‘There – that’s the house where old Frau Brüshaber lived, she used to get terribly upset when I got a better report-card than her grandchildren; they were such creeps . . . she said if old Wiedow, the headmaster, had crawled up her ass, then she’d shit him straight into the Baltic! And this house used to belong to old Laufmüller. Haven’t you read about him in your history-books? He was always at odds with the powers-that-be, which at the time meant District President von der Decken, Ludwig von der Decken. To annoy him, Laufmüller bought this mangy old dog and called him “Ludwig”, and whenever von der Decken appeared, Laufmüller, with a broad grin on his face, would call his dog, “Heel, Ludwig, heel!” The District President used to get livid. What with all that going on, we didn’t have a revolution here in 1918. Huh.’

‘And is Herr Müller still alive?’ I asked.

‘Lord, no, he’s been dead for ages. He wanted to be buried at the roadside, with his head directly underneath the road.’

‘What for?’

‘Well . . . so that he could go on looking up the girls’ skirts as long as possible . . . Here’s the customs!’

The customs. A man entered the compartment and politely enquired whether we . . . and we said no, we hadn’t. And then he went away again.

‘Can you see the point of that?’ asked Lydia.

‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘it’s just a game and a religion, the cult of the fatherland, which happens to be a blind spot of mine. I mean, look – this business with fatherlands and so on, they can only play that game for as long as they have enemies and frontiers. Otherwise, you’d never know where one stopped and the other began. You couldn’t have that now, could you . . .?’ The Princess opined that you couldn’t. We were rolled onto the ferry.

We came to a standstill in a narrow iron tunnel, inside the steamer. With a judder, the carriage was secured.

‘I’d like to know . . .’ the Princess said, ‘what makes a ship float. They weigh such a lot: why don’t they sink? You’re an educated bloke!’

‘It’s er . . . the air trapped in the bulkheads . . . you see . . . the specific gravity of water . . . well, really it’s the displacement . . .’

‘Love,’ said the Princess, ‘when someone uses that many technical terms, something’s wrong. So you don’t really know. It’s a shame you’re so awfully ignorant, Peter. But then I suppose you can’t have everything.’

Up on deck we wandered the length of the ship, and from port to starboard. The engines were churning away very quietly. We pulled out of Warnemünde, and imperceptibly drew away from land. Past the end of the jetty we could see the coast.