People only ask about what they can handle. Wavery did not ask about the sign. He did not ask again what was wrong. He had not insisted this morning and he did not do so now. Instead he talked and as he spoke, she stole back to him. He talked about whatever came into his head, about his childhood in Mathon, the view over the Beacon one way and Hay Bluff the other, his schooldays in Oxford, the Sundays on which he had waited for his parents to take him out, sitting, dangling legs on a pillar box in the Bardwell Road, knowing they would arrive late and leave early.

“I love you,” she said.

He went on talking.

“Did you hear that, Thomas? I love you.”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“I love the way you say my name. I love your hot head, your lovely face, your laugh. I love your pigeon’s toe. I love you for having shared with me your garden.” She rolled on her back. She waved her arms. She was holding back more tears. “I’ll see you at a party one day talking to someone, your arms waving, and I’ll come up behind you and say ‘Bob Hope’ and you’ll turn and hug me and no one will know why.” She turned towards him. “I love the way your body moves around me at night, that whenever I move you adjust yourself and bring me back.” She said, “I don’t want to betray your fantasies of me.”

Her face was wet. He licked the tears, not speaking. They slept.

He woke, feeling her warm skin. Was he never to feel it again? “Catharine?” Outside it was still dark. “Six-thirty. We ought to be getting up.” She said nothing. “Are you there?”

She said, “I love you, Tom. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

They landed a few minutes before noon. They queued to present their passports. The man, noting Wavery’s profession, inspected with curiosity the scarf around his neck. He had smelled it four passports away.

“Will you spray it?”

She sat on the bed and applied her scent. “All the girls will come running,” she had said.

They walked to the baggage reclaim. He lifted her suitcase from the conveyor belt. His eyes remained on the trolley. She opened her arms and held him. “This is just horrid . . . Thank you for everything . . . every single moment.”

“Goodbye then.”

“I’m going, Tom. I won’t ever look back.”

“Yes, yes, of course you must,” and he held her hands incredibly tight to his face.

He kissed the top of them. He put the knuckles into his eyes to stop the tears. She pulled away and he opened his eyes. There was someone over her shoulder, a man he knew from somewhere, watching him.

Chapter Eight

1

ON SATURDAY MORNING, Genia Ortiz closed the door and kneeled on a cushion beside her bed. She pulled the trunk towards her. It was made from hardwood and covered in green canvas, studded with brass buttons at the corners and hooped in steamed ribs of cedar. She wiped the dust from the top. She opened the lid wide enough to be able to slip a hand inside. Steeled by two glasses of vodka, she delved for the photographs of Balnasharki.