‘I doubt it, and my grandfather probably suspects that he is the last of the line to perpetuate the class distinction he inherited with the title. The new England is a different dish of tea, though Grandfather, if he thinks about it, wouldn’t let himself accept it.’

‘You intend to go on drawing your own bath, do you? I never heard that expression before. It has to be as archaic as the crumbling class system you mentioned. Shall I let drop to Rachel that you’re destined to be a lordship?’

‘Not unless you want it revealed that your father is a millionaire.’

‘I’ve never needed to use that to land a girl.’

‘If you had to, she wouldn’t be worth landing, would she? Shall we now draw our baths?’

After dinner, Rachel retired briefly to change from her frilly white dress into more casual clothing.

‘You have my permission to put on again your uniform,’ she said with a laugh before departing.

They returned wearing unwrinkled jeans and T-shirts. While they ate, the garments left heaped on their beds had been meticulously pressed.

Paula proved to be a bubbly brunette, as Semitic in appearance as Rachel was not.

‘There’s a big Jewish community centre here, isn’t there?’ A.P. remarked as the four headed in Rachel’s car for the first of the several clubs and discos they were to visit.

‘If you wish to go there, you must do so without me,’ said Rachel, ‘and Paula will say to you the same, as would all our friends. If the Jewish activities are what you have come to Germany to observe, you must find those interested in them to show them to you.’

‘Frankly,’ said Jeremy, ‘we had a basinful of that in Munich, and I’d welcome a change.’

‘In that case,’ said Rachel, ‘I shall keep my promise to escort you. Had you not said that, I would have introduced to you my elder sister, who lives, eats, and thinks Jewish.’

‘Some of our generation at home are like that,’ Jeremy told her. ‘Most, though, are what I’d call the happy medium, like me.’

‘With German Jewry there is no such thing,’ Paula informed him.

‘Why is that?’

‘According to my parents, who side with my sister against me,’ said Rachel, ‘the community here is in a special position.’

‘I agree,’ said Jeremy, recalling the intensity with which the girl in Munich had spoken of it.

‘I had not yet finished. We have to be seen to be standing together, my father says, not only by our host country, but by Jews elsewhere who have contempt for our living here. I did not ask to be born here and shall not allow the past to spoil for me the present,’ Rachel declared.

The kind of silence Jeremy had not expected to feature in this outing briefly followed.