‘Perhaps you’d prefer a cigar? Daddy smokes the best.’

She slipped into the next room and returned with a fat cigar. ‘See what it feels like for once to be Herr Bondheim, director of the Agricultural Bank.’

‘Or Dr Kreindel, who gives me my daily bread,’ joked Gurdweill too.

And after taking a couple of puffs: ‘Not bad at all! The rich know how to live!’

Lotte was paler than usual. Her pallor was conspicuous against the dark colours of her robe.

‘I don’t like Sundays and holidays,’ she said. ‘They’re so boring.’

She stood up and opened the door to the passage a crack, and called out to the maid to make tea.

‘A person at home is like a fruit without its skin,’ reflected Gurdweill. ‘His slightest gesture reveals some intimate little secret. The tone, for instance, commanding and pleading at once, in which she called the maid …’

Lotte returned and sat opposite her guest, tucking her robe around her knees. She took a cigarette from the box she had previously placed on the table next to her, lit it carelessly, and began blowing reddish-blue smoke rings, one after the other. The short winter’s day was growing increasingly darker. A bleak silence filled the house, as if there were nobody living there.

‘Aren’t your parents at home?’