‘You’d like some tea, sir?’ enquired Olive.

Peter kept his hands clasped tight together. ‘Yes, tea,’ he said. ‘I shall be down directly.’

‘Very good, sir.’

When Olive had gone, he left the dressing-table and walked across to the oval cheval-glass by the window. In it, he saw a dark, shy-looking young man in a plainly-tailored grey suit; a young man whose complexion was too dusky to be English, and yet whose short straight nose and sharply-defined forehead were too European to be those of a pure-blooded African. Racially, he was a thrice-cut cake: a third Dutch, a third Hottentot, and a third German-Jewish.

He was used to the difficulties of having tinted skin. He was an automobile mechanic, working for the Vulcan motor car company in Southport, Cheshire, but he knew that for all of his talent with a spanner he would never make chief engineer. He raced, too, a little, whenever there was a spare 10-hp car and enough ethyl. But he would never be allowed to make the grade as a first-class driver. This was an England which tolerated half-castes as the inevitable outcome of a far-flung colonial empire, but which scarcely ever admitted a ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ to the inner circles of society.

It had helped Peter that his stepfather had been the Reverend Hugh Ransome, much respected for his work amongst the poor of south London, and amongst the heathen in South Africa. His stepfather had taught him manners, and proper dress, and all the niceties of small conversation. But none of these graces had really been enough to whiten his face, and he had known ever since he was at school that only an Act of God could win him admission to the prizewinner’s enclosure of Edwardian society.

Perhaps this diamond was it. The one miracle which could change everything. He opened his hand, and the huge stone was warm, already infused with his own heat. The sun caught it, just the tip of it, and it flared up with brilliant rainbows and shatteringly bright triangles of reflected and re-reflected light, a spangled hall-of-mirrors in miniature.

‘Your father made sure you were taken care of,’ his mother had whispered, and the words fell on his memory like sheets of soft tissue paper.

He recalled sitting by his mother’s knee almost twenty years ago on a winter’s night in the old vicarage, toasting muffins on the end of a fork, his cheeks hot as baked apples, and he remembered his mother saying, ‘Did I ever tell you the story of the man who gave up everything he had, all his possessions, even the estates that he adored so much, just to buy his secret love the most precious stone in the whole world?’