‘She would have said no and then what?’

‘I don’t know. I just know that it was wrong to suddenly write a letter and say “I got married” – in the past tense. Nobody does that.’

He didn’t answer her. He did not like the hurt in her voice, like it was her own hurt and not their mother’s.

As if his silence disturbed her she continued, ‘It wasn’t kind.’

‘It was honest.’

‘But it was hard. She was like someone ill when she read your letter. Defeated and ill …’

‘She’ll come to accept it.’

‘Of course she’ll come to accept it. That’s the whole point. It’s inevitable but you could have made it easier for her, that’s all.’ Then in a lighter tone she said, ‘Do something theatrical. Get down on your knees and beg for her forgiveness.’

They laughed at this together, somewhat deliberately to ease the tension. What he wanted to do was explain, speak about Emma and say: She welcomed me, I was on the periphery and she let me in. ‘Do people get tortured to death in that dentist’s chair or am I going to be the first?’ he had asked Emma that day making her smile, when he stumbled out and spoke to her with lips numb with procaine.

‘It would have been good if Emma and Samia had come with you,’ Manaal was saying. ‘I wanted that too.’

‘Why didn’t they?’ She had asked that question before, as had others. He gave different reasons to different people. Now in the car he felt that Manaal was asking deliberately, wanting him to tell her the truth. Could he say that from this part of the world Emma wanted malleable pieces, not the random whole? She desired frankincense from the Body Shop, tahini safe in a supermarket container.

‘She has fears,’ he said.

‘What fears?’

‘I don’t know. The sandfly, malaria … Some rubbish like that.’ He felt embarrassed and disloyal.

They heard the sunset azan when they began to look for the house without a garden wall, described by Zahra. But there were many houses like that; people built their homes and ran out of money by the time it came to build the garden wall. So they turned left off the asphalt road anyway when they reached El-Ma’moura, hoping that Manaal would be able to recognise the street or the house.

‘Nothing looks familiar to you?’ he asked.

‘But everything looks different than the last time I was here,’ she said. ‘All those new houses, it’s confusing.’

There were no roads and hardly any pavements, only tracks made by previous cars. They drove through dust and stones. The houses in various stages of construction stood in straight lines. In some parts, the houses formed a square around a large empty area, as if marking a place which would always be empty, where houses were not allowed to be built.