“Silkleigh has a lot of days like that?”

“Only when he is drunk. And then he becomes the man you saw.”

“And other times?”

“On other days he is the calmest of men. He talks about the sea, about the songs he hears underwater, about the turtles he makes shine with his fingers. On these days he becomes like his hands.”

“His hands?”

“He has beautiful hands. Women look at the hands of men they wish to touch them, señor. I want him to make me shine in the night. Like his turtle.”

A bell struck eight. Wavery looked involuntarily at his watch, his hand. It was two-fifteen.

“I have to go to the library,” he said.

Chapter Seven

1

AT WHAT POINT had Wavery understood the force which bound him to Catharine? Not in the two months of their correspondence. She was a pebble in his shoe, no more. So he told himself.

He wrote every week. On paper he discovered things to say that he had never said to Penny. These things he hoarded for Catharine. He described his last days in Lima, his surprised regret over leaving Peru, his first homecoming in four years. He took pleasure in the most ordinary details. The Dutch lodgers had left their flat in an appalling state, “but I can turn on the tap without worms tumbling out.” There was still no confirmation of his last posting, and this was annoying his wife. He had two months leave owing. He was in no hurry to begin work.

Catharine’s letters were confessional. In one of them she talked of her mother. “What was the first thing I did when she died? I watered the plants. I felt alive and intense and when Adam returned he said ‘What’s happened? I’ve never seen you looking so beautiful.’ Isn’t that terrible?”

Then early in September Wavery wrote to tell her of an extraordinary piece of luck. Did she remember his hankering to retire to Sintra, outside Lisbon? He’d had a letter from a friend of more than thirty years ago. This man’s elder sister had died and he was looking to sell her estate below Pena Palace. From his description of the house there was a sporting chance it might fit Wavery’s requirement exactly. Penny, unfortunately was busy preparing for an exhibition in the west country. “I’ve decided to have a look anyway,” wrote Wavery.

In her next letter Catharine wrote, “You know what I’d like more than anything? To come with you.”

They came as a brother and sister might, in the middle of October. Wavery booked rooms at a hotel in the Bairo Alto. He would fly out a day earlier to make arrangements. They would meet on Friday at a café near the Moorish castle. In his last communication to her was simply, “Café Queluz, Praça dos Pássaros, three o’clock.”

His conscience was clear. They were spending a weekend together because they needed each other. He was going to be very good for Catharine in some way, and she for him. Their trip was innocent, just as his feeling for her was innocent. He was sure of that. At the Lisbon Embassy he was about to come into his own. But before coming into his own he wanted to be, by God, in a simple way a little bit happy. For thirty-five years he had been married to a woman whose behaviour suggested it had been a waste of everybody’s time. If only for a weekend, he saw redemption staring him in the face.