The playing-field was empty. The shutters were closed on the changing hut. Turning on the overhead lamp, she read the time by her watch, but by then the first lights were coming up in the valley and the river was lost in the low mist of dusk. Turner stepped heavily on to the path and pulled open the passenger door.
'Waiting for someone?' he asked and sat down beside her, closing the door quickly so that the light went out again. He switched off the wireless.
'I thought you'd gone,' she said hotly, 'I thought my husband had got rid of you.' Fear, anger, humiliation seized hold of her. 'You've been spying on me all the time! Crouching in the bushes like a detective! How dare you? You vulgar, bloody little man!' She drew back her clenched fist and perhaps she hesitated when she saw the mess his face was in, but it wouldn't have made much difference because at the same moment Turner hit her very hard across the mouth so that her head jerked back against the pillar with a snap. Opening his door he walked round the car, pulled her out and hit her again with his open hand.
'We're going for a walk,' he said, 'and we'll talk about your vulgar bloody lover.'
He led her a long the timber path to the crest of the hill. She walked quite willingly, holding his arm with both her hands, head down, crying silently.
They were looking down on to the Rhine. The wind had fallen. Already above them, the early stars drifted like sparks of phosphorus on a gently rocking sea. Along the river the lights kindled in series, faltering at the moment of their birth and then miraculously living, growing to small fires fanned by the black night breeze. Only the river's sounds reached them; the chugging of the barges and the nursery chime of the clocks telling off the quarters. They caught the mouldering smell of the Rhine itself, felt its cold breath upon their hands and cheeks.
'It began as a dare.'
She stood apart from him, gazing into the valley, her arms clutching round her body as if she were holding a towel.
'He won't come any more. I've had it. I know that.'
'Why won't he?'
'Leo never said things. He was far too much of a puritan.' She lit a cigarette. 'Because he'll never stop searching, that's why.' 'What for?'
'What do any of us look for? Parents, children, a woman.' She turned to face him. 'Go on,' she challenged. 'Ask the rest.'
Turner waited.
'When intimacy took place, isn't that what you want to know? I'd have slept with him that same night if he'd asked me, but he didn't get round to it because I'm Rawley's wife and he knew that good men were scarce. I me an he knew he had to survive. He was a creep, don't you realise? He'd have charmed the feathers off a goose.' She broke off. 'I'm a fool to tell you anything.'
'You'd be a bigger fool not to. You're in big trouble,' Turner said, 'in case you don't know.'
'I can't remember when I haven't been. How else do I beat the system? We were two old tarts and we fell in love.'
She was sitting on a bench, playing with her gloves.
'It was a buffet. A bloody Bonn buffet with lacquered duck and dreadful Germans. Someone's welcome to someone. Someone's farewell. Americans I should think. Mr and Mrs Somebody the Third. Some dynastic feast. It was appallingly provincial.' Her voice was her own, swift and falsely confident, but for all her efforts it still possessed that note of hard-won dexterity which Turner had heard in British diplomatic wives all over the world: a voice to talk through silences, cover embarrassments, retrieve offences; a voice that was neither particularly cultured nor particularly sophisticated but, like a nanny in pursuit of lost standards, doggedly trod its course. 'We'd come straight from Aden and we'd been here exactly a year. Before that we were in Peking and now we were in Bonn. Late October: Karfeld's October.
Things had just hotted up. In Aden we'd been bombed, in Peking we were mobbed and now we were going to be burned in the Market Place. Poor Rawley: he seems to attract humiliation. He was a prisoner of war as well, you know. There ought to be a name for him: the humiliated generation.'
'He'd love you for that,' said Turner.
'He loves me without it.' She paused. 'The funny thing is, I'd never noticed him before. I thought he was just a rather dull little... temporary. The prissy little man who played the organ in Chapel and smoked those filthy cigars at cocktail parties... Nothing there... Empty. And that night, the moment he came in, the moment he appeared at the doorway I felt him choose me and I thought: "Look out. Air raid." He came straight over to me. "Hullo,Hazel." He'd never called me Hazel in my life and I thought: "You cheeky devil, you'll have to work for this." '
'Good of you to take the risk,' said Turner.
'He began to talk. I don't know what about; I never much noticed what he said; any more than he did. Karfeld I suppose. Riots. All the stamping and shouting.
But I noticed him. For the first time, I really did.' She fell silent. 'And I thought, "Hoi:where have you been all my life?" It was like looking in an old bank book and finding you've got a credit instead of an overdraft.
He was alive.' She laughed. 'Notlike you a bit. You're about the deadest thing I ever met.'
Turner might have hit her again, were it not for the awful familiarity of her mockery.
'It was the tension you noticed first. He was patrolling himself. His language, his manners... it was all a fake. He was on guard. He listened to his own voice the way he listened to yours, getting the cadence right, putting the adverbs in the right order. I tried to place him: who would I think you were if I didn't know? South American German?... Argentine trade delegate? One of those. Glossy-latinised Hun.' Again she broke off, lost in recollection - 'He had those velvety German endbits of language and he used them to trim the balance of every sentence. I made him talk about himself, where he lived, who cooked for him, how he spent his weekends. The next thing I knew, he was giving me advice. Diplomatic advice: where to buy cheap meat. The Post Report. The Dutchman was best for this, the Naafi for that; butter from the Economat, nuts from the Commissary. Like a woman. He had a thing about herbal teas; Germans are mad about digestion. Then he offered to sell me a hair- dryer. Why are you laughing?' she asked in sudden fury.
'Was I?'
'He knew some way of getting a discount: twenty-five per cent, he said. He'd compared all the prices, he knew all the models.'
'He'd been looking at your hair too.'
She rounded on him: 'You keep your place,' she snapped. 'You're not within shouting distance of him.'
He hit her again, a long swinging blow deep in to the flesh of the cheek and she said 'You bastard' and went very pale in the darkness, shivering with anger.
'Get on with it.'
At last she began again: 'So I said yes. I was fed up anyway. Rawley was buried with a French Counsellor in the corner; everyone else was fighting for food at the buffet. So I said yes, I would like a hair- dryer.At twenty-five per cent off. I was afraid I hadn't got the money on me; would he take a cheque? I might just as well have said, yes I'll go to bed with you. That was the first time I saw him smile; he didn't smile often as a rule. His whole face was lit up. I sent him to get some food, and I watched him all the way, wondering what it was going to be like. He had that egg walk...
Eiertanz they call it here...
just like in Chapel really, butharder. The Germans were crowding the bar, fighting for the asparagus, and he just darted between them and came out with two plates loaded with food and the knives and forks sticking out of his handkerchief pocket;grinning like mad. I've got a brother called Andrew who plays scrum-half at rugger. You could hardly have told the difference. From then on, I didn't worry. Some foul Canadian was trying to get me to listen to a lecture on agriculture and I bit his head off. They're about the only ones left who still believe in it all, the Canadians. They're like the British in India.'