She held another rectangle of stiff card to her nose. She moved her head, passing one eye and then the other over the surface before allowing it across the gap. Reverently she offered it to Wavery. It was the photograph of a house at the end of a tree-lined avenue.

“Balnasharki,” she said.

Those walnut trees had been heeled into the earth by her grandfather, a pacifist, on the morning he joined his regiment in Kiev. One tree grew this way, one that, repeating his turmoil in an avenue of conflicting trunks, this tree bowing towards the house he loved, the next away, towards the battlefield where a July evening would find him basted in mud, his guts spilling from a neatly buttoned tunic.

She retrieved the photograph. She savoured it again. Balnasharki, she was thinking. The Motherland had called her!

Tentatively, she was unleashing her childhood demesne. She could see the fir-cone dome through the trees, the farm buildings beyond and the pothole in the drive and her father saying to her mother, “Really, Alexandra Andreevna, we must fill that hole in.” But they never did.

The drive continued, past the lawns where they had had snowball fights in the dark, to her mother’s lake of carp. There was vodka on her lips, but Genia Ortiz could taste that lake as she had tasted it from a carnival mask on her last summer, scooping into her mouth the tannic brown water before returning to the dance. Her parents had been married thirty years. Her father watched his wife dancing with Colonel Slava. She leaned close, laughing. “Let me show you the lake.”

“Evgenia Nikolaevna, will you dance with an old man?” They danced and a breeze carried champagne bubbles of air into her mask. She sneezed and her father said, “If only we could blow our noses to clear our minds.” Less than a year later Colonel Slava’s men were prising up the parquet floor for firewood.

Reluctantly, Genia Ortiz put down the photograph. She lifted a hand to her white hair, and thought of Balnasharki in the days after the Duma. A war orphan’s home, then an agricultural cooperative, today deserted. The wind cutting itself on the broken glass, slime on the lake, the walnut trees neglected in the avenue, only the argument of leaves the same. She dared to entertain these images because of the letter she carried folded in her sleeve.

“I have made a decision, Señor Consul General. I am going back.”

“I’m glad,” said Wavery. “I hope you won’t regret it.” But he was not thinking of Balnasharki. He was thinking of a house in Sintra he would never see again.

His expedition to Sintra with Catharine was the end. This he now saw. At the time neither of them had been aware of it. For one morning in an empty house, Catharine had realised his fantasy. In so doing she had blighted his favourite place. He could never go back there because it would always reek of her. There was another, plainer reason. The idea of Sintra, in so far as he had taken time out to think beyond the garden, had depended on his retiring from the Lisbon Embassy. He had seen himself enjoying non-executive directorships and other respectable sinecures that might come the way of a retired ambassador, while gazing at the miraculous stages of growth of his every plant. But Thomas Wavery, retired early, last post Abyla, was not the same thing as Thomas Wavery, retired Lisbon.