'It is a bit fast, the pulse.'

'I thought so. And my breathing. I can't seem to slow it. As if there's this tightness across my lungs.'

'The wound? Any pain?'

'It's strange. A kind of tingling. A sort of… effervescence in that area, to the side.'

'If you'd be so good as to get on the couch, I won't be a moment.' He smiled at her and moved to the door.

'Where are you going?'

'To call for a nurse.'

She laughed and shook her head, in amazement, he thought.

'Dr Carriscant, really, you have cut me open and removed part of my body. I appreciate your sense of decorum, but it's not necessary.' She removed her hat, set it down on the chair and went behind the screen to the examination couch.

'Could you help me? I don't like to swing my legs up.'

He crouched quickly in front of her, dry-throated, his fingers on her ankles. Small black kid boots with low heels, a crisscross of laces wound through brass button-hooks. He swung her legs up on to the couch. A faint creak of leather as she turned with him and then lay back.

'I'm very grateful, Doctor.'

'No, no. You were right to come.'

Her fingers unbuttoned the side of her skirt. Buttons on both sides. Gleam of buckles too.

'There are these small belt things.'

'I have them.' He unbuckled them at each side and folded down what was now the front flap of her skirt top. She undid the bottom of her jacket and pulled it wide. There was a cotton shift below, with a thin yellow chalkstripe. He could see beneath its hem a strip of her belly above the navel and the puckered top of her drawers, held tight by a cloth drawstring bow. She tugged the ends free and widened the waist to its full extent.

He was not thinking. His head was empty of everything but the rushing, finger-drumming noise of the rain. Scent of rosewater from her, dusty, sweet. His eyes flicked to the window: the garden was darker, overshadowed, the lights in the room glowed brightly in the premature dusk.

'I just – ' he began, his fingers on the loose waist of her drawers. He pulled down carefully, exposing first her navel and the pale plump swell of her belly, then the gentle jut of her pelvis. No further.

'If you could just lift -'

'I'm worried it'll hurt, my muscles there are weak.'

'Here.'

He slid his hand beneath her, palm uppermost, into the small of her back. He took her weight and she arched carefully, her hands busy beneath her buttocks, freeing the rear flap of her skirt, pushing it down over the bulge of her haunches. His hand was hot on her spine.

Fingers on her drawer waist again as he pulled it lower to reveal the scar. It was looser than he had anticipated and his tug revealed a full inch of her pubis, the wiry golden hair grown back, almost.

He stiffened with shock at the sight, his chest suddenly full of air, his groin alive with stirrings, slackenings, as his penis thickened, pushing against his trousers. He pulled up the waistband a little, to cover it – so – tugging down the right side to reveal the scar. He kept his head bowed: he could not meet her eyes, in case she had seen that he had seen.

That bright shiny pink mark he had made on her. No inflammation. He ran his fingertips along the weal, the dots of the stitches faded to nothingness, practically. His hands on her again. He closed his eyes.

She said softly, 'There is no-one called Esmerelda.'

'What?'

'In that novel, East Angels. No-one called Esmerelda, no Captain Farley, no "besting" of anyone in particular.' She was looking at him with intolerable directness. He took his hands away from her belly.

'I don't understand,' he said, realising now what he had revealed of himself and his motives that day at her house.

'You never read that book. You lied about it to me, and yet you wanted to borrow another. Why?'

She propped herself on her elbows. Her voice was lazily quizzical as she stared at him. She was asking questions to which she already knew the answers.

'Because…' His voice was low, confidential, almost a whisper. 'Because I wanted to see you.'

He leaned forward at her and as his lips touched hers he felt her arms go around his neck drawing him down.

The door locked, the lights off, they made love with great and tender solicitude and the absolute minimum of movement for fear of tearing or damaging her healing wound. He slid off her skirt and drawers and then, with his help, she turned and knelt above his supine body on all fours as he prepared himself, unbuckling his belt and tearing open his fly, and she, inch by inch, with great care lowered herself on to him, easily. Her hair hung down, the ribbon loosened somehow, brushing his face, and once he slipped his hands up beneath the cotton shift to hold her hanging breasts in his palms.

'It's not sore,' she whispered, as she worked herself slightly to and fro.

He lay back, not moving, his hands on her thighs now as she gently moved up and down, tiny undulations.

He could not hold back for long and when the moment came the almost absolute stillness of their posture, the lack of bodily contact, of any heaving or straining, made it seem dreamlike, otherworldly, as if this extraordinary experience were happening while he lay buoyant in some tepid stream or was held in the windshifted topmost branches of some mighty tree.

Then she eased herself down and lay on him and only then did they kiss and touch, nuzzle and caress. He could think of nothing to say. Nothing. And so they lay still on his examination couch, behind the screen in the unlit room, as the rain poured down and it grew dark outside.

After she left he sat there in the gloom, numb with a helpless sense of joy, exhausted and stupidly happy. He closed his eyes and tried to bring to mind her smells and textures, the words they had said to each other, certain moments that he could hardly believe had happened. He found his memory maddeningly elusive. For a brief second he could re-experience the full softness of her breasts in his hands and then an image of the consulting room ceiling, its heavy lamp fixture, the sepia foxing of some damp stains, would push that aside, to be elbowed away in turn by the whisper of her voice in his ear – 'I know, I know' – or the tickle of her thick hair on his face, the sight of her upper body twisting round rebuttoning her skirt, or her pale lovely face looming for a last kiss. What had their final words been? He could not recall. How had they arranged to meet again? Surely – surely – they had organised something? He was seized suddenly with an awful fear that this would be the first and last time they could come together in this way and, with a rush of bile, he cursed his marriage, and hers. He suddenly detested Manila with its provinciality, its small-mindedness, the impossibility of privacy amongst its resentful expatriates with their prurient curiosity, the ubiquity of servants, prying, whispering, the impossibility of ever being anonymous or alone.

In such a mood of frustration he left the hospital and walked out through the blue dusk, down Calle Palacio and Fundacion to the Real gate. He crossed the stagnant moat and headed for the Luneta, which he could see ahead of him, its ring of electric lights burning brightly in the encroaching night. Across the bay the Sierra de Marivelles hills were opaque and dark, a final stripe of citrus-orange picking out their silhouette. Music carried to him from the bandstand as he approached the crowds and the dozens of carriages moving slowly round and round the grassy plots in the centre of the oval.

As always the crowd was predominantly dressed in white and at this hour – or was it something to do with his eyes, he wondered? – the linen suits and muslin camisas seemed to glow in a stark, unearthly fashion in the gathering darkness. The music changed from a jaunty rendition of 'The Yellow Rose of Texas' to a lilting waltz and again it seemed to him that the pace of the circling people and of the ponies drawing the carriages slowed to accommodate the new rhythms of the music. Men and women he knew greeted him as he moved aimlessly through the crowd and he raised a hand in brisk acknowledgement, keeping a vapid smile on his face and turning this way and that, changing course at each encounter to avoid having to speak further to them.