Dalmar isn’t in his room and the bed is neatly made: he’s been up for a while, I’m guessing, maybe he’s out on errands. I’m about to leave, when I hear voices coming through the wall that divides his room from the back bedroom, the low rumble of his voice and a more high-pitched one responding.

Dalmar is in Angela’s room, standing self-consciously in the centre of it while Angela is crouching on the floor, unplugging a kettle that sits on the carpet near a plug socket. She rises, a little red-faced, and without looking at Dalmar, takes the kettle over to a small sink in the corner – a tiny sink in fact, the kind of sink where, if you bent and splashed water over your own face, you would soak the carpet around your feet. As she turns the creaking tap, she says over her shoulder, ‘Sit down.’

There is a wooden chair next to a small table on the other side of the room but Angela has gestured behind him, to the single bed against one wall. Dalmar glances around and then sits, carefully. He has the air of a man who agreed to come in for a cup of tea two minutes ago and is already wondering how soon he can decently leave.

While Angela returns the kettle to its socket and kneels on the floor beside it, two mugs and an open carton of milk next to her, he looks around the room. It is darker than his, being at the back of the house, and a little smaller, but she has done it nicely enough. The bed has a quilt in pinks and purples and a matching purple cushion, huge and square, propped up against the headboard. It is the kind of thing Dalmar guesses is useful if you think of drinking tea in bed as a treat, a strange British habit that he has never acquired. On the wall perpendicular to where he sits, there is a scarf, a kind of garbasaar, but with tassels, which she has pinned to the wall with brass tacks.

She looks up from where she is still kneeling, making tea, and catches him looking at the wall. She gives a small laugh.