'More clothes? This house is full of your clothes now.'

'It's not.' Her voice was harsh and she was angry. And then, more rueful: 'I knew you'd be beastly.'

'You remember what we agreed, Gloria. We are not going to make this a permanent arrangement.'

'I'm just your weekend girl, aren't I?'

'If that's the way you want to think about it. But there are no other girls, if that's what you mean.'

'You don't care about me.'

'Of course I do, but I must have just a bit of wardrobe space. Couldn't you take a few things back to your parents… and maybe rotate things as you need them?'

'I should have known you didn't love me.'

'I do love you, but we can't live together, not all the week.'

'Why?'

'There are all sorts of reasons… the children and Nanny and… well, I'm just not ready for that sort of permanent domestic scene. I must have breathing space. It's too soon after my wife left.' The words came out in a torrent, none of them providing any real answer for her.

'You're frightened of the word "marriage", aren't you? That really frightens you.'

'I'm not even divorced yet.'

'You say you're worried about your wife getting custody of the children. If we were married, the court would be more sympathetic to the idea of you keeping them.'

'Perhaps you're right, but you can't get married before you're divorced, and the court will not look favourably upon a bigamist.'

'Or look favourably upon a father living with his mistress. So that's the reason?'

'I didn't say that.'

'You treat me like a child. I hate you.'

'We'll talk about it when I come back from Berlin. But there are other people involved in such a decision. Have you considered what your parents are likely to say to you if you moved in here?'

'What they'd say to you, that's what concerns you, isn't it? You're worried about what my parents are going to say to you.'

'Yes, I am concerned about them.'

She began to cry.

'What's wrong, darling?' I said, although of course I knew what was wrong. 'Don't be in such a hurry about everything. You're young.'

'I've left my parents.'

'What's that?'

'All my things are in the suitcase – my books, my pictures, the rest of my clothes. I had a terrible row with my mother, and my father took her side. He had to, I suppose. I understand why he did it. Anyway, I've had enough of them both. I packed my things and left them. I'm never going back.'

I felt sick.

She went on: 'I'm never going back to them. I told them that. My mother called me names. She said awful things about me, Bernard.'

She was crying more seriously now, and her head fell onto my shoulder and I could feel the warm wet tears on my bare skin. 'Go to sleep, sweetheart. We'll talk about it tomorrow,' I said. 'The plane doesn't leave until lunchtime.'

‘I not staying here. You don't want me, you've told me that.'

'For the time being…'

‘I not staying here. I have someone I can go to. Don't worry, Bernard. By the time you come back from Berlin all my things will be out of here. At last I can see you as you really are.'

She was still limp in my arms, still sobbing with a subdued and desolate weariness, but I could hear the determination in her voice. There was no way she was going to stay except on promise of marriage and that was something I couldn't bring myself to give. She turned over to face away from me and hugged herself. She wouldn't be comforted. I remained awake a long time, but she went on sobbing very quietly. I knew there was nothing I could do. There is no sadness to compare with the grief of the young.

24

Berlin is a sombre city of grey stone. It is an austere Protestant town; the flamboyant excesses of South German baroque never got as far as Prussia 's capital. The streets are as wide as the buildings are tall, so that the cityscape dwarfs people hurrying along the windswept streets, in a way that the skyscrapers of Manhattan do not overwhelm the human figure. Even Berlin 's modern buildings seem hewn from stone, their glass façades mirroring the grey sky, monolithic and forbidding.

Inside Lisl Hennig's hotel the furniture had the same massive proportions that characterized the city. Solid, stately, and uncompromising, the oak tables, the heavy mahogany wardrobes, and the elegant Biedermeier cupboards and china cabinets of peach and pear wood dominated the house. Even in my little room at the top of the house, the corner cabinet and the chest of drawers, the carved chair and the bed built high upon several mattresses left little space to move from window to door.

I always slept in this room. It was the one I'd occupied as a child, when my family had th? top floors assigned to them by the British Army of Occupation. From this window I'd floated my paper aeroplanes, blown soap bubbles, and dropped water bombs into the courtyard far below. Nowadays no one else wanted to use this dark cramped little box room so far from the bath. So the dark-brown floral patterned wallpaper remained, and over the tiny fireplace there still could be seen the framed engraving of medieval Dresden that Lisl Hennig had put there to hide the marks where Werner's air gun had been fired at a drawing of Herr Storch, the fat mathematics teacher. Storch had been a dedicated Nazi, but he had somehow managed to evade the denazification procedures and get his job back after the war.

I moved the picture to show Werner that the marks were still there. 'Spat! spat! spat!' said Werner, firing an imaginary pistol at the place where the drawing of Storch had once been.

'You've got to hand it to him,' I said without mentioning Storch by name. 'He stuck to his views.'

'He was a Nazi bastard,' said Werner without rancour.

'And he did little to hide it,' I said. The sky was black with storm clouds and now the rain began, huge drops of water that hit the glass with loud noises and made patterns on the dirty windowsill.

'Storch was cunning,' said Werner. 'He rephrased all his Nazi claptrap into anti-British and anti-American tirades. They could have put him inside for spreading Nazi ideas, but the British and the Americans kept telling everyone how much they believed in free speech. They couldn't do much about Storch.' Werner was standing by the fireplace, fidgeting with the china figure of William Tell that had been relegated to this room after a maid had dropped it into the sink while cleaning it. The pieces had been stuck together with a glue that had oozed to make brown ridges around the arms and legs.

I'd been trying to find some suitable opportunity to tell Werner about Tessa's meeting with my wife and about her request for the children, but the right moment didn't come. 'Do you ever see him? Herr Storch, do you ever see him?'

'He got married again,' said Werner. 'He married a widow who had a watchmaker's shop in Munich.' Werner was dressed in a dark-grey worsted jacket and the corduroy trousers that the Germans call Manchesterkosen. His shirt was green and with it he wore a green polyester tie with little red horses. On the hook behind the door he'd hung a tired old grey raincoat. I knew he had an appointment with some East Bloc bank officials that afternoon, but even if he hadn't told me, I would have guessed he was going over to the East; he always wore such proletarian clothes when going there. His long black coat with its astrakhan collar and the kind of tailored wool suits he preferred, to say nothing of his taste in shoes, would have been too conspicuous in the streets of East Berlin.

'Trust Storch to fall on his feet.'

'He made your life hell,' said Werner.

'No, I wouldn't say that.'

'All that extra homework, and always making you come out to the front of the class and do the geometry at the blackboard.'