Their conversation ran out beside the pool with Wavery’s promise of an invitation to his reception in August.

“Perhaps that’s what he’s writing out – his guest list,” thought Genia Ortiz.

The impending celebrations divided Abyla. Those who had not been invited to the opening ceremony, which included a reserved seat at the temporary bullring near the docks, made plans to spend the period abroad. Others such as Genia Ortiz, who had angled so assiduously to extract their invitation from the Governor’s Chief of Protocol, spent a fremendous amount of time telling people what a bore it was and really they hadn’t decided yet if they would attend.

Or was he writing to Silkleigh?

Soon it was Ramadan.

In El Hadu and the mountains beyond they fasted from sun-up to sun-down, at night celebrating with silk soup the month in which the Prophet had received his divine revelation.

The Playa Benitez in Abyla filled every afternoon with sunbathers.

In the privacy of the Abyla Swimming Club, the owner of the enclave’s most celebrated Eyes, climbed from the pool, slipped a finger under her costume and stretched the material back over the contours of her capacious bottom. The Governor’s wife had grown fat as thin, sparrow-like women sometimes do in their fifties and her tastes had kept pace with her girth. She was bored. She liked drama. She liked fuss, but she found none of it in Abyla.

Beatrice Menendez lay down on her lilo and opened Life Is Worth Living by Monsignor Fulton Sheen in its Spanish edition. She dreamed of the men she had known. Periclito. A small Englishman. And lately, Lieutenant Casares.

She imagined Lieutenant Casares at her side. “Higher up, no, higher,” she told him as he pounded a sturdy anthem on her back and rubbed an itch from her skin. But the itch remained. She floated her eyes, for so long unrecognised in Abyla Television’s competition, over the pool. Lieutenant Casares was nowhere in sight: he was marching in front of her husband at another of the Governor’s rehearsals.

Did the Governor have an equivalent list? She didn’t much care. Her husband could not take a spoon to his mouth without it irritating her. When he ate his branflakes at breakfast she wanted to strangle him. She was bored by his proximity, by his fetish for white, by his hypertrophied ego. Irritated above all by the ferret ambition. It would genuinely surprise her if he could manage the time for an affair.

This morning there were only two people in the Abyla Swimming Club: the man whose job it was to skim the surface of dust and the British Consul General.

Up and down he swam as he swam every morning. To the Governor’s wife a man’s character revealed itself in his movements. Without his glasses, with his pinkish-grey skin and silvery hair, the man in the pool looked to Beatrice Menendez like a very correct and charming fish.

She doubted his intimacy with the passions that rent her body, but in the mornings she would greet him warmly. There were few good reasons to remain in Abyla: one of them Lieutant Casares; another was the prospect of curtseying to Señor Wavery’s Queen.