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than the point of arrival. I found my sister away from home and the house in uproar. There had been telegrams about me. My new brother-in-law, a middle-aged man with a bald head, was at a loss to account for my presence; nor did I, now that the moment had come, find anything to explain. He started to question me. I’d felt lonely, I said, I wanted to see my sister. To this I stuck. It seemed hours again before they got hold of her – she was playing in some tennis tournament – and brought her home and I was able to fling myself into her arms.
    They were puzzled, they were kind, they did not try too hard to understand; I was not punished. My sister tried to bring some of the enormity of my conduct home to me – my poor father: the many forms of anguish I had caused him. I closed my mind. My future was not discussed, or so it seemed, perhaps I was closing my mind to that too. At any rate I was not shipped back at once, day after day slipped by and still there I was.
    And where was I? Once more admitted willy-nilly into an adult world. Wiesbaden town and spa must have been pretty unique in the Germany of that post-war period: it was flourishing. There was work, there was food in the shops. Life and money was kept flowing by the occupying French and more fantastically by white Russian émigrés, grandee refugees at their first stage with jewels to sell still in their baggage before they turned to Paris and to driving taxis. My sister’s husband, whose mother had been English, was on excellent terms with the occupying forces and said to be discreetly plotting for a separation of the Rhineland. (For this he paid dearly twenty years on: the Nazis executed him.) He was a man with much musical knowledge and a flair for the theatre: l es spectacles . As deputy mayor his functions included the administration of the state opera, the ballet and the fireworks. At home he kept open house to three categories of guests, and to these only, senior French officials, Russian émigrés, singers and musicians. Every evening they came. His hospitality and connoisseurship … my sister’s youth, vitality and chic … (That marriage did not last either.) Although a bedtime was supposed to exist for me, I saw a good deal of it all, and it seems to have been my lot to have known only the more uncharacteristic enclaves of German life. I was dazzled. The singers sang, the musicians played. For the first time I heard Brahms and Schubert and ‘Voi che sapete’; I also heard Stravinsky. (All Voss Strasse and my father had produced between them was Caruso on the gramophone.) A young Hungarian tried to give me piano lessons, a huge old gentleman, a cousin of the late Czarina, gave me ices at the pâtisserie. I was allowed to go to the opera, one night I saw the fireworks. I was taken to the races where someone kindly explained to me the workings of the tote, and let loose about the tennis club all morning. I managed to get work – ecstasy! – as ball girl on the courts.
    Treats, long days of treats. Because, it became clear, I was to be sent back. I had only to stay resolute , I told myself (like the Red Indians), then it could not happen. They could not drag me back against my will. What was necessary was to tell my sister. If you don’t send me back, I was going to say, if you let me stay with you, I’ll give up all the rest, the opera, the social life, the tennis: you can send me to a strict day school. That part I had pat but I had no words for the rest – the Why not to send me back. My sister was hard to get hold of on her own, she slept late in the morning and after that everybody streamed into her room with the breakfast tray; every day I promised myself to talk to her on the next. When the bad morning came, it was still unsaid. All I could do was go limp and howl. They did drag me down the drive … they did take me back. That journey was accompanied.
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    We are at table at Feldkirch, we are having dinner upstairs in the room we now