Laure was in her dressing gown, crouched down beside Marenka.

‘This is goodbye,’ he said. ‘In another life, it might have been different.’ She did not look up. ‘Laure, please think about yours. Do you intend to spend it snooping and hanging around in the shadows at the behest of your embassy? Yes? All the things you rejected when you were in Prague.’ Her shoulders tensed. ‘Don’t do it. I’ve had my life and made the mistakes. But I wouldn’t want you to do the same.’

She shook back her hair as if to brush away unwelcome knowledge. ‘I hope your life is how you wish it. And successful.’ She stood upright and faced him and he ached to kiss her one final time. ‘You’re a good man, but a divided one, I think. You love your children. You were generous to me but your politics took you in other directions.’

He considered pleading for them both to begin again, to make something out of the disaster – and dismissed the idea.

‘Do you remember the Pierrot piece I was talking about?’ Laure stood up. ‘The marionette who plucked his own strings out? I used to be frightened that it was Tomas. But, I think after all, it was you. You once said that Tomas would be the broken man but it’s you who’s broken.’

‘And you,’ he said.

There was a long silence.

‘You and I are done,’ she said. ‘Done.’

He got back to his hotel room and stood for a long time with his back to the door, unable to put one foot in front of the other.

Not even after the death of Eva had he felt like this. Scorched inside and as if the roots tethering him to his life had been pulled up, one by one. Whether he could ever atone for the things that had been done, he did not know.

The contradictions of his history were savage but – not forgetting Czech humour – also funny. What would have happened if the Prince in the folk story had ended up helpless and out of control as he now was? What would have happened if the Prince had hacked through the defensive hedge of thorns only to find that Sleeping Beauty was not only not waiting for him, but hostile?

He ran a shower as hot as he could take it and stood under it for a long time. He dried himself, put on the hotel dressing gown and mixed himself a drink from the mini-bar and took it to bed.

Since the fall of the Wall, the hotel management had made efforts to compete with its Western counterparts, but the bed was far from comfortable and the sheets were cheap and slippery. He did not expect to get much sleep. Nor did he.