‘He’s out on safari, but he’s picking us up at Langani and then we’ll travel north to the camp he’s setting up for us in Samburu.’ There was a kernel of regret that he had not yet telephoned her, or found some way of sending her a message in the two weeks since her arrival. True, he was in the bush, but when his camp moved from one area to another he always took his clients to a hotel or a lodge where communications were surely possible. She closed her mind to the sense of disappointment. ‘I expect you’ll see him at the end of our safari, if you’re still here in Nairobi.’ She reached up to kiss her father and to rumple his hair. ‘Goodnight, Daddy. I love you.’

They set out early for Langani, driving past the fenced-in boundary of Nairobi National Park, where rhinos and lions now gazed at the silhouette of tall buildings that formed the city’s broken skyline. Their route north took them up through the glassy green of terraced coffee plantations, and the steep red earth where the Kikuyu toiled in deep, fertile soil. Along the roadside wooden stalls were hung with bulging hands of green bananas, and piled with neat pyramids of mangos, oranges and tomatoes. They passed women laden with bundles of firewood, or balancing tin drums of water on their heads as they swayed along narrow paths that vanished into the tangle of vegetation. It was Sunday morning. People spilled out of the small mission churches, their songs of worship floating in through the open windows of the car. The Aberdares rose in a blue haze, above a framework of verdant forest and ragged banana trees shredded by the wind. A waterfall roared out of a narrow gap in the hillside to become a gently meandering river, curling through the valley below. Trays of coffee beans were drying in the morning sunshine, and the road was shaded by flame trees with scarlet blossoms, and trees of tumbling yellow cassia flowers. As they climbed higher the trees held out bare branches draped with veils of old man’s beard, and the summit of Mount Kenya soared before them, glittering and magical in the distance.

When they drove through the gates of the farm they were suddenly silent, and as they stepped down from the car they embraced one another, tears blurring their first sight of the old stone house where a riot of honeysuckle still obscured the chimney. Camilla was struck once more by Lottie’s lawn, and the tenuous boundary of the clipped hedge that separated the homestead and the garden from the expanse of untamed, open plains. She was the first to shake hands with Lars Olsen. In spite of his size and his air of calm authority, he seemed a little awkward among Hannah’s friends, and he soon disappeared on the pretext of organising their bags.