“Poor Tom. At least you won’t be corrupted by power. And there’s Lawrence within easy reach.”

When he looked up she was sleeping. He went to the other room. He heaved with tears he didn’t want to shed. He gripped the window sill and looked at where the Suffolk sky was as grey as his hair, expecting to see an old Volkswagen in the drive and Penny’s father signalling, Yes – they had lobster!

He looked down. Three ladybirds moved on the lintel, creeping one after the other in a line over the white gloss. Her diary lay between his hands. He saw the back of a photograph between the pages. It would be a painting. On completing a work she always photographed it. Don’t take it out, he warned himself, but he took it out, the photograph of a man in his mid-fifties, short black hair, blue eyes, open-faced. He sat at the end of a boat on a lake, a river, an estuary. He turned, smiling at the person who held the camera.

“I’m leaving.”

She stood in the doorway. There was a suitcase against her knees. He could think of nothing to say. He handed her back the diary.

“How will you . . . ?”

“I’ll take Mummy’s car,” she said.

He carried her suitcase. She must have had it packed in advance. Protectively he thought, she doesn’t have the dagger of beauty to defend herself against men. “You look awful,” he said, not meaning to say it in such a way, but seeing the effect of his words, appalling and indelible, like the wrong paint on a watercolour. She sat in the driver’s seat. She stared at her lap, not looking at him. She smiled unnaturally. “You certainly know how to bolster egos,” she said. He kneeled beside her. He opened the car door wider. He tried to kiss her. She offered her cheek, her forehead. When he searched for her lips she turned away.

He was in the house when her parents returned.

“No luck with the lobster,” her father called from the next room.

“You can leave this, Tom,” said Penny’s mother when he went to wash-up the cups.

Chapter Ten

1

THE NEW YEAR came and still the drills were silent. The days were agitated by fierce shafts of sound from the muezzin and the tapping of Emilio’s mother on the asylum windows and the kay, kay, kay of five strange birds from their cliff-top incunable.

The birds had settled in a tumble of bronze-green fathers on a military slope the other side of Monte Hacho. They had flown from Punta Leone, smoked out of their nests by the Admiral Grau. They had settled in silence, because of the silence, and when in the first week of January the machines restarted it was too late: their nests were built anyway.

“They’re not ordinary ibis,” Zamora explained to Wavery in the Club de Pensiones. They sat beneath his father’s portrait in a long wood-panelled room. At the far end there was an open hearth where four old men were playing dominoes.