From the branches came a disgusting, contented crunch.

“That’s not a bad title,” said Wavery.

5

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

Five words and some numbers, but they had altered Wavery’s life as thoroughly as Silkleigh’s workmen would transform the residence. (Led by a snappish foreman from Gibraltar, they were moving through the house room by room, but with admirable discretion.)

Wavery referred to Catharine’s letter several times a day. Wherever he went, he kept it on him, folded inside its envelope. Each time he read the words he could extract a different interpretation. “Sit three men down in a room, tell them a story and they’ll leave that room with three separate versions.” That’s what he’d been taught as a young entrant. It was the same with Catharine’s letter. Was she coming only for the weekend? Or to plan the rest of their lives? Might she never come at all?

No verb even. But it had the effect of freeing Wavery from a situation that had begun to suffocate him so powerfully he did sometimes wonder if he would survive to witness the Royal Visit. Until the moment of Catharine’s letter, he had believed his life was finished. In Abyla he had not been able to think of Thomas Wavery and remain sane. At the bar of the Café Ulises, he had suspended himself in others’ lives so as to avoid concentrating on his own reflection. He now had a rest of his life.

Planting a garden was one way he prepared himself. Writing, he discovered, was another. Catharine had sent him a letter. He wrote one in turn. Since his appointment, he had drawn on all that his training and upbringing had taught him to suppress. Guided by Silkleigh and Senator Zamora he had steeped himself in Abyla, locking out the past. At his table on the terrace Wavery wrote down page after page to retrieve it. But he was writing something he had no intention of sending. Not since a brief period as a young diplomat had Wavery felt imbued with such a genuine sense of mission, nor such lucidity. Then, when he had been flying high, his energies focused exclusively on the sky above. He had avoided the landscape beneath him. Now at the age of fifty-eight he was looking down. If there was to be any virtue at all in these pages, he had to embrace the earth. He thought: I must force myself to see everything as it was.

March came, and April. La Mujer Muerta lay shimmering in the heat. The figs had not ripened on her forehead, and her dry flanks pronounced the death of the land. In the heat, men waited to harvest what the frost had spared and the wind not carried away.

On Monte Hacho the heat burned away the nasturtiums and sorrel, sparing only the pines. On moonless nights a pair of baldheaded ibis could be observed on their courtship flights. Every day the birds left their nests to forage. One morning at the Abyla Swimming Club, Wavery saw a rapid blue shadow on the water and an ibis dipped its beak in the surface. In the middle of April another was disturbed rootling in the dustbins at the Hotel Zamora.