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others from the Korean War, I had some when I was a child – though not as many, I quite envied him – which was why I recognized them silhouetted against the mottled, yellowish sky in the window, just as I would have recognized them in flight during my childhood had I seen them. With my hand, I had steadied the plane that my head had bumped against: I considered opening the window, it was closed and so there was no breeze, the planes did not move or sway, apart from a very slight toing and froing – a kind of inert, or perhaps impassive, oscillation – inevitable in any light object suspended by a thread: as if above the head and body of the child they were all languidly preparing for some weary night-time foray, tiny, ghostly and impossible, which would, nonetheless, have taken place several times in the past, or perhaps it still anachronistically took place each night, when the child and the husband and Marta were all at last asleep, each one dreaming the weight of the other two. “Tomorrow in the battle think on me,” I thought or, rather, remembered.

 
    B UT TONIGHT THEY did not sleep, possibly none of them did, at least not well, not straight through, not as they would hope to, the mother, ill and half-naked, lying on the bed watched over by a man whom she knew only superficially, the child with the covers half off (he had got into bed on his own and I didn’t dare rearrange the miniature sheets and blankets and tuck him in properly), and the father, who knows, he would have had supper with someone or other; after hanging up and looking thoughtful – lightly scratching one temple with her forefinger – and a touch envious (she may have had company, but she was still stuck in Conde de la Cimera as she was every night), all Marta had said was: “He told me he’d just had a fantastic meal at an Indian restaurant, the Bombay Brasserie. Do you know it?” Yes, I did know it, I liked it a lot, I had dined in its vast colonial-style rooms on a couple of occasions, a pianist in a dinner jacket sits in the foyer, and there are respectful waiters and maitres d’hotel, and huge ceiling fans winter and summer, it’s a very theatrical place, rather expensive by English standards, but not prohibitively so, a place for friends to meet and celebrate or for business meetings, rather than for intimate, romantic suppers, unless you want to impress an inexperienced young woman or a girl from the working classes, someone likely to feel slightly overwhelmed by the setting and to get absurdly drunk on Indian beer, someone you won’t have to take to any intermediate place before hailing a taxi with tip-up seats and going back to your hotel or your flat, someone with whom there will be no need to speak after the hot, spicy supper, you can merely take her face in your hands and kiss her, undress her, touch her, framing that bought, fragile head in your hands in that gesture so reminiscent of both coronation and strangulation. Marta’s illness was making me think morbid thoughtsand although I was breathing easily and felt better standing in the doorway of the boy’s bedroom, watching the aeroplanes in the shadows and vaguely remembering my own remote past, I thought that I really should go back in to the other bedroom, to see how she was and to try and help her, perhaps take off her clothes, this time in order to put her to bed and cover her up and evoke the sleep which, with luck, might have overtaken her during my brief absence, and then I would leave.
    That wasn’t how it was. When I went back into the room again, she looked up at me with her dull, clenched eyes, she was still hunched and unmoving, the only change being that now she was hiding her nakedness with her arms as if she were ashamed or cold. “Do you want to get under the covers? You’ll get cold like that,” I said. “No, please don’t move me, don’t move me an inch,” she said, adding at once: “Where were you?” “I went to the bathroom. You’re not