MORNING SERIAL
‘SORRY about that,’ she said. ‘Sorry. It just came over me. Somehow I wasn’t in the mood for all that out-of-date claptrap. Asses. Aren’t they just pathetic?’ The word had not struck Michael. The girl’s robust innocence reduced them, and Wolfi’s bored scepticism for all things military and punitive reduced them, and the farmer who praised webbing belts reduced them. Perhaps, after all, that old nightmare would not come round again. Not, at least, in the original form.
They moved automatically toward the stone Madonna. A light had been rigged up beside her and shone obliquely on to the sterile monumentality of her face. She had been scrubbed clean of lichen and bird droppings and made presentable.
‘That was him, wasn’t it? Old Doughnut. Did you recognise him? I’m sure that was Donitz.’ ‘Oh yes. That was him.’
‘I was Donitzed, you know. By Patterson. He made me put on an iron helmet. Dredged out of the lake. He does it to all of us. Fraternal rite of passage, even if you’re a woman. Bet he didn’t do it to Wolfi or you.’
‘I’ve been Donitzed already. In another life.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I was on his staff, briefly.’ ‘Really? What was he like?’ ‘Rigid, limited, correct. Fine strategist and commander, old-style naval officer, antiSemite, yes-man and, let’s say, like many of us at that time, a bloody lousy judge of character. Crooked kind of uprightness.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Isolde, smiling at the panache with which he brought off the colloquial English of ‘bloody lousy’.
‘No. That’s right. It doesn’t. We pass the baton to you. I hope,’ he added gruffly, on a sudden impulse, ‘I do hope it goes well for you and Wolfi. I really do. He deserves happiness. So much happiness.’
And the step back he took from their young lives was the renunciation of a claim. Valedictory, a blessing. He threw away a trove of hopes and expectations and felt the lighter for it.
> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES MONDAY