He was quiet now, the laughter gone.
“Your father went away?” Lorna prompted.
“Yes. In 1939, he was called to the Wehrmacht, to the army. He left us on Christmas Eve. In April, he was already dead.”
“Oh!” Lorna gasped. What could she say to that?
For a while, the silence was broken only by the soft suckling of the lamb in Paul’s arms.
“After, life was hard for my mother, so when I became sixteen, I left school to work. A friend of my father said I would learn to be a clockmaker too.”
“You were an apprentice?” offered Lorna.
“Apprentice?” Paul tried the word. “Is that a young man who learns when he works?”
Lorna nodded, and she could almost see Paul filing that new word into his mental dictionary as he had done earlier with froth.
“It was difficult work, very … small.” Paul squeezed his fingers together as if to demonstrate. “But I liked it. For two years I learned about clocks and about watches, how to carve faces, grind cogs, cut jewels, and how to mend other makers’ pieces. Sometimes I felt my father sitting at the table beside me, holding my hand as I worked.
“But then it was January of 1944, my eighteenth birthday, and I was taken away from my work and away from Dresden, and I too entered the army of the Third Reich.”
As Paul lapsed into a thoughtful silence, stroking the lamb’s neck with his thumb, Lorna realized that she wanted to hear more. She opened her mouth, only to close it again. And it felt strange, standing over him, so she sat down on a small wooden stool just inside the pen.
Paul looked up as she sat, and it seemed to bring him back from another place and time.
“You must miss your father,” Lorna said simply. “I can’t imagine what I would do if my dad …”
Paul was very still and Lorna regretted saying anything. But now that she had, she needed to keep going.
“And you must worry about your mother and sister too. I know I do. I mean I worry. About my brothers.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I miss my father and yes, I worry.”
There was silence again, and Lorna determined that she would not break it this time with another silly …
“And your mother?” He was studying her now. “Do you miss her?”
Lorna’s throat contracted. She hadn’t expected this. “My mother died a long time ago.”
“I know,” he replied. What had Mrs. Mack told him? “But still you can miss her?”
Lorna shrugged. She didn’t have any memories of her own, only those borrowed from the stories her brothers told about their mother. How much could she think about missing her mother when her brothers were so far away and in such danger?
“I miss my brothers more,” she replied.
Spoken on a breath held tight, her words were barely audible, even to herself.
Paul waited, but when she said no more, he prompted her again.
“And will you tell me of them? Have they been at the war for a long time?”
Could she tell him? Should she tell him? Wouldn’t this be “careless talk”? But suddenly her desire, her need, to talk about them became overwhelming and she wanted desperately to talk about John Jo and Sandy, and how much she missed them. And who else was there who would listen?
“John Jo’s the oldest of us, and has been away the longest,” Lorna said, and the release of her breath came as a relief. “He could hardly wait to be part of it. He volunteered for service on the morning he turned eighteen, in ’forty-one. Of course, he’d tried to sign up the summer before, lying about his age, but by chance, the sergeant at the recruitment office had been at school with Dad. Can you believe it? So he knew John Jo wasn’t old enough to join up. John Jo was so furious, we didn’t dare go near him for days after.”
Lorna found herself smiling at the memory, and Paul smiled too.
“John Jo was a ruffian.” She noticed Paul frowning at the word. “I mean, he was wild, always wrestling someone or something—a school friend, a dog, or Sandy. But he was fun—he is fun. When I was much littler, he would build forts in the woods for us to play in, or we’d run down to paddle in the sea.”
She pointed in that direction, and Paul nodded.
“John Jo loves this farm so much. He’s only ever wanted to be a farmer, like Dad, though he seems to be doing all right as a soldier. He writes sometimes, but he doesn’t say very much, except to complain about the food and the weather.”
“I think every soldier writes to home about those things. The food and the weather.”
Lorna noticed then that when Paul smiled, and the raw skin was pulled even tighter across the cheekbone, it lost its pink color, becoming almost as white as the skin on his other cheek. It made the darker pink of his full, undamaged lips even more noticeable.
Lorna suddenly realized she was staring, at his burns and at his lips, instead of listening to what Paul had been saying.
“Sorry?” she stammered.
“I ask you about your other brother? Is it Sandy?”
“That’s right. Alexander really. Mrs. Mack says he would have been called Alex, but he was Sandy soon as they saw that his hair was red like our mum’s. He got Mum’s blue eyes and freckles too.”
“Freckles?” Paul asked.
“Oh, em, the brown dots, across your nose and face.” Lorna prodded her face in explanation. “You know, freckles.”
Paul nodded in understanding.
“Freckles,” he repeated.
“Yes, Mum had freckles and blue eyes. And red hair. I don’t really remember her because I was only three when she died, from the influenza. We have photographs of her, but you can’t see that her hair was red.”
Strangely, Lorna found it easy to talk about her mother, like this, in the abstraction of someone else’s memory.
“But no red hair or freckles for you?” Paul asked.
“No, not for me, or for John Jo either. We are both true Andersons, like my dad—dark eyes, dark hair and dark souls, that’s what my grandpa used to say.”
“Dark souls?” Paul said, shaking his head doubtfully. “I do not think—”
“It’s true,” Lorna said, “Sandy’s quite the opposite of John Jo and me. He’s incredibly clever, and also kind and sweet. We’re just selfish and bad-tempered. You just wait till you meet my brothers, then you’ll see I’m right.”
Something in Paul’s expression made Lorna think about the words she’d just uttered. Wait until you meet them … Why would Paul ever meet them? John Jo and Sandy might not be back until the war was over, by which time the prisoners would be gone from Gosford. And then it struck her, how would either of her brothers feel if they found her cozily chatting with an enemy soldier like this? She knew exactly how they’d feel, and she knew what they’d do about it too.
Lorna suddenly felt panicked, as if there were army boots outside the door, and jumped to her feet. What had she been thinking, trusting this stranger, this enemy, with her precious memories?
“Sorry, I need to get back to the house,” she said, grabbing Paul’s dishes and dashing for the door.
Just