Penny’s paintings were the children they had never had. She lavished on them what once she had lavished on him and over a period he came to miss the burnish of her attention which he received whenever he sat for her. And Wavery, looking at his wife as she painted him, would think: That palette knife is a scalpel. She is scraping herself into her work. She is giving to her art bits and pieces of herself which can never be retrieved. The better the work, the more its completion leaves her diminished, exhausted, brittle. The more it drives us apart.

When signing the portrait, she wrote P. Tredwell, not her married name. “Penny Wavery – too many y’s,” she explained making a face, and he thought he understood. He didn’t want it to hurt him, but it did.

He grew to be in awe of her art and the people she met through it. She had gone further in life than he had. Some part of himself that in her was satisfied on canvas lay unresolved and combustible inside him. He had his work, but the work you did in an embassy offered no landscape to anyone.

As Penny grew more successful as an artist, Wavery made an effort to create a landscape for himself. To his surprise and delight he discovered he possessed a natural talent for gardening. Luck played a part, and intuition, in particular the way he learned to feed his plants – not too much nor too late, but as they came out of the dormant season. He might have been a childless, unfathering creature, but he was able to bring plants to life.

“Of course, it’s very akin to being a painter,” Penny would tell visitors, more and more of whom tended to be fellow artists. “He takes everything from his’ own palette. But instead of putting it into words or pictures, he makes a little curve of lime green or a patch of blue. The only drawback is the place is so full of bees.”

He dreamed of the gardens he had been forced to leave behind.

Travel exacerbated the distance between them. Those people who once would have been her friends, she no longer tolerated. She complained that his colleagues treated her simply as a decoration, a leaf of lettuce to brighten up one of those plates in the Ambassador’s residence embossed with lions and unicorns. Wavery felt in his heart, on the contrary, he was the useless one.

To himself he argued that his heart was a robust thing. It would fill again like the magic cistern they visited near Petra, where water was a crop that ripened, oozing mysteriously from the rocky walls. But he felt unreplenished until the time came when he told Penny he loved her and she, recognising the tone he employed to appreciate her paintings, said, “No, Thomas. You don’t love me. You’re just very, very fond of me.”

She was right. She had not called him Basualdo for many years. He longed to experience the passion they had lost. He thought, people never tell you about the end of sex. In the silted channels of his desire, he noticed each new hair on her breast, each scratchmark below her eye. He saw all her vulnerable parts and he exaggerated them. He criticised Penny mercilessly to himself. Because he loved her, loved her, loved her, he told himself. But it wasn’t that. The sweet words he had used to preface their lovemaking, he now used later – usually following an argument. In this new territory, it became easy to argue, to say the wrong thing, to dip the brush in any number of false colours, to apply another small, indelible mark to the portrait of their life together.