Sometimes in the morning I tended Irene’s garden, or did the laundry, or tried to fix things: a broken step, a dripping faucet, the Jeep’s spare tyre. I took my time and thought about how our story would continue. But sometimes Irene wanted to hear the next installment first thing in the morning, and I had to improvise and slow it down, and elaborate, and embroider. Then we let lunch go by the wayside, and I sat by her bed on the balcony into the late afternoon, telling our story.

I recounted our flight across the Atlantic. As we looked out of the window we saw another plane in the distance, just as, in the middle of the ocean, you can come across another ship – a greeting from the new world you’re on your way to. In New York we took a room at the Waldorf Astoria, and enjoyed the city like rich tourists until our money started running out. We went to the Empire State Building, to the Statue of Liberty, to the Metropolitan Museum, to the Guggenheim and the Frick Collection. We walked north through Central Park, past where people had warned us not to go; we ventured into Harlem and to the Bowery, we ate at Café des Artistes and at the Russian Tea Room, and at Tavern on the Green. Irene had never been to New York, and she hadn’t seen a film in a long time, and she enjoyed the sights that everyone has images of in their mind, from films or from their brief trips. There were two beds in our room at the Waldorf Astoria, and Irene wanted to know whether either of us had suggested sleeping in the same bed. But she didn’t love me, she only liked me, so I found that two beds were more appropriate.

How our days passed – when Irene rested, and we ate, and I talked – depended on how she felt. She did not need the diapers; the mishap she’d had the night Gundlach and Schwind left didn’t repeat itself. But she often felt nauseous, and threw up what she had just eaten. Anyway, she had no appetite. She praised my spaghetti carbonara, my mushroom risotto, my goulash, but the only thing she really enjoyed was my salad.

Our days had the kind of ease that, back then, I’d dreamed our life in Frankfurt might.

Once I got carried away and told her so.

“Yes,” she said, “but it’s a life unto death.”

7

Day by day it got hotter. The wind from the sea stayed away, and the air that usually feels like a nothing wrapped itself around us, thick and warm. The birds stopped singing and flying, and the plants in the garden withered. Irene banned me from watering them, saying water would soon be in short supply.

“Do you want to move into the house on the beach?”

“Tomorrow, perhaps.”