‘Just a jumble of fantasies. Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, dear child!’

‘No, I don’t mean that,’ said the Princess. ‘I mean they’re always so terribly chic. Even when they write about being broke, they tell a stylish version of it. They seem to have both feet off the ground. Will a newspaper ever talk about what it’s really like: how you start scrimping on the twentieth of each month, how things get miserable and petty sometimes, how you can rarely afford to take a taxi, not to mention buying a car. Instead, they feed us their ridiculous cult of fashionable living . . . do any of us live in proper flats?’

‘Those people gobble you up,’ I said. ‘And the worst of it is that they set the questions. They mark out the course and build the fences – and you have to answer, and follow and jump . . . you can’t choose for yourself. We’re not on this planet to choose, but to make do – I know that. But you’re just given a whole lot of crossword puzzles to solve: one from Rome, one from Russia, one from America; fashion and society and literature. It’s a bit much for one man, I think.’

‘If you think about it,’ Karlchen said, ‘we haven’t really settled down since 1914. A bourgeois craving? I don’t know. You achieve more when you have peace. An atmosphere lingers – effects go on being felt. Do you remember the insanity in people’s eyes when our money melted away, and you could have bought the whole of Germany for a thousand dollars? We all wanted to be cowboys then. What a time!’

‘My dear chap, it’s our misfortune not to believe in so-called “problems” – only fools console themselves with those. It’s a parlour game.’

‘Work,’ said the Princess. ‘Work helps.’

‘Dear Princess,’ said Karlchen, ‘you women take what you do seriously – that’s your undeniable advantage over the rest of us. But if you can’t do that . . . and such a good-looking young woman too . . .’

‘You’ll be thrown out for that sort of talk,’ said the Princess. ‘Do you understand Platt German?’

Karlchen beamed: he spoke Platt like a Hanoverian farmer, and the two chattered away for a while in their foreign tongues.

What was that she said? I sat up. ‘But you never told me that?’

‘No? Didn’t I?’ The Princess was all innocence. Usually she was a good liar, but now she was terrible.

‘Well?’

The Generalkonsul had been after her. When? Two months ago.

‘Tell.’

‘He was after me. Well, you all are. Sorry, Karlchen, all except you. One evening he . . . Well, it was like this. One evening he asked me if I could work late, he had a long “exposé” he wanted to dictate. That happens sometimes – I thought nothing of it; of course I stayed.’

‘Of course . . .’ I said. ‘Otherwise you might even have an eight-hour day.’