Every evening, Tommy Collyer walks, hand clasped tightly in his mother’s, along the varnished walkways of the ocean liner until they are facing the dense, vivid striations of the tropical sunset. They have left the monsoon behind them in Bombay but every night the clouds stack themselves above the horizon like slatted blinds. His mother has a box of paints in her cabin, a heavy wooden case with a red NEEDED ON VOYAGE label pasted onto it. Every day he begs her to open it, and every day, after a ritual set of objections from her, which he finds intensely pleasing, she clicks open the catches and shows him the contents. The brushes, the porcelain palette, the water flask. But what he wants to see are the paints. The little lozenges of colour, silky-shiny like sweets, each with a dip worn into it, some more worn than others. He runs his fingers gently across the rows of pigment; secretly he wants to eat them, because they are so unbearably pretty, or squeeze them like rubber tree sap between his fingers. They intoxicate him, like the rich headache fumes of petrol, or the leafy perfume of his father’s cigars.

‘My Indian colours,’ his mother calls them, and sometimes mutters about having to change them when they get home, which makes no sense to him. Why change these lovely colours? And isn’t home the place they are leaving behind? Gamboge, cadmium yellow deep, cadmium orange, scarlet lake, rose doreé, permanent carmine, cerulean blue, viridian, Hooker’s green, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, Indian red. These are the colours of the vast monsoon sunsets. His mother, on their first evening at sea, had brought out her paints and her easel and set to work while he watched over her shoulder, Daddy being somewhere else – Daddy is always somewhere else. She had made thick stripes of blue, purple, violet, red and orange, and blurred each into the other with a watery brush, which he had thought quite splendid but which Mummy herself did not seem to care for.

‘And now it’s gone,’ she had said, with a touch of irritation, as if sunsets were just one more thing that could not be trusted. It was the voice she usually reserves for remarks about Daddy, in fact. Tom had recognised it immediately.