“Does she know how you feel?”

“Oh yes, I think so,” said Silkleigh. “Not wishing to play it up, I told her she was sensational.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she’s thinking about it.” But it was perfectly plain what she felt. “Her eyes are like traffic lights saying, Go, go go!” He twiddled the tip of an imaginary moustache. “I tell you, Mr Wavery. She. Is. A. Trip. In her embrace boys become old men –”

“In my experience,” Queesal’s voice interrupted them, “when a woman says she’s thinking about it, she’s thought.”

The mirrors blurred as the doors swung open and Emilio’s dog came in tugging behind him Captain Panteco and Dolores. The librarian retrieved her hand and stood moodily in the entrance. She knew how sexy she looked when she looked like this, but she was not feeling sexy. Panteco’s superior, thank goodness, had summoned him to Madrid. Since the New Year, the policeman had become intolerable. Tonight he had hooted for five minutes outside her flat before bellowing at the window, “Dolores, come on!” And what had happened? In her hurry, she had squeezed into a pair of shoes too small for her.

She leaned on a pillar and with the toe of one shoe eased the other off by the heel. Severely she examined the big toe poking through the hole in her Charmed Life stocking. She wiggled it and thought of Dionisio Porcil, who had stumbled into her outside the library as she bent down to retrieve some books from the pavement, books borrowed by Senator Zamora ten months before which she had retrieved from him. Porcil had helped her into the library.

“Are you here tomorrow?”

She nodded.

“Good,” said Porcil. A girl like that got her books carried.

And why not? thought Dolores. If you could read several books at the same time, why shouldn’t you enjoy men simultaneously. She was sick of Panteco. Every time they went to bed it was like a walk in an. enemy’s field.

“I’m sure he’s a coprophile,” she told Rosita in the chemist’s where she bought her breast-firming cream. If he was a Spaniard like Ernesto he’d put it in from the front, not the back. “He is difficult to make come. It is boring, boring, boring. He is like a theatre that never ends.” And Rosita had sat through it for two years! Porcil at least was rich. He also listened, or pretended to.

“See a table, Dolores?”

She glanced at the policeman as if he was one suspicious pimple. Captain Panteco ignored her. His eyes went marching through a regiment composed of his dim images to the stage where Rosita was singing. He could not see a free table.

“It’ll have to be the bar.”

At the bar, Silkleigh and Queesal were talking in low voices.

“I was in contact with Encounter.”

“Really?”

“Superficial contact.”

Wavery listened to Rosita. “I want you more than life and if it wasn’t a sin I’d want you more than God.”