Her hands gripped the ornate gate, fastened by two coils of rusted chain. The garden was planted in a rectangle no more than twenty yards long and thirty wide. In that space, with no sense of overcrowding, were most of the colours under the sun. White clematis climbed over white hydrangea. Double hibiscus grew blue among red japonica, and a path lined with pale pink cherry trees drew their eyes to a squat house, purple-coated in bougainvillea.

She put her hand to her mouth and pointed. “An Australian bottle-brush!”

They identified other shrubs and flowers. He admitted, “I can fall for plants in the way people go on about falling for Mozart concertos.”

“What a marvellous place,” she said. Her excitement could not be restrained and escaped in a joyful rattling of the gate. It was the excitement of a young girl at the zoo with her father. Wavery too pushed his head through the railings. He wanted to prolong this moment of sharing the one small thing they had in common.

Someone moved behind a window. The door opened and a man in a brown uniform advanced down the path, speaking urgently into a walkie-talkie.

Wavery withdrew his face from between the bars. “I think we’d better go.”

He drove her to lunch in a restaurant on a cliff two miles south of Lima. The restaurant, El Salto del Fraile, was named after a friar who leaped into the waves when the woman he loved sailed for Europe. Vicente, a friend in the Senate, once mentioned to Wavery he took his girlfriends to the Friar’s Leap.

A waiter drew back the chairs at a table by the window. The day was overcast and a cheerless wind clawed the glass. It was one o’clock but the waiter flicked his cigarette lighter, applying the flame to a candle in a red glass holder. Catharine fiddled with the candle as they spoke, the light darting onto her face and over her bare arms.

Wavery raised his hand for the waiter, who returned with a bottle of Tacama Gran Tinto. It was good, said the man, pouring the wine. He’d had it for breakfast.

Another couple entered the restaurant. The man was corpulent, his fleshy face rammed into a greying beard. The eyes at the bottom of his face were hard and shiny, like buttons in one of the Ambassador’s Chesterfields. The girl was younger, with a small nose and overripe hips.

The waiter drew back two chairs at an adjacent table.

Wavery said, distracted, “I thought you might like lunch by the sea.”

Catharine smiled at the lowering of his voice. When she smiled her smile was fenced in by two small lines at the corner of her mouth.

He said, “Do you want me to ask for another table?” None of the other tables were occupied.

“Don’t be silly,” she laughed. When she laughed another line appeared, outside the boundary.

“I’m glad I saw you in the lift,” he said. “I realised at Rita’s I had done all the talking.”