There'd been a lot of women like this, ever since Mitford. Now they were dying off but you still came across a few. This one had reached the stage of the obsessional love-hate relationship that presages final rejection: she still had leanings, and had to deal with them by voicing them, even to strangers. She had to get assurance from as many people as possible that she was on the right track now.

"The way to blot him out," I said, "is not to think of him at all. Nobody dies until the last lover stops loving him."

Then her face puckered and she began shaking, and it all came out, beginning with a lot of things like, "No one can understand " and "With me it's different " and "You don't know what it's like " while I quietly sat down on a black futurist chair and watched her until she brought out the cold hard facts.

"I was in the Bunker." She sat crouched on the floor with her lean shoulder against a chair, spent before she began.

"The Fuhrerbunker?"

"Yes." After the first sip she hadn't touched her drink

"When?"

She looked blank. "Don't you know when?"

I said: "I don't mean the date. I mean at the beginning, the end, or all the time?"

"All the time."

"How old were you then?"

"I was nine."

"A child."

"Yes."

Her tone had dulled. The answers were so automatic that I suspected she must have given them often before under psychoanalysis. She crouched with her eyes shut. I went on slipping questions in until she took over; it was the classic approach and she was versed in it.