When they sat down he was reminded immediately of the reason he had married her. By the end of the meal, he knew why the marriage had not worked. Something else annoyed him. He disliked the fact that she didn’t tell him to stop scratching his nose, that her eyes skidded to the people at the next table, that already she had forgotten he didn’t like white wine. Her brittle superlatives had disappeared with her contentment and the image of her contentment, instead of relieving Wavery, had upset him. He made a joke about her tortoise, but she didn’t bother to smile. He made a conscious effort to engage her. “Like that story . . . ” he said.

“What?”

“I thought I told you.” But it was Catharine he had told.

“No,” she said. “It was probably her you told.”

“It was you,” he lied, in that instant snapping an invisible string that during thirty-five years had bound them together. He heard the sound of precious stones scattering about them.

“No, Tom.” She was firm. “You didn’t. Ever.”

They stood up from the table together and she touched his shoulder to support herself. There was no blood in her touch. He squeezed her arm, as if he would feel there the person he had known on a summer’s day at a picnic in Hyde Park. Foolishly, he tried to kiss her goodbye. He tasted the horrible sensation of her reluctance. Her hand withdrew and she said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The letter from Penny’s lawyers jabbed him into thinking of the person he was desperate to forget. Why had he made with Catharine such a ridiculous pact never to telephone, never to write? It had been her idea, and for her sake he had given way to it. Catharine had presumably not heard about his appointment to Abyla. Or else she had been trying to contact him ever since at the Lisbon embassy. Perhaps somewhere in the Foreign Office there were eighteen letters addressed to him. All of them opened by Queesal.

He took out the letter from the envelope in his hand, unfolding it. Even before he read the sentence, he recognised the hand on the page.

“Hotel Zamora, four o’clock, 3–6 July,” he read.

At six-fifteen Queesal opened the door. He stood before Wavery’s desk, tightening his tie and brushing imaginary crumbs from his trousers.

“There are one or two economies to suggest.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the budget for servant’s shoes,” said Queesal. But overall he approved of the imaginative way in which Asunción had managed her sub-heads.

Wavery reached for a paper clip and sat back, smiling. “Of course, George, things are a bit artificial at the moment. We’ve had no expenses – apart from the residence.”

Queesal’s jaw set in a mould of studied uninterest. His eyes, penetrating the glass lenses, fixed on Wavery’s official diary, open on the desk at the first week in July. He twisted it to face him. He turned back the empty pages as if it were a ledger.