In the bed he lay gazing at the outline of a beam above his head. He had no candle with him and the beam gradually lost its edges, dissolving into an obscurity from which it seemed, occasionally, to reappear before sinking again, more completely. Now that he was motionless he realised he was exhausted. It was like an echo of his fever days at Jesse Campbell’s house. He drifted, his thoughts moving over the remembered day in a series of touchings that seemed both predictable and random, like a bee’s progress across a garden. He saw the cherubs in the theatre, the moustache of the young officer in the coffee house. From there it was Rizzo, the feel of his face, his shut eyes, the feel of Emily’s, her breath on his wrist . . .

He slept, uneasily, some residual sense of self hanging like dross in an expanse that was neither entirely silent nor entirely dark. He began a dream in which the cleaning woman in the glass dome was his sister Lucy, and that she knelt in a black slick of blood, scrubbing brush in hand, talking calmly to him about her Comforter. Then something cut across it all and he came awake in a series of swoops, confused, frightened, some primal fear on him.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“Tran-quillo,” came a voice, a mouth that could not be more than a few inches from his ear.

“Ah . . . The Spanish gentleman . . . ”

“Yes,” said the voice. “The Spanish gentleman.”

Lacroix shifted towards his own side of the bed. He felt the other settling. He was not sorry to have company, someone to dispel the vile, senseless dream. “Madrid?” he asked.

“Cordoba.”

“Cordoba. The south.”

“You know Spain?” asked the voice. “Usted habla español?”

“Habla? Pequeño. Su pais . . . es muy interesante.”

“Gracias. Muy amable.”

“You are going home now? To Cordoba?”

“Not yet,” said the voice. “But one day . . . ”

“Mmm,” said Lacroix, circling towards sleep again. “For me also. Home, but not yet . . . ”

He turned away. They slept back to back through the depths of the night, on each face a frown of concentration sleep softened but could not erase. In the morning, when Lacroix woke, the man had already gone. The man, his pack, his heavy coat.

They ran the last yards to the cathedral, hurrying in from a rainburst, Emily clutching Lacroix’s elbow as they came through the door into a space of high, even light. It was a few minutes past eleven thirty. They stood by the door catching their breath and brushing raindrops from their faces.