My first thought is that he is a supermodel and she must be his poor assistant. Hans and Rita have come from Düsseldorf to visit a sick friend and want to stay for a week. Hans immediately removes his shirt and jumper, kicks off his shoes, vaults over the back of the sofa and plonks his feet on the coffee table. Rita looks embarrassed. We drink wine together and make small talk.
The following morning I ask if everything is OK in their room. A silence descends. “No, it was awful. I try to sleep in your living room but she say no, I must ask you first.”
My heart sinks. Is the bed uncomfortable?
Rita, who has just had a shower, gathers her towel around herself. “No. I cannot sleep with this man. All night he wants sex. I have told him again and again that because of his philandering I have nearly killed myself with sorrow. I spent two years crying and not eating. All I could do was read Proust and weep on the couch.
“This week, he wants to come to the UK with me to visit our friend and, for the sake of the children, to try again. But no, no sex. I tell him this before we leave.”
“What can I do?” pleads Hans. “I am very highly sexed. I need sex, two, three times a day. If I do not have, I must go bouldering.”
Rita catches my look. “It is a sport. You climb over very large boulders in a field. It is exhausting.”
“So,” he continues, “I can sleep in the living room? On a cushion maybe, or you have another mattress?”
I mumble that it would be uncomfortable and inconvenient. I watch as he cooks himself three fried eggs and decorates them with slices of apple. (They have brought an enormous plastic box of sliced fruit with them from Germany.)
“I cannot sleep with this woman, without having sex, so I must sleep elsewhere,” he says. “So, if not the living room … I sleep with you, yes?”
“Tea, anyone?” I ask nervously.
I borrow an air mattress from a friend to put in their room and, with great satisfaction, hear Hans struggle to blow it up. Rita shows me pictures of German industrial photography and her new lover in Düsseldorf. Just as good-looking as Hans but he doesn’t go bouldering.
