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better. Angel could do that to her. He was older. He had authority. He had experience.
    ‘It’s all right for you,’ she said, gently, ‘you don’t owe six hundred thousand euros to the bank.’
    ‘But I also don’t own nearly two million euros’ worth of property.’
    ‘I own one million eight hundred thousand euros’ worth of property. I owe six hundred thousand to the bank. The lawyer’s fees are…Forget it. Let’s not talk about numbers. They make me sick. Nothing has any value until it’s sold.’
    ‘Which is what you’re about to do,’ said Angel, in his most solid, reinforced concrete voice.
    ‘Anything can happen,’ she said, turning a page so viciously she tore it.
    ‘But it tends not to.’
    ‘The market’s nervous.’
    ‘Which is why you’re selling. Nobody’s going to withdraw in the next eight hours,’ he said, struggling to sit up in bed. ‘Most people would kill to be in your position.’
    ‘With two empty properties, no rent and four thousand a month going out?’
    ‘Well, clearly I’m looking at it from a more advantageous perspective.’
    Manuela liked this. However hard she tried, she couldn’t get Angel to participate in her catalogue of imagined horrors. His objective authority made her feel quite girlish. She hadn’t yet got to the point of recognizing what their relationship had become, how it fitted with her powerful needs. All she knew was that Angel was a colossal comfort to her.
    ‘Relax,’ said Angel, pulling her to him, kissing the top of her head.
    ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be able to compress time and just be in tomorrow evening now,’ she said, snuggling up to him, ‘with money in the bank and the summer free?’
    ‘Let’s have a celebratory dinner at Salvador Rojo tonight.’
    ‘I was thinking that myself,’ she said, ‘but I was too superstitious to book it. We could ask Javier. He could bring Laura so you can have someone to flirt with.’
    ‘How very considerate of you,’ he said, kissing her head again.
    When Angel and Manuela had met it seemed that the only thing holding her life together was her legal battle over Javier’s right to have inherited the house in which he was living. They’d met in her lawyer’s office, where Angel was sorting out his late wife’s estate. As soon as they’d shaken hands she’d felt something cave in high up around her stomach and no man had ever done that to her before. They left the lawyer’s office and went for a drink and, having never looked at older men, having always gone for ‘boys’, she immediately saw the point. Older men looked after you. You didn’t have to look after them.
    The more she found out about Angel the more shefell for him. He was a phenomenally charming man, a committed politician (sometimes a little too committed), right wing, conservative, a Catholic, a lover of the bulls, and from an established family. In politics he’d been able to broker agreements between fanatically opposed factions just because neither party wanted to be disliked by him. He’d been ‘someone’ in the Partido Popular in Andalucía but had quit in a fury over the impossibility of getting anything to change. Recently he’d joined forces, in a public relations capacity, with a smaller right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucía, which was run by his old friend, Eduardo Rivero. He contributed a political column for the ABC newspaper and was also their highly respected bullfight commentator. With all these talents at his disposal it hadn’t taken him long to bring Javier and Manuela back together again.
    ‘All energy expended on court cases like yours is negative energy,’ Angel had told her. ‘That negative energy dominates your life, so that the rest of it has to go on hold. The only way to restart your life is to bring positive energy back into it.’
    ‘And how do I do that?’ she’d asked, looking at this huge source of positive energy in front of her with her big brown eyes.
    ‘Court cases use