What was served to him, not in a balloon glass but a chunky tumbler, was a sluggish, brownish stuff, viscous as sherry, with a fragrance reminiscent of cough medicine. He drank it anyway, though he knew it would give him indigestion. But it might help him to sleep, he thought. On the other hand, it might just as easily keep him awake. Latterly, his nights had become a mixture of stark wakefulness and fitful, ashen dreaming. He had hoped, with faint hope, that down here it might be otherwise. Surely the least that might be expected of a holiday was that it would foster sleepiness.

‘Look,’ Evelyn said, ‘the girls, they keep their hankies in their sleeves, just like in Ireland.’

His wife, now, she slept as if sunk in a coma. It was good that one of them at least was able to rest, though her preternatural stillness puzzled him. How was it the terrors of her past didn’t rise up to jolt her awake, like bolts of white lightning striking out of the darkness? On this, as on so many things, he hadn’t the nerve to quiz her. From the beginning, she had let it be known that whatever ghosts lingered with her were hers alone, her private hauntings. He used to assume she would confide in him eventually, but she didn’t, and by now it seemed she never would. Secretly, in some black cavern of his heart, he was glad. He had quite enough demons of his own to wrestle with.

Yet there was so much he didn’t know about this intimate stranger he was married to, so much he wasn’t permitted to know. She wouldn’t even tell him her murdered parents’ names. Or how many siblings she had lost. Or which camps they had perished in. One day she let slip that her oldest sister – she didn’t say how many other, younger ones there were – had perished in a German concentration camp, of tubercu losis. This fact, which immediately he saw her regretting having divulged, he took and stored away, as if it were a formal document, signed and sealed, though what it might be a testament to he wasn’t sure.

He told himself the details of her past didn’t matter, and they didn’t, really, although at the same time they did, precisely because of being withheld.

The facts he did possess were few. An uncle who was a doctor and supplied morphine to someone high up in Hitler’s court had got her out of Austria via France and Spain – this, it occurred to him just now, accounted for her knowing San Sebastián and the Hotel Londres. The uncle had gone on to America and made for himself what she, widening her eyes, described as a ‘big, big career’ at the Mayo Clinic.