“Does your name start with a W?” A gypsy stood by his table in the Praça dos Pássaros. Pigeons clattered through the golden leaves, chesting the cold, briny air like ladies settling down to bridge. From the little square, full of blue-tiled houses and drying sheets, his eye followed two streets down to the Tagus.

The old woman crossed his hand with a sprig of rosemary.

“Yes.”

“Lots of changes.”

He accepted the rosemary. “Thank you.”

“Five hundred escudos.”

He paid. He ordered another coffee. He was cold. She was seventy-nine minutes late.

Black hair, white face, lilac dress. “Remember me?”

Wavery leaped to his feet, spilling coffee. They bumped noses. He said, “You’re here, you’re here. I don’t believe it.” His heart slammed against his chest.

She said, “Time has got to stand still now, hasn’t it?”

He took her suitcase and they walked through the streets. She breathed in the bracing air. “I knew I was going to have a marvellous time, as soon as I stepped out of the taxi. If you didn’t turn up I was determined to enjoy myself.”

“You thought I might not turn up?”

She said happily, “The hotel in Lima! Or had you forgotten?”

Her room was identical to his: small, with green handpainted furniture and a view onto a church roof. Above the pediment an angel blew a chipped trumpet.

“I’ll leave you to unpack,” he said. “I’m in 402. End of the corridor, turn right.”

Moments later there was a knock. Her telephone was not working. A man had come and fiddled. He could not fix the fault until Monday.

“I have to ring home.”

“Use mine,” said Wavery.

He put on his coat and went out into the square. He explored the damp-smelling church. He kicked a ball back to a small boy. He looked in the window of an antique shop. There were bits and pieces of a glass chandelier, a leather holder for playing-cards, a tin slipper ashtray and a row of black and white carnival masks with beaks for noses.

He glanced up at his hotel window. She must have finished speaking because she was standing there, looking at him. She opened the window and waved, and thereafter an open window became a sign that one or other had finished on the telephone.

He came back into the room. He tried to smile. “All well?”

“Oh, yes. Bowling along.” She stood up to leave. By the door she touched his shoulder. “What is it, Thomas?”

“Who does –?” He could not bring himself to say her husband’s name.

“I’m with my sister. And you? What does Penny think?”

“I’m here to see the house in Sintra.”

“Alone?”

They dined in the back room of a fish restaurant behind the castle. Later, if he thought hard, he would be able to bring back to mind the wooden tables, the metal coatstand, the large man in a red shirt who served them fresh clams and a chilled Casal Garcia.