The wrist was staying at the Hotel Zamora. That’s what her driver had asked for. Silkleigh would get her name from the bellboy. He would take her to the Multicine Cervantes. He would fill her with such an insane desire for him she would assuredly clamber to her hands and knees, right there in the front row, bury her head in his lap and by her moist manipulations bring him to pummel the arms of his chair and scream, “This is cinema!”

The screen went blank and he saw Wavery.

“Women not your thing, old soul?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Wavery.

“Any nippers? Where’s Mrs Wavery then?”

Wavery explained he was in the process of divorcing Mrs Wavery. Silkleigh nodded several times in quick succession as if he’d seen a magpie. His face became heavy again. “Bloody time. Goes so quick,” he said. “Thirty-five years. Christ, I sympathise, Mr Wavery. Eine kleine of the same, Mohamed. One for you, Excellency?”

Wavery shook his head.

“But objectively, because people are so loathsome, the business of splitting up should be easy. Getting together is the high-wire act.”

Wavery looked around for a table, but Silkleigh held his arm. In a desolate voice he said, “Speak to me, Mr Wavery. I need a kindred spirit. Someone who understands what I feel.”

“What do you feel?”

“A little off colour, to tell you the truth,” said Silkleigh, his braggadocio waning. He pulled up his chair. “I’ll be serious, promise. Promise, promise.” He lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old. “Tell me honestly, do you ever mind you’re not all the people you couldn’t bear to be?”

Wavery was rendered helpless by the appeal. He had come here to escape his own mawkishness, not to share it with an Esperantist barfly up to his oarlocks in brandy-based cocktails. Silkleigh’s eyes implored.

“I suppose so,” said Wavery. “I suspect there are times too when all of us no longer want to be the people we have been.”

“Do you think so? Well, this is a relief. You see, I don’t have any of the shit you have floating after my name. Being an orphan, I was brought up by Jesuits. Twelve years with them, and I tell you, we had none of your advantageous public school muck in Father Michael’s little establishment, oh no. Not in Yeovil. No friends either. Not one.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Silkleigh.”

“I get terribly lonely, old soul. Except when I’m underwater.”

It had not been enough for him to find Emilio’s body. Silkleigh would not rest until he had found the boat. All afternoon he had been underwater. He stared over the brim of his glass. The oil had sufficiently dispersed. He lowered himself into his Satan’s Whiskers, two aluminium cylinders on his back, three thousand pounds to the square inch, revolving in his neoprene suit, flippering through the luminescent sea, saying to himself: Silkleigh, remember when you’re in the water you only have to think it and you see it, how if you think rainbow wrasse you see a rainbow wrasse, how if you want to see a dolphin you see a dolphin, so don’t for the love of that woman in the tinted car, let’s think of puffer fish or sharks or Portuguese men-of-war, let’s sink ever so gently sandwards, towards blinny that kiss your ears in tiny nibbles and octopus that break when worried into the lovely opaque whiteness of their fetish, you didn’t know they had a fetish for white, did you, and sea perch and crown-of-thorns starfish and triton conches, and let’s think of Emilio who didn’t suffer because to drown is really to fall asleep on a couch, whose boat I cannot find but which must be here somewhere.