‘If I were you,’ she said softly, ‘and I didn’t want to talk about it, I wouldn’t have left them out.’
He lay there in silence, hating her for seeing through him, loving her for exactly the same reason. She made no attempt to press him further, and that was probably why he began to speak.
He didn’t start at the beginning and he didn’t start at the end, he started in the middle and he leapt around, doubling back on himself. She asked very few questions. There was no need; the words tumbled out of him.
He told her about the Professor and his beaky nose and their games of chess and the gut-rot hooch they used to buy from the officers’ mess—alcoholic footwash destined for the brass, but distilled through bread and flogged off to the rank-and-file by the batmen. He told her about the low, menacing profile of a Tiger tank, the silence of an 88 shell as the sound struggled to keep up with it, the spine-chilling shriek of the Nebelwerfer rockets, and he tried to describe the helpless terror of a sustained artillery barrage, bent double in a slit trench, the ground quaking, shaking your fillings loose.
He told her about the friends who had died, the ones who had cracked up and been shipped out, the ones who had been maimed. He described the horrors of the ‘far ward’ at the field hospital, nurses holding cigarettes to the mouths of men who had lost their arms, others with whole parts of their faces missing, being fed ground liver squeezed through a tube.
He told her what he had done to the men who might or might not have been responsible for the Professor’s death, and he described their triumphal entry into Rome a few days later. He detailed the baroque splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence perched high above the shores of Lake Albano where they were sent to recuperate for a few weeks. Unreal afternoons spent lazing on the volcanic sand beaches of the lake, swimming in the aquamarine water, sipping crisp dry Frascati wine from the nearby hills and flirting with the local girls. Dreamlike memories they desperately clung to when their orders finally came through and they found themselves back in the thick of the action—in France this time, clearing Germans from a scattering of islands off the south coast, then fighting their way eastwards along the Riviera, securing the border with Italy, where the mountains collided with the sea and where Conrad’s war came to an abrupt end.
He told her how it happened, though not why, because he wasn’t sure of the answer himself, even then. All he knew was that war left you clinging to the raft of your own sanity, not because of the horror—that, you grew used to—but because it tore at the heart of every man’s being, his sense of who he was.
You could be brave one minute, a coward the next, selfless then cruel, compassionate and heartless within moments of each other. You spent a lifetime forging a view of what made you tick, what marked you out from other men, massaging yourself into being. Then war came along and ripped that construct limb from limb. It seized you by the neck, pressed your face to the mirror and showed you that you weren’t one thing or another, but all things at the same time. The only question was: which bit of you would show itself next? That’s what fucked you up. The not knowing.
He told Lillian all this. It was far more than he had ever told anyone, though that wasn’t saying much. The only other person he had spoken to was the doctor at the hospital in England, and that had been under duress.
When he was finished, Lillian held him tight and kissed him on the neck, her cheek wet with tears, cold against his skin.
‘It’s okay now,’ she said.
And he had laughed, not in derision, not in amusement, but because she was absolutely right.
It was.
Twenty-Five
Wakeley waited till she was cleaning the bedrooms on the south side of the house before making his way outside to her car.
Returning to the study, he left the door ajar, and when she came downstairs he called to her.
‘Rosa.’
She deposited her mop, pail and other cleaning items at the door and entered. ‘Mr Wakeley.’
‘Would you make some coffee, please?’
‘Of course, sir.’
He didn’t want coffee, but he hadn’t quite finished reading the file, and he needed all the facts at his fingertips before springing it on her.
Rosa returned ten minutes later with a tray. He took a bite of a cookie while she poured the coffee from the pot. Unprompted, she stirred in half a teaspoon of sugar. She noted and remembered that sort of thing. It was the kind of attention to detail he demanded of himself and appreciated in others.
‘Rosa.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Why don’t you tell me about Miss Lillian and the fisherman, Conrad Labarde?’
‘Excuse me?’
She was almost convincing.
‘No doubt she swore you to secrecy, and I respect your loyalty, I do, but I need to know, Rosa.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you’re saying.’
He got to his feet, crossed to the door and closed it. ‘I don’t have much time,’ he said, turning back, ‘so let me put it another way. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll have you arrested for stealing.’
‘What? I have never—’
He interrupted her, raising his hand. ‘Please, spare me the indignation, I know you haven’t. But the police might see things differently when they find certain articles of Miss Lillian’s hidden in your car.’
She glared at him.
