The Last Wolf (5 page)

‘Your wife's not a sailor as well?' the grandfather asked.

‘She died some years ago.'

‘I'm very sorry to hear that, Herr Richter.'

‘Yes, it was a great loss to us.'

They progressed from the main course – a mutton stew, which reminded Reinhard of the stolen sheep – to a pudding made of cherries and sponge. It was good, though he didn't much care for the yellow sauce with the wrinkly skin that went with it.

Afterwards the grandmother suggested a game of croquet.

‘Just you young ones while we sit and have coffee.'

Reinhard said, ‘I regret that my brother and I do not know how to play this game.'

‘Oh, that doesn't matter. Hamish and Stroma will show you.' She smiled at him. ‘It's just for fun. There's no need to take it seriously.'

But he took all competitive sports seriously – athletics, tennis, swimming – and he didn't care to lose. His father had always stressed the importance of winning. Second best was not good enough, third was a humiliation, fourth a disgrace and anything else unthinkable. The girl's brother was watching him.
Hamish always wins
, she had told him.

The grandfather said, ‘You can play doubles – you and your brother against Hamish and Stroma. Does that sound all right to you?'

Father would not expect him to refuse; it would be discourteous to their host. ‘Yes, sir.'

‘Excellent.'

Outside, there was still plenty of daylight left – a long Scottish summer evening. Even some sunlight. They went down mossy stone steps on to the lawn where the brother handed out the heavy sticks and told them the rules. There were six hoops and four balls – blue, black, red and yellow. One side would use the blue and black balls, the other the red and yellow. The point of the game, apparently, was to move your ball round the lawn by striking it with the stick (called a mallet), so that it went through all six hoops in the correct order and direction and then hit the peg stuck in the middle of the lawn. Both partners must achieve this in order to become the winners. Turns were to be taken in the sequence of the peg's four painted bands, starting with the blue. Passing through a hoop was known as ‘running it' and earned an extra shot, and if you hit one of the other three balls this was called making a ‘roquet' and you must then place your own ball in contact with the one you'd just hit and hit it again with your ball. This was called ‘taking croquet' and could only be done once to that ball between hoops.

Hamish had spoken fast, running his words together in the way that the English did, but Reinhard had listened very closely and it all sounded quite easy. They tossed a coin for which side should start, and almost immediately he discovered that it wasn't easy at all. The brother was as good as he had feared, and Stroma, though she was wild with the mallet, was often lucky. Whenever the brother earned extra shots, which was frequently, he would use his own ball to whack one of theirs hard, sending it rolling across the lawn, far away from the hoop. Stroma did the same, if she got the chance, though she couldn't hit as hard.

‘It's part of the game,' the brother told Reinhard when he protested. ‘Tactics, you see. You have to plan ahead. A bit like chess.'

He played on grimly, convinced now that the match had been set up deliberately to humiliate them. Hamish and Stroma had both finished and won while he and Bruno were still trailing far behind.

‘Bad luck!' the brother called out and they all shook hands in a very sporting English manner.

Luck had had nothing to do with it; they had never stood a chance. He swiped angrily at his ball and sent it cannoning over the lawn edge. When he went to find it, the girl came after him and helped him search in the long grass. This time it was she who found the ball and held it out. It was all he could do not to snatch it from her.

She looked up at him. ‘You're jolly cross about losing, aren't you?'

‘No,' he lied. ‘Not at all.'

‘Yes, you are. I can tell. You're scowling and looking awfully angry. Really furious, actually. You're not a very good sport, are you?'

He knew that the British set great store by good sportsmanship. If you lost you must look as happy as if you had won and be sure to congratulate your opponent as you shook hands, which he and Bruno had failed to do.

‘I am sorry. I do not often lose. Winning is important to me.'

‘But that's silly. It's only a game. It doesn't really matter whether you win or lose.'

‘It matters to me,' he said.

When they climbed back up to the lawn, Bruno and the brother had disappeared. The sun, he saw, was sinking down in a crimson blaze of glory.

‘The skies here are very wonderful.' He tried to make up for his poor behaviour. ‘I think they are even better than we have in Germany.'

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I wouldn't know. I've never been to Germany.'

From her cool tone he understood that she had not approved at all of his bad sportsmanship. ‘Then you must come one day when you are older. It's not so far away to visit. You could come to Hamburg and stay at our home. When you are bigger. How old are you now?'

‘Twelve.'

Older than he had thought; she was very small for her age. A little shrimp standing beside him. He could easily pick her up and carry her under one arm if he wanted – which would probably make her as angry as he had been about losing the game of croquet.

‘I am seventeen.'

‘Yes, I know. I heard you tell my grandmother. And you're going to join the German Navy when you leave school. That's what your father said.' For some reason she didn't seem to approve of that either.

‘If I am accepted into the Academy.'

‘Will you be in a submarine, like your father?'

‘I hope so. We call them U-boats.'

‘I know. There are pictures of them in Hamish's war comics.'

‘Comics?'

‘Sort of magazines. Adventures about the war. He's got stacks of them. They show German U-boats fighting with the Royal Navy and torpedoing our ships. Is that what your father did?'

‘He sank some ships, yes.' Seventy-eight to be precise but, of course, he would not tell her that. It was on the tip of his tongue, though, to tell her about his father going in to Glas Uig and stealing the sheep, but he stopped himself in time.

She said, ‘I think it's a sneaky sort of thing to do – hide under water to attack ships.'

He did not know the word she had used, but he guessed its meaning.

‘Submarines are not always under water – they must often come to the surface. And the British Navy has submarines, too, you know.'

‘They're not like U-boats.'

He couldn't see her expression because the wind was blowing her hair across her face, but he felt her deep disapproval.

She said, ‘Hamish thought you were German spies.'

‘Spies?' He was taken aback. ‘But we are not at war now.'

‘We might be again one day.'

‘In Germany, we hope this could never happen.'

But he was not so sure that it was true. His country could not be kept subjugated forever. So, perhaps, there might have to be another war one day. Perhaps he might have to sink British merchant ships, like Father had done, and fight against the Royal Navy.

They went on watching the sky changing, the crimson spreading like spilled paint across the sky. He had certainly never seen such a sunset.

She said suddenly, and in a much softer tone, ‘I'm very sorry about your mother dying. It must have been awful.'

‘Yes. It was not nice.'

He remembered it very well: the visits to the hospital, his mother's efforts to keep on speaking and smiling as she grew paler and thinner, shrinking in her white bed. Towards the end, she had given up trying to speak and smile and lay still and silent with her eyes shut. He had been ten years old, Bruno seven.

‘Who looked after you afterwards?'

‘My father, and our servant, Greta, who we have had for many years. And we were going to school every day in Hamburg.'

She corrected him once more. ‘We went to school – not we were going. You'd only say that if you were in the middle of going somewhere when something else happened.'

He said stiffly, ‘We went to school.'

‘What about during the holidays?'

‘Father always takes us sailing and we always play much sport.' His English was probably wrong again but he went on quickly, before she could interrupt. ‘We are always busy. But, of course, we are not so lucky to have a beautiful island like this.' He was trying to make more amends not only for being unsporting but also a suspected spy. ‘When will you leave here?'

‘In September. When we have to go back to school.' She pulled a face. ‘Ugh!'

‘You do not like your school?'

‘They're sending me to a new one next term – a boarding school miles away. I know I'll hate it.'

‘Perhaps not.'

‘Yes, I will.' She sounded very certain.

‘Well, we leave tomorrow morning, so you must come and see our boat before we go. You and Hamish.' He gave her a winning smile – his most charming, which he knew was very charming indeed. ‘Then we can show you that we are certainly not spies.'

They went indoors and, before the evening ended, the grandmother played the grand piano. He thought that the waltz was probably by Chopin and it was very pleasant to sit listening to it in the fine old room. He'd never learned any musical instrument himself, but his father had a big collection of records – the heavier-going works of Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and so on. When the grandmother had finished and they had applauded politely, he asked the girl if she played too.

‘A bit.'

‘I am sure that you are very good.'

‘Actually, I'm very bad.'

The grandmother said, ‘Don't talk such nonsense, Stroma. Reinhard would like to hear you play, wouldn't you, Reinhard? I think the Nocturne would be very nice.'

She went unwillingly over to the piano and wriggled to the edge of the stool so that she could reach the pedals. She was biting her lower lip in concentration as she started to play. So serious, so intent that he wanted to smile. She was not as good as her grandmother, of course, and her hands were too small to reach some of the chords properly, but she'd lied to him about being very bad. He listened intently, his eyes fixed on her.

Later that evening, once the visitors had gone, Stroma told her brother of Reinhard's invitation.

Surprisingly, Hamish agreed. ‘I think we ought to go, so we can see if there's anything suspicious.'

‘What sort of thing?'

‘A radio transmitter . . . secret code books . . . cameras . . . things like that. Keep your eyes peeled.'

‘Reinhard wouldn't have asked us to go there if they were spies.'

‘Yes, he would. To put us off the scent. Actually, I thought Bruno seemed quite decent – for a German. When I showed him my models, he thought they were brilliant.' Hamish's bedroom was full of model ships that he'd made. ‘I asked him about their Navy and he said they don't have much of one at the moment. He's really more interested in planes and he'd sooner join their Air Force, though his father doesn't know it. They're only supposed to fly gliders at the moment, but I bet they don't stick to that. You can't trust them an inch.'

Stroma lay in bed that night, listening to the quiet splashing of the sea against the rocks, and thinking about the elder brother. He was sunburned, which made his eyes look very blue and his teeth very white, and the sun had bleached his hair blond. A spy would never look like that, whatever Hamish said. Spies were small and dark and ugly: nothing like Reinhard at all.

It was raining the next morning – misty curtains of drizzle drifting in from the sea and moving across the island. Reinhard waited on deck until he saw the brother and sister come out of the woods and clamber across the boulders on to the stone jetty. Unlike himself, they wore no waterproof clothing – only shorts and woollen jumpers – and their feet were bare. From the way they hopped aboard
Sturmwind
he could see that they were familiar with boats.

‘You are very wet,' he said to the girl, who had ignored his outstretched, helping hand. ‘I hope you will not take a cold.' Her hair was plastered flat to her head, raindrops running down her face and dripping off the end of her nose.

‘Oh, no. We never do. We're used to it. It's
catch
a cold, not take, by the way. Just in case you wanted to know.'

He hadn't wanted to know at all. ‘Well, I hope you will not catch one.'

His father, in a very good humour, took charge, conducting their visitors down the companion ladder and showing them the galley on the port side, the chart table on the starboard, the saloon which doubled as the main cabin, the forward cabin where he and Bruno slept. Everything was very clean and tidy and well polished; it always was.

Father clapped his hand on Hamish's shoulder.

‘So, what do you think of our
Sturmwind
?'

‘She's very nice indeed, sir.'

‘Are you a good sailor?'

‘I'm not too bad, sir.'

‘And your sister?'

‘She's pretty hopeless.'

His father laughed. ‘But she will get better when she is older and stronger. If we come back to Islay one day, you must both come to sail with us.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

Reinhard doubted that they would come back for years, if ever. By next summer he would have finished at high school and, with luck, he would be going to the Naval Academy as soon as he had done his National Labour Service. There would be no time for long sailing holidays; time only for study and hard work.

Back on deck, as they were leaving, he said to Stroma, ‘I will write a letter to you from Hamburg, if you don't mind. Perhaps you will write also to give us your news?'