She stayed with him for two months, traveling with the circus up into Belgium, to Liège, to Mons. In a town up there whose name Wim was never told, there were two churches, one on either side of the main square, each with spires about ninety feet tall. The tightrope was suspended from one to the other and Maurits commenced his walk by stepping out of the belfry of the Sacred Heart and heading for the belfry of the Queen of Heaven. No one knew why it happened. Catherine told her cousin he lost his equilibrium because he was so excited at the news she had given him that morning— news which excited her not at all—that she was pregnant. Perhaps he was tired. They had been traveling for most of the day and only reached the place in the early evening. Whatever caused it, he lost his balance halfway across and fell. The crowd screamed, people rushed forward to try and catch him, a vain effort. He died instantly, smashed on the cobblestones of the square.

Catherine went home to her parents. She was only eighteen. It was 1958, a time when pregnancy outside marriage was still a disgrace. But her parents looked after her. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer, there was plenty of money. They sent her to her aunt in Utrecht and there Wim was born in a small and very select nursing home. Catherine had had months in which to recount her experiences to her cousins, girls whose ages were very near her own, and it was one of them who passed what she knew on to Wim. For Catherine didn’t stay long. One night when everyone was asleep, including the three-week-old baby, she went, leaving the baby behind. It was his prolonged howls that brought one of the cousins to the room and found her gone.

“No one wanted me,” Wim said, “but they thought it their duty to keep me. I stayed a few months with Aunt Marie, during which she had me baptized in a name of her choosing, then a few more with my grandparents, then back to Marie. One of my cousins got married, so it was time for her to take her turn. I was with her for a year and then she had a child of her own, so it was back to my grandparents. They didn’t mind how much they paid to have me looked after. It was just that they found it a bore doing it themselves. I was a nuisance, no one made a secret of that. They used to say so, sighing and smiling. ‘He’s a nuisance, poor little thing, but what can we do?’ My father’s mother turned up when I was eight. I spent two years with her. I think my other grandparents gave her a lump sum.”