But he could no longer do this. After seventeen months in Oxford, he could no longer describe the continent to her, the rivers, mountains, deserts. He couldn’t tell her how it was his aunt who had been responsible for introducing Dyer to South America – after his mother died, Vivien had sent a plane ticket, pressing him to come and stay. How he saw the shadow of palms on the tiled wall, the yellow bunches of small plantains, and a spell was cast. He couldn’t tell her about the limitless horizons and the lapwings’ shrieks. Or the cities, Buenos Aires, Iquitos, Belém, the favelas in Rio, the pueblos jóvenes outside Lima. He couldn’t tell her of obscure places like Rio Pico, Hortensia, Tres Cruces, Corbett, Satipo, or the village in the Peruvian jungle where he had passed five days in a sweat-drenched delirium. He couldn’t tell her about the excitable fellow journalist he had known who went to interview Sendero prisoners in Lurigancho gaol – a scoop, Jaime kept saying, a real scoop – and was released with his tongue cut out. He couldn’t tell her of the tropical night when he lay in a makeshift gondola beside a canoeira, a girl plying her trade in Iquitos’s Venezia district, a pink birthday candle in the milk-tin, and the wizened paddler, his back to Dyer, rowing in steady, heart-shaped strokes out into the Amazon, unswerving as Charon. The fresh body in the grass under the flyover. The name on the church door scrawled in the blood of the priest. The bar–café in Joaquim Nabuco where he liked to go to read. He couldn’t tell her of the samba that pulsed through the river mist, the buzzards that drifted down from the mountains like open bibles, the jolt of freedom as he cantered along an avenue of eucalypts, out onto the straight dirt road, the smoke of burnt hay, the horseradishy smell of the wild grass, the pricked back ears of the horse.

‘South America,’ he said carefully, ‘is great if you like butterflies.’

‘I adore butterflies.’

A waitress in a short black skirt with black stockings served them. The plates were blue Limoges and warm.

‘Silvi, this is really good,’ Jocasta called out.

‘Gilles brought it back from Brussels.’ Her pale, boss-eyed face drifted over them.

Soon they had finished their foie gras.

‘Amigo, mind if I smoke?’ she said to him.

‘No.’

‘It’s all right, you won’t get cancer. It’s an e-cig. Not as good as tobacco, but better than nothing.’

‘I don’t mind. Really.’ He sat with his arms to his side, like a man dining at High Table.

‘You’re a good amigo. That’s the only Spanish I know.’

‘They don’t speak Spanish in Brazil.’

Jocasta inhaled, absorbing this. ‘Yes, of course, I knew that. Portuguese. But do they have fortune tellers there?’

‘They’re called pais de santo.’