“Speak, child! You’ll never get lost with a tongue in your head.”

“Hello, Señorita Rosita.” But his face was a playground robbed of its swings.

She moved on. Old men and fatherless children. That was Abyla. And a few hairy-arsed soldiers. As soon as they could walk up the gangplank, the young crossed to Algeciras.

Rosita hadn’t followed them. Like her stepmother and Senator Zamora, she disliked the Peninsula. Her husband had been a peninsulare. He had walked off the ferry with his guitar. He had wooed her on the Playa Benitez under the stony gaze of La Mujer Muerta and with the hard tips of his fingers. In Abyla a lot of love began on the Playa Benitez. In Rosita’s experience a Playa Benitez love lasted two weeks.

Old Lady Fortnight, she described it to her friend Dolores.

Rosita had hoped Norberto would teach her the secret of song. He had been so nice. He wrote her poems. He promised to give up drugs. He would find work. On their wedding day he bought her paella and Black Forest gateau. Then one evening he had ridden up on a duty-free motorbike and shouted “Whore!” He tried to stub out a cigarette on her face. He ripped the first and last pages from her favourite books and wrote “adulteress!” in lipstick on their wall.

He’d heard from someone who’d heard from someone else that she was having an affair with Señor Ortiz. But she wasn’t. The conductor had promised to give her singing lessons. That was the limit of his attentions. It was Norberto who had been unfaithful – although not until he’d accelerated his bike onto the ferry to Algeciras for the last time did Dolores tell Rosita.

There was no one else until Panteco. She went with the impatient policeman because it was better to be wanted than not wanted, but she hadn’t wanted his child. That was the reason she left him.

“Why, Rosita? Why?” he would demand, barging into her shop and then marching off in the middle of her attempt to explain, only to come pounding on her door in the evening. “Why?” She dreaded the sound of his steps on the stair, his booming voice. It upset her, the childish speed with which he raced through life, spilling everything to the ground when there was no need to hurry like that. And he would have spilled her. For months after the miscarriage she couldn’t bear the sight of him, as if she’d eaten something that would forever after make her sick. She could not bear the touch of any man until one night as she sang fado in her brother’s café, she looked down through the peacock lights and there, sitting at the bar, looking slightly lost, was the Englishman.

The love Rosita would grow to feel for Silkleigh was out of her realm, but there was no one in Abyla with whom Rosita could discuss him. She could not confide in her stepmother. “Don’t glamourise him,” Marie Amaral said this morning, embarrassed to talk of emotion. Then, as if it was the wisest thing in the world, she had said stiffly, “The horse one can’t have is still a horse.”