Contents

On Tangled Paths

Afterword

Historical Persons and Places Mentioned in On Tangled Paths

PENGUIN CLASSICS

ON TANGLED PATHS

THEODOR FONTANE was born in the Prussian province of Brandenburg in 1819. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he made his living as a writer. From 1855 to 1859, he lived in London and worked as a freelance journalist and press agent for the Prussian embassy. While working as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 he was taken prisoner, but released after two months. His first novel, Before the Storm, was published when he was 58 and was followed by sixteen further novels, of which Effi Briest, No Way Back and On Tangled Paths are all published in Penguin Classics. He died in 1898.

PETER JAMES BOWMAN completed a PhD on Fontane at Cambridge University, and now works as a writer and translator. His biography of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, The Fortune Hunter: A German Prince in Regency England was published in 2010.

Afterword

ONE OF THE ODDEST THINGS about Theodor Fontane’s career as a novelist is how late it began. He was approaching sixty when his first novel appeared in 1878, two years after he gave up his post with the Academy of Arts in Berlin to devote himself to his chosen vocation. ‘I am just starting,’ he told his publisher with pride and trepidation. ‘Everything lies ahead of me, nothing behind me.’¹ With theatre-reviewing providing his only steady stream of income, and under the perplexed gaze of his wife, who doubted his literary talent and struggled to forgive him for throwing up a well-paid job, he spent the next twenty years producing novels, among them some of the most enduringly popular in the German language.

Fontane was born on 30 December 1819 in Neuruppin, a garrison town north-west of Berlin, the son of a pharmacist and descended through both parents from the French Huguenot refugees who had settled in Prussia in the late seventeenth century. He attended schools in Neuruppin and Swinemünde, the small town on the Baltic coast to which the family moved a few years later, but his most important teacher was his charming, eccentric, rather unsteady father, who spent hours questioning him on the lives of great men and enacting historical anecdotes with him – what he called his ‘Socratic method’, which gave the boy a lifelong passion for character and dialogue. Three years at a vocational school in Berlin completed his formal education at the age of sixteen, after which he too trained as a pharmacist. On completing his apprenticeship he worked as a journeyman in various towns, but was always keener on writing poetry and translating English authors (having learnt the language by reading it) than on his tasks at the shop counter. He joined literary clubs, where some of his efforts got their first airing. His first publications were two volumes of ballads, which appeared soon after he decided, in 1849, to put aside his pestle and mortar for good.

In 1850 he married Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, like him of Huguenot stock. As a husband, and soon a father, he needed secure employment, and found it in Berlin as a journalist in the pay of the government press office. He had previously inclined towards the republican cause, and the events of 1848 found him on the barricades, so it was with some misgivings that he undertook his new duties. But his association with the government, which took various guises in the following years, benefited him when he was sent to England for several months in 1852 and several years in 1855 to write articles on Anglo-Prussian affairs for home consumption and plant copy favourable to Prussia in the British press. During these sojourns he deepened a long-standing interest in his host nation’s literature, then much in vogue in Germany. Among novelists he particularly treasured Scott, Thackeray, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, and in later years he acquainted himself with George Eliot and the eighteenth-century humorists Fielding, Sterne and Smollett.

Before returning to Berlin in 1859 Fontane went on a tour of Scotland, vividly recorded in his Jenseit des Tweed (Beyond the Tweed), and under this stimulus he began a regional and historical description of his native Brandenburg, loosely structured as a travelogue and filled with colourful anecdotes. This became his main project of the 1860s and an intermittent preoccupation thereafter, appearing as a series of volumes collectively entitled Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Rambles through Brandenburg). It was an unlikely idea, for there seemed little romance in the flat landscapes, scanty cultural achievements and earthbound people of this Prussian heartland, but he produced a fine evocation of the region and its sturdy traditions that still finds appreciative readers today. During this time he also worked as a journalist for the Kreuzzeitung, the paper of the landed interest, and was commissioned to write long accounts of Prussia’s wars of 1864 against Denmark, 1866 against Austria, and 1870-71 against France.

German unification, the goal and outcome of these feats of arms, marks the beginning of a shift in Fontane’s political outlook. After two decades working for official press organs and for a paper whose motto was ‘With God for King and Country’, the former revolutionary had come to be seen, and to see himself, as a conservative. But though he rejoiced in national unity he soon grew disenchanted with many aspects of the new Reich. The brash materialism of the newly-rich middle classes and strutting militarism of the officer corps particularly galled him, as, increasingly, did the narrow selfishness of the old Junker families. Only the working classes held promise for the future, he believed, and could not be denied their just deserts for much longer.

Heralding this shift, Fontane left the Kreuzzeitung in 1870 to work as a theatre critic for the liberal Vossische Zeitung. For the next nineteen years he wrote pithy, often humorous reviews, which, like his longer essays on novelists such as Freytag, Raabe, Pérez Galdós, Turgenev and Zola, belie acute critical powers with an easy-going, homely style. In 1876 he was appointed first secretary of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, but soon realized that he had no aptitude for the job and even less for negotiating the web of bureaucratic rivalries into which it cast him. Within a few months he resigned and set up as a full-time novelist.

When Fontane told his publisher at the end of his sixth decade that everything lay ahead of him he was right in one sense: at an age when most people look forward to retirement he embarked on twenty years of unremitting labour. Sitting at his desk in the small flat at 134c Potsdamer Strasse which he occupied from 1872, he wrote seventeen works of fiction and two volumes of memoirs, each manuscript given a fair copy by the long-suffering Emilie. But in another sense his remark is misleading, for while the novel proved to be the perfect conduit for his creative energies, his earlier efforts as a poet, journalist, critic, travel writer, historian and translator were not just a series of false starts. Together with a lifelong epistolary habit (and he is one of the best letter-writers in German), they honed his style and cultivated the feeling for character and anecdote that was first kindled by his father’s ‘Socratic method’.

He produced two historical novels, including his maiden work Vor dem Sturm (Before the Storm) of 1878, set in Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars; a few less convincing tales mixing suspense, crime and fate according to a then-fashionable formula; Graf Petöfy (Count Petöfy) of 1884, which portrays the perilous intimacy between the Viennese nobility and the world of the theatre; and Unwiederbringlich (No Way Back) of 1891, an elegiac story of squandered happiness set in Schleswig and Copenhagen and one of his most flawless works.² He is, though, most celebrated for his narratives of contemporary Berlin life. L’Adultera (The Adulteress) and Cécile, published in 1882 and 1887, depict the entrapment felt by women whose much older husbands deny them meaningful autonomy. Irrungen, Wirrungen (Aberrations, Confusions; translated here as On Tangled Paths) appeared in 1888, the thematically similar Stine in 1890, and Frau Jenny Treibel, a comedy of manners set among the wealthy bourgeoisie, in 1892.

But it was not until 1895 and Effi Briest, the story of a girl married by her parents to an apparently suitable but in fact most unsuitable man, that Fontane enjoyed his first major commercial success. This was followed in 1896 by Die Poggenpuhls (The Poggenpuhls), a critical but affectionate portrait of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times, and in 1898 by Der Stechlin (Stechlin), which suffuses the interwoven stories of two families with the author’s philosophy of gradualism, engaged scepticism, and tolerance. The unfinished Mathilde Möhring, a richly comic narrative of an ambitious young woman carving out a career for her pliable but lazy husband, was written earlier but first published in 1907, nine years after Fontane’s death at the age of seventy-eight on 20 September 1898.

These novels (several of which are short enough to be called novellas) depart from two dominant traditions in German fiction: the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, which charts the shaping of a single person’s identity from adolescence to adulthood through conflicts and accommodations with the world in which he lives; and Poetic Realism, the highly crafted tales set in provincial, sometimes idyllic and at any rate fairly static communities in which moral dilemmas can be presented free of larger social or political questions. Fontane’s place is rather in the mainstream European school of social realism, with its close description of material reality, multiple characters embedded in complex social networks, and a rejection of the idealist, supernatural and escapist tendencies associated with Romanticism in favour of a more rationalistic world view.

On Tangled Paths clearly lies in this ‘European’ tradition. The newspaper serialization that preceded the book edition bore the subtitle ‘An Everyday Berlin Story’, and, while there is no known factual source, the tale of an affair between a seamstress and a lieutenant in an aristocratic regiment is really too straightforward to require one. In an odd compliment to the novel’s verisimilitude, Fontane received a visit shortly after its appearance from a distressed woman in her mid-forties who claimed she was the seamstress and he had written her story. ‘It was,’ he recalled, ‘a terrible scene with no end of wailing.’³

The novel is perhaps most obviously realistic in its attention to locale. During the writing process, which lasted with long interruptions from 1882 to 1887, Fontane visited important scenes and landmarks in the narrative like the Hinckeldey memorial on the Jungfern Heath, the Rollkrug Tavern, the New St James’ Cemetery, and Hankel’s Stowage. Topographical precision is established in the very first sentence, which pinpoints the Dörrs’ market garden (which really existed, though the Dörrs themselves did not), and thereafter we are taken along real streets, past real buildings, and into real restaurants and shops. Fontane hoped his readers would enjoy ‘the Berlin flavour of the thing’,⁴ and so lovingly is the city brought to life that it almost qualifies as a character in the narrative.

Equally precise is the time-frame. The story opens during the week after Whitsun 1875, Baron Botho von Rienäcker and Lene Nimptsch having become acquainted the preceding Easter Monday. They part at the beginning of July, and Botho marries his wealthy cousin Käthe von Sellenthin in September. Events of the next few months are briefly sketched in before the story is taken up again in May 1878. The novel ends with Lene’s wedding in early August of that year.

Because On Tangled Paths describes scenes in the mid-seventies from the perspective of the mid-eighties, it is, in some degree, a document of change. The wording of the opening sentence makes it plain that the market garden no longer exists, and Berlin readers would have known it had succumbed to urban sprawl, just as the inn at Hankel’s Stowage had been replaced by a colony of villas. This was the period of rapid industrialization and economic growth known as the Gründerjahre (Age of the Founders), and Berlin, from 1871 the capital of the new Reich, experienced a building boom that gave it the extent and grandeur of an imperial metropolis. Its population swelled too as migrants from rural areas arrived to take jobs in factories and on construction sites.

These changes naturally unsettled the aristocracy, whose agrarian wealth was now eclipsed by the fortunes of industrialists and financiers. However, blue blood still dominated the higher reaches of the army, politics, diplomacy, and the civil service, and had received a powerful fillip from Prussia’s military successes. Titled officers in prestigious regiments were society’s idols, a reality captured in chapter 6 when the thirteen-year-old porter’s daughter looks up adoringly as Botho emerges from his flat in walking-out dress. Despite this glamour the lives of such men in peacetime often felt a little purposeless and, like the young officers we meet in chapter 8, they filled their time with cards, gossip, horses and mistresses. Meanwhile Botho’s uncle Baron Osten represents the preceding generation of the nobility that held to the old Prussian values of unswerving honour, plain speaking and plain dealing and looked upon the clever but duplicitous Bismarck and his flashy new empire with distaste.

The other main group depicted in the novel is the working class, to which belong the Dörrs, the Nimptsches, and various minor figures, many with a distinctive Berlin twist: a cab driver, a shop assistant, a postman, a cemetery attendant, and several domestic servants. The general impression they create is of a capacity for hard work, a generous but unsentimental outlook, a caustic sense of humour, and an appetite for life’s simple pleasures. All belong to the established lower orders rather than the new industrial masses, but nonetheless lead tough, precarious lives. Lene supports herself with piecework for one of the better textile firms, but her primitive living conditions and the physical decay of her foster-mother, ground down by an equally toilsome life, point to the vulnerability of her situation. Indeed, seamstresses, laundresses, milliners and shop girls often earned so little that they were obliged to accept a ‘protector’ from a higher station in life, a situation familiar from the representation of Parisian grisettes in literature and opera but equally prevalent in Berlin and personified here by the officers’ companions introduced in chapter 13.

Lene has no resort to such expedients, and does not, it seems, benefit from her connection with Botho even to the extent of receiving gifts from him. Their relationship is based purely on mutual inclination, and it is Lene’s pride to be her lover’s equal in human terms. For his part, Botho displays occasional touches of condescension that are almost inevitable given the social and educational gulf between them, but always treats her with respect and delicacy. Deeply in love, they also understand that by temperament, taste and values they are perfectly matched. But a permanent union is out of the question, for while marriages of impecunious noblemen to daughters of the new plutocracy are by now too common to excite notice, marriage to such as Lene would mean Botho’s banishment from his family and social circle, the forfeiture of his inheritance, and, most probably, the obligation to resign his commission.

It is easy to read a novel in which the social hierarchy bulks so large as politically motivated. The Marxist critic Georg Lukács believed it showed ‘the moral, humanist superiority of the plebeian figures over the ruling class’ and called Lene ‘a triumph of the popular-plebeian’.⁵ Such trenchancy is, however, unwarranted. For one thing, taking all the characters together, it is not true that virtue resides only at the bottom of the social scale and vice only at the top; for another, these characters are more than just products of their environment (Lene’s lack of a Berlin accent underlines this). Although he wrote at a time when the Naturalist School, inspired by Zola, was in the ascendant in Germany, Fontane rejected its deterministic view of human beings as victims of poverty and hereditary flaws, as well as the political message that accompanies this ‘scientific’ approach.

This is not to say that Fontane is indifferent to social problems, simply that his critique is descriptive rather than reformatory, and that his main focus is on individual human subjects. Rather than the struggle of one class against another, or of a free-spirited person against external social constraints, On Tangled Paths examines the tension within that person’s mind between social conditioning and the instinct for self-definition. In this way the theme of a cavalry officer’s impossible love for a poor seamstress, itself of purely historical interest, gains universality as an exploration of the rival claims of self and society, integrity and accommodation that will always be with us. It is easy to censure past injustices, but any community at any time imposes ‘dominant discourses’ and behavioural norms on its members, who must overcome a part of what has become their own identity before they can go against the grain.

The lovers apprehend that the social obstacles to their happiness, while real and powerful, embody no eternal or essential human distinctions: Botho lacks the sense of class entitlement exhibited by his uncle and mother and is able to mock the vapidity of aristocratic life; and Lene differs from the other inhabitants of the market garden in viewing ‘fine gentlemen’ as people in better circumstances rather than beings apart. And yet neither of them rebels. She appears positively fixated by the thought that their relationship must end (though her remarks to this effect may enclose a forlorn hope that he will contradict her), while he interprets various ‘messages’ in his environment as warnings against breaking with caste and custom (though his rather tortured logic suggests an attempt to rationalize faintness of heart as devotion to order). Their refusal to entertain the possibility of marriage or even the settled concubinage that Botho’s friend Rexin plans with his mistress almost seems to make them advocates of the system that frustrates them.

And yet, are they wrong to give each other up so meekly? Botho’s life after he leaves Lene is emotionally bleak, ever more so as the extent of his loss dawns on him, but staying faithful to her would have placed him in circumstances for which he is ill-adapted. This prospect, which he later conjures up as an admonition to Rexin, would mean the souring of their happiness and, for him, a probable loss of self-respect. Are they not, then, better off remaining in familiar circles with spouses who, for all their shortcomings, are both suitable and tolerable? In lesser hands this would be a story of ‘good’ individuals brought low by ‘evil’ society, and Gideon Franke and Käthe von Sellenthin would be ogres. But Fontane sees the necessity of a social order for the regulation of human affairs, even as he knows that the principles of the one he inhabits are transient and often unfair. Indeed he is as sceptical as his unheroic hero about defying the collective and seeking happiness in romantic isolation: partly because he believes man is a gregarious animal, and partly because he rejects the idea of a core of personality free from environmental conditioning.

These are some of the main lines of a sociological reading of the novel. Of course there have been many other approaches: feminists have analysed gender roles, comparatists have identified influences and parallels, and historical critics have explained political, economic and other contexts. There have been investigations into the uses of memory and imagination, of poetically charged settings, and of allusions to major literary texts and the stale formulas of popular fiction. Close readings have shed light on the structure and rhythms of Fontane’s prose, while studies of individual characters have offered divergent evaluations of Frau Dörr, Käthe and Botho.

In a recent article I argue that Botho and Lene’s determination to see their love bond as unique is undermined by other characters, who reintegrate it into banal, impoverishing categories even before larger social forces compel its dissolution. This process can be intentional, as when the officers, irritated by Botho’s belief that his love is ‘special’, seek to reduce it to the recognizable template of an officer’s premarital affair with a working-class girl; or unintentional, as when Frau Nimptsch treats the couple as typical lovebirds or Frau Dörr regales them with saucy language that cheapens their experience. Moreover, Botho himself never fully casts off the clichéd patterns of thought and speech of his peers, and while he claims to cherish Lene because she is ‘different’ from others, his initial attraction is based on seeing her as an artless, unspoilt girl living in an Arcadian setting – the biggest cliché of all.⁶

Other interpreters have gone in search of ‘the thousand finesses’ Fontane said he had woven into the text but feared no one would perceive.⁷ These include networks of verbal motifs, in particular ‘order’, ‘happiness’ and ‘binding’, as well as symbols like flowers/wreaths (representing love, marriage and death) and Frau Nimptsch’s fire (embodying hospitality, comfort, and the reassuring continuity of life). Tautly arranged patterns of anticipation and retrospection, of parallel, echo and contrast, illuminate individual choices and destinies. Thus Botho’s inability to stand by Lene is foreshadowed by Dörr’s ornamental cock being put to flight by the neighbour’s dog in chapter 2, and his mockery of aristocratic chatterboxes in chapter 4 acquires an irony at his expense when he ends up marrying one. Certain recurrences set authenticity off against inauthenticity: a moonlight walk can be an unforgettable moment of delicate bliss or a commonplace of romantic dalliance, and a woman proffering a strawberry from her lips can be a spontaneous gift of love or a routinized technique of allurement. Such patterns are economical in their means, as are the representative episodes – Botho’s evening with the Nimptsches and Dörrs, his lunch with his uncle, the officers bantering in their club – that distil countless similar exchanges.⁸

Fontane is an acknowledged master of dialogue, and this novel shows as well as any his skill in deploying myriad registers without trying his readers’ patience by transcribing every dialectal tic or the fumblings and stutterings of real speech. As well as creating a vivid texture, dialogue plays a central role in character-drawing, which is effected not by introductory thumbnail sketches but by speakers revealing themselves in language and talking about one another – a technique that also enacts the theme of the struggle to maintain autonomous identity in the face of categorization by others. Meanwhile the narrator remains detached, often refusing to speculate about motivation, declaring ignorance on some matters and keeping discreetly silent about others. There are scenes of great poignancy, such as the lovers’ final parting or the death of Frau Nimptsch, but their presentation is delicate and restrained, yielding an atmosphere of sorrow devoid of sentimentality. The implicit stance of the author is one of urbanity, gentle irony, and humanity – essentially the style of a sage old man.

Fontane’s fear that readers would be oblivious of his craftsmanship was realized when the novel was printed in instalments by the Vossische Zeitung in July and August 1887. However, it was not the summer heat that impeded their appreciation, as he had predicted, but the scandalous content. The practice of well-situated bachelors having affairs with lower-class girls, though exceedingly common, was not discussed in the public sphere, and by depicting it without clear moral disapproval – indeed letting the lovers spend the night together as if this were perfectly normal – the author whipped up strong gusts of Victorian prudishness. Subscriptions to the newspaper were cancelled, and one of its owners wrote angrily to the chief editor, ‘Won’t this dreadful whore’s tale soon be over?’⁹

Taken aback by this ferocity, Fontane prepared the ground carefully for the book publication by F. W. Steffens of Leipzig in January-February 1888. Well-disposed reviewers were alerted in advance, and no copies sent to the probably hostile conservative papers. The result was gratifying: a series of lengthy, serious-minded reviews praising his courage in tackling such a knotty theme, his evocative use of local colour, his skill at letting characters speak for themselves, and the winsomeness of his principals. The passage of time has only strengthened this esteem, while the initial objections soon lost their force. By 1910 the book was in its fifteenth edition, and according to the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925 it was Fontane’s best-selling title. Since the 1960s his status as the most important German novelist between Goethe and Thomas Mann has been firmly established, and this work is generally held to be among his three or four finest. It has been filmed twice, and is a common set text in German schools.

In English-speaking countries Fontane continues to be neglected outside the German departments of universities, despite the fact that as a social realist he wrote in a mainstream European rather than specifically German tradition.¹⁰ Nonetheless the present work has already been translated four times: as Trials and Tribulations by Katherine Royce (1917); as A Suitable Match by Sandra Morris (1968); as Entanglements by Derek Bowman (1986), and as Delusions, Confusions by William L. Zwiebel (1989). I can only justify adding to this list by stating my belief that these versions fall too far short of the original in too many ways to allow readers to form a true idea of its quality. The present translation, which is based on the edition of the novel published by Goldmann Verlag in 1980, aims to convey as much as possible of the verve of dialogue and the fluent cadences, relaxed poise and wry humour of the descriptive and narrative passages – in other words what Thomas Mann, who was deeply influenced by it, called the ‘Fontane tone’.

1

At the point where the Kurfürstendamm intersects the Kurfürstenstrasse, diagonally across from the Zoological Gardens, there was still, in the mid-eighteen-seventies, a large market garden running back to the open fields behind; and in it stood a small, three-windowed house with its own little front garden, set back about a hundred paces from the road that went by and clearly visible from there despite being so small and secluded. However, the other building in the market garden, indeed without doubt its main feature, was concealed by this little house as if by the wings of a stage set, and only a red- and green-painted wooden turret with the remains of a clock face (no trace of an actual clock) under its pointed roof suggested that there was something hidden in the wings, a suggestion confirmed by a flock of pigeons fluttering up round the turret from time to time and, even more, by the occasional barking of a dog. The whereabouts of this dog eluded the viewer, although the front door on the far left stood open all day long, affording a glimpse of the yard. There was in general no apparent intention to hide anything, and yet anyone who passed that way at the time our story begins had to be content not to see beyond the little three-windowed house and a few fruit trees standing in the front garden.

It was the week after Whitsun, when the dazzling light of the long days sometimes seemed never-ending. But today the sun was already behind the Wilmersdorf church steeple, and the rays that had beaten down all day were now replaced by evening shadows in the front garden, its almost fairy-tale calm exceeded only by the calm of the little house, in which old Frau Nimptsch and her foster-daughter Lene lived as tenants. Frau Nimptsch herself was, as usual, sitting by the large but barely one-foot-high hearth in her front room which occupied the whole width of the house, and she crouched forward gazing at a sooty old kettle whose lid kept rattling even though steam was already billowing from the spout. The old woman stretched both hands out to the glowing embers and was so absorbed in her thoughts and daydreams that she did not hear the door out into the hallway opening and a sturdy female figure bustling into the room. It was only when the latter had cleared her throat and addressed her friend and neighbour (our Frau Nimptsch) warmly by name that she turned towards the back of the room and, just as amiably and with a touch of mischief, replied, ‘Ah, Frau Dörr, my dear, how good of you to drop by, and from the “castle” too, ’cos it is a castle an’ always will be, with its tower an’ all. Now sit yourself down … I just saw your dear husband goin’ off somewhere. Course – it’s his skittles night.’

The visitor so warmly greeted as Frau Dörr was not merely sturdy but of decidedly imposing proportions, and gave the impression of being a kind-hearted, dependable soul but also a person of distinctly limited intelligence. This clearly in no way troubled Frau Nimptsch, who repeated, ‘Yes, his skittles night. But what I’ve been meanin’ to say, my dear, is that your husband can’t go about in that hat no more. It’s worn smooth an’ a proper disgrace to look at. You ought to take it off him and put a new one out. He mightn’t even notice … Now pull up a chair, Frau Dörr, my dear, or better, sit on that stool over there … As you see, Lene’s gone out an’ left me on my own again.’

‘So he was here, then?’

‘Certainly was. An’ they’ve gone out Wilmersdorf way. You never meet no one on that path. But they should be back any minute.’

‘Well, I’d best be goin’, then.’

‘No need, Frau Dörr, my dear. He won’t stop. An’ even if he does, he’s not, you know, like that.’

‘I know, I know. An’ how do things stand?’

‘Well, what can I say? I think she’s gettin’ ideas, even if she won’t admit it, buildin’ her hopes up.’

‘Dear oh dear,’ said Frau Dörr, as she drew up a slightly higher stool than the footstool she had been offered. ‘Dear oh dear, that is bad. When they start gettin’ ideas, that’s when things turn bad. Sure as night follows day. You see, Frau Nimptsch, my dear, I was in the same boat, but I never got no ideas. And ’cos of that it was quite a different kettle of fish.’

She could see that Frau Nimptsch did not quite grasp her meaning, and so went on, ‘It was ’cos I never got no ideas into my head that it all worked out so smooth an’ easy, and now I’ve got Dörr. It’s not much, I know, but it’s respectable, and you can show your face anywhere. And that’s why I went to church with him and not just the registry office. If you don’t do it in church they’ll always talk.’

Frau Nimptsch nodded, but Frau Dörr repeated, ‘Yes, in church. St Matthew’s it was and Büchsel^* took the service. But you see, what I really meant to say, my dear, is that I was actually taller and more takin’ than Lene, an’ if I wasn’t prettier (’cos you can’t really know, and tastes do vary), well, there was a bit more of me, which there’s some as like. No doubt about it. But even though I was fuller, you might say, with more substance, an’ even though there was somethin’ about me, p’raps – yes, there definitely was somethin’ about me – still I was always quite straightforward, almost a bit simple. An’ as for him, my count, fifty years old if he was a day, he really was a simple soul, always as cheery as can be an’ indecent with it. An’ if I told him once I told him a hundred times: “No, no, Count, that I won’t have, I draw the line at that …” And that’s how the old’uns always are. I tell you, Frau Nimptsch, my dear, you just can’t imagine it. Dreadful it was. An’ when I look at Lene’s baron I still feel right ashamed of what mine was like. An’ as for Lene, she’s no angel, I don’t suppose, but she’s a tidy, hard-workin’ girl, can turn her hand to anythin’, an’ with a sense of what’s right and proper. An’ you see, my dear, that’s the sad thing about it. The ones that gad about all over the place, they fall on their feet and never come to grief, but a good girl like her that takes it all to heart an’ does it all for love, that’s bad … Or maybe it isn’t; after all you only took her in, she’s not your own flesh and blood, an’ maybe she’s a princess or somethin’.’

Frau Nimptsch shook her head at this notion and seemed about to answer. But Frau Dörr had already stood up and, looking down the garden path, said, ‘Lord, here they come. And not even in uniform, jus’ a plain coat an’ trousers. But you can tell just the same! An’ now he’s whisperin’ in her ear, and she’s laughin’ a bit to herself. Oh, she’s gone all red … And now he’s leavin’. An’ now I think … yes, he’s turnin’ round again. No, no, he’s just givin’ her another wave, and she’s blowin’ him a kiss … That’s the way. Yes, that’s what I like to see … No, not a bit like mine, not a bit.’

And Frau Dörr went on talking until Lene came in and greeted them both.

2