It was a glorious day – perfect weather for laying eggs, as the Princess put it. We went to the station. It was a tiny station; really just a little house, but it took itself so terribly seriously as a station, that it had quite forgotten it was a house. There were two pairs of rails, as every station has to have, and there was the carriage puffing noisily. It wasn’t a train as such, only a single carriage-cum-locomotive. It had put on a little smokestack, to give it some credibility. It pulled in. Hissed. Karlchen.

As always when we hadn’t seen one another for a long time, his expression was equable, friendly, a little foolish, a sort of ‘Ah . . . so there you are . . .’ expression. He came up to us, the shadow of the imminent greeting already visible on his face, and carrying a tiny little suitcase. He was a tall fellow, and his slightly battered face looked ‘youthful and alert’, as he put it.

Hello – this is . . . meet . . . now shake hands . . . where’s the rest of your luggage? When the preliminaries were over, I asked,

‘Well, Karlchen, how was your trip?’

He had fluttered up to Stockholm, he said, in an aeroplane, arriving at noon . . .

‘Was it nice?’

‘Well . . .’ said Karlchen, and bared his teeth in his habitual grimace, ‘there was an old lady who didn’t take to flying very well. Give me a cigarette, will you. Thanks. And they have these little bags . . . She had already used up two of them, and the third didn’t reach her in time, so the man next to her will either have to buy himself a new suit, or have his old one cleaned. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sitting next to her. The rest of the view was very nice. And how does Madam like it here?’

As Karlchen said ‘Madam’, which he didn’t himself believe in, he stiffened and politely inclined his upper body; he accompanied this with a charming gesture, abruptly extending his forearm and then withdrawing it again with the elbow bent, as if he had wanted to inspect his cuff-links . . .

And how was Madam enjoying it?

‘If he wasn’t here,’ Madam said, ‘then I would be having a very restful time. But you know what he’s like – always blathering on – never leaves you in peace . . .’

‘Yes, he was always that way. How nice,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ve left my umbrella on the train.’ We went back to get it. Things don’t disappear in Sweden. The two came to an immediate understanding – it’s strange how, within the first few minutes people often determine the entire future course of their relationship. Here you could sense immediately that the two of them had hit it off: they took Life, and me in particular, less than seriously.