She said, “Thank you for letting me be here.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You can’t know the effect you had just putting ‘Café Queluz, Praça dos Pássaros, three o’clock.’ Ever since I was a girl . . . ” But she stopped.

“Tell me,” said Wavery.

“There’s something I’ve always hoped, all my life,” she said. “It sounds mad, like a faith. But I’ve always hoped to meet someone who was so close in spirit that separation for all its pain did not count. Someone to whom I could say, ‘I’ll see you there – some far-flung place – at such and such a time, in a week, a month, a year.’ And know that meeting would happen, would come to pass.” She went on, “What I suppose I’m saying is that I’ve always wanted a relationship where I can say, ‘Café Queluz, Praça dos Pássaros, three o’clock.’”

“Here we are then,” said Wavery gladly. He refilled her glass with the tart white wine. He looked up and she was staring at him.

“Well, what are you searching for? You’re only going to see a short-sighted, middle-aged diplomat.”

She accepted the wine. “Funny, I have a different image of you.”

“Really?”

“It’s the little things you remember, not the obvious ones. Your pigeon toe. Did you know your toe had a pigeon?”

Next morning they travelled by taxi to Sintra. Sciatica prevented Wavery’s friend, a former head of the British Council, from personally showing them the estate. His lawyer would meet them at eleven outside the main gate.

The house lay behind a crumbling chest-high wall beyond the hotel of Seteais, at the end of a drive which had once been tarmaced. It was painted white, with broad bands of blue along the edge of the walls and about the windows. The building was single-storeyed and arranged around an open courtyard. Oak trees brushed the roof and through the oaks they could see a small chapel.

In the courtyard there was an inquisitive cat, a chicken in a cage and a girl wearing a grey school skirt. There was a smudge mark on the girl’s shirt from where she had leaned against the wall, watching them walk up the drive. “The cook’s daughter,” murmured the lawyer. He stood aside for Wavery and Catharine to enter. Above the door into the hall there was a cactus cross. In the hallway was a huge Kelvinator fridge, its plug removed. On the walls were pale rectangles where paintings had hung.

Catharine opened a cupboard. There was an old radio on the shelf and an almost empty bottle of island malt.

“Was she married?” Wavery asked the lawyer.

Twice, the man thought, although she had been alone by the time she died.

They walked into an anteroom. The architraves were decorated with dusty putti.

“This is where she came to get away from her husband,” said Catharine. There was thick dust everywhere. “Or where he came to drink whisky when she was in church,” said Wavery.