‘What happened to them, Angus? You never told me.’

Angus sighed. ‘I felt very bad about it,’ he said. ‘At least at first. I feared that I had made a terrible mistake giving them to a stranger whom I met walking through Drummond Place. Then I heard what had happened and I’m relieved to say the outcome was very satisfactory.’

Domenica raised an eyebrow. ‘They found a good home? All of them?’

‘Yes, as it happens, they did. They ended up in a small travelling circus in Ireland, would you believe? Finn MacNamara’s Jumping Dogs was the name of the outfit. They were trained to jump through hoops and so on. Apparently they’re very happy – dogs love performing. They’re based in Cork, but go all over Ireland doing their tricks.’

Domenica said that she thought this a very satisfactory ending. ‘As a child,’ she said, ‘I always wanted to join the circus. What child hasn’t?’

‘I wanted to go to sea,’ said Angus. ‘We used to go for holidays on Mull when I was a boy, and I loved watching the boats. I thought that there would be nothing more exciting than to be a stowaway. In fact, when I was eight, I tried to stow away on the MacBrayne ferry from Oban. My parents were watching me, of course, and saw me hiding in one of the deck lockers.’

Domenica laughed. ‘Not a good choice of ship,’ she said. ‘You would just have gone backwards and forwards between Oban and Mull. Until you were eighteen perhaps.’

‘And now …’ said Angus.

She waited for him to continue. What did he want to say? Those two words – and now – seemed to point to a whole hinterland of regret. And now it is too late. And now my dreams are but as dust. And now there is so little time left.

He said nothing further. She waited. A breeze, so gentle as to be almost undetectable, had blown up from the south, touching the branches of the olive trees, creating a ripple in the grey-green sea of leaves.

84. Icarus, Cyril, a Ducati

Nothing really happened – and then everything happened. Domenica would later find it difficult to reconstruct events: understandably, perhaps, so emotionally significant was that day, and so unexpected its central, crowning moment. Or was it really unexpected? Might she have detected in Angus’s look, in the manner in which he seemed to be weighing every word he uttered, in the way that his hand was trembling as he handed her a cup of coffee, that he was on the verge of some moment of annunciation? Perhaps; and yet she did not, with the result that when Angus suddenly cleared his throat and addressed her, she was not ready for what was said.

‘You know, Domenica, when you look at your life,’ he began, ‘by which I mean when I look at my life, I can hardly reflect upon it with complete satisfaction.’