The Forest of Souls. Carla Banks

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       5

      Faith leaned back in her chair and listened to the verbal fencing that was going on between Grandpapa and this journalist, Jake Denbigh. When she’d arrived, Grandpapa had seemed confused and upset. Or that’s what she’d thought when she came into the room, but he’d greeted her as normal, and now seemed to be enjoying himself, sometimes evading Denbigh’s questions, sometimes using them as an opportunity for dogmatic pronouncements.

      Denbigh didn’t seem unduly put out by these tactics. He was good-humoured and persistent, and gradually this paid off. She watched as her grandfather’s interest was aroused, and he began to talk seriously about the difficulties of starting again as an immigrant in a strange country, in a continent that had been ravaged by war.

      ‘Is it easier now?’ he was saying. ‘There is always suspicion of the stranger. People are people, Mr Denbigh.’

      Before Denbigh could step in, he went off on a tangent about human nature, the urge to fear and reject anything that was different. Denbigh flashed her a quick, amused glance as he caught the thread of Grandpapa’s argument and deftly brought it back to the topic in hand. ‘Were you made to feel a stranger, Mr Lange? You’d fought for Britain.’

      ‘I was always the stranger,’ Grandpapa said.

      There was a box of photographs on the table, which interested her. Grandpapa was not a photograph person. As far as she knew, he didn’t even own a camera. She picked up one of the wallets and began to flick through it, keeping half her attention on the interview.

      They seemed to be business photos–records of official events that must go back years. She hadn’t known they existed. She had a sudden vision of Grandpapa’s life shut away and hidden in locked desks and dusty boxes, old papers in government offices, crumbling away to nothing, lost, because no one cared, apart from the restless archivists, people like Helen who would search and sift and bring the past to light.

      The interview was winding up. Denbigh’s questions were moving towards the general now. ‘You’ve always had a reputation as a risk taker. It’s one of the things that made you so successful. What makes someone like you walk so close to the line?’

      Grandpapa shrugged. ‘What is there to lose if the gamble fails? It is only fear that stops you.’

      Denbigh looked at Grandpapa. ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Eastern Europe was closed to us for decades. Has the new openness reunited you with your past?’

      The silence stretched out. She saw that look of blankness she thought she’d seen in his eyes when she first arrived. She took a breath to intervene, but then he spoke.

      ‘I have never left it,’ he said.

      Denbigh stood up, closing his notebook carefully. He held out his hand to Grandpapa. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Lange. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.’

      ‘And I you, Mr Denbigh,’ Grandpapa said.

      ‘I’ll see you out,’ Faith said. She followed him out of the room and retrieved his coat from the hall closet, noticing as she did so that the central heating was switched off. No wonder the house was so cold. Irritated, she pressed the button to trip the switch. Grandpapa was taking economy to ridiculous lengths these days. She needed to talk to him about that.

      Jake Denbigh was waiting in the hall. She gave him his coat. ‘Was that useful?’ she asked as she unlocked the front door.

      It was a formal query, but to her surprise he took it seriously. He paused in the doorway. ‘I don’t know. I think so. He’s СКАЧАТЬ