“Maria; she’s a student of Germanistik too. Guten Abend,” he said to her approaching.

“Nee — goede avond,”^[7] said Maria and, with merry abandon, stuck her hand out.

“Goede avond,” replied Sebastian, noticeably taken aback. “Hoe gaat het met je?”

“Het gaat prima — bedankt! Houdt u van Dublin?” she said, eyes inquiring, dark smudges evident around her small and perfect face.

“Ja, absoluut,” he smiled, avuncular. “Het vliegveld was juist net zo mooi als mijn woonkamer, en dat zijn de enige twee kamers de ik tot nu gezien heb. Ik vermoed, dat er in Ierland ook andere ruimtes zijn — bioscopen, restaurants, slaapkamers, bijvoorbeeld. Wellicht kan je mij daar een van laten zien?”

“Wellicht,” she laughed, clearly hearing his grammar before his content. It was always amazing what you could get away with in a foreign language. Her Dutch was good, if a little Tectonic: normally he resisted the attempts of foreigners to speak Dutch with him but he had (like many men) no objection to speaking his mother tongue with pretty young women. Indeed, he stepped it up then, warming to his native nasal Amsterdam accent when she checked him with an English “And Rich, how are you?”

“Mmm?” Rich had been elsewhere, he was clearly no connoisseur of the Dutch language. Rather his brain was an amalgam of talk shows and Internet shooters; he was a functional inebriate.

“Sebastian and I were talking. You know, I know some Dutch too. Pikje!” That’s right, huh?’

Maria looked at Sebastian, “And what does that mean?”

“It’s Dutch slang,” he said, and dipped into his pocket for a cigarette; “Zigarette gefällig?”

“Thank you.” The smoke bloomed at her lips. “You know I’m a fan of your works.”

“Really? I thought they were very passé amongst the young.”

“Passé?”

“Faded, outdated, old.”

“No! Really, the opposite. The scene in Cavakis de Patriach when she makes him take the pill for a month — that was a truly post-feminist trope.”

“I feel very post-feminist these days,” he said. Back in his prime, carousing at literary soirées in a velvet waistcoat, he had understood feminism as a tactic to impress women. He had been very odd then; rather more similar to her than him, he reflected, looking at his two interlocutors.

At the drinks table he and Maria continued talking and Rob worked on a rolly. “Und wie gefällt dir Dublin?”

“It’s alright. I moved here when I was eight; I’m not bored of it yet.”

“But you don’t have an Irish accent.”

“I went to an international school; there were lots of French, East Europeans, Czechs. An Irish accent was not seen as desirable.”