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dignity.
    ‘Alex! It would be best if you sat in the front. Morag can sit beside you, she’s only half-pint size.’ He favoured her with a different smile, elderly brother and affectionate. 'I'll go in the back too, between Hester and Madeleine.’
    I wondered wryly if he had promised Eve that should he go on this expedition he would see he was properly chaperoned.
    Hester looked pleased enough with the arrangement, but I was acutely uncomfortable. I wondered if they would have perhaps liked to hold hands if it were not for my presence. I was also acutely aware of James Fitzgerald’s physical nearness. Once before I’d registered the fact to myself that I seemed conscious of his presence when he was in the Ambassador’s office just beyond the communicating door. Now we sat in the back of the taxi, uncomfortably close. He was a big man, and our arms and legs touched. I could even feel his breathing.
    Luckily, the conversation was cheerful and continuous. Ashford and Morag turned round to join in.
    Our journey took us up through the foothills of the Andes. At times the road wound round the flanks in a series of hairpin bends, then plunging into small green valleys, by vast still lakes.
    James Fitzgerald pointed out places of interest. The fort, high on an escarpment where the sixteenth-century Spaniards had set up camp, the remains of an Inca village with its ashlar walls. From time to time he addressed some remark in a Charaguayan dialect to the driver. They exchanged jokes—the Charaguayans love to laugh. And even Mr. Fitzgerald had a most unaffected and infectious laugh.
    But once he must have told the driver to pull into a rough lay-by on the road.
    Morag looked round questioningly, ‘Does the wee wilk think we’re picnicking here, then?' she asked in the one appellative of her vocabulary.
    James Fitzgerald shook his head and smiled, ‘I want Madeleine to see the earthquake fault. It’s here, remember, that you get the really awe-inspiring view.'
    Morag opened her mouth as if to ask who was running this expedition anyway, and then shut it. Her eyes slid to my face and she winked.
    ‘Just here,' Mr. Fitzgerald leaned across to open the door for me, as the car stopped. ‘It's well worth getting out for,' he said, uncurling himself and following me. ‘The others have seen it before.’
    Side by side, we stood on the edge of a precipice. Far, far down below, I saw the huge split in the mountain range which Don Ramón had pointed out from the aircraft. Now I saw it magnified a thousand times, and going down and down into the bottomless darkness in the bowels of the earth. I held my breath. I must have swayed on my feet, for Mr. Fitzgerald put his hand under my elbow to steady me. For a moment everything seemed utterly silent. Even the others waiting lazily in the car stopped talking. The air was very cold and rare and still. A great orange sun was just about to set. I heard the thin tinkle of a goat’s bell from far away, like some distant warning—a needed warning. That deep dark precipice seemed to draw me, had an analogy with some deep dark precipice I was beginning to discover within myself.
    Then Morag must have made a remark to the others, for I heard Hester laugh. I shook myself free of my mood, and Mr. Fitzgerald's hand, and with a murmur of thanks, returned to the car.
    ‘You look pale,’ Mr. Ashford remarked kindly. ‘It’s quite breathtaking, isn’t it?'
    I nodded.
    ‘I thought you were going to step in over the deep end at one point,’ Hester smiled.
    ‘And that wouldn’t have done at all,’ Morag shook her corkscrew curls emphatically. ‘My wee wilk, Petiso, would have gone spare, that is so. He’s taken a great shine to you, Madeleine.’
    ‘I can’t think why,’ I said, blushing.
    It was left to Mr. Fitzgerald to make the remark which sounded so polite and diplomatic but which was really so caustic.
    ‘Really?’ He raised his brows in derisive disbelief. ‘Well, if you can’t, I