The diaries alone, as an unadorned source, were interesting as a human document; but my father found a way to give them much wider moral significance. He did this by interleaving them with accounts of the concurrent administrative activities of my father’s office, the most notorious of which was the framing of the so-called Commissar Order prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. This had authorised the immediate arrest and summary execution of all Communist officials by occupying forces. It was held to be the point at which the German Army surrendered its military orthodoxy to the insane imperatives of the Nazi regime.
My father’s insertions were presented without comment, except for a crucial and damning passage in his preface, where he pointed out that Heinz Thorn was one of Halder’s senior subordinates and would have been intimately involved in his office’s administrative activities. Halder, who after the war was eventually honoured with the Meritorious Civilian Service Award by the US government for services to the state, was one of the senior generals who had helped formulate the Commissar Order; he had also advocated blanket reprisals against groups containing hostile individuals. The implication was clear: despite all his aesthetic scruples, my grandfather was deeply complicit in the brutalisation of the war in the east, a brutalisation that had led to the death of millions.
The book was a modest but unexpected success when it appeared in paperback, its cover adorned with a misty black-and-white photograph of my grandfather. A handsome man, he was shown in uniform with a peaked cap on which the Nazi eagle and swastika were prominent. My father freely confessed that this had outraged my mother as much as anything else, because my grandfather had destroyed everything from the war years apart from his diaries, forcing the publishers to use a post-war civilian photograph on which they had superimposed the uniform. My father was dismissive on this matter, claiming that the cover was meant to be symbolic, was actually better than the unadorned image since it conveyed the extent to which my grandfather had been compromised by the Nazis, despite his intelligence and culture. He was an exemplar of the moral corruption that had destroyed Germany. To me this was the height of hypocrisy, especially coming from a man who’d always been intolerant of anything but typographical covers.
What had my mother made of it all? Had she voluntarily surrendered the diaries to him in the first place? He always claimed so, though it was all too easy to imagine him taking them witho her knowledge, using them for his own ends.
After reading the book following Rees’s accusation I had a long telephone conversation with Tanya in which I damned it as nothing more than character assassination. To my surprise, Tanya confessed that she had also read it, a matter of months after we first met. And while she sympathised, she could also see my father’s point of view. Modern research was showing a greater complicity on the part of the German armed forces in Nazi war crimes; a similar re-evaluation was taking place about Soviet excesses. Uncompromising ideological forces had swept along even the good-hearted. The savagery of the times had tainted everyone but the most saintly.
It was only years later that I discovered Father had donated all the royalties from the book to the Institute for Holocaust Studies.
Again a telephone was ringing. I lay in the bath, surrounded by mounds of foam. I was holding a framed family photograph, a rare one showing all four of us, Rees and I not yet teenagers, huddling in the loose embrace of my mother and father, who were standing like two strangers in front of a sign advertising a ghost train.
With an agility that surprised me I pivoted out of the bath, grabbed a towel and padded into Tanya’s bedroom. By now the phone had stopped, but it started again. I snatched up the receiver, somehow convinced that it was going to be Lyneth.
“Hello?”
“O? Is everything all right?”
Tanya.
“Fine,” I said. “I was in the bath.”
She’d obviously rung off and tried again because she didn’t want to leave a message. She wanted to talk to me direct, make sure I was behaving myself.
“Did you have some lunch?” I heard her asking.
Had I? To my relief I remembered putting the macaroni cheese back in the freezer and preparing a tuna salad. I had done it myself. Sometimes my lapses were just that—lapses, not indications of Owain’s manifestations.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’ve even washed up. How did the talk go?”
“I haven’t given it yet. I’m on my way.”
The bedside clock showed one-thirty.
“I’m missing you,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“You’ve already asked me that. Don’t worry. I can cope. Are you nervous?”
“About what?”
I’d meant the talk, but I said, “About leaving me alone.”
I heard her laugh, though it wasn’t entirely spontaneous. “I’m sure you can look after yourself. Just don’t forget to take your tablets. The little red ones.”
Antidepressants. I said, “Do you think they’re working?”
“What?”
“The happy pills.”
I heard her fumbling with the phone. “Do you?”
This wasn’t fair on her. “Absolutely,” I said. “But I couldn’t get my electric razor to work in the bath.”
“Owen!”
“Joke.”
I heard her breathe in. “Not funny.” She sounded distinctly peeved. “Not funny at all.”
“Sorry. I was just trying to demonstrate that I haven’t entirely mislaid my sense of humour.”
“Do you want me to come home now?”
“Of course not. I didn’t mean to rattle you.”
“You’d better behave yourself. Don’t do anything daft.”
“Well, I’d decided against sunbathing.”
“Listen, I need to go. Are you positive you’re all right?”
“Scouts’ honour.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Break a leg.”
When the line went dead I felt a sense of my own foolishness. Dredging humour out of a situation that was not at all funny, least of all for her.
The wardrobe doors were open; sweaters, shirts and underwear poked out of drawers. I’d been going through my clothing again, searching for keys, money, anything that would give me information or facilitate my urge to go exploring. But everything important was locked away. Including the smallest bedroom across the landing, whose door in my frustration I’d only just refrained from forcing.
I put on my towelling robe and tidied everything as best I could. I set the photograph back on top of the dresser by my bed. It was the only one there, another relic that Tanya must have salvaged from my hous. The empty house whose phone might be ringing even now, with Lyneth calling, wondering where I was. No that was ridiculous. Tanya or someone else would have told her I was here. So why hadn’t she rung, or at least put the girls on the phone to speak to me? Had she taken all the family photographs when she left? Had I done something so terrible she’d shut me out of her and the girls’ life completely?
I went back into the bathroom and pulled the plug. The right arm of my robe was now wet to the elbow. I stood there in the steam and spicy bubble-bath fragrance, watching the mountain range of foam slowly collapsing as the water drained. Tanya and Lyneth. Lyneth and Tanya. The two fixed emotional points of my adult life that I’d orbited like a planet around a binary star. I just hadn’t been able to stay away from Tanya.