“What is it?”

Ernesto said, “Something to make us enjoy ourselves more.” Determination had made him pale.

In her forty years, Genia Ortiz had never seen anything so ridiculous as the “instant orgasmic douche” of this Dr Linz. A perforated rubber ball, the size of a greengage, was connected by a thin tube to a transparent football. When squeezed, the liquid in the football released itself through the perforations in the greengage. “Undress,” he whispered. She removed her clothes in a trance. The conductor stood at the basin, filling the larger balloon with vinegar, lysol and warm water. She saw the furtive caresses as he coated the long tube with vaseline.

“This goes there,” he said, holding up the greengage. He kept his back to her. He unbuttoned his shirt and trousers while she inserted it.

“Ready?”

“I think so.”

He turned, naked, and picked the warm balloon from the sheet beside her.

“At the moment of ejaculation,” he read out, “we both squeeze.”

Dr Linz’s apparatus would involve the Ortizes in some improbable contortions, but nothing would match the occasion of their first experiment when after less than a minute Ernesto screamed, “Squeeze!” Tense with fright the two of them fumbled for the football which they dislodged from the pillow next to her head, dilating the sphere so frenetically that it slithered from their grasp, bouncing once, twice, three times on the floor before it was jerked back by the umbilical entrail tugging at their loins, coming to rest with an audible shudder against one of Ernesto’s shoes.

Ernesto was filled with shame. Not so his wife. Rigid with panic at the outset, she found herself stimulated by the tube linking them. There was something about the preliminary preparations which also aroused her – even if Tromso’s birth exactly nine months later testified to the inefficacy of the Venus Apparatus as a contraceptive device. And experiencing a sensation entirely new to her in bed, she found the operation comical.

In a way she had fallen in love, and falling in love she brought to her love-making all the fervency she might have given him in her twenties.

After experimenting for a week with the Venus Apparatus, Genia Ortiz discovered her preferred position. She sat astride Ernesto on the blue arm chair, looking into the malleable globe between them. It was a position she favoured for five years until out of the blue she received a note “on behalf of one who wants to see justice in this matter”. The unsigned scribble informed her of Ernesto’s ministrations to an assistant cook in the asylum on Calle Silvestre.

“From then on, it was downhill,” Silkleigh told Wavery. They stood outside the Abyla Swimming Club. “But you are never innocent in how you choose to be destroyed, old soul. You should know that.”

“But how do you know all that?” asked Wavery.

“If you live in a city of exile, you become aware. And I’m a writer, remember. I know who’s telling the story and what the story is and why the story. I can sum up these people’s lives in a minuto. Where they’ve got to and how, who has been felled by sloth or greed or sheer bad luck, or driven by the power of love. Oh, yes, old soul, I’m good on others. It’s simply myself I can’t work out.”