The housekeeper had told Wavery their names, but it was easier to refer to them as she did by the architect’s sobriquets of Pas de Problème and Plaisir des Yeux. Of the two, Wavery had only met Plaisir des Yeux. A message delivered to Halima explained in ungrammatical French that his foreman was in Morocco securing building materials.

The hall smelled of plaster and paint. Wavery pressed down a switch, and light flared on the debris of trestles, pots and tiles. Plaisir des Yeux was working on a room to the right of the stairway, a room described by Halima who had seen the architect’s plans, as “the banqueting room”. The confectioner’s sweet counter was recollected in pale lines on the floor boards; the shop entrance by a rectangle of fresh cement. Loose plaster and the paintmarks of feet led from the room and up a carpetless staircase. Wavery climbed to the kitchen, following the white footprints of Plaisir des Yeux. Everything would be ready within three months, he had been assured.

The interior of the residence was made altogether bleak by the absence of furniture. OED had promised Wavery this would be arriving imminently, in the same ship as his belongings.

Halima had left. Wavery’s dinner was in the fridge, a small tortilla and a tomato and onion salad. Afterwards he made a pot of tea. He opened a carton and milk spilled onto his suit. “Open other end,” he read in Spanish. He carried the tray upstairs.

Wavery’s bedroom was the only habitable room in the house. French windows opened onto a roof terrace where the low calcimined walls retained the afternoon heat. The terrace, fifteen feet by twenty, was large enough for a roof garden.

There was a tree the size of a large magnolia overlooking the terrace, growing from the lane below. Wavery recognised the silken-haired leaves of a handkerchief tree. Had the General lived to see it flower? You had to wait twenty years or more for the Davidia involucrata to drop its white, handkerchief-shaped bracts.

Wavery opened the French windows, disturbing a grey cat from the branches. The animal leaped onto the wall and seeing Wavery, lazily raised its tail. “The cat, sometimes known as Ham (!) seems a happy little creature,” Asunción had written in the notes she had left him. Ham’s stomach was not strong, but she flourished on a diet of horsemeat and water.

“Hello, Ham,” said Wavery. He stretched out to caress her tail. She was descended from a line which had survived the General’s shotgun. There was hope if Ham had survived. He looked over the wall and into the narrow cobbled lane. The Calle Zamora ran parallel to the Marina Española, spanning the block between Calle Millan Astray and Calle Silvestre. It was a back street, but busy. Pedestrians used it as a short cut and motorists to double park, so that every morning began with furious hooting.

People changed in the Calle Zamora: they felt no one was watching them. So they spoke to themselves. They shook their heads, giggling. They urinated against the cars. Girls with the night’s party on their faces sang pop songs; students sat on doorsteps reading texts; the grocer’s son thumped his ball into the chalked goalpost Plaisir des Yeux had said he would paint over. Perhaps it was the tall asylum on the corner of Calle Silvestre which made Calle Zamora such a refuge, an escape from the ceaseless tap-tapping of inmates anxious to secure the street’s attention.