The same cases had accompanied him to Lima, to Amman, to Phnom Penh and they would have accompanied him again to Lisbon. They contained the life of a man who had lived the world over; also Martial’s truth that he who lived the world over lived nowhere.

One case was packed with seven of Penny’s canvases, painted in Peru. They showed the influence of the Cuzceño school. Beasts with peculiar noses. Christs with women’s thighs. A pair of pliers floating beside a severed hand.

Wavery drew out the largest canvas. The figure of a man lay suspended horizontally across the summit of a mountain. His arms were crossed and he lay calmly, without a head, the severed neck-bone like an eye, while a squadron of low-flying angels lifted him heavenwards in a shroud of grey and pink feathers. One angel carried his head separately by the hair.

“Lovely, darling, but what is it called?”

“‘Sisyphus Happy or The Diplomat’.”

Penny, dipping her brush into the core of her misery, had found it to be the colour of Wavery’s face.

Pas de Problème came into the room. From a crate he picked out a tennis racket and some bald yellow balls. “In Morocco very popular is the golf sport,” he said. He looked at the canvas against the wall, then at Wavery.

“Mais c’est vous, monsieur!”

Wavery tore open another lid, slitting the foil, releasing a zodiac of houses, cities, countries where he had shed bits and pieces of himself until what remained was a man standing in a bare unpainted room holding a grotesque rose which twitched if you so much as whispered to it.

The thought of Catharine darkened his darkness. He had nothing with which to build a fire against the darkness except this plastic flower and the promise which fluttered over its white-rimmed spectacles. He carried the pot to his bedroom. He planted it on his bedside table and pressed the red button. “Boo!” he said. There was no response. He licked his lips. He hovered over the petals. “E quem me dera, ter outra vez vinte anos,” he chanted. The sunglasses dipped in a desultory shiver. The battery must be flat, or else the mechanism did not respond to Portuguese. “Pack up all my cares and woe,” he began furtively and he felt the private embarrassment of a man alone in a room who is trying to make a plastic rose dance. “There I go, singing hello . . . ”

The plant lurched.

Halima’s voice at the door: “Is anything wrong, señor?”

9

Penny said, “So you did like the house?”

It was the second time she had asked. He had described his visit to Sintra, but there was a hole and she saw it.

“And Michael – did you see him?” she asked.

“No. He was ill.”

“Everyone seems to be ill at the moment.”

They were having dinner in a Portuguese restaurant three streets from their Fulham flat. She wore her favourite earrings.