Yes, a strange, haphazard assortment. Later on, the family Bible also found a place, and a pen stand of some golden, varnished Australian wood. Above the table was the big portrait of Camille’s dead brother, Arthur. There were too many associations with that table to ever part with it.

They had grown up with these things around them, accepted them naturally. Camille’s parents had lived with these objects for years, built up their home, created that home for their children and then, piece by piece, given over everything. All these pieces of furniture handed down from generation to generation were part of an inheritance which emerged out of an European colonial ancestry. Yet within mat heritage there was an identity to be explored which entailed investigating how these many racial strands mingled in their veins. Within the context of that imperial ideology lay several clues. They had involuntarily become part of the political and historical mission which had resulted in colonialism. They had to live with these inescapable facts but not condone them. Perhaps they were clinging to what they would inevitably have to give up, what would eventually be a requiem for the past. They would not sell it so cheaply. Rather they would keep it till the very end, the bitter end, until a different kind of migration took place. For displacement was to be expected. Where would these wanderers find new territory for their habitations? Where, in what strange new clime would their cumbersome possessions fit in? The wood would surely warp.

Relinquish, relinquish. Not cling …

Now, suddenly, all these things had a different value. These artifacts had a greater price than the lives of their possessors. They could be bought, taken away; they could enhance other lives that had lost their identities and took their colour briefly from a cosmopolitan social milieu. These outsiders, these aliens, could pillage with their money, create a new history for themselves out of those ravaged lives. The invasions were subtle. Melwyn had the power of money which these two schoolteachers, Raj and Camille, did not have. Indeed, could never have.

Melwyn padded about the house, walking with a panther litheness. He moved swiftly onto the verandah, lifting the cloth spread on the old oval-shaped teak table stained with ink and water marks. Thick lenses concealed the colour of his eyes. His smooth face betrayed nothing. He eventually looked at the chiffonier, opening out the drawers which were filled with books and papers, peered into every bowl and jar on the shelves, opening doors on spaces crammed with cut glass decanters and cruet sets swathed in cobwebs.

Camille and Raj stood at a distance, mere onlookers in their own home as this man, this stranger, this transient rummaged in every nook and cranny of their lives. They felt exposed, ravished. So much so that they disassociated themselves from each object, however delicately wrought, however precious.

‘How much is this? Your last price?’ Melwyn kept asking.