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nothing mattered. They
could have lain down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His
flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever
to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew
now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long
scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that
was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a
surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion
of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had
been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its
rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than
flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her
skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked
back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It
was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered
whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was
inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept
squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but
not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her
clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet
seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you
can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it
to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might
pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you