Christina is sent up from the school hostel by the matron with a message. She stands before Ruth Allen in her starched white uniform, straight hair combed over the ears and severely clipped back, filled with a sense of her own importance. The message is delivered as she stands before Ruth behind the barrier of the table with the English breakfast set on it. How golden and ripe the slice of papaw is. So like the beak of a glossy selalihini which feeds in the grass. They watch each other gravely, this child so solemn, so serious in intent, and this white, alien woman who has so much power within this little world bound by its tall, dark convolvulus hedge.

In the school hall, in the library, are paintings and photographs of missionary principals, Englishwomen, those intrepid ambassadors of Christ, dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century. Women. Women who had moved out of the restrictions of their Victorian whalebone, their high-necked gowns, their bustles and ankle-length skirts. With their solar hats they had ventured into a garden filled with pagan traps. There were souls to save. There was a new morality to impart. Their faces were strong. Beautiful faces, some of them Rossettiish in their beauty. It was sacrifice. Sacrifice. Sometimes burying their very young children, husbands too, far from home …

If I should die, think only this of me,
There is some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England …

Lines which Ruth Allen often reads out from the platform at school assembly.

Ruth eats little bits of the garden, a flower vanishes down her throat, a fruit, leaves, petals. Soon the garden will be denuded of its plants and the bare twig-like stalks will tremble awkwardly in the wind. She will settle her roots into the earth which will press itself against her pale, stalk-like body, the pale lily of her body, the necrotic stalk. Nothing will remain and the tumulus of her brick edifice will crumble with time …

All around her, orioles, magpies, mynahs feed off the ripe fruit on her trees. She is ambushed by their wild cries. Their appetites are enormous. They peck and peck, their beaks going deep into the very essence of the fruit. They probe into the lonely cave of her life and the seeds fall all day, float and scatter into faraway gardens.

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die.