She crept down the ladder, let herself out. The beauty of the moonlit sea, even in her wretchedness, took her breath away, but she would not let herself be seduced again, not ever — and she began to walk quickly up the lane between the alders and the hazel bushes.

Then, as she came up behind the house, she heard music. Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, a wonderful tune, dreamy… and saw light streaming out onto the terrace.

Of course. Verena’s dance. She had entirely forgotten — inhabiting, since her mother’s phone call, a different world. As she crossed the gravel, meaning to take a short cut to the road, she saw that the drive was full of cars: two-seaters mostly, the colour bleached out of them by moonlight, but the shape — predatory, privileged — perfectly clear. Cars for laughing young men with scarves blowing behind them, young men with goggles and one arm round their giggling girls, driving too fast.

There had been a shower earlier. As she made her way across the lawn, her shoes were soaked. The Chinese lanterns swayed in the breeze, but the long windows were uncurtained and open at the top. She could see as clearly as on a stage the couples revolving. The melody had changed; it was a tango now. She knew the words: It was all ’cos of my jealousy. Some of the guests were dancing cheek to cheek, most were hamming it up, because it was impossible for the British to take anything seriously; certainly not jealousy, certainly not love.

The room, now that the double doors were open, seemed vast; the banks of flowers, the silver champagne buckets belied the informality of Verena’s dance. A few older women sat round the edge, watching the girls in their perms and pastels, the arrogant young men.

And how arrogant they were; how they brayed and shrieked as the music stopped, tossing their heads, pulling their girls to the array of glasses, pouring out more drinks. How they laughed, and slapped each other on the back, while in Vienna people were being piled into cattle trucks and taken to the East, and Heini –

But her mind drew back. It would not follow Heini.

Now she could see Quin. He had come into the room and he was carrying something in a tall glass — carrying it to Verena, to where she sat in a high-backed chair. He didn’t look like the braying young men, even in her anger she had to admit that. He looked older and more intelligent, but he was part of all this. He belonged.

Verena was simpering and he bent his head attentively, squiring her, while the dowagers smirked and nodded. It seemed to be true, what everyone said — that he would marry Verena. She was pointing to something on the floor and he bent to pick it up and handed it to her, gallantly, with a bow. A rose from her extraordinary headdress! Quin as a Rosenkavalier — that was rich! A man who’d rushed out of the Stadtpark as though the music of her city was a plague…

And as if they read her thoughts, the three serious dark-suited men on the dais launched into a waltz! Not Strauss, but Lanner whom she loved as much. She knew it well, she had danced to it with Heini in the Vienna Woods.

‘Oh no! Not that old stuff!’ She could hear the braying, blond young man with the slicked-back hair. ‘Give us something decent!’ A second youth, almost identical, staggered up to the band, shaking his head.

But the band went doggedly on: playing not well, perhaps, but carefully, and the young men gave in and pulled the girls out and began to lurch about, parodying the sweetness of the waltz, exaggerating the steps. Most of them were drunk now, they enjoyed colliding with each other, enjoyed deriding the music of another land. Now one of them stumbled and almost fell — a tall youth with black curls and that was really funny. His partner tried to pull him up and then a red-haired boy with freckles flicked champagne into his face. It was all so hilarious. All such a scream…

The stone was in her hand before she knew that she had picked it up. She must have seen it earlier, for it was the right size, heavy enough to make an impact, small enough for her to propel it with force. The act of throwing it was wonderful: a catharsis — and the crash of the splintered glass. It seemed that she waited for seconds, minutes almost, yet it was not so, for by the time Quin came out on to the terrace, followed by an excited, angry group of revellers, she was already running back out of the light, across the grass… was down in the lane which would lead her to the road.

‘There she is!’

‘It’s a girl! Come on, let’s get her!’

Then Quin’s voice, quiet, yet a whiplash. ‘No. You will all go back inside. I know the girl, she comes from the village and I will deal with her.’

They obeyed him. He had seen where she went, but there was a danger she would turn from the lane into the copse for shelter, and though he knew she could not escape, for the wood ended in a high fence and a stream, there were sometimes gin traps there, set by poachers. Even so, he schooled himself not to run till he was out of sight of the house.

He caught up with her easily. She had done exactly as he had expected.

‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘There may be traps! Take care!’ He spoke in German, using all the means to calm her, approaching slowly. ‘Don’t move.’

But she had already stopped. When he came up to her she was leaning against a spruce sapling, her posture, in the fleeting moonlight, that of a young St Sebastian waiting for arrows.

His words, when they came, punctured her martyred pose in an instant.

‘I don’t like bad manners,’ said Quin quietly. ‘These people are my guests.’

Her head went up. ‘Yes. The kind of guests one would expect you to have — a man who owns the sea. Braying, mindless idiots who mock at music. Don’t they know what is going on? Can’t they even read? Have they seen the papers? No, of course they only read the sporting pages; which horse has gone faster than another and the report of who curtseyed to the King in a headdress of dead ostriches.’ She was shaking so much that her words came in bursts between the chattering of her teeth. ‘Today… now… while they get drunk and scream in their ridiculous clothes, my people are gathered up and put into cattle trucks and sent away. While they pour wine onto the floor and fall over, young boys who believed in the brotherhood of man are beaten senseless in the street.’

Quin made no move to comfort her. He was as angry as she was, but his voice was entirely controlled. ‘I will not point out to you that your people — using the word in a different sense — stood in the Heldenplatz and yelled in their thousands for Hitler. But I will tell you this. In mocking at the people you saw here, you commit more than ill manners; you commit an injustice over which you will burn with shame — and very soon. For it is these braying boys who the moment war comes will flock to fight. It is they who will confront the evil that is Hitler even though they do it for a jape and a lark. The boy who drank too much and fell over has just passed out of Sandhurst. He’s Ann Rothley’s only son and if war breaks out I wouldn’t give him six months. His friend — the one who poured champagne over him — is a lieutenant in the Marines. He’s engaged to that girl in the blue dress and they’ve put their wedding forward because he’s being posted overseas. The Bainbridge twins — the ones who don’t like waltzes — are in the air force. Both of them. I suppose they might last a year because they’re excellent pilots, but I doubt it. You will be able to look into that room this year or next year or the year after and see a roomful of ghosts — of dead men and weeping women. While your Heini, I wouldn’t be surprised, will still be playing his arpeggios.’

‘No!’ Her voice was scarcely audible. She could not turn from the shelter of the tree. ‘I had a phone call this evening. They’ve caught him. Heini is in a camp.’

Chapter 21

‘I can’t,’ said Heini in a choking voice. ‘I can’t do it.’

The red face of the camp commandant with its

brutal jaw, its small blue eyes, thrust itself into Heini’s.

‘Oh, I think you can. I think you’ll find you can.’

Heini saw the flash of the knife in the commandant’s hand, and realized that he was defeated. There was not even a potato peeler — he was expected to peel three buckets of potatoes under a cold water tap. He had explained that he was a pianist, that his hands were not like other people’s, that they were his livelihood, and no one had listened, no one cared. One slip of the blade and he would not be able to practise, perhaps for weeks.

Beside him, Meierwitz had already started, neatly slicing off the discoloured eyes, dropping the naked potatoes into the water. But Meierwitz was different, he came from a working-class district in the Ruhr; Meierwitz was used to hardship; he whistled as he worked, he pointed out a robin on the fence post, watching them.

For Heini, the grey fields, the grey sky, the murmur of the sea on the shingle beach a mile away, were a featureless, nightmare world. The somnolent black and white cows grazing behind the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp might have been creatures from Hades. It was his third day in captivity and already he knew that he would crack up under the strain. The men slept six to a hut, they rose at seven to do PE in the freezing cold, breakfast was porridge which he had read about and never seen, and bread and dripping — and always tea, tea, tea — never once a cup of coffee. Then came these frightful chores — potato peeling, vegetable slicing, any of which could damage his hands, and in the evening the raucous noise of mouth organs or the wireless or people playing poker for matchsticks. And now lectures were being organized, compulsory ones, and the previous night there had been a film show where a mindless comic had run about playing the ukelele and losing his trousers. If this was what passed for culture among the British, he was going to be very unhappy here.