‘You must read my uncle’s sermons,’ Serena tells Lydia. ‘We can read them together. They’ve all been neatly tied up and put away by my mother. Oh, how she loved that brother of hers. When you come, I’ll show them to you. What shall I do with them? We can decide, can’t we?’

Lydia goes to tea. Up the stony path with the charred remains of gigantic bougainvillea bushes. An empty stone pond with a stone frog splayed out above it, hovering like some uneasy spirit over the cracked basin. Lydia knocks on the door. The security man who is guarding the house comes out of his watchtower. A severed trunk of a huge tree stands like a guillotine block at the foot of the high bank which is covered with more black-green bamboos.

Some moments pass. Serena appears at the door which opens, but not fully, to allow Lydia entrance. The security man hovers about, giving her a sense of unease: the suspicion for an outsider, an intruder.

‘I was preparing for you. Come in,’ Serena says.

Lydia almost wishes she had not come on this visit to sit in this museum of death. She has rarely come here before. The last time was when the matriarch was alive. And also her husband. Lydia and her husband had been invited to their home. Serena had not been present. The old servants had stood around like bodyguards but had appeared to be part of the background, unlike the uniformed security guard who watched for any sign of encroachment, or … what? There is constraint in this new atmosphere. She enters the gloom of the shuttered house. Above her head is a ceiling of faded, woven Dumbara mats, their brilliant colours turned a neutral, mushroom tint. Lydia is curious. Someone’s Holy of Holies. Serena spreads her ambience around. It is to be a kind of guided tour. Lydia, no voyeur, feels a reluctance to begin this exploration so compulsively planned by Serena. Serena puts the finishing touches to the bowl of ice cream she is making and puts it away in the refrigerator. Every bit of space is now hers. She is the mistress of the house, and the unhappy ghost of her mother begins to edge its way into oblivion.

‘My uncle’s sermons are all in that chest,’ Serena points to a carved piece of craftsmanship wrought out of golden-brown satiny wood. Orientalism. Chinese. The Christian sermons have lain undisturbed for years in old boxes, the pages yellowing with age, proselytizing the minute creatures that feed on paper and text. Preservation. Preservation in the sarcophagus of memory. While the fleshly body was dust, these ghostly emanations remained.

‘What shall I do with these sermons?’

‘Give them to the Theological College,’ says Lydia.