Billie had a tan, either permanently, or from the sun by the seaside where she had been before. As well as her brown skin, she had fawn-coloured eyes and, amazingly, blonde hair, real blonde . . . it didn’t seem to go with the rest of her. Billie’s mother was a . . . a what? From Pernambuco. No, her mother was German, she had lived in Pernambuco a long time with her German husband, and there must have been something once upon a time . . . Billie was, at a cautious guess, a half-caste, or a half-half-caste, something like that. There was a foreign sweetness about her; when she sat like that, with her legs drawn up, her hands behind her knees, she was like a beautiful cat. You could watch her forever.

‘What sort of schnaps was it we drank last night?’ Billie asked slowly, without taking her eyes off what was happening at a distance accessible only to herself. The question was perfectly valid – but her expression was wrong for it, a quietly dreamy rigidity, and then out came that question about schnaps . . . We laughed. She awoke. ‘Well . . .’ she said.

‘It was a Labommel schnaps,’ I said perfectly seriously.

‘No, really . . . what was it?’

‘It was a Swedish corn brandy. If you only have a glass of it as we did, it’s pleasant and refreshing.’

‘Yes, very pleasant . . .’ We were silent again, and enjoyed the sun. The wind breathed over us, fanning our skin and stroking our glowing pores. I was in a minority, but I didn’t mind. The two were united – not against me, but to some extent excluding me. For all our affection, as I walked along beside them, I suddenly felt that ancient childish feeling little boys sometimes have, that women are strange, alien beings whom you will never understand. The way they are made, what they have under their skirts . . . just the way they are! My boyhood coincided with a time when women’s rigging was something highly complicated – just think off all those hooks and buttons to be done up when they got dressed! Adultery must have been an intricate business then. Nowadays, men have more buttons than women, who, if they are clever, can open as simply as a zip-fastener. And sometimes, when I hear women talking together, I think each must know the secret of the other; they are subject to the same manipulations and fluctuations in their existence, they have children in the same way . . . People are always saying women hate each other. Perhaps it’s because they know each other so well? They know too much about one another, right down to their essential being, which for many of them is the same thing. The rest of us probably have a harder time of it.