'You should forbid them more, Siebkron,' Herr Saab declared recklessly, his voice thick with burgundy. 'They are crazy damn fools, Siebkron. Turks.' Saab had out-talked and out-drunk them all, forcing them into embarrassed silence. Only his wife, a little blonde doll of unknown origin and a sweet, revealed bosom, continued to vouchsafe him admiring glances. Invalids, incapable of retaliation, the remaining guests sat dying under the sheer tedium of Herr Saab's diatribe. Behind them, two Hungarian servants moved like nurses a long the beds, and they had been told - there was no doubt in Turner's mind -that Herr Ludwig Siebkron merited more attention than all the other patients put together. And needed it. His pale, magnified eyes were already drained of all but the last drops of life; his white hands were folded like napkins beside his plate, and his entire listless manner was that of a person waiting to be moved.

Four silver candlesticks, 1729, by Paul de Lamerie, octagonal based and, in the words of Bradfield's father, quite decently marked, joined Hazel Bradfield to her husband like a line of diamonds down the long table. Turner sat at the centre, midway between the second and third, held rigid by the iron bands of de Lisle's dinner jacket. Even the shirt was too small for him. The head porter had obtained it for him in Bad Godesberg for more money than he had ever paid for a shirt in his life, and now it was choking him and the points of the half-starched collar were stabbing the flesh of his neck.

'Already they are coming in from the villages. Twelve thousand people they will have in that damn Market Place. You know what they are building? They are building a Schaffott .' His English had once more defeated him. 'What the hell is Schaffott ?' he demanded of the company at large.

Siebkron stirred as if he had been offered water. 'Scaffold,'he murmured, and the dying eyes, lifting in Turner's direction, flickered and went out.

'Siebkron's English is fantastic!' Saab cried happily. 'Siebkron dreams of Palmerston in the daytime and Bismarck in the dark. Now is evening, you see: he is in the middle!' Siebkron heard the diagnosis and it gave him no comfort at all. 'A scaffold . I hope they may be hang the damn fellow on it. Siebkron, you are too kind to him.' He lifted his glass to Bradfield and proposed a long toast pregnant with unwelcome compliments.

'Karl- Heinz also has fantastic English,' the little doll said. 'You are too modest, Karl- Heinz. It is just as good as Herr Siebkron's.' Between her breasts, deep down, Turner glimpsed a tiny flash of white. A handkerchief? A letter? Frau Saab did not care for Siebkron; she cared for no man, indeed, whose virtue was extolled above her husband's. Her interjection had cut the thread; once more the conversation lay like a fallen kite, and for a moment not even her husband had the wind to lift it.

'You said forbid him.' Siebkron had picked up a silver nutmeg grater in his soft hand and was gently turning it in the candlelight, searching for telltale flaws. The plate before him was licked quite clean, a cat's plate on a Sunday. He was a sulky, pale man, well scrubbed and no more than Turner's age, with something of the hotelier about him, a man used to walking on other people's carpets. His features were rounded but unyielding; his lips autonomous, parting to perform one function, closing to perform another. His words were not a help but a challenge, part of a silent interrogation which only fatigue, or the deep cold sickness of his heart, prevented him from conducting aloud.

'Ja . Forbid him,' Saab assented, leaning well across the table in order to reach his audience. 'Forbid the meetings, forbid the marching, forbid it all. Like the Communists, that's the only damn thing they understand. Siebkron, Sie waren ja auch in Hannover ! Siebkron was there also: why don't he forbid it? They are wild beasts out there. They have a power, nicht wahr, Siebkron ? My God, I have also made my experiences.' Saab was an older man, a journalist who had served a number of newspapers in his time, but most of them had disappeared since the war. No one seemed in much doubt what sort of experiences Herr Saab had made. 'But I have never hated the English. Siebkron, you can confirm that. Das können Sie ja bestätigen . Twenty years I have written about this crazy Republic. I have been critical -sometimes damn critical - but I have never been hard against the English. That I never was,' he concluded, jumbling his last words in a way which at once cast doubt upon the whole assertion.

'Karl- Heinz is fantastically strong for the English,' the little doll said. 'He eats English, he drinks English.' She sighed as if the rest of his activities were rather English too. She ate a great deal, and some of it was still in her mouth as she spoke, and her tiny hands held other things that she would eat quite soon.

'We owe you a debt,' said Bradfield with heavy cheerfulness. 'Long may you keep it up, Karl- Heinz.' He had arrived back from Brussels half an hour ago, and his eye was on Siebkron all the time.

Mrs Vandelung, the wife of the Dutch Counsellor, drew her stole more snugly over her ample shoulders. 'We are going to England every year,' she said complacently, apropos of nothing at all. 'Our daughter is at school in England, our son is at school in England...' She ran on. Nothing she loved, cherished or possessed was not of an English character. Her husband, a shrivelled, nautical man, touched Hazel Bradfield's beautiful wrist and nodded with reflected fervour.

'Always,' he whispered, as if it were a pledge. Hazel Bradfield, waking from her reverie, smiled rather solemnly at him while her eyes regarded with detachment the grey hand that still held her. 'Why, Bernhard,' she said gently, 'what a darling you are tonight. You will make the women jealous of me.' It was not, all the same, a comfortable joke. Her voice had its ugly edge; she could be one of several daughters, Turner decided, intercepting her angry glance as Saab resumed his monologue; but she was not merciful to her plainer sisters. 'Am I sitting in Leo's place?' he wondered. 'Eating Leo's portion?' But Leo stayed at home on Tuesdays... and besides, Leo was not allowed here, he reminded himself, raising his glass to answer a toast from Saab, except for a drink.

Saab's subject, miraculously, was still the British, but he had enriched it with autobiographical matter on the discomforts of bombing: 'You know what they say about Hamburg? Question: what is the difference between an Englishman and a man of Hamburg?

Answer: the man of Hamburg speaks German. You know in those cellars, what we were saying?

Thank God they are British bombs ! Bradfield, prosit! Never again.'

'Never again indeed,' Bradfield replied, and wearily toasted him in the German style, looking at him over the brim of his glass, drinking and looking again.

'Bradfield, you are the best piece . Your ancestors fought at Waterloo, and your wife is as beautiful as the Queen. You are the best piece in the British Embassy and you didn't invite the damn Americans and you didn't invite the damn French. You are a good fellow. Frenchmen is bastards,' he concluded to everyone's alarm, and there was a moment's startled silence.

'Karl- Heinz, I'm sure that isn't very loyal,' said Hazel and a little laugh went up at her end of the table, originated by a pointless elderly Gräfin summoned at the last moment to partner Alan Turner. An unwelcome shaft of electric light broke upon the company. The Hungarians marched in from the kitchen like the morning shift and cleared away bottles and china with inconsiderate panache.

Saab leaned still further across the table and pointed a big, not very clean finger at the guest of honour. 'You see this fellow Ludwig Siebkron here is a damn odd fellow. We all admire him in the Press Corps, because we can't never damn well get hold of him, and in journalism we admire only what we cannot have. And do you know why we cannot have Siebkron?'

The question amused Saab very much. He looked happily round the table, his dark face glistening with delight. 'Because he is so damn busy with his good friend and... Kumpan .' He snapped his fingers in frustration. 'Kumpan ,' he repeated. 'Kumpan ?'

'Drinking companion ,' Siebkron suggested. Saab stared at him lamely, bewildered by assistance from such an unexpected quarter. 'Drinking companion,' he muttered; 'Klaus Karfeld,' and fell silent.

'Karl- Heinz, you must rememberKumpan ,' his wife said softly, and he nodded and smiled at her valiantly.

'You have come to join us, Mister Turner?' Siebkron enquired, addressing the nutmeg grater. Suddenly the lights were on Turner, and Siebkron, risen from his bed, was conducting the rare surgery of a private practice.

'For a few days,' Turner said. The audience was slow in gathering, so that for a moment the two men faced one another in secret communion while the others continued their separate pursuits. Bradfield had engaged in a desultory cross-talk with Vandelung; Turner caught a reference to Vietnam. Saab, suddenly returning to the field, took up the subject and made it his own.

'The Yanks would fight in Saigon,' he declared, 'but they wouldn't fight in Berlin. Seems a bit of a pity they didn't build the Berlin Wall in Saigon.' His voice was louder and more offensive, but Turner heard it out of the dark that was beyond Siebkron's unflinching gaze. 'All of a sudden the Yanks are going crazy about self-determination. Why don't they try it in East Germany a little bit? Everyone fights for the damn Negroes. Everyone fights for the damn jungle. Maybe it's a pity we don't wear no feathers.' He seemed to be challenging Vandelung, but without effect: the old Dutchman's grey skin was as smooth as a coffin, and nothing would sprout there any more. 'Maybe it's a pity we don't have no palm trees in Berlin.'

They heard him pause to drink. 'Vietnam is shit. But at least this time may be they can't say we started it,' he added with more than a trace of self-pity.

'War is terrible,' the Gräfin whickered, 'we lost everything,' but she was talking after the curtain had gone up. Herr Ludwig Siebkron proposed to speak, and had put down the silver nutmeg grater in order to signify his will.

'And where do you come from, Mister Turner?'

'Yorkshire.' There was silence.

'I spent the war in Bournemouth.'

'Herr Siebkron meant which Department,' Bradfield said crisply.

'Foreign Office,' said Turner. 'Same as everyone else,' and looked at him indifferently across the table. Siebkron's white eyes neither condemned nor admired, but waited for the moment to insert the scalpel.