Barstow’s. He had no idea who they were, but he could look them up in the telephone book and send her a letter, or if it was close, deliver it by hand. It needn’t be long, but it would be polite. I apologise if I appeared a bit forward. She’d bolted when he suggested meeting again, so he must have moved too fast. He’d made a fool of himself too, when he told her what he taught. Why did he have to get the shakes then? Maybe that’s why she left in a hurry. She sensed his instability. Thank you for your company at tea. He didn’t know her surname but was sure it would arrive, especially if he put ‘typing pool’. There couldn’t be that many Bettys in a typing pool. There is a meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in St Pancras next week which I plan to attend. I’ll send off a postal order too, as they need the money. She’d been brittle, non-committal, even strict with him, but when he’d trembled and spilt his tea she’d seemed sensitive, understanding. He’d put ten bob on her writing poetry. I enjoyed our talk and hope we meet again, perhaps at Aldermaston.

He leaned back in his chair and laughed. He’d never send the letter. He was far too shy. Was it shyness? Or nervousness? Most men his age were married. He found it hard to make the first move and his job took up most of his time, so where would he ever meet anyone? That’s what his mother kept saying, Why don’t you find a nice girl and settle down?

Would that it were that simple. It wasn’t just reticence, or time, he knew. It ran far deeper than that. He stared into the flames, his mind wandering back to Berlin. Enough. He opened his briefcase and took out the exercise books, resting them in a pile by the fireplace, glancing at the mantel clock on the shelf. Ten thirty. He’d work for an hour, then go to bed. Do what he could, and polish off the rest in his lunch break. The clock was as silent as the room, no brash tick-tock or tinsel chimes. It sat on its chrome base, reminding him, pain etched in its round glass face, a kind of penance.

He shut his eyes and tried to think of Betty sitting in front of him, cradling her cup in her slender, white fingers, but it was another woman’s face he saw, another’s hands with broken nails clutching a chipped enamel jug, picking through the rubble of the Adlon, where dusty buddleia and grass were colonising the ruins and where he’d spotted a rabbit the day before. Her hair was a rich golden brown, like Betty’s, but streaked with dust. Her eyes were gold.