He turned on to his side, thrashing his legs against the constricting bedclothes. His imagination was overheated. Darkness played tricks on the mind. And he had been drinking, too, and drinking too much, as Evelyn had pointed out. She knew his long history on the bottle. ‘On the bottle’ – it was from Quirke she had first heard the phrase, and had been much amused by it. ‘You were all – what is that saying? – you were all weaned too early, all you Irish men.’

Fully awake now, he got out of bed, going quietly for fear of disturbing Evelyn, and went into the bathroom. Yes, he had drunk too much. Despite the bracing effects of the  Jame son, the sticky aftertaste of Spanish brandy still lingered on his tongue.

At the handbasin he filled a tooth glass with water, but then recalled the awful warnings he had read on the dangers of drinking water straight from a Spanish tap. He crept back into the bedroom and felt his way about in the silvery gloom, and at last found a bottle of mineral water in a cabinet at his side of the bed. He uncapped it and drank from the neck. On the bottle, he thought, and grinned bleakly into the glimmering darkness. The water was tepid and had a slightly brackish taste, but at least it was wet, and probably could be trusted not to give him a dose of dysentery or something even worse.

That was another reason to stay at home, the possibility of falling ill in some unsanitary foreign resort and being forced to put himself under the care of non-English-speaking medics who wouldn’t even understand what he was complaining of.

He sat in his pyjamas at the desk beside the window, seeking solace yet again in the view over the bay. It was late, it must be four o’clock, but in the stillness he heard music playing somewhere, though it was so faint he thought he might be imagining it.

But no, there was music. It wasn’t the palm-court orchestra, the members of which would have packed up and gone home long ago. Maybe it was a wireless playing in one of the rooms along the corridor. A woman’s voice, was it, singing flamenco? He strained to catch the distantly tiny, wailing notes as they rose and fell, rose and fell. He must get hold of a translation of some of those songs, to find out what terrible tragedy it was they were all lamenting with such throbbing fervour. He wondered if there was any happy flamenco music. If so, he had not heard it. Unless they were smiling through their tears.

Still the distant music buzzed and wailed. He thought again he was imagining it. Maybe there were mosquitoes in the room. They made the same kind of thin, ethereal sound.