We chugged through Lolland, which is as flat as a pancake, and we flicked through our newspapers. Then we played the book-game: each of us in turn would read out a sentence from his or her book. The sentences fitted together quite beautifully. The Princess turned the pages, and I gazed at her hands . . . she had such dependable hands. For a while she stood in the corridor, staring out of the window. Then she went off, and I couldn’t see her any more. I reached for her bag, which retained the warmth of her hands. I stroked it. They ferried us across another stretch of sea, and then we chugged some more. At last, we reached Copenhagen.

‘If we take a room over the courtyard at the rear,’ I said in the hotel, ‘then we’ll get cooking smells, and the drunken Spanish composer will probably still be around from last time, composing ten hours a day on the piano. But if we take a room at the front, where the town hall clock strikes every quarter hour, we’ll be reminded of time passing.’

‘Couldn’t we take somewhere in the middle . . .’

So we took a room overlooking the town hall square, the clock struck, and it was all marvellous.

Lydia picked at her food, and watched me admiringly. ‘You do gobble . . .’ she said agreeably. ‘I’ve seen people who eat a lot, and people who eat quickly . . . but so much and so fast!’

‘Pure envy,’ I muttered, and turned to the radishes. It wasn’t a gastronomic supper, but it was a very nutritious one.

As the clock struck, she turned over to sleep and I heard her say softly, as though talking to herself. ‘You’re on a ship now. There’s a really heavy swell . . . a cup of luke-warm machine-oil . . .’

I had to get up and drink plenty of soda water.

4

Copenhagen.

‘Shall I show you the sea-food restaurant where Ludendorff always used to eat, when he was still a war hero?’

‘Yes, show me . . . no, let’s go to the Lange Linie instead!’ We looked at everything: the Tivoli Gardens, the beautiful town hall and the Thorwaldsen Museum, where everything looked as though it was made of plaster.

‘Lydia!’ I called, ‘Lydia! I almost forgot. We absolutely have to visit the Polysandrion!’

‘The . . . what?’

‘The Polysandrion! You’ve got to see it. Come along.’ It was a long walk, because the little museum was right outside the city.

‘What is it?’ asked the Princess.

‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘It’s where a couple of Balts built a house for themselves. One of them, Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen, imagines he can paint. But he can’t.’

‘And we’re going all this way just to see that?’

‘No, not exactly. He can’t paint, but he does – and he always paints the same thing, his adolescent fantasies: young boys and butterflies.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked the Princess.