Serena had been insistent that Lydia should come and see the old house. Why? Why? Her mother had lived in this fortress for years shut away with her son John who was progressively becoming more reclusive and secluded from the real world, surrounded by servants, a chauffeur and the attendant who was like a warder. Serena lived for the greater part of her life in Europe, flying in, flying back, a migratory bird who would alight in the sunny garden and pick branches and bunches of flowers and leaves that she would bear to Lydia in her arms as if she were reenacting some ancient rites of the Earth Mother. She never changed. Her voice reed-like, through which legends of the past whispered. She had rejected feminine fripperies.

‘I hated all those beautiful dresses my mother made me wear,’ she recollects. Each time Lydia met her she had become more and more austere. ‘Why do you wear a hairshirt?’ Lydia would ask her.

For years she has not changed the white kurta, the cassock-like shirts. The straight grey hair is always tied back with a scarf to protect it from the dust of the roads. She walks in her heavy mountaineering boots more suited to the Swiss Alps than this country. In wet weather she stuffs the boots with newspaper.

‘I cook my own food. Everything together, brown rice and vegetables. I like roast chicken. Just give me a wok and vegetable knife—that’s all I need in cooking. My mother loved good food … I would not eat with her.’

‘Why?’ Lydia asks.

‘Because the servants put things into it. Into the food.’

Poison? Charms? Evil ingredients to dull the senses with strange opiates?

Serena has found no happiness in living in Europe. ‘Europe has been a total sell-out.’ But she goes back all the time. When she is here, she walks round the old house, stirring memories out of the dust of ancient possessions—books, photographs, furniture, paintings, a cupboard full of starched linen. She lives in the past. Memories of the family greatness during the colonial era. She holds on to those desiccating memories which compel her to make inventories of the possessions that have now to be divided. Her brother gets one third share which will mean nothing to him. To Serena, too, in a sense. She envisages a museum where the artefacts of her family will be preserved—possessions that she feels fit into the British period of history. No one thinks them important. She documents every detail of her life, of her past. Lydia is the catalyst to ail this, but feels that corrosive dust thick on her hands, dust which she must wipe off.