And there I was, aged nineteen. Tante Huguette standing in the salon clutching Madame Debord’s letter. Always neat and starched, Tante Huguette. Not a hair out of place.

‘She says the girl she currently employs is to be wed. She needs someone as soon as possible.’ Her eyes scrolled down the letter. ‘She’ll post the train fare as soon as she receives your acceptance.’

‘My acceptance?’

‘The money your father left is nearly gone. Your grandmother’s money too, spent. There is little opportunity for you here.’

‘But this is home.’

‘You should find Paris to be very agreeable.’ She looked out of the window.

‘What will you do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How will you manage? Without me here?’

There was Tante Huguette, raising her chin, pursing her lips. ‘I’ll manage. I can rent out your room; it will help.’

And there I was on a train, the enormous, gleaming bulk and steel and steam of it bearing me forth to the unknown, the unknowable. Bearing me forth to you.

2

Pieter

Åkrehamn, Karmøy Island, Norway, 1921

I used to spend the summers with my grandparents on Karmøy Island. I was salt. I was sea. I spent these languid days swimming at the beach, though the North Sea, as my grandfather would have said, was as cold as a witch’s tit. I splashed and kicked and dove to the white sandy bottom where the world under the surface of the water was untold, unknowable and ever-shifting.

Each time I swam, when I first leapt into the sea, the cold reached into my chest with two hands and squeezed my lungs, and I was forced to bellow as if I were a musical instrument. The temperature got my blood pumping and my skin tingling. When the sun shone and there was no wind, the water was a marbling of blue and topaz and emerald, but when the wind was up and the weather rough, the surface of the water swelled and folded and galloped, and the colour changed to steel, to fighting green. And on these rough days, the sea sprayed foam against the beach boulders, which resembled the rumps of sleeping elephants.

I could hold my breath underwater for over a minute.

I could dive down several metres before my inner ears pulsed and ticked.

After swimming, I would climb to the top of my favourite boulder, hot and rough as animal hide under my feet, and dry off in the sun. My hair dried briny and brittle and crusty with salt.

After swimming, I was fiercely hungry. I wanted to eat everything in sight.

My grandfather was a fisherman, and was usually gone before I woke up in the mornings. He was very tall and thin, and had thick black, wiry hair that sprouted from his head as if the salt-strong wind had sculpted it that way. He often smelled of fish innards, and told stories of gales and ice and the moon rising over the sea like a distant fire in the dark. In his pocket, he carried a sharp knife, which he used to carve off bites of chewing tobacco from a plug he kept in a tin. It was he who taught me that the sea was never too cold for a swim.