“Merci, monsieur . . . ” He cocked his head. “ . . . mademoiselle.” Too late, he gestured for the others to come quickly with their examples of purple crystal, their butcher-birds.

With the sun blazing on its windscreen, Abyla’s one and only Daimler accelerated into Africa.

Catharine laughed. “It was worth coming all this way, just to be called mademoiselle.”

Then she said, “Are we . . . ? Still?”

“Yes,” he said. He thought: Only through hearing their voice can you truly appreciate a person. But at this moment her presence was as hard to endure as her absence had been. He placed his hand on her leg, gripping it hard. She took his hand between hers, kissing it, opening its fingers, pressing them to her lips.

He sensed her inspection, her immaculate smile. “Tell me you love me,” she said.

“I love you.”

“Tell me again.”

Again, he told her. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”

“I didn’t know if you’d received the letter.” She touched the side of his face. “You’re greyer,” she said. “But slimmer.”

“Lots of swimming,” he said. “And no parties.”

“We’re on the same time span again,” she said. “Every time I thought of you, you were one hour behind.”

He swivelled a glance at her. He was monstrously happy. “Can one be closer than this?”

She kissed his fingertips. She anointed him with her smile. “I don’t want this day to end,” she said.

At the end, when in a concerned voice Catharine said, “Darling, where are you going to retire to?”, Wavery would be incapable of summoning up a single nugget of gaiety. Neither then nor at any time earlier had he been able to form the idea for himself. Her question would be a silencing force, hard as the African light. As soon as he heard it he knew he had never properly adjusted to the idea he would be alone. That Penny would not be with him. Nor Catharine. But neither had he asked himself why it was that Catharine might have changed her mind about seeing him again.

The truth was, Wavery’s imagination failed him beyond the three days he had planned in Chauen. In that respect Penny was right. “Women see the whole picture. Men see it obsessively, piece by piece.” Catharine’s visit to Abyla, the possibility of which had occupied his mind for six months, was a piece of this picture. Since the day he received her letter, it happened also to be the only piece.

If pressed to say what he felt as he drove her through the mountains where Lieutenant Zamora had warred against the shadows and Zamora shot his pig, Wavery would most likely have borrowed a phrase of Silkleigh’s: “There’s no future tense in Arabic, kara mia. Unlike the language of the future!”

They reached Chauen at seven, the dry hills yielding the town at the last possible moment. A crown of houses and minarets balanced white and blinding on a rocky brow above a river. The hotel lay on the far rim. Asunción had booked a double room in his name.