‘You’ve been working all weekend,’ he said. ‘Won’t you come for a Sunday-afternoon drive with us. I promised the kids that we’d go for a swim and an ice cream.’

She sighed. There were still emails to go through and work to be done to familiarise herself with the new South Coast Highway project, and then there was the new adviser.

‘I’m waiting for a call from Eva Aðalbjörns. She’s up for the job.’

‘That’s great,’ Nonni said. ‘You’ll have someone whose fashion sense is as sharp as her political antenna.’

Úrsúla laughed.

‘I could do with some fashion sense myself. I wish I could deal with the clothes thing like men do, just a new tie once in a while.’ 30

‘You always look great. But seriously, that’s really good,’ he said and kissed her temple again. ‘She seems to be a hard worker. So next weekend you can send her home with the emails and you can come swimming with us.’

He turned in the doorway, smiled and winked at her, and for a second she felt a jolt of the electricity she had used to feel when he smiled at her. He became more handsome as the years passed and he would carry it well into old age. A hint of grey in his dark hair and stubble would just make him look even cooler. She couldn’t fail to see how other women looked at him, and when they were out somewhere in company she was proud that he was her husband. But this flash of lightning was inevitably accompanied by the guilt that had coloured every aspect of their relationship since moving back home. He regularly asked what the problem was, but whether they were with the counsellor or alone at home, she was still unable to say out loud that she felt a kind of emotional shortfall when it came to him and the children, that she knew deep down that she loved them, but didn’t truly feel it. She couldn’t say that she felt an affection for them any more than for people in general; she liked people and wanted to help them, and that included these three people. But beyond that … nothing much.

She had been warned about this long ago, both in training and when being supervised during her first couple of years working in disaster relief, and by colleagues in the field, who told her that while some of them suffered from PTSD, with bouts of sweating, trembling and nightmares, others became hardened. She was clearly one of the second group. This wasn’t something she had ever expected. She was resilient, with her head screwed on properly, or so she had thought: a sensible, down-to-earth, tough person. But when Médecins Sans Frontières had borrowed her from UNHCR to organise the emergency camps in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic, everything had changed.

It was in Liberia: after a few weeks of gulping back the fear, 31dressed in yellow coveralls in which the tears and the sweat mingled in the overpowering heat, and seeing through the goggles how a human body could shrivel into an anonymous pool of vomit and shit and slime and blood, it was as if this had become her only reality. This was the real human situation that nobody at home was aware of or capable of understanding. And she couldn’t explain it to them. There was no way to tell the story. There were no words that could describe the Ebola epidemic. There was also no easy way to have this kind of thing stored away in your memory. She felt that she had been wearing those plastic coveralls ever since.