murder. For weeks we discussed nothing else—that and the difference between an artery and a vein. We had all been scared by the murder— though we would never have admitted as much—but we must have known more about first aid than any other children in the land.
“The tinker was hanged a few weeks later. I shall never forget the Tuesday it happened. Most people thought he should die, but our village lived that day in silence.
“Sorry,” I said after a moment. “That’s all a bit dark.”
She nodded, smiling. “I’d like to hear about your family, your parents.”
“Well, I was not especially close to my father but I respected him. My grandfather—who I never knew—had started a book publishing business and it had been very successful. Montgomery & Mann published novels, history, and science books mainly, and by the time my father joined the family firm the company had offices in Edinburgh and New York as well as in London.”
“Have you been to New York?”
“No. Not even Edinburgh.”
“I’d love to see New York. I’d risk those submarine things if I had the chance.”
“You would?”
“I told you, I’ve got this … this wanderlust. I’m just sitting out the war. Once it’s over, I’m going to travel, travel, travel. But I’m interrupting again—sorry. You were telling me about your father—he must have been to New York.”
“Yes, a couple of times, I think. To see how the business operated there. He once told me he had had the idea in the back of his head to emigrate but then he met my mother and she hated the idea. So no move was ever made—my mother is quite unlike you in that respect.”
Sam smiled. “Go on.”
So I explained that when my father was about forty-five, and I was fifteen—as I pieced the story together later—his father received an offer from a big conglomerate, an offer that was, as the saying goes, too good to turn down. “Six months later, my grandfather died of a heart attack and my father inherited the money. He stayed on at the firm for a while, although he didn’t need to work, but he gradually lost sympathy with what the conglomerate was doing with the company, and so, around the time I was in Germany, he left.
“He was, therefore, a bookish man. And he was, I think, more interested in ideas than in people. There were books everywhere in the house and for that reason, among others, he didn’t feel the need—as so many of his friends did—to send his son away to prep school. One effect of this was that Izzy and I had from an early age a life independent of our parents, making us self-reliant. At the same time, we had a content family life. Christmas, Easter, and birthdays were celebrated but not ostentatiously—one gift was enough for anyone, in my parents’ opinion. My sister and I were made to play outdoors in most types of weather but this wasn’t cruel, and when either of us was genuinely ill our parents were very solicitous.
“I did go away to boarding school when I was thirteen. But even then I didn’t go far off. It was at boarding school that my first interest in Germany began to form. One of my father’s jobs when he was still in publishing was to keep up with German scholarship, which was then the equal of—and in many respects superior to—both British and American scholarship, in history, medicine, engineering, and chemistry, for example. So I always took an interest in the German language, German history, and German science.
“I’m talking too much,” I said, suddenly noticing that Sam had long finished her lunch, whereas mine was eaten less than halfway through. “Sorry,” I added. “Why don’t you talk for a bit while I attack this fish.”
“Okay.” She smiled. “If you can run to another shandy.”
My glass was empty too. I waved to Maude, the waitress, and ordered more drinks.
“I’ll bet your life was more interesting than mine,” I said.
She bit her lip, in a way that I had noticed her do before. “Yours sounded idyllic, as family life should be, reserved but content, not disfigured by war. But I’m sure you left out lots of bits that weren’t idyllic.”
I shrugged, chewing. “Epileptic fits, gypsies, murder—it’s the best I can do.”
“I’m one of four girls,” she said after a pause. “A family a bit like your vicar’s. I grew up in Bristol. My father was in the merchant navy so he was away a lot.