He had bought it from a Berber girl in the Rif. That was all he could talk about when they first met. This girl and her teapot. Think of something else, Marie Amaral told herself, not a Berber dancing girl from the Ait Haddidu. Her attention slipped to his wrist. He had no watch. What an affectation, she thought.

“She amazed me very much.” One night the girl had danced around the fire. Towards the end of the dance she held the teapot to the faces of the three medical students. The flames on the distorting metal – he thought it was silver, like her bracelets – made his handsome face go on forever.

“What do you drink?” asked the girl. Her eyes mocked him. They had been emboldened with antimony and her eyebrows arched with soot. There were indigo tattoos on her chin.

“Champagne,” he joked. He held up his metal mug. The girl lowered the camel-neck spout and poured.

“It wasn’t a vintage, and it was warm. But it was champagne.”

The student next to him, also from Oran, asked for vodka.

“And what came out? Vodka!” The action was repeated, this time with wine, after which David determined to buy the miraculous vessel. The girl refused. It was an heirloom. She stroked the lid, mocking him. It had passed into her family when her ancestors defeated King Sebastian. It had belonged to the ten-year-old Duke of Barcelos. It had been made in Cordoba under Abd-ar-Rachman III. “It is magic.”

David held out his mug for more. Again she poured. She could name her price, he said. She shook her head, jingling with armillae. He mentioned a price she could name. The armillae jingled again. He raised his offer. The fire was dying when her head grew still and she parted with her magic heirloom. He took the teapot to bed. “Only the teapot, Marie.”

The girl was gone when he woke, so he was unable to question her about the words engraved on its base which included the name of an industrial town in northern England.

When in 1962 she left Oran, Marie Amaral tidied the teapot away. It was all she had of her husband and it made her jealous.

Memory was a rapist too. She only had to look into her son’s face to be gripped by the sight of his father and not the man she had loved. How often had two never-experienced-madness eyes escorted her back to the present dinner table and she heard herself say brightly, “Where were we?”

Periclito never asked. But now and then Rosita would say, “Mama, tell me about Daddy.”

There was little to tell. She had met Rosita’s father in the winter of 1959 after he had spent a year in the Rif studying plants. He was a Portuguese Jew, a doctor, a passionate believer in the healing properties of herbs, and a lover of football. He was also a widower. His young Portuguese wife had died in childbirth. Two months later he put Rosita in the care of his sister in Lisbon and departed for the mountains.