When she went to see her sister in hospital she found that Elsa had already made friends with a little boy who was a patient there. She now had a new playmate while Janine went back to an empty, lonely house. The loneliness continued when her brother and sister returned to their boarding school in Kandy. The rains came, families were flooded out of their bungalows and the beautiful Sylvia Craighlaw came with her children to stay temporarily with them. Janine would watch her admiringly, her dark slanting eyes, ivory skin and dark wavy hair. She had a secret inward look about her as if her inner life and thoughts were walled in. Her husband was a blue-eyed, red-cheeked man, an official in the railway and Sylvia’s life appeared to be devoid of the romance she longed for. Some years later she was to leave her husband and children, flout all the conventions of the time, divorce her staid husband and marry a small, dashing Captain in the British Army. Her secret, she would tell the other ladies, was that in order to win a man a woman must always be a good listener. But Janine knew that it was Sylvia’s supple body, ivory skin and dark secret gaze which really drew men to her.

Janine remembers watching her young cousin Lorna walking with her lover under the thunbergia bower. They stood under its green shade, with the honeypeckers dipping into the nectar that welled in the cerise throats of the flowers, with their arms entwined about each other. Lorna had brilliant blue eyes and Titian red hair, she was as beautiful as a Renaissance painting. Bert’s looks were dark and saturnine; they were both so young and vulnerable, on the threshold of life, and they had come to announce their betrothal to their aunt and uncle. But they would not be like this forever. Time would pass, they would cross the seas and Bert would grow to be an invalid and die, leaving Lorna alone and bereaved.

Baby Uncle visited them and laughed and joked as if he had never known sorrow in his life. He was the only son of a Sinhalese family, rich, with many acres of land. Yet he never married and never had children, and no one remembered him when his laughter was finally stilled and he died.