“Wait!” But I’m not sure I’ve said it out loud. Or maybe I have because she takes her hand off the handle then, reaches across the space between us, puts her arms around me.

It’s not a hug. It’s a hold. A solid one. I feel her strong arms around me. She pulls me closer and my face presses against the hollow of her neck, her skin there soft and warm and I smell her smell. Her essentially Iris smell and it is fresh. Like fresh-baked bread. Like just-cut grass. Like all those smells you remember from the first time you smelled them and when you smell them again, you remember the first time and it takes you by the hand, the memory, escorts you back, through the maze of all your memories to that first time so you can feel how you felt. That first time.

“Thank you for coming with me, Terry,” she whispers into my hair. There is a collection of words, queueing at the back of my throat. Jostling against the back of my teeth. If I open my mouth, they will tumble out and none of them will be sufficient. None of them will be enough.

I nod instead. So she knows I’ve heard her. So none of the words can get out.

“I’m hungry,” says Dad from the back seat.

“Come on so,” says Iris, opening her door. “I hear they serve chocolate in this place.”

The cheerfully blue building is surrounded by hedges. I can’t think of the name of them now. I can’t think about anything except putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward, keeping my mouth shut tight against the insufficient words, linking Dad’s arm. There is a pond. A stone heron waiting at the water’s edge. A bench. A tiny, wooden bridge. All these things glance against the edge of my vision, trying to distract me. Perhaps that is their purpose.

Even with Dad’s ancient shuffle, we are already at the door of the building, Iris has already lifted her hand, curled it into a fist. She is about to knock when the door opens and a woman smiles at us. Says, “Welcome,” like all good hosts should. She moves to one side, waves us inside and tells us her name is Hanneke.

No surname. Which seems curiously un-Swiss. This is a first-name-basis situation I suppose.

She is tall and thin with long white hair and huge black-rimmed glasses. She is a wearer of comfortable shoes. She is a middle-aged woman. Her face is devoid of makeup.

She looks so ordinary. So...uncomplicated. If I had to guess at her occupation, I might say librarian. Or lollipop lady. Or the woman behind the glass at the post office.

What does she say when people ask her what she does? At an afternoon tea party, say? She looks like a woman who might attend such things.

Hanneke.

Maybe she did tell us her surname and I didn’t hear it. I feel strange. Like I’m underwater. Everything seems distorted, as if I’m wearing somebody else’s glasses.