By the time I was twenty-seven a whole weekend with Dick had come to seem almost impossible. A night was rare enough. Usually it was a matter of three or four hours in an evening before he caught the late train home, and sometimes only of lunch. So when his work took him to Germany for a few days, and we were able to contrive a weekend in Bruges on his way home, it felt like a new beginning.

It was November. I arrived in Bruges late on a cold and foggy afternoon and went straight to one of the little hotels which overlook the open space called the Sands. I had heard the hotel spoken of affectionately by someone, and neither of us knew of any other. It’s recommenders much have stayed there in summer. In November there was no one at the desk, and the woman in the bar seemed surprised when I asked for a room, and all the cooking smells of the vanished season were congealed in the roofed-in courtyard full of dusty palms and wicker chairs through which she led me to the stairs.

The room was big, a “family” room: two brass beds with a cot across their feet, and a small radiator which failed to respond when the woman twiddled its tap and shook it. When I had convinced her that I knew we would have to pay extra for it, she fetched an electric fire. I opened both windows wide while she was out of the room, so that the smell of other people could be replaced by fog which could then gradually be warmed into our own smell, and her disapproval of the eccentricity was such that she never smiled again for the whole weekend.