‘Oh, yes. When she saw me her face lit up, but I had to wait until she had arranged for the boy to be looked after. Then I took her out to lunch and she spent the whole time telling me what a terrible time the poor child had had, and how she would make quite sure he was properly cared for, and how sad it was that he was on his own. “He’s only nine,” she said.’

He breaks off again. Why in God’s name did he start this story? This isn’t what Elizabeth wants to hear!

‘You were only nine when you were sent to school in England,’ Elizabeth says quietly.

‘Yes.’ Philip lets out a long breath. ‘It was different, of course, for me.’

‘How?’

‘I had Uncle Georgie and Uncle Dickie to look after me, and I was fine,’ he insists. ‘I was a boisterous boy, very self-reliant even then. I could look after myself. That poor kid was starving and beaten. That never happened to me.’

‘I imagine boys of nine still need their mothers.’

‘I was fine,’ he says again, and he feels Elizabeth studying him.

‘You keep saying that.’

‘Well, I was,’ he says defensively. ‘I was like those children over there.’ He nods in the direction of a gang whooping and yelling around a cluster of trees. ‘When anyone tried to hug me or kiss me, I’d wriggle out of their clutches. I didn’t want any of that.’

He remembers playing outside at Salem one hot summer day until his sister Dolla had dragged him inside. She fussed around, making him change his shorts and brush his hair.

‘Please don’t argue Philip,’ she said tensely when he protested. ‘Mama wants to see you.’

But his mother hadn’t wanted to see him. Dolla took him to the sanatorium where Alice looked through him and played fretfully with the fringe of her dress. She barely seemed to know who he was while Dolla made determinedly cheerful conversation that Alice ignored.

‘Kiss Mama goodbye,’ his sister said at last. Philip didn’t want to. The woman in the chair was a stranger, not the sweet, loving mother he remembered, who gathered him up and tickled him and called him her petit chou. But Dolla insisted and when he leant reluctantly forward and pressed his lips to his mother’s cheek, he felt her flinch.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dolla said in the car on the way back to Salem. Her lips were pressed tightly together and he’d had the uneasy feeling that she was trying not to cry. ‘I thought it would help.’

Philip never knew whether she had thought the visit would help him or their mother, but suspected that it just made it worse for both of them. He didn’t get so much as a birthday card from his mother for five years after that.

He has learnt not to think about that day at the sanatorium. Easier to think about cricket or riding his bike instead. The memory is a bruise, one you forget until you press it by mistake.