And why the ancient university? My parents chose it for me because it was old, prestigious, focused, disciplined. Discipline was what I needed.

Stone it was, the university and the university town. I was stone, heart of stone. And alone.

One late night after leaving the city I smashed my car into a wall of stone. Fragments rained down. Metal flew and rained down. I stepped away from all that rain, unscratched and not unhappy.

Prosecution seemed like the beginning of something new, though that came to nothing. But it made me bold enough to tell my mother I was chucking it all in – the stones, the study.

‘But you can’t,’ she said. ‘Can’t throw your life away.’

I stood like stone.

‘Change courses,’ she suggested, ‘find something you like. You have to do something. The trouble with you is you’ve had it too easy. You don’t know what it’s like to have to work. To have work is the important thing in life.’

My father, over the phone, told me to settle down and see sense. But the financier didn’t sound as though he cared what I did, being involved in deals with this or that country and taken up with all his affairs. I think he was in Spain at the time.

‘You’re going to your grandmother’s,’ my mother said after the enquiries were over.

I thought at first she was talking about Bedstemoder, our father’s mother in the city of Copenhagen, where Janny and I had often stayed when neither of our parents could be home with us in the school holidays. Another city of stones. I was not averse to spending a week or two with Bedstemoder Konnie, who was funny and generous and had a wonderful library.

However, my mother was talking about Grandmother Oriwia, her own mother, on the other side of the world. We’d been to see her once when we were little. There had been a mysterious grandfather too, but he wasn’t there at the time. My sister and I knew his nationality, the name he was known by, and that was all.

There were aunts, uncles and cousins.

We played in the trees, went swimming in the ocean and skidding in the mud of the estuary.

Grandmother Oriwia sent us cards at Christmas.

Attachments.

‘Go there for six months and sort yourself out,’ my mother said. ‘You’ll soon see how the other half lives.’

‘Who was he, the grandfather?’ I asked my mother as I packed my bags.