They walked between the grand houses and the smoking rubbish and Wavery was gripped by the urge to jump. If they jumped now, hand in hand and one two three . . . He saw himself and Catharine rolling through the cracked shoes, the melted shampoo bottles, the intestinal spews of cassette tape caught in the cactus while above them, urged on by the one-armed man, the ice-cream lovers abandoned their car and the vagrant stood erect in his hole and the children mounted the admiral’s shoulders and they peered down at two specks on the sand where the waves wrapped the shore in a tattered ribbon.

He rubbed an elbow. “It’s cold.”

She had the fog in her eyes. “Listen . . . ” She was unable to complete the phrase.

“Yes?” The garua must have frightened her. That and the tension in the streets. You could never underestimate the tension. It was everywhere around them, like the fog.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No, Catharine. Tell me. It’s what I’m here for.”

She said, and it was not what she had been going to say, “Have you ever felt you had a protective spirit?”

“Early on,” said Wavery. Once he had thought himself in-vincible.

“Or yourself to be one?”

“Catharine,” he said at last. “What’s this about?”

A young girl searched his face. Then the much older woman elbowed her aside. “When we had lunch you were like a very good father. It was a luxury for me to have someone who listened and talked in that way.”

“I’m still listening, Catharine.”

She said, “That week – when Adam was in Ica – I began walking round myself, trying to catch myself unawares. I was looking for a means of convincing myself that I was no different from anybody else. I wanted someone to say ‘No, you’re normal. What happened then was of no significance. It’s got to be allowed out.’ I was ready to explain this to your colleague, whatever his name was, at Rita’s party. But . . . but he didn’t want to know.”

“What didn’t Queesal want to know?”

“Oh, nothing that doesn’t happen to thousands of other children. Parents not getting on. Parents saying to you, ‘We’re only staying together for your sake, because of you,’ and you saying to yourself, ‘My God, if only I wasn’t here.’ Parents passing their guilt onto you, which isn’t right because if they really couldn’t stand each other then they would have left. Wouldn’t they?”

“Generally,” said Wavery.

“Your mother then taking you away. You saying, ‘It must have been something I did.’ Your perpetually unexplained guilt.” She pushed the words out one after the other. “Those days when I was alone here – I saw things clearer.”

When she failed to go on, Wavery took her arm. “Catharine? What did you see?”

“I saw that what then happened to me stole my freedom to choose. I saw how I was forced to imitate. I saw that all the time I was saying to myself, ‘I will be like everybody else, if it’s the last thing I do.’”