We stood on deck, by the railing, breathing the clear air and looking at both shorelines: the Danish coast behind us, and the Swedish coast approaching. I watched the Princess out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes she was like a complete stranger, but I kept falling in love with this stranger, and having to win her all over again. The distance between a man and a woman! But then how lovely, to dive into a woman like diving into the sea, without thinking . . . Many of them wear glasses, as it were; they have forgotten what it is to be a woman in the real sense. They just have that thin layer of charm left. Damn it! I suppose we ask a bit much of them: intelligent conversation, logic, good looks and a certain degree of fidelity – and yet there is still that irrepressible longing to be gobbled up like a beefsteak by the woman with jaws crunching . . .

‘Do you have any Swedish currency?’ asked the Princess dreamily.

‘Yes, I have some Kroner,’ I said. ‘It’s a lot of money, and we’ll have to be careful how we spend it.’

‘Skinflint,’ said the Princess.

We had a joint travelling fund, which it had taken us six months to work out. We were in Sweden.

Customs again. Swedish German is different from Danish German. With the Danes, it’s a faint exhalation, which sounds light as a feather. The consonants emerge half a yard in front of the mouth, and dissolve in the air like birdsong. With the Swedes it comes from further back in the throat, and with a wonderful lilt . . . I showed off horribly with my ten words of Swedish, but no one understood them. They probably thought I was some particularly complicated type of foreigner. We had a light lunch.

‘The bouillon,’ said the Princess, ‘looks like water in half-mourning!’

‘That’s just what it tastes like too.’ We went on to Stockholm.

She slept again.

To watch someone sleeping is to feel superior to them – it’s probably something left over from prehistoric times, perhaps it’s the dormant thought: he can’t hurt me, but I can hurt him. At least she didn’t look foolish; her breathing was quiet and firm, and her mouth stayed shut. That’s how she’ll look when she’s dead. Then her head will be resting on a board. Whenever I think of death, I see rough, unplaned boards, with little splinters. She’ll be lying there, the colour of candle-wax, but there will be something awe-inspiring about her. Once, when we were talking about death, she said, ‘We all have to die – you sooner, me later.’ Her thinking could be so masculine. The rest, thank God, was all woman.

She awoke. ‘Where are we?’