“I’m not going to glamourise him. He’ll have to walk on his knees up the Calle Camoes before I speak to him again.”

Or ring, thought Marie Amaral, seeing her stepdaughter’s peach-soft resolve to hate the man.

Rosita could not talk to Dolores, who only wanted to talk of herself and Ernesto. She could not talk to her brother. Periclito was in Caracas. Only Clotilda could have helped her to explain the phenomenon of her attraction to Silkleigh. But Clotilda Zamora was not speaking to anyone.

“Is that taken?” A man, an Englishman, was asking her something. She could tell he was an Englishman by the V-neck, the tweed jacket, the hair falling over one eye. This one was clutching an armful of mimosa.

Rosita moved along the bench, creating space for him. She knew the amount of space an Englishman needed.

“I was looking at the children,” she said.

Wavery said, “Is that Pablo?”

“God loves men who love their children,” remembered Rosita from somewhere. “Do you have children, señor?”

“No.” Wavery recognised Zamora who cupped his mouth and called, “Did Asunción give you the list?”

From his pocket Wavery produced the computer print out. He brandished it.

“Thank you,” Wavery called back. “I’m going to the library now.”

Zamora looked about for Pablo. “Come on, Pablo,” he said. In an attitude of grandfatherly despair, he propelled his grandson across the square towards the ice-cream kiosk. Wavery watched the motionless rocking horse, the man from Algeciras by the fountain, the eyebrows of shade made by the palm leaves in the dust.

Next to him Rosita placed a tortoiseshell comb in her mouth and flipped her hair forward, over her face. With the comb she fastened her hair into a loose chignon, tucking it up from the furrow of her neck where the fine black hair grew silver. She gave several shakes to make sure it was secure and sat back.

She said, “Señor Consul General, how does one sleep with an Englishman?”

“Silkleigh?”

Her face sank deeper into her collar. In the white fur she nodded.

“Are you positive you want to?”

They both laughed, Rosita’s laugh lost in her coat. She said, “I know everyone is suspicious of him. Silkleigh is dangerous, they say, but I don’t feel that. With me he’s just rude. ‘Rosita, you’re the only person I have to hurt.’ As if it’s a compliment.”

“He does rather pretend to know about everyone.”

“Psssh. It’s all in his mind, in his English imagination. You know what I think about Silkleigh, señor? I think he’s a mythomaniac. How can he know anything of other people when he is such a hopeless judge of his own character?”

“Do you know what he thinks of you?”

She stretched out a finger and pressed it against her long nose. “He thinks I’m cheap.” She said the word as if she were saying “cheese” to one of the street photographers in Calle Real. “If men think you’re cheap, they tend to think twice before signing up.”