‘I zay,’ he shouted, mimicking her, ‘that these rooms are self-cleaning. We go out, and when we come back it’s as if we’d never been here. It’s part of the general con trick that hotels play on us.’

‘You are a ridiculous man. I don’t love you.’

‘If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.’

Silence for a moment, and then her voice again, with that self-conscious, tentative note that always came into it when she encountered something she wasn’t familiar with or didn’t understand. ‘Who is that?’ she asked.

‘W. H. Auden.’

Another silence. They could not see each other, but he could hear her smiling.

‘Ridiculous man,’ she said softly.

‘Who, me or Auden?’

‘Ridiculous man!’ she said again, more loudly.

‘What’s that in German?’

‘Lächerlicher Mann.’

‘Laker-licker-man? Ridiculous language.’

He dropped his toothbrush into a glass and walked back into the bedroom. She turned her head and looked at him.

‘You do love me,’ he said. ‘Why deny it?’

‘Oh, love,’ she said. ‘This little word that causes so much trouble to people.’

The pale curtain stirred at the window. They could hear the voices of children on the beach. She smiled at him in her demure, self-conscious fashion.

Let it last, he thought, not sure what he meant, only offering it as a kind of prayer into the void. Please, let it last.

Chapter 10

Later that morning, she said, out of the blue – the cliché wasn’t a cliché, down here in cloudless Basqueland – that he must have a hat, to protect his scalp now that the rains had passed and the sun was shining more strongly every day.

‘But I have a hat,’ he said, showing it to her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. She had seen this hat of his all too often. It was made of heavy black felt and was, she pronounced, entirely unsuited to the Spanish climate. ‘Your big Irish head will boil.’

‘You promised me northern Spain would be southern Ireland.’

‘Not in the summer.’

‘It’s not the summer.’

‘It’s hotter than the summer is in Ireland. Much hotter. You should have brought the other one.’

He had a straw hat but had left it at home. He hadn’t expected to need it, with all he had heard of how much it rained, in these parts.

‘I have hair to protect me,’ he said.

She sniffed. ‘Not as much as you think.’

She liked to tease him in this way, saying he was going ‘thin on top’. She had first heard this formulation from Quirke himself. It delighted her, and she never missed an opportunity of using it.

‘You need a good panama hat,’ she said, ‘with a close weave, to shield you from X-rays, since you are going thin on—’

‘X-rays?’ he scoffed, interrupting her. ‘What do you mean, X-rays?’

‘Well, whatever it is that is in sunlight. You want to get cancer?’