“Wasn’t it lucky!” she said. Adam wanted some papers collected from Mr Queesal. “To do with the wine company I was telling you about.”

“Look –” He tilted the bottle. “We’re drinking it.”

“He spent all last week in – Ica, is it? It sounds pretty grim, the situation there.”

“Then you were alone in Lima?”

She shook her head, her concentration on the candle. “It was a very strange feeling. I’m not used to being alone, not abroad.”

“We could have had you to lunch.”

But she needed to explain what had happened to her, alone in Lima. “I felt exposed.”

“Did you walk through the centre?”

He hadn’t understood. “Not exposed to anyone else. Exposed to myself.” Alone in Lima she had felt none of the myriad props by which she was encouraged to construct her life at home. “I was forced to be myself.”

“Is that such a terrible thing to be?”

She sat back. “Look at me, telling you things like this. You can’t be interested.”

He was dismayed. “Oh, but I am, I am. Someone who thinks as you do. I can’t tell you. It’s not –”

“What I’ve been describing, you must feel it the whole time.”

The waiter returned. Wavery was about to tell her that he felt the opposite, but the moment had passed.

They ordered, Wavery recommending the ceviche mixto. They talked and he learned she lived in London, off Kensington High Street. She had been married seven years. She had two daughters and a younger half-sister who worked for a charity for the blind.

To avoid the subject of her husband Wavery asked about her parents.

“My father was a soldier.”

“Did he fight ever?”

She mentioned a name, a military operation known to Wavery in childhood. “He led it”

“Did he now?”

She could tell Wavery’s admiration.

“Good heavens. So a very great man.” He could remember the obituaries. The front pages had been devoted to testimonials of her father’s courage, to the horrors he had endured at the hands of an unforgiving enemy, which resulted late in his life with suicide.

“Yes.” She dropped her gaze onto the lateen of light in front of her. “It’s funny. I hardly ever think about him, but I was thinking about him last week in Lima.”

“And your mother?”

“My mother? She was, well, she was a wife.”

“Did they discuss his past?”

“Not much. They separated when I was ten. He shot himself shortly after.”

But a strange expression had come into her face. It was not the child’s expression Wavery had witnessed on Rita’s patio in front of Queesal. This face was older, more worn. She looked about, upset. And then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, she stretched over to the next table where the couple were preparing to eat prawns off a raised plate, and she plucked one.

She began shelling the tail. Wavery, shocked, whispered, “You can’t do that.”

To emphasise the same point, the bearded man made a performance of offering her the whole plate. A grim smile crept along the young girl’s face. The smile said, “This woman may be attractive, but she’s mad.”