But I did not cry. I tried to go down the stairs slowly, one foot in front of the other, step by step, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Then she stopped on one step for a long time, until she caught her breath. “You said that English legal firms are taking over German ones. Why don’t you open a branch of your firm in England with the two older ones?” I thought of the distance my children maintained with me. “They did follow in your footsteps after all.”

A couple of steps further down, she stopped again. “My daughter – you’ll have to see whether you think you can tell her about me. I don’t want you to upset her. I want you to do her good. If you do her good by doing nothing, then do nothing.”

Then we had reached the end of the stairs. “How lovely,” she said, standing in the water. Everything was lovely, the warm water, the smooth sea, the pebbles and fish and plants at the bottom, the sky, still morning-blue, without the haze of the day’s heat. Irene leant into my embrace, took everything in, and rested. “Can we make it to the boulder at the end of the cove?”

But after only a few steps she felt sick, and she threw up what she had just eaten. We took a break and sat down on the veranda of the house on the beach. “And if we had met as children?”

“I remember the schoolhouse, yellow brick with red sandstone ornaments, and its two equal halves, one for girls and one for boys. Like the building, the schoolyard was divided into two equal halves, and during the main break the girls and boys from grades one to four would walk, two by two, in two big circles overseen by some of the older children, who were themselves overseen by a teacher. The older children who didn’t have to oversee us were free to move around, and they bothered us, and hit us, and took our apples and pretzels – it was a game for them, it wasn’t about the apples or pretzels, but about getting away with it.

“I was an anxious child. I was afraid of school, of the teachers, of the big kids, of the walk to school, where the big kids bothered me, and sometimes hit me or took something from me. Of arriving late, and again and again I was late; though I left on time; I would dawdle out the way, dreading school. For a long time, I saw my life at school through a fog, without understanding what it was about, or what mattered.