“Yes I do too,” I said.
“Well then, come when you get up. We will give you coffee. You take coffee?”
“Sometimes.”
“You ought to always. It's a wonderful drink. When I am working, I drink nothing but coffee and chicken broth until the evening. Coffee in the morning and chicken broth at midday. If I don't, my work suffers.”
I thanked him for asking me, and we crossed the quay in silence and sat down on a bench.
“Do you love the sea?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “But it is too lonely.”
“That's what I like about it,” I replied.
“I wonder,” he mused, looking through his spectacles away into the distance and thinking his own thoughts. “It must be nice to be a soldier, or a young undergraduate … to sit in a crowd and listen to the band….”
And then, as was usual with him, after a pause and without apparent connection, he added: