Miriam put her arm around me. “She’s strange, but I like her. Do you wish you’d married someone like that?”

“I did.”

“I’d like to help her. She needs to have a child.”

“Only I can help her there.”

“You’re going to be busy with Señor Robles’s secretary, remember. Tomorrow could be tricky.”

I embraced Miriam, glad that Sally had charged her imagination. “Dear, you always wanted to live on a desert island with three strange men.”

However, by the next day Sally’s sunny humour had returned. She knelt on the sand by the bathing hut, straw horns tied to her head as Henry made passes with a beach towel. While Miriam fed Alice and Lucy, I took a handful of black olives and a bottle of beer and walked into the scrub-covered dunes. I sat down in one of the hollows, trying to work out my route across the bay. Thinking of Cordobés and the maimed beasts waiting for the sword, I imagined a startled tourist on a pedalo crossing a wake stained with blood. Long after the ferry left for Cadaqués, its waves rolled against the beach, as if Poseidon himself were reminding me of my close escape.

Smoking a cigarette, Sally climbed through the grass towards me. She still wore the straw horns around her white hair.

“Time for a rest.” She slumped down beside me. “Jesus, I’m pooped. You and Miriam … there must be a knack.”

“Tell us if you find it—we’ve been exhausted since 1957.”

She sailed the straw horns into the air. “They’re wonderful, take it from me. Everything turns into a party. I wish my childhood had been so much fun.”

She spoke wistfully and flicked at the hair blowing into her eyes, almost trying to set the loose ends alight with her cigarette. Endlessly patient with Henry, Alice, and Lucy, she was short-tempered with her own body, as if it had failed like a thoughtless child to respond to the problems on its mother’s mind. She had chewed her nails to the quick, and her left nipple was raw and tender. A faint chemical odour rose from the gusset of her bikini, a hint of stale spermicidal jelly, and I guessed that she had been too distracted to change her cap for a few days. She helped herself to an olive from my hand.

“Where’s your apartment? I can’t see it today.”

“Next to the hotel with the sign … if some developer hasn’t moved it. We should have come straight here with a couple of tents.”

“It’s great. I like Gozo best—Circe’s island, I drank from her spring. And Ruanda. Last year I was going to live with the Watusi.” She patted the sand on her legs, as if readying herself for some husband painted in white dust. “Miriam told me that you come from China.”