“Oh, I don’t think she was very religious,” said Catharine. Idly, she drew something with her finger in the dust

“She kept an antique pistol in her desk,” said the lawyer.

“To shoot lovers when she’d finished with them,” said Catharine. She brushed away her telephone number and stood up.

She opened more doors. “Look!” she said, passing into what had been a bedroom. “The sea.” Excited, she seized Wavery’s hand. “Oh, Thomas, you could have your bed there. But you’d want the walls a different colour.”

“Light blue?”

“Yes,” she nodded. She was approving. “Light blue would be fine.”

There were three bedrooms, each with views to Colares, and a large drawing room which led down four steps into a huge garden. The air was humid and chilly. On a hill to the right was the red roof of another house and through the olives they could see the sea.

“You’d think you were in the tropics,” said Wavery. “Look at those palms. They are rather terrific.” He stepped outside. No one had tended the garden. The grass was long and blunted with leaves. Here and there in the undergrowth peeped large blue and white flowers.

“Verbena, nicotiana, camellia, camellia, camellia,” said Catharine behind him.

“I’d plant more olives. One or two, over there.”

“They take too long. You want something quicker. Robinia’s quite fast.”

“I don’t think I like robinia. I want olives.”

“You could talk yourself into liking it.”

He sat on what had been a retaining wall. After so many years, the landscape was coming back to him. Yes, he could imagine planting himself here. He said, “I always longed for a settled place where I could watch the seasons.” He wanted a garden with all sorts of secret corners, nooks where he might get right away. He conjured to Catharine a grass path through the foliage. It led to high hornbeam hedges and arches passing into separate gardens, each like a room. This was his fantasy: to arrange the smaller gardens with plants from the countries he had lived in. Sintra’s climate made it possible. Everything grew miraculously.

“While Penny is painting, I can wander around smelling Argentina, Jordan, Hungary, Peru.”

As they walked through the empty rooms, exchanging fantasies, Wavery felt he was coming out of the dormant season. Secretly, he was saying to himself, Oh, Oh, Oh, if we allowed ourselves to live . . .

“This is charming, Thomas,” Catharine was saying. “Lovely, in fact.”

“So I should put in an offer?”

“Definitely.”

They had lunch at Seteais and late in the afternoon returned to Lisbon.

Before dinner Wavery telephoned Penny. He wanted to discuss with her the house and the price, but there was no answer. She had gone to Poole for the day, to plan the exhibition. She must still be in Dorset. He opened the window. In a while Catharine knocked.

He said, “I called my other reality and she’s not there. There’s only this.”

“Shall I now, then?”