I saw my mother for the first time since my return at a dinner with the Cartwrights and my father. She kissed my cheek, asked about the journey, then spent the rest of the night in conversation with Mrs Cartwright. At subsequent meetings she rarely spoke to me or Lucy, and once or twice I caught her looking at us askance.

Maud lunched with us once, too. She and Lucy seemed to get on well, but it was only me that the family invited to the coast with them in late July, three weeks after their arrival.

‘Please come,’ Lucy said, slipping her hand into mine.

‘Go, go,’ my father said, when I mentioned their plans. He beamed at me. ‘There’s nothing like your first train journey together.’

The house the Cartwrights rented was in Tiwi. It was very grand, with indoor plumbing and a swimming pool in the garden. The beach was peaceful and secluded, with a handful of locals selling fresh fruit and only one other family holidaying there, and the water was warm and clear for miles, all the seaweed caught up in the coral reef at Diani. It was always so hot – I’d never known anywhere else where the heat grew out of the ground and ran up my legs.

We went into town a few times to see a picture at the Roxy cinema, and for a meal on a visiting ship for only a few shillings per person, the metal railing of the gangplank blistering our hands if we touched it. Other times we ate at The Nairobi’s sister club, which jutted out over the cool blue of the Indian Ocean, bluer still against the palm trees and the blazing white walls of Fort Jesus. Afterwards we took a boat back to our beach, walking the last half-mile along the sand, Lucy dawdling with me while her parents went ahead, our clothes clinging damply to our skin even though the night-time air was cooler.

Sometimes the two of us stopped to look out at the ocean, and she rested her head on my shoulder. Afterwards, my jacket would smell of roses all night. Once she let me kiss her, so soft and yielding. She tasted different to the way Sylvie had, all those years ago, although I tried to put that moment out of my mind. The smell of her skin close up was different too, soapier, less personal.

Another time she let me put my arms around her waist and run my hands downwards to rest on her pert buttocks. At night I thrashed about in my bed, a few rooms down the corridor from hers, unable to sleep.

‘Thank you for being a friend to Lucy,’ Sarah said, over our last supper. ‘I can tell she’s happy here.’

Lucy blushed a deep crimson.