‘That wall’s had damp,’ she says. ‘That’s what that scarf is for. It’s supposed to be fixed but there’s a stain. I painted over it but the paint flaked off, maybe there’s still some damp there, I don’t know, so that’s just to cover it. I got it at the market.’ She’s embarrassed, but Dalmar thinks it was a good thing to do. He thinks that however little you have – the scarf was probably two or three pounds – you can still brighten a place, make it your own. He thinks that it is the kind of thing that a woman likes to do whereas a man would just look at the damp and feel depressed. Women’s habits, women’s things: how long is it since he has seen women’s things? He’s seen plenty of women, they’re all over the place in this country in various stages of undress, but their things, their scarves and cushions and little – what is that odd English word? Ah yes, knick-knacks. That funny little collecting habit they have …

Angela brings tea over and hands him a mug and he looks down into the tea, which is not any shade of brown that he is used to drinking. ‘Oh sorry,’ she says suddenly. ‘You probably have sugar, don’t you? I haven’t got any, I gave it up.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ Dalmar says, even though he doesn’t really see the point of tea without sugar. He manages to sip it without wincing and smacks his lips so that she knows he is actually drinking it.

‘I do have biscuits though.’ Angela opens the cupboard above her table and brings down a packet of custard creams, unopened, which he suspects she may have bought especially for this occasion.

He says, ‘Thank you,’ and takes one, nibbling the edge of it. He has to admit, for a country whose food is so uniformly dreadful, the snacks are pretty good – he loves crisps, eats two packets a day sometimes. All the same, the effort Angela has gone to is making him feel tired. Her gas fire is on full and because her room is quite small, the fug in the room is making him drowsy even though he has only been up for an hour. He never manages to feel fully awake when he’s on nights, not until he’s actually on the station in the pitch dark and it’s so cold his manhood shrinks to the size of the white grubs his uncle used to dig up from around his sugar cane at the beginning of the rainy season. He wants to be polite, but he doesn’t want to be so friendly that she gets the wrong idea, for he is now realising what has been blindingly obvious for a while, that Angela is hoping for a little more than friendship.