Hildegard sat stiffly at the piano, in a position self-conscious, maidenly. She sat with her eyes lowered over the keys, on the nape of her taut neck a glitter of golden hair, scraped up too quickly, stiffly, into the little braids. The Weihnachtslied was an official act that she performed yearly. But inwardly she quivered with private emotion that translated itself hollowly once into one of the high, clear notes.

Aber sing’. Sing’ mal, Elyot, Hildegard said, turning on him a slow, sweet, bitter smile.

From the tree he could almost hear the pinging of artificial frost. The tree was bright with coloured balls, green and scarlet, and a silver star that shone among the candle flames, a scent of resinous burning. He smiled back at her brazenly.

Then it broke off, the song, with the smashing of the piano lid, leaving the older voices raised on an accent of surprise. Frau Fiesel looked like an old, amazed, and injured squirrel when Hildegard slammed the piano lid.

Ach, Hildegard! Frau Fiesel said.

She could not play, said Hildegard, he sat alone in his room, or stood there by the Christmas tree, looking, smiling as if, he was altogether hateful, she said.

She went out of the living-room, leaving behind her a trail of half-suppressed emotion.

Sehen Sie, Frau Fiesel said.

That was repeated in glance, if not in word, by Frau Geheimrat Behrens and Fräulein Nusz. Round him their reproach struck silently, or by implication, as he nipped the flame from a candle that had burnt too low.

Frau Fiesel sighed. She picked at imaginary cottons on her skirt. She said that Christmas was not what it was, the Christmases before the War, there was plenty then, everything was different, changed by the War. For which he was responsible, he felt. He became an immediate object for her reproach.

Many winter days Elyot heard Frau Fiesel’s voice protesting against snow, he heard the slamming of the front door as Hildegard came from or went to her work, the rubbery thud of the snowboots that Hildegard threw off in the hall. Many little acts on the part of both endeavoured to retrieve lost ground. But the bird wasn’t caught that still had a wing, said Onkel Rudi, irrelevantly, over the soup. Elyot pretended not to understand. But there was a secret tie, an understanding between Onkel Rudi and himself. The soup was good and nourishing, said Frau Fiesel. She always said this when the soup got thin. It was her way of pacifying her conscience in the face of material circumstance.

The conscience has a habit of rousing in the thaw. You listen to the rain on cobbles after the anaesthesia of snow. I should go to Hildegard, said Elyot, I should try to explain away this pantomime of two people in opposite corners. But he resented even her appearance now. The golden, sealed surface of her face that would blur in a gust of hysteria. There was a falseness in Hildegard that he could not quite bridge. He felt his emotions had been enlisted in an illegitimate cause. So that he held back continually. He tried not to think of the gauche physical encounter in the forest. Because this pointed to an Elyot Standish as false as Hildegard.