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Boy read the inscription on the back. "Earl Fitzherbert?" he said scornfully.
"Yes. The previous earl, your grandfather--and mine. Daisy found that photo at Ty Gwyn." Lloyd took a deep breath. "You told Daisy that no one knows who my father is. Well, I can tell you. It's Earl Fitzherbert. You and I are brothers." He waited for Boy's response.
Boy laughed. "Ridiculous!"
"My reaction, exactly, when I was first told."
"Well, I must say, you have surprised me. I would have thought you could come up with something better than this absurd fantasy."
Lloyd had been hoping the revelation would shock Boy into a different frame of mind, but so far it was not working. Nevertheless he continued to reason. "Come on, Boy--how unlikely is it? Doesn't it happen all the time in great houses? Maids are pretty, young noblemen are randy, and nature takes its course. When a baby is born, the matter is hushed up. Please don't pretend you had no idea such things could occur."
"No doubt it's common enough." Boy's confidence was shaken, but still he blustere
d. "However, lots of people pretend they have connections with the aristocracy."
"Oh, please," Lloyd said disparagingly. "I don't want connections with the aristocracy. I'm not a draper's assistant with daydreams of grandeur. I come from a distinguished family of socialist politicians. My maternal grandfather was one of the founders of the South Wales Miners' Federation. The last thing I need is a wrong-side-of-the-blanket link with a Tory peer. It's highly embarrassing to me."
Boy laughed again, but with less conviction. "You're embarrassed! Talk about inverted snobbery."
"Inverted? I'm more likely to become prime minister than you are." Lloyd realized they had got into a pissing contest, which was not what he wanted. "Never mind that," he said. "I'm trying to persuade you that you can't spend the rest of your life taking revenge on me--if only because we're brothers."
"I still don't believe it," Boy said, putting the photo down on the side table and picking up his cigar.
"Nor did I, at first." Lloyd kept trying: his whole future was at stake. "Then it was pointed out to me that my mother was working at Ty Gwyn when she fell pregnant, that she had always been evasive about my father's identity, and that shortly before I was born she somehow acquired the funds to buy a three-bedroom house in London. I confronted her with my suspicions and she admitted the truth."
"This is laughable."
"But you know it's true, don't you?"
"I know no such thing."
"You do, though. For the sake of our brotherhood, won't you do the decent thing?"
"Certainly not."
Lloyd saw that he was not going to win. He felt downcast. Boy had the power to blight Lloyd's life, and he was determined to use it.
He picked up the photograph and put it back in his pocket. "You'll ask our father about this. You won't be able to restrain yourself. You'll have to find out."
Boy made a scornful noise.
Lloyd went to the door. "I believe he will tell you the truth. Good-bye, Boy."
He went out and closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1943 ( II )
Colonel Albert Beck got a Russian bullet in his right lung at Kharkov in March 1943. He was lucky: a field surgeon put in a chest drain and reinflated the lung, saving his life, just. Weakened by blood loss and the almost inevitable infection, Beck was put on a train home and ended up in Carla's hospital in Berlin.
He was a tough, wiry man in his early forties, prematurely bald, with a protruding jaw like the prow of a Viking longboat. The first time he spoke to Carla, he was drugged and feverish and wildly indiscreet. "We're losing the war," he said.
She was immediately alert. A discontented officer was a potential source of information. She said lightly: "The newspapers say we're shortening the line on the eastern front."
He laughed scornfully. "That means we're retreating."
She continued to draw him out. "And Italy looks bad." The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini--Hitler's greatest ally--had fallen.
