‘Of course I love you, silly man – you said so yourself. Though why I should love you I do not know.’

She touched his hand where it rested on the table. She often reached out to him like that, as if to make sure he was still there, still real.

The day was hot already. Quirke felt drowsy. He hadn’t entirely recovered yet from his troubled night of anxious waking. Even when he had managed to fall back to sleep, something had continued to weave its way through his dreams, like a thin trail of oily, acrid smoke, something to do with the young woman on whom he had accidentally eavesdropped here.

Evelyn was speaking to him.

‘What?’

‘I said, I am so glad you chose that one.’ She pointed with her chin at his splendid hat where it lay before him on the table. The thing looked, to Quirke’s eye, irritatingly smug and self-satisfied, in its polished newness.

‘It’s just a hat,’ he said.

‘No no, it’s a Ponsol hat,’ Evelyn countered. ‘Un gorro de Ponsol is muy especial – that’s what the girl in the shop whispered to me when your back was turned. Muy especial – very special.’

‘I always feel like a clown when I have to wear something new,’ he said. He squinted up at the clock over the building opposite, guarded by its rusty cannons and its pockmarked stone lions. ‘Did you know that an English gentleman always chooses a valet whose measurements match his own, so that he can break in his suits and his shoes for him?’

‘Break in?’

‘Wear them first for a while, to take the look of being new off them.’

‘Why?’

‘Bad form, unscuffed shoes, or a suit without a wrinkle.’

She gave him a grave slow stare from under her fringe, her plump top lip pushed out. ‘This is a joke, ja?’

‘Nein. It is not a joke. It is the truth. At least it used to be true, when the English still had valets – and when there were still gentlemen, for that matter.’

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

‘Such a strange people, the English,’ she said. ‘How did they win the war?’

‘They didn’t – the Russians and the Yanks did. I thought you’d know that better than anyone.’

‘I wasn’t there, when it was being won,’ she said gravely. Quirke wryly smiled – the last word, yet again.