“How could he?”

“Don’t judge, Tom.”

“It’s a great art, not to sit in judgment.”

“Tom . . . ”

“I don’t think I have it.”

He lay away from her. He faced the window, the mountain skyline. He knew of no vocabulary with which to respond, and he knew there was something awful still to come. He turned back, holding her to him. “We’ll slay those demons,” he managed.

“You can’t imagine. You can’t imagine, Tom.”

In Lima, when he had come towards her on Rita’s patio, she had reached a turning point. It had stirred in her mind before and she realised it was there to be confronted. She could have slipped back into the mould of her pretence and buried her demon so deep she might have completed her life without disturbing it again. But circumstances had taken control. Wavery had protected her in precisely the way she should have been protected by her father, instead of the reverse. He’d protected her from humiliation. He had done the very thing her father hadn’t done, and in return she had loved Wavery with the kind of love that demands absolute honesty.

“Does your husband know?”

“No. No. He doesn’t know. He wants to adore me.” Only Wavery knew. Her mother was dead and her father had blown his brains out in his seventy-second year.

She was weeping again, the tears falling stronger this time. “That’s all I’ve done. From the beginning, that’s all I’ve done. Smile and say yes, yes, he’s wonderful, isn’t he?” Sustaining the myth of her father, the great war hero. The myth of her husband, the brilliant businessman. Her own myth.

“Where’s my reality, Tom?”

Her suffering annihilated him. Her head was hidden in her hair as she rocked from side to side. “I’ve never been a virgin, Tom. I never felt a virgin until I met you.”

All the time he had known Catharine, this is what she had been struggling to solve. He felt numb. This is what had frightened her so much in Lisbon when the mask blotted him out, leaving him high and dry. She had needed his help, not his love. She had wanted him as a very other father figure, and what had happened? He had failed her on every count.

His numbness spread. He felt a different person. She stirred against him and he ceased to be Thomas Wavery. He was a father holding the child he’d never had. He was the war hero, wanting to staunch his mutilated spirit with her innocence. He didn’t mean to hurt her. He sought her unquestioning love, that was all. He wanted her to return him to his own childhood, to a landscape uncratered by warfare.

Her fingers reached behind him, probing, digging, causing pain. The pain chimed with a feeling he had that was unbearable. She turned away, at the same time pressing herself to him. He responded, and together they went forward into the dark, mephitic earth. A cry dried on his lips. He thought: this is how death tasted.