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or merely absent, had got the better of me by making me one of themselves – brutal, lustful, something from a Gothic bestiary. Ah, what a bloody Manichean mess life is.
3
    Poor Roper found a woman in Elmshorn. Or rather she found him. She married him. She needed the leisure of marriage to enforce a lesson diametrically opposite to the one I’d been trying to teach. Though Roper and I were both in the British Zone of Germany we never met, and it wasn’t till the marriage was a couple of years old and the lessons well under way – back in England, in fact, with both of us civilians – that I was able to indulge my not very-strong masochistic propensities (vicarious, anyway) and see the
Ehepaar
(these lovely German words!) in cosy domestic bliss.
    I remember the occasion well, sir. Roper said shyly, ‘This is Brigitte,’ having got the introductions arse-backwards. He realised it and then said, in confusion, ‘
Darf ich vorstellen
– What I mean is, this is my oldest friend. Denis Hillier, that is.’
    Roper had been released from the army no earlier than anyone else, despite the scholarship that was awaiting him at Manchester University (not Oxford, after all) and his obvious potential usefulness in the great age of technological reconstruction that was, we were told, coming up. He was now in his third year. He and this Brigitte had had a twelve-month engagement, she waiting in Elmshorn with the ring on her finger, he getting his allowances and a flat sorted out in that grey city which, when you come to thinkof it, has always had some of the quality of a pre-Hitler
Stadt
– rich musical Jews, chophouses, beeriness, bourgeois solidity. I understand that that picture has now, since the immigration of former subject peoples longing to be back with their colonial oppressors, been much modified. It is now, so I gather, much more like a temperate Singapore. Perhaps the German image only came out fully for me when I saw Brigitte, almost indecently blonde, opulently busted, as full of sex as an egg of meat, and a good deal younger than Roper (we were both now twenty-eight; she couldn’t have been more than twenty). She’d contrived to stuff the Didsbury flat with cosy Teutonic rubbish – fretwork clocks, an elaborate weatherhouse, a set of beer-mugs embossed with leather-breeched huntsmen and their simpering dirndl-clad girlfriends. Lying on the sideboard was a viola, which Roper, perhaps never having met one in England, insisted on calling a
Bratsche
, her dead father’s, and she could play it well, said proud Roper – nothing classical, just old German songs. There seemed to be only one thing of Roper’s in the stuffy Brigitte-smelling living-room, and that was something hanging on the wall, framed in passe-partout. It was the Roper family-tree. ‘Well,’ I said, going to look at it. ‘I never realised you were so – is
Rassenstolz
the word?’
    â€˜Not race,’ said Brigitte, whose eye on me had been, since my entry, a somewhat cold one. ‘Family-proud.’ For that matter, I hadn’t taken to her at all.
    â€˜Brigitte’s family goes back a long way,’ said Roper. ‘The Nazis did some people a sort of service in a manner of speaking, digging out their genealogical tables. Looking for Jewish blood, you know.’ I said, still looking at past Ropers: ‘No Jewish blood here, anyway. A bit of French and Irish, some evident Lancashire.’ (Marchand, O’Shaugh-nessy, Bamber.) ‘A long-lived family.’ (1785–1862; 1830–1912; 1920 – This last was our Roper, Edwin.)
    â€˜Good healthy blood,’ smirked Roper.
    â€˜And in my family no Jewish,’ said Brigitte aggressively.
    â€˜Of course not,’ I said, grinning. And then, ‘This Roper died pretty young, didn’t he?’ There was a Tudor Roper called Edward-1530–1558. ‘Still, the expectation wasn’t all that