He went to another room with its carved settee and chairs. ‘These chairs I like. These two. But not the settee.’

The settee and chairs had come from Martha Barry. Martha was one of a large family, her father an old British engine driver in the Ceylon Government Railway. They had once been next-door neighbours. Dottie, her sister, had been married briefly; her husband had left her and she slept alone in an enormous old four-poster bed. The chairs were again part of old houses. They had belonged to friends and settled in comfortably with all their memories.

It seemed to Camille as if she was swathed in strong cobwebs of the past which would not release her. The furniture piled round her stood for the past, in fact had taken the place of all those who had gone away, leaving her to fend for herself without resources. A wasp buzzing about her head kept building its clay castles on the leg of one of the tables. Potter wasps, her mother had called them. Potter wasps. How hard, how firm and unbreakable those dwellings were and the larvae safe and protected inside with their store of food.

The table was piled with books and an old porcelain basin. Everything was covered with dust. In Camille’s old home this quaint table, European styled with its stretchers that could hold out trays or draw them back, sliding in and outwards, was filled with brass trays and blue glass Chinese vases. There was a tray with a hunter engraved on it. On either side of him were a tiger and a deer—the hunter was between the two. There was no escape anywhere, not in that jungle. Not for the deer that he was hunting, not for himself who was the hunter. Only the stronger predator would escape. The others had to face annihilation.

All these things belonged to a life where the objects were not valued merely because they were possessions. They were used, shabby, part of a life which, with all its conflicts, had stayed secure. Camille’s father had brought them newly minted coins and poured them out onto their palms. The money bought nothing but was merely an extension of his love, inarticulate and undemonstrative, for his children. He would take the big iron signal lamp and slide the coloured panes into yellow, red, green, to delight them. Signals which meant a matter of life and death on those train journeys through endless tunnels. The lights had been put out and now there was no one to warn her of the impending danger from earthslips and landslides or even sabotage on the tracks. She had to find her own way. That lamp had been lost long ago.