Wavery said, “Only that I rang.”

“How’s Peru? Pretty rough from what I read at the moment.”

“Yes,” said Wavery. “It is pretty rough.”

On Saturday he drove to Suffolk. Penny was staying with her parents. He wanted to be the one who broke the news about Lisbon, to tell her the great flummery of the flag on the car, the name at the foot of the telegram, the fowl-feather hat were not for him, but her father, an avid reader of the appointments’ column, had already shown her the announcement in The Times.

He was not at home when Wavery arrived. He had driven Penny’s mother to Aldeburgh. They were both crossing fingers for lobster.

“You know how it is,” Wavery told Penny. “Anything you put down, one, two, three, you don’t get.”

“It’s only Nescafé. Do you mind?”

“Your hay fever’s bad,” said Wavery, but she was crying. “What’s wrong?” He felt the detachment in his face, a mixture of tolerance, embarrassment, guilt.

“I want it to end.” There was determination in her words, a hardness he had not known before.

“Why?”

She went into the next room and sat in a chair, blowing her nose. He followed, placing a log on the fire.

“I’m seeing someone else,” she said.

“I thought you must be,” he said as a reflex, not thinking she must be at all, but knowing in five minutes’ time he wouldn’t be able to look at her, so now deliberately looking at her, trying not to show his hurt, keeping his voice calm, as if he were saying he would like coffee. He placed another log on the fire.

“Are you in love?”

She shook her head. She would spare him that as she had spared him the question, “Who is she?”

She said, “I was closer to you than to anyone I could have ever met.”

She pulled her ankles into her side while Wavery held back the tears, afraid that any word would uncover his pain.

“Come on, Thomas. Don’t tell me this comes as a surprise. If you’re suprised by this, it can only be because you’ve been so distracted.”

On the table next to the basket there was a portrait of Lawrence in governor’s uniform, fixed in his undoubt.

She went on, “I feel awful saying this . . . ” She could probably have stomached his infidelity. But his appointment to Abyla was the last straw. She had reached a point where the prospect of packing and unpacking again was unendurable. She had wasted too much of her life running hotels for freeloaders, undoing the work of her predecessor with work her successor would in turn undo. The one thing she wanted to do was to paint. Not enough life left for anything else.

In spite of what the office said about jobs for spouses she knew they much preferred Penny to perform her Mother Teresa bit and to play bridge, which yes, might have been bearable in Lisbon, despite everything, but not in a two-horse town in Africa.