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exquisitely decorated with gold patterning. Leo had never set foot in it but peered into the doorway sometimes, and smelt the scent of something mysterious and ancient.
    In the next apartment was a couple whose child’s ragged, asthmatic cough had punctuated most nights that winter. Below him was a Fräulein Lena Goldwasser who had revealed, in their only conversation, that she worked as a nurse in a clinic out in Wannsee. Leo talked to no one in the block apart from a schoolmaster called Martin Rinkel, who would sometimes come and knock at the door with a bottle of bad schnapps and a deck of cards. Other evenings, Leo got on with a translation he was doing of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, something he kidded himself he might have published one day. Not because he thought it would sell, but for the sheer satisfaction of seeing his name in print.
    Solitude suited him fine. As an only child it had been his natural condition, and he was rarely desperate for company. From time to time he had run into a couple of men he’d known at university. They flocked here, the men who liked other men, because that was what Berlin was famous for. They discovered a homosexual freedom they could never find at home, even if that same freedom was laced with terror now as they found themselves liable to arbitrary arrest. If they were foreigners they were dealt with by the police, but their German friends risked a beating or worse from the storm troopers. The Brown Shirts took pleasure in meting out punishments of an especially perverse and sadistic nature, punishments that cast a savage light on their own benighted souls.
    As for himself, there was a woman back in London, a secretary at the Foreign Office called Marjorie Simmons. Or at least she used to be Marjorie Simmons; she was married now, so not Simmons any more and not working either. She lived in Putney, but her husband was abroad, meaning that she was free to take the bus up to town pretty much whenever she felt like it, on the pretext of visiting a gallery or a day’s shopping in Knightsbridge, and when he was in London she would call him and they would meet in Brown’s Hotel, a place of dingy elegance, in a side street off Piccadilly.
    At the thought of Marjorie’s face, the freckled nose and smile revealing slightly buck teeth, Leo felt a twist either of regret or revulsion inside him. When they first met, it had been nice enough. She was girlishly enthusiastic about the plays they went to and the concerts at the Wigmore Hall, and she had listened to his travel stories with every sign of interest. Then one day, when he had returned from a vacation in Czechoslovakia, she announced blithely, as if to a gossipy girlfriend, that she was getting married, to a man whom Leo had always considered dull and unintelligent. Wrong-footed by this approach, he had congratulated her warmly.
    No sooner had Majorie told him, however, than she gave a secretive little smile, and said, ‘But that doesn’t have to spoil our little arrangement, does it?’
    And like a fool, he had shaken his head and agreed.
    Since then, whenever they met, he had tried to ask about her husband, but she diverted the conversation immediately. She liked to compartmentalize him, he realized. He was part of that ribboned section of her life that was labelled pleasure. He probably had the same status to her as a trip to the theatre. Indeed there was something theatrical about the pleasure she took in lovemaking. It was like a performance in which Marjorie herself was on stage. He had noticed the way she glanced in the triptych mirror while they were in bed or as he tried to read her poetry after sex. The way she observed her magnificent body, the freckled shoulders, the curving slope of her back, the suspenders and silk knickers, as though just the experience itself was not enough. The way she stroked the reddish curls between her legs and the skin of her inner thighs, white as a boiled egg. She needed to be both spectator and