We were in our rented room, the windows wide open against the heat. Outside, the dense noises of summer; shouts from the street, a click of a croquet ball, laughter, sudden and incomplete and above us Mozart on a tinkly piano. A dog, woof woof woof, chasing the lawn mower. I had my head on your belly and I could hear your lunch on its way to your bowels.

You said, ‘I’m going to leave.’

I thought, Yes, of course you are, you’re going back to the shell.

You said, ‘I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.’

I’ve hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one’s watching. They haven’t faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

We went home to my flat and you brought nothing from your other life but the clothes you stood up in. Elgin had insisted that you take nothing until the divorce settlement had been agreed. You had asked him to divorce you for Adultery and he had insisted it was to be Unreasonable Behaviour.

‘It will help him to save face,’ you said. ‘Adultery is for cuckolds. Unreasonable Behaviour is for martyrs. A mad wife is better than a bad wife. What will he tell his friends?’

I don’t know what he told his friends but I know what he told me. Louise and I had been living together in great happiness for nearly five months. It was Christmas time and we had decorated the flat with garlands of holly and ivy woven from the woods. We had very little money; I had not been translating as much as I should have been and Louise could not resume work until the new year. She’d found a job teaching Art History. Nothing mattered to us. We were insultingly happy. We sang and played and walked for miles looking at buildings and watching people. A treasure had fallen into our hands and the treasure was each other.

Those days have a crystalline clearness to me now. Whichever way I hold them up to the light they refract a different colour. Louise in her blue dress gathering fir cones in the skirt. Louise against the purple sky looking like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. The young green of our life and the last yellow roses in November. The colours blur and I can only see her face. Then I hear her voice crisp and white. ‘I will never let you go.’

It was Christmas Eve and Louise went to visit her mother who had always hated Elgin until Louise told her she was divorcing him. Louise hoped that the season of goodwill might work in her favour and so when the stars were hard and bright she wrapped her mane around her and set off. I waved, smiling, how fine she would look on the Steppes of Russia.