All this made a logical progression through Ross’s mind as Chesterfield began gathering more clothes from the dirty floor, but he understood, deep in his heart’s core, that he would never confess it to any living soul.

‘I was a good doctor,’ was all he said.

‘But you use the past tense,’ said Chesterfield. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because that is all there is,’ he said. ‘In the middle of an ocean, there is only stasis. All I know is the past.’

‘Have you no plans for when you arrive in Singapore, Sir?’

‘I will not notice Singapore. It has no meaning for me. I will only seek out some kind of native craft at the wharves there. Praus, I believe they are named. To convey me to Borneo.’

‘To take up your doctoring again?’

‘No. I go for only one reason: to save my brother.’

‘From what, Sir, if I may ask?’

‘I do not know. Now, when you have collected sufficient laundry, please be good enough to go away and leave me to myself.’

The old servant was slung about with a capacious canvas bag, into which he now began piling Ross’s cast-off things. He did this hastily, almost in the manner of a burglar carrying off his swag, and this action of his brought to Ross’s face an amused smile. He was tempted to say to Chesterfield that once he had washed and pressed the shirts and undergarments, he could keep them for himself, that his despair was so complete that he really did not care if he was forced to walk about the ship naked and submit to the ridicule of having his private parts exposed to strangers. But he held back from this. It was as if he believed that remaining covered up, indeed almost invisible in his wooden hutch, he might at last construct a new person, one who had eaten all his shame and let it pass through him into a stinking pot, taken away by a man whose only vanity was to believe in himself.

He asked himself how on earth this new Ross could be assembled.

It came to him that if he could recall more than a scant few genuine acts of kindness in his life, then these might act as a kind of guide-rail on which he could lean when the weather of self-loathing blew in.

He lay in his coffin-bed and tried to cover himself with a blanket of recollection. He took himself to the Wiltshire lanes and woods of his childhood. He carried a butterfly net. Ahead of him – always running on ahead and then suddenly stopping when he sighted an insect or a plant which interested him – was Edmund, blithe and happy in each passing moment, an innocent whose collecting zeal brought bright blood to his cheeks and laughter to his throat. Edmund would shout instructions to him: ‘when we reach the field, tread softly, for plovers nest on the plough. Hark when the wind rattles the gorse, for we shall find bees clinging to the flowers. Watch the sky for us, so we are not lost in the dark.’ And he always tried to obey his brother and then, at the end of an afternoon, guide them safely home. For it was in Edmund’s nature to stray from the path, to lose his sense of direction, and more than once it was Valentine who had led his brother back, as the dusk came on, to where their mother waited in her parlour with a lit lamp and worry in her heart for her boys.