Once, Marcia had walked into a house, an uninhabited house open to sightseers. A woman, whose name she had forgotten, had once lived there. The table was laid for tea as if visitors were expected—Scottish tea with shimmering preserves of strawberry or plum, tea cakes, and a warm pot of tea brewing with sugar and cream. She went from room to room as if following some compulsively beckoning shadow, observing the arrangements, so ordered, so perfectly in place, observing everything that had belonged to that past life, from the blue glass bottle of milk of magnesia in the tiled bathroom with its old-fashioned porcelain bath, to the suitcases piled on the top of the wardrobe which must have been carried on journeys to unknown destinations, to the pile of books for bedside reading. A young woman had hovered around like a disturbed gnat among the preserves and then followed Marcia as she entered each room, creating her voyeuristic fictions. A lonely bed, she observed, the bed of a woman who had never married, never even had lovers, the linen so smooth and unruffled. But her spirit must still dwell here, thought Marcia, and, as if to confound and perplex her own musings, a faint strand of hair, perhaps imagined, lay on the white pillowcase.

Marcia stood before a photograph in which this unknown woman was seated at a city banquet and the lens of her imagination focussed on those satiny shoulders with their thin taffeta straps, on that careful coiffeur of marcelled hair, on a face that gazed at hers and established a never-to-be-broken, never-to-be-forgotten bond.

Marcia walked out to the road and gazed out at still unexplored vistas of a still unexplored city, feeling the wind ruffle her hair and plucking wild Scottish flowers. A nun came along, young, with a beautiful, virtuous face, and they talked.

‘Where is Woodland Church?’ Marcia asked.

‘Let me take you over the bridge,’ the nun said to her, ‘I’ll show you the way.’

But it was growing late and Marcia thanked her and said goodbye, for they would never meet again. The convent the nun went back to, that safe haven, would never be for her.

So she returned to Domingos, her first friend, as he unrolled the reels of his life and his fictions. He had lived with an American woman for fifteen years, a student he had met in the American university he was studying in. She had left him. There were no children.

‘Domingos, you must have a child. You are only forty years old.’

‘No, no, I am too old. I have my sister’s children.’