Mackie leaned forward. 'Are you up to a little debrief?'
'I'll try.'
'Ben Kamen?'
'We found him. He was sleeping. Wired up to a machine, an, um, electromechanical calculating machine", he called it. A Z3, yes.'
'All right. Good. You didn't manage to get Ben out?'
He shook his head. 'Last I saw of him, that SS officer came – Fiveash. I was looking down into the cellar room from the roof space. Doris challenged her. They could all be dead by now.'
'We'll have to assume they're not, until proven.'
'I think Doris must have done for the Z3.'
'Good girl,' Mackie said, nodding. 'She'll get a medal for this, if posthumously. But it may not do a lot of good,' he said to Mary. 'Not if they still have Kamen.'
'What I don't understand,' Gary said, 'is how Doris managed to smuggle in that much explosive. I mean, we were all searched on the way in.'
His mother said, 'It was George.'
'George?'
'That wooden box containing the spear – it wasn't as solid as it looked.'
Gary shook his head. 'I never knew. What happened to George?'
'Sergeant Tanner kept out of the fighting,' Mackie said. 'Sensible chap. Now he's stayed behind to help clear up the mess. He's on our side, fundamentally, of course. Look, you did all you could, all that was asked of you. But the operation will be judged a failure, I think.'
Mary said, 'Why? They have Ben Kamen, but Doris destroyed the Z3.'
'Yes, but they can rebuild. We've been receiving reports of paratroop raids on high-technology establishments. Bletchley Park. Radar research sites. Places like that. We're pretty sure they are planning a Loom Mark II – were, even before the events of today. Bigger and better. We haven't stopped them, just slowed them down a bit. Of course that's something. But the fact that we acted against the Loom might, paradoxically, convince Trojan's SS superiors to take it more seriously. Ben was the key, really. We hoped to save him. That was a mistake. Should have gone in specifically to kill him.' He sighed. 'May be a while before we get a second crack at it.'
'The Menologium,' Gary said suddenly.
They both looked at him sharply. 'What was that?'
'I remember. Ben talked about something called the Menologium. He was terrified.' He stared at his mother. 'Look, what's going on here? What are you mixed up with, Mom?'
'We'll brief you properly in a secure environment,' Mackie said. 'But for now, please – if you are beginning to remember-'
'He said it had been sent back". This Menologium. He showed me a paper tape to prove it. As if I'd understand…'
His mother looked at Mackie. 'It had to have been sent back. I mean, I found traces of it in the literature. Records of it going back to the fifth century. With Kamen's name embedded in it.'
Mackie asked, 'Gary, when was this Menologium sent back? Did Ben say?'
'Two days ago. He was clear about that. He said the bit of paper tape confirmed it. He said I had to be sure to tell you, Mom.'
His mother grabbed the side of the boat, her face white.
'Mom? Are you OK?'
'Yes, yes. It's just – Tom, two days ago. But I was finding evidence of Ben's tampering with the Menologium, I held it in my own hands, I copied it out, months ago. The evidence existed, in a sense, even before the Menologium had been sent – perhaps even before Kamen did his bit of coding in the acrostic – perhaps even before any drafts of the Menologium had been prepared at all. Now you tell me, how is that possible?'
Mackie stroked his stubbly cheeks, pulling his lips. 'Perhaps I should write another letter to Mr Wells.'
'So Trojan saw through his scheme to meddle with Hastings. But he failed – the Menologium didn't work. It can't have. Because Harold lost, didn't he?'
'That's what I remember being taught at school,' Mackie said drily.
'Nothing happened, two days ago, when Trojan closed his switch. No flashing lights in the sky. I remember two days ago, and three, and four; my memories are continuous.'
Gary stared at her. 'What on earth are you talking about?'
'But now we live in a history in which the Menologium was sent back, but failed to deflect Hastings. Maybe there was another history that existed before Trojan threw the switch – gone. It never existed, and never will. And the people who inhabited it – copies of us, but different from us-' She shuddered. 'It could be that way, couldn't it? That could be how the history change works. I don't know if I can deal with this.'
'You're scaring me,' Gary said. 'Ben was scared. I've never seen such terror, and Ben was a Jew in Nazi hands. He had a lot to be scared about. I promised to get Ben out when he was taken from the stalag. I failed. I'll have to go back.'
'Well, you could get the chance, old bean, although it might be a while,' Mackie murmured. 'And while this Menologium may be a busted flush, they'll no doubt start off on some new history-bothering project altogether, and we'll have to start from scratch too. More research on your agenda, Mary. What a bloody show this all is, what a show. We really have got to put a stop to it.' He glanced over his shoulder. 'But that's for tomorrow. Soon be at the ship. Hot cup of tea, that's what we need.' He pulled out a pipe and began to fill it.
His mother grabbed Gary and buried her face in his collar. He put his arms around her. She was trembling. But even now he didn't understand what she was so scared of.
The motor boat forged on through the fading afternoon light.
III
WEAVER
MAY-JULY 1943
I
13 May 1943
The air in the farmhouse kitchen was a mass of cigarette smoke and steamy cooking smells.
'I'm telling you you're not going out again dressed like a bloody little tart.'
I'm sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what's problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what's the problem.What are you going to do, Dad, thump me again?'
Sitting at the kitchen table, Ernst sighed. He was tired tonight, tired from the rounds of combat training. His ears rang from the gunfire. Not enough, however, to shut out the raised voices.
Irma worked listlessly at the range. Little Myrtle, now nearly two years old, was bundled-up skin and bone on the floor at her mother's feet, playing with worn wooden blocks. Fred and Heinz sat together at the table, two shapeless lumps hunched in their grimy shirts, smoke curling up to the ceiling from their cigarettes. Glasses and a half-empty vodka bottle sat on the table between them. The television set was on, its screen a lens showing indistinct figures, walking, smiling, shaking hands, while jolly martial music played.
Viv was before the mirror. She wore one of her smarter dresses, the powder-blue, much let out with her mother's help. She was working at her lips with her little finger. Seventeen years old now, she had blossomed into an attractive young woman – if a slim one, but everybody was skinny nowadays. Ernst knew how much of her glamour was faked, tricks learned from the girls in town: a pencil line to mimic a stocking seam, a bit of beetroot juice and Vaseline smeared on the mouth in lieu of lipstick.
As usual she was the centre of the arguments.
Heinz took a drag on the cigarette he held between the stumps of the fingers of his right hand. 'Can't say I blame the father,' he said to Ernst. I'm sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what's problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what's the problem.She really is a Jerrybag now, that one.' He used the English word amid his guttural German. He had come back from the east with his voice shot, whether by gas or Russian cigarettes he wouldn't say.
I'm sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To
make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what's problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what's the problem.And how long have you two been at the stuff?'
Heinz shrugged. 'An hour, maybe more. Ever since the feldgendarmerie called again.' The military police were trying to get Fred to train with the Volkssturm militia. 'He told them where to shove their helmets, and they cut the rations again, and that was that.'
Viv turned to the door. 'Right, Mum, I'm off.'
Irma asked, 'What time will you be back, love?'
I'm sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what's problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what's the problem.Now don't you encourage her,' Fred said. 'Don't you bloody make it seem as if this is all normal.' Fred's voice was heavy. He was a stubborn old man who could defy the German military police, but he had no control over his daughter.
I'm sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what's problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what's the problem.Oh, Fred, what am I supposed to do? She's seventeen, she can do what she wants.'
I'm sorry for the bad quality. However we really did as what you said. To make things clear, could you please give me name of jobs with bad quality? If possible, the errors with picture. Only told us what's problem is no enough, The more pictures you can send to us, the more clearly we can understand what's the problem.Well, thank you very much,' Viv said heavily. She fixed her hat on her head; it was a small trilby. 'I'm glad somebody in this house treats me like an adult and not a criminal.'
'Just be careful, love.'
'Yes, yes.' Viv walked past Ernst, not even looking at him.
When she slammed the kitchen door behind her Ernst winced. He felt guilty; he felt that the kindness he had tried to show the girl when he had first been billeted here had somehow gone wrong, that she had at last become what her father had feared. But what else could he have done?
Heinz topped up Fred's glass.
Ernst crossed to the sink, and stood with Irma before the open window. As the English midsummer approached the days were long; it was after seven in the evening, but the sun was still above the horizon, the sky a deep but brilliant blue, the world green and full of birdsong. It often struck him how resilient nature was. It took only days for weeds to colonise a bomb site, far faster than any human agency could clear debris and rebuild. And some men did not recover at all. Look at Heinz. He had come back from his winter on the eastern front wounded in body and mind – come back aged.
Irma handed Ernst a glass of cold water. When she took a step her clogs clattered on the stone floor. The clogs were made by Fred from wood and a bit of old leather; shoes were another item the civilian population found ever harder to replace. 'You can't blame Viv. Poor girl! It's not much of a time to be growing up, is it? No wonder she goes after a bit of glamour. You can't blame her.'
He sipped his water. 'Any news of the boys today?'
She shook her head. It had been a month since they had had a letter from Alfie, now sixteen, who had been working on a bombed-out airfield in Kent. But now there were rumours that anybody who had been involved with the Hitler Jugend was to be drafted into the Volkssturm or even the British units of the Wehrmacht, and trained to fight the expected counter-invasion. As for Jack, three years after he had been taken as a POW, there had been no word at all of him for months and months, not even through the Red Cross.
'Fred always gets worse after the post comes. In a way he frets more about Alfie than about Viv, or even Jack. Alfie's so young, you see. He can probably barely remember a time before the Germans came. It might be hard for him to shake it all off, when the Americans come.' She glanced over. 'They're starting in on the vodka earlier every day.'
Ernst forced a smile. 'Well, Heinz says he lost the fingers of his right hand at Stalingrad, but came back with a bottle of vodka in his left.'
'I hope you ate well today, Herr Obergefreiter.' She stirred the watery stew. 'Potatoes and turnip again I'm afraid. Not even any whale meat tonight! They cut our ration again, the feldgendarmerie.'
'Heinz told me.'
'Fred's a war veteran. They can't expect him to take up arms against his own countrymen. You'd think they'd have the respect not even to ask. I know he's heading for trouble. I mean, the way he swears at them! Well, maybe the Americans will be here before it all comes to a head.'
'I am sure we will cope,' Ernst said vaguely, hoping to reassure her.
She smiled and pushed hair out of her eyes. She too had lost weight; the bones of her temples were prominent, her hair thinning. 'You're always so kind, Herr Obergefreiter. It's a strange thing – I never thought I'd feel this way in that time after the invasion – I miss those old days, ever so. When it was just you. I know Heinz is your friend, but with him here, and the other soldiers in the towns, you know…'
He understood. The movement of troops in anticipation of the counter-invasion had upset the web of obligations and compromises that had grown up among the local people and the troops stationed among them. He himself had been irritated to have Heinz foisted on his billet, after the business over Claudine. But Claudine was long dead, and Heinz was damaged by his own war; it didn't seem to matter any more. 'Heinz isn't so bad,' he said gently. 'There are worse.' Some of the men had been brutalised by their time in the east.
'Oh, I'm sure,' she said. 'In fact he's company for Fred, in a way.' But her voice was flat, a sign that she was hiding something from him, as she often did. She shooed him away so she could finish her cooking.
Ernst sat with the men and grudgingly accepted a small shot of vodka.
The television showed a newsreel, a Nazi grandee in a long leather coat touring an armaments factory. He could have been anywhere in Albion, as it seemed the whole protectorate was given over to such industries.
'Herr Goebbels,' Fred told Ernst. He pronounced the name the comical way Churchill did, 'Gobbles'. 'Poking his nose around Canterbury.'
'We are honoured,' Heinz said mockingly. He raised his glass. 'To the Reichsminister!'
'At least he's here,' Fred said. 'It's a bloody long time since Hitler showed up.'
'It is not Goebbels we need,' Heinz growled. 'Not him and his speeches and his slogans. It is tanks and guns and shells and bullets we need to face the Americans.'
'You've got reinforcements,' Fred said. 'You're a bloody reinforcement, man.'
Heinz laughed. 'Yes, and I still have one hand left that I can shoot with! God save the Fuhrer.'
But Ernst knew that Heinz's tanks and guns were unlikely to come any time soon. Despite the rumoured Allied build-up on the other side of the First Objective the Reich's resources were increasingly being diverted to the astonishing battles being fought out in the east.
Now Goebbels calmly watched a row of blindfolded auxiliaries being executed by firing squad. The music swelled to a brittle climax as the bodies shivered and fell.
'I will tell you one thing,' Heinz said. 'I would not want to be a British partisan in the hands of the SS. From the Fuhrer down, they are saying it's all your fault, you British, the troubles we are having.'
Fred laughed. 'What, even Stalingrad? Uncle Joe and his T-34 tanks might have had a bit to do with that.'
'Yes, but if you buggers had not been so stubborn, if you had made peace as any sensible person would have done, we would not have so many men tied down on this absurd little island.'
Buggers. Ernst suppressed a smile. Heinz had picked up a good deal of English from Fred. Fred said, 'And so those bloody SS thugs take it out on English children, while
they hide from the Russians like the cowards they are.'
'You won't hear me defending the SS, that's for sure.'
Ernst stood, downed his vodka and picked up his jacket. 'I probably ought to pack before dinner. The truck's coming for me at midnight.'
'Where are you going now?' Heinz asked.
'I have a posting on the coast in Kent. Richborough. Five days.'
Heinz eyed Ernst. 'Is this your brother pulling strings again?' Even before his return from Stalingrad Heinz had always been a hugely suspicious soldier, endlessly perceiving favours done and postings manipulated. He got up unsteadily and lurched over to Irma at the range. 'Where's that blessed stew, woman?'
'Coming,' Irma said without emotion.
Seeing Ernst was leaving, Myrtle gurgled and raised her little arms to him. With his jacket slung over his shoulder, he squatted down. He picked up her Mickey Mouse gas-mask from where it sat on the floor and waggled it. When she grabbed for it he picked her up, his hands under her armpits. She laughed when he bounced her gently, and plucked at the buttons on his shirt. He could feel her ribs, her elbows and knees were lumps of bone, and he could make out the shape of her little skull as she smiled at him. He knew little about the development of children, but it seemed to him she was behind with her walking and talking. It was strange to think that this child had always been hungry, every minute of every day of her short life.
Heinz's shadow fell over him. And when he looked up, he saw Heinz's left hand, his good hand, rake upwards over Irma's hip and settle on her breast. She elbowed him away, with a nervous glance at Fred. Heinz just laughed and staggered back to the table.
Irma saw that Ernst had seen all this. She glanced again at Fred, and hissed, 'You won't tell him, will you? It's not what you think. I mean – it's just for the rations. Heinz brings me extra, you know, I need it for the child.'
He stood, keeping his face blank. 'I could have helped you. There was no need.'
She shook her head. 'I would never beg favours of you. I have my pride, Herr Obergefreiter.' She began to ladle out the stew.
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