2.

‘Going on your own? But why would you suddenly decide a thing like that?’ Jay had said.

‘But I’m ready to go, I’ve cleared out my building contracts,’ Jay had said.

‘And the wedding?’ Jay had said. ‘You can’t just pull it all out from underneath us like that.’

‘Is it… are you unhappy? I thought we were good,’ Jay had said.

Later when he started to get petulant, he protested that writing about the Count was his idea.

And my reply, so thin: ‘But darling, you’re not the one actually doing it, are you? And it’s because I care so much about you it would be a distraction. I just think I might get more done on my own. I feel a kind of urgency over it. Let me go first and maybe you can join me later?’ And then I’d tried to reason: ‘And at least this way we won’t have to give away the cat.’

When Mel had offered up her apartment, I’d said to Jay one evening, ‘If we’re going to base ourselves in Berlin for a while, it would be good to find something I could work on that connected the two countries.’

Jay told me that when he was a kid his dad used to love telling him stories about this audacious German folk hero who came down to the Pacific during the First World War. There was an immediate spark: it had daring, it had adventure, it had a messy historical back-view.

‘I have a particular fascination,’ I wrote speculatively to a publisher, ‘with the incident in December 1917, when Count von Luckner was a prisoner of war on Motuihe Island after his cruiser, theSeeadler, was shipwrecked. Whilst at the camp, he faked setting up a play for Christmas and requested props which were later used in his escape attempt. Stealing first a fast motorboat, and then a scow, he took off for the Kermadec Islands with a sextant made from things found in a barn, a sail sewn from a sta