How was I to know that was the last night of my childhood? Maybe if I had, I would have held Tub in my long, skinny arms all night long.

My wife, Sonja, is from a different world, a Nordic world of snow, soused herrings and long winter nights. She left that world when she was seventeen, her mind her passport; for her mind was, and is, so razor-sharp it would make minced meat of Ockham himself. Sonja could have studied anywhere — MIT, Harvard, Oxford — but the first time I saw her was at King’s College, London. An ugly building which seems even now an unlikely place to find beauty. Yet it was there that I saw her for the first time, there that I first touched her hand and noticed nothing unusual. For she left me breathless, boneless and, eventually, she would argue, heartless. I managed, somehow, to speak, to form words and ask her where she was from, what she was studying, as her hand grew hot in mine. She frowned and looked at my lips, as I looked at hers. We smiled and knew then — both of us — that this meeting would last a lifetime. And so it has. It has lasted for the life-time since that moment. It has stretched over twenty years and I have never stopped loving the woman whose hand I first touched in that ugly building.

* * *

The first time I took Sonja down to Devon, to my mother’s house in Thurlestone, it was a humid August night and we arrived to find her drunk, weaving slightly, her gestures clipped yet indefinite. The three of us sat in the library, searching for conversation as my mother fumbled with her glass, her cigarettes, her lighter. The air was heavy, made boxy by the static of an impending storm. When my mother went to the kitchen for a refill, I followed her and told her my news, told her why Sonja and I had come to visit. I knew my mother had spoken, knew she’d said something because the air moved. ‘Sorry?’ I asked.

My mother whirled round, furious, gripping a green gin bottle tightly by its neck. ‘I said, “She may be beautiful but she’s not right for you.’”

I looked out at the volcanic arch, which shattered the horizon of the line between sea and sky. A dark slab of granite in the bay, sun blazing through its portal. ‘I can’t believe that, Ma,’ I tried to say but I must have only whispered.

My mother, her glass frosted by ice, smiled her wintry smile. ‘You can’t even talk any more.’

‘I’m going to marry her.’

‘Then you’re a fool.’

‘I love her.’

‘Fine. Fine. Love her, then, go ahead and love her. But you don’t have to marry her.’ My mother scissored around the kitchen, sharp as a blade, picking up oddments and resetting them, slicing them, cutting them up or down and throwing them away. A lime was slashed and sectioned. She came to rest against the hard chrome edge of the cooker, holding her colourless drink against her chest, against her heart of stone.