In the next room someone pounded on the wall.

He gathered her in his arms and she held onto him, weeping. She said, “Tom, I have to tell you something . . . ” He stroked the hair from her face. He pulled her back from the abrupt edge. “Look at me,” he said. “It’s me.”

Her eyes looked at him. They were filled with waves breaking.

“I have to tell you . . . ”

But she was speaking to herself in a thin, frightened voice. Her pain carried him down. It was an anchor dragging at the root of her being. It was as if she was responding to some immeasurable damage, so deep it might never be found – and if found the more damaging it would be. He caressed her face, her arms. He was in uncharted, boiling waters. This was an experience for which nothing in his life, nothing in his books, had prepared him. He said, “I love you.”

She pummelled her knees with her fists. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see? I’m worried your love will turn into something as strong against me, and I don’t want it to.”

“It won’t. How can it?” He stilled her face with his hands. “Tell me, Catharine. I want to hear.”

But she shook free her head. “I can’t,” she said in her locked-away voice. And with the trust of a lost animal, she allowed him to carry her to bed.

Not once on Sunday did she allude to what had passed between them. All day she was bright and loving. In the morning they explored the town again and in the afternoon they walked to an abandoned mosque where olive-pickers stood on ladders and flexed back the branches, their heads lost in leaves.

That night he approached her again, and she welcomed him.

She undressed. She lay down, looking at him, holding his face between her hands as he moved in and out until it was not a part of his body moving inside her, but his whole being, when suddenly her eyes disappeared and there was a mouth screaming in terror again, and hands punching at him, beating his face, pushing him away.

She sprang away from him, collapsing against the wall.

“Tell me,” he begged. “You must tell me.”

She was vomiting her breath on the floor. He went to her and she held up her hands, sobbing. There was a knock at the door, but he didn’t answer. He picked her up under the arms. “Catharine, tell me.”

She shook her head. He had never seen such pain before. The colour had left, as though a bandage was falling away. Instead of a young woman of thirty-four, she had the bark cheeks of an old woman.

“No!”

The terror in her eyes appalled him. It was the terror of one of Penny’s creatures. Catharine had met something in him which frightened her off, but what was it? In the outstretched silence, she looked at him. Her very being was pressed to her eyes, beating in silence against them, calling for help, sliding away.