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recognise from the previous evening’s dinner. This person was carrying a suitcase and von Igelfeld, glancing down at it, saw the initials MG painted discreetly above the handle. This, he concluded, must be Mr Matthew Gurewitsch. He had noticed that the guest room on the floor below his, a distinctly inferior guest room, he had been led to believe, had been allocated to Mr Gurewitsch, and a small name card had been attached to the door in recognition of this arrangement. Feeling more confident of his surroundings, after he had introduced himself to Mr Gurewitsch, von Igelfeld showed him to his room, which was unlocked.
    ‘A comfortable room,’ said von Igelfeld, noting with pleasure that the furniture was distinctly more worn than his own. ‘No bathroom, I’m afraid. But then these old buildings don’t take too well to modern plumbing.’
    ‘No bathroom!’ exclaimed Mr Gurewitsch. ‘Even the crypt on the set of
Aida
has hot and cold running water these days!’
    ‘Well, that is opera,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘This is Cambridge. And it seems that there’s no bathroom.’
    ‘But what do I do?’ asked Mr Gurewitsch.
    ‘There’s a bathroom over on the other side of the Court,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘It’s attached to the Senior Common Room. I think that you will have to use that one.’
    ‘You don’t have one upstairs?’ asked Matthew Gurewitsch hopefully.
    Von Igelfeld was silent for a moment. If he told this new visitor about the bathroom that he shared with Professor Waterfield, then that would mean that there would be three people sharing, rather than two. Two was bad enough, of course – look what had happened that morning – but if there were three people using the one bathroom, that would be even worse. It did not matter that Mr Matthew Gurewitsch appeared to be an extremely agreeable man, it was purely a question of practicality. The bathroom issue was a problem which the College should face, and it was not up to visitors like von Igelfeld to have to shoulder the responsibility of everyone’s bathroom needs. No, that would be to expect too much. He had no
locus standi
in bathroom matters in Cambridge and there was no moral obligation on his part to draw the attention of others to the existence of such bathroom facilities as there were.
    At the same time, it was clear to von Igelfeld that he could not tell a lie. The motto of the von Igelfeld family was
Truth Always
, and he could not ignore this. It was true that he had deviated from it in that unfortunate encounter with Dr Max Augustus Hubertoffel, the psychoanalyst, but he had dealt with the moral sequelae of that lapse in as honourable a way as he could. But the incident had reminded him of the need for strict truthfulness. So his words would have to be chosen carefully, and here they were, forming themselves with no particular effort on his part: ‘I do not have a bathroom in my rooms,’ he said.
    Although quite spontaneous, the words were well-chosen. It was indeed true that von Igelfeld did not have a bathroom in his rooms. There was a bathroom in the vicinity – on the landing to be precise – but this did not belong to von Igelfeld and therefore the precise terms of Matthew Gurewitsch’s question did not require it to be disclosed. He felt sorry for Matthew Gurewitsch, and for the many others like him in Cambridge who presumably had no bathroom, and this prompted him to invite the new visitor to join him for coffee in the Senior Common Room.
    ‘I could introduce you to some of the Fellows,’ he said expansively. ‘Dr C. A. D. Wood, Mr Wilkinson . . . ’ He tailed off. Perhaps it was not a good idea. Poor Matthew Gurewitsch, no doubt exhausted after his journey, would hardly wish to be plunged into the unfathomable intrigues of mathematicians. ‘Or we could talk just by ourselves,’ he added. ‘That might be better.’
    Matthew Gurewitsch was happy to do either, and after he had found a place for his suitcase on a rather rickety