If he had wanted to resist the violence Eden roused, but there was a half-craving for its stimulus, as if, taken away, nothing would exist, the empty room, the stuffy streets, Eden herself was agreed on this, silently, unwilling to withdraw. She hated him with equal passion. Sometimes she went to her room and cried, the luxurious tears of self-pity, pausing a moment for a footstep that might prolong the reason for dissatisfaction. Time, she felt, age would reduce the tyranny. This is the usual panacea. She looked forward, out of the wilderness of fifteen, to a state of emotional independence. The cold, untouchable look of older people always made her envy them.

Time instead made you wonder, brushing your hair in the mirror, or was it distance, made you wonder at the comparative simplicity of things a year ago. It seemed like this at any rate to Elyot Standish. The mind clung gratefully to the known detail, to Eden in a black velour hat, while the feet ventured into foreign worlds, on the worn, German bedroom carpet. Outside, he could hear, they were preparing what Frau Fiesel had described abstractly as Essen. Outside, across the street, in the late afternoon shade of limes, the German voices of German children. He shivered under his hot clothes, just for the strangeness of it all, and his own isolation.

Frau Fiesel said he would soon get used to the German food, it was good and plain, it was good and plain because Germany had lost the War.

Then came a peculiar, sighing silence, through which he reached for a kind of sausage that his tongue tasted gratefully, the rough, raw, meaty texture, with the flavour of garlic. There was nothing equivocal about this. Eating it he felt safe, consoled, he could withdraw from his embarrassment. But embarrassment persisted fitfully.

First meals in strange houses are full of this embarrassment, the unexplained histories that start up with strange faces above the napkin, the arbitrary ritual of other people’s tables. There were the eyes, the eyes of Hildegard, the face, the attitude, that became, you gathered, Frau Fiesel’s daughter. The eyes of Hildegard were pale and inquiring. She hoped he would enjoy Germany. The pale eyes of Hildegard would watch for a lapse in taste. He said, between mouthfuls, he was sure he would. Because it seemed the only thing to do, apart from the limitations of vocabulary.

The Germans were a wonderful, a misunderstood people forced out into the wilderness, said Herr Richter, who became by deduction Frau Fiesel’s brother.

Herr Richter liked to use the word Volk. It bristled from his small, intense mouth like the greyish stubble from his shaven head. He moved in a perpetual cloud of exasperation, at everything, or nothing. Herr Richter had been a prisoner of war, Frau Fiesel explained in the living-room. He had suffered very much. Frau Fiesel seized on her brother’s suffering as a source of steely virtue. She was for ever discovering virtues, whether in her brother, or in the good plain food of Germany. We have so little, Frau Fiesel often sighed. So little of what, you felt it better not to inquire, fearing to encourage across the border the abstract glitter in Frau Fiesel’s eye.