‘It’s for the leopards.’

‘What if the children see it?’

‘They won’t know what to do with it.’

‘I don’t want it indoors.’

‘It’s for our own protection, my love.’

‘It’s asking for trouble,’ my mother said. ‘Hide it.’

‘As you wish.’ My father must have recognised the danger in my mother’s voice, as I did, because he changed the subject. I silently thanked him for whatever purchase had distracted my mother from deciding to end my new friendship, and went back to bed.

Chapter Six

Miss Graham, our tutor, was tall, with overlapping front teeth and eyebrows that met in the middle. She’d come out to Kenya with a family from Edinburgh, but they’d gone back and she’d stayed out for her painting.

Maud adored her, but I got the impression that Miss Graham didn’t like me, and I didn’t warm to her either. Three weeks after she started she complained to my mother about ‘disturbing images’ I’d drawn on my exercise books. They were doodles I’d done without thinking, but my mother sided with Miss Graham, although all she did was look at me coldly and tell me if I wanted to be treated as an adult I had to act like one. I lingered after she’d left, scuffing my shoe against the dining table, reluctant to go back to the classroom. I might have escaped a beating this time, but her words still stung, and the thought of Miss Graham’s satisfied look made me rigid with anger.

We woke every weekday for breakfast at eight. Lessons were between nine and twelve, then our mother joined us for a hot lunch. Afterwards, there were more lessons until two, when we had a bath. The totos ran the bath for each of us, which took nearly an hour: first they drew the water from the well – at least ten buckets per bath – then heated it in a cauldron kept in the kitchen hearth. Afterwards, they transferred it from cauldron to bath in ten more trips with the bucket. Sometimes they forgot to heat the water for long enough, and we had to sit in ice-cold water, our lips and fingers turning blue.

In the afternoons, my mother napped, and we would row out onto the lake, or go for a walk, or watch Miss Graham painting. Her fingers were surprisingly delicate when they held a paintbrush. We were silent around her, unless she started the conversation.

‘I’ll be running out of blue soon,’ she always said, as she was choosing a colour for the sky. ‘Blue and brown, those are the colours I use most out here.’

‘What colours did you use most in Scotland?’ Maud asked once.

‘Green and grey.’

‘Did you ever go anywhere else? What colours are other countries?’