“Lucky you,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.

“If you say so.”

“Are you furious?” he asked me, and I wasn’t expecting that question, so I was honest. I didn’t have time to hide my answer behind anything, to cover it up.

“Yeah,” I said. “I am, sort of. I hate change.”

In the silence that followed he went back to poking at the keyboard of a clunky old laptop. The ancient fridge hummed. The bird fussed. My asthma was starting up, that wet wheeze like chunks of my breath being passed through a sieve. I am allergic to dust. It makes my eyes burn and my nose run and my lungs block all the exits, and it is everywhere, I know, but that old house was the Mothership, the source of its Nile. I used my inhaler and concentrated on breathing, and I had another look around while Henry tapped away. The back wall was covered in clocks, different shapes and sizes, not one of them set to the same time. All that ticking sounded like rain dripping somewhere on a roof.

“Change,” Henry Lake said, “is unavoidable. Essential. It’s the engine of everything.”

“I know,” I said, because I hadn’t meant it at an atomic level, I’d just meant the my-mum, emotional-rebound kind of change.

“Imagine life without it,” he said. “A rock in a stream.”

“Rocks change,” I said. “The water changes them,” and Henry smiled.

“You’re a smart one, aren’t you. I can see we are going to be friends.”

“Friends are a bit of a sore topic for me,” I said.

“It’ll pass,” said Henry. “Life will provide.”

“You reckon?”

“I’m an unspeakably old man,” he said.

“So?”

“So I’ve seen it enough times to know.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“But you will.”

It was quiet then, and I looked at the woman’s portrait again, the smooth skin of her back, her turning head. I looked at her for a long time.

“I do like that painting,” I said, and he smiled.

“Lifetimes since I did that.”

“You did it?”

“I used to love to paint,” he said. “A very long time ago. And then a very long time ago, I gave it up.”

Some tiny part of me believed the woman in the portrait might actually turn around. I remember thinking how silly that was, that I felt like that, even in that moment. “She’s very lovely.”

“Yes.” Henry frowned and carried on typing. “She was.”

He turned the laptop screen toward me, some kind of aerial view. Wild dust, scrubby trees, a shrunk river. A pack of dogs crossed the picture from bottom corner to top. Tall slanted shadows, left to right. “Look at this,” he said. “Today, we’re on the savanna.”

“Today?”

“Yes. See?” He got up and pointed to the giant wall map. “Sub-Saharan Africa. About here.” He put a pin in it.