‘I already do, Fräulein. Thank you.’

The following afternoon, Anton saw Lena in different clothes, not the day uniform or the evening dress, but things of her own, with a blue ribbon in her hair. She was with Johanna, and they were on their way to the stables, from which they emerged on bicycles. Anton moved swiftly. He found Young Joseph with his head under the bonnet of the unreliable motor van that had first brought him up from the station.

‘Can I borrow this?’ he said, grabbing an old bicycle that was leaning against the wall.

‘It needs air in the tyres.’

‘That’s all right. Thank you.’

He pedalled hard to the end of the drive and looked both ways. Two distant bicycles were heading in the direction of the town and he set off to follow them.

It was absurd, he knew, and perhaps distasteful, to shadow someone in this way. If they noticed him, he would have to pedal past, ignoring them or claiming some errand in town.

He wondered as he rode how many of Delphine’s attributes had been essential to his passionate response to her, his sense that she was the irreplaceable other half of one being. If some parts of her body had differed in any respect, the whole might have been lost. The faint shadow on the upper lip, the triangle of moles beneath her breasts that he kissed in sequence. Perhaps there could be no negotiation there. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have mattered if she had had a different name or had been a fraction taller; if she had read twice as much, or half as much … if her laugh been pitched a semitone up or down; if her father had been German, not French. Perhaps Lena’s differences from Delphine lay in inessential things like these and the essence of what he loved might turn out to have been preserved in a second woman. Shoulders, laugh, skin tone or a splinter of her soul … And more than that, in fact; because however much he quantified and reasoned, he had no doubt that the woman he was following was Delphine. The uncertainty lay in exactly how, but he had no time to ponder such abstractions as the soft tyres bumped over the road.

Once in town, Lena and Johanna dismounted and left their bicycles against the wall of a shop. Anton was in time to see them disappear into the market square, where they lingered at a fruit stall. Lena talked to the old man behind the piles of apples and berries as he filled a paper bag for them. Their next stop was a clothes shop, selling traditional dresses he couldn’t imagine were of interest to them, but again absorbing an inexplicable length of time. Anton was reminded of his childhood, when his mother had taken him on errands. The butcher’s had been a particular ordeal, as they waited once, while he pushed the toe of his shoe round in the sawdust on the floor, to be served with the meat and then as long again to pay the woman behind the till before the bloody parcels were released.