‘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. ‘Not like 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 into 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, but harder. 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.’