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very clean black shoes, stood and waited, pencil and pad in hand, while Frederick ordered steak and eggs and onions from the typewritten menu sent up from the dining room.
    She thought that the serving girl was – well, seemed to be – enjoying playing her role. Uniforms brought out other selves. She remembered how different she felt in her UNRRA uniform in Vienna.
    Edith urged Frederick towards indulgence. ‘To begin? Oysters?’
    ‘I’ll have the tomato soup.’
    ‘Order some dessert, too.’ And before Frederick could order, she said to the serving girl, ‘He’ll have the bavarois Chantilly .’
    The serving girl smiled. Frederick looked at Edith with resignation.
    She ordered the ‘oysters en coctaile ’ – she had given up correcting the hotel-menu French – followed by the fillets of snapper and sauce tartare. ‘And for my dessert I will take the meringue Chantilly .’
    The girl wrote it down on her pad. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’
    Frederick said, ‘I usually have lunch with the workers, sitting on the ground with our backs to the wall in the sun.’ He was acting too. ‘I got the men’s camp lunchboxes improved.’
    ‘Nutritiously improved?’
    He laughed. ‘No, more-to-eat improved. I don’t think nutrition’s on their minds. That may be next year’s campaign.’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Frederick, have some oysters. Tomato soup is rather –’ She was about to say common, but changed it to – ‘dull.’
    Frederick looked at the serving girl and nodded.
    ‘And, of course, some wine. Send up a bottle of claret and a bottle of something white – that Australian wine . . . I always forget its name. Graves?’
    ‘I know the wine, ma’am,’ Janice said. ‘Whenever I order it, the cellar man says, “Oh, that’s for the woman from Europe.” ’
    They all laughed and Edith felt glad of the laughter – it warmed the atmosphere.
    Frederick raised an eyebrow. ‘Two bottles of wine?’
    ‘What we don’t have with our lunch, Ambrose and I can drink some other time.’ Edith said that they usually received their weekly wine delivery from the High Commission – French – but sometimes the wine didn’t turn up and they had to resort to the hotel cellar, ‘such as when your lot have a strike on the waterfront’.
    She turned to Janice. ‘You may tell the cellar man, Janice, that I was from Australia before I was from Europe, and I am from Australia now. This is my brother Frederick, Janice, who is not from Europe, although he lived for a time in Central Europe.’
    Frederick rose and formally shook hands with Janice, who said, ‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’ She even did something of a curtsey to Frederick, which was not normal. Edith rather liked it.
    As he sat down again, he said, ‘I’ll change my order, Janice, and have everything that my sister from the Continent has suggested.’
    Janice, in an educated voice that Edith had not heard before, said to him, ‘Nothing is too good for the working classes.’ Then, in a broad Australian voice, ‘That’s what I alwus say.’
    Edith saw something in this playlet that she didn’t understand. She also saw that Janice was perhaps playing with her. It was slightly unsettling. Irritating.
    Edith said, ‘You look the part today, Janice.’ The voice of a guest to a servant who is perhaps not what she seems. Staring at her, trying to decipher the playlet.
    Janice then said, ‘These black stockings prickle.’
    ‘Remind you of schooldays?’
    ‘At my school we had better quality.’
    Edith was tempted to ask the name of her school but decided against that.
    After Janice left, Frederick said, ‘Have you been to Russia?’
    She shook her head.
    ‘I was there at a cadre school before the war. In Russia, lunch, or obed , is the largest meal – several courses, the soup comes after a salad. And the salads are a meal in themselves. Topped with meat or fish. Pickled vegetables. Then meat or fish and roasted vegetables. And, of course,