‘You talk too much. You talk to everybody,’ Domingos had warned her.

Yet, wanting, needing human contact, Marcia could not stop smiling completely, like Browning’s Last Duchess.

And then, there were the phone calls from a mysterious stranger, phone call after phone call. The man kept changing his name. He called himself Ravi. Then Shankar. ‘I must meet you. I came to the Hall but you were out. I am lonely.’

‘Why don’t you make friends? Go out with some of the Scottish girls.’

‘No, I cannot. I am afraid. You and I are Asians. I want to be your friend. I want to send you a book.’

The book arrived but it was a journal with suggestive pictures. A sales book which advertised all kinds of paraphernalia for people who needed to be titillated. A glossy catalogue. Inflated, almost life-size human figures. Was this the only overture to friendship that a lonely human being could offer? Was there no other language? Marcia felt sick. This was not the kind of friendship she had envisaged. Ahmed, another of her friends, admonished her, ‘It is you who encourage these people.’

Marcia was filled with sadness. Sadness for this man who thought mat she would be prepared, away from the confines of her own society, to taste a new freedom. It was not what she had wanted at all. She shredded page after page of the glossy catalogue into the waste paper basket. The tokens of an undiscovered relationship.

The phone calls, however, persisted. The next time he called, Domingos was by her side. She had summoned him for strength and told the mysterious stranger so. ‘My friend wants to speak to you.’ They were never to meet or speak to each other again.

Domingos was packing his gifts to take home. Marcia was invited to see them. They went up to his room and he pulled out a suitcase from under his bed to show her all the toys and presents he had saved his precious pounds for. Presents for his nieces, nephews, mother, sister, Carmencas. There was a barking, toy dog and a tartan skirt of one of the Scottish clans, the Black Watch, for Carmencas.