‘But it doesn’t make you feel any better, does it?’
‘Not really. Guilt sticks to me like clay.’
‘They were young, like you. It’s so senseless.’
‘Lorrie had a girl at home he was going to marry and Rat was his mother’s only son.’
‘Rat?’
‘Short for Humphrey.’
‘Of course, silly me!’ she quipped, grinning back at him.
‘We grew closer than brothers and yet, in the end, only Brian and myself remained out of the original squadron. The others dead.’ He drew his lips into a thin line. ‘Dead, at the bottom of the sea or in pieces. Jamie, Rat and Lorrie, their names are engraved on my heart and on my conscience.’
‘Give yourself time, George. Time has a way of ironing these things out.’
He looked at her intently and his expression lightened as if the sun had defied the force of nature and risen above the towers of the church.
‘You really understand, don’t you, Susan?’
She reached over and placed her hand upon his. ‘A little, and the little I don’t, I try to.’
He shuffled across the rug so that he could wrap his arms around her and kiss her. With Susan he could muffle the insistent scream of war, the nagging of his conscience and the small, plaintive voice somewhere deep inside his heart that was Rita’s.
Chapter 16
Max was unable to concentrate. He lit the small candle and began slowly to ignite the eight flames of the menorah, the symbol of Hanukkah. From the moment he and his sister Ruth had arrived at Elvestree, Primrose had resolved to practise their Jewish festivals and customs as they had done in Austria, before Hitler had set out to extinguish the very soul of their people. Ruth’s face was solemn. She never spoke of the family they had lost but it was impossible not to think of them at such a time. Some memories never fade. Mrs Megalith’s glasses were perched on the bridge of her nose and she dug her chin into the folds of flesh on her neck. Her face was serious too, in spite of the cats that circled her ankles and rubbed their backs against her calves. Max’s thoughts were far from Vienna and the small dining room where his mother had nodded at him across the table to indicate the moment to light the candles and say the accompanying prayers. They were with Rita. Since the day he had kissed her in his bedroom they had spent evenings together playing chess, reciting poetry or writing their own prose to read out to each other beside the fire in Primrose’s drawing room. She had finally noticed him.
Ruth watched her brother’s hand tremble as he lit the candles. She wondered whether he was remembering, as she was, the dimly-lit dining room in Vienna where their father presided over the family gathering of uncles and aunts and cousins to celebrate the festival of Hanukkah. She could almost smell the smoke from his cigar and taste the wine in the air. She shook away the invading sense of nostalgia with a toss of her head and focused her now glittering eyes on the flame in her brother’s hand. Mrs Megalith felt the contradicting vibrations in the room, Ruth’s heavy sadness and Max’s light excitement, and sent one of the cats scurrying out from under the table with a firm kick of her foot.
‘That’ll teach the little rotter!’ she exclaimed as Max lit the eighth candle. Then she raised her glass. ‘To absent friends, that we may always remember them.’ Max thought of Rita, Ruth of her mother, and Mrs Megalith cast her mind momentarily to Denzil. He wouldn’t have put up with all these cats and they wouldn’t have dared intrude if he were still alive. She felt a cold nose against her knee and sent a fat ginger cat flying out from under the table to join the other. Ruth felt tearful and sunk her eyes into the steaming soup, silently fending off the memories that now threatened to swamp her. Mrs Megalith launched into a story about her late husband’s disastrous tiger hunt in India and Max began spooning the soup into his mouth with relish. Neither seemed to notice her anguish.
Then, just when Ruth’s tears threatened to spill, Max’s spoon hesitated before his lips. Mrs Megalith was laughing raucously at the thought of Denzil being chased by a tiger when he had been told very firmly to remain still. Max was no longer listening. He looked down to see a small white cat sitting quietly at his feet staring up at him with large, unblinking eyes the colour of the peridots on Mrs Megalith’s earrings. Max shifted his eyes to his sister and felt his heart, a moment ago as light as a soufflé, now slump with compassion. Without further thought he swept the cat into his arms, stood up and walked around to the other side of the table where Ruth sat hunched over her cooling soup. Mrs Megalith’s laughter faded into a chuckle as she watched him place the cat onto his sister’s knee where it proceeded to nuzzle her face affectionately. The old woman understood the boy’s gesture and gazed at him with admiration. When she turned back to Ruth, the cat was licking up her soup with her neat pink tongue and Ruth was giggling, her tears settling into her eyelashes, her misery forgotten.