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 along 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 mean 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.’