‘Yes, yes, that is Chinese but it is difficult. We cannot read it.’

It was their language but they could no longer understand it. They had lost the key to that identity. Relinquished it, together with the names—their own names that had been changed in the missionary school. The delicate brush strokes of the Chinese characters defied their understanding. The teapot reminded them of a lost identity whose recollections remained as faint and ghostly as the aroma of the jasmine-scented tea which it had once held.

Melwyn walked everywhere, looking, touching, assessing. He suddenly came to a standstill and stood thoughtfully by the satin wood and ebony centre table supported on the wide-branched antlers of a slain stag. It must have been a magnificent stag; both wood and antlers had come from a long-ago-ravished forest.

‘I like this,’ he said.

‘Melwyn likes your table,’ Jasmine announced happily. At last he had shown approbation. They were all so pleased at this significant remark. He would surely want to buy this piece.

‘You will sell?’ Melwyn asked, looking at Camille.

She felt that what had attracted him most deeply, even more than the golden grain of the satin wood, were the immense and impressive antlers. But certainly he would never see himself as the vanquished stag. Rather, he saw himself as the hunter who had vanquished the stag. This table would be his trophy.

‘I don’t want to part with this,’ said Camille. ‘It belonged to my father; he had it made many years ago when he was in one of those distant, remote outstations in Batticaloa, living alone, with his family far away from him. He would take his gun and go hunting into the jungle and come back covered with tick bites from a wilderness of thickets. He would layer the walls of his dwelling with glistening snake skins, and hang weaver birds’ nests and antlers with the date and the place of the shoot inscribed on the wooden mounts. They were the trophies of his expeditions.’

Perhaps he had shot that stag; she did not know. She could not remember. All he had told her was that he had designed the table himself. The octagonal satin wood with its carved ebony edge like black lace belonged to that youthful period of his early married life. It had always been part of their home. Carefully arranged with various objects that were meant for decoration and ornamentation—a little brass bowl with a Hindu deity, a cherry blossom tree, a miniature marble bird bath, things that were brought back from the aunts’ Continental tours in the great Cunard liners … things that mingled strangely with the assortment of brass bowls, trays, vases.