The Good Father (22 page)

She heard the back gate close, heard her father singing softly, a little drunkenly, under his breath. Relieved, she said, ‘It's Dad – he's been to the pub.'

Peter turned away; ignoring her father's greeting, he let himself out into the alley.

Chapter 25

Esther had known about Hans from the first week she had gone to work at the Dunns'. Not that she had meant to pry; she had only been putting away Mrs Dunn's underwear when she came across the diary in her drawer. She had lifted it out, thinking that it would be better taking up space somewhere else, when a photograph fell from between its pages. An SS officer gazed at her from the floor. Quickly, she had picked up the photo and put it back inside the diary, her hands shaking a little with the shock of seeing that uniform. For days she tried not to think about the diary or the photograph. But the next time she was putting laundry away her hand strayed against it. She had lifted it out, opening it at random. Unable to stop, her heart beating furiously, she had begun to read.

The diary was kept safe in her own drawer now. She sometimes thought that she should throw it away, bury it in the bin beneath the potato peel and newspapers and ashes from the fire. Or burn it perhaps, although she thought that would take too long; the cover was thick card, and it had a tiny silver lock – broken before she found it. Metal and card would be difficult to dispose of in the grate and she dreaded Mr Dunn or Guy finding her at such a task. Guy especially would ask too many questions, smiling and teasing but determined to get to the truth as always.

Guy. She wondered if he knew how his stepmother had adored him, how much she'd compared him to her beloved brother Hans the SS officer whose picture she kept in her diary, the man who had stormed through Poland and Russia, stopping only to force Jews to dig their own graves. On the back of his photograph were written the words,
To my darling sister Ava – take care of Rudi for me!
Rudi was a dog, an Alsatian like Hitler's. Ava had written about this dog in the diary, how he had been killed by British bombs alongside her parents.

The diary lay on Esther's bed now. She was packing, having decided that she wouldn't stay here another two weeks, even if it was in her contract. Mr Dunn could deduct money from her wages if he liked but she wouldn't stay, not after today. Today she realised she couldn't go on ignoring the idea she had that, in her mind, Mrs Dunn still lived with her brother in Berlin, that she still worshipped him despite everything she knew, that she would protect him no matter what.

Today Mrs Dunn had set upon that stranger who had driven them home from that humiliating outing, flinging her arms around him as he helped her out of his car. ‘Hans,' she'd said. ‘Hans.' She had begun to cry, silently, and the stranger who was kind and gentle had allowed her to hold him, had even put his arms around her, holding her quite close, although she stank of pee, was soaked in it. He had caught her eye over Mrs Dunn's shoulder, had smiled sadly. ‘Let's get her inside, shall we?'

The stranger had looked like Hans; she could understand why Mrs Dunn had believed it was him. He had the same blue eyes and blond hair, the same perfect, symmetrical features. She had felt embarrassed for him, not that he seemed in any way perturbed; he had behaved as if that kind of thing happened to him every day.

Esther picked up the diary from her bed. It was from the year 1946, an eventful year for Mrs Dunn, the year she met Mr Dunn, the year she married him and came to England and fell in love with Guy – because it was like a falling in love, the way she described it, writing with far more joy and excitement than she ever wrote about her new husband. Meeting Guy, loving him, seemed to help with all the grief she felt over the loss of her brother, although sometimes it seemed Guy only helped a little. Some of the diary's entries were only about Hans, the childhood they'd spent together that was so idyllic, so full of picnics in summer and sleigh rides in winter. There was only a year's difference in their ages – they could have been twins, wished that they were. Ava missed him terribly; she dreamed of him at night. She tried to imagine what it would have been like for him when the executioner – one of his English murderers – had put the noose around his neck.

There was a knock on her door and Esther put the diary down, quickly hiding it beneath one of her sweaters. Guy poked his head around the door.

‘Hello. I couldn't find you – or Ava. Is she in bed already?'

‘Your father's seeing to her tonight.'

‘Is he?' He raised his eyebrows in surprise, making her blink because sometimes she couldn't bear to see how handsome he was, how unattainable. She heard him close the door. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Packing.'

‘Yes – I can tell that much.' He ducked his head to frown at her. ‘Esther? What's going on?'

She managed to look at him. ‘I've decided to leave.'

‘Why?' He sounded horrified. ‘You can't! We can't manage without you.'

‘Yes, you can.' She brushed past him to fetch the few items of clothing left in the wardrobe.

‘Does Dad know?'

‘Yes.'

‘And he's just letting you go?'

‘Yes.'

‘Didn't he offer you more money? He will – he was probably too shocked to think straight.'

‘He did offer. But I've got another job.' She took her winter coat from its hanger, realising that it was too bulky to be packed and that she would have to carry it home over her arm. Home. She could almost cry at the thought of her parents' welcome. Her father would be so pleased that she had left this place and its German woman. As she put her coat on the bed, Guy caught her arm.

‘Esther, come downstairs. I'll make you some cocoa – you like my cocoa – and we can talk.'

‘There's nothing to talk about.' She shrugged off his hand even as she wished he would hold her as that stranger had held Mrs Dunn today, tenderly. But she had seen him in the park this afternoon with that blonde girl, that beautiful, tall, princess of a girl. Few girls could compete with that – especially not someone like her.

Desperately Guy said, ‘Please, Esther. Please don't leave.'

She frowned at him. Surprising herself with the harshness of her voice, she said, ‘Why do you care so much? Your father will find someone else to do your dirty work.'

‘Dirty work? Is that how you see it?'

He looked so hurt, as though she had slapped him. Immediately she said, ‘I didn't mean it like that.'

‘I thought you liked Ava.'

She snorted, not really meaning to but unable to conceal the scorn she felt so suddenly. ‘
Liked?
'

Stiffly Guy said, ‘Cared for, then. I thought you cared for her.'

She thought of Ava, how she had bathed her and dressed her and coaxed her into eating, how she would sometimes sit and brush her hair for ages because it seemed to soothe her. And sometimes Ava would look at her as though she had just woken from a deep sleep and couldn't understand who this stranger was who was talking to her as if she was a child. At first Esther had been excited by these apparent awakenings; she would begin to ask Ava if she knew where she was, if she remembered her name. Soon enough she realised that the looks were nothing, no more than an imitation of life.

The only thing left to pack was the sweater that lay on the bed, hiding the diary. She said, ‘I'd like to get on now.'

‘Esther . . . ' Guy sighed. ‘Stay, at least until we find someone else.'

‘I can't.'

‘Why not?'

Because of Hans, she thought. She didn't even know his surname, enforcing the feeling the diary had given her that she was far more intimate with him than she would ever have wanted to be. She sat down on the bed wearily. ‘I miss my family.'

This at least was true enough. Looking up at Guy she said, ‘My father never wanted me to come here.'

Guy shifted, obviously uncomfortable. He knew her family's history, how her parents had only just escaped Vienna with their lives, leaving behind their own parents, their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins. They never saw any of them again. He knew because she had told him, one sunny afternoon a few weeks ago when he had offered to help her peel potatoes for supper and he had asked how it was she spoke German so well. She had wondered then if he knew about Hans, believing that Ava would have found it impossible not to talk about him to this boy she loved so much. Looking at Guy now she was more certain than ever that he knew all about his stepmother's brother.

He sat on the bed beside her. ‘I suppose we should thank you for staying as long as you have.' Turning to face her he said suddenly, ‘I'll miss you.'

‘No you won't.'

‘I will.' He searched her face. Softly he said, ‘I think you're lovely – you know that, don't you?'

She stood up, outraged that he should pretend like that just to try to make her stay. The suddenness of her move sent the diary slipping from the bed to land at his feet.

To her shame, Guy picked it up. He opened it, closed it again. He laughed harshly. ‘You've read this?'

‘No.'

‘What's it doing in your room?'

She felt herself colour darkly.

‘You've read it.' He shook his head, gave that same ugly laugh. ‘Well, I suppose I can't say anything. After all,
I've
read it. All
Hans this
and
Hans that
.' Holding the diary by its spine, he shook it so that its pages fanned out. He looked up at her. ‘Where's his photo? I left it between the last week of June, the first of July. Her birthday week.'

Unable to look at him she said, ‘I left it in her drawer.'

‘This is why you're leaving, isn't it?'

She nodded.

Gazing at her, he said, ‘She used to tell me that he was the best brother anyone could have – the kindest, the most loyal. When everyone else had left her alone he came back to find her, to take care of her. That's how he was caught; he could have escaped like so many others, but he cared about her too much.'

He stood up. ‘I'll leave you to finish your packing. Goodbye, Esther, good luck in your new job.'

Ava had said, ‘I wish you could have known him, my darling. You would have loved him so. Everyone did. He was so handsome, so full of life.' She sighed wistfully. Gazing out of the cottage window at the sodden English countryside she said, ‘Perhaps you and I should escape – go home to Germany. I'll show you where we were born, where we had so many happy times . . . '

It had rained for three days. Alone in the cottage his father had rented for the month, Guy and Ava played the card games she had taught him and Ava talked about her childhood, halcyon pre-war days when the sun always shone, bleaching Hans's hair still blonder and burnishing his skin to gold. Guy hadn't wanted to think about Hans, not really. He was the enemy, after all, and not just an ordinary enemy, like the dull-witted German soldiers depicted as such buffoons in his comics, but an SS officer, one of those men who despised fair-play and decency and the proper rules of war. But the more Ava told him about her brother, the more human Hans became, no longer a cartoon version of evil, but someone he could empathise with when Ava told him of the arctic conditions he'd endured in Russia. He forgot for the moment that the Russians had been on their side.

That rainy afternoon though, it seemed that Ava was determined not to be sad, allowing herself only that one sigh before turning to him, becoming bright and brisk as she said, ‘We'll go for a walk. We shall put on our Wellington boots and take our umbrellas and the English rain shall not defeat us.'

Perhaps the rain had loosened the stones.

In the garden, Guy stopped his angry pacing and looked back at the house that had never truly been his home. His father had bought the place when he came home from Germany – a house to impress Ava, to make her love him; Guy had always suspected that his father believed Ava didn't love him as much as he wanted her to. But the house was just a house to Ava and couldn't replace all that she'd lost; not even he could do that. It was his role just to listen, to be the one to whom Ava could relate her tales of Hans and in telling those tales, make her brother live again.

He saw his father at Ava's bedroom window. Harry blamed him for the accident – of course he did – just as he blamed him for his mother's death. If he hadn't been born, his mother wouldn't have become ill with post-natal depression; if he had been good like other children – not being constantly expelled – he would have been at school that June, and Ava wouldn't have volunteered to take him away on holiday. His mother would still be alive; Ava would still be herself, if not for him.

Looking up at the bedroom window, he held his father's gaze. At last Harry drew the curtains without acknowledging that he'd seen him.

Guy went on gazing at the window, rage building inside him. Suddenly, he turned and ran through the garden and out onto the quiet street.

Chapter 26

Guy wandered the streets, his rage gradually subsiding: he could never be angry for long, it seemed too much of a waste of energy to him. Still, he couldn't bring himself to go home. Home was too full of Ava.

He walked until the storm came, the thunder so loud, the lightning striking down so fiercely after the heat of the day, so close; he knew how dangerous it was. He was only a few yards from the house, the place that Hope had shown him, the place he had probably been heading for all along. The key was no longer in its hiding-place so Guy smashed a pane of glass in the door and released the catch from the inside. He went upstairs, the lightning violently, briefly, illuminating the dark passageway. This house was full of ghosts; he'd sensed them that afternoon as Hope led him from room to room. He had wanted to explore the house alone. Only then they had heard the voices outside, and the panic had begun.

He went first into the room full of toys, where the picture of the prince hung above the fireplace. The picture had its own ghost, of course, its very own horror lurking to surprise the unwary. A warning, Peter Wright had called the goblin, at least according to Hope. A warning against sex with boys like him. He went to the picture and touched the goblin's leering mouth. Hope thought Peter Wright was a pervert. She didn't realise that most men were, beneath their earnestness or pompousness or stern aloofness or any of the other disguises used to make mothers and fathers believe their children were safe with them.

He had been six when a master first fondled him. He had been eight when he was first buggered. Buggered! What a fat, horrible word that was, disgusting and preposterous at once. He knew that most boys made more of a fuss about it than he did – that they cried more, at least; he didn't cry at all. He pretended to be someone else entirely when they touched him, not Guy Dunn at all but a boy called Dan who didn't care for anyone or anything. And when it all got a bit too much even for Dan, he simply ran away. He knew he wasn't like other boys, he had some crucial bit missing, some bit that was to do with pride and self-respect and taking yourself oh so bloody seriously. Most boys – most men – were stupid bastards, both the bullies
and
the weaklings. He had learned that from his first day at his first school. So far he hadn't met anyone to change his mind.

The prince in Wright's drawing had a very beautiful face, like Wright himself. When he saw this picture, Guy had thought that Wright might be queer, a thought that had crossed his mind when he'd met him at Irene's birthday party. He certainly didn't look at Hope in the way Hope imagined he did. Innocent little Hope, she made him smile sometimes, she was so sheltered, and then she would shock him – even him – with the things she did. He hardly knew what to make of her, had to concede that he didn't know that much about girls, given his upbringing. He did believe he loved her though. He believed it more each time he saw her, as she became more familiar to him.

The lightning flashed again, making the prince's face look suddenly animated, as though his horse had startled. Guy turned away, remembering that Hope really believed Wright wanted her – and it puzzled him that she could misread the signs so badly. It was obvious to him that Wright loved her as a father would. Guy frowned, thinking of the likeness between Hope and Peter Wright. Then: ‘Christ,' he said aloud. Then, more softly, ‘
Christ
.' Of course – Wright was Hope's father! Their alikeness spoke for itself. No wonder this house had felt so haunted to him; it was stuffed full of this great enormous secret.

Guy opened the wardrobe, the drawers in the chest, searching for clues, wanting to find evidence to back up his new theory, realising that he wanted Wright to be Hope's father rather than that idiot Jackson. He went downstairs, began on the desk in the sitting room, working his way steadily through the house. It seemed as though someone else had done this before him: most of the drawers and cupboards were empty. Finally, the rest of the house searched, he stood in the scullery at the top of the cellar steps, breathing in the smell of damp walls and coal dust.

He felt along the wall, hoping to find a light switch just as there was on the cellar steps of the derelict house that had been his retreat from the world before he met Hope. Thinking of that house now and the hours he'd spent alone there, he began to feel the pressure of his own strangeness, a feeling he'd had less often since Hope but one that still had the power to unnerve him. Perhaps he would never be in step with the world, would always be an outsider looking in on other people's lives, wondering at the insignificant things that seemed to matter so much to them. He made himself think about Hope, the kindred spirit he had found; they were outsiders together, especially if his hunch about her was true. His fingers found the switch and the steps were bathed in a dim yellow light.

The cellar contained only gardening tools, neat and tidy where he had expected to find the usual accumulation of rubbish and spiders' webs. Guy walked along the corridor that led from the main cellar to the outside steps. There were doors along its length. The third door hung open and Guy could see that in the space behind it, a paving-slab had been lifted and someone had been digging into the exposed dirt floor. Two small metal spades – the kind children used to dig sandcastles – lay beside the hole, and beside the spades was a pile of small bones.

Guy squatted down to look more closely. He thought at first that they were animal bones – those of a rat, perhaps, or a small dog. He picked one up and examined it. After a moment he went to fetch the spade he'd seen hanging on the cellar wall.

Harry lay beside Ava; she was sleeping, the doll Danny in her arms. Guy had given her the doll the first time he had visited her in hospital. His arm had still been in plaster, his face so pale still that Harry had believed he would never truly recover but would remain forever this wan, frightened little boy. He was eleven years old and had lost his odd, cocky confidence that had always made him seem so much older and so independent that Harry would feel totally superfluous to his son's needs. This feeling had helped ease the guilt Harry had carried around with him since he left Guy at his first boarding school – even before that, if he was being honest with himself. He realised he couldn't remember a time when he hadn't felt guilty over his son.

Harry had never asked how Guy had come by the dolls. He had had an idea – one that he was ashamed of – that his son had stolen them from the children's ward where he'd stayed for a week after the accident. It was only recently that he had overheard Guy telling Esther that he had bought the dolls from the hospital's little shop. Guy had laughed that easy, careless laugh of his. ‘They cost me all my pocket money – even then I didn't have enough. The woman in the shop let me off. I think she felt sorry for me.'

Harry had gone into the kitchen then, wanting to embrace his son, to beg his forgiveness for doubting him. Guy had glanced at him, smiled in that knowing, supercilious way he had that was such a barrier between them; it was as if Guy had known all about his suspicions – even as if he had made up the story about spending every penny he had on the dolls because he knew that his father was eavesdropping. Harry experienced the same irrational anger he often felt around his son; he returned to his belief that the dolls had been stolen. This belief fitted with everything he knew about Guy, all his bad behaviour that had Harry travelling up and down the country looking for schools that would take him on.

Ava stirred in her sleep and Harry stroked her hair, murmuring to her that he was there, that everything was all right. Danny stared up at him with his big, smiley blue eyes – amazing how much expression could be stitched into cloth. He remembered how Guy had placed Danny and the other doll at the foot of Ava's hospital bed and had stood silently beside him as Harry tried to explain that Ava might not recognise him any more. Guy had nodded. ‘That doesn't matter. When she gets better we can explain who we are.'

‘We think this is the very best we can hope for, Mr Dunn,' the consultant neurologist had said. The man had glanced at him, returned to the pages and pages of Ava's medical notes. Harry waited, although he knew the consultant didn't have anything else to say – really couldn't be bothered any more now that there were no more operations to carry out, no more experiments he could try to shock his wife's brain into behaving. At last the man looked up at him. ‘I'm sorry. Take your wife home, take care of her – there's nothing more to be done.'

And he had taken care of her – he had – to the very best of his ability, the very best way he knew how: he threw money at the problem. He had paid for the finest nursing home he could find. But Ava had deteriorated in the Home, despite its gardens and lawns and views of open countryside, despite its lovely public rooms that were full of the demented old. Whenever Guy was home he would insist on accompanying him on his weekly visits to the place, and on the way back his silence bore down on Harry like a Panzer division. He had wanted to ask Guy what he thought he should do, because didn't he have to work every day to pay his school fees? He had to work, resolving other people's problems with each other – how was he supposed to look after Ava? But Harry never said any of this, never tried to make excuses, only bore the terrible silence.

Then one day the nursing home wrote to advise him that it was about to close; apparently there were more profitable uses for such a large amount of real estate. The closure had set him on the path that eventually led to Esther.

Harry sighed. As he'd put Ava to bed he'd entertained the idea that he could possibly change Esther's mind. But then he'd thought about how she'd told him she was too young for this job of caring so much and so relentlessly. The young needed to see progress and rewards; they needed something to aim for. And Harry had seen the way Esther looked at Guy, and soon Guy would be leaving and his unpredictable, rare visits home wouldn't be enough to sustain the girl's hopes.

How easy it was to blame everything on Guy, Harry thought, and how perverse, when the boy was innocent of everything Harry wanted to find a scapegoat for.

Getting up as quietly as he could, he laid the female rag doll down in his place and stood over Ava, ensuring that she slept on. He was tired; he thought that in the morning he would be able to think more clearly. For tonight he had no idea of what he would do or even how he would live, now that his life had hit the buffers with such dull predictability. Not that he had predicted any of it; he'd believed Esther would stay for ever, that Val would go on loving him so selflessly. Laughable, really, if he felt like laughing at all. He hadn't realised he was capable of such self-deception. He had always thought rather better of himself.

Leaning over his wife's bed, he kissed her, catching the scent of the soap with which he'd washed her face. ‘I love you,' he whispered, and it wasn't a lie, not a true lie. He loved her in ways he couldn't even explain to himself, ways that he was sure he could trace back to that rat-infested room in Berlin, when the memory of a beautiful, blond boy swinging on the end of the hangman's rope was all too fresh in his mind.