telegrams work,' he said. ‘You're meant to be on your guard before you open them.'

‘Mrs Armstrong went and told everyone what had happened and they all gathered outside while she read it.'

A bed of cotton-grass grew along the base of the bank, looking like a line of snow where it stretched towards the houses. A flock of birds sat motionless on the water beneath them.

‘I went into town,' he said, not having mentioned this to her previously.

‘To see the Jew. I know.'

‘I wish you wouldn't call him that,' he said.

She looked at him, half-closing her eyes against the light. ‘I know that, too,' she said.

‘His name's Jacob.'

She repeated it ten times over.

‘I know it's what everybody else here calls him, but I thought you were different,' he said.

She saw through this subterfuge immediately. ‘How am I different?'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘If I'm different, tell me
how
I'm different.'

‘You have more sense,' he said. ‘More compassion.' She considered this for a moment. ‘I doubt it,' she said.

‘More ambition, then.'

‘And what does that have to do with not calling a Jew a Jew?'

He refused to tolerate this any longer. ‘Suit yourself,' he said, and prepared to rise.

She put out her hand and held him back. ‘Jacob,' she said. ‘And you're wrong about everybody else here calling him a Jew. My mother never does.'

And, presumably, she's already told you not to call him that.

She bowed her head for a moment.

He sat back down beside her.

‘It's mostly because I don't have anyone else to talk to. Nobody my own age.'

The oldest of the other girls was at least four years her junior.

‘I know that,' he said.

‘
She
pretends to do it,' she said, meaning her mother. ‘But she doesn't know how to, not really. And besides …'

‘It's not what you want from your own mother.'

She shook her head. She leaned forward to watch the other children. They were further away than earlier, their voices barely audible.

‘What do you remember most about him?' he asked her.

She lay back against the slope, folding her arms across her stomach.

‘He used to take me out with him. Fishing. Into
town. He used to take me to places I wasn't supposed to go.'

‘And your mother disapproved.'

‘It sometimes seemed like she disapproved of everything he did. She once told me that his own mother had warned her against marrying him. She said he
used
people and that he'd use me just the same.'

‘She loved him, I suppose.'

‘Something. I was born six months after they were married.'

‘And you think that's why she married him?'

‘What else?'

‘It wouldn't account for his behaviour afterwards.'

‘He always used to complain about feeling trapped. Every time they argued, he'd say it.'

‘Trapped by her?'

‘I used to think he meant trapped by this place. Who wouldn't feel trapped?'

‘But now you think he meant because she was pregnant?'

She nodded.

Nothing he said would relieve her of the uncertain blame she still felt.

‘She said that half of everything was her fault, anyway. She used to defend him, especially when she was with the other women. She used to say they didn't know him like she knew him.'

‘There must have been something,' he said, wanting to reassure her.

She propped herself up on her elbow. ‘You don't have to,' she said.

‘Don't have to what?'

‘Side with him on my account.'

‘I wasn't. I don't know the man. All I know is that you, at least, still have a great deal of affection
for him and that his return means a lot to you.'

She acknowledged this in silence.

‘Do you think he'll leave?' he asked her. ‘Come back here, let the Authorities think he's settled, and then go?'

She shrugged. ‘It's what
she
thinks will happen. What is there here for him any more? Farm work? Not even much of that now that the farmers can pick and choose who they take on. He once told her he was going back to the Midlands to work in a car factory. He said he'd be the one to pick and choose if he lived there.'

‘Perhaps he'll want you all to go with him,' Mercer suggested, but with little true conviction.

‘She wouldn't leave,' she said. ‘Not now.'

‘And you?'

‘You think he'd take
me
with him?'

Her disbelief, he knew, was intended to prompt him into saying more. ‘Why not? You could enrol at a college or a—'

‘College?
Me?
'

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's not what people like me do.' She still wanted to be convinced.

‘I'm talking about there, not here,' he said. ‘The Midlands, anywhere.'

She fell silent, considering all he had just suggested. She had left the local school two months earlier, and it surprised him to realize how little thought she had given to her future, caught in this limbo of her father's absence and the anticipation of his return. He wished he could persuade her not to expect so much of the man or his home-coming. And then he became concerned that he himself might now become the source of further false hope and impossible expectation, and
that she might repeat all he had suggested to her mother.

‘It must be hard for her,' he said eventually, hoping to distract her from these new thoughts.

‘She won't talk about it. Even before the telegram, she said nothing. All
she
wants to do is remember everything good about him. On the one hand, she thinks everything's going to have changed for the better, and on the other, she goes on and on about the way things were as though it was anything worth having in the first place.' She checked herself at this sudden outburst, and he saw again the divides she repeatedly crossed, the opposing directions in which she was constantly being made to face.

‘I meant it's going to be hard for her to adjust to having him around,' he said.

‘She'll cope,' she said. ‘That's what she does – she copes. Copes, and then tells you over and over how well she's coping.' It was the harshest thing yet he had heard her say about the woman, and he regretted even more having raised the subject.

After that, perhaps because she was conscious of having said too much to him, or of having revealed feelings she herself did not yet properly understand, she lay on the bank without speaking. She closed her eyes, and after several minutes of her silence, he wondered if she was sleeping.

He rose to leave her.

‘I wasn't asleep,' she said.

‘I have things to do.' He gestured towards the site.

‘When shall I come and clean for you again?' she said.

He moved so that his shadow ran over her face and the high sun no longer blinded her.

‘Is there a valid – an
acceptable
– distinction to be made, Captain Mercer, between, on the one hand, actually killing a man, and on the other, allowing a man to die when you remain convinced that some action on your part might have saved his life, or at the very least have improved his chances of survival until someone better able to save his life was able to reach him?' Mathias kicked at a mound of clay-encrusted bottles turned up by one of the airfield diggers.

Beside him, both Mercer and Jacob paused at the remark.

Mercer let the lost rank pass. It occurred to him that Mathias had been so long among military men of one sort or another that he felt more comfortable using it; ‘Mister' always sounded too formal in his hard English, derogatory almost.

Jacob shook his head in disbelief at the question.

It was clear to Mercer that Mathias was talking about himself, and that he had long considered asking the question. Until then, in the hour the three of them
had been together, he had remained largely silent.

‘I suppose it would depend on the men and the circumstances,' Mercer said, knowing how inadequate an answer this was, hoping to prompt Mathias's own further explanation.

He had encountered the pair of them at the end of the runway and they had beckoned him to them. A group of Mathias's fellow prisoners congregated at some distance, kicking a ball against one of the abandoned outer buildings of the airfield.

‘Just tell us,' Jacob said, surprising Mercer by this bluntness, knowing that Mathias had hoped for a further degree of understanding and acceptance before being made to explain himself.

‘It was during our retreat from Vimont,' he said. ‘One of my men, a boy really, was struck by several shell splinters in his face and chest. I put pressure pads on the worst of the wounds. His own field-dressing case was empty, filled with cigarettes. Several others stopped beside me. He'd only been with us a month, since the middle of May.'

‘What was his name?' Jacob said. ‘Use his name.'

‘Kretschmer, his surname was Kretschmer. We all called him “Adolf”. For obvious reasons.' He turned to Mercer. ‘He was very enthusiastic, you see. Keen to push you back into the Channel and then to chase you home over it. Having been hurriedly sent there, we did nothing but scramble away from the coast for a fortnight. Sleep and run, sleep and run. Through Falaise to the east. You were at our heels all the way. It became a joke to us – waiting for the order to regroup and counter-attack. We all knew it was never going to happen.'

‘It wasn't him,' Jacob said.

‘Wasn't who?'

Jacob pointed to Mercer. ‘It wasn't
Captain
Mercer coming at you across the waves.'