‘Come sit, dahling. Constantinople is a long way away and we want you to be cosy.’

So is Kathmandu and Timbuktu, Stanley thought, before replying, ‘I’m only going as far as Istanbul, actually.’

His companion chuckled. ‘Constantinople and Istanbul are one and the same, although the former is the parent of the latter.’

Intrigued, he studied her profile under the guise of looking out of the window. She seemed ageless, blessed with a prettiness suffused with the kind of dignity not bestowed at birth but that one had to earn.

‘Would you like an apple?’

My mother told me never to accept gifts from strangers, he almost quipped, before nodding his assent. He had had no breakfast.

‘It is true. I am a stranger,’ she replied, even though he had not spoken aloud. Or had he?

On her lap was a basket covered with a white napkin. She withdrew the type of small, hard, flawed fruit he hadn’t seen since his childhood. It didn’t look like plastic, nor did it taste watery.

‘I have been making this trip every summer for as long as I can remember. This part of the world is very dear to my heart. In the winter I fly home to Jamaica, to be with my mother.’

Stanley had thought her accent familiar, and he now recognized it as the genteel lilt of Jamaica’s middle classes: that subtle inflection that the mother country’s schoolteachers could never iron out completely. His parents would mock her as one-a dose hoity-toity Uptown Browns.

‘My parents are Jamaican too. Rather, they were.’ He felt so comfortable with this woman that he became more chatty than he’d been in months. ‘I’m always recalling things they used to say. Sometimes I can hardly separate their thoughts from mine; they just jump in and deliver some opinion or wisdom. Much the same as they did in life.’

‘That is the Jamaican way, as you know.’

‘Do I? I don’t really. I’m a Londoner and, well, it might sound pretentious, but these days a citizen of the world, so to speak, or of Europe at least. Hey, maybe we’re related.’

‘I very much doubt it, my dear, unless your parents lived to be two hundred years old.’

She turned to look at him directly for the first time. Her eyes glistened like spoonfuls of raw demerara sugar; yet they had no soft centre – no pupils. He sunk into his seat and slapped his forehead with his palm and exclaimed, ‘Bomboclaat!’

‘And if you wish to converse with me, kindly refrain from such profanities. I am sure your father did not raise you to talk like that.’