‘No, I don’t vant to get concer.’

They found a hat shop not far from the hotel. It was called Casa Ponsol. A sign over the door announced with a proud flourish that it had been founded in 1838. It might have been an annexe to the Londres. Quirke felt intimidated.

A young woman approached them, smiling, with her long, tapering, honey-coloured hands joined before her. She was tall and slim, and wore a suit of cream-coloured linen. Her gleaming, night-black hair was parted in the middle and drawn tightly back and wound in a knot contained in a thing like a little black lace net-bag at the nape of her neck.

‘Buenas días,’ Evelyn said. ‘My husband requires a hat.’

The slim young woman smiled and rapidly, with a con juror’s aplomb, produced out of their boxes a number of straw hats and laid them along the glass counter. Quirke brusquely tried one on, took it off, and said he would take it.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Evelyn cried. ‘Try some of these others. We are not in a hurry, and neither is this young lady. Look at this one, with the wide brim. Or this – the red silk band is very nice, ja?’ He gave her a terrible look, which she ignored. ‘What about this darker one, do you like it? Very dramatic, very duende.’

The young woman smiled at her again.

Quirke snatched the second hat from his wife’s hands and clamped it on his head.

The saleswoman said, ‘Me lo permites?’ and reached out those graceful hands of hers and adjusted the angle of the hat, drawing it down at one side. Quirke caught her smell, milky and yet sharp – lily-of-the-valley, he thought, and for no good reason recalled Goya’s Maja desnuda. But the maja was of a different type entirely, chunky, with hair under her armpits and cockeyed breasts, an ill-fitting head – the angle to the shoulders was all wrong – and lumpy, sallow flesh. The slender creature before him would be as smooth all over as oiled olive wood.

He said he would take the hat – he hated shopping almost as much as he hated holidays – without bothering to look at the price tag. When he saw the amount popping up on the cash register, he blinked twice and swallowed hard.

‘It is a lovely hat,’ Evelyn said firmly, standing back to admire him in his dashing new headgear. ‘You look so handsome,’ – she turned to the saleswoman – ‘doesn’t he?’

‘Sí, sí, ciertamente – un caballero.’

That he understood. A caballero, eh? He felt ridiculous. He thought of his Confirmation day and the scratchy new suit he had been made to wear. That was the year Judge Garret Griffin and his wife rescued him from Carricklea and took him into their home to be their second son.