She reached her landing and propped the paintings against the doorframe. She found the key. She was damned if she was going to let him in. That’s right, she thought, feeling his invisible arabesques. Fold away your arms. The arms that lifted into wings when he conducted, undulating up and down. Preparing the way for some intense cantabile, urging those below to flight. Under those arms, for five whole years, Genia Ortiz had become Bizet’s Carmen, Puccini’s butterfly.

“I thought I’d scared you off.”

Genia Ortiz did not throw herself onto Ernesto’s pyre, but she burnt all but one of his batons, to the same flames consigning a mountain of sheet music. The scores reminded her too much of their bedroom, which may not have been the room in which he died, but was the room in which he practised. On the nights before he conducted, it smelled like a badger’s set.

Frequently he spoke of the day when he would lay down his baton and compose, an ambition which surprised his wife since so far as she knew he could only manage Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” on the piano. His own music, he announced, would express happiness without sounding ridiculous.

He had indeed written one popular melody, “On the Promontory”, which everyone commended as prettily crafted.

Meanwhile he conducted from his stomach, restrained in a tight abdominal belt to assist him in the art of correct breathing. He tapped his naked belly in the wardrobe mirror. Everything was controlled by the stomach! Oboe players had thin chests. Bassoon players looked like their bassoons. While horns – and his baton described in the air what Genia Ortiz would at a future date recognise as the breasts of his cor anglais.

In the early years, Genia Ortiz accompanied him to seasons in Spain, Portugal, even to the Residenz Theater in Munich. Her preferred seat was in the third row of the left aisle. She saw how he loved to dress up, how he loved the rigmarole of clapping, walking back, waving his hand at the orchestra, registering surprise when a small girl gave him flowers, and delight when the same girl presented another bunch to the visiting contralto – invariably selected for her looks as for the spontaneity of her amphibrachs, which would explain why the Abyla Philharmonic remained an ever larger part of the year at home.

Genia Ortiz was forty-five, in the twenty-eighth year of her marriage, when she received the anonymous note informing her of Ernesto’s attentions to Sybella, a temporary cook at the asylum in Calle Silvestre. Nothing worse had ever happened to her. That day the sun set on her love and made revolting the appetite which after a fast of twenty-three years had come only with the eating. She lay on her bed, flat on her stomach as if she had swallowed a crocodile. That night when he came home she said, “I can’t work out if you’re a great man or a fool.”

Surprised by his wife’s excursion into analysis, Ernesto said happily, “I await your answer, my halfness.”