away from her husband’s voice, and instinctively he reached out and pulled her back against the wall. A moment later Ritter was in the room, blinking against the steam. Silas sensed the sergeant on the other side of the open door. He felt the weight of the man, and he strengthened his hold on the sergeant’s wife. Silas had never before been so frightened or felt so alive. Jeanne’s heart was beating hard against his chest as she leant into him. It was as if their bodies had made a decision for them, and now they were powerless to stop the ongoing course of events.
After Ritter left, Jeanne emptied the clothes from the laundry baskets onto the stone floor and then pulled off her own to add to the heap. Her nakedness inflamed Silas, not only because he thought her beautiful but also because of her defiance. Then and afterward, the thought of Ritter was never far from either of their minds when they made love. They were settling scores with passion.
At first they were happy. Ritter was often away on business, and the Professor never left the manor house. His health had deteriorated since he had broken with his younger son, and there was a grove of trees near the west wall of the grounds where Silas and Jeanne felt safe from detection. It was invisible both from the professor’s study and from the manuscript gallery on the second floor.
Jeanne lay on the floor of pine needles and unwound the mane of her rich auburn hair so that it fell across her lover’s knees. Looking dreamily up through the treetops toward the sun, she told him the story of her past. She’d kept her family dead and buried deep inside herself all the years she’d been married to Ritter, but now they came to life again. Her father had been the local postman, and in the years before the war she and her younger brother would walk out with him into the countryside beyond Caen after his rounds were over for the day. They took straw baskets and picked blackberries in the hedgerows, and Jeanne looked for the wild woodland flowers to take home to her mother, who wouldn’t be separated from her kitchen. She always kept one back for her father to wear in the buttonhole of his green tweed jacket.
Philippe, her brother, was ten years old and still he couldn’t read or write. But he made up for it by his innate kindliness. If you asked him to fetch the coal, he would do it again and again until you had to order him to stop. He had curly black hair and was a little overweight. Everyone loved him and wanted to protect him. Except that when it mattered, they didn’t. After the Germans came, they built a house for backward children on the coast, and one morning, when Jeanne’s father was out at work, the nurses came and took Philippe away. There were other children in the truck, and there was no real time to say goodbye. Jeanne never saw her brother again, and after that day her father stopped taking her out into the countryside. Instead he began to drink too much red wine in the evenings and took to singing patriotic songs out of key. He swore to Jeanne and her mother almost every day that he would protect them from the Nazi bastards, but in the end, when the British came, he hadn’t been able to save himself, let alone anyone else. He’d been caught in the cross fire just like so many others.
Jeanne wept when she thought of her father and her mother and Philippe and everything she had lost. All the emotions that she had kept battened down since she left France thirteen years before rose to the surface and burst through the floodgates of her self-control. She emptied herself onto Silas, and it wasn’t long before he began to feel suffocated by her. All his life he had learnt the virtues of self-restraint. To show your heart only meant more hurt from adopted parents or bastards like Ritter. And the truth was that Silas couldn’t have exposed himself to another human being even if he had wanted to. He had long since locked himself up and thrown away the key. He couldn’t provide Jeanne with the emotional response she craved, and so she began to make him angry. But he took care not to show her what he felt. He wanted her, and besides, he was frightened of Ritter. Silas tried not to think of what the fat man would do to him if he ever discovered the truth.
But sometimes he didn’t succeed. There was one day that Silas would never forget as long as he lived. It was the summer after his mother died, and he had gone into his father’s study, as he sometimes did, early in the morning when he was sure that no one was around. The professor never got up before ten, and Silas thought that Ritter was away on business. He sat at his father’s desk and idly opened the drawers one by one. Ritter found him with several letters in his hand. Silas didn’t have time to replace them in the drawer from which he’d taken them. The sergeant had done that, keeping hold of Silas’s wrist as he did so. And then he’d squeezed. Lightly at first, and then harder and harder still. Silas hadn’t tried to struggle. It was as if the pressure of Ritter’s thumb had paralysed him. It felt like the sergeant was exploring him in some horribly intimate way. Silas remembered how Ritter had looked down at him from above. There was a look of rapt concentration on his face, and then, just before the end, the tip of Ritter’s tongue had come out, flicking round the corners of his big mouth.
The physical pain had been bad, but the shame afterward was worse, far worse. Silas felt as if Ritter had looked deep down inside him-at his guts, his intestines, his liver and kidneys. And after he let go, Ritter only said one thing: “No more sneaking about, Silence, you hear me. You know what I’ll do if I catch you again, don’t you? You know what’ll happen next time.”
And Silas had known. He didn’t need to be told. He could imagine exactly what it would feel like when the sergeant’s big hand reached between his legs and took hold of him down there.
Silas was frightened, and so he was forever urging caution on Jeanne. It made her think that he didn’t really love her, and part of her didn’t want to be careful. It was almost as if she wanted her husband to know what she was doing to him. But now her meetings with Silas became less frequent, and when they met, they argued. Silas wanted to finish the affair, but he didn’t have the courage to tell her how he felt. He couldn’t let her reach the point where she had nothing left to lose.
In truth, he grew tired of Jeanne. It wasn’t in Silas’s nature to want what he already had. Instead he lay awake at night and thought of Sasha, who seemed so entirely indifferent to him. Now when he met Jeanne in the trees out near the west wall of the manor grounds, he would close his eyes and pretend that she was Sasha. And afterward, in the evening or the early morning, he would return to the same place with his camera and focus his telephoto lens on Sasha’s windows. Sometimes he’d get lucky. The curtains would remain undrawn, and he could take photographs. He kept them under lock and key in his room and gazed at them at night when everyone was asleep. There were several of Sasha in her robe, leaning over with her breasts partially exposed, and one where she was naked with her back to the camera. It was extraordinary, the contrast between her perfect neck and her burnt, ravaged shoulders.
Jeanne guessed nothing of all this. She knew that Silas often avoided her, but she put this down to his almost irrational fear of her husband. For her it was different. Now that she had begun to live a little bit, Ritter seemed less significant. Once or twice she even caught herself laughing at his situation. He guessed nothing of her infidelity. He carried on abusing her without once imagining that she was cuckolding him with the colonel’s son.
Jeanne stepped out into the corridor but then paused before going downstairs, looking out through a tall narrow window at the grey, overcast sky. A big wind was blowing the elm trees from side to side, and Jeanne felt glad of the coat that she carried over her arm. In the kitchen she could hear her husband washing the plates from his breakfast, but it wasn’t fear of him that made her hesitate in the hallway. She was too busy remembering the past. Closing her eyes, she could hear the running and the shouting all around her once again. She had stood exactly here, a few paces back from the thick front door, waiting for the right moment to pick up an overcoat and hat that had fallen on the floor. When everyone had gone, she’d hung them back on the rack and then stood waiting behind the locked door for the police cars to arrive.
“Wake up, Jeanne. You look like Lot’s wife. Not mine.”
Jeanne turned, startled out of her reverie. Ritter was inches behind her, his fat face creased with laughter. She hadn’t heard him coming. He must have crept up on her. It was a favourite trick of his. For a big man, he had an uncanny ability to move almost soundlessly, and he always enjoyed the moment of shock induced in his victim when he suddenly announced his presence behind them. It was juvenile, but Jeanne had long ago realised that her husband was at bottom extraordinarily immature. He pursued his own pleasure, usually at the expense of other people, and was able to do so with such single-mindedness because he had no capacity to imagine what they were feeling. He was entirely without empathy. It was what made him capable of first raping his wife before she had even had time to wake up, and then playing a practical joke on her half an hour later.
Ritter had never really grown up. That was the key to understanding him. It made him both strong and weak. He had considerable native cunning, and he was almost entirely unrestrained by conscience. But he wanted to be led-to be led and to be loved, and the colonel had given him what he needed. In the army and afterward. Now, with the colonel gone, Ritter felt lost. He ate even more than ever-big breakfasts like today-but it did nothing to fill the emptiness that he felt inside.
Ritter had understood nothing of the colonel’s manuscripts, but John Cade’s desire to own things and people had made perfect sense to him. The colonel’s ruthlessness and singularity of purpose had been the qualities that
