GREEKS BEARING GIFTS
The tin of sherbet lemons sits exactly where Archer put it two days ago, gathering dust on his desk.
He does not look at it. He tries, as much as possible, to ignore it.
Für den Kleinen, Huth had said. A present. For your boy.
Cigarette smoke spiralling lazily upwards, his smile knife-edged and unreadable.
He hadn't asked where Huth had got it from, this small miracle of sugar rationing. He doesn't want to know. He can already picture the evicted premises, the children's ransacked bedroom. He imagines Huth finding it among the wreckage, stooping to pick it up from a nest of rubble and shattered glass.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps he bought it on the black-market.
Either way, Archer cannot look at it without thinking of schoolboys being loaded onto trucks, shivering in their uniforms. Of a gloved hand on his son's face, the juxtaposition of black leather and boyish skin somehow blasphemous, somehow obscene. Like the ringing of jackboots upon a church floor. The sacred and the profane.
Gifts are inseparable from the giver and he does not want to bring Huth home with him. The creak of his trench coat, the smell of his cigarettes. With a silver deathshead on his brow and an iron cross glittering at his throat. The thought of his long shadow in the hallway, like a spectre needing to be banished. Better not to invoke it at all. Better not to invite it in in the first place.
There is home, and then there is everywhere else. Inside is safe, a warm soft world of tea and toast and homework done by lamplight; outside is the underworld his work takes him into, the dark alleys filled with bodies and the howl of the air raid sirens.
It's a distinction he has been struggling to maintain for months, fighting a losing battle in the face of shifting lines and slipping boundaries. His walls finally came crashing down the day the bombs fell on Cheam, turning inside out and outside in, turning lives upside down. Interiors spilling out onto the street and his wife's body left open to the air.
He wants to keep Dougie away from all that, keep him shuttling between carefully constructed facades. School, church, home. Lock the door and keep the wolves at bay.
But in the end he does take the tin home with him, if only to bury it at the back of a wardrobe. Out of sight, out of mind. At least this way Harry will stop raising his eyebrows every time he walks past and catches sight of it, this artefact from another time.
A day later the boys meet him at the door with contrite expressions, sticky-mouthed and dusted with sherbet. Sorry, Dad. Sorry, Mr Archer. We were looking for something and we found- They are apologetic but not truly repentant, all guilty grins and conspiratorial nudges. And Archer cannot find it in him to be angry. Perhaps it's better this way after all.
He just prays that Mrs Sheehan never finds out that he's been plying her son with SS sweeties.
We saved the last one for you Dougie says by way of apology, holding it out like an olive branch. Snug in his palm, hard and smooth as a stone.
An unwanted gift trailing too many unknown strings, its provenance too uncertain.
From Kellerman it would have been a bribe, nothing more and nothing less. Reassuring in its simplicity, in its transparent intent. Inspired perhaps by the twin girls smiling out of the silver frame on his desk – pretty in plaits, as fat and golden as freshly-baked loaves. (Archer wonders if they know about the whores, if Lieber Vater ever comes home with lipstick on his collar).
But Huth is a tactician, not a politician. He knows how to negotiate but does not deal in the currency of treats and favours, of flattery and false compliments. He wears no wedding ring and his desk is bare of photographs. From a man like him it could mean anything, it could mean nothing at all.
And if years of classical education have taught Archer anything, it's to beware lavish feasts laid out like offerings at a stranger's table. They are always a temptation, honeyed snares set to catch the unwary. Seductions, of one kind or another. He wonders idly if crystallised citrus counts as fruit, for mythological purposes.
Dad? Is something wrong? Dougie asks, his face crumpling into a frown. Beside him Bob eyes the sweet with sudden suspicion.
No, Archer says hurriedly, no boys, of course not, and pops it into his mouth before he can think. Rolls the powdery-sharp taste of it over his tongue. Childhood fizzling in his mouth, the taste of things long gone and half-forgotten.
Sweet and bitter, both at once.
~*NOTES*~
Written shortly after Episode 2 aired. I thought it was interesting how obviously uncomfortable Archer was with Huth interacting with Dougie at the church – look at his body language, it practically screams don't touch him, don't talk to him, stay the hell away from my kid – so this is my attempt at exploring that dynamic a bit.
Huth probably doesn't actually have any ulterior motives in this, besides liking Archer and by extension his son, but I think he'd probably be thrilled to know how much he's (unintentionally) fucked with Archer's head. Or maybe that was the plan all along…