“Come on.” He guided her back to bed.

“I’m frightened,” she said in a voice not much louder than a breath. “There’s nowhere left to go.”

He caressed her to sleep. At some point he woke. His arms were empty. She lay fully dressed on the floor. She allowed him to take off her shirt, her skirt. She stretched out under the sheet, her legs together, her back slanted from him. At last she spoke, and it was a hiss.

“When I wasn’t with you, I annihilated you. I thought of reasons to destroy you.”

“Why do that?”

“Oh, Tom, you don’t understand. Feelings like these don’t disappear. You have to kill them, stamp on them, murder them.” Her words lacerated him. She wanted him to feel her pain, the pain he had caused her to feel by loving him as she did. She spoke over her shoulder. “Don’t you see? I want to kill it. I want to stop this unending lie.”

Wavery sat up. “Catharine, you have to tell me.” Everything she was saying was making it impossible not to tell him. “Please, can’t I help you unlock this? Let me tell you over and over again the only thing I can tell, what I told you last night. I love you.”

She turned on her back. She had crossed some threshold of pain and her breath was slower. “Thomas?” She twisted her head. She had to say the words twice before he heard. “Hold me.” He did so and she began speaking, her voice separated from her body as falteringly she revealed the wound that ran in tree-rings to her core.

So it was that in the early hours of Monday morning Wavery learned of the demons unearthed by their love. He had only become conscious of Catharine at the moment he rescued her from Queesal, but in fact she had been aware of him earlier in the evening. Such an ordinary thing had triggered the attraction she felt for him, something ridiculous, nothing more than the black paint mark from Penny’s easel on Wavery’s trouser leg. Catharine had seen it across the room. Everyone in that room had been so smart, so important, so sensitive to how smart and important they were, but here was this man with a dark disfiguring patch on his leg, and unaware of it. People need to show they are successful, yet it is vulnerability which draws love.

But it was more than that. The patch of blackness mesmerised her. Ever since childhood she had felt the same colour louring over an unexplored part of herself. And when they talked, she felt at once that she could tell him about herself. Under his protection she had felt able to start scissoring away at the vast edge of her forgetfulness.

“In Lima, yes, I felt something. I didn’t know what it was.”

She found out what it was two months later, in Lisbon. That night in her hotel room when Wavery had tied on the carnival mask, he was blotting out her face with another mask, a military mask.