They ate dinner near the hotel. Afterwards they walked back through the empty streets. Their steps echoed against the church and a cat’s howl ricochetted up into the night.

He followed Catharine into her room. “So after this we mustn’t see each other?”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he said, and then, “All right, you talk.” He sat on the mini-bar, picking up the mask which rested there, wrapped in its stiff brown paper. She lay down on the right side of the bed. She spoke as if she had learned what she was saying by rote. “It will be much easier if we say, ‘This is it’.”

Unthinkingly, he began to untie the string on the parcel.

She said, “I will never be able to say to you, ‘Stay for Christmas’, or ‘Let’s have friends to dinner’, or ‘Let’s go to Venice’. Think of all the things I cannot say to you.”

He pulled away the string.

She said, “I have tried to give you everything in these days. Have I failed you in anything? But it’s better this way. You to your wife, me to my family.”

He removed the paper wrapping.

The mask lay in its untidy brown petal of paper. He took out the unpainted face and placed its rough surface to his own.

“E quem me dera, ter outra vez vinte anos,” he chanted throught the puffed plaster lips.

“What’s it mean?”

He translated. “‘I wish I were twenty years younger’.”

“Here.” She stretched out a hand. “Let me try.”

He went over to the bed, where she pulled it off him. He raised her head from the pillow and knotted the two black ribbons behind her ears.

“How does it look?”

His tongue sought hers through the rough, expressionless hole.

Then something terrible happened. He was kneeling above Catharine, undressing her, and she was unbuttoning his shirt when suddenly her body tensed and what had been a caress became a struggle.

“No.” Her hands were trying to scratch him and he was frightened to let go. He realised she was saying something, but what she was saying was at odds with the violence in her body. She was beating his chest and his face, imploring, begging, “Please, keep away. Please. Please.”

He threw off the mask, pulling the ribbons through her hair. He held her face. “It’s me, Catharine,” he said. “It’s not anyone else.”

But she was slithering down some perilous slope of her own. She whispered, sobbing, catching her breath, “Yes, but who are you?”

Her head was pressed against him, a dead weight moving with the coughing tears.

“Don’t hate me,” he said. “Say something.”

She spoke into his chest. She lifted up her reddened eyes. Her mascara had left two smudges on his shirt. “It’s horrible here.”

“You don’t like your room? Lisbon?”

“The place where I am.”

A third reality, separate from the other two, was creeping up on them. She sat up and shivered. “There, then. That’s the sign. We’ve come to it. I knew it would come and I wish it hadn’t come so soon. That’s STOP, isn’t it?”