Overruled, I shut up, and the two started an animated discussion as to whether Karl Düsig was still living by ‘the River’ – you know, Düsig – Naah! the old rascal! Yes, my goodness, he was still living there! And had just produced another baby: the man was seventy-eight years old, and as I stood there at the luggage registration office, I felt quite extraordinarily envious of him. It was his sixteenth. But now there were only eight minutes till the train was due to leave, and . . .

‘Do you want the papers, Lydia?’ No, she didn’t. She had brought something to read with her. Neither of us suffered from that peculiar disease of finding yourself at a station and suddenly buying a couple of pounds of newsprint, when you can be pretty sure in advance it will be tripe.

And so we got the papers.

Alone in our compartment, we set off via Copenhagen to Sweden. But for the moment, we were still in Brandenburg.

‘How do you like the scenery, Peter?’ asked the Princess. Among other things, we had settled on the name Peter – God only knows why.

The scenery? It was a bright, windy June day – quite cool, and the landscape looked clean and tidy – it was waiting for summer and saying, I am bare.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the scenery . . .’

‘Now, for my money, you really could say something a bit more profound,’ she said. ‘For instance, this landscape is like frozen poetry, or it reminds me of Fiume, only the flora there is more Catholic – something like that.’

‘I’m not Viennese,’ I said.

‘Thank God for that,’ she said. And we travelled on.

The Princess slept. I was thinking quietly to myself.

The Princess often accused me of saying, ‘It’s so nice that you’re there!’ to every woman I was in love with, and she meant every one. Which was an awful lie, because sometimes I would say or think, ‘It’s so nice that you’re there . . . and not here!’ But when it was Lydia who was sitting next to me like this, I would say it and mean it. Why?

Because. In the first place . . . I don’t know. We knew only this: one of the profoundest German sayings is about two people who ‘can’t stand the smell of each other’. We could, and that, if it lasts, already counts for a lot. She was everything to me: mistress, comic opera, mother and friend. What I was to her I could never discover.

And then there was her deep voice. Once I woke her up in the middle of the night, and when she woke with a start, I said, ‘Say something!’

‘You idiot!’ she said, and fell asleep smiling. But I had heard her voice, I had heard that wonderful contralto voice.