She closed her eyes while her hair was washed, and she almost forgot the little hairdresser’s altered demeanor under the soft, massaging fingertips caressing her scalp. It was the most soothing feeling she had ever known. She was falling asleep as she remembered one summer at the beach, the summer of her great love, long before Werner, when a young man lay next to her, playing with her hair while her fingers sifted through the warm sand, and she felt her body opening, receiving, and she was carried far away on a tide of happiness – but then suddenly the sky grew cloudy and all the beachgoers disappeared. She was all alone, and ice-cold rain started pelting her hair. She woke with a little screech:

‘Aah! The water’s cold! What are you doing?’

Horrified, she peered up into a face that looked just as upset as she herself felt, and she realized that there was something wrong, something incredible and terrible, which she, Britta, who had come here to calm her nerves, would now be unavoidably involved with for the next couple of hours. Her poor heart started pounding disconcertingly fast. She would have to mention this to the doctor – her hypersensitivity to the suffering of others. It was like a sickness. She shook her head weakly from side to side in response to the stammering apology the hairdresser mumbled, and then she shut her eyes again in resignation, as the fingers on her head pressed into a second round of shampoo lather.

Ow, unfamiliar fingers were pressing too hard, and were not evoking any more delicate, dreamy thoughts.

When she sat in front of the mirror, which reflected her face in the most flattering lighting imaginable, for some reason it made the much younger woman’s face behind her look even paler, and her curiosity won out over all her other feelings.

‘What’s wrong, Mrs Mikkelsen?’ she asked sympathetically. ‘It’s not like you to be so quiet. Aren’t you feeling well?’

The thin pastel blue figure turned away from her, and Britta noticed with distaste that the back of the woman’s hair was matted and dull.

‘My husband left me yesterday – do you want me to leave it long in front of your ears, as usual?’

There was hardly a pause between the two statements, but – as Britta later explained to people when she recounted the episode – her heart nearly stopped beating at the sight of the two teardrops sliding down the young woman’s cheeks.

It was too much, unfair really, that this should happen on this particular day, when she had woken in her darkest mood next to the still warm depression in the bed where Werner had slept. She wanted to laugh hysterically, because she had come here – no rushed here – to forget, to be soothed by vacuous but familiar and sweet chatter, to be surrounded by wonderful smells, and to be treated by caring, almost loving hands, and then –