‘Er . . .?’ said Karlchen. ‘Sorry, what . . .?’ He carried on as if nothing had happened, and nothing had happened. But he had to say it – otherwise he might have burst. Gradually we began to behave like sensible people.

We had known each other a long time, and talked in a kind of abbreviated telegraphese. The Princess got the hang of it surprisingly quickly – but there was nothing secret about it, it was just our complete agreement on the basic issues of life. Both of us knew that ‘things weren’t that great’ . . . and out of scepticism, understanding, inability and strength at the right time, we had produced an attitude that meant we kept quiet, where others set up a wild hubbub. Apart from his reliability, the man’s great assets were negative: all the things he didn’t say, didn’t do, didn’t start . . . We had none of those cultured, post-prandial conversations, in which men pay ghastly tribute to ‘the spirit of the times’, without actually changing their lives one iota. There was no dispensing of literary culture, and no Viennese aphorisms about Death, Love, Life and Music, as you get from Austrian journalists and that ilk . . . it’s terrifying listening, and the first time you hear it, you actually believe that printable twaddle, though there’s not a word of truth in it. But Karlchen was a quiet sort. He blew smoke at the world, nothing surprised him, he was a steady worker at the Lord’s filing-cabinet, and he brought up two children at home, while still remaining his own man. Now and again he would fall in love and sin, and when you asked him what he had done this time, he would bare his teeth in that typical grimace and say, ‘She led me back over the threshold of youth!’ and then everything would be all right again for a while.

Now he was sitting here, smoking and reflecting.

‘We should write to Jakopp,’ he said. Jakopp was the other one – there were three of us. Four, with the Princess.

‘What shall we write?’ I asked. ‘Did you see him? You passed through Hamburg, didn’t you?’ Yes, Karlchen had passed through Hamburg and had seen him. Jakopp was the most crotchety of us. An employee of the Hamburg water-works, he was an orderly type with a passion for dahlias – ‘the dahlia, an orderly flower’, he would say – a playful and eccentric man, who had four hundred and forty-four idées fixes in his head. We were a good team.

‘Where has the Princess got to?’ asked Karlchen. The Princess had gone into town, ‘buying buttons’, in other words, shopping. We never went shopping together because whenever we did, we would squabble. She was gone, anyway. There was silence for a moment.

‘Well, Karlchen, and apart from that?’