‘I feel so bad for you,’ she said, and she could hear that her tone of voice, despite her efforts, was better suited to a sentence like: What does that have to do with me? Then, giving in to an irrepressible urge to be mean, she leaned in toward the mirror and added, ‘Sure, just leave it as usual. My husband loves this look, I must say.’

With a nearly unnoticeable emphasis on the words: my husband.

She regretted it immediately, but at the sight of the hairdresser’s slowly blushing face, she thought about Werner’s recent icy remark to her, as they were on the way out the door to drive to the theater:

‘My dear, I don’t mean to insult you, but couldn’t you do your hair in a way that better matches your age?’

My God, the whole evening was ruined, even though he immediately tried to make it up to her and blamed his exhaustion and his work that – she didn’t understand why – had been taking up all his time. And the following days, how did she make it through? Their kids were getting so big and self-centered, they wouldn’t understand. Irene, the eldest, laughed to her friends: ‘Please excuse my mother. She’s going through a change of life, just like us!’ It was supposed to be so incredibly funny. And what was that? Her heart! So loud she could hear it. She couldn’t stand the way it surprised her, not unlike suddenly being shut in with this stranger who knew everything about her. Everything! To whom she had revealed things she wouldn’t even have told her best friend. And who had misunderstood her, misused her trust so completely, that she thought she could proceed to trot out her own private life! As if a person went to the salon to be entertained by the things in life they were trying to escape from for just a little while.

‘Would you please –’ she put her hand to her heart, avoiding the other woman’s eyes – ‘I don’t feel all that well. Would you open a window? The air is so heavy –’

She really should visit her doctor right away. Her heart was actually hurting. She had to bear down and not give in to her sensitivity. She had to do that much at least for herself. Imagine if she had told me everything, thought Britta, irritated. Why do otherwise perfectly stable people always have a tendency to be so dramatic about it when something bad happens to them? ‘My husband left me yesterday!’ Unconsciously, she had never connected the little ‘Mrs’ in front of the woman’s name with the thought of a husband.