And yet. This world, she thought, outside my reach … I can’t be someone looking on, all my life. I can’t forever stand the way I do at school, peering through the iron gate while the others play their games. I can’t wait for a man who never comes.

Carina arrived home shortly before midnight, unsteady on her feet. She found her daughter lying on the balcony outside, her eyes so swollen that even through the mists of alcohol Carina couldn’t help but notice.

‘Have you been bitten by an insect?’

Lena shook her head.

‘Did one of the children hit you at school?’

She lifted the light body and carried it inside, putting her down on her own bed.

‘There. You can sleep with me tonight.’

The girl curled herself away.

‘Here,’ said Carina, ‘have some of this.’ She mixed some schnapps in a glass with a little sugar and water. It was the best she could offer and it cost her something to dip into her own supply. Lena refused to take it, but climbed under the blanket, which she pulled up to hide her face.

Carina drained the glass. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning,’ she said, lying down beside her daughter and falling asleep.

When she was thirteen, Lena left school. In that time, she had received three postcards from Stefan and two promises to visit, but had had no sight of him. Sometimes she wondered if he had drowned at sea. His fishing boat had drifted beyond the bar to be swept up by ocean currents, blown and buffeted till it capsized, leaving him trapped beneath the upturned hull with its thin blue stripe … It seemed to her that the best course of action was to save some money and take a train to Trieste. She had made the journey before, after all; the only difference was that this time she would be alone.

First, she had to find work. She was too young to clean at the clinic with her mother, to be a waitress or even a washer-up in a café; but Frau Winkler, the lady almoner at the hospital where she had been born, said when Lena reached the age of fifteen she could come and work in the laundry there.

The money from the hospital, it turned out, was barely enough to buy food to keep her going. One day, after she had spent the morning folding sheets, she saw a young man on crutches with a leg in plaster, coming down the corridor. He had curly hair and a reddish face that to Lena suggested kindliness – like the man in the wharf with the blue shirt, but less intimidating. It was not the type of colouring she’d seen often in the streets, where the people were dark-haired; it was almost a girlish face.

The young man smiled at her and, for all the caution she’d been taught by her mother, Lena smiled back.

A few days later, she saw him again, this time hopping round the small courtyard at the back of the hospital. She waved. He put his cigarette between his lips, stuck one crutch next to the other and waved back with his free hand, almost toppling over. Lena laughed as he regained his balance, and he laughed back.