Her favourite Surrealists were women. Their reproductions would decorate her studios: the shrouded figures of Sage, the bird paintings of Tanguy, the uneasy perspectives of Ithell Colquhoun, whose gothic novel The Goose of Hermogenes she had discovered in a first edition on a stall in Sintra.

In those early days, she was nervous about showing her oils, but under Wavery’s encouragement these made a stealthy advance into the drawing room. They hung alongside the Victorian cattle scenes supplied by the Overseas Estates Department and the signed photographs of sovereigns with vacantly royal expressions, and gradually Wavery’s own visions of the Leper King’s temple at Angkor or the Devil’s Throat at Iguassu or the Benedictine woods behind Buçelas (originally a fond, untroubled memory), were replaced by a fissured surface of staccato colours disturbed by half faces, single eyes and animal horns. At moments of depression, Wavery joked, he felt accurately represented by Penny’s portraits of him. But in truth he could not readily distinguish between her portraits and her landscapes.

She gave curious titles to her paintings. Time and again he could not discern a relationship between title and content. In “Danger, Mirror Ahead”, painted in tempera, she staged a mournful dialogue between an empty guitar case, a serpent of the underworld and a moustache. “I thought of calling it, ‘Melusine on a Saturday’,” she told him, folding her arms. He thought she might have been teasing. He searched the canvas for clues but it resisted his participation.

He watched Penny type her preferred title onto a white card, the year in which it was painted, its size in centimetres and the materials used in its execution.

“Lovely, darling.”

Many galleries had given her exhibitions. These included the Galeria Lobo in Lisbon, the venue of her first show. When there was a reasonable chance Wavery might return to Lisbon thirty-three years later as Ambassador, Penny was pleased – not merely for herself, intending to keep the owner of the Galeria Lobo to his long-held promise of a retrospective, but also for her husband, she being more ambitious for Wavery than he had become for himself.

Lisbon might also restore something that had gone underground between them.

When first he joined the Diplomatic Service, Wavery had been full of the great anticipations in life. But in Lisbon his ambitions began their guttering out. Asleep, he might dream of sitting again the Foreign Office exam, yet each day greeted him with the miserable pettiness of diplomatic life, until one morning, fumbling with the combination on the bag-room lock in Phnom Penh, the realisation came to him it was no longer Thomas Wavery who occupied the position of Second Secretary with commercial responsibility, but the position which occupied him, a position spent opening letters, answering them without exposing the Embassy to commitment, never ever letting slip what he felt; wax setting in the Service’s ways.

After five years abroad, in Lisbon and Phnom Penh, Wavery was posted to London and discovered he represented a country he knew nothing about. He had been living out the middle-class manners of a generation that had vanished from the face of Britain. He had been speaking for a people that no longer existed. Like the boy in Woyzeck, he had glimpsed the moon and believed it was friendly. He had flown to the moon only to discover it was made of cheese. He had returned to earth. But the earth wasn’t there any more. The earth was an upturned pot and he was quite alone.