He sat down. He remembered the origin of the image of girls’ necks. It was how Penny had once described the Ambassador’s birds. Wavery had begun in the past few days to appropriate many of her habits. He would catch himself wearing a particular expression, or speak with an intonation he realised afterwards was hers, or squeeze a hand between his crossed legs, as she did. This evening he had eaten one of Penny’s meals. Halima had prepared it from a recipe in the concertina folder inspired by a Beef Wellington, served in Amman by the Soviets in 1969. Tonight’s meal had been edible, but Wavery wondered if it might have lacked some elementary ingredient.

“Next on the World Service, a bulletin of world news . . . ” Wavery turned up the volume. He was not inured to the afternoon’s silence. There was news about Bosnia, South Africa, China, but over the announcer’s voice he listened for the birds, their cry vibrating together with another sound.

The sound of his wife in their London flat when she found his shirt stained with mascara.

Catharine’s louder cry in Lisbon.

Since arriving in Abyla, Wavery had done all in his power to stifle these cries. He reverted to a trusted habit, the trait Penny had least admired in her husband. Once she told him if ever he appeared to be flying on a magic carpet, it was only because he had swept so much under it. In the office he was better able to suppress the things that might upset him. There he was assisted by the modus operandi of a working consulate. He could smother himself in progress reports of one sort of another. At work he saw it his duty to encourage trade between Britain and Abyla. The prospects of commercial links, while not obvious, did exist for investors with foresight and initiative. To the DTI he wrote explaining that the antimony works were looking for a British partner. Also there might be tenders for a new hypermarket. He wrote to a merchant banker he had known at Cambridge. Might he consider taking a stake in Abyla’s one and only clearing bank? He wrote to the British Council. Could Abyla be included in the British Council’s “Meet the Author” programme? More humdrum was the routine demanded of him by the Foreign Office. He wrote a considered report for Pulleyblank, his Head of Department, “Abyla and the Straits Tunnel: first impressions”. There had been letters to the Foreign Office Inspectorate about an Inspector’s forthcoming visit in January; letters to the Overseas Estates Department on the subject of a Daimler to be relinquished after the Royal Visit; while to the Governor’s office in Gibraltar he had sent a copy of the Foreign Office circular about saucepans, marked for his sister-in-law’s attention. “In case Hoyter failed to warn Lawrence,” he had scribbled at the bottom.

Wavery attempted to be again the career diplomat of a year ago, the man in whom the strongest passion had been habit. It was at night, when he came home to his residence, that he felt the commotion of different passions. The truth was, Wavery couldn’t persuade himself he had sacrificed everything for Catharine. Just as he preferred not to dwell on his appointment, so did he not wish to bring her within the cast of his thoughts. Not to think of Catharine, he tended his heart like a bonsai tree, pruning it into a stunted shape of his own making. In the Lisbon hotel he had made a conscious decision. There had been nothing altruistic about this decision and the result was not a colossal wound. He was wounded in the way an ordinary man is wounded. For three weeks, he had listened to the diplomat in him. Don’t think of her, this person said. You mustn’t think of her. Not if you want to get up in the morning and go to bed at night. And soon, if you don’t think of her, you will forget her.