Where would she go? Where was her home? She had no papers. Was there a record of them in London? Was she still a refugee? She had to find out what had happened to List. The Germans would know where he was. She’d find him. He’d said he’d take her away. Did he say he’d keep her safe? She couldn’t remember. He’d look after her. He’d said she’d be his mistress, at another time.

And Geoffrey? She couldn’t imagine that she had once loved him too. It was so long ago. She was a different woman then. If he had survived, she could never tell him about her war. Or anyone. How she had sex with the officers as if she were a whore, nursed the enemy soldiers as if they were her own. Never put up a moment’s resistance. Too cowardly to stand up to them. She had looked forward to Maximilian List’s visits. Her earlier love for Geoffrey seemed from another time. List was the man who loomed in her imagination, her memory. Geoffrey was a good man, despite his youthful indiscretions. If he was alive, it was best she never met him again. Best he forget her.

Her old life was over. She knew that, then. La vie est terminée.

Chapter Fourteen: Joe

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

JOE

Jersey: June 1985

What Joe couldn’t tell Geoffrey was how Trude still ate at his heart. There were many ways to sin, many ways to break a spirit. He had believed Trude. Believed in her. Two souls lost in the moil of war. He squeezed his fingers into his eyes.

‘Will you bid me goodnight?’ he said. He was fatigued, a weariness that chiselled at bones and sinews, made it hard to put one step in front of another, one thought ahead of another. He felt those moments in his body as he relived them in his memory. He’d never revealed these sins, not in forty years. Oh, he’d told Geoffrey bits in the early days. Ernst. The lice. The hunger that reduced them all to animals scratching for life, thinking of nothing else. Once or twice he’d talked of cruelty, but not the sins. Geoffrey knew all about that too, had the same stories to tell.

A time came when there was nothing left to say and neither spoke of the war again. The memories were stashed away to gather dust, untouched, unvisited.

‘Can you put yourself to bed this evening?’

‘Turn on the light before you go.’ Geoffrey’s voice was weak.

Joe pushed himself up, flicked on the switch. The fluorescent strip flashed before it filled the room with a harsh white light. Geoffrey was gripping the armrest, grey bone through faded skin, knuckles now a range of frailty. His handkerchief was on his lap.

‘That was a shocking story, Joe,’ he said, softly.