“No.”

“I do.”

Zamora lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the fire. The Senator’s, suspicion of the English was automatic. The Phoenicians knew Señor Wavery’s country as a land stocked with Belgians, of interest for its tin. As a Spaniard, Senator Zamora inherited a conviction that Wavery’s countrymen had clung without justice to Gibraltar and, more damaging, they numbered Joseph Silkleigh. Clotilda should be encouraged to marry anyone, anyone at all, but, Santa Maria, please not the English diver.

After Asunción had circulated the nut bowl a third time and Zamora, kissing Pablo goodnight, had recoiled in horror from his grandson – “Pablo! You stink of smoke. Have you been smoking, child?” – and Wavery had exchanged some anodyne remarks about the attractions of Abyla (having been alerted by Asunción it was best where possible to avoid mention of the tunnel), there fell an uncomfortable silence in which the only sound to be heard was the sound of three grown-up people eating peanuts.

It had seemed such a good idea! thought Asunción. She could not have foreseen her father would choose to elect today a grey cardigan day.

Zamora had woken from his siesta downcast. After lunch he had needed a walk. Señora Criado, having basted a leg of lamb with olive oil, fresh rosemary and crushed garlic, had served up the dish with no small pride – only for Zamora to discover the meat was in fact beef. He knew he was prone to exaggeration but it was possibly the most revolting meal he had ever tasted.

As he walked by the sea he thought he heard his name called by the familiar voice of his dead wife. “Teodorooooo.” He looked into the dusk and was overwhelmed by the memory of Minerva’s nonchalant beauty – the same as Arletty’s in Les Perles de la Couronne – before the throat cancer ravaged her.

“Teodoroooo . . . ”

She was warning him! Teodoro, don’t do it. Do not consign all the beautiful ideas in your head to the green machine. Do not abandon your own nature for children’s toys. You are a man of scholarship. How can you expect to master Pablo’s computer if you do not understand the instruction manual? Remember the fate of Leopoldo! As he stood on the Playa Benitez, there floated into his mind the usually welcome, but on this evening disagreeable spectre of the quinologist.

His great-grandfather, the generous donor of Santa Maria’s bell, a lover of cold grapes and marzipan, a pleader for stowaways, a founder member of the Club de Pensiones and Abyla’s most brilliant after-dinner speaker, a man whose qualities were known wherever venereology was respected as a science and who with his chinchona bark had treated politicians of all parties and priests of all denominations, had sunk with the Santarense off the Gulf of Mexico in 1896. Lost with the marble staircase intended for the Teatro Amazonas had been Leopoldo Zamora’s life work.

Senator Zamora wondered, after another day exposed to the technological elements: Was this the fate awaiting his own decades of research?