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Librarian. ‘My aunt cannot abide spinach. If she has spinach—’
    He did not finish. ‘I don’t see that at all,’ interjected Unterholzer.
    ‘Oh, I assure you, Herr Unterholzer, she has never been able to eat—’
    Unterholzer ignored the Librarian and addressed von Igelfeld again. ‘A single person would like ten of the twenty, you say? Well then, if he is sharing with somebody else they’re surely going to find ten that they both like, or can eat. So in each case he’s having ten. That’s not less choice – it’s the same.’
    Von Igelfeld smiled. Unterholzer was just not getting the point. Prinzel, who was also puzzled, now steered the conversation back to marriage. ‘There are many shared moments in a marriage,’ he said. ‘That is one thing you discover when you marry.’
    ‘But, forgive me, Herr Prinzel,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘Forgive me for pointing out that surely most people would know that
before
they get married. Spending time together, I would have thought, is a fundamental feature of marriage – something that everybody knows.’
    ‘There is knowledge and knowledge,’ interjected Unterholzer. ‘You may think that you know something and then you discover that you didn’t really know it – not in the full sense. So …’ and here he glanced atvon Igelfeld, ‘so unmarried people – those whom nobody has ever wanted to marry …’ and he looked at von Igelfeld again, ‘those people, with all due respect to them, may be ignorant of some of the more subtle implications of the married state. That is my view, for what it is worth.’
    Von Igelfeld bit his lip. It was quite intolerable to have to sit and be condescended to by Unterholzer, of all people. He knew that he should have maintained a dignified silence, but he just could not let this pass. ‘Many unmarried people are unmarried by choice,’ he said. ‘They are often rather more discerning people: people who are not afraid of their own company. Not always, of course – but often.’
    ‘I’m not sure about that, Herr von Igelfeld,’ Unterholzer replied. He was about to continue, but the Librarian had something to add.
    ‘My aunt never married,’ he said.
    It had been a very unsatisfactory conversation from von Igelfeld’s point of view. He could discount anything that the Librarian said, of course, as Herr Huber had very little knowledge of the world. He knew something about book classification and paper conservation, perhaps, and he appeared to have some arcane – and entirely useless – knowledge of the ins and outs of nursing homes, but when it came to any other topic,including marriage, he was not to be taken at all seriously. Unterholzer could also be ignored most of the time, even if it was important to listen to what he had to say if only to refute it. He was married, of course, but von Igelfeld was very doubtful as to whether his colleague had learned very much from that experience. So he, too, could be safely discounted. But then it came to Prinzel, and here was a fish of an entirely different stripe. Von Igelfeld admired Prinzel, and had done so since their student days, when he had accorded to Prinzel that devotion that the scholar-poet classically gives the hero-athlete. Prinzel knew about women, who had flocked to him even in their student days, and if anybody were going to influence von Igelfeld’s view of marriage, it would be Prinzel.
    It was significant, then, that Prinzel should have sauntered into von Igelfeld’s office later that day and taken up the theme of the coffee room conversation. ‘Interesting remarks were made this morning,’ he said, as he walked over to gaze out of von Igelfeld’s window. He often did this, and von Igelfeld tolerated it. Unterholzer, by contrast, was never allowed to look out of that window and was always sharply censured if he did so. ‘I do not mind your admiring my view, Herr Unterholzer,’ von Igelfeld had said. ‘But I would prefer you to ask permission before