We lay in a meadow, bathing our souls.

The sky was flecked with white; when you had been roasted by the sun for a while, a cloud would come along, a light wind would blow, and the temperature would drop a little. A dog trotted over the grass, a good way behind us.

‘What kind is it?’ I asked.

‘A bull dachshund,’ said the Princess. We let the wind blow over us some more, and said nothing. It’s nice to have someone you can share a silence with.

‘Damn,’ she said suddenly, ‘it’s awful – but I’m not really here yet. God damn my job in Berlin. My head is still buzzing with the old boss and all that . . .’

‘How is he now?’ I asked idly.

‘Well . . . same as ever . . . He’s fat, curious, cowardly and mean. Apart from that, he’s quite nice. Fat, that would be all right. I don’t mind fat men.’ I made a movement. ‘Don’t you start getting ideas . . . your little spare tire!’

‘You probably think you’re something special, just because your name is Lydia. Now let me tell you . . .’

When the conversation had calmed down again, she continued, ‘All right then, fatso. But his curiosity . . . what he’d really like would be for me to give him some new bit of gossip from the trade every day. He’s a spiritual voyeur. He doesn’t himself participate in most things, but he wants to know exactly what everyone else is doing; how, who with and how much they earn – especially that! And what they live on . . . What? How does he earn his money? He does it by bare-faced cheek. Oh, Poppa, we could never do that! For four years I’ve had to watch how the Herr Generalkonsul manages, for instance, to avoid paying his bills on time . . . we couldn’t behave like that, which is why we’ll never be rich. You just wouldn’t believe it! It doesn’t matter who he’s dealing with; he’s so brazen, he’ll twist a signed contract or he’ll repudiate it altogether, then he’ll suddenly forget what his excuse was . . . No, Cheri, you’d never be able to operate like that. You might want to, but you’ll never do it!’

‘Do people let him get away with it?’

‘What else can they do? If you don’t like it, he says, you can sue me! But it’ll be the last time you ever get an order out of me! And he sticks to that quite rigidly. People know that – and in the end they give in. Just recently, the whole office was redecorated; you should have seen how he treated the workmen! But that’s how you get to go to Abbazia, while the workmen walk across the Alexanderplatz. That’s life.’

‘And in what way is he mean?’