He shrugged. Each of them, perhaps not meaning to, sipped from their glass at the same moment. The wine was rich, a deep metallic taste.

‘So here you are,’ he said after a while.

‘Yes. I thought I’d return your call. And Camillo told me the other way into the tower.’

‘It’s usually locked.’

‘An oversight.’

‘I knew you would come.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Then that’s your problem, Rachaela.’

‘Why,’ she said, ‘do you say my name that way?’

‘I enjoy your name. It’s a family name that I offered your mother as a title for you. She naturally originally rejected it with scorn and repulsion. She thought I’d come back to make an honest woman of her.’

‘Yes, she’d have preferred to be married. But I think she’d have settled for your support. For your being there.’

‘I couldn’t be there,’ he said. ‘I had no interest in any of it. It was something the family had brainwashed me into thinking I must do. I spent two years out of my prison and I hated them. I got you, and that was that. I needed to go back to earth, here.’

‘And you had no interest in me.’

‘No. As a child you were nothing to me. Something I’d accomplished.’

Rachaela swallowed with the copper wine the bitterness of her mother, the twenty-five years of being with that warped and irate woman. There had been only those magics stumbled on by accident—classical music, books, the things her mother despised. So often the radio switched to the pop channel to cancel her dreams, or the book was snatched away: ‘You can wash those dishcloths through if you want something to do.’ ou left me,’ Rachaela said, ‘in a desert.’ She thought of a childhood where a tall dark man led her by the hand through a park, swans on water, bread for the ducks. She thought of a man’s voice reading to her. A shadow playing a piano. And the daggers of tears were in her eyes. She blazed with sudden pain. ‘But it would have bored you. A child.’

‘I must try to find you now,’ he said.

‘You’re too late. I don’t want you now. I don’t need you now. You’ve wasted it. I won’t let you in.’

‘But you’re here.’

‘Like you, I’m curious. To see who it was that abandoned me twenty-nine years ago when I was blind and dumb.’

‘Don’t, Rachaela,’ he said.

And in his face she saw too an answering pain, his young man’s eyes and lips drawn with it.

‘It’s a lie, anyway,’ she said. ‘I still don’t believe you’re my father.’

‘There it is.’

They sat in silence, and the cat rose up between them, stretching, its glorious coat rosy from the dying fire.