‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom first,’ I said. She was pulling the pyjama-jacket over her head, her breasts wobbling: these were real film star’s chicks and for a moment I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Each brown nipple was like a British Tommy’s helmet.

‘Don’t be too long, Bernie,’ she said, dropping first her sash, and then the trousers, so that she stood there in just her knickers.

But in the bathroom I took a long, honest look in the mirror, which was one whole wall, and asked myself why a living goddess like the one turning down the white satin sheets needed me of all people to help justify an expensive laundry account. It wasn’t my choirboy’s face, or my sunny disposition. With my broken nose and my car-bumper of a jaw, I was handsome only by the standards of a fairground boxing-booth. I didn’t imagine for a minute that my blond hair and blue eyes made me fashionable. She wanted something else besides a brush, and I had a shrewd idea what it was. The trouble was I had an erection that, temporarily at least, was very firmly in command.

Back in the bedroom, she was still standing there, waiting for me to come and help myself. Impatient of her, I snatched her knickers down, pulling her onto the bed, where I prised her sleek, tanned thighs apart like an excited scholar opening a priceless book. For quite a while I pored over the text, turning the pages with my fingers and feasting my eyes on what I had never dreamed of possessing.

We kept the light on, so that finally I had a perfect view of myself as I plugged into the crisp fluff between her legs. And afterwards she lay on top of me, breathing like a sleepy but contented dog, stroking my chest almost as if she was in awe of me.

‘My, but you’re a well-built man.’

‘Mother was a blacksmith,’ I said. ‘She used to hammer a nail into a horse’s shoe with the flat of her hand. I get my build from her.’ She giggled.

‘You don’t say much, but when you do you like to joke, don’t you?’

‘There are an awful lot of dead people in Germany looking very serious.’

‘And so very cynical. Why is that?’

‘I used to be a priest.’

She fingered the small scar on my forehead where a piece of shrapnel had creased me. ‘How did you get this?’

‘After church on Sundays I’d box with the choirboys in the sacristy. You like boxing?’ I remembered the photograph of Schmelling on the piano.

‘I adore boxing,’ she said. ‘I love violent, physical men. I love going to the Busch Circus and watching them train before a big fight, just to see if they defend or attack, how they jab, if they’ve got guts.’