His face crumpled slightly; but then he said, ‘Well, we should do something, of course. Get to grips with something. And maybe it isn’t such a bad idea.’

I flung my arms around his neck and kissed him.

The business took off. Word soon got around that a new shoe shop had opened on the outskirts of town, and the little bell that Robert had managed, after a few failed attempts, to fix above the door rang at almost all hours of the day. The house was on the approach road, near the main road heading west. Our apartment was right above the shop; at dawn I could see the commuters’ faces behind their windscreens, and if I leaned out of the window I could wipe the dust off the sign that read Martha’s Quality Ladies’ Shoes. I worked from eight in the morning till six in the evening; I checked the stock, displayed the merchandise and attended to our clients’ wishes. Robert was responsible for the bookkeeping, and sometimes the two of us would sit up all night at the kitchen table trying to insert some order into his muddled system.

Robert was a man full of insecurities and anxieties, and it was an effort for him to hold his own in life, which he saw as a perpetual challenge. He was always fighting the worries that plagued him and the objects that seemed to stand in the way of his fidgety limbs.

The bungled marriage proposal was just the first in a long series of clumsinesses. Shoeboxes and tins of polish slipped from his hands; shoe trees, brushes, open cash boxes all fell to the floor, and almost every week documents and receipts went missing. He didn’t know how to treat objects. And he didn’t know how to treat a woman. It was as if Robert’s hands were leading a life of their own, incapable of expressing his ideas about love.

One night I asked him, ‘What do you really desire, Robert?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean in bed.’

‘Oh,’ was all he said.

‘Tell me,’ I insisted.

‘I don’t think I have any desires in that regard,’ he said.

I would have liked to have had a child. I often imagined what it would be like to cradle a little person like that in my arms. When they got bigger, I’d take them by the hand and walk with them across the fields. We’d weave ourselves crowns of field flowers and spin round and round in the white drifts beneath the poplars.

Sometimes, at night, when another month had gone by, I would listen to Robert breathing beside me, feel his body twitch in sleep, and tremble with happiness and longing for what was to come.

But it didn’t happen. It’s pointless looking for reasons; there’s no explanation and no blame. I didn’t reproach Robert, and instead of succumbing to despair I put all my energy into running the business. I wanted to move out of our road, which I found increasingly grey and dreary, into the centre of town, and I started looking for suitable premises. I dreamed of a splendid showroom, light and spacious, and shop assistants whose elegance was on a par with that of their customers. Every night I imagined what it would be like to create an atmosphere like this, full of life and light. Sometimes I would creep down the dark stairs and try on one of the latest models. I would walk around the shop, observe myself in the mirror, and smile as I never did when I was a young girl.