They were children, little girls in pairs, all in a line, like a double-row of pearls. A bossy-looking person was leading them, glaring round all the time – none of them were talking. As they came closer to us, we stepped aside to let the procession pass. The leader threw us a glittering look. The children trotted on. We didn’t speak as they filed past us. At the very end was a little girl on her own; she walked as though she were being pulled along, her eyes were stained with tears, she still sobbed occasionally as she walked, but she wasn’t crying. Nor was her face puffy, as a crying child’s sometimes is . . . instead, it looked as though it had been emptied of tears; there was a golden shimmer in her brownish hair. She looked at us as she might have looked at a tree, tired and indifferent. In a fit of exuberance and kindness, the Princess offered her a couple of harebells we had picked. The child quivered, then looked up, her lips moved; perhaps she wanted to say something, to thank her . . . but just then the woman at the front turned round and the little girl quickened her step and hurried after the troop. Dust and the sound of the children’s marching feet. Then it was all over.

‘Funny little girl,’ said the Princess. ‘What sort of children are they? Let’s ask later. Peter, my son, do you get Northern Lights here? I’d so like to see some Northern Lights!’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course, but everything you want to see, my daughter, happens the month you’re not there . . . Life’s like that. But that comes in the next lesson. Northern Lights – yes . . .’

‘I think they must be lovely. I saw them once as a child, in an encyclopaedia. That was a world of its own, too, that encyclopaedia, with its little leaves of tissue-paper. There they were, illustrated, the Northern Lights, very big and bright, they’re meant to cover half the sky. I think I’d be terribly scared if I saw them. Just imagine, big coloured lights in the sky! What if they fell! And landed on your head! But I would love to see them just once . . .’

The pale-blue sky arched over our heads; at one point on the horizon it turned a deep dark-blue, and where the sun had gone down earlier, it glowed a rosy yellow, and shone and twinkled a little.

‘Lydia’, I said, ‘shall we make our own Northern Lights?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Look,’ I said, and pointed up at the sky, “you see, you see – there – there they are!”

We both looked fixedly up – we were holding hands, our pulses and our blood flowed from one to the other. Just then, I loved her more than ever before. And then we saw our Northern Lights.