‘Let’s sit.’ He pointed to a bench. His legs ached, his stomach was knotted. He led the way, one step, two, as if each stride were a mile, the path mountain scree. His feet splayed forward, out of control. He grabbed the arm of the bench, lowered himself onto it. She sat at the far end, sideways, facing him. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers threaded in a cat’s cradle.

‘I told you I was in Germany at the end of the war.’ She raised an eyebrow, yes. ‘Well, something happened that came back to haunt me.’

‘We’re all haunted by the war,’ she said. Her words could have soothed, but her voice had a challenge in it. ‘So what was so dreadful you couldn’t get over it?’

What did she know about getting over things? She was casual, callous almost, as if she had no understanding of the suffering of war, the choices made in the heat of the moment, no way of imagining what it could be like. She’d been a child. Evacuated, most likely. Spent years in the countryside collecting chickens’ eggs and running free.

‘I was in Berlin,’ he said. His voice had an edge, and he was glad. ‘I can’t tell you what we were doing.’ He looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry, even now. Official secrets and all that. It’s not important. All I can say is that I was a translator. Very lowly on the scale of things.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘You teach German. Makes sense.’

She was staring at the statue of Charles II, at the gravel path, at the grass, threadbare after the summer.

‘My German was formal, pedantic.’

He wasn’t sure, but he thought there was a half-smile.

‘I’m a perfectionist,’ he said. ‘I like to do things well. I wanted to improve it, my everyday German, to become fluent.’ He leaned against the armrest. ‘To be light-hearted, conversational. To banter. The sort of thing that native speakers take for granted.’

Betty shrugged, eyes focused on the grass. She tucked her hands under her thighs, the fabric of her skirt taut across her legs.

She had done that, tucked her skirt beneath her thighs, stretched it tight. He gulped, swallowing his saliva the wrong way, coughing, his eyes streaming. Betty didn’t look up at him, not once, hostility high as a cliff, hard as rock.

‘I found a teacher,’ he went on. He was trembling, jellied with nerves. ‘Who would be prepared to help with my German, for a hundred marks an hour.’ He smiled. ‘Or five cigarettes. That was the currency in Berlin at the time. Cigarettes. Did you know that?’

The muscles in her jaw tightened and her eyes filled with tears. She sniffed, wiped them with the back of her hand. He couldn’t understand why she should be upset. Very few people here worried about the Germans.