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terse way of hers that made any further questions superfluous. Henry knew his wife well enough to know that the unspoken context of this question was: Spare me the details, I don’t want any explanations, and, above all, don’t play dumb.
    Henry speared a piece of fish with his fork and spread a little Riesling froth over it with his knife. “Not in the least,” he replied truthfully. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of things.”
    With that, the essentials had been said. The telepathic contact that comes with years of marriage is often misinterpreted by outsiders as silence. Before getting married, Henry too had assumed that couples who sit at restaurant tables and eat in silence have nothing to say to one another; he now knew that they make eloquent conversation without exchanging a word, sometimes even telling each other jokes.
    Martha went upstairs to work on the final part of the fifty-fourth chapter, which was to conclude the novel. At the veranda door she turned to Henry again.
    “Do you really want a change, Henry? Aren’t things all right the way they are?” She didn’t wait for a reply.
    Henry did the washing up and fed the dog. Then he withdrew into his studio to watch the sports roundup and stick some more matchsticks onto his drilling rig.
    High shelves of unread books stood alongside filing cabinets full of newspaper articles. Everything ever published about him was filed here by date, language, and author. The most important prizes and awards hung on the walls or were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets. Even in early childhood, Henry realized that he had a bent for copying and archiving. With every novel that came out, his collection grew by an entire bookcase. He’d stopped showing it to Martha; the very thought made him blush to his ears in shame.
    At the window was his desk. It was here that he answered letters, sorted his expenses for the accountant, and constructed all manner of drilling rigs out of matchsticks. Once finished these were banished to the cellar and later burned on the barbecue when they grilled sausages at their midsummer parties. He’d already stuck over forty thousand matches on the true-to-scale model of the Norwegian Troll A platform, which is, as it happens, the largest Condeep production platform for crude oil in the world. Henry wound up by watching two episodes of Bonanza and went to sleep feeling inspired. He had no dreams that night, but he slept peacefully and soundly like Hoss Cartwright from the Ponderosa, for he now knew what was to be done.
    ———
    He was woken by the whir of the automatic blinds. Sunlight penetrated the room and he flung the duvet aside; the sundial pointer of his morning erection showed a quarter past seven. Poncho was asleep next to the bed. Henry drank coffee, had a long shower, and got his hiking boots out of the cupboard. As soon as Poncho saw the boots he began to twist and turn, prancing up and down at the front door wagging his tail. He ran ahead of Henry to the car and leaped onto the passenger seat. It was the hour of their daily ramble.
    To avoid being recognized by the locals on his outings with the dog, Henry always chose remote places within a sixty-mile radius; after all, a novelist is not a rambler. Thanks to a military map on which even the smallest woodland paths were marked, he had, over the last two years, discovered large tracts of meadowland and forest, roamed over picturesque moors and through secluded coastal regions, seen all kinds of rare birds and wild animals, and even lost some weight. There was hardly any danger of getting lost, because the two hundred and twenty million scent-detecting cells in Poncho’s nose always found their way back to the car.
    This time Henry picked a tract of forest twenty-five miles west of the small town, an area where he’d roamed with the dog a few times before. He got out at a gloriously shady picnic area. Not far away a cascade was burbling in the bracken. The scent of fresh pine