Afterwards, her back curved into him, she talked. “I remember leaving you at the airport and collapsing on my bed and Adam saying ‘Good weekend?’ and my falling into a deep sleep and finding your grey hairs on my jacket when I woke. I’d been frightened of embarrassing you with my feelings, of embarrassing myself.”

He held her hands.

She went on, “I went through all the photographs of myself as a child, just to see if there was any trace of that look you talked about on Rita’s terrace, the one that you said gusted through you. I couldn’t see it.”

“I love you,” he said.

She said, “I never stopped thinking of you. Once or twice I was talking to someone and I had to stop because suddenly I have had this clear image of your face as we made love that night. I was worried I’d become glass, that everyone could see through me, see what I was thinking.”

“I love you.” He wished he could have been the first man to use those words. They were all he could say, and each time he said them they became more inadequate.

She withdrew her hand. Drawing a long breath, she said: “We know, don’t we, that this is all we have? We have a pack of cards, that’s all. We can play them how we like, but there are only so many cards and the pack is going to run out. We know that, don’t we?”

“Yes,” said Wavery. “That’s right,” and he kept from his voice what he could not keep from his mind. The reason she had broken her promise, the reason she was here in Africa – did it have to do with her problem? Or was it to solve his?

She slept and for a while he watched her sleep-ironed face. He slept tangled with her and he woke with her face at his shoulder, disturbed by the muezzin.

In the morning, he stood before the mirror, shaving. She came into the bathroom and he kissed her, leaving foam on her cheek. “It’s been so long since I spent time with someone I didn’t know,” she said. She looked at his face in the mirrror, blurred by the steam. “I was dreading the little things. You wearing pyjamas, or a vest. Or I’d hear you say, ‘Is it all right if I use your toothpaste?’”

They had Saturday and on Saturday night it happened as it had happened before in Lisbon. She was above him, her hair falling across his face, her body rising and falling with his, when suddenly he felt a shiver in her wings. Her head jerked sideways into the hollow of her arm. Her expression changed and she stared at him. Another person raised her face. She arched back in a convulsion. A tearing sound came from her throat as if something was ripping inside.

“No!”

It was the excoriating, primal cry of a terrified child. “No! No! NO!” She struggled to free herself, tearing against some hook in her flesh. She hurtled away from him, her arms flailing, her hands hiding her face. She ran from the bed and burrowed into the corner of the room where she wrapped her arms around her knees, coughing out her fear in short, hoarse moans, repeating, “Don’t make me, no, please don’t, please, don’t.”