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.