They shopped at Spaar, the supermarket that catered to the University Village, filled with haggis, black puddings and fruit puddings. One day Marcia felt herself being clasped from behind, someone’s strong hands covered her eyes while she was choosing her vegetables and fruit. She struggled to release herself, turned round and found herself looking into Domingos’ eyes, sparkling with fun and excitement. Marcia felt shy. In front of all those customers and salesgirls! It did not matter to Domingos. You did not have to feel self-conscious with him.

‘I am shopping today so that you can have lunch with me,’ he told Marcia.

He took great pains to prepare that lunch. Almost everything was out of tins except for the salad. In the apartment at Birbeck Court, the food was set out in bowls and dishes. It tasted like champagne and caviar.

At Birbeck Court, everyone who shared the apartment with Marcia wanted to be Domingos’ friend. The Scottish girl. The Algerian girl. The Moroccan girl, too, thought him very handsome, very attractive. They admired his macho looks—he was so manly, so tall … his ruddy complexion, his thick, closely-growing dark hair and dark moustaches …. He went to Paris for a short holiday and Marcia found herself missing his voice that called out every day as he passed by her flat. He sent her a gay froth of a picture postcard, something light and frivolous to enliven her days of deep and serious reading. When he returned, he told her he had lived in the apartment of another Colombian friend of his, a brilliant Russologist. As a young émigré, he had become the protégé of a woman twenty-seven years older than himself whom he had married. She was now in her seventies, a frail invalid. She did not mind any more if her husband had lovers. She accepted it. She lived with its reality. It did not destroy her. She was wise. Her husband still looked after her. She needed his attention and he was grateful to her. She had made him, the once young émigré, what he now was.

Domingos was faithful to Carmencas with whom he had lived for eight years. In Paris, where he went for a week’s holiday, he admired the beautiful women. ‘The most beautiful in the world,’ he said, as if he were moving through the galleries of the Louvre in his quest for the ideal, for that which surpassed the ordinarily beautiful. There he met a woman. ‘She was not beautiful,’ he told Marcia, ‘but I found her fascinating, interesting. We talked all night.’ Yes, he was faithful to Carmencas.

Domingos would never accept an act of kindness without some token of its recognition—a pineapple, a box of chocolates or an evening at the pub where they would sit talking while Domingos drank a frothing glass of ale and popped red glace cherries into Marcia’s avocat.