The last days are difficult. He has lost his novelty interest for the children who get on with their pursuits. He goes for walks with Louisa. They sit on chairs on the veranda in the evening drinking pisco sours. Both father and daughter hear the clock ticking and want to make the most of what remains of their time together but they have said all that there is to say. She is a grown woman. The bonds between them are historic. He has his life. She has hers. The love he feels for her is so acute that it is painful but how can he express it? He had hugged her and cuddled her and helped her with her homework until she developed breasts and it seemed inappropriate to feel them pressing on his chest. And her curriculum was beyond him. What were the unspoken, unconscious, explicit influences on her formation? Neither wants to ask, to analyse, to dissect. The silences between them grow longer. Jomier has heard all he wants to hear about Louisa’s life in Argentina. There is not much to say about Jomier’s life in London. He cannot tell her about his unhappiness – the wretchedness he still feels all these years later because her mother left him for Max.

On the last night of his stay, Jomier cannot sleep. He has eaten and drunk too much. The pisco sours, the Mendozan red, the T-bone steaks, the dulce de leche dessert, a last Cohiba, the Johnnie Walker Black Label as a nightcap, the heat, the mosquitoes or imagined mosquitoes. And his thoughts. About Louisa. Like and yet unlike her mother. Wiser. More measured. Her feelings under control. Does she really love Jimmy? Or has she learned from the breakdown of her parents’ marriage to mistrust romantic love? To play safe. Is there, at the back of her mind, a sense that if things had been otherwise in her childhood she might have taken a greater risk in her choice of a husband? ‘Not blame exactly . . .’ She is affectionate towards Jomier. She is scrupulously kind. But perhaps she does blame him for giving up too easily – for capitulating before the zeitgeist which says that, after a daughter has reached the age of puberty, a father no longer has a role to play. A source of authority? Patriarchal claptrap. A personification of the superego? Cod psychology. The guardian of her chastity? A cover for incestuous desire. So Jomier had backed off. He had given up. He had given up his role as guide and mentor and left Tilly and the zeitgeist to urge her on. Have fun while you can. Play the field. Don’t marry too young. But Louisa had known better. She had crossed an ocean to find a husband who, unlike her father, would kill a wife who made love with another man.