Last Man to Die by Michael Dobbs Page B

than any of the taunts she had hurled at him since puberty had snatched the child from her and turned him into yet another deceiving, unworthy man. He had remained at university one vacation, preferring to spend his time with books and fellow students, and she had pursued him there, making such a scene of sobbing accusation and hysteria in front of his few close friends that he had felt humiliated and forced to do what he had vowed not to, and return home with her. No sooner had they stepped inside the front door than the tears turned to taunts and recrimination. Accusations about his friends. His loyalties. His obligations to her. His right to be his own man. ‘I made you, and what you are. Never forget that!’ she had screamed.
    And he had slapped her. Once. Full across the face. He wasn’t quite sure why. Not just hate, nor simply frustration. Perhaps because what she said was true, she had made him, uncertain and unsure, a man with no family and no experience of love, perhaps not a full man, perhaps incapable of love. If he were ever to find out, to discover what sort of man he truly was, or might become, it would have to be without her. And he had slapped her because that was the only way he knew to put an end to it. To go beyond the point of no return, to walk away, never to look back.
    But as Hencke looked across the kitchen at the old woman he couldn’t stop himself looking back,reliving it all, losing himself in the mists of his haunted memories.
    Why on earth had they been painted red? Some Bolshy bloody painter, he supposed. Maybe he should have them repainted blue, a good Tory colour, and ignore the bleatings he would get from the two Labour members of his War Cabinet. Still, it scarcely mattered any more. The war in Europe would be finished with soon, the bombardment of London by Hitler’s rockets finished with even sooner as their launch sites were over-run, and then he wouldn’t have to use this subterranean rathole any more. Oh, to be in fresh air once again … He leaned back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke towards the low ceiling and its huge steel girders, painted as red as traffic lights, which had captured his attention. According to the engineers they were strong enough to bear the collapsed weight of the entire building underneath which the wartime Cabinet complex had been built. ‘Has anyone told Goering?’ he once enquired sceptically. He always felt uneasy under here. It was not that he was afraid to die, his contempt for his personal safety had been proven on battlegrounds throughout the British Empire during his younger years as a soldier, but that had been in the mountains of India’s North West Frontier, on the Sudanese plains or the open veldt in Southern Africa. Not cooped up in a sewer. He felt claustrophobic, uneasy, and the damp wormed its way into his bones. His bad shoulder was playing up again and he tried unsuccessfully to massage the ache from it. Not much longer, he sighed, as he watched the cigar smoke being caught in the draught of a wall fan and dispersed to the far corners of the small roomamongst the fifteen other people attending Cabinet.
    Churchill was distracted. The First Lord of the Admiralty was droning on about shipping figures, a matter which had ceased to interest Churchill since Admiral Doenitz’s U-boats had lost control of the Atlantic and stopped sinking merchantmen by the score. At that time it had been a matter of finding enough food to eat and oil to fuel the Spitfires and Hurricanes. Now it was all about tonnages of this and tonnages of that and how the fishermen were demanding the return of their boats requisitioned for war duty. Statistics. Bloody statistics. He had no mind for them any more. Some people wanted to fight the entire war with statistics, but war wasn’t about desiccated figures; it was about men, real-life flesh and blood men, and hopefully more of the other side’s flesh and blood than your own. He dragged his thoughts back down