Tamar by Mal Peet Page A

Loenen. Johannes was still alive, just. They’d had to lie him facedown on a table with his head over the edge to stop him drowning in his own blood. He managed to hang on long enough to see his wife for the last time. He died ten minutes after she got there.”
    Tamar flicked the remains of his cigarette into the dark.
    “Marijke says it wasn’t until the following afternoon that Oma let them wash his blood from her hands and face. She couldn’t speak. When she still hadn’t managed to say anything a month after the funeral, Marijke began to think she never would. It looks like she was right.”
    Dart found that he had nothing to say either.
    Tamar stood up and slung the Sten gun round onto his back. “These people matter to me. More than they should, probably. I would like to think that I can protect them, but the truth is that by being here I’m putting them in danger. I suppose when Nicholson told me where I’d be based, I should have said no. But —”
    “But you don’t argue with Nicholson,” Dart said.
    Tamar nodded as though Dart had hit on the right explanation. “Exactly. No one argues with Nicholson. That’s right.”
    An hour later, Tamar stole barefoot into Marijke’s room. The curtains were pulled back, and the room was full of moonlight. She was sitting upright against the blue-white pillows, the blue-white sheet pulled around her; her face was divided in two by the shadow of the window sash. He sat sideways on the bed, then lowered himself so that his head rested on her shoulder. He felt the hardness of her collarbone against his cheek. She put her right hand to his face. They spoke in whispers.
    “You haven’t told him about us.”
    “No,” he said.
    “I don’t understand.”
    Tamar sighed but didn’t speak.
    She said, “It was so difficult tonight. I thought you must have told him, but then I watched his face and saw that he had no idea. I wanted to touch you but your eyes kept telling me not to.”
    “My love, I’m sorry.”
    “Oma actually told him, did you see that? And Ernst didn’t understand. He thought she was still talking about the puppet shows, and I didn’t translate. She looked so . . . confused.”
    “Marijke, I —”
    “Is it against the rules, our relationship?”
    He let his breath out: a sigh, almost a laugh. “Probably. I don’t know.”
    “Don’t you trust him?”
    “Of course I trust him. Of course I do. It’s not that.”
    She turned and let his head fall gently onto the pillow. She looked down at him, leaning on her elbow. “But this is all about trust, isn’t it? Are you afraid that if Ernst knows about us, he won’t be able to trust you? He’ll start to think you’d put me first, rather than him?”
    And he wondered how he could have forgotten how clever she was. Sooner or later she would work out what he was actually afraid of. It wasn’t exactly a matter of trust, or lack of it. It was something more dangerous than that: envy. In English just a little word, but in the sound of it there was something green and grasping and wormy.
    He said, “I just don’t want anyone — anything — to touch us. There are things I want to . . . keep out.”
    Later, when Marijke was asleep, he kissed her again and eased himself from the bed. Then, reluctantly, he went to the cold spare bedroom.
    Dart had fallen into deep sleep so quickly that when the nightmare woke him, he felt panicked and confused, completely ignorant of where he was. The strange gargling noise was coming from his own mouth, he realized. Someone had stabbed him in the throat with a pen and his windpipe was filling with black ink. He was so certain this had happened that his hand flew to his neck to feel for the wound. After a while, he was calm enough to realize that he was cold. He felt on the floor for his sweater and put it on, then spread his coat on top of the thin quilt. The gun slipped from the pocket and clattered onto the bare floorboards. He groped around for it and laid it on