Sometimes after work Wavery would rush home with flowers from a barrow in Estrela, tumbling upon Penny on the terrace where she sat in a thin grey slip, undressing her as she tried to smell the blooms through the tang of paint and turps. They would weekend in the pine trees near Lagoa. At night they made love on the beach among the abandoned beach chairs. “Oh, Basualdo,” she breathed, licking his shoulder, calling him by the name of the make-believe lover she had been awarded in her Portuguese class. She kissed him and the sweat on her tongue was gritted with sand.

When after two years Penny had not conceived, she saw a doctor recommended by the Embassy. A preliminary examination found nothing untoward. “He said he’d better check you before going further.” But the problem did not lie with Wavery. Three months later Penny made another appointment. Wavery was sitting on the terrace when she returned from the clinic. She had not expected him to be there. He had told her he was having drinks with a friend of theirs at the British Council. She had not prepared herself.

“Michael had to go to Evora,” He explained. He waited for her to speak. “Well, darling? What did he say?” But he could see the answer in her face.

In the months afterwards Wavery realised it was not possible to overestimate the misery of childlessness. It became a source of profound insecurity in Penny. He had daily to perform feats of assurance, telling her it made no difference to his feelings. If he saw someone childless he learned never to ask why they didn’t have children. But when he did come into contact with children he was accidentally wonderful. Not having experience of them, he treated them like adults – which they adored.

For a while Penny’s infertility bound them together, producing in her a fervour of creativity. On the Lisbon terrace she painted Wavery as he was then. Pale, black-haired, so black that others joked he used boot-polish. Intelligent. Efficient. But not vain.

“Penny, am I vain?”

“Totally.”

He was proud of his wife, although he could not pretend always to understand her paintings. But he could understand her talent which blossomed on that terrace until it bewildered him. Once coming to wash her brushes, she found him alone, standing before a canvas. “I love it – but I don’t see what’s going on,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“There’s something so –” and he said what he had meant to say, “– so gloomy there. You’re not gloomy are you, darling?”

She touched his cheek with her brush. The paint had dried and the brush was harder than she knew. “Thomas, when will you learn not to confuse me with my work?”

At art school Penny had experimented with gouache and aquatint. Then her most successful paintings had been blurrily delicate landscapes – trees reflected in the Cam near Granchester, cornfields with a patina of frost, studies of Wistman’s Wood. In Lisbon she discovered the influences which transformed these landscapes beyond all recognition. She discovered surrealism. The Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua below their terrace housed a “Temptation of St Anthony” by Bosch, a few unrestored canvases by Romney and Reynolds, and a selection from the Portuguese School of the sixteenth century, whose motifs – decapitated saints, mongoloid Christs, fish-shaped Satans – she found pertinent to the twentieth century. Late Picasso she would acknowledge also as an influence; and a teacher whose lessons she attended at the Gulbenkian, who advised her whenever she found herself blocked in the execution of a painting to turn it upside down. Wavery had no such recourse. It was something he envied his wife.