He stood back to let her through the door first.

There was something else, though, wasn’t there? She might have asked and he might perhaps have told her, but what would she have asked and what did she want to know? It was history now, all history, the war over, he gone, the two of them here, the place where he had been, India, gone too, in a way, no longer that place where he had been, that he had seemed to hold in him.

There was something else, wasn’t there? Out there where you were? That was what she wanted to ask. All she said was, Come again, as she drove him back to the station. The boys had to come in the car with them as there was no one at home to mind them. You must come and see us again, next time you’re in England.

He said that he didn’t have much connection with England any more.

At least the boys weren’t fighting. So often they fought in the back of the car. She took a look behind her. They had the windows wide open and were leaning out, each on his own side, feeling the wind and the land passing. It was so green this moment of the year. Was it as green, she wondered, where Jack Hussey lived? If he could grow those plants then she supposed it must be, though the Africa she imagined was quite other, vast and brown and open to a blue horizon. She drove on, came to a crossroads, waited for another car to pass. There was so much that she had not asked this man, that she sensed he might have said, if she had asked, and now he was leaving.

So you’ll stay in Kenya?

For the foreseeable future.

But is it safe? I read these awful things in the papers. She had read of an uprising, atrocities, white farmers killed in their beds. It’s frightening, she said, what’s going on.

It’s not what you think, he said. Again, he was saying to her, it’s not what you think. He spoke forgetful of the boys in the back of the car. She supposed that he wasn’t used to being with children, didn’t know how much they picked up in adults’ talk. I know what they say here at home, he said. But it’s not us they’re killing, it’s each other. Blacks being killed, horribly, and blacks killing blacks, not whites. And there’s worse. There are terrible things going on, that don’t get into your papers at home.

Terrible things, he said, looking out of the window at the green land passing. Things you see that you never forget.