Thus the leisure and luxury of their days bewitched him utterly, and so too did the pleasures of the evenings: especially the concerts, and after dinner the word games, which they sometimes played, in the wavering glow of candles on the terrace; cognac, coffee, scattered dictionaries, Cuckoo laughing at some absurdity. Archie Charlie searching for a word in the rustling pages, Marcus smug with triumph when he won; playing games which she could not properly join because her English was strictly limited to the words which she needed to express herself. Or not herself as it happened; but Leni Minx. The concerts, on the other hand, didn’t worry her at all. They were very similar to the ones at Lamsfeld. One evening perhaps Schubert, on another Dvorák, at another a ‘Cuckoo Mixture’, as she called it herself, which ranged cheerfully from Schwarzkopf and Placido Domingo to Sophie Tucker or Elton John. She had nothing to do but listen.

However, the word games were different. These too they had played at Lamsfeld, but within the terms of mainly German reference, names with which she could be familiar. Here the scope was wider, and she was paralysed with ignorance. Who was Chaucer, Amy Johnson, Bottom, Barbara Castle or Benny Goodman? She was mostly lost: and Marcus was not always brilliant himself, but when he didn’t know he sought the answers, and then the ‘discussions’ with Archie Charlie commenced on which he feasted like a glutton at a candystall.

And that was the rub. The sudden glorious discovery of conversation with two worldly people, or three when Minerva chose to play, moved him further away than ever: for although she tried hard, she found it impossible to join him in his quest for knowledge, for her own, even in German, was fairly limited and confined essentially to her own boundaries. He wanted to explore wider fields. She was terrified that she was becoming a bore.

As Leni Minx in Canteloupe Road she was secure: she knew exactly who she was, and the role which she had invented for herself was simple, effective, and had delighted him. He had said, not very long ago, that he wanted no changes in her, that he loved her as she was, and had no desire to wake up one morning and ‘find that she had changed’. Well, it was getting harder and harder, under these conditions, to stay as Leni Minx and far too easy to drift back to her original patterns of behaviour as Luise; it seemed that she was doing it more and more often. All day at the picnic, for example, she had been Luise, and apart from a few limited moments when she had remembered her rôle, she had not played Leni at all. And yesterday at ‘La Civette’ she had got into a fearful muddle, behaving in a perfectly ridiculous manner. She had found it impossible to suppress the emotions of Luise.