Winter of the World

‘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 Tŷ 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 clear that Hitler was losing the war.

There had been no police investigation of the death of Joachim Koch. It had been reported in the newspaper as a road accident. Carla had got over the initial shock, but every now and again the realization hit her that she had killed a man, and she would relive his death in her imagination. It made her shake and she had to sit down. This had happened only once when she was on duty, fortunately, and she had passed that off as a faint due to hunger – highly plausible in wartime Berlin. Her mother was worse. Strange, that Maud had loved Joachim, weak and foolish as he was; but there was no explaining love. Carla herself had completely misjudged Werner Franck, thinking he was strong and brave, only to learn that he was selfish and weak.

She talked to Beck a lot before he was discharged, probing to find out what kind of man he was. Once recovered, he never again spoke indiscreetly about the war. She learned that he was a career soldier, his wife was dead, and his married daughter lived in Buenos Aires. His father had been a Berlin city councillor: he did not say for which party, so clearly it was not the Nazis or any of their allies. He never said anything bad about Hitler, but he never said anything good either, nor did he speak disparagingly of Jews or Communists. These days that in itself was close to insubordination.