‘Yes. She sent me a couple of pictures and I’ve seen her in the papers. I can’t believe it – how she looks in the magazines and so. When will she be back?’

‘Around six, I think.’ Her voice was thick with frustration and jealousy, but she knew he would not even notice. ‘Meanwhile, would you like tea or a cold beer? Or we could go out for a coffee somewhere.’

‘No, let’s stay here. There’s so much to tell you. And I want to hear all your news, little sis.’

‘I’ve told you most things in my letters,’ she said, stung by the idea that Camilla had sent him photos. She had never forwarded any to Dublin, or mentioned that she had sent pictures to Piet.

‘No, you haven’t. I don’t know a thing about your real life. Only your studies.’ He grinned and squeezed her hand, and her heart thudded in her ears. ‘How are your parents? And Tim?’

She made fresh coffee and sat down beside him on the sofa. ‘You’re so pale,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen you without a tan. You look quite strange, as though you need to be put out on the grass with the laundry, to seep up the sunlight.’

‘There’s not much of that where I’ve been,’ he said. ‘Come on now, don’t try to change the subject, girl. Tell me all your secrets. Have you got a boyfriend?’

She found herself telling him about Dublin, about the foggy air and the crowds, and the suffocating smell of wet clothes in smoky pubs. She tried to describe the emerald colour of the fields, the skies that were purple, and the flocks of crows rising off newly ploughed soil, and she spoke of voices singing Celtic love songs around turf fires, and men that played the fiddles and the spoons. But she did not speak about her loneliness and the ache in her bones for hot, yellow sunlight and the taste of salt in a cobalt sea.

‘What about Hannah and your parents?’ she asked him at last. ‘It sounds bad down there, with all the talk of Rhodesian independence, and the government locking up black people who want to be politicians, and this man Ian Smith with his all-white party. It sounds bad, with worse to come.’

‘It’s rough down there, yes. And Pa doesn’t like his cousin, or his job. He has no interest in tobacco farming, and there are security problems on the farm. He’s often out on patrol, looking for tsotsis, and he hates that.’

‘What are tsotsis?’ Sarah asked.

‘Thugs, I suppose, is the nearest English word for them. They’ve started attacking white farms and businesses, and organising ambushes on the roads. They’ve killed a number of people already.’

‘You mean like the Mau Mau?’