The Welsh Girl (3 page)

"Your English is good," Rotheram called from where he was bent over the projector. He didn't like the others asking too many questions.

"Thank you," Hess told him. "
Und Ihr Deutsch
."

Rotheram looked up and a loop of film slipped off the reel

he was removing, swinging loose.

"I only meant you do not seem to need the subtitles, Captain."

Rotheram recoiled the film tightly.

"But perhaps I should be complimenting you on your English instead."

Mills barked out a little laugh and then looked puzzled. "I'm not sure I get it."

"It's not a joke," Hess said pleasantly. "I'm asking if Captain Roth-eram"--he drew the name out--"is a German Jew."

Rotheram felt the others turning to look at him, the major sitting up straighter. He kept his eyes on Hess but felt himself colouring in the gloom.

"Well," Mills said. "I'd never have guessed."

"You have to know what to look for," Hess said nonchalantly, as if it were a parlour trick.

"But Jews can't be German, Deputy Reichsfuhrer," Rotheram told him flatly. "Or did you forget that also?"

Hess's lips twitched, a small moue.

"Besides, you're wrong." But even as he said it, Rotheram was conscious of his accent asserting itself, as it did when he was tired or angry.

"My mistake, I'm sure."

"Captain," the major called wearily. "Let's press on, shall we?"

The second reel moved to the evening events of the 1934 Reich Party Day, a grainy sea of flags waving in a torchlit parade, and finally to footage of Hess himself, starkly pale under the floodlights, rallying the crowd, leading the ovation until his voice cracked with the effort. In the drawing room, Rotheram watched Hess closely, saw him flinch slightly, his nostrils flaring as his younger face stared down at him. His eyes, beneath his bushy brows, widened as he watched, and

he seemed to clutch himself, his crossed arms drawing tighter, his leg hitched higher on his thigh. The tip of his cigarette glowed in the dark, and the smoke twisted up through the projector's beam like a spirit. At the next break, he called for some light and said he needed to stretch his legs. He rose and walked twice around the room quickly, his limp jagged, his head bent.

Mills tried to join him. "Are you cold?" But Hess waved him away, and the doctor approached Rotheram instead.

"How much longer?" "One more reel."

"Good. I don't want him too agitated." Rotheram looked up. "Isn't that the point?"

"It's
your
point, my friend. My job's to keep him healthy. I

don't want him stressed or overtired." "I understood--"

"You understood wrong," Mills hissed. "And don't be thinking you can go around my back to the old man. He and I have an understanding."

Rotheram looked up and saw the major watching.

"Do you mind?" he asked Mills steadily. "I'd like to start this."

Mills turned and motioned curtly for one of the corporals to light a fire. There was a clatter of coal from the scuttle, and for a few seconds they all watched as the flame caught.

The final reel showed Hitler addressing the crowd, and Hess sank against the seat cushions as if he were trying to smother himself in the chair. Rotheram, glancing round, noticed Red-grave and Mills thoroughly engrossed in the film, intent on the younger Hess, the one formed from shadow and light. Turning back, he found Hess studying him. Their eyes met for a moment--Hess's dark, but shining--before Rotheram had to look away, his heart racing, as if the figure on the screen had met his gaze.

Afterwards, pacing the room once more, Hess repeated that yes, of course he recognised himself in the film, so he must accept that he had been there. Yet he had no memory of the events depicted. He touched the side of his head with his fingertips as if it were tender. "All that is black to me."

"No memory?" Rotheram asked. "None at all? And yet you seem agitated. Disturbed." The room was very still now without the tick and whirr of the projector.

"I wouldn't say so. Troubled, perhaps." "Troubled, very well. Why?"

"Troubled that I can't remember, of course. How would you feel if you were shown and told things you had done that you had no memory of? It is as if my life has been taken from me. That man was me, but also like an actor playing me."

Hess sniffed. The chimney was drawing poorly. Mills raked through the coals with the poker, making them spit.

"Do you even want to remember?" Rotheram asked. "
Naturlich
. A man
is
his memories, no? Besides, I'm told

the tide has turned. Paris fallen? Germany facing defeat? I should like such memories of happier times."

"The film made you happy, then? You enjoyed it?"

"Not happy!" Hess cried. He raised his hands in frustration, let them drop with a sigh--"But you are trying to provoke me."

There was a moment's silence, and then Mills said, "You must be tired."

"Yes," Redgrave added. "Perhaps it would be best if we conclude this evening, turn in."

"Major," Rotheram began, but when he looked at Redgrave's hangdog face, he stopped. He had been about to say that this was his interrogation, but it occurred to him suddenly that Mills was right. As far as he and the major were concerned, it was no interrogation at all. It wasn't that they thought Rotheram couldn't determine whether Hess was mad or not; they thought it was irrelevant. That unless Hess was

raving or foaming at the mouth, he'd be put on trial. They believed the decision had already been taken. That was why they couldn't see any point in this. It was a sham in their eyes and, worse, to continue it a cruelty.

They expect me to find him fit
, Rotheram thought, because

they believe I'm a Jew.

He became aware that Redgrave and Mills were staring at him, waiting.

"I suppose I am finished," he muttered.

Only Hess was not. He was standing at the pier glass scrutinising his own reflection. Turning his head from side to side to study his face.

He ran a hand through his lank hair, held it off his brow. "Another thing I don't remember: growing old." He smiled bleakly at them in the narrow mirror.

Rotheram spent a restless night in his bare cell of a room-- the former servants' quarters, he guessed, up a narrow flight of stairs at the back of the house.

It was all so, unreasonable, he thought. He'd been brought up, nominally at least, Lutheran, his mother's faith; knew next to nothing about Judaism. In truth, he'd always resented his

grandparents, refusing to write the thank-you letters his mother asked him to send in reply to their begrudging gifts, and he'd been secretly pleased when they'd fled to Paris, as if this proved something. Even when, two months after they'd left, his father's pension had been stopped, Rotheram had been convinced it was simply a mistake. The Nazi bureaucrats

were just fools, too dense to understand a subtle distinction like matrilineal descent, something his mother had explained to him in childhood. He was in his second year of law at the university, but when he tried to register for classes the following term, he was told he wasn't eligible to matriculate and realised he was the fool. It made him think of an occasion

years before, when, as a boy of thirteen or fourteen, he'd asked his mother yet again why he wasn't Jewish if his father was. Because the Jewish line runs through the mother, she'd told him.
Yes, but why?
he pressed, and she explained, a little exasperated, that she supposed it was because you could only be absolutely sure who your jmother was, not your father. He went away and thought about that--deeply and narrowly, as a child will--and finally came back to her and asked if she was sure his father
was
his father. She'd stared at him for a long moment, then slapped him hard across the mouth. "That sure," she said.

Just before her death, she told him how she'd been spat on in the streets of Berlin in 1919. "After Versailles," she said. "Because I was Canadian.
That
's what your grandparents could never forgive. I was a reminder of the enemy who'd

killed their son. I wasn't
German
enough for them, you see?"

Among her possessions, after her funeral, he'd found a photograph of his father he'd never seen before. It must have been taken on that last leave because he looked gaunt, his tunic loose on his frame, his features sharpened almost to caricature, no longer the smiling, slightly plump figure in a close-fitting uniform that Rotheram had seen in earlier poses. This was his father, he thought, and the figure had seemed to rebuke him. And yet the following week he'd gone ahead and anglicised his name.

He looked at his watch--not quite one a.m.--and decided to try the CO. Hawkins was an insomniac--his own sleep ruined by so many round-the-clock interrogations--and often spent nights at his desk catching up on paperwork. Sure enough, he picked up on the second ring, sounding more alert than the sleepy operator who put Rotheram's call through.

Barefoot, greatcoat over his pyjamas, Rotheram huddled over the phone in the draughty hall and said he was ready to

head back to London.

"You've made up your mind about Hess? That was quick."

Rotheram hesitated, stared at some movement down the hall, realised it was his own reflection in a mirror.

"Not really."

"What? Speak up."

"No, sir," Rotheram enunciated. He cupped his hand

around the mouthpiece, conscious of the stillness of the house around him. "I'm just not sure I'll be able to, under the circumstances."

"So spend some more time. Take another run at him." "I don't think that'll do any good," Rotheram offered. "But why, for heaven's sake?" Hawkins seemed to be

shouting in the quiet of the hallway.

And Rotheram was forced to admit that he was reluctant to find Hess sane because the thought of confirming Redgrave and Mills's assumptions rankled.

"Let me get this straight," the CO said. "You believe you can judge Hess fairly, but you're concerned that others won't see that judgement as impartial because they think you're Jewish. Those are the horns of your dilemma?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, but do you ever think you might not be so impartial after all?"

"I'm sorry, sir," Rotheram said tightly. "Even if I were Jewish, I'm not sure why it should make me any less impartial than a Frenchman or a Russian."

He heard Hawkins take a sip of something, and then another. Finally he asked, "Tell me, my boy, honestly now, don't you ever think about your family? Your grandparents made for Paris, you say. Don't you wonder where they are, what's become of them?"

Rotheram was momentarily taken aback. He began to say no and stopped, unsure. Hawkins had taught him to recognise

the pause before answering as a lie. It came to Rotheram that whatever he said now would seem false. So he was silent, which as Hawkins had taught him might mean a man was holding something back, or simply that he didn't know.

"I'm sorry, sir," he whispered now. "You'll have my report Monday morning."

There was a long sigh at the other end of the line, and Rotheram felt how he'd failed Hawkins. But when the CO spoke again he sounded brusquely hearty.

"No need to hurry back, my boy. There've been some new orders, as a matter of fact. The POW department want someone to visit their camps up in North Wales. Something to do with screening and the re-education programme.

Denazification and all that. Thought you'd be just the fellow to liaise. Anyhow, the orders should catch up with you there later today, or tomorrow at the latest."

"What--?" Rotheram began, and stopped, silenced by the sound of his own cry in the still house as much as by Hawkins's steely jocularity.

Gripping the receiver, Rotheram told him stiffly that he understood, and he did, although dully, as if his head were still ringing from the blow. The CO had been flattering him with this mission, he realised; more than that, it was a consolation prize. The decision had already been made, but not by Rotheram. Hess would be going to the trial, but Rotheram wouldn't. The closest he'd come to Germany, any time soon, was the image on the screen.

"You will be missed," Hawkins said. He was the one whispering now. "It's just that there's a sense that Jews ought not to be a big part of the process. To keep everything above board, so to speak. To avoid its looking like revenge. Can't stick a thumb on the scales of justice and all that. And really, that stunt at Dover." He laughed ruefully. "That's what you get for playing silly buggers."

Rotheram was silent and the CO filled the pause by asking, "By the way, how is Rudi, the old bastard?"

"Probably as sane as you or I," Rotheram said, and Hawkins laughed again.

"Well, that's not saying much, dear boy. That's not saying very much at all."

Rotheram held the receiver long after it had gone dead, reassured by the weight in his hand, until he heard a floorboard creak overhead, and finally set it gently back in its cradle. He wondered who else might be awake, whom he might have woken. Hess's room was on the second floor, and suddenly he hoped the Nazi might appear, escaping, any excuse for Rotheram to take him by the throat. On the landing, he peered down the corridor. There was Hess's guard, the corporal who'd served them Scotch, slumped in his chair, giving off a series of soft, flaring snores. Rotheram only meant to wake him, but as he stood before the guard, it seemed as easy to step over his outstretched legs and lay an ear to the door.

Nothing. Rotheram wondered if he was listening to an empty room, if Hess had already fled (but no, the key was still in the lock) or thrown himself from his window (surely it was barred). Still nothing, except Rotheram's own pulse, like a wingbeat in his ears. Perhaps all he'd heard before was a particularly stentorian snore from the corporal. And yet he couldn't quite shake the conviction that the room was empty-- not as if Hess had left it, precisely, but as if he'd never been there. Rotheram must have leaned closer, shifted his weight, for the floor beneath him gave a dry groan. He stifled his breath, counted the seconds. Nothing stirred, and yet the silence seemed subtly altered now, the silence of another listener, as if Hess were behind the door or under the covers or crouched in a corner listening to him, Rotheram, wondering