The college darkroom was free when she got there, and she was relieved that there was no one else around to disturb her concentration. She liked the solitary process of developing and printing. It gave her space for her thoughts, and excused her from the awkward business of integrating with her fellow students. There must be something basically wrong with her, she thought, that she had been unable to adapt. She still felt like a foreigner after all this time, despite her roots. Strange how, in Africa, she had always identified herself as Irish, while in Ireland she felt like an alien. Ruth in the alien corn, except that she had found no Boaz in Dublin. Her Boaz was an Afrikaans farmer who lived thousands of miles away and looked on her as some kind of kid sister. Time and again now, she asked herself why she continued to cling to her impossible teenage dream. This torch bearing was ridiculous, and it was time she paid more attention to the young men in college who were friendly and interested. But the students of her own age seemed immature. Unformed somehow. And it wasn’t just because of Piet. It was something in herself, some part of her that could not connect with Ireland, with college, with anything here. There were not many overseas students in Dublin. Among the Irish everyone seemed to know or be related to everyone else, while she remained an outsider. When she tried to describe her life in Africa, the immensity of the landscape, the tribal peoples and their customs, the wildlife on the plains, people listened for a short while and then their eyes glazed over and she realised that they had no conception of what she was talking about. They could not even begin to envisage the vastness of the Maasai Mara, the awesome experience of watching hundreds of thousands of wildebeest on their annual migration, the mystical feeling that stole over you as you watched the dawn light dancing on the Indian Ocean. Finally, she had stopped talking about it altogether. Except with Mike. Mike had been interested, had wanted to understand. Or so she’d thought. What a revelation that had turned out to be!