‘Everything’s fine,’ Girardo assured him, but he spoke with unusual vehemence. Things were fine not as a matter of course, but in defiance of some prevailing difficulty. ‘We know you’ll get back safely. That’s enough.’

‘Enough?’ Azelio glanced at Agata, as if she might have some idea of what he should read into the word. ‘Is Luisa still there?’

‘I’m here,’ Luisa replied.

‘All right.’ Azelio decided not to pursue an explanation in her presence. ‘I’ll be seeing you all very soon.’

‘Of course,’ Girardo agreed.

‘My love to all of you,’ Azelio said, forcing a tone of casual cheerfulness.

‘And you,’ Luisa replied.

Azelio cut the link and sat in silence.

‘It looks as if there’s going to be a knack to this,’ Ramiro observed. ‘They might have added a few tenses to the language while we were away.’

Agata squeezed Azelio’s shoulder. ‘Luisa sounded happy. And your uncle was probably just irritated by some political development.’

He turned to her. ‘What’s that a euphemism for? More people in prison, or more smoking ruins?’

‘I’ll sort everything out when I talk to Lila,’ Agata assured him. Having witnessed Azelio stumbling she’d be better prepared to communicate across the gap.

But when her own call was connected she barely made it through the greetings before her brain seized up.

‘The light bending . . . do you know about that?’ she babbled.

‘I read your report,’ Lila replied. ‘Those observations were impeccable, and you’ve separated the curvature theory from Vittorio’s as sharply as we could have wished. It’s a great achievement.’ The words were warm and sincere – but Lila’s excitement at hearing that her life’s work had been validated was long gone. Agata had imagined the two of them dancing elatedly around her office, chanting ‘Four-space is curved! Gravity is not a force!’ But that was never going to happen: this was old news for both of them now.

‘What did you make of the vacuum-energy work?’ she asked hopefully.

‘The diagram calculus is beautiful.’ Lila didn’t use that word lightly. ‘It’s the most promising approach I’ve seen for a long time.’

Beautiful . . . but still merely promising? Agata wasn’t offended; she knew that she hadn’t taken the project to completion herself. But what had Lila and her students been doing in the interim? She wasn’t vain enough to imagine that they’d been hanging back, waiting for her to join them in the flesh and guide them forward.

‘So how much progress has there been?’ Agata pressed her. ‘The effects of curvature and topology were still very sketchy in the version I sent you – but I’m sure people must have found ways to tidy up most of the loose ends by now.’

Lila hesitated. ‘I’m afraid things are much where you left them.’

‘Where I left them?’ Agata was confused. ‘When did all of this reach you?’