I first saw Martha in the town hall square. She was walking back and forth with two girlfriends, laughing constantly. I was sitting on a bench, and every time she walked past she turned her head towards the town hall and seemed to be gazing at the tower, or the clock, or something in that direction. I’d already noticed her incredibly long neck. It was long and slender and it drove me crazy. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do; I just sat there on the bench, feeling every bit as stupid as I probably was.

I found out where she lived, and one day I stood outside and waited until she came out of the house. She didn’t look at me at first, just walked straight past. Then she turned and said, ‘You think you’re quite the daredevil, don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

‘Things can’t move fast enough for you.’

I stared at her neck. ‘Don’t know,’ I said.

‘Well, you can’t be expected to know everything,’ she said. ‘But there’s no harm in making an effort, is there?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Sure.’

‘So what shall we do now?’

‘No idea,’ I said. ‘Walk around the block, maybe?’

‘Such a daredevil,’ she said, and off we went.

We were married soon afterwards. I proposed to her, and as I tried to put the ring on her finger she stared straight at me the whole time. Her eyes seemed to bore into mine, and I started to have doubts. The ring fell out of my hand and rolled under the kitchen bench. She burst into peals of laughter, and at that moment I sensed that this might be the start of a colossal misunderstanding.

She was always talking about love. For me, love was neither a blessing from God nor the result of some sort of effort; it was just a word like any other. Martha had interested me because I was lonely, and because you had to have a girl. And I married her because I wanted children. Although I was young, there was hardly anything else I wanted from life.

I’d set my heart on making a cradle myself, with my own hands. With wooden rockers and silken drapes. I imagined what it would be like to hear the sounds that little person made in the darkness of our bedroom. Martha said I was bound to saw off my fingers. She saw us as two diverging branches on the trunk of the same tree. But that’s not the case. We had no roots in common. I’m not even sure we breathed the same air. We stood beside each other for years among racks of shoes that held no interest for me; we slept in the same bed, ate at the same table, looked out of the same window onto the same approach road. We spent half our lives in the same room without ever really touching each other.

‘I’d like to have a child,’ I said to Martha. ‘People need to extend beyond themselves.’