“Oh, my halfness, it’s you.”

In the photograph she recognised the sylvan features of the music prompter.

“I can explain –”

“And these?” said Genia Ortiz, who, when tossing the pot-pourri by their bed, had winnowed from the bowl three pairs of earrings, not one of them her own.

“These?” Her face was a loose web of lines in which her eyes were buzzing wasps. Ernesto confessed. She listened: lie upon lie upon lie upon lie, as if each lie he told was of no more import to him than a cup of tea when to her it was the utmost poison.

From this time on she slept in Tromso’s room. Ernesto was too shy to approach her further. He left his door ajar at night. He listened to her move about the bathroom, yearning for a hinge-squeak, for her voice to say, “Ernesto?” And his answer, “Yes.” “Where are you?” “Here, my halfness. Here.” “This is so stupid. Can I . . . ?”

Across the corridor, she lay in bed with her four-year-old son. She noticed her husband’s open door and only when she heard him close it in the middle of the night and begin snoring like a tractor did she turn. Sometimes in her most aspiriny depths, she regretted the passing of her pious but splendid copulations. For the most part she held to the belief her husband, the conductor, was a heartless, wicked, soulless skunk.

Genia Ortiz turned the lock and made a dash, but Ernesto’s ghost was licking the mole on her neck, running his tongue back and forth over the hard button of flesh, smoothing out the strand of stiff hair.

“Ernesto, no!”

Why had she stayed with him for so many years afterwards? Was it inertia? Was it because he shored up her illusions about herself? Or was it because no one else had come along? Unlike him, she had not gone looking. She refused to expose herself to pointed fingers. And now she had padlocked a ruined place.

She squirmed away from him. But he had touched her and she was communing to herself in a whisper. She was thinking of the days when she was mad for him. Why had she cared for him so much? Hadn’t he known the truth? That in all those nights she resolutely slept away from him she had nevertheless been desolate for his caresses.

She contorted her head. “Ernesto, no. I really mean no.” She slammed the door.

She had never felt so out of breath, not even when Anna Pavlova’s bulldogs had chased her in Petersburg. She stumbled into the front room where she balanced the Virgin and the Matisse on the window cushion. Very delicately, so no one would hear, she opened the windows. The evening remained silent. In the clear sky above she heard the wing beat of the strange black birds. She watched her swans conduct Sibelius with the wings they had plucked from the ice. They passed overhead, circling the bay, gliding over gardens grey with dust, the stampede of houses along El Hadu, the uplifted nose of the fisherman’s dog who had found no grave to starve on.