We’ve changed, she thought, quite changed. In a matter of only about three weeks. How strange it is. It has been so gentle that it has been almost unnoticeable: nothing terrifying; no sudden wrenches, no blinding flash and hey presto! No sudden trick to unnerve me. Worse than that really; a dawning awareness which has gradually nudged me into acceptance. We have changed and that is that. A subtle weaving of brilliant threads through the safe, comfortable, tweedy fabric of the life which they had invented for themselves from the moment that they had met in Gus Bender’s Studio. It had altered the texture for good.

In a dreadful way, she thought, it was really all her fault. She should never have gone to Lübeck in the first place; that’s where the changing had started. Should have resisted all family blandishments, all emotion, all loyalty to Horst, and not gone, ‘Never Go Back’, they say. She had. Fatal error. Instead she should have joined Marcus on the holiday: tent, bedrolls, frying-pan, discomforts included. They could have hitched, drifted happily about wherever they wished, been together, stayed safety within the confines of their own planned lives, the boundaries which they knew. Instead she had gone her way, duty bound, and he had come here and wandered, as he had put it, ‘into someone’s garden’ and been bidden to stay. And that had made the second vital moment in the change.

For her it had not been the cultural and emotional shock that it had for Marcus. She was accustomed, with one or two minor and some major differences, to the kind of life into which they had moved. Her own, after all, had not been so very different, before Leni Minx, and it had not been difficult to adjust. Too easy in fact. There had been times indeed when she had been uncomfortably aware that she had given herself away as Luise: but each time she suspected an error of that sort she made a greater one as Leni to erase it. And had survived, as far as she knew, intact. Even though quite often the strain was acute.

However, things had been different for Marcus. He had fitted into this new life, once so alien to him, as easily as a finger into a thimble; accepted the sudden flow of affluence with alacrity, eagerness even, as if he was making up for the drab years of deprivation, disillusion and what he called ‘tinned spaghetti and rising damp in Dorking’. He had no compunctions about making errors, as she had, for he had nothing to hide, and he was constantly asking that his faults in such minor things as table manners, social behaviour, or even the complexities of accurate speech, should be corrected. Not from her; for she was Leni who was not supposed to know, but from Cuckoo who did; and was a willing teacher.