uncle’s will, and how it ties in with what happened back then. The rest of your career will be kind of a build-up for that. So let’s talk about Vienna.”
“Well, we can, of course. . . but there’s lots more, you know, that I haven’t told you, much more about Burma, and Berlin, Malaya, Korea. . .”
“I really want to get into Vienna now. We can always go back, later on. I just want to know, like, where I am, when we get there. Is that OK?”
“Of course, of course.”
“OK. . .”
She referred again to her notebook, to the pages at the back where she kept the questions. Herbert braced himself. This was going to be the hardest part, the part he didn’t want to disturb. He wanted to see the place again before he brought its memory into the light. Memories were gossamer to the touch, no matter how powerful.
“OK. So, you were, what, twenty?”
“It was February of 1934. I was nineteen, nearly twenty, yes.”
“And why did you go there?”
“Oh. . . my parents thought it would be good for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was thinking about the Church, but I wasn’t really sure. It would have meant Oxford, probably, and my mother wasn’t keen. I don’t know. Anyway, it was arranged that I should go and stay with Uncle Wolf. He lived in Vienna, an uncle by marriage, the aunt died before I was born . . . that’s neither here nor there . . . Wolf was considered to be, I suppose, the family intellectual.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes. So off I went.” He reached into the small bag he’d brought with him from the other compartment, and produced a fat brown envelope. “Actually I found something that might interest you. Wolf’s letter, inviting me to stay, with a lot of helpful information about the neighbourhood. In fact my father had written to him, but. . . It is in English.”
“Oh, wow!”
She took the packet of paper as though it were an orphaned chick, and looked, for a long moment of awe, at the postmark. Herbert sat back and took a break. He had glossed over that, at least. He would not have to return, now, to that dreadful year after school when he questioned everything, the bewilderment and distress of his parents, the rector’s irritation. In that year he had been branded both as a religious maniac and an atheist, and had narrowly escaped the charge of lunacy—which meant a torture-cell and family shame, back then.
Wolf would sort him out, they decided. Funny old Wolf, whom no one had seen since the Great War, a shady character, a black sheep by marriage, was nonetheless undoubtedly learned, and lived far away, in a city famed as a centre of ideas. The sickly mind was packed off to a warmer mental climate.
Elspeth looked up, wide-eyed.
“And this was the uncle who died, and left the pile of stuff, and said, what was it. . .?”
“Left instructions that the parcel should be opened fifty years after his death. Yes. It’s going to be two months late, but I don’t suppose it matters. The lawyers were quite right, I think, to wait for me. I am the only relative, apart from Mickey, of course.”
“Two months. . . Oh, were you there when he died?”
“Oh yes.”
“Oh my, how awful!”
“Yes. Yes it was, quite. I was very young, you see, and a long way from home. And I couldn’t stay, really, with the. . . well, it was almost civil war. It was, really, but it didn’t last long, as it happened.”
“So did your uncle die in the war?”
“Yes . . . no . . . that is he wasn’t shot, or anything. He died of a heart attack. He was well over eighty, he’d had a rough time of it here and there. It could have happened at any moment. But, as it was . . .”
Elspeth stared in silence, humbled by grief. He wished she would say something, now, anything, rather than leave him there, looking down at the rigid face of the old man, with the sobs and the screaming all around. The red wine on his uncle’s shirt looked like a splash of blood, but there was real blood on his own hands as the windows shattered in. There was firing outside, and a girl near him screaming at a pitch too high for her voice, a dry, silent scream, with both hands held to one side of her face. She was the pretty one, the one he never got to know because she didn’t speak English. Then the blood started running from her arms onto the dead man, dripping from her elbows onto the stiff white shirt, bloody tears shed for the death of beauty.
The door slid open, and Mickey said;
“What’s the matter with you two? Somebody died?”
“Oh honey, your father was just telling me about his uncle.”
“The mysterious Uncle Wolf? Good Lord, it sounds as if you’ve only just started.”
“We’ve been kind of filling in the background. Like I told you.”
“I see. Well, Mother was wondering when you were planning to turn in. If at all.”
“Give us a few more minutes, OK? A half hour, maybe.”
“OK. See you later.”
The door closed again, and she leaned forward to look at him, solicitous, apologetic.
“You OK?”
“Oh yes, I’m quite all right, thank you. I just couldn’t help thinking . . . It’s a long time ago, of course, but it made a very profound impression on me, for one reason and another.”
“Right, right.”
“I was there, you see.”
“Right.”
“I was with him when he died, as he died.”
“Right, OK. You want to talk about something else?”
“No, no, that’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“Because there was something else I wanted to ask you, aside from Vienna and everything.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. . . It’s kind of personal?”
Herbert allowed himself a small smile, which he hoped would appear as one of encouragement. How much more personal was she going to get?
“Ask away, Elspeth. I don’t mind, I assure you.”
“OK. I just wanted to ask you, are you a really committed Christian?”
“Well, yes . . . as I told you, I was thinking of entering the church . . . I have always been a believer, I think, in some way.”
“Right. Only, you know, Mickey’s name is really Miles? Miles Christie, doesn’t that mean Christian soldier?”
“Christian soldier, soldier of Christ. Without the final E it would, yes.”
“Right.
