‘I want you to pretend. You’re middle-aged. A friend of my mother’s. We’ve been to an opera together and now I’ve lured you back to my room on some false pretext. You must pretend to be affronted by the things I suggest, though secretly you’re excited.’

He seemed to have difficulty breathing after such a long speech.

Lena understood what he meant and sat up straight like one of the customers come for a fitting at Herr Thaller’s.

When in the course of the game he had taken off his shirt, she saw a raised white scar on his back. ‘What’s this?’ she said, running her finger down it.

‘Some butcher in a field hospital. He was trying to relieve the pressure on my lung. It’s nothing.’

It was easy enough for Lena to play a role of false propriety. Beneath the guise of mother’s friend or dress-shop customer she was beginning to be aroused by this polite man with his wound. She was almost naked, fondling him, when he took a final piece of costume from his bag: a green hat with a pearl-headed pin.

At another time, she might have laughed, but she was too far gone in the adventure and she knew then that she would let him make love to her and that she would like it. When he was settled inside her, he had one more demand to make. He whispered in her ear the words she must say. She said them as instructed; and many times more in the course of the next hour.

This man was not like Rudolf. He seemed desperate, yet he had control. When eventually it ended, she fell back on the pillow in a mixture of exhaustion and delight.

He thanked her and apologised for the odd things he had asked her to say and do.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Lena. ‘To be honest, I enjoyed it.’

‘So it seemed.’

He laughed; and for the first time, he seemed happy.

‘It’s dark in here,’ he said. ‘With just the candles. I can hardly see your face.’

‘I can turn on the light if you prefer.’

‘No, it’s all right. The flickering. It’s exotic.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘My name is … Friedrich, if you like.’

Lena closed her eyes. Few men were willing to give her a name and she suspected that the ones they offered belonged to someone else, in a joke to be shared later with a friend. It was to be expected.

The sense of health and well-being that had washed over her when they had finished making love was starting to fade.

‘I can make you some tea,’ she said. ‘Would you like that? Or some wine?’

‘You must think me very strange,’ he said. ‘I’m not really. In every other way I’m normal. It’s just something I have to work through. It’s as if … One more time, and I’ll be over it.’

‘How long have you been like this?’

‘About … I don’t know. Many years, I suppose. But it’s better now. After the war, I was too shocked to think about women or the past. But then the war feelings, the shock, receded, and my other life, before the war, came back. The grief. I suppose in the last three or four years it’s haunted me. I’ve tried to purge the longing. To burn it away. It’s as if there were a number of women – a score, a tally that I needed to reach. And then I’d be normal again.’