“Esperanto,” the Englishman was saying. He addressed the dog at his feet. “Who is the strict gentleman on the chair?” He laughed to himself. The merriment rattled with unhappinesss. “Language of the future,” he said. The words rolled out of sight under his chair. “Sounds silly, but there’s an element of truth in it. Isn’t that so, my angel? I know, you’re looking for your master.”

He ruffled the dog’s ears, then patted the air above the animal’s head. It was a curious gesture, as if he were flicking his fingers dry. The dog pulled at the lead. The bar lights flashed on his blue teeth and in his eyes and on the pink foam frothing his gum.

“Now go and lie down like a good dog. If we were underwater and I flicked my fingers like that, you would sparkle. Just like an angel.”

He glanced at Wavery. There was an urgent friendliness in the glance. He held out a hand smeared with oil. “Joseph Silkleigh,” he said. “And this is Toribio. That’s Emilio’s seat you’re sitting on, old soul.”

Silkleigh talked to the fractured strumming of the guitar and Wavery listened. “I run a business. It’s not running very fast, either.” He sold water-purifying systems to houses, hotels, “any ippety-oy who will buy them – you just plug them under the sink and they take the diseases out as the water flows through. Simple as that.”

But what really interested him was the sea. The sea was never dull – ever, ever, ever.

He’d been diving all day for the fisherman, in the shallows off Punta Leone. In the afternoon he had dived to eighty feet where the water fell into night and the air was almost chewable. He couldn’t stay long because of the current and the oil burning on the surface, broken by the poniente into several flaming slicks. He had swum ashore below La Mujer Muerta where the beach was noisy with the flap of oil-glued wings and dying sandwich terns and the air smelled of dead seals. There would be a stench in the sand for months.

“The pearl of the Mediterranean,” he said. “More like Armageddon.”

Only God and the damsel fish knew where Emilio’s vessel lay. His new boat had found old stones. There he was one minute, sailing her home from Essaouira, the next watching a great bow slice out of the sea mist. This was one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world, a ship a minute and then the wind, for which the narrow Straits acted as a funnel, and which came – he clicked his fingers – like that! When the wind got up, it didn’t mess about. And once you had negotiated the wind you still had to reckon with the current, the Atlantic rushing in at ten knots, meeting the sill connecting Abyla with Gibraltar, bursting upwards, so if you were crossing by boat you could be rolling backward and forward, starboard to larboard. You could be swimming in sweet innocence at ten feet and a couple of breaths later you could find yourself at a hundred and twenty feet, saying bye bye quickly.