Jane stared at the child’s body for a long time. With the water trickling over it, making the whiter flesh appear soft and malleable, it suggested to her an image by which she had long been haunted, the image of Emmeline’s poor golem, damp from its rotation on the pottery wheel, forming itself into an ugly creature in Emmeline’s hands. She longed to take up the child and bring it back to life.

She reached out to take Julietta’s arm, and glancing sideways at her lover, saw that she was very pale. She, too, had seen the child’s body and said in a querulous voice to Jane, ‘I can’t see that without imagining what I would feel if this were Marco, laid on the slab. Why does the mother not come to claim it?’

‘Because she is heartless, or because she herself is dead.’

‘There should be no death,’ sighed Julietta. ‘There should be only pleasure and delight.’

The crowd barely moved along the glass wall, though now new visitors to the morgue were pressing in behind.

‘Vous voyez,’ said Guy Mollinet, as the press of the living began to be stifling and uncomfortable, ‘we have not simplement cousins et cousines des morts, but you have also the tourists, like we are.’

‘Should we be ashamed of being here?’ asked Julietta.

‘Non, non,’ said Monsieur Mollinet, ‘we must look. We must understand. Ces morts, ce sont nous.’

Jane turned to Mollinet to say that she already had long experience, in her work as a nurse, of seeing the dead and that she agreed with him – that the living should not turn away. But her words were suddenly lost as an elderly man with a hectic look in his eyes pushed past her and began screaming that he had recognised his own corpse and was here to take it back.

In her room that night, Jane found that her whole body ached and she lay down on the bed in the serene comfort of her white nightgown, glad at last to be alone.

She knew that no day in her twenty-five years of life had been as strange as this one and she felt that she would remember it always: the visit to the morgue, the child’s body, the memory of Emmeline’s sorrow, and – superimposed on these sad images – a vision of herself that morning, with Tirard’s obscene rubber ‘appendage’ strapped to her loins, making love to Julietta exactly as if she had been a male lover. The sexual power of this had been such as to make both Jane and Julietta cry out and they had been momentarily disconcerted to hear the occupants of the adjoining room banging upon the wall. But they hadn’t been able to stop. The rest of the world had ceased to exist for them.

THE RIVER TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN

When Leon had heard the storm approaching, he and Sir Ralph Savage had not yet reached the Sadong, but they had come a long way – too far to make it back to the rajah’s mansion before the rain fell – and under the darkening sky Leon led the rajah to the small longhouse inhabited by his mother, Taminah.