People do not suspect what they start with a simple gesture. When Wavery had looked into Catharine’s eyes on Rita’s patio and at lunch at the Friar’s Leap he had focused on the possibilities of life. He had been impelled beyond the bounds of his normal existence into new latitudes. Catharine had disturbed a muscle he had put to sleep for more than thirty years.

After swimming twenty lengths, Wavery climbed from the pool. He dried himself, scrubbing a towel over his head. “Breakfast, Penny?” he called. He crossed the lawn, to the house. The children had disappeared inside their classrooms. Near the hedge, the tortoise was mounting an imitation chimu pot.

Should he have agreed to see her again? Or was it a selfish thing to do?

“What about tomorrow?” he had said, feeling his absence of power over himself; also a sense of his power over her and a wanting to enjoy that too.

“Where?”

He had suggested the Hotel Bolivár. One o’clock. They would have lunch in the grill room.

Wavery threw the towel onto a chair. He began to dress. It wasn’t selfish, he reassured himself, unfolding a white shirt Penny had given him for Christmas. He had formed an intellectual sympathy he would like to explore.

He buttoned the shirt and was attacked by doubts. Fifty-eight was no age to form intellectual sympathies. Lunch had not been just the purest bliss. It had offered glimpses of a companionship he had not hitherto known. Drawing out Catharine Riding, sharing the have-you-ever-seens, were-you-also-ins, did-you-feel-toos, Wavery had been taken out of a place he had long ago fortified for himself.

He made his decision while knotting his tie. He would cancel lunch. When he reached the office he would write her a note. He would fold her away in a buff-coloured envelope which he would arrange for the Embassy driver to deliver, as soon as he could, but not later than twelve-thirty, to the head waiter at the Bolivár.

Penny collapsed her easel and carried in the mountain. The mountain was a massive lump of grey dust. She saw it as livid yellow, enlivened by two horns and an eye. At the edge of the exhausted landscape stood a tree. Wavery felt if he pushed it the tree would fall over, never to grow.

“Lovely, darling,” he said with feeling and she smiled.

“Why are you crying?”

She said, “I’m not crying, you idiot. It’s this bloody hay fever.” She squinted at the tortoise. “What on earth is Paracas up to?”

“I think he wants to go back to the desert.”

Wavery was late for the Tuesday prayer meeting: he had been waiting for the driver to return from the petrol station. The weekly meeting was an occasion for the Ambassador to demonstrate his seniority and for everyone else to circulate ideas which might appeal to him as useful. In his first year he introduced from his previous post the habit of settling the staff around a table and combing the newspapers for items they thought merited discussion. This ceremony had been abandoned when someone found an article revealing that the Ambassador’s name had been found on a death list. His nerves had frayed a good deal since then. The only creatures he regarded with any degree of trust were his geese, of which he kept a flock in the residence compound.