is it? Doesn’t it happen all the time in great houses? Maids are pretty, young noblemen are randy, and nature takes its course. When a baby is born, the matter is hushed up. Please don’t pretend you had no idea such things could occur.’
‘No doubt it’s common enough.’ Boy’s confidence was shaken, but still he blustered. ‘However, lots of people pretend they have connections with the aristocracy.’
‘Oh, please,’ Lloyd said disparagingly. ‘I don’t want connections with the aristocracy. I’m not a draper’s assistant with daydreams of grandeur. I come from a distinguished family of socialist politicians. My maternal grandfather was one of the founders of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. The last thing I need is a wrong-side-of-the-blanket link with a Tory peer. It’s highly embarrassing to me.’
Boy laughed again, but with less conviction. ‘
‘Inverted? I’m more likely to become prime minister than you are.’ Lloyd realized they had got into a pissing contest, which was not what he wanted. ‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to persuade you that you can’t spend the rest of your life taking revenge on me – if only because we’re brothers.’
‘I still don’t believe it,’ Boy said, putting the photo down on the side table and picking up his cigar.
‘Nor did I, at first.’ Lloyd kept trying: his whole future was at stake. ‘Then it was pointed out to me that my mother was working at Ty Gwyn when she fell pregnant; that she had always been evasive about my father’s identity; and that shortly before I was born she somehow acquired the funds to buy a three-bedroom house in London. I confronted her with my suspicions and she admitted the truth.’
‘This is laughable.’
‘But you know it’s true, don’t you?’
‘I know no such thing.’
‘You do, though. For the sake of our brotherhood, won’t you do the decent thing?’
‘Certainly not.’
Lloyd saw that he was not going to win. He felt downcast. Boy had the power to blight Lloyd’s life, and he was determined to use it.
He picked up the photograph and put it back in his pocket. ‘You’ll ask our father about this. You won’t be able to restrain yourself. You’ll have to find out.’
Boy made a scornful noise.
Lloyd went to the door. ‘I believe he will tell you the truth. Goodbye, Boy.’
He went out and closed the door behind him.
16
1943 (II)
Colonel Albert Beck got a Russian bullet in his right lung at Kharkov in March 1943. He was lucky: a field surgeon put in a chest drain and reinflated the lung, saving his life, just. Weakened by blood loss and the almost inevitable infection, Beck was put on a train home and ended up in Carla’s hospital in Berlin.
He was a tough, wiry man in his early forties, prematurely bald, with a protruding jaw like the prow of a Viking longboat. The first time he spoke to Carla, he was drugged and feverish and wildly indiscreet. ‘We’re losing the war,’ he said.
She was immediately alert. A discontented officer was a potential source of information. She said lightly: ‘The newspapers say we’re shortening the line on the Eastern Front.’
He laughed scornfully. ‘That means we’re retreating.’
She continued to draw him out. ‘And Italy looks bad.’ The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini – Hitler’s greatest ally – had fallen.
‘Remember 1939, and 1940?’ Beck said nostalgically. ‘One brilliant lightning victory after another. Those were the days.’
Clearly he was not ideological, perhaps not even political. He was a normal patriotic soldier who had stopped kidding himself.
Carla led him on. ‘It can’t be true that the army is short of everything from bullets to underpants.’ This kind of mildly risky talk was not unusual in Berlin nowadays.
‘Of course we are.’ Beck was radically disinhibited but quite articulate. ‘Germany simply can’t produce as many guns and tanks as the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States combined – especially when we’re being bombed constantly. And no matter how many Russians we kill, the Red Army seems to have an inexhaustible supply of new recruits.’
‘What do you think will happen?’
‘The Nazis will never admit defeat, of course. So more people will die. Millions more, just because they’re too proud to yield. Insanity. Insanity.’ He drifted off to sleep.
You had to be sick – or crazy – to voice such thoughts, but Carla believed that more and more people were thinking that way. Despite relentless government propaganda it was becoming
