‘With you I am. I could eat you all up.’

‘I have already. And you will have indigestion because I am nothing but skin and bone.’

‘I love your skin and bone. Smooth and warm. Soft.’

Her finger ran round the inside of his ear. ‘Perhaps then I can stay a little while, here with you?’

‘Where else would you go?’

‘I don’t know. I have a friend in Holland Park.’

‘But you are my agent now: you said so.’

‘Yes: I am. But you don’t have to love your agent, you know.’

‘I haven’t said I did, have I?’

The finger stopped tracing his ear and was still. ‘No.’

‘But I am new to the job. I will need advice all the time.’

‘And what will your friend in the next room say?’

‘Martin? Across the passage? Nothing. He likes German food.’

‘He does? Fantastic’

‘He’ll have to.’

She eased herself away and leant up on one elbow looking down at him. ‘But you must not get fat.’ She placed her hand flat on his stomach. ‘This must not have a little bump on it. German food is heavy, you know, the clients will say, “No thank you, we do not want photographs of Buddha, we are Arabs.” So I must give you salads and fruit.’

‘Why don’t you shut up and come back.’

‘I am not far away. Here only, watching you.’

‘I want to watch you.’ He dragged her down and wrapped her tightly in his arms.

‘I don’t want to go away,’ she said after a moment.

‘I don’t want you to go either. What about this Dieter? I seem to have moved him out.’

‘Oh, Dieter. Oh well, I don’t know. It was not like you with him, I just was like a friend, is it? Cooking … I make the flat pretty, so on. Fantastic. He was good to me, but you know he smokes too much, and “stuff”. He is not always quite all right.’

‘Was that what he was in Hamburg for. Ciggies?’

She suddenly thrust her head hard against his chest. He felt her shoulders shrug.

‘Was it, Leni? Ciggies and “stuff”?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was blurred. ‘Perhaps more than that.’

‘That’s bad.’

‘I know. I have seen. In Berlin I had two friends; they died. Amin was sixteen. He just went to lie down on a seat in the zoo, and piff! Just like that, he was dead. Also my friend Hannah, she is dead …’

‘Leni. You don’t handle “stuff”, do you? Swear?’

‘I swear.’ She pushed the bend of her arm close to his face.

‘You can see. No marks. None anywhere. Never, never, never.’

‘Because it is the worst thing,’ he said, ‘the very worst.’

‘I know.’

‘Is that what Dieter did? Bring it over to the Mayerling place, smuggle it in?’

She struggled out of his arms suddenly, put her own round him. ‘Don’t ask me these things. I don’t know. Please let me stay with you. I will be no trouble, you will see, I am very neat…’