BARNEY: Is at home alright. Not dressed yet, but then I don’t s’pose that matters. Hoist yourself in.

JOSEF enters, a trifle uncertainly. BARNEY slams the street door and heads for the kitchen, with a time limit warning.

Five minutes.

NANCY adjusts her dressing-gown, as JOSEF addresses her apologetically from the archway.

JOSEF: I am sorry. It is not a good time?

NANCY: Not really, no.

JOSEF: I went last night to the hotel. But they told me there you were on leave. You and—

NANCY: That’s right. Yes. We’ve taken two weeks off. A sort of holiday.

JOSEF: I did not understand a holiday. If I had known—

NANCY: Doesn’t matter.

She takes his hat and puts it aside.

Sit down.

JOSEF: I have come with news.

NANCY: Yes well, sit down—you’re always on your feet. You never seem to sit down.

JOSEF: [a placating smile, but still standing] A sign of someone on the move.

NANCY: Even so, you ought to know, it gets on people’s nerves a bit— [Relenting] What’s your news? Somethin’ good, I hope?

JOSEF: It is for me, yes. I have found at last somewhere to live.

NANCY: You have? I’m glad. That solves that, then.

She turns away, her mind on what has gone before.

JOSEF: It is a small flat, in a house belonging to a man called Halliday. Not big, but it is all furnished, and it has its own private entrance.

NANCY: Great, for these days. How did you manage that?

JOSEF: Before he changed his name, the owner was called Hallenstein.

NANCY turns, conscious of having lost the thread of the conversation.

I have found accommodation where I should have looked for it at the beginning. In the house of someone like myself.

NANCY: Oh. A refugee, you mean? Another—

She hesitates.

JOSEF: Another, so. A European and a Jew.

NANCY: Well, sensible, I s’pose. You’d understand each other’s point of view, and that.

JOSEF: Yes. European Jews, we understand each other very well. Even more so, those of us who are trying to pass as being—not so much a European, or a Jew.

NANCY: [jolted] Oh now, isn’t what I meant. You’ve never changed your name, or tried to make yourself fit in more—never done that.

JOSEF: Not my name. Is true. But other things—the fact I am a Jew, for instance. Oh, yes. Let me say I never was a good one. What the old folk call not very frum. Even back in Austria. Here I was determined I would not be frum at all—a liberated man. I would turn my back on being both a Jew and European—which is why, you understand, I went to hotels like the City Club. Very Australian, very typical—and very lonely, if you do not happen to be either of those things. And why, of course, our talks across the bar, they came to mean so much to me. And why a little nonsense name like Fieldmouse was a pleasure. Too much so, I’ve come to realise—