The seminar on Hugo Rask’s life and work hitherto began at 1 p.m. on the Saturday. Besides her own lecture there would be an art critic speaking and then a panel on “The social responsibility of the artist.”

They arranged to assemble fifteen minutes before the event started. The air still had some warmth to it and Ester was wearing a thin gray coat that hung elegantly round her legs as if it were expensive, which it was, but she had bought it in a sale. She draped it over the back of the chair next to hers. When Hugo Rask came into the room, it was that particular chair he chose to pull out and sit on, although there were others vacant. But first he picked up her coat in his hand and moved it to the window seat. His fingers closed round the fabric and the gesture with which he moved the garment was the most sensual she had ever witnessed, at least as far as moving an inanimate object was concerned. There was an absolute kindliness in the delicacy of the touch, the physical incarnation of perfect care.

If you touched objects and fabrics like that, you must carry with you an extraordinary tenderness and sensitivity, Ester Nilsson thought.

During the lecture he sat in the front row, paying close attention. There was intense concentration among the hundred and fifty members of the audience, who had all paid to be there. Afterward, he came up to Ester beaming and thanked her by taking both her hands in his and kissing her on both cheeks.

“No outsider has ever understood me so profoundly and precisely.”

She felt a rushing and roaring inside her and found it hard to follow the rest of the program. All she could think about was the gratitude she had seen in his face.

When the event ended at five o’clock she stayed close to him and tried not to look too much as she felt. The artist’s son was there, a bearded young man in a woolly hat, direct and spontaneous in his manner. He praised her lecture and said they ought to go for a drink or three. It was the only thing in this world and beyond that Ester Nilsson wanted to do. If she had been able to go for a beer with Hugo Rask that evening, her life would have been perfect.

But she had to get home.

Her brother was visiting from abroad and Ester and her partner were having dinner with him and her father. Her brother only came once a year so she could not cancel.

“Another time perhaps,” said Hugo.

“Any time at all,” Ester said in a muffled voice, trying to hide her emotion.

“Why not drop round to the studio some time and pick up those DVDs you couldn’t get hold of?”

“I’ll be in touch,” Ester said, sounding even more muffled.

“It really was perceptive, your presentation today. I’m moved.”

“Thank you. It was no more than the truth.”

“The truth,” he said. “That’s what we’re both looking for, you and I. Am I right?”

“Indeed you are,” she said.

During dinner with her partner, brother and father, Ester was heavy with longing to be elsewhere. The timbre of her voice revealed what she was feeling, as did the glitter in her eyes. She was aware of it but could change neither the timbre nor the glitter. She only wanted to talk about Hugo Rask and his art, and what had been said during the day. At one point she dismissed the artist and ridiculed him in unnaturally harsh yet somehow intimate terms. That, too, told the attentive all they needed to know. But none of the others round the table was particularly attentive.

She felt very alone and completely exhausted. In the course of a few hours, or since the previous Sunday when she had started to write Hugo Rask into existence within her, or as the result of a long disintegration, Ester had become a stranger to her partner. Her whole self was one huge sense of absence.

She felt she could develop a friendship with Hugo, an elective affinity. The artist would get to know her and Per, and come to dinner with them. They would discuss the big questions and broaden one another’s minds through conversation. Nothing would change, it would merely be enriched.

Reality is built one step at a time. She was on the second step.