At home the sea is warm. Seagulls perch on the jetties. Roses grow along the wall. Now what? Find another? When everything is about him. When he is the only man in the world. Forget him. Kiss another. She tries to move on. She doesn’t say no to anything that might ease her pain, distract her. She drinks. She gets drunk. She kisses other men. She sleeps with other men. Afterwards she feels remorse and shame, she trembles in the grey dawn from fresh, unbearable pain. An earthquake is rumbling. She is caught up in an avalanche. It is happening now: the destruction of the old. She isn’t doing anything, it just happens. She is a mute, somnambulant part of it. She is free from her external past, but she has yet to step into her present, she has no idea about the future and every kind of emotion whirls around this space.

When the fourth attack happens, she knows that it will pass. That it will last an hour and a half and then slowly it will pass, and that makes it more bearable. It is true, as someone has said, that when you are in pain, you are doing the work. Pay attention to your crisis, the book says. It is telling you that something is wrong. If you regard a crisis as an external disaster that has befallen you, it will simply intensify; she tries to view it as a message.

She has experienced this before. Her mind tells her that it will pass, that it must be endured and then it will be over – for now. She keeps reminding herself, but doesn’t believe her own words. She will never smile again.

Is this happy? Is this sad? Looking back, the times when nothing was certain have a unique quality. When everything was up for grabs, when she couldn’t even make a guess at how it would pan out, how the ending would unfold, that is how she remembers it. Is it when you don’t know what to feel, when you don’t know what will happen, when your questions are truly open-ended and sincere, that time stops?

Except now he doesn’t know what he wants. He chuckles. Now she has been put in her place, now she is where she should be. His voice is calm as it was on her answering machine, laid-back as if he can barely be bothered to talk, as if there is nothing at stake for him, as if he doesn’t mind either way. She is gasping for air. Say yes! Say yes!

‘So do you want to see me?’

‘Yes!’

‘Do you know where I am staying?’

‘Aren’t you staying in the same place as last night?’

He laughs. It was a joke. He was joking!

‘I think it’s too late,’ he then says.

‘I don’t mind. I’ll take a taxi.’

He hesitates. ‘I think it’s too late,’ he says again.

If she had been at home, he says, when he called, but she wasn’t. That is her punishment. She begs, she pleads, he says no, he has made up his mind. Hurt me, hurt me so I can feel who I am.

The fourth time. She offers to call them a taxi. She offers, yes, she does all the running. She goes out to buy breakfast, she offers, yes, she nips out to get it. She makes coffee, yes, she offers, and carries it and milk and cups on the tray and washes up afterwards.

‘I’ll do it,’ she says and does it, and he lets her do it, and thanks her for doing it and says he is not used to women doing things for him, a nice surprise, he says, and she is delighted. If he forgets his jacket, she will run up seven flights of stairs to fetch it from the wardrobe for him and seize the opportunity to look at his clothes, they are so different from other men’s clothes. She thinks once or twice or several times: I can’t do this for ever.

She pulls the duvet over both of them and tucks it under them, under him and herself, little Arnold, my darling, my beloved. But at the same time a little voice at the back of her mind is saying: Is this how it’s going to be? Will he always be the child?

‘She’s upset,’ he says when Ida comes back. ‘She says that maybe she still loves me.’

That is how you feel when you are on the verge, when you are about to experience loss.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ida wants to know.

He runs his hand over the back of his head, the heat has left small beads of sweat on his scalp.

‘I like her better when she’s like that,’ he says.

Life is strange. People, who have never met each other, have the greatest possible impact on each other’s lives, they determine what may or may not be possible for us.

‘Do you want to be with her?’

‘No,’ he says and ponders it. ‘I want to be with you.’

Something happens for the first time there, later it will happen frequently and eventually she gets so used to it that she forgets that two people can have more than one nice week together. The dramas, the scenes, the quarrels and the sweet reconciliations. Howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds. All dregs whisked to the surface, shame meets shame and makes love more passionate. Still in a state the next morning and out into the too-bright light of the world, late, wearing sunglasses in all kinds of weather to the dingiest of bars, dives, the darkest corners, drinking beer until their hands stop shaking. Until they laugh at themselves as if what happened was funny: We’re crazy! There’s no one like us, no one understands. Their love is impossible to explain.

They unpack in the same room. In an old house where Norwegian researchers and students are put up. A window overlooking a courtyard, laundry flapping in the wind, cats on the flagstones. His suitcase in one corner, hers in another. His toiletries on one end of the bathroom shelf, hers on the other. His travel alarm clock on one bedside table, her diary on the other. She doesn’t make any entries while she is there, she is never alone. The sun at its zenith. They have plenty of time. Out into the city to cafés or into the pine forest. Crooked trees form canopies over them in the twilight. Lanterns and the voices of children who stay up late, who race around. She wants to finish her play about the clairvoyant woman’s difficult love, he intends to translate poetry. Two beers. This is how it should be, how it used to be. They walk on the dusty road, arm in arm and with a bottle of white wine to the Institute in the evening, to type into a computer when the others have gone, when it is dim and empty and quiet. They manage it. Working in the same room. In the same room, at separate computers in the empty reading room, opposite one another. They work on their individual projects and from time to time they look up and catch the other’s eye and smile, vaguely distracted, lost in their work, but at the same time complicit: we’re in the same place, literally and metaphorically. If one of them goes to the loo or to the kitchen to fetch more wine or anything else, and passes the other, a hand goes out to caress a head or hair. Things are good between them.