'Coffee!' she said into the air in front of her, and she walked on – dragging Stewart a little, who had some difficulty getting past the pathetic piece of tartan under the bird cage, his desire for it still shamed him so.

For a moment, in the small space that was Eliza's reception room, Stewart felt the burden of future conversation. What could he say to this woman? She was too large and he was too tired.

She walked a little away from him, and begged him to sit. Then she paused. Then she walked back to join him, and turned her head a little away as she sank into the matching chair. There was a silence; it seemed easy enough, but a bubble of misery rose quickly to the surface, and broke with,

'You know, Doctor, I am immensely weary of it all.'

Of the war?'

'No. Of this, my dear Doctor. Of all this.' She turned and indicated, it seemed, her own skirts – unless it was the floor she was pointing to; the Aubusson blue of the rug that toned so strangely well with the beige of the mud floor. She swept her hands wide and then let them fall into her lap. Then she lifted her face to his with a gaze that might well have been called 'radiant and sad'.

Ί am immensely weary, Doctor, of being Eliza Lynch.'

Ambushed again, thought Stewart, as the urge to free her came over him, not from the mud or the bullets – though these played their part, as he threw her over the pommel of an imaginary horse and rode her out of there. No, he would grab her and kiss her and take her most violently, and in so doing release her, not from the war, nor the world, but from the terrible prison of herself. This hair, these clothes, this high and graceful look. Come with me and we will simply live. There will be butterflies in the meadow, and so on. Christ, he was tired.

She picked herself off the chair to trail a little across the room. Her dress was the most beautiful thing he had seen for a long time – if you did not count the sunset that daily broke his half-mended heart. It was green. What kind of green Stewart could not say. Green that bristled with a silvery light, there in the dark room. She picked up a photograph of Lopez, then set it down again and drifted on. She had sunk, Stewart realised, at least three bottles of champagne. Eliza always was a hearty girl.

Ί work quite hard you know,' she said.

Ί know that,' he said.

'At table for example, I work quite hard to keep it smooth, and I am not looking for admiration, Doctor, not so much – but these bitter little looks and the sentences that creep out of people's faces, these Ungenerosities, when I have waded through hail and fire to put an acceptable something on the table in front of them. The centrepiece

– those careless flowers in their urn – I copied from an oil by Jensen, the Dane. The work, Doctor. The work! And why do I do it? I do it for love. And high endeavour. I do it so that we should not always be so small, and it is vulgar of me to say so, Doctor, but pearls before swine is one thing, at least the swine don't despise the pearls, the way these men despise me.'

'My dear lady,' said Stewart, surprised by her nonsense. 'You are beginning to sound like…' He was going to say 'my wife', but he skipped, quite quickly, to, 'a quite ordinary woman'.

For one gaping moment Stewart thought he was drunk. Then he remembered that it was the war that made him feel like this; the war and this room within the war; this house

– a bowl of light like a diamond in mud, or a diamond, even, in some man's turd – and he had some memory of a man with his belly slit – or was it the entire length of his intestine? – he had a memory of a man, at any rate, with a jewel inside him at Curupaiti, or Tuiuti, or Curuzú, or in a dream he had right here in Humaitá, a dream of difficulty and kidney stones and something astonishingly beautiful, precious and hard, that was deep inside a man. Which was when he lurched awake to find Eliza still talking; the murmur of her husband's voice in the next room a hushed counterpoint. No time had passed at all.

'Why should I not sound ordinary, Doctor,' Eliza was saying. Ί am ordinary. I am ordinary as well.'

'As well as what?' he rudely asked. Well, she had woken him, after all.

'As well as a whore?' he might have said – but who cared these days? They were all meat. (Though could 'meat' be said to sleep, as he now needed to sleep, and was it not the blissful thing about Eliza, after all, that she was absolutely meat, and absolutely not meat at the same time, which is to say, a woman, as opposed to a potential corpse? This whirligig of philosophy taking no time at all in his head, or just exactly the time a man needed to shut his eyes and open them again, which is an eternity, or about as long as a blink.)

'As well as being the First Lady of Paraguay,' said Eliza, her voice a little hurt, and proud.

'Of course,' he said.

'But they would hate me anyway, I think. Honestly. You might as well be in Ireland. You might as well be in Mallow – where I grew up you know – a bitter town, it made my mother weep – but we all come from bitter towns, do we not, Doctor? Every unfortunate on the surface of this earth comes from some or other bitter little town.'

He could not but agree.

And as he slept and woke for the next while (sometimes while looking straight at her) she continued to speak. She was most eloquent, though she had the disconcerting habit of suddenly appearing in a different place in the room.

'My dear friend's greatness is a burden to him,' she might say.

Or, 'All I want is to be with my family at this terrible time.'

The surprising thing was that she meant it. Here in the middle of everything, she was talking about nothing at all.

'You know that I came to Humaitá to escape his brother's contempt, and the contempt of his mother and sisters in Asuncion. That is why I came to the field of battle, even though I was with child at the time. Because real bullets are as nothing to me when compared to the slights I suffer at the hands of those women. I came to tell him as much. I found him and flung myself at his feet.'

Stewart woke. He sensed a conclusion in the air.

'For every enemy that he has, I have two, because for every man that hates him there is another who says that whatever he does it is at my urging; because a woman's ambition is a fathomless thing – as though I was some witch who hexed him into my bed, and whispered, "You must, my darling, invade the Mato Grosso before the spring." And so we suffer, Doctor. A woman has no limits, because she may not act. She is all reputation, because she may not act. So, even as we do nothing, our reputations grow more impossible, and fragile, and large.'

This seemed to him partly true, though a little bit dull. To say that women were beside the point always struck him as being – well, beside the point, somehow.

'My dear Eliza,' he said.

She paused. She had let herself down. And feeling it keenly, she tried to make him hers again. Stewart was entirely awake as she turned to him with ardent, very female eyes.

'We have come a long way together, William Stewart -you and I. Sometimes I wonder how we got here, at all.'

There was a lot to disagree with in what she had said. He might start with the word 'we'. He might point out that, though they were together in this room, they had 'arrived', each of them, in very different places. And he had a huge yearning for the life he might have led – a life that was familiar with flowers and unfamiliar with Eliza Lynch. But as he tried to enter it, and imagine it, he found he could not. Whatever life he was living now, it was the only one he had got, and it was bound, however loosely, to this irritating woman. He could not conjure one without her.

'At least I have a friend, in you, Doctor. At least I have that.'

He stood rather smartly, and bowed and sat back down again. Perhaps she meant it. Their silence was so profound it drew Lopez at last – he snatched back the door hanging and put his mad face into the room. For a second, Stewart was afraid, but Lopez was not jealous in the least. Such was Stewart's smallness, in the scheme of things. And indeed, Eliza stood and walked towards him as a Great Woman might walk towards a Great Man. At which, Stewart's stomach notified him, of a sudden, that he had eaten more in the last few hours than in all the previous week.