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hers. I loved her, but she didn’t love me. He had nothing to fear. It would never have happened again.’ He looked quickly at the old man and was reassured. ‘She loved music,’ he said, ‘Mozart in particular. I have a disc of the Jupiter at home. I’d like to give it to your wife. You could tell her I found it in the stock room.’
    â€˜We haven’t a gramophone – only a cassette player.’
    â€˜It was made before the days of cassettes,’ he said as a man might have referred to ‘before the days of motorcars’.
    I asked him, ‘What do you mean – it would never have happened again?’
    â€˜It was my fault – and Mozart’s . . . and her loneliness. She wasn’t responsible for her loneliness.’ He said with a touch of anger (perhaps, I thought, if he had been given enough time he might have learnt how to fight), ‘Perhaps he knows now what loneliness is like.’
    â€˜So you were lovers,’ I said. ‘I thought from what Anna-Luise told me it had never come to that.’
    â€˜Not lovers,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t call it that – not in the plural. She spoke to me next day, on the telephone, while he was at the office. We agreed it wasn’t right – not right, I mean, for her to get mixed up with a lot of lies. There was no future in it for her. There wasn’t much future for her anyway as it turned out.’
    â€˜My wife says that she just willed herself to die.’
    â€˜Yes. My will wasn’t strong enough. It’s strange, isn’t it, she didn’t love me and yet she had the will to die. I loved her and yet I hadn’t enough will to die. I was able to go to the cemetery because he didn’t know me by sight.’
    â€˜So there was somebody there to cry for her – besides Anna-Luise and the servants.’
    â€˜What do you mean? He cried. I saw him cry.’
    â€˜Anna-Luise said he didn’t.’
    â€˜She’s wrong. She was only a child. I don’t suppose she noticed. It’s not important anyway.’
    Who was right? I thought of Doctor Fischer at the party whipping on his hounds. I certainly couldn’t imagine him crying, and what did it matter? I said, ‘You know you’d always be welcome. I mean my wife would be glad to see you. A drink one evening?’
    â€˜No,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not. I don’t think I could bear it. You see, they look so much alike.’
    There was nothing more to be said after that. I never expected to see him again. I took it for granted that he had recovered this time, though his death would not have appeared in any paper. He was not a millionaire.
    I repeated to Anna-Luise what he had told me. She said, ‘Poor mother. But it was only a little lie. If it only happened once.’
    â€˜I wonder how he found out.’ It was odd how seldom we named names. It was generally ‘he’ or ‘she’, but there was no confusion. Perhaps it was part of the telepathy that exists between lovers.
    â€˜She said that when he began to suspect – he put a thing on his telephone to record conversations. He told her so himself, so when that conversation took place he must have known. Anyway it wouldn’t surprise me if she told him herself – and told him that it wouldn’t happen again. Perhaps she lied to me because I was too young to understand. Holding hands and listening to Mozart together would have been almost the same as making love to me then – as it was to him – I mean my father.’
    â€˜I wonder if he really wept at the funeral.’
    â€˜I don’t believe that – unless he wept to see his victim disappear. Or perhaps it was hay fever. She died in the hay fever season.’

12
    Christmas came down and covered the land in snow up to the edge of the lake – one of the coldest Christmases for many years, enjoyed by dogs and