‘I’m used to it,’ he answered, sucking in another mouthful of the tea. ‘You should taste the stuff they serve us in that place over there,’ – he jerked his chin in the direction of Government Buildings – ‘’twould make a jennet blench.’

He laughed. He had slipped again into his hustings voice, the one usually reserved for ‘his people’. He put down the saucer, looking around the room to see who among the genteel clientele he had offended, and lit another cigarette.

‘I really must go, Doctor Latimer,’ Phoebe said.

She felt dispirited suddenly. She wanted to be away from this terrible man. That morning she had received a letter from David Sinclair, her former boyfriend, who had left her when he emigrated to Israel. It had given her a jolt, to be unexpectedly addressed out of the past, and from so far away, further even than Spain. Most of what David wrote was a bland account of his day-to-day doings, but the closing paragraph had deepened into something more unsettling.

You should reconsider and come over here. Life means something in Israel, and in every moment there is both danger and opportunity. We’re building a country from the ground up. You would love it.

Reading that, she had smiled sourly. This wasn’t how he had spoken when he was leaving her. Oh, yes, he had asked her to go with him, but she had known very well he didn’t mean it.

The letter was signed, Love, D. She had read it twice, standing in the hall beside the big square table, then had gone back upstairs to the flat and sat by the window and read it again.

Danger and opportunity – what did he mean? Mortal danger, she supposed, the possibility of being killed at any moment – the country was menaced on all sides by hostile states and people seething with hatred – but what opportunity did he imagine he could offer her, out there in the desert?

She hadn’t kept the letter. She had crushed it in her fist and thrown it into the kitchen bin. She wasn’t angry. But she was puzzled that he should have chosen to write to her now, after all this time. It was four years since he had gone. He had been born in Ireland, and probably he was homesick, and feeling sorry for himself. Yet those words stayed in her mind: danger, opportunity. They were both troubling and alluring, like the ‘impure thoughts’ the nuns in the convent used to warn about. Deep inside her there lurked always the urge to break free, to make a life elsewhere. As April had done.

She would go to San Sebastián, as Quirke had urged, and find there her beloved lost friend, brought miraculously back to life, like Hermione in the Shakespeare play she couldn’t remem ber the title of. Despite all the horror and deceit, des-pite everything, a certain romance attached to April’s tale.