Later, when they had reached what the captain, in an announcement from the cockpit, described as their cruising altitude, the plane gently dipped its nose and then seemed to hang motionless. He was offered a drink. There was tea or coffee, wine or spirits. He would have preferred a beer. He asked for tea. He was given a tray, with sandwiches on a plastic plate, and a piece of cake and a miniature glass of  water and a sweet wrapped in crinkly paper. These things, so homely and familiar, comforted him. They were a link with the ground, a lifeline to life.

He ate his cake, he drank his tea. He peered out of the window and saw a flat, unmoving sea that seemed to be a sheet made of countless tiny flakes of gleaming tin. None of it looked real, the coast inching away behind them, and a bank of fluffy white clouds motionless on the horizon, and the sun steadily shining somewhere unseen. The stillness, that was another comfort. At this height, everything became suspended, and there was hardly any sense of speed. He was afloat.

The air hostess had a snub nose and smelled of ‘Evening in Paris’. When she minced past him along the aisle, he admired her ankles and her neatly packed bum. The seam of one of her stockings was crooked, and at the sight of it something inside him, that for the past half hour had been paralysed with fright, stirred itself and lifted its head and managed a tentative little cheep. Flesh, perfume, a girl’s stockings. Life.

In a little while the hostess came back, offering him more tea. He thought of asking her if she would be staying in Madrid overnight. But what good if she was? When they landed he would have to go straight into the city, and to a railway station there – he had the name written down on a blank page at the back of the book he was still reading – and find the train that would take him north, to the coast, the very coast they would soon be flying over.

A sleeper train, it would be. He had booked a first-class compartment for himself. Spend the night with two or three dagos stacked on bunks above and below him, smelling of armpits and dirty socks? No thank you, señor. Terry valued his privacy.

After the long descent, the plane landed. He got through customs like a breeze, found a taxi, gave directions to the station. The air was dense with an unfamiliar mugginess. Everything smelled foreign. Well, it would, wouldn’t it.