The German Numbers Woman Read online

  Laura removed one of the earphones: ‘I got a video from town. Thought some entertainment together might do us good. It’s called Zulu. We can watch it after supper. I’ll tell you the landscape and what’s going on.’

  He wanted to stay in the wireless room, but the treat was impossible to resist. To do so would be churlish. She had grown so perfect at describing scenery and action in films that he might as well not have been blind.

  She called that the meal was ready. For the first course there was grilled herring fresh from the boats, and a bottle of cold white wine – straight out of the refrigerator. ‘You feed me too well,’ he said.

  She took the headset off. ‘You need it, burning your energy at that wireless.’

  ‘I’ll get fat. I’m putting on weight as it is.’

  ‘You are,’ she laughed. ‘So much the better for me. Come on, silly.’

  He clattered back the chair, stood to hold her for a moment, then let her lead him into the dining room.

  FOUR

  The field sloping up from the broad canalised river was opaque and dark compared to the luminous streak of water which looked set to run over the banks at the next visitation of rain. Little more than the roof tiles showed, until Richard got to the crest of the opposite rise, white overlapping planks of its walls standing out in the dusk.

  Thick grass, rich food to fatten sheep and cattle, bent under his boots, and he wondered when the rabbits would feel the sting of hot shot from the twelve-bore carried by Ken who walked at his own pace behind. Clean Sussex air gusted over the wooded ridge and, closing the gate carefully, Richard paused as the last daylight melted in the meadows to either side of the river.

  Ken drew level. ‘It ain’t dark enough.’ They walked along the lane to a position downwind, Ken’s wellingtons squeaking on the saturated grass. ‘Won’t get no darker, though.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it will.’ Richard’s leather Trickers squelched into ruts and potholes which couldn’t be dodged. He was glad, without knowing why, when a rabbit went shot-free in crossing the track. Last night one ran almost the whole length of the lane before the house, caught in his car beams, as if a jump to safety meant the drop of a thousand-foot cliff. Lit up by the chase, Richard wanted to run the bunny down, but it took the risk rather than be crushed under his tyres, and must have been relieved to find itself alive.

  ‘Flash a light,’ Ken said softly.

  He steadied the eight-volt lamp, till a rabbit lifted its head in the beam, ears flattened. Water in his eyes distorted the image. Hard to make out what it was.

  ‘It’s something,’ Ken said. ‘Keep the torch on.’ His double-barrelled twelve-bore had been left to him by Group Captain Willis, for looking after his estate, a light and efficient killer of wildlife at seventy yards. Richard had looked at it, a new toy to handle. Daedalus the ancient artificer couldn’t have made one better – if it had been possible in those days.

  Ken slid two plastic-coated cartridges primed with black shot into the breeches. In his sixties, he still had the best of eyesight, certainly better than mine, Richard thought. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘It ain’t a rabbit, but blessed if I know what it is.’

  Richard’s eyes were still blurred by the wind, and he focused them on Orion’s Buckle and Belt rearing over the wood like buttons on the cloak of an otherwise-invisible man. ‘So what can it be?’

  Ken stepped forward and looked across the greying fields. ‘Darned if I know. I’m flummoxed.’ He had whispered in Richard’s kitchen one night over a glass of whisky about having grown up poorer than the poor. In the thirties his parents and four kids had been turned out of their tied cottage, to live in a tent most of one winter in Cotton’s Wood, till the father found another place. ‘I used to look at the stars, and say I’d never live like this again. And I was only ten. People don’t know what poor is these days.’ Which was a preliminary bit of hype for the cunning old rogue to suggest, a few days later, that Richard pay a higher rate for having his garden looked after. Hard to refuse after hearing such a hard luck story. He should try being at sea on a small boat with nothing but a wild gale as an overcoat. Still, he didn’t want to deny Ken’s truth about his appalling childhood.

  A phosphorescent glow by a clump of reed grass might be the tail of a rabbit and, if so, Ken was sure to score. Sharp sight and country know-how had put him in charge of a Bren gun section in Normandy during the war, and he had been in some of the worst fighting. After five years in the army he rarely moved beyond a few miles from where he was born, as if the luck of surviving had unnerved him. The only mechanical transport he allowed himself was a bike, though he would go on a bus if his wife was with him. He didn’t smoke, and drank little more than homemade parsnip wine in his cluttered parlour.

  A grunt as he fired. The flash and noise sent pigeons rattling in the trees, and Richard felt Ken’s reluctance to dash along the torch’s beam. He must have known there was no rabbit at the end of the light, but Richard’s presence had distorted his judgment. The wasted bullet had gone through a rectangular cake of cattle salt. Luminous in the dazzling light, it lay as if it had been manufactured with a hole in the middle.

  Richard brought the gun to his shoulder, and Ken wondered what the silly so-and-so was up to. On his own, he’d have had a couple of bunnies for the pot by now. Not wanting to go home without having fired a shot, Richard squeezed the trigger, and the cake of salt disappeared.

  An owl hooted from inside the wood, the letter R in morse. ‘Sounds a bit like them noises I sometimes hear coming from your attic,’ Ken said. ‘All them squeaks.’

  Richard broke the gun, stooped to put the empty case into his pocket. ‘That’s just my hobby.’

  Mud at the gate had been churned by cattle and tractors. ‘I often wondered,’ Ken said. ‘They used to be spies as did that, didn’t they?’

  The wind was fresh, though not cold for October. Weeks of rain had left the fields spongy. ‘In war, they did.’ Richard decided to use earphones all the time from now on, in case the police sent a specialist to snoop in the bushes and listen to what he was taking down. ‘I don’t suppose there were any spies around here. They were caught early, so I read. They hanged them. Or maybe they were shot.’

  He hadn’t noted such a vindictive tone from Ken before: ‘Serve ’em right, as well.’

  Out of Richard’s unease rose the question as to why he had decided to come out for a night’s shooting with his bumpkin of a gardener. Even harder to say why he was on earth, as if looking at the stars might bring back a long-dead sense of right and wrong.

  ‘No rabbits’ll be seen on such a night,’ Ken said, on the way up the gravel path to Richard’s house. ‘I’ll be off now, to see what the wife’s got for supper.’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  Ken sensed that Richard didn’t care to. ‘It’s only a mile. A walk’ll do me good.’

  He locked the garage, and saw him out of the gate, on the way to the back door noting his aerial slung between two willow trees, branches shaking in the wind. Must stop it going up and down like a yo-yo – though he was satisfied with the circular plate-like satellite dish clamped to the roof and beamed into planetary realms. In that respect it was a suitable house, up on a hill and giving good all-round reception.

  He would have liked a smell of supper when he got in. Was it from spite, or indolence? She thought of everything, so it must be spite. He shook off his boots by the cloakroom door, set the guns in their cabinet, and put on slippers, unable to say what room she would be in. Couldn’t much care. Probably in the sitting room.

  Roaming the fields made you hungry. Ken would sit down to his roast or hotpot, with jam roll and custard to follow, his fat wife slapping it down yet glad to see him eat; but Richard put a slice of smoked bacon in the pan and when it was halfway brown cracked in an egg, and two hemispheres of ripe tomato. A breakfast at night was enough to go to bed on, though he wouldn’t get there for some time. No need to watch his weight, being slim enough at forty. Pale hair, which Amanda always said resembled a toupee, was short enough to never need combing.

  He ate quickly, a blob of yolk splashing the knee of his jeans, wiped with a paper towel. Smoke from the toaster came up, so he banged the side and trowelled butter on burnt bread. Amanda stood in the doorway: ‘You’re stinking up my kitchen with your fry-ups again.’ She pressed the switch: ‘Try using the extractor fan.’

  The noise was like that of a plane taking off, and he relished silence now and again. ‘I forgot.’

  Relaxed, or so you might assume, he was ready to spring, like a panther and as unpredictable, blue eyes turned on her, looking slightly mad, as always, and fully knowing the power of his expression. He was about middle height, less tall than she, but tight with violence, always to be feared, except when he was feeling northwest passage and midnight sugar rolled into one. Then she was as mad as he, but with love, so that was all right. ‘You always do forget. It’s there for keeping the smells of cooking down.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Well, you paid for it.’

  The only way to let her have the last word was to keep quiet. He needed to mark the cessation of the day by a sanitary cordon of tranquillity, but she had often said that if she didn’t talk she felt like a waxwork and, he admitted with a smile (which could only annoy her) she certainly looked a pretty one, beautiful even. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I had a salad earlier. Where were you?’

  ‘After rabbits, with Ken.’

  ‘All boys together, eh? Why didn’t you let me know you were going out?’

  ‘You were nowhere to be seen.’

  ‘I was at Doris’s. She did my hair.’

  ‘So I see.’ The treatment of her short fair hair had kept th
e aureole of curls tight to her head, and he liked that, but blue-grey eyes and smallish mouth gave her a desultory, hungry look, as if never getting enough of what she wanted out of life, whatever that might be. She wore a high-necked white blouse with a broad tie of equally white bands hanging between the folds of her small bosom. In her late thirties, she could at times look blowsy and haggard, but the glow of dissatisfaction had restored her to the younger woman he had first seen sitting in a park bench reading a book, and fallen in love with. ‘Your hair looks wonderful,’ he told her.

  ‘It’s always best if somebody else does it. When I help Doris in the salon though she pays me well. Says I’m one of the best hairdressers she’s ever had.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true.’

  She liked his compliment but wouldn’t show it, lit a cigarette and said: ‘You could have left a note when you went out.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to me.’

  ‘It never does.’

  Being married, who needs enemies? He wanted to smack her around the chops, but what was the use? He once did so, and she’d walked out. Then she came back, by which time he had got used to living alone. Now he’d got used to living with her again, and didn’t want her to go. Maybe that meant she would. She was more of a mystery to him than he could be to her, whatever she thought. Perhaps he had been neglectful. All she’d wanted was for him to leave a note so that she would know he would be coming back. Whenever he went out she feared he might not (though that could be because she didn’t want him to) unless he let her know exactly where he was going, and that wasn’t always possible. So now and again he made up fancy little itineraries out of kindness, though he didn’t like having to tell lies, which they really weren’t, since no other woman was involved. He supposed their ten-year marriage had gone on too long, more and more memories neither of them could mention without spiralling into dangerous arguments, topics well recognised so that whoever brought one up knew very well what they were doing, thus breaking the rules, which happened when a seeming indifference on one side or the other caused boredom too painful to be endured.

  She was bored now, with him, with life, above all with herself, and the glow of argument was in her.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘you’re too selfish. You’re too mean to share your thoughts with anyone.’

  And that’s how it should be, yet to be called selfish riled him above all else, too proud to go through the list of what he had done for her, and though to be honest assumed she had done as much for him, he couldn’t think for the moment what it was. He only knew he’d helped other people, often, but such unthinking bastards hadn’t thanked him because they considered his money had come too easy.

  ‘I haven’t known you to do a good deed in your life,’ she said. ‘It just isn’t in you.’

  He’d never told her, because if he did she’d say what a fool he had been to help such people. And so he was. But a pure good deed from the goodness of his heart to someone who would appreciate it out of the goodness of his? No, she was right. ‘Oh, pack it in, for Christ’s sake.’

  His menacing tone didn’t scare her, though she knew it should have. ‘Of course, it could be there’s nothing there. I should have realised it from the first. The trouble with me is that I take so long to learn.’

  Such painful denigration in her laugh he knew to be a sham. Silence was the only way to calm matters, though she would consider it a weapon. After pouring tea he sat without moving, though smoke from his cigarette signalled that at least he wasn’t a waxwork. The food boiled in his stomach, for there was nothing he could safely tell her. If he really told her what he did to get money, and described the state of his mind, she would scream herself to death, or bury him with scorn. No, she was as hard as nails. They both were, two worlds incapable of meeting on a human and tolerant level. She already suspected he did something crooked to get money, for how else could he have paid for the house from a suitcase of cash? He wasn’t the mortgage type.

  She fished for the truth with barbed hooks, the last way to get anything. If one day they decided to kill him because he knew too much they might do away with her as well, and should the police pull him in he wouldn’t want them to think she had been involved. He lived such a life that the luxury of easy conversation couldn’t be for him, and so not for them. Everything cost something.

  She sat and faced him. ‘Why did we have to buy a house like this?’

  The same old question: a hilltop house with every comfort, only ten miles from the coast, and within a couple of hours of London. ‘It’s convenient. It has a good view.’

  ‘You mean for your aerials?’ She’d heard it before. Often was too often. She nearly died with worry when he went to crew a yacht back from Gibraltar, and listened to the dreadful weather forecast every day. He took off in the car one morning and said he was going to London, then no word for three weeks. ‘If I’d told you, the worry would have been far worse. If things had gone wrong you might have ended in the drek.’

  He was, at best, lavish and fun to be with, so could you wish a man dead for habits which were as much part of his act as falling in love with you had been, though so long ago? One way or another he had made ten years seem like forever, which in a way she supposed she couldn’t fault him for, if she wanted to live that long, which she could never be sure about, with someone like him.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the house,’ he said.

  She lit another cigarette, and puffed smoke at his face. ‘Nothing a bulldozer couldn’t set right.’

  He blew smoke back. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘If I knew I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Where would you be? More tea?’

  ‘How the hell would I know? Please.’

  The agreeable feeling of mindlessness he’d had while out with Ken had gone. Freedom and the spacious fields had taken away all worries – the sort of mood she couldn’t know about, or envied him for having. ‘I do what I can for you.’

  Like pouring tea. Thank you very much. You know how I live for it. So much preoccupied him, and he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell her about it. He was indifferent to her, didn’t have the resilience to argue and break her boredom. All these years she had sat in the house trying to unravel what routes his blood ran on, but with so little evidence it was useless. He seemed not to care, and only reacted when she goaded him beyond endurance, not even then giving anything away. He would swear and bang his fist against the wall, and go off to sulk in the attic room, where he would either stare despairingly out of the window, or at the curtains when they were drawn. If it was daylight he would glare at the green hell of the countryside. Or he’d sit hunched up at his special wireless taking messages which he said were no business of hers. She might as well be living in a gorilla cage.

  He stood, and came to her. ‘Let’s not have a bust-up. I know life’s not easy for either of us.’ A warm tight hand on the back of her neck usually worked in bringing her to what they both wanted. He’d read in a book that the neck was one of the erogenous zones, and he supposed that was because the main cables from the brain ran through such constricted space to get to the sexual regions lower down. Also there was hair close to the neck, as in the other place. ‘You know there’s nobody else I love like you, nobody I care about, almost nobody else I know, in fact, except the people I have to work with, and I’d rather not know them most of the time.’

  He was talking, not exactly motormouth, but it would have to do. She stood, and who kissed first was hard to say. His body was a stove. She was always amazed at the heat it gave off, how it warmed her into wanting him, or not being able to resist what he had to give, or thinking that to make love was the only way of quietening him, and herself, come to that. She wanted something, anyway, and at the moment it seemed to be a bit of all three, as long as neither said anything more but just got on with what she must have wanted all day, and what he needed as well by the feel of it.